Bosch: Legacy Recap: Grave Matters — Grade Season 2’s Double-Episode Premiere

Bosch: Legacy put abducted Maddie, her father Harry and us viewers through the damn wringer with the first pair of episodes of Season 2 (now streaming on Freevee, along with two others).

After opening with a quiet tribute to dearly departed Bosch vets Lance Reddick and Annie Wersching, the premiere confirmed everyone’s worst suspicions from the very end of Season 1, as we “rewound” to watch Maddie arrive home at the end of the day, only this time we saw the luchador mask-wearing Screen Cutter assault her. Maddie put her police training to good use and gave about as good as she got, but ultimately was knocked down for the count by a rag full of chloroform.

From there, we got glimpses of the Screen Cutter — aka city building inspector Kurt Dockweiler (now played by David Denman) — lugging Maddie out of her home in a vinyl case, loading her into the back of his truck, and then driving her out into the desert. Along the way, Maddie took one stab at escape, when the bag was briefly unzipped, but she was promptly subdued by a syringe of something.

A few scenes later, Maddie’s at-least-temporary, but still thoroughly harrowing, fate became clear, when the first episode revealed to both her and us that she had been buried alive, in a makeshift coffin!

All the while, Harry rallied the LAPD troops — well, best he could, being an ex-cop turned civilian. In fact, he had to be reminded once or a dozen times that he couldn’t work this case. Harry is the father of a daughter, though, so he without hesitation used J. Edgar, Mo and Chandler to scrape together some leads.

Speaking of Chandler, she connected a huge dot by working with a police sketch artist to ID a man she had seen lurking outside Maddie’s bungalow the day before, and sure enough he was recognized to be Dockweiler, whom Maddie had reached out to when investigating the Screen Cutter.

Thing is, no sooner had Harry & Co. made this match than Dockweiler showed up at the cop shop to turn himself in! But he had a repugnant agenda, offering to trade Maddie’s location — all the while reiterating that she didn’t “have much time left” — for full immunity on the many rapes he had committed. Knowing time was of the essence, Harry finagled himself private time in an interview room with Dockweiler, only to learn precious little (while nearly gouging out the guy’s eyes).

Maddie, knowing that her dire sitch was being fiendishly live-streamed to the public, managed to relay the fact that she was near Edwards Air Force Base (a fact she gleaned from her memory of a fighter jet roaring overhead). Mo took that fact and overlaid it with the location of the religious cult commune where Dockweiler had been raised, and gave Harry a small yet still sizable search area to work with. Chandler hooked Harry up with a helicopter, then joined him for the trip to the Mojave Desert, where they got to searching a few abandoned shacks and sheds.

Jerry, in a new sit-down with Dockweiler, clocked references to Maddie being left with enough “air,” plus an “hourglass” sands mention. Relaying that info to Harry, they deduced that Maddie was buried alive somewhere in the desert.

By the grace of the TV gods, Harry ascended a weather vane and used binoculars to spot in the distance the piece of pipe that was used to provide underground Maddie with air — and which she, at that instant, was kicking/wriggling with her foot after a frightful encounter with a scorpion. Harry grabbed a shovel from a nearby shed, darted to the pipe and got digging, unearthing the coffin lid and then Maddie in minutes.

What did you think of Bosch: Legacy’s edge-of-your-seat, double-episode Season 2 premiere?