Bosch: Legacy

Bosch: Legacy - Official Trailer | Prime Video
Prime Video AU & NZ
Bosch has had enough of the Los Angeles Police Department Bureaucracy, or maybe they've had enough of him. In any case he's out on his own. Right off the bat he picks up a super wealthy client, which is what you need if you are going to make a dramatic TV show. In a parallel thread, the good guys are still pursuing the bad guy from last season, but it's a race to see whether they can make him pay in court or whether the Russian mob removes him from the planet. I'm kind of rooting for the Russians. This business of going through the courts is annoying and tedious in the extreme. Crate and Barrel show up in episode 4, which is the last one that is currently available.

On Amazon FreeVee. If we have Amazon Prime, why do we have to sit through the ads? To be fair, there weren't that many of them.

Paladin

BOSCH Season 7 - Official Trailer | Prime Video
Amazon Prime Video

We're watching season 7 of Bosch. Somewhere past the middle (episode 6 maybe?) they are talking about a hitman and Jimmy Robertson (played by Paul Calderon), the aging Latino detective, mentions Paladin, Have Gun Will Travel, and Richard Boone and draws blank looks from everyone else, including my wife. How could they not know about this fixture of American culture? Don't they teach nobody nuttin' in school no more? I guess not, and not too many people delve into history. It's really not surprising none of the characters recognized the phrase since all these whippersnappers were born after the show ended in 1963, but I bet all of the actors did.

TV Intro | Pilot | Have Gun – Will Travel
John Daniels

Wikipedia gives us a little background:

The Paladins (or Twelve Peers) are twelve fictional knights of legend, the foremost members of Charlemagne's court in the 8th century. 

Statue of Roland in the town hall square of Riga, Latvia.
Image courtesy Patrick Mayon

Roland was the leader of the pack.

Bosch, 8 episodes, 50 minutes each, on Amazon Prime

Have Gun - Will Travel, 225 episodes, 25 minutes each, at least some of which are on YouTube

Perry Mason

Perry Mason: Official Trailer | HBO
HBO

This 2020 version of Perry Mason bears no resemblance to the original. In case you don't know, Perry Mason as a character has been kicking around since 1933. I know him from the popular TV (television) show that ran from 1957 to 1966. Those shows are available on YouTube.

Perry Mason Opening & Closing Theme
Danny Linden

In this current show Perry is a PI (Private Investigator), not an attorney like in the books and TV shows. Why the big change? I suspect it's because the writers had a good story and they needed a name for their lead character and picked Perry Mason because they liked the TV show. I dunno. They seem completely unrelated.

Regardless, it's a good show. It's set in 1931 in Los Angles. One of the first settings is the Angels Flight inclined railway that showed up in a Bosch episode. It's a very complicated show with all kinds of emotional entanglements. Some of those are what you expect in a crime show, but some are not. 

We have a bit of history in Tatiana Maslany as Sister Alice McKeegan, a stand in for the real Aimee Semple McPherson, an evangelical preacher who pioneered the use of radio to reach a broader audience.

The Hollywood Reporter has a review.

HBO 8 Episodes, 1 Hour each

Update March 2021 corrected the number of episodes because everybody has a different screen layout.

Bosch Season 6

Bell 412 Helicopter equipped with ARDIMS Radiation Detection Pod - U.S. Air Force photo/Staff Sgt. Matt Davis

We watched season 6 of Bosch last weekend. One of the stories involved the theft of some radioactive cesium from a hospital. This got everyone understandably excited - there have been a couple of ugly incidents involving this stuff. I remember hearing about the one in Brazil, that one gave me a very bad impression of Latin American Bureaucracies.

In the show, a whole alphabet soup of government agencies descend onto Los Angeles. One concrete action they did was to make an aerial survey of the city using helicopters carrying radiation detection equipment, very much like the photo above.

Polimaster Radiation Detector

Jerry Edgar, played by a notorious gangster from The Wire, buys a personal radiation detector (similar to the one pictured above) that ends up being pretty useful. Interesting thing is that no one mentioned either of these detection devices by name, but somehow it was pretty clear what was going on.

Radiation Dosimeter Ring

The victim was wearing a radiation dosimeter ring, similar to the picture above. I knew people working with radioactive materials wore dosimeter badges, but the rings were new to me. They make sense though for people who are actually handling radioactive materials. How dangerous radiation is depends on time and distance. We are constantly exposed to very low levels of radiation, but how  close you are to 'hot' radioactive material can make a big difference to how much danger you are in. You can stand a couple of feet away from a low level source for a few minutes and be in no danger, but if you are actually handling it, your hands are going to get a much higher dose.

Fouga Magister

10 - MIG 15: Hydraulic failure above Mojave desert (with EN subtitles) - LOW FUEL HELICOPTER LIFE
I came across this video on a couple of other blogs. It's pretty cool, it's rolling along, and wait! What's that?

Fouga Magister at the 1:24 mark

That's a Fouga Magister, an airplane I had never heard of before I saw it on an episode of Bosch a couple of weeks ago. A little digging turns up this video, shot at the same airport.


Fouga Magister - California City Airport - Mojave Desert 2017
California City was somebody's post war dream that failed to materialize. Now it's a bedroom community for Edwards Air Force Base which is just down the road.

The Fouga Magister is a twin engine, two place, French military jet trainer from the 1950's. It was occasionally armed and used for ground attack in places like Africa. Rumor has it that it was used to shoot down the DC-6 carrying Dag Hammarskjöld to a peace conference in Africa:

In April 2014, The Guardian published evidence implicating Jan van Risseghem, a military pilot who served with the RAF during World War II, later with the Belgian Air Force, and who became known as the pilot of Moise Tshombe in Katanga. The article claims that an American NSA employee, former naval pilot Commander Charles Southall, working at the NSA listening station in Cyprus in 1961 shortly after midnight on the night of the crash, heard an intercept of a pilot's commentary in the air over Ndola – 3,000 miles away. Southall recalled the pilot saying: "I see a transport plane coming low. All the lights are on. I'm going down to make a run on it. Yes, it is the Transair DC-6. It's the plane," adding that his voice was "cool and professional". Then he heard the sound of gunfire and the pilot exclaiming: "I've hit it. There are flames! It's going down. It's crashing!" Based on aircraft registration and availability with the Katangese Air Force, registration KAT-93, a Fouga CM.170 Magister would be the most likely aircraft used and the website Belgian Wings claims that van Risseghem piloted the Magisters for the KAF in 1961. A further article was published by The Guardian in January 2019, repeating the allegations against van Risseghem and citing further evidence uncovered by the makers of the documentary Cold Case Hammarskjöld, including refutations of his alibi that he was not flying at the time of the crash.

Dag Hammarskjöld! Now that's a name I haven't heard it a very long time. I guess that's not surprising since he died in 1961. Since I was a youngster at the time, I suspect he was another name that popped up in discussions my parents had, like Sun Yat-sen or Chiang Kai-shek.

Airplanes

We've been watching Season 5 of Detective Harry Bosch on Amazon Prime. It's entertaining. We've got multiple story arcs all winding through the season. Some are serious, some are funny, the characters are all well settled in their roles. A couple of airplanes make an appearance.

de Havilland DHC-6 Twin Otter

The Otter plays a continuing role ferrying shills from Los Angeles to an encampment in the desert. The bad guys are running a scam collecting prescription opioids from a pill mill. The purported reason for using an airplane is so that Russian mobsters won't find out where their base is, which is important because they are stock piling supplies to make fentanyl. So they are using the pill mill scam to finance the stock piling. Once that is complete, they can break into the big time!

Jerry Edgar talking to an airport copper
That's a Fouga CM.170 Magister sitting on the other side of the fence.

A Fouga Magister makes a brief appearance around 9:55 in episode 3.

Crate & Barrel

GREGORY SCOTT CUMMINS: "BOSCH" (Demo Clip 1) 2017 Edited
Thinking about LA detective shows, I remembered a couple of detectives who were pretty entertaining in a Click & Clack kind of way. At first I thought they were from Cold Case, but that was wrong, so I consulted with my wife and moved on to The Closer, but that was wrong too, and then I finally realized they were Crate & Barrel from Bosch. They were pretty funny. Maybe they will be back in the next season.