Ever wonder what a dirty cop thinks about? Episode 8 of Ballard (“Last Call”) begins with a backup on its own timeline, as Robert Olivas rolls up on the fresh crime scene at Ballard’s place, and Ricardo Chavira plays the scene well. We see Olivas’ eyes, scanning for clues that could connect Driscoll to him. He feigns concern for Ballard – “She’s one of ours” – while asking if the attacker’s phone was found. And he leads the charge on Driscoll’s pad, where he slips the burner phone Mo Bassi had just placed there into the pocket of his LAPD windbreaker. Dude’s dirty world is already crumbling, but he doesn’t know that yet.

Later, at a meeting of the corrupt cop minds, we see the surviving members of their crew. Olivas, running point; Driscoll’s old partner from Narcotics; another detective who’s deep in debt; the beat cop we saw Driscoll meet with in the parking structure; and The Follower, whose pitch to cut Martina loose is rejected. And Olivas says Driscoll’s death changes nothing, that their deal with the Zacatecas Nuevas cartel will continue.

In the present, Ballard and Parker share a moment. With the revelation of his cahoots-ness with Driscoll, they finally have enough hard evidence to go after Olivas for real. They embrace in triumph, but not without a moment of reflection. While any dirty cop deserves to go down – “a disgrace to the badge,” as Laffont says later – it’s not the same thing as exposing Olivas as the sexual predator he is. Parker wonders if holding him accountable for the cartel crime is enough to truly put their own traumas to rest. 

“No boards, no bullpen,” Ballard declares in the cold case unit. Not when they’re dealing with dirty cops and drug cartels, and don’t know who else on the force could be involved. With info provided by Harry Bosch and Mo Bassi, the team traces all of the links between Driscoll and his tree of burner phones, with a few numbers outstanding. Like The Follower’s, for example – and you know that means it’s make or break time for Martina. Can’t a Gen Z’er just make dinner and watch Love is Blind with her beat cop boyfriend without discovering his buzzing burner phone and learning that a drug cartel put a handle on his back? Luckily she makes an excuse and gets away safely. And at Ballard’s, Martina breaks the news by finally saying his name. 

For as intriguingly criss-crossed as the storylines have been in Ballard, using Martina as bait to lure Manny out of the burner phone shadows is Cop Show 101. They catch him – complete with a nice physical takedown by Parker – put him in cuffs, get him a lawyer, and set up an interview room at Rawls’s off-site private security firm. Manny hems and haws a bit, but mostly cries, and ultimately agrees to Ballard’s demand for a full video confession. He spills on Montana running him, on Olivas taking over, the whole bit. To us, it feels even more Cop Show 101 that Ballard would then bring this corruption bombshell directly to Captain Berchem. She must trust his brillo pad mustache more than we do, because didn’t they just establish that Driscoll still has dirty LAPD friends everywhere? The captain doesn’t even seem super impressed with her cracking what amounts to a police corruption scandal the size of Rampart back in the late 1990s. “This is good work, Ballard. But I mean it – bring me in from the get-go if you want me on your side.”

At home, out in the shed, putting coats of paint on her surfboard to the tune of Nick Drake’s “Place to Be,” Ballard’s still thinking about the Pearlman case. What if the killer targeted his female victims not through looks, age or ethnicity, but because they were advancing in their life and work? Those mementos in the storage facility – a name tag from a job, a script from an acting gig, a new pair of fancy heels. Ballard muses that the serial killer was punishing these women for what he perceived as overstepping their station. 

It’s a solid enough theory for her to hit Berchem’s office the next day, who accepts her pitch to take back the Pearlman case. Ballard even shares a civil conversation with the Councilman, telling him how the investigation helped her cold case unit gel, gave it real purpose. As the whiteboards are rolled back out and the pictures of the vics put back up, work shifts to digging into Ballard’s new angle on the serial killer’s motives.

Ballard Briefs For Episode 7 (“Last Call”):

• While all this was going on, Laffont was continuing his quest to find Gael, who was last seen six years ago as an infant in the arms of his father Luis Ibarra. While Driscoll ultimately murdered his father, it turns out that back then, the boy was left in the care of a stranger, who eventually turned him over to an LA-area fire station.

• What was a brand of lipstick designed for Black women doing in Sarah Pearlman’s bedroom? It’s another new angle on the serial killer case, and Ballard brings it to Darcy the evidence tech for DNA analysis. 

• Of course it was gonna be in front of all the other parents. As Olivas drops off his son at an upscale elementary school, his cartel burner blows up. “Manny, you don’t call me, I call you!” But it’s not Manny Santos. It’s Detective Renée Ballard, the woman he wronged in so many ways. And she lets Robert Olivas know his corrupt ass is burnt. What’s a dirty cop think about as he’s stuffed into the back of a police cruiser?     

Johnny Loftus (@johnnyloftus.bsky.social) is a Chicago-based writer. A veteran of the alternative weekly trenches, his work has also appeared in Entertainment Weekly, Pitchfork, The All Music Guide, and The Village Voice.