The final, last, and ultimate season of Bosch has just dropped on Amazon Prime, which I don’t know about you but it was a surprise to me. Amazon are very, very bad at curating their own shows, and you do wonder if there’s anyone over there with their eye on the ball. You’d think, since I’ve used my account to watch the previous six seasons, that they might have dropped something on the Amazon home screen for me, but no. Just adverts for no-name kitchen gadgets that would take up space in the cupboard for a few years and then end up in a landfill.

Still, Bosch is always welcome, notwithstanding the fact that it is under-watched, under-appreciated, and underrated. By now, the producers have reached one of the more recent books, so this story was fairly fresh in my mind.

I was just contemplating, as I sometimes do, whether to delete a couple of posts from this blog because they generate a lot of follow-spam, which is what happens if you make it impossible for spam comments to appear on your blog. Instead, you get lots and lots of follows and “likes” from trashy bot-created content-scraping web sites. It doesn’t create work, but it does irritate the hell out of me. What does this have to do with Bosch? Just that, my various reviews of this series do generate a steady flow of what I assume are real human visitors, curious about whether this under-publicised and under-discussed show is any good.

It is. But Season 7, I think, does feel a bit brusque and hand-washy, so it’s not without its faults.

My earlier reviews: Season 1; Season 2; Season 3; Season 4; Season 6 (I don’t know what happened to Season 5).

In brief: Season 7 is (very loosely) based on The Burning Room (Bosch #17), which was published in novel form in 2014. In reality, the connection to the novel is tenuous, and mostly this is a continuation of earlier story threads, and most particularly a continuation of Bosch’s antagonistic relationship with the FBI, who infuriate him by protecting suspects and claiming it is for ‘the greater good’. From Bosch’s point of view, this is always an inversion because he cares more about victims of crime than he does crime syndicates. Anyway, most of the plot and many of the characters of the novel are jettisoned in favour of a kind of similar apartment fire but that’s more or less it.

Titus Welliver and the rest of the cast are still good, and I’m not sure saying this is the final season means that we’ve seen the last of the character, but still. This does feel like a wrap. And this is partly why it feels a bit rushed, because you can kind of see the end coming, and it is all over fairly quickly.

Complaints.

1. There are only 8 episodes, and the longest of them is 50 minutes, meaning that this show ends up feeling more like a modern 5-parter. You barely notice the transitions between episodes. The title sequence usually took me by surprise.

2. The richness and complexity of early seasons, usually based on three of the novels, is replaced by what feels like standard continuity of plot and character – in order to get it done.

3. You don’t really get the sense that the loving photography of Los Angeles is something they think about anymore.

4. The #metoo harassment sub-plot feels especially superficial and deserved more serious treatment.

I still enjoyed it, and I’ll watch what comes next (Lincoln Lawyer? Ballard and Bosch?), I just wish there was more of this that I could make last longer.