We’re four episodes into Ballard, and while the cold cases the team’s investigating are interesting, what’s grabbed us most is this trauma fog Detective Renée Ballard is living and working within. Here and there, hints of its size and shape have emerged from the undefined gloom. Olivas’ visit to her office in Episode 1; her confrontation with Ken Chastain in Episode 3. But with Ballard, and the captivating way Maggie Q is playing Ballard, we realize now her trauma is like gravity or oxygen – pushing her down, all the time, even if she won’t let anyone see her grasping for air, and drawing on her reserves of fortitude to keep moving forward. 

In the middle of a productive meeting about the missing John Doe bullet – more on that in a moment – Laffont breaks the news. A single vehicle accident. A drunk driver at the wheel. It was Ken Chastain. And as Q lets Ballard’s firm, professional veneer falter for a fleeting second, it contains within it the raw emotions and weariness of an entire year. Should she have listened to him when he tried to apologize for not standing with her? Can she even ask herself that question now, without undercutting everything that occured? After the news, she quickly resets her features. Pushes her feelings back into the fog. But Laffont, Colleen, and the rest of the team see it and hold it with her. She should go to the funeral to memorialize the good in her old partner. “Don’t let those RHD assholes keep you away.” And finally, at the funeral, and after four episodes, Q lets Ballard’s sorrow show through. 

“Ken realized you were telling the truth,” Chastain’s widow tells Renée afterward at the reception. It’s cold comfort for both of them – the detective left his wife and children behind, and in the end, Ballard couldn’t recognize his contrition. But Chastain’s death creates even more torsion. At the funeral, Ballard notices the considerable friction between Parker and Olivas, and reveals to Zamira that it was Olivas himself who assaulted her. Now it’s Parker’s turn to go silent. Could this RHD prick have assaulted both women? There was a reason Parker abruptly left RHD and the LAPD, and as Ballard says, “the last time I came for one of the brotherhood, it didn’t go well.” Developing!

Martina the Gen Z whiz kid has sourced an AI reconstruction of the missing John Doe bullet, complete with striations. Firearms Freddie is impressed with the technology, but also rueful over the ability of AI to do his job. (We hear you, dude!) And with this representation of the bullet, it’s linked definitively to a gun used in an entirely different crime by a man already in lockup. Javier Fuentes is played by Richard Cabral, who for our money will always be the MVP of Sons of Anarchy’s very large cast. And when questioned, Fuentes sets off some huge landmines in the John Doe case. The man slain was Luis Ibarra, well known on the streets of LA as a coyote for a Mexican drug cartel. And the story of how Fuentes ended up using the same gun that killed Ibarra for a totally different crime is what cracks open a window on a ring of cops trading in hot weapons with the cartels. 

A white dude in his 40s gave Fuentes the gun, he tells the detectives. “Definitely a cop – street calls him ‘Montana.’” As in Tony Montana, Scarface, the patron saint of the violence-coded. Ballard and the team generate a “six pack” of headshots for Fuentes to look at, and he puts his finger directly on one guy’s face. “That’s the cabrón they call Montana.”

While the detectives were drilling into this ring of corrupt cops who use their badges and access for evil fun and illicit profit (Fuentes: “Not just guns – all the cartel shit”), Anthony Driscoll (Brendan Sexton III), Montana himself, was meeting with the young predator beat cop we’ve been calling The Follower. Martina sees more of him in this episode – it’s just innocent flirting; they smile and laugh together; how could she know? – and it’s now evident that it’s been Driscoll/Montana running The Follower this whole time. Uncovering the cops-to-cartels connection is a huge break for the cold case team. But Montana’s been steps ahead all along.   

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.