Pour out an ashwagandha smoothie in remembrance of one Eddie Rojas, because a jaw-dropping Episode 5 twist has ended Allyn Moriyon’s run on The Lincoln Lawyer as the newest member of Mickey Haller’s support team. In what is by a mile the most shocking thing this series has ever done in its three seasons on the air, Eddie is killed when Mickey’s Lincoln Navigator is attacked on the road as they traveled back from Victorville. Given the severity, as they were rear-ended at high-speed by a massive commercial towing wrecker, and seeing how the Lincoln was transformed into a ball of minced and shredded sheet metal, what’s really surprising is how anyone was walking away from this at all. 

As Mickey crawled shaken from the wreckage, he better have been thinking about how much more seriously he should be taking all of the “Be Careful” warnings he receives on the regular. Because Haller could easily be dead right along with Eddie. While we’re disappointed to see the character killed off, Eddie Rojas dying while in service of one of Mickey’s latest ambitious legal gambits is certainly a wake-up call that Haller will have to listen to. The whole reason they were out in the open, driving on an empty road back from Victorville Prison, was because of Mickey’s meeting there with both Sly Funaro Sr. and Hector Moya. To Sly, Mickey explained how him and his low-rent lawyer flunky son playing games with doctored subpoenas is what unexpectedly exposed Glory Days and directly got her killed. And to Moya, Mickey pledges cooperation, if only on the cartel enforcer’s insistence that the murder-tainted gun Glory placed in his room wasn’t his.

Going into this, it felt like a typically bold play from Haller, but one with promise. He agreed to help a murderous criminal, because it would help his client Julian be exonerated of murder charges. Not only that, but it satisfied Mickey’s perception of the rule of law as the ultimate leveling agent. Of course Moya is a terrible person, he told Eddie on the way to prison. And to the young man’s point, a criminal like Moya going free could be a detriment to society’s already skewed prejudice toward Latino men. But Mickey stressed that Moya should be in prison for doing something he actually did, not through a bunch of funny business, all of it apparently arranged by loose cannon DEA agent James DeMarco.

DeMarco. This guy, man. It really seems like Lincoln Lawyer is setting up Michael Irby’s DEA cowboy as the real villain behind everything happening. At the outset of episode 5, as they sat in the Lincoln, DeMarco asked why Haller would want to help a cartel sicario leave prison anyway. He scoffed at Mickey’s idealism about putting somebody away fair and square. (“Court? That’s quaint.”) And he told him something that feels even more prescient, now that we know what happened to Eddie and how Mickey almost joined him. “This is a war, Haller. And you have to choose which side you’re on.”

Before the attack, the team was also operating at a high level. Cisco tracked the Las Vegas-based gun dealer who falsely testified about selling Moya a pistol – along with his small-time drug dealer wife, he was just another lackey of DeMarco. Lorna and Izzy dove deep into police case files from a decade of murders out in the San Fernando Valley, and found a substantive link between DeMarco and Neil Bishop. While the evidence hadn’t solidified completely, the network of bad shit rolling backwards downhill toward DEA agent DeMarco was growing in usable volume. It’s like what Mickey told Moya during their tense meeting in a closed area of Victorville, where the cartel enforcer was enjoying his porterhouse steak. (The privileges of the powerful.) “Once we get them in court, it’ll be harder for them to hide behind their badges.” Even if Moya greeted Mickey with the open threat that he could have him immediately and permanently disappeared, for Haller – and us –  treating with Moya felt like one of his risks worth taking. The uncertainty was worth the stretch.   

When The Lincoln Lawyer hit us with the six-month time jump at the beginning of Season 3 Episode 3, we thought that was pretty bold. While people have been attacked in this series before, and while obviously murders will always be at the center of what’s going down in court, Lincoln Lawyer has also been pretty consistently a series where slickness plays most and the solutions just present themselves. While people are always telling Mickey Haller that he makes things too personal – in Ep 5, trying to comfort Andrea about her client being killed by an abusive ex-husband, Mickey himself admits that as lawyers they get too messy and too involved – the warnings never felt substantive. It felt like those blood capsules Mickey used in Episode 2 – necessary theatrics to engineer a preferred result. But Eddie Rojas dying in a car wreck? That was orchestrated by Mickey Haller’s enemies? It’s a suddenly serious, entirely new gear for this series. It’s unfortunate that the just-added Moriyon became the catalyst for this increased sense of danger. But if Lincoln Lawyer wasn’t going to kill off one of his former wives or a member of his support team, it needed a way for Mickey to get through his head how serious everything is getting.

Haller will have to respect that severity as he moves forward with this mess of a case, even now, as it’s burbling and changing shape dangerously with all of the emerging links between Julian LaCosse, Hector Moya, James DeMarco, and the scope of the havoc left behind in the wake of the Glory Days murder. Havoc like the death of sweet smoothie enthusiast Eddie Rojas.

Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.