We’re now four episodes into Ballard, and while the cold cases being tackled by the team are intriguing, what captivates us the most is the cloud of trauma that Detective Renée Ballard navigates through in her life and work. We’ve glimpsed pieces of this overwhelming haze through moments like Olivas visiting her office in Episode 1 and her confrontation with Ken Chastain in Episode 3. With Ballard, portrayed compellingly by Maggie Q, it’s clear that her trauma is all-encompassing, much like gravity or oxygen, constantly weighing her down. Despite this, she masks her struggle so well, summoning inner strength to carry on.

During a significant discussion about the missing John Doe bullet—details on that to follow—Laffont delivers startling news. There’s been a single-vehicle crash involving a drunk driver, Ken Chastain. Q marvelously depicts a moment where Ballard’s stoic professional demeanor briefly crumbles, exposing a year’s worth of suppressed emotions and exhaustion. Should she have heeded his apologies for his lack of support back then? Can she even face this without invalidating past events? After receiving the news, Ballard quickly regains composure, pushing her feelings back into obscurity. Yet Laffont, Colleen, and their team share her burden, urging her to attend the funeral and acknowledge the positive aspects of her former partner. “Don’t let those RHD jerks keep you away.” At the funeral, for the first time in four episodes, Q allows Ballard’s grief to surface.

“Ken knew you were honest,” Chastain’s widow confides to Renée at the reception. Both women find little solace in this, as he left behind a family and Ballard never saw his remorse. Chastain’s passing stirs more tension. Ballard observes the strain between Parker and Olivas at the funeral and discloses to Zamira that Olivas was her assailant. Now Parker is taken aback. Could this RHD officer be responsible for harming both women? Parker exited RHD and the LAPD abruptly, and Ballard reflects, “When I last challenged one of their own, it ended poorly.” The plot thickens!

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.   

Ballard Briefs:

• It’s Crate! And Barrel! At the funeral! Gregory Scott Cummins and Troy Evans were always a hoot as Harry Bosch’s Old Guy Crew of retired detectives in Bosch: Legacy, and they make an appearance in the funeral sequence here in Episode 4 of Ballard. “Ken Chastain could always be depended on,” Barrel says in his eulogy. “When things got bad, he was the guy you wanted in your corner.” Looking on, Ballard gives no reaction to this. But you can see it at the same time, her mind and emotions playing the partner she trusted against the man she believes failed her, and feeling bad about the conflict between those two phrases.

• Renée rethought her demand to send back the BYOB project. She’s at home, planing the surfboard in the shed out back her place, when Lifeguard Guy pops in with beers. “‘Doctor’ Tutu thought it would be cathartic for me to build this board,” she tells him as she grabs a cold one. And when he notices the old Polaroid of her father and her tacked on the wall, Renée reveals that he died in a surfing accident when she was just 14. “Just one of those things, you know?” She adds wistfully. “It’s always there.” Pain and emotion, following her around. Kinda like her trauma fog.

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.