By Johnny Loftus for Decider
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.
Read the rest of the recap, HERE.