How ‘The Lincoln Lawyer’ Just Set up Potential Season 4 — What Could Be Next?

[Warning: The below contains MAJOR spoilers for The Lincoln Lawyer Season 3.]

The following post contains discussions of suicide.

Things finally seemed to be looking up for Mickey Haller (Manuel Garcia-Rulfo) when everything came crashing down—and set up a potential Lincoln Lawyer Season 4 we need to see.

In the Season 3 finale (now streaming on Netflix), investigator Bishop (Holt McCallany) took the stand and revealed that DEA Agent DeMarco (Michael Irby) killed Gloria Dayton (Fiona Rene); she’d planted a gun in drug trafficker Hector Moya’s (Arturo Del Puerto) room on his orders and had been subpoenaed. After his testimony, Bishop shocked everyone in the courtroom by revealing he had another gun (the judge had the bailiff take his primary weapon) and shooting himself, dying by suicide. Mickey’s client Julian La Cosse (Devon Graye) was free—and got a nice settlement.

Then, as the season ended, Mickey was looking forward to a vacation when he was pulled over for a missing license plate—and during the stop, the police officer found the body of his client Sam Scales (Christopher Thornton) in the trunk!

Below, co-showrunner Ted Humphrey breaks down the major moments of the Season 3 finale and teases what could be ahead in a potential Season 4, including confirming which Michael Connelly it would be adapting.

Sam Scales is in the trunk at the end, which means a fourth season would be adapting The Law of Innocence, correct?

Ted Humphrey: That would be the thinking.

How are you feeling about the chances of a fourth season?

I mean, we’re in the hands of the audience, right? We’re quietly optimistic about it, but obviously, with Netflix, it always depends on how the current season goes. And so I would say to our fans and viewers of the show, if you want a fourth season, which we very much want to bring you a fourth season, then by all means watch and tell your friends.

Talk about having Mickey be in a good place right before that ending. The journey you put him on this season—he just decided he wasn’t going to quit, he’s talking about vacation, he’s smiling in the car, he was happy, and then you drop this on him.

Yes. It’s funny, my wife said to me when she saw that, oh, can’t you just let this guy be happy for a minute? And I said, well, it wouldn’t be much of a TV show if we did that. But no, Season 2 of the show was, we referred to it internally as the Icarus season, right? Mickey is flying high off the Trevor Elliott case, and then he gets kind of knocked down to speed and has to rebuild himself. And so coming into Season 3, he’s really unsettled. He’s discovered that Glory Days is dead and the sins of the past are all kind of piling up on him. That’s really what, in a sense, Season 3 is about and what The Gods of Guilt is about. It’s Mickey’s guilt. It’s Mickey’s guilt for all the things that he’s done that may have hurt people that he cares about, which in a lot of ways is much worse even than them hurting yourself.

And at the end of the day, he’s managed to overcome that. He’s managed to right the wrongs of the past. He’s managed to get justice for Glory Days and for others, and even for Julian La Cosse with the settlement that he gets him at the end. And so finally, he feels like, the chaos of the last few years is behind me. I’ve gotten over my addiction. I’ve gotten through that period of time where I was getting too big for my britches. I’ve gotten over these sins of the past, and now I can kind of get back on an even keel and just start my life over again. And then wham! As I say, it wouldn’t be much of a drama if we didn’t throw a curve ball into his life.

What excites you about exploring having Mickey as a client at this point in his life and career?

We’re really proud of Season 3 and just as we were making it, we just felt like—and it’s not surprising because it’s maybe our favorite of the books or one of them, and Michael has said that it’s maybe his favorite book, The Gods of Guilt—we did that book justice, that this season does that story justice, that we were able and in many ways, as we always do, obviously to expand it. And because we have a much bigger palette to work with in a 10-episode series, and in particular, once you get to the finale, very proud of that. I was very proud to direct that episode and it really came out well.

And so we just thought, “What could top this?” Well, what tops it is obviously Mickey is now the client, the jeopardy that his clients have been in up until now, now he’s in, and it’s truly the toughest case of all. And if you think back over the course of three seasons, what is the mantra that his father taught him and that Legal Siegel [Elliott Gould] has reminded him of? There’s no worse client than an innocent man. Well, what happens when you’re that innocent man and how do you handle that? And how do you deal with the fact that traditionally a lawyer who represents himself is a fool for a client? So we’ll see.

Courtesy Of Netflix

Talk about crafting and building the tension of Bishop on the stand leading to that ending. It is in the book, it’s with Lankford in the book, but even just the buildup of him sitting outside the courtroom…

Yeah, it was very deliberate. So much of it obviously relies on this powerhouse performance by Holt McCallany, which was a privilege to witness and help bring to life, but so much credit obviously has to go to him. And so on some level, even what you’re talking about with him sitting outside, I mean, we built that obviously in the scripts as we sort of knew the tension. It’s that Hitchcock thing of the bomb was under the chair and then you’re waiting for the bomb to go off. He’s the bomb. And so you don’t know how it’s going to go off, but it’s going to go off in some way. And he’s sitting there, but so much of it was just like point the camera at Holt and get out of the way because he will sell even the quiet moment of sitting on the bench, not even saying anything. He will sell the tension that’s in that moment. And he certainly did.

And then the judge asking for his weapon also to hand it over…

Yeah, there was a whole internal debate on that about [that] because you want to handle that in a way where you’re not telegraphing where it’s going, but it’s the logical thing that would happen. And I like to think and I hope that we got that balance right.

You did. But was she at all worried about him hurting anyone else or was she only seeing a man she needed to worry about for himself?

I think it’s probably both. Especially in the modern age, right? You’ve got to take all those things into account.

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This next book that could be the fourth season, if we get one, it features Bosch (Titus Welliver in the Amazon franchise), and I know we’ve talked about how it’s impossible to do a crossover right now. Are you figuring out a way to bring in a past character from the show, possibly a new character to fill that part of the story?

Well, the only thing I can say about that is that as we’ve discussed before, unfortunately, Bosch is not a possibility for us. And at this point, obviously if we were to ever were to be able to do that, we’d have to somehow backfill the relationship between the two of them. But that’s pie in the sky thinking anyway. Just like what we did in Season 3 with the character of Neil Bishop, who is, as you point out, Lankford in the books, Michael has given us in his books, and we have then expanded in the show this panoply of characters and situations for Mickey and it gives us a lot of different wells to draw from. And they do this, I’ve noticed, in Bosch as well—there are so many Bosch books. We only have, I think there’s seven now Lincoln Lawyer books, but there are, I don’t know, 20 something Bosch books. And so they have so many books to work with that they’ve had seasons where they’ve combined two and even three different books into one season and they’ve mixed characters around and Mickey Haller and those books has become somebody else. So there are always ways to do that.

Is there anything else you can say about what we could see in the fourth season? Like who could and could not be returning? 

All bets are off. All bets are off. Stay tuned, keep watching.

The Lincoln Lawyer, Seasons 1-3, Streaming now, Netflix

If you or anyone you know is having suicidal thoughts, please contact the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 1-800-273-TALK (8255) or dial 988. If you or a loved one are in immediate danger, call 911.