WARNING! This article contains major SPOILERS for The Lincoln Lawyer’s season 4 finale!Cobie Smulders makes a world-shaking entry into Netflix’s The Lincoln Lawyer in season 4’s final sequence, which will carry massive consequences for season 5’s story.
The cast of The Lincoln Lawyer brought in some exciting new names for the fourth outing, with Constance Zimmer, Kyle Richards, and Sasha Alexander tackling major roles. However, one of the season’s biggest casting additions was left a mystery until the very last scene, at which point How I Met Your Mother‘s Cobie Smulders was finally introduced in a major twist reveal.
In The Lincoln Lawyer season 4’s final scene, Smulders appears as a mysterious woman taking notice of Mickey in a grocery store, eventually following him to the parking lot and asking to confirm his identity. All of a sudden, Mickey is shot at and Smulders helps him to take cover. After the two prove to be safe, Cobie Smulders’ character reveals herself to be Mickey’s sister and the episode cuts to black.
In an interview with ScreenRant‘s Jordan Williams, The Lincoln Lawyer co-showrunner and co-creator Ted Humphrey discussed the truth behind Cobie Smulders’ character identity as Mickey’s sister and what her arrival means for the series’ found family. Humphrey likened Smulders’ character to being a “free radical” unexpectedly floating in to make Mickey “question everything he thought he knew about himself,” noting this twist was the perfect opportunity to “knock [Mickey] personally” after being consistently thrown for a loop professionally:
ScreenRant: The final scene: Cobie Smulders coming in as Mickey’s sister. She comes in just kills it for those last couple minutes – the intensity is already there. I’d love to hear more about bringing her into the fold and in such a world-changing role like that.
Ted Humphrey: “Well, world-changing is, I think and hope, the right word. We felt that it was time for that. Like I said before, we’ve told this story of a man’s redemption and getting a little too big for his britches and being knocked down by not just the sins of his past, but then literally by being accused of murder and having to fight for his own freedom and his own life. And now that he’s free of that, he’s got to take stock of who he is, and what he wants, and how has this all changed him?
And suddenly, this completely unseen free radical floats into this situation. And we felt that it was important to do it from a personal angle and not from just another case or somebody gets murdered or something like that. We’ve sort of seen that. And so we felt it was really important. We’ve knocked this guy for a loop professionally, now let’s knock him personally, and make him question everything about who he is or what he thought he knew about himself.”
For the latest Lincoln Lawyer twist ending, Humphrey wanted to go in a different direction from Mickey’s life being upended by a professional obstacle. This time around, Mickey’s cliffhanger has to deal with being confronted by a family member he seemingly never even knew existed.
With The Lincoln Lawyer season 5 already renewed by Netflix, the cliffhanger will officially be addressed and explored with Smulders’ mysterious character. And, just through the final line revealing her identity as Mickey’s sister, the upcoming episodes’ initial story has already been laid out for the new and returning characters alike. According to Humphrey, “they’re all going to be knocked for a loop by this,” with The Lincoln Lawyer season 5 addressing key questions about how they’ll react to the news while also answering why Smulders’ character has finally found Mickey at this point in time:
ScreenRant: It’s not just a big shock for him. It’s going to be a huge shock for the entire team, for his ex-wives, for his daughter. How do you see that shifting the bigger dynamic at large, not just with Mickey being shocked to his core of his identity and family, but how that could impact the entire team?
Ted Humphrey: “Well, I think it is what you said, that they’re all going to be knocked for a loop by this, and the fun will be in how do they all, including Mickey, react to this? How do they all cope with this? First of all, who is this person? Is she even telling the truth? If she is, what does that mean? And also why now? Why come to him now at this moment? I will tell you there is an answer to that, and it will form the basis of the way we unravel all this and the story that we tell in season 5.”
One line of thought that Mickey will have to consider after The Lincoln Lawyer season 4’s twist ending is whether Smulders’ character is even telling the truth about being his sister. The implication is that she would be his paternal half-sister, perhaps being Mickey Haller Sr.’s daughter that he either never knew about or kept a secret from Manuel Garcia-Rulfo’s Mickey. Therefore, Mickey will first have to figure out if she really is his sister before trying to work through why he never knew about her and why she decided to find him now.
That said, Mickey having a sibling doesn’t come as a surprise to readers of Michael Connelly’s Mickey Haller book series that the Netflix show is based on. In the novels, Mickey becomes close with his half-brother, the Michael Connelly-created detective Harry Bosch. However, since Amazon owns the rights to the Harry Bosch character (portrayed by Titus Welliver in Bosch, Bosch Legacy, and Ballard on Prime Video), while Netflix has the rights to Mickey Haller, neither is able to appear in the other streaming brand’s universe.
Exclusive: The Lincoln Lawyer co-creator Ted Humphrey addresses potential future spinoffs at Netflix and what’s needed for them to happen.
As such, for the first three seasons of The Lincoln Lawyer, it seemed as if Harry Bosch, or a Bosch-like sibling replacement, would never appear. As Humphrey has now teased, it seems the series was just waiting for the right time to introduce such a personal twist for Mickey by finally giving him a familial connection akin to Bosch in the books.
Though she won’t just be a stand-in for Harry Bosch in The Lincoln Lawyer season 5, Smulders’ character creates an opportunity to tell certain stories between Mickey and Bosch from the books that couldn’t be directly adapted into the Netflix series. The Lincoln Lawyer has found substitutes for Bosch in the past, such as giving Cisco a heightened role or through Detective Griggs in season 1, but Humphrey explained there are other book narratives for Mickey that require “a closer person,” which is where the sibling angle for Smulders’ character comes in:
Ted Humphrey: “We are in a unique position, and Bosch and the Bosch universe is in the mirror image position of ours, in that you have these two characters, who in their literary world are linked, who in television cannot be linked because we’re on two different platforms.
So what Bosch has done throughout that series is create other characters to take the place of Mickey. And we did that in season 1 with Detective Griggs, who is wonderful, who we’d love to find a way to bring back. But there are some stories that we want to tell that require somebody inside the tent, if you will. A closer person. And so it felt like not an opportunity to just do that with a different person, but an opportunity to create new stories, but use that template.”
Rather than being the new Bosch, Smulders’ character in The Lincoln Lawyer season 5 will tell new stories based around the “template” created by Mickey and Bosch’s dynamic in the books. The Netflix series is no stranger to making key changes from the novels, so taking the template of that character while adding new twists, conflicts, and stories remains true to how Humphrey and The Lincoln Lawyer team have previously approached adapting Connelly’s work.
All 10 episodes of The Lincoln Lawyer season 4 are now available to stream on Netflix.
- Release Date
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May 13, 2022
- Network
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Netflix
- Directors
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David E. Kelley
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Manuel Garcia-Rulfo
Mickey Haller
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