Two Hundred A Day - Episode 10: Chicken Little Is A Little Chicken

Episode Date: May 14, 2017

Nathan and Eppy discuss S2E9 Chicken Little Is A Little Chicken. Angel asks Jim Rockford for a little help collecting some money - but before he knows it, Jim is orchestrating a way-too-complicated shell game to keep two rival mob bosses from planting both him and Angel at the bottom of the LA river. This episode has it all and we really highly recommend it! Thanks to: zencastr.com for helping us record fireside.fm for hosting us thatericalper.com for the answering machine audio clips spoileralerts.org for the adding machine audio clip Freesound.org for the other audio clips Support the podcast by subscribing at patreon.com/twohundredaday. Big thanks to our Gumshoe patrons! Check them out: Richard Hatem Lowell Francis's Age of Ravens gaming blog Pluto Moved On Podcasts and Video Lets Plays Kevin Lovecraft and the Wednesday Evening Podcast Allstars And thank you to Shane Liebling and Dylan Winslow! Two Hundred a Day is a podcast by Nathan D. Paoletta and Epidiah Ravachol. We are exploring the intensely weird and interesting world of the 70s TV detective show The Rockford Files. Half celebration and half analysis, we break down episodes of the show and then analyze how and why they work as great pieces of narrative and character-building. In each episode of Two Hundred a Day, we watch an episode, recap and review it as fans of the show, and then tease out specific elements from that episode that hold lessons for writers, gamers and anyone else interested in making better narratives.

Jim, it's Beth. You have the vet's number, the flea collar, and extra litter. One thing I forgot, keep him away from other cats. He's not very discriminating. Welcome to 200 a Day, a podcast where we explore the 70s television detective show, The Rockford Files. I'm Nathan Palletta. And I'm Epi Dyer-Avishaw. And which episode are we talking about this time, Epi? And which episode are we talking about this time, Eppie? We are talking about Chicken Little is a Little Chicken, which is the ninth episode of season two.

And spoiler, we never meet Chicken Little. So this episode might be a little different from our standard format just because we had already recorded our episode about this episode. but unfortunately there was some construction going on at someone's house and the audio was not very good. In addition, we also did our first Rockford Watch live watch tweet-along on the old Twitter with some other friends of the show, which was super fun and involved watching this episode again. And so now we come back together to consider it from our perspective for a third time. Right.

Because all of the circumstances of the show have kind of gelled, for me at least, into a little more of a holistic sense of the fun stuff and the cool stuff. It might be a little more freewheeling in our conversation and a little less A to B. So you are forewarned. Maybe you'll like this more. Who knows? I would make a recommendation to our listeners that they watch the episode at least twice before listening to this.

And then maybe have some conversations with friends and family about it a couple of times too. So they, so they get up to speed with us. I should say we're, we're joking but i think i think a master class could be taught on this episode alone the more i watch it the more i love it i agree there's a lot going on both on the plot level and kind of the craft of the episode

level yeah not to mention the character level this is an episode focused on Angel, and a lot of the interactions between Jim and Angel are the joy of the episode. And between James Garner and Stuart Margolin just bouncing off each other and clearly having so much fun with those characters. I found watching it that I, especially when we were doing the live tweet, I kind of just wanted to write down every single line of dialogue and tweet those out. It's good. It's extremely quotable. There are a lot of good ones. And for the record, if anyone is interested, there is an archive via

Storify of our tweets from the live tweets. So you can find a link to that through our Patreon at patreon.com slash 200 a day if you want to find all of the most quotable quotes. I think we managed to nail a lot of them during that. Alright, shilling aside,

shall we get into this episode? Yeah. This episode was directed by Laurence Doheny, who also directed the Farnsworth Stratagem, which is another very con-focused episode. It seems to have a stylistic affinity for these kinds of stories. And the script for this one is by Stephen Cannell, who we learned is pronounced Cannell,

not Cannell, thanks to a video that Epi sent me. So apologies for our previous episodes where I mispronounced that name. It is in fact Cannell. You make it sound like I sent you the video just to correct you, but I honestly didn't even... I didn't notice that we were mispronouncing it. I just sent the video. It's a nice little interview with James Gardner. Yeah, it's a great little interview where he's talking about the show, and we'll throw it in the show notes for this episode.

So, yeah, it has all of the high-water marks of the core cannel writing, I think. The different layers of the story, the hucksterism and con-focused stuff. But yeah, tell us about the preview montage, which I think orients us pretty well for the content of this episode. Now I'm trying to remember the preview montage. I wrote very little about

that in my notes here, and since I've seen so much of the episode, or seen the episode several times now, I do know it features Angel quite a bit. Yeah, it features Angel. It features kind of the top plot points, which is that there's $30,000 of hot money involved. Angel's in trouble. He's getting death threats, and he's getting framed for something.

Honestly, the opening montage, although lovely and calls you in and says, you know, here's Angel. You're going to get a lot. It's good, Angel. You get some good lines. You can't watch the opening montage and not sit down and watch the rest of the episode, which is exactly what it's supposed to do. But that aside, I want to talk about the answering machine message because we have something unique going on here. Yeah, so as you heard at the beginning of this episode, the answering machine message is from Beth about her cat.

And this is, as far as I could tell from internet research and also my own memory and consulting other fans of the show, this may be the only time where the message on Rockford's answering machine has direct relevance to the plot of the episode. Right. And it's not like a clue that you need to know, but it's a lovely little Easter egg, if you will. If you pay attention to what's on the answering machine, it sounds just like, oh, okay, Beth is making Rockford watch her cat. That's answering machine level funny. Right. But then later in the episode he's like well

beth is out of town i need to watch her cat so i'm going to stay at her place tonight i was like no we already knew that because of the the message and that's the only time that happens in the whole series as far as we know at this time if you know of another episode that does this let us know and we'll uh add it to the the rarity list but I'm pretty sure this is the only one. And then the very first scene in this episode is one of the most ominous scenes in television history. Angel Martin alone in a garage with Rockford's Firebird f***ing around with the door for some reason. And my blood ran cold when I first saw this,

given what I knew of Angel and what I knew of Rockford in his car. Yeah, it is mysterious. We don't see Rockford without his car very often or the car without Rockford. To the eagle-eyed viewer, you can see that he's stuffing money into the side panel. It's not just something random. There is a shot of Bill sticking out of his hand. So Angel, just something random there is a shot of bill sticking out of his hand so angel as we know up to no good as per usual that said he does once he drives out of the garage and the music kicks in it is a little more upbeat because that that first little scene there's no music or orchestration and then the credits for the episode play over the a really nice panoramic shot of angel driving jim's car down the coastal highway to, in fact,

park outside of his trailer. I feel like immediately I was reassured. Okay, this is coming back. There's no bodies in this car. So Angel knocks on the door and then heads into the trailer where Jim and his dad Rocky are engaged in a fierce battle of chess. So this whole opening bit is just like a really nice, quick but potent character piece for these three characters. We come in with Angel as Rocky is checkmating Jim, but Jim refuses to give up until he says that he gives up. That's even his line, right? He says, like, we're not through until I say I'm through.

Then there's a long pause while he stares at the board and then he finally tips his king over while he's deciding that he has in fact been defeated by his father angel launches into great con man patter about the state of the chessboard given the the experience now of seeing this episode quite a few times and talking about it i found this moment to be kind of important in my interpretation of of the events of this episode i think that you see angel being faster than rockford when it comes to the con game rockford i think has better con game than angel because rockford has a little bit more wisdom. He knows when to pull up short, and he knows when he's in danger. The reaction to Angel and Rockford, how they both react to danger in a con game, is very different.

Angel is acutely aware of when he is personally in danger, but he doesn't see when danger is approaching him. He gets blinded by the reward, whereas Rockford doesn't look for the reward. So he's more aware of when he's possibly stepping into a dangerous situation, but when he's in a dangerous situation, he has more composure. You know, he has a little bit more control over his. Yeah. Angel's a coward, right? So when the danger happens, Angel's reaction, a fight or flight reaction, right? Usually flight. Well, Rockford is still thinking at the level of what does this person want out of the situation? How can I leverage what they want to get what I want, even when he's in danger? And what this scene shows, I think, is that in many ways, the differences between Rockford and Angel

and how they approach the con game would make you think that Rockford is better at the con game and smarter about it. But that's not the case. And I think that this scene helps us kind of establish that. The Angel sees what's in store for Rockford on the chessboard through the language of a con game before Rockford can see it. And that becomes important near the end of the episode. It's not an accident that they're playing chess. Yeah. For this episode,

because there's a little bit of chess-like move, counter move at the end. A lot of the patter is great. The way that Angel analyzes the board state. You got to move your boss or Rocky's going to lay a subpoena on him. Go through a couple other choice phrases and ends up with then you got nothing left but punks and junkies but uh rockford does finally tip his king over and uh walks out of the trailer to go talk

about some some business that angel wants to talk to him about uh but not before we we see rocky grab a couple bills that were clearly the bet that he and his son had had on this game. Rocky coming out ahead, I believe. I think, yeah, it looked like Rocky was grabbing about $10, presumably five of which was his and five of which was Jim's. As his bookkeeper, that's where I'm going with that. All right.

The Jim's down five. Well, and then he's down another another two because to talk about this business, they go over to the hot dog stand. He gets a couple of hot dogs without even asking Angel. Rockford knows that Angel's probably going to scam it out of him anyway. So he might as well just get him a hot dog now.

So in one of our few scenes where we see Rockford purchase food and then consume it while the scene is happening, they consume their hot dogs while they talk about this business proposition that Angel has. Angel wants Rockford to help him get some money that he's owed from Tom Little, or as we quickly learned, nicknamed Chicken Little. Jim doesn't really know who this is, but Angel reminds him that he came into the jail where the two of them were jail buddies

about a month before Rockford got out. So Rockford kind of remembers him, but never met him, which is actually important plot-wise. It's one of those things where he says it at the time, it doesn't matter, but upon rewatch, to use language that I don't really like that much,

it closes a plot hole that potentially could occur later, which is another element of the the tightness of the writing in this one um anyway tom little uh was known as a forger as a pen and ink man and had some scam going on the upshot is that he owes angel two thousand dollars angel went to collect it couldn't him, can't track him down at work, and he wants Jim to go find Tom Little to get Angel's two grand for him. But Rockford, of course, wants to know what's in it for him. Right, exactly. There's a great negotiation between him and, unfortunately, in my notes,

I have just that he gets about half of that two grand at the end of it. But in the beginning, I can't remember where they start with this negotiation. He starts by asking what's in it for me. And Angel says, I figure about a yard, which is slang for a hundred bucks. And Jim says, a hundred bucks doesn't even get my heart started. Because as we know, he works for $200 a day plus expenses. And so they're arguing about what about all the times that I dropped everything to help you jim's like this is different i'm not helping you stay out of jail this is a gambling debt like i'm not going to do it for for less than half it's

interesting to see them argue because it's at every impasse in every moment of crisis they renegotiate their friendship that's what's happening like the the telling of the past deeds and then and we get a lot of that throughout this episode but this is this is uh sort of the beginning of that angel gives up uh maybe suspiciously quickly and says okay fine you're in for half rockford says that he'll take a look for old time's sake of course as he heads over to the to his car to go check out tom Little's apartment, he finishes his hot dog and Angel warns him, oh, it might be a little low on gas. Yeah. So what else is new?

So we immediately cut to Jim knocking at the door at Tom Little's apartment. A kind of weaselly looking little guy opens the door. He's there. So there's no mystery of tracking down Tom Little. Quote unquote Little. Right. Rockford asks him if he down Tom Little. Quote unquote Little. Right. Rockford asks him if he's Tom Little. He says, yeah.

They have some back and forth, which ends up with Jim insisting that he come with them back to the beach to settle this. And our suspect here, Tom Little, he's supposed to pick up his brother. So he wants to know if they can pick him up as part of the deal.

And Rockford, having no reason to say no, is like, yeah, sure. So he makes this phone call to his brother, Sid. A couple of things that I really enjoy about this scene, aside from him referring to Rockford as a knuckle crusher, which is great. So in hindsight, we know that Rockford's the only one in the dark here.

But nobody there knows who's in the dark or who knows what. And there's lots of money on the line that we don't know about. But in hindsight, we do. And everything that goes on in the scene is all very, like, penny ante. It's all very petty, little, all right, I'll go with you, but you have to, you know, give my brother a ride and given the gravity of what's happening i just love that contrast and the idea that these characters are keeping everything on this sort of low level to suss out whatever what the other characters know they don't immediately panic because there's a lot of money on the line

because the person that just came through the door may not have any clue how much money is on the line exactly watching this as an audience member this is the first the first level of what we know will Because the person that just came through the door may not have any clue how much money is on the line. Exactly. Watching this as an audience member, this is the first level of what we know will unfold to something else, right? Yeah. So it's also serving that purpose of bringing us along with Rockford getting drawn into this situation that he doesn't know about yet. he doesn't know about yet. Sure enough, Rockford picks up the brother Sid, who is about a foot and a half taller than the other guy who's already in the car. And that's when we see Rockford start to get a little suspicious where he's like, you don't look like his brother. Yeah, half brothers. I just like moments in fiction like this where it's become close to apparent that everyone knows that there's a lie going on but nobody's going to mention it or directly address it because they still aren't

sure what the lie is about or where it's surrounded so rockford continues on with this story that he's picking up the brother even though you know at this point rockford is his suspicions are up and it's just conveyed through like his facial expression and his tone of voice that we start to see that he thinks something is fishy. But they go ahead and return to the beach to meet up with Angel. But when Angel sees the two guys get out of the car after Rockford, he just panics on his face and just yells, No, Jimmy!

And then he flees he runs across the parking lot jumps into rocky's pickup and peels out so clearly this is not going the way that he had anticipated you could time just where everyone was uh when we did the twitter thing yeah by when they just tweeted no jimmy it was it was a great way to sync everyone up. Rockford runs back to his car, has a little scrabble with Brother Sid, goes to punch him in the stomach, but instead punches him in what looks to me

directly in the gun that he has in his waistband. Yeah. Hurting his hand, allowing the two quote-unquote half-brothers to just take his car and shoot off in pursuit of Angel. So yet again, uh, Rockford is deprived of his car. He's gentleman enough to inform them as they're driving away that it's low on gas, pal. It's a great little microcosm here of how this episode does a really good job of balancing, uh, humor. Like it's funny. It is a funny episode.

But the stakes for the characters are not very funny. Right. And get steadily ratcheted up. And so the characters are taking things very seriously while the episode is still humorous for us watching it as audience. It's well-written in that way. It's fun to watch and it's funny,

but it matters to the characters. Yeah. Like this moment is a great illustration of that point because it's Rockford doing the very easy but sometimes hard to see math where he realizes my life is more important than this car. Right. So I'm not going to put up a fight for the car. I'm going to stay alive and we'll figure out what's going on from there. It also illustrates who is he angry with at this point. Right. put up a fight for the car. I'm going to stay alive and we'll figure out what it, what what's going on from there. It also illustrates who is he angry with at this point,

right? I mean, these guys are taking his car, but he's probably most mad at Angel, right? Like, let's be real. I mean, the reason why it's low on gas is because of Angel.

The reason why Angel just stole his dad's truck. Yeah. There's a lot of, a lot packed into that very tiny little moment of humor, which I agree with you. Because of that, it elevates it beyond just having a joke to say.

So the cars are gone. Rockford goes to the police station to talk to his friend, Sergeant Becker, and report his car stolen. Because as we know, Rockford is big on filing official reports so that he has something in the system for when it inevitably comes back

and becomes more serious later. Over the course of this scene, they have a little back and forth about why didn't you report it sooner? Well, I thought they'd return it. General Jim Dennis banter before Angel kind of slimes his way in to try and talk to Rockford before he says something in particular to Becker. In the background, the B plot, if you will, of this whole episode is Becker jimmying the vending machine to get a couple cans of beef stew out of there because neither of them has a quarter.

And the department can't be bothered to put a change machine in the break room. Oh my god. We're gonna, again, it is tight writing but nothing, nothing in this episode isn't part of something else and which I love. Another element of the humor also

is that everything is a setup and then there's a payoff later. Whether it's a punchline or a connection to something else. But it's amusing enough and fun enough to watch in this instance that it only makes it better when it pays off later. Exactly. Yeah. This extends even to little, very little things like I forgot to mention. forgot to mention but when jim and angel are having their first conversation at the hot dog stand and they're talking about their time in prison angel mentions that he sang in the choir half a sentence and that pays off later yeah and that's a setup i didn't even notice until watching this numerous times anyway becker asks jim what he wants jim would like some beef stew

out of the vending machine which sounds real gross to be perfectly honest yeah it's the most disgusting thing he gets gets him his beef stew and uh and then angel finally pops in he's not able to get jim's attention before he goes in to to really make the full report and so he has to be in the same room with jim and denn. So fun side note here, this scene plays out as the first meeting of Dennis and Angel. Like when he walks in, Becker's like, Oh, you have jailbird written all over you. What's your name?

Listeners will remember in, when we talked about the Farnsworth stratagem, there was a moment in there where the, the humor of it played off Dennisis and angel both being involved with the scheme of yeah gems and not liking each other so according to some of our twitter friends these episodes were indeed shot in a different order than they were aired which seems like it would be the obvious explanation it's not a huge shame that that happened but i can i can see how if you were watching through the whole series on your own i I would actually prefer to see them in the order that they were shot.

If we're binging them in our modern era. Yeah, I would want the history of this episode to influence how I saw the strategy. Just knowing Becker and Angel, you don't even have to have them in the same scene to know that they won't like each other. But still having this history would be kind of fun and while this this show doesn't have meta plot right and that's one of the things we like about it that there's not long-term storylines that you need to keep track of or anything like that there is this kind of slow accumulation of in the universe facts that happen that change over time and one of them is when characters meet each other how long they've known each other and why and what they know each other has done and also stuff like uh becker starts going up the ranks in the police

department eventually and that's like yeah a thing that differentiates later season so i don't really think think of those things as like meta plot or continuity even but they're just facts about the world that once you watch a lot of it, you start to notice when things are dissonant. And this is one of those dissonant notes just because of production schedule. Yeah. So Angel is there though, as we learn in a minute, because he doesn't want Jim to report the car stolen. But before he can talk to Jim, Becker has to have a conversation with him

because Angel, Angel Martin, is in the known associates file. Yes. Not Jim's known associates file, but Tom Little's known associates file. Which he has pulled because they found Tom Little at the bottom of the river that morning wearing some concrete overshoes. This is a bit that when I first saw it, I completely glossed over it because I was in the main thrust of the plot. So, of course, every character you encounter is going to talk about Tom Little. But this is a neat little coincidence, right? Like it's at no point do we expect Rockford having told Becker about Tom Little.

Yeah, there's no reason for him to have brought it up because he doesn't know what the deal is with the car. He just wants it back. And, you know, it could be incriminating to him or, you know, whatever. Like, so this is a little bit of a surprise that Becker would know about the Tom Little plot. And it's because of this murder that has happened. So it's come in at a different angle and it's raised the stakes where before we were looking for him and now he's clearly been killed this is a good episode to do something like a like a relationship map for yeah right like take all the principles and then see why they are involved and how there's all these different vectors becker's only involved because he's investigating the murder of tom little right

other than just being a character that's in the show. And the murder of Tom Little is also a clear message, right? It means something really serious is going on. It's not just a $2,000 gambling debt. Yeah, he didn't just happen to die. He's got cement shoes and he's in the river, right? It's a straight up murder, like for sure. And also, if you're listening, and he says this morning, that establishes that tom little was

murdered before uh jim went to the apartment so again everything is focused effective bam bam great writing but yeah becker wants to talk to angel angel says well i have a really full schedule uh can't we talk about this later and dennis with his great, I think you noted the way that he takes Angel's neck. Oh, yeah, yeah. He grabs him by the back of the neck, which in a previous episode that we have done a podcast of, this was something that he did with Rockford in what can be described as like a comforting or affectionate sort of way. And here, it's how you would deal with a cat. You grab him by the scruff of the neck.

And he says, later just won't do. Yep. And takes him out of the scene. Which is where Rockford is frustrated with. Because now he knows that Angel has lied to him about something. He doesn't know what it is. But he knows that Angel hasn't been straight with him. And he throws down his unopened can of beef stew in anger.

Cut to a little bit later outside of the station where he's waiting for Angel to come out. So Stuart Margolin is a great physical comedian here. Broadly he is, but also like when he comes running out and he shouts, Jimmy, no, and all that stuff. But also on the kind of, I don't want to say subtle because it's not subtle, but on the lower, like you see his skin crawl because he's so close to cops.

Right. His nervousness is palatable. When he first enters that scene, you half expect the sort of that Pink Panther theme to play in the background because he's just peeking around the corner. And you can hear like the twinkle toe sound of like a cartoon character approaching or whatever. I just really enjoy watching him in all these scenes and watching him convey how utterly uncomfortable Angel is in this situation. Angel is in such trouble that he would walk right into this hornet's nest to get a hold of Rockford. Right. Get a hold of Rockford.

Right. And the reason that he's willing to do that is because he doesn't want Rockford to report the car stolen because there's $30,000 of cash stashed in the left front door panel. Angel insists that they get away from the station before he actually even tells him with the great line, I'm getting a bad case of the Fifth Amendment. Yeah. And Angel came to the station in Rocky's truck. So they're getting back into rocky's truck to get out of there so this is when jim insists on tell me what's really happening you have to tell me what's going on because you know this is getting out of hand so this whole conversation happens while they're on the move in the truck but there is a shot as they're leaving the parking lot of another car across the

street watching them so as viewers we know that they're they're being followed throughout this conversation so tom little offered angel two thousand dollars to take some cash which happened to be thirty thousand in a brown paper bag down to the stock market to buy thirty thousand dollars worth of preferred stock, then sell it a couple hours later and bring it back to Tom Little. This conversation happened at a bar where Angel was enjoying the, quote, Red Irish health food breakfast, which is tomato juice and Irish whiskey. Just like beef stew.

Oh, boy. Just mix that with the beef stew. There you go. This explains the hairy chests. Anyway, so he did what he was told to do. It's not necessarily illegal, even though it's totally laundering money. He has the $30,000. He went over to Tom's apartment to give it to him.

There were two guys there and they came after him with guns. So he ran. He ditched them. He stashed the cash in Rockford's car. And then that's when he went to go see Rockford. This all goes into a beautiful back and forth argument about neither of them leveling with the other one and who's done what to who and when. And it's important that all we're doing here is paraphrasing like i i have quotes written in my notebook here but i don't even want to attempt them because the the delivery is so important yeah rockford does ask him obviously he's a crook and he wants you to launder this

money it's hot money what did you even think about doing that and angel has this whole thing about well you know you know how it is money's tight And I give half of everything I make at the paper to my mother. She's been sick. He has all this patter. This is what I like to think of as the C plot of the episode. Angel's mom comes into play here. He says this, and then Rockford comes back with, oh, it sounds like she's doing better. She died while we were in prison.

Angel's like, oh, Angel can't prison and he's like oh angel can't remember who he's who he's given this mother story to uh over all the years so they just had this great argument and there's one point where speaking of the kind of the amount of continuity in the show angel brings up what do you mean you always level with me what about that jewel heist you sent me in to talk to those like coffin makers or something like that like another great slang term for for mobsters and that's actually referencing an episode from season one where there was a con involving a necklace and a fake necklace and switching the real necklace for the fake necklace anyway that's season one episode 16 counter gambit which is also a fantastic

episode uh they're arguing so much that rockford has pulled the truck over and they're just stationary uh that's when the scene is ended by a couple of gorillas just walking up to their windows with guns all right come with us like i said i'm not going to be able to go through and quote all this but it is another one of those scenes where the dialogue it gives us a bunch of exposition in a very entertaining way it's not like somebody's just gonna dump it in our laps we get to see these two great actors perform these characters in kind of a broad way and it gives us insight into the history of the characters it gives us like their sort of relationship to each other

you can see how they both attempt to kind of sway the other, but they can't. I mean, one of the reasons why these characters work so well is that neither one of them has the tools to fully convince the other to do it their way. Right. They're always going to have a

point of conflict. Yeah. Even when they're trying to work together. Also, this is this is the second layer of the story like we've peeled back the original lie obfuscation of the truth it's not a two thousand dollar gambling debt there's thirty thousand dollars of hot money involved and there's these goons as captivating as this scene is do not think you're about to get a breather no this next one it just ratchatchets right up from here. So our goons throw our heroes into the car, and then we head into a dimly lit warehouse

where a mob guy, who we shortly learn is named Chester Sierra, and his right-hand goon bitching about the pizza that he got. Right. They got pizza with anchovies, but there's not enough anchovies. But the crust is good. If I might, as a child of the 70s, I'm going to ask the younger generation here, have you ever had a pizza with anchovies? Don't know if I have.

My dad eats anchovies and sardines out of the can, which I always thought was gross. Exactly. I mean, gross like beef like out of the can yeah which i always thought was gross exactly i mean like gross like beef stew out of a vending machine like it this episode made me realize that trope that style of pizza has kind of disappeared like anchovies on a pizza used to be second place to pepperoni on a pizza as far as like the most common i i'm talking out of my ass here but this is my experience of my own childhood that that was it's not that I like really enjoyed anchovies on pizza. It was just, if you're going to get pizza, it's either going to have pepperoni on it or anchovies or sausage, you know? There's some cultural shift about anchovies on pizza.

It was a thing. So they're having this conversation about the pizza while jim and angel are being brought in so they hear the conversation about the pizza then they sit down chester offers a bite of pizza to angel who does take the bite and it goes could use more anchovies good crust though just like echoing what they just said it's a perfect angel moment. The physical scene where he's feeding it to him is it infantilizes Angel in a way

that he's perfectly comfortable to drop into. He's like, yeah, I'll do this. This is what you want. This is what I'm gonna do. We know who has the power in this situation. It is Chester Sierra, or as he calls himself, an urban horticulturalist which is oh man become a this standard of our vocabulary here in western this might be the most

chewed scene of the rockford files that we have seen for this show thus far yeah oh to encapsulate what we learn here is that chester sierra is he's part of the mob and he's in charge of whatever physical area Jim and Angel are in. And he has this whole monologue about being left with the garden of this bigger mob boss who's cooling off in Europe. Why? Because he's a good gardener, because he's known as what's known as an urban horticulturalist, because what he plants, he tends the seeds and harvests what grows. So when his guys saw Angel laundering all that money and he didn't know about it ahead of time, he wants to know why he wasn't informed because it's on his turf, right? And so he sees his friend Angel go talk to his friend Rockford.

So he just wants to know what's going on. So Angel basically tells the same story that he's told Jim with a little equivocating and bringing up again his mother at the urging of Rockford. Tell him about your mother. So he tells him the whole story about that that we know so far. I think I'm pretty sure he doesn't actually embellish it or leave anything out. No, I think it does. I think it's just, yeah. So he tells him there's $30,000.

It's in Jim's car. I don't know who those guys were that took it. That's the only thing that turns out to be obviously untrue. But whoever did has that money, blah, blah, blah. Chester does not believe him. Who would tell such a flaky story? He says, I fought you guys down here for pizza for dinner and instead of a little honor and decency you feed me an ice cream sandwich

and he tells his guys to drop him in the river what a memorable guy yeah but more of the absolutely gorgeous uh rockford files i don't even know what to call it. Just the, like, he really peels my banana, or I'll climb your tree, or you feed me an ice cream sandwich. It feels a little ridiculous to our ears, but when they're delivered by those characters, they're actually threatening. Yeah. And again, this is another line that has stuck with us here in Western Massachusetts. Angel tries to negotiate, maybe you should just kill one of us and then like kill jimmy and i'll send the message and then i'll still be here if you need to kill someone else

which is another perfect angel moment the extent at which he elaborates on this plan is so beautiful because he i mean you get the gist of it immediately kill rockford that'll be the example and i'll be the one who lives to tell about it. Right. But he, he goes on to explain that he'll always be available for engagements. Like if you need him to come and explain what happened to Rockford, like it's just very, it's very angel to keep the dialogue going. Right.

Keep talking as long as possible. Yeah. Chester is having none of it. He has his goons, you know, take them away and he finishes his goons uh you know take them away and he finishes his pizza with a knife and fork so we we know he has low moral moral character angel keeps talking while they're they're walking through the through this warehouse

and then turns the patter into a distraction and then just yells and shoves one of the guys and runs away through an open door which staggers everyone and surprises the other two long enough for Rockford to grab a gun from one of the surprised henchmen and for him to run. And then we have this short, well-shot sequence. Angel's in the lead. He jumps in the car to flee. He leaves Rockford behind, but Rockford manages to cut through an alley at the right place, run out in front of Angel's car, and then get in for the getaway. Clearly, Angel was willing to just leave Rockford behind, but since he got forced to pick him back up, they'll both make

their escape. When we watched it for the tweet-along, this would have been Emily's second viewing. The first time would have been a few years ago when we were watching through the whole series. And we had to rewind and watch that moment where Angel screams and runs off again, because we had to make sure. I don't think there's any indication to Rockford. This is Rockford reacting to what has just happened. This isn't Rockford and Angel executing a plan of any sort. No, this is Rockford capitalizing on the distraction, but I think he's as surprised as the other guys. Yeah, and Angel's escape plan, the extent of it is to scream and run away. And it is the most effective. If Rockford wasn't there, then they wouldn't have been distracted with Rockford and they probably could have caught up with him again. But aside from that, any other person could have been with Angel and Angel would have

gotten away with that. And I love that. This is the sort of quick and dirty, I'll worry about the consequences later that gets Angel out of most of his problems and creates most of Angel's problems. Yeah, it's good. They're getting away in the car and, you know, Angel's panicked. We have to leave town. This is really serious. And then he says, wait until you see Marty Frechette's guys.

And that's when Rockford's like, wait a second. What do you mean Frechette? He's not around here. And that's the thing that Angel has, quote unquote, forgot or just withheld from telling Rockford that the two guys that were in Tom Little's apartment, he recognized one of them as a goon for this other mob boss who has a different territory named Frechette. And those are the guys that Rockford brought back to the beach and stole his car.

So Rockford is trying to put this all together now. At the end of the last scene, Chester sierra had a line where where he he said hey i want to see tom bring him in here so chester sierra didn't know that tom little was dead uh yeah so rockford wants to know okay so who was tom swindling angel he keeps saying they have to get it out of town and this is when we get our connection back to our machine message which is that rockford is staying at beth's tonight because he has to take care of her cat anyway. So that should be a safe enough place to cool off for the night. They'll reconnect tomorrow and try and figure out what's going on.

The end of this scene sees Angel being a little sad and offended because he and Chester, they were in the prison choir together, calling back to his one-off little line at the very beginning about singing in the prison choir together. Calling back to his one-off little line at the very beginning about singing in the prison choir. All right. And then, but before Rockford can rest, he goes back to tell Becker that, no, his car really seriously has been stolen. No fooling this time. Becker knows that something's up. Something's not on the level.

He doesn't know everything. And he starts threatening Rockford. If you're not being straight with me, I'm going to come down on you and all this tough cop talk. But that's when someone from the vending machine company is doing an audit or something of the machines. Yeah. And is with a lieutenant who's saying, these men are police officers. No one would be stealing from the vending machines. Count it again. Rockford manages to regain the moral high ground by saying, well, like, I have a record. So I know criminal behavior when I see it. I'm not going to quote the lines, but it is another character moment between Becker and Rockford that is lovely.

We have a moment for a breath. And then we come back to Rockford sleeping on the couch in Beth's apartment which seems very Jim and so we have our shot into Beth's apartment I know you're a big fan. First of all I'm a big fan of the foley work here The really bad cat yowl

that just repeats a couple times Over and over but I'll get into this in the second part of our our podcast here but i i do want to point out the excessive number of plants that uh beth has and what an asshole beth's cat is uh because i think both of those are incredibly important insights into the character of beth who doesn't appear in this episode. The closest she comes to appearing is this apartment and the answering machine message. And we get a lot about her character nonetheless.

Absolutely. But other than this plant-filled setting, there's not much more to being in the apartment. Rockford goes to meet Angel at Angel's place of business. He has a mediocre job at his brother-in-law's newspaper. That's his day job. And he's freaked out because he has learned, and it seems like everyone's learned,

it's news, that the target of the $30,000 swindle was in fact the paper. Right. They meet in a restroom? Yeah, they meet in a locker room or a restroom. Angel's paranoid that the place may be bugged because, quote, my brother-in-law is a weirdo. So he turns the water taps on to obscure any bugs that might be listening. Which, again, kind of kicks off this whole sequence of humorous ways that Angel interacts with the environment while he is scared for his life.

I love the paranoia about his brother-in-law. So yeah, so the swindle was cashing phony checks from the newspaper. Angel thinks that he's being framed for it. That's why Little had him do the actual laundering. So he's super worried about this, obviously. They go from the bathroom or the locker room into a room with some kind of copier or mimeograph or some kind of duplicating machine that, again, Angel turns on to obscure their conversation and then can't figure out how to turn off. that the way that Tom Little got all the information for the scam was by basically pumping Angel for information a little at a time, like what paper stock the company uses and who they use as their engraver and all that kind of stuff.

So Rockford puts the pieces together. You got conned by Tom Little. The gag when they leave that room is that Angel can't turn off the machine and keeps duplicating. And as they get out of there, he just goes, it's 1984 already. The, the police state,

the paranoid state that he's in, he thinks he's being watched and the machines are watching him or something. They head downstairs to angel's office. Cause of course his office is basically a little nook underneath the staircase in the bowels of the, of the building. Rockford wants him to go through everything step-by-step. We we'll write it down we'll figure out how to get out of this but when angel opens his drawer he discovers that all the engraving plates and forgery materials are in his desk he is getting

framed but good and uh we have another of our gotta watch them scenes of Rockford trying to just opt out of the whole thing just be like nope you know what you're in too deep like there's nothing I can do I don't want to be involved you're on your own the blocking in this scene is great because Angel's desk is almost underneath the staircase as Rockford is trying to separate himself from the situation because the situation has become so messy he goes halfway up these stairs and they have a lot of this conversation with Rockford literally looking down on Angel the whole time. I love it. This is where he delivers the line about it's a frame made for a dummy and it looks good on you. This is a great moment of putting Angel at his lowest. This is rock bottom metaphorically, but also physically. He's on the concrete floor of the basement, nowhere to go.

Yeah, it's very impactful. You see that Angel is completely at his wit's end, completely out of options, and now Jim is abandoning him. completely out of options. And now Jim is abandoning him and Jim leaves the building. And there's this whole sequence of a kind of physical comedy where Angel is following him and slipping and sliding and stumbling over himself, trying to catch Jim as Jim's just like heading out of this, out of the building. But it's also highlighting how hapless Angel is.

Yeah. Angel chases him down outside of the building over to rocky's truck as as begging for his help and rockford turns to him with what reason could i possibly have for helping you and that's when we get the the emotional center of the episode where angel just looks at him super seriously and in a very sad tone of voice just goes because you're my friend oh it's so heartbreaking it's so great great. Who can say no? Yeah, exactly. So Rockford gives in to the inevitable, appealed

to the friendship bond that they have and says, okay, he thinks he can figure out a solution, but Angel has to do exactly what Rockford says. No balking or he's out. He has a plan, but it's going to require Angel to die. And of course, Angel's response to this is a thing to be watched,

but does involve him going, not bulking, not bulking. Again, we're seeing the extent in which Angel is willing to go to survive, which includes quite literally dying. So what this plan is, is they go back to the paper later before the galleys are due for the actual printing press they're going to insert a fake obituary for angel into the paper so that all of the goons both chester sierra and his guys and marty forshett and his guys think that angel's dead rockford writes up a fake uh death piece he gets Angel to give him his birth name, his government name,

if you will, which turns out is Evelyn. Yeah, he's happy about that. Angel's a moniker. What's your real name? He goes back and forth about the details in the obituary because he would like to be made out to be a little better of a person than perhaps he's being portrayed. There's another callback to his mom. Yep. It's like, how would you like your mother to read that about you? Yeah. But Angel puts it in to get printed. So he's going to have his fake death notice and all the papers. And then they go back to Beth's apartment for Rockford to explain the plan. So over drinks out of some exquisite cut crystal tumblers. I will agree with some of our watch along friends and calling those out as being lovely artifacts at the time. Yeah. Rockford explains his plan. He frames it as it's a

classical shell game. We're going to have the money and we're going to have the plates and we're going to have an empty briefcase. We have the two bad guys in play. We have Chester Sierra, who we've already seen. We have Marty Frechette, who we're going to see in the next scene. Someone killed Tom Little. Presumably they also want to kill Angel. Now Chester Sierra, who we've already seen. We have Marty Frechette, who we're going to see in the next scene. Someone killed Tom Little. Presumably, they also want to kill Angel. Now Chester wants to kill Rockford. So to get both of these guys out of the way, we're going to try and cut this deal.

And then we're basically going to double-cross someone. So we're going to have the two bad guys there. We're going to have three briefcases. One's going to have money. One's going to have the plates, the evidence of the scam, so that they go down for the $30,000 scam. And there'll be an empty one to perpetrate the shell game. The goal is to end up with the $30,000 for the two of them.

Frame Frechette with the evidence. And it's not really a frame. They think he's the one behind the swindle. Sierra comes up empty, but then they can explain. Everyone comes out clean. As a classic shell game, there's going to need to be someone in on it to make a switch at the right time. That's going to be Rocky. Bing, bang, boom. There you go. If you are confused listening to me talk about this, Angel is just as confused on the show after Jim explains it to him.

And I think as confused as audience members we are watching this explanation the first time i saw this i was like like i agreed with angel like that's really confusing like what is that even going to look like oh whatever i'll just watch and see how it turns out upon re-watching i feel like it is intentionally confusing because that feeds into how it actually ends up which is confused at the end i feel like there's a sort of intentional positioning here. Okay, so he's using these tumblers to kind of show how it's going to come about. But you don't really need that visual aid. Right.

It's definitely a confusing thing. It's not that you don't need it because it's that visual aid doesn't help. Yeah, it's more confusing. Right. I think that this mirrors the chess game at the beginning this is this is one of my thesis for this episode we have this mirroring the chess game at the beginning and angel sees through the physical representation he sees through the symbols what these tumblers are supposed to represent same way he saw through how the chess game and saw it in the language of the con like he understands how cons work and

that's how that's the filter through which he sees the world so angel here is the smartest man in the room which is not often a thing as an audience member I feel like most of this episode has been about how Angel isn't smart and that he needs Rockford to be smart for him. But we get this moment early on that establishes that here is where Angel is smart. And it's not that we're supposed to, as audience members at this moment, understand that Angel being confused by this means that this is a doomed plot. I think we're supposed to come to that in hindsight afterwards. Right. It's the reverse of the chess game where Angel saw the inevitable ending and explained it for us. In this one, the fact that he can't see it and can't explain it is a tell that the that the plan itself is not a good

plan right but because we're along for the ride we're like okay let's just see how it comes out and then it's that second it's that re-watching where you're like oh that's why this scene is structured the way it is the reason why we're along for the ride is not just because we're watching a rockford files episode and we're along for whatever ride it's going to deliver. But we're along for the ride because we have fallen for the Rockford con all along. He's charmed us so much that we're like, well, Rockford knows what he's doing. But Angel, because he knows Rockford, is like, I don't know. I love that. Rockford ends the scene by saying that he's run it 10 times.

It's a delight to see a master at work, right? Yes. So just trust Rockford. Everything will be fine. But what he has to do now is get all the pieces into place, which means he has to go talk to Marty Frechette. If we hadn't already had Chester Sierra with his grandstanding, Marty Frechette might be the

most scenery-chewing, memorable mob bad guy we've had. But as it is, he's only second place in my estimation. This is all about contrasts, right, between these two mob guys. And I think that's both to help differentiate them for the audience and also to communicate how they do have real rivalry or they do have some kind of real tension between them. Sierra was in a dark warehouse who was eating anchovy pizza. Frechette is in this like Bel-Air kind of looking open mansion with a pool. He's watching racehorses on a little mobile TV that his goons have. on a little mobile TV that his goons have. And his arm is in a cast in this like articulated sling because he had an accident on the horses and broke his arm.

Over the course of this scene, he has a elegant breakfast that's been laid out for him that he kind of picks at. Rockford doesn't get any, of course. But again, in contrast to the anchovy pizza of chester sierra but yeah so for shet he doesn't really have much reason to listen to rockford but rockford gets his attention by saying that he knows where the thirty thousand dollars is and then sells him on this plan to plant the evidence of the swindle on sierra to frame him which means he goes to jail, which rids Frechette of the rival and that the

handoff will go down at Angel's funeral. Again, this is another great scene. There's some great lines here. What do you feed these guys? It's not the food, it's the rabies shots. Oh, so good. And this great sort of status jockeying that goes on in the scene where Rockford has all the answers that this guy wants and this guy just wants to dismiss Rockford but Rockford keeps hinting at having answers to the point where at the end he just acquiesces and does everything Rockford has suggested including the coat hanger trick to scratch his arm in the cast that's all great yeah we see Rockford working his i'm gonna play off what i think he wants strategy and having it work out there is a little bit of like narrative

convenience this is towards the end of the episode so rather than having back and forth he kind of just agrees because we need to get to the end the uh the structure of the show is such that usually once we get into the the last act things start being a little simpler and having a little less back and forth. It seems to be a trend over many of these episodes. This is a good point for our More You Know segment. Dipso. This is a word that Rockford and Frechette throw back and forth at each other. It means drunk.

Was it short for dipsomaniac? That's what it is. Dipsomania is alcoholism, essentially. So this back and forth where they call each other drunks, I think it's divorced of the context. And I think they're just using it as just to be mean. I don't think they're literally calling each other drunks. In context, they're just calling each other morons, rightons right like why would i listen to an idiot like you why would

i listen to a dipso like you but right as not a child of that time period i was not aware like i i knew it was you know calling him dumb but uh i did not know that that referred to alcoholism that is our fact for uh the fact for this episode All right. So Frechette agrees to this handoff. Jim notes that he'll drop off an identical briefcase later so that they can make the switch to tell Sierra that they're giving him the money, but actually give him the plates. That's the con that he pitches that Frechette agrees to. We then get a scene of Chester Sierra in his office, presumably, on the phone, finishing a phone call. And then he turns to his goon who's sitting on the couch and explains that that was Marty Frechette calling to apologize. He doesn't want trouble over this territory dispute and that he's willing to give him the money to call it even. Perhaps the most important part of that scene is the amulet that Frechette is wearing.

It's so gaudy. It's amazing. His goon says that it doesn't sound like Frechette and Chester Sierra rationalizes it by saying, well, he must think that we're the ones who killed Tom Little and he's worried about trouble from the police. So if he's scared, this is probably on the level. Again, a little bit of narrative convenience that these mob guys who distrust each other decide to trust each other for this handoff. And then we go to the big finale, Angel Martin's funeral. So much goes on in this scene that we're actually going to go ahead and consider it in a little more detail in our second half. As we've kind of hit on a lot of the themes of the episode and a lot of the narrative elements in this one as we've been talking about it um we'll go a little more into the mechanics of the scene after the break

but uh plot wise we have a relatively sparsely attended service angels up in the balcony wearing sunglasses attending his own funeral which seems seems 100% in character for him. Yeah, there's no way that wouldn't have happened. The meat of this scene is there's a priest giving his funeral service, saying some remarks about Angel Martin. While that's happening, briefcases are being handed back and forth through our principals in the pews between Rockford rockford rocky chester and his guys and um forshett and his guys there are also other people there so they're handing these briefcases back

through rows of people which is again just funny it's it's it's very this scene is very funny uh not only because of the physical comedy of moving these cases around. But also if you actually listen to what the guy is saying, what the priest is saying, it's hilarious. It's full of gags. It's full of, uh, you know,

as his sainted mother would say, and, and talking about, uh, his service in the military, which we know from other things that he was dishonorably discharged and all this stuff. It's quite funny.

It's worth watching. And then watching again, just to make sure you listen to what he's saying because it's just full of good jokes but yeah briefcases go back and forth um everyone seems satisfied and then suddenly the cops bust in the bad guys all jump up and start running around rockford runs out and there's a quick little chase where everyone's chased down by the cops everyone's caught we're on the steps up to the church where rockford has been apprehended by becker along with all these other people and he says okay dennis what if i tell you that i have the 30 i'm holding

in this briefcase the 30 000 that were swindled from the newspaper and and i think he says that for shet has the plates i forget who he was aiming to actually give the plates right then the briefcase that he's holding has the evidence of the uh forging and then he opens his briefcase and sure enough rockford is holding the briefcase with the plates and his face just falls and dennis arrests everyone, couldn't be happier about that. Dennis has definitely arrested them all and let the judges sort them out. Exactly. Rockford is genuinely surprised and amazed that his plan did not go off according to how he planned it.

And we finish up with our last scene of the episode. Rockford's in a jail cell, as he so often ends these with i do want to mention this cut because he says how did it get messed up and then they cut to angel's face angel's face outside the bars of the cell that rockford's in and angel couldn't be happier everything's wrapping up just fine don't worry jimmy they're going to get you out of here you know your plan went off so well you pinned the the swindle on yourself. But because Sierra and Frechette both got arrested, they started ratting on each other.

And so they're both going to jail. So Rockford's going to be just fine. This is our final round of Angel Jim banter. We end the scene with some officers coming in to move Rockford down to County because he can only be in this jail for 24 hours.

He thinks they're coming to free him, but no. The process of the law must go forward. And Angel knows this fact, too, which is great. It's like Angel's like, oh yeah, that's what they do. As he gets hustled out the door, he wants to know where his car is. And Angel ends our episode by saying, We're going to find it any day now, Jimmy. Freeze. Roll credits. End of episode. Beautiful. Angel ends our episode by saying, we're going to find it any day now, Jimmy.

Freeze. Roll credits. End of episode. Beautiful. So, interestingly enough, we end the episode with Rockford, you know, still in jail and without his car. But thankfully, we can presume that his freedom and his vehicle will be restored to him by the time our next episode airs. The hanging question is whether or not he'll get his car. From a bookkeeper's point of view, he is out whatever he lost on the chess game,

the $2 for the hot dogs. So he's doing good. I mean, he's only down upwards of $12, except he's missing this incredible asset, which is his Firebird, which we hope he gets before the next episode, but maybe he buys a new one? We've already seen it disappear a couple times thus far.

Yeah, this final, the way that this episode ends is again comic, right? We end on an up note. It's funny. They've gotten out the other side of the stakes. They're not facing the bad things they thought they were facing. So now we can laugh at the situation obviously angel benefits from his friendship with rockford rockford does not benefit absolutely uh yeah oh man so we'll go

into the the switcheroo and how that's all handled in the show in the second half along with uh some final thoughts on the other narrative elements that are great from this episode but uh great episode must watch probably i would say absolutely i liked it a lot the first time we watched and talked about it and i think i like it more now than i did then because some of the things that bothered me then i've managed to either rationalize or seen how they're part of the structure after watching it so many times i think that the episode is definitely richer on the second viewing yeah i really enjoyed it the first time but the second time uh knowing that certain things were coming up did two things it helped to understand bits that your brain just kind of washed over the first time you're just

like yeah okay i'll accept that that that's a thing and then now you know that that's going to be important and come up again so you pay closer attention and the other bit is that you get to do things like you did with the homily there where the first time your eyes are on all the action and the second time you can take a moment and appreciate you know what's going on in the background that may not inform the scene but has its own juiciness yeah and also just like the recurring bit like uh angel's mom and yeah the jail choir you notice one or two of them the first time and then when you're watching it again you see how how they're interspersed and how they they have a good comic rhythm yeah yeah. Yeah, just great, great episode.

Everyone who has watched it that we've talked to has really liked it. Definitely one that people remember from the show run. Highly recommended. When I go to tweet about Rockford Files, I often try to find a gif to share with the world. A disproportionate number of the gifs are from this episode. There are so many quotable lines. Yeah. Yeah.

They sure are. Yeah. So go watch this. Then join us in our second half for our, or at least on my end, way overthought unpacking of the briefcase scene. It's how we do. Plus our additional thoughts on the structure and narrative elements for you to take into your own stories and games.

See you then. 200 a Day is supported by all of our listeners, but especially our gumshoes. For this month, we have six of them to thank. Thank you very much to Kevin Lovecraft. Check him out on the Wednesday evening podcast All-Stars Actual Play podcast. Visit misdirectedmark.com to find that feed,

along with other gaming podcasts in the Misdirected Mark Productions Network. Lowell Francis. Check out his gaming blog full of insights and historical analysis of roleplaying games at ageofravens.blogspot.com Pluto Moved On. Visit plutomovedom.com to find a podcast about tabletop RPGs, video games,

as well as their YouTube Let's Plays. Thank you to Shane Liebling and Dylan Winslow. And finally, a big thank you to Richard Haddam for his very generous support. Find him on Twitter, at Richard Haddam. If you want to get a shout-out for your podcast, blog, or anything else you do, check out patreon.com slash 200aday and see if you want to be our newest gumshoe. Thank you, folks. You're the Pontiac Firebird beneath our wings.

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and the Sword and Sorcery Fiction of other people, along with games and comics at worldswithoutmaster.com. So Nathan, what do you have going on? Well, I'm always working on designing and publishing new games. You can find my current offerings, including the Worldwide Wrestling World Playing Game, at ndpdesign.com. Or check out my Patreon for process and new experiments at patreon.com slash ndpaoletta. Thanks for listening. And now, back to the show. Ah, welcome back to 200 a Day.

We've just gone over episode 9 of season 2, Chicken Little is a Little Chicken. We've told you many times to go watch this episode, and now we're going to talk about some of the lessons. Actually, before we get into that, we're going to talk about the big swindle at the end, the big shell game. A lot of the elements of the story structure and things that we really like about the episode, we hammered on a lot in the first half. we really like about the episode we hammered on a lot in the first half yeah so stuff like how thing how bits and jokes and even plot elements were set up early and then fulfilled later how every character had a real compelling reason to be directed into the same plot and there's standard things that we say about about rockford files in general these characters you can see that they have a life outside of what's going on.

They're in the middle of conversations whenever Rockford shows up and you have every reason to believe they'll continue to have things going on. Plus, I think there's a whole set of lessons you can learn just by watching the two mob bosses, by watching Frechette and Sierra and just how over the top they are,

but in kind of a in context, believable manner and how they use their mannerisms to be so memorable as characters. So there's a little bullet list of things that we really like about the episode. Epi, how exactly did the briefcase swap go down? Can you lay this out for our audience in a clear and easy to understand manner? No, but let me talk about it a little bit. I do think at some point my brain turned off the analytical side. Absolutely, yeah. Going into it, you have Rockford trying to pull this off. You have,

for some reason, Rocky involved. And if you're a fan of the show, the very notion that Rocky would be involved makes you suspicious of the efficacy of the actual con, right? Yeah. Rocky is not our number one character for doing subtle or underhanded or clever things. Yeah. As far as I can tell, we get the intent of the con two ways. We get it where Rockford explains it to Angel, and we get it a second intent that's obviously a con in and of itself, as Rockford explains it to Frechette, right? Right. He tells Frechette they're going to stick Sierra with the plates. Right. And that Rockford's going to keep the money as kind of payment for making this all happen

and getting Sierra out of the way. But then the real, the quote-unquote real intent is to stick Frechette with the plates because he's the one who's actually responsible. And once Frechette goes down, then Chester sierra has no reason to you know has no reason to keep coming after the two of them and they end up with the money in both scenarios jim wants to have the money in his hands at the end of the day the reason why sierra is there is to get forchette to bring the money. Right. To get the money from Frechette. Yeah. Yeah.

Because Frechette has done his con on Sierra's territory. Right. So he is in trouble. He's in danger from Sierra. He doesn't want to be in danger from Sierra. So Rockford, who doesn't really need to have Sierra involved, except the offer to remove Sierra from the equation through this complex scheme.

Basically, he's establishing a contract where he says, I will remove Frechette from the picture, and in exchange for that, you will bring me money. Yeah, remove Sierra from the picture, but yeah. God damn it. I keep confusing these two. I can see them in my head. I know what they eat, but I can't keep their names apart.

In order to remove the urban horticulturist from the scene, the horse guy, in order to remove Sierra from the scene, Frechette has to bring money to Rockford. Correct. me two and a half viewings to figure out. I couldn't figure out why Sierra was involved at all until I realized that he was the bargaining chip to get Frechette involved. Exactly. Yeah. Jim gets Frechette to get Sierra to come to the funeral so that Jim and Frechette can con Sierra. Right. That's the proposal. But then Rockford's actually conning for shet and not sierra those are the two levels of the con when you're watching this episode you can let that just kind of wash over your brain and wait to see how it comes out at the end which is why i think it's clever that both scenarios have rockford ending up with the money because they're like okay that's what i'm

looking for if rockford has the money then he's done what he wanted if he doesn't have the money then he hasn't done what he wanted uh even though there's all this other stuff. So I made a diagram. Maybe I'll put it in the show notes which was actually really helpful because it showed me this. So we have Jim. We have Rocky for reasons we still don't really know

other than he said we need someone to make the switch for the shell game. We have Frechette and we have Sierra. Jim starts with the plates. They have the forge plates because they were stuck in Angel's drawer. So Jim starts with the plate. Frechette starts with the plates. They have the forged plates because they were stuck in Angel's drawer.

So Jim starts with the plate, Frechette starts with the money, and Frechette also starts with an empty briefcase. During the homily, what we see is Jim passed the briefcase back to Rocky, Rocky tosses it over to Frechette, Frechette then hands one of the briefcases he has back and it gets sent over to Sierra. And then the camera focuses on this other guy who I think is one of Frechette's goons, who's not sitting with Frechette, but he's like one row in front of Frechette. He's the one that Rocky actually throws the case over to. And then the camera just sees this shows us a briefcase sliding on the floor and then a briefcase sliding on the floor the other way. But doesn't show us who is picking up which one. And then we see Rocky pick up a briefcase and then hand it back to Jim.

So my intention here was like, all right, what actually happened? I want to see how this all tracks. But I think what happens, what the direction is, whether this was written or they decided to shoot it this way, is that there's an intentional question mark in the middle where you're not sure who just slid which briefcase to who. So one then imagines that the switch, if it happened at all, happened with Frechette because he just sends the plates back to Rockford. Because Rockford started with the plates and he ends up with the plates. Right. Yeah. Because in Frechette's mind, if he's not onto Rockford's plan.

Why wouldn't he just keep the money? Right. He's just giving Rockford an empty suitcase. Yeah, exactly. Or what could have happened is someone made a switch. There were two switches and they ended up reversing each other. Right. But the camera doesn't actually give us the information to determine what in quote-unquote reality of the show, what happened. But we as audience are made manifest in this whole exchange because there is a gentleman who asks, what's the deal with the suitcases?

Yeah, it's like mind your own business. So this is interesting to me because it's not modeling reality right right maybe maybe the point to take out of this is that the joy of the scene is not even though i did it because i want because i got obsessed with it the joy of the scene is not in trying to determine exactly what happens it in fact gives you a structural barrier it doesn't show you who moves the last two suitcases so the scene hinges on intent and then on outcome but it doesn't care about the reality of how the intent turns into the outcome right that transition is purely what do we need to make the story that we want to happen

happen but there's enough detail and texture there to make it feel like it's really happening i think it's interesting that it very demonstrably is like it actually doesn't really matter how this happened what matters is that jim ended up pinning it on himself that's the joke that's the dramatically satisfying outcome does that make sense am i am i way overthinking this? No, I mean, I think one of the missing parts in all this is what Jim's play was, right? Like what was the actual shell game that he was trying to do? Yeah, I mean, we know what his intent was. What we don't know is what was Jim going to do to ensure he ended up with the money and Frechette ended up with the plates.

It's not important to the story, but I can totally get behind the, wait a minute, how does this... That's why I think we're supposed to be with Angel on this. You're needlessly complicating this and I don't see where it's going to work, but I'm going to go along because I trust you, Jim. It's also interesting because Rocky is supposed to make a switch of some kind but we don't see him with an extra briefcase Sierra's the one with the extra briefcase so he's the one who would be making the switch but what is he switching there's at least one additional stage of complication that Jim has put into it yeah by involving Rocky and it's kind of his own fault that it doesn't work out the way that he intended. So we get to see a little bit of Jim's hubris, I guess.

Yeah, yeah. You know, he has a pretty high estimation of his own skill level, and it works sometimes, and sometimes it doesn't, and this is one of the times that it didn't. It's fun because, like I said at kind of the onset here, where you'd expect Jim to be smarter than Angel in this particular category because he appears to be smarter than Angel with everything else. And we see that with Angel gloating at the end where Angel's not the one in the jail cell. Jim's the one in the jail cell.

So yeah, I think that that completely delivers that feeling of overconfidence because as he hears the stories from Angel, he can see where Angel went wrong, but he wasn't in Angel's shoes for any of those decisions. And then when he's like, okay, we're doing my thing now, it just falls apart on him. Which is out of character for the Rockford files in general, but I like it. I like that it fits in there that way. It pays off the investment. We've used that term pays off a lot for this episode, but it does where the manner in which

Rockford gets drawn into this particular scheme, he fights against it every step of the way. It's kind of not his fault or his business, but he's stuck. And so he needs to concoct

this kind of equally unlikely idea to get out of it. It makes sense in the narrative arc of the episode where maybe one that didn't have Angel in it, he probably wouldn't be doing this kind of cockamamie scheme. So I guess maybe a takeaway from that whole discussion is the idea of focusing on intent and outcome and not focusing on the execution as much

can be a really valuable tool right especially for for game stuff it's a great example of what a lot of games call like conflict resolution right or scene level resolution where it's like we're interested in whether rockford gets the money or gets the plates or gets nothing i guess is the other option but those three potential outcomes for rockford and we want to know which one it is. So we're going to determine what that outcome is. And then there's some other mechanism by which we decide what the interstitial steps between the start of the scene and the end of the scene are, whether it's just us telling the story, whether there's some kind of narrative framework for who decides what when but especially in a situation where there's confusion or opaqueness

i think it's a good way to kind of cut through cut through that and just get to like how are we going to end this how are we going to get to where we want to be at the end of the scene or end of the episode this is i think what like a liminal case this sits on the border of where you want to go with that because i'm thinking of uh the scene in mad max fury road all right where go on they're being chased and it's nighttime they're they're duck i think in the in the mud or whatever and the it's foggy and in the distance the bullet farmer i think is the guy who's coming after him oh yeah and uh max walks out you don't see what happens and he comes back and uh he washes all the blood off like after the explosions and everything what makes that scene work is that you don't see it we're kept from

seeing it and if you think in a stage show a stage magician show obviously what makes the show work is that we don't see what happens we aren't aware or we're distracted by the thing we're supposed to see and so that it's fun and it feels magical so there's definitely ways to make that happen but here what makes this sort of this borderline case is that you do want to see how a con goes down and i think that this one it would be completely feasible for someone to fall on the other side of the edge than i have i've fallen on the side where i'm like i feel it did what it should have done which was a bunch of things were happening here and nobody was paying close enough attention but that is probably me offering that up to the show rather than the show uh preparing me to treat it that way i think it it gives you enough to feel

like it was thought about right like someone wrote that scene yeah how is this thing gonna look how is it gonna feel you know what is the audience gonna get out of seeing this exchange happen but someone also made the decision to say we don't want it to be easy or perhaps even possible to really know how it went down. Right. Either because there are too many people involved, the scene would be too long. It's more important thematically that there's a little bit of like, did Rockford mess up or did someone switcheroo on him? We actually don't know. And that preserves a little bit of his...

Dignity? Yeah, dignity. It gives him enough cover to be like, we still trust that he knows what he's doing. This once didn't work out. There's enough there to drill down on, but there's not a right answer. And I think that's interesting and important.

When you were talking about, say, at the table while you're role-playing, I think it's perfectly functional to hand wave a lot of that stuff to just say and then this happened uh we do that all the time role playing especially with things that we can't we maybe don't have the language to explain but i had this experience i happen to know this story it's kind of a legend about the mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss. I think that's how it's pronounced. G-A-U-S-S. Anyways, there's one way to tell this story, and that's this. He was a young kid.

He was in school, and his teacher gave all the other students busy work, said, I want you to add up all the whole numbers from 1 to 100. And he wrote down the answer right away and turned it in. And then it took everyone else quite a long time. And when the teacher got to grading them, he realized that Gauss had the right answer, which he figured out in a matter of seconds. And that astounded him. And that's it. That's our story. What isn't interesting about this story is that I don't tell you how he figured it out. I can tell you how he figured it out. He figured out that 1 plus 100 is 101, 2 plus 99 is 101, 3 plus 98 is 101, and he

realized that there were 50 pairs of that, and he multiplied 50 by 101 and got 5050, and that's the right answer. And that part of the story is vital to that kind of story. If you don't explain this math trick while telling the story, you just said this precocious kid was right about something and that was it. But if you explain how he was right, you go, oh, wow, that's a neat thing. And so when you have this sort of shell game thing like what often happens in a rockford files if they have a con going we marvel at the con we want to see it because we want to be like oh that was very interesting that rockford pretended to be an insurance instructor insurance adjuster adjuster thank you so the question is if you're creating something i don't

like i i can't address whether this episode did the right thing or not, but if you're creating something, the question is, is the meat of your story how neat this con was? Or is it what happens on the other side of it? In this case, is the story at the end of this episode, look at this meticulous shell game that Jim constructed? Or is the story, Jim end of this episode look at this meticulous shell game that jim constructed or is the story jim is in over his head but through sheer luck he managed to scrape by right and save the day and that's actually the story right like the second one is is yeah the

story of the episode jim gets sucked in he's in way over his head on something that he has no actual investment in. And by the skin of his teeth, he manages to save the day. And also, and it just occurred to me, but I think if you had to decide whether to show Jim's genius through the shell game of switching the suitcases or through how he deals with Frechette when he proposes it to him. Like that's the real con is getting Frechette on board. That's definitely the more interesting one. Not to say that your interest in the shell game is unwarranted, but I think that that's,

no, I think that's what you're going to decide. Well, I think that's what my delving into it showed was that the shell game was actually for lack of a better term, smoke and mirrors in terms of the arc of the episode. Yeah. But I just I think craft wise, the fact that there's enough there to make it feel real in the world that it's in is also important.

I think it's a stronger scene because there's enough of it to make you think that there was a process that led to that outcome yeah so but it's definitely fun to watch so if you want to take a crack at it and maybe tell me what you think about it do so and let us know on the uh on the old internet tell us no let us know what you think all right you had some some further thoughts on best apartment i believe yeah i had two notes here um one that had to do with beth's apartment so previously we talked a bit about rockford's trailer and how important that is to the character of rockford and to how you center rockford in the story and this episode relied on but did not show similar relationships between rockford and his car because we were trying to follow his car around it was obviously

important to him so we look at beth's apartment in this episode and it tells us everything we need to know about Beth. If we have never met Beth and we just have this particular episode to judge her by, we would know about sort of her nurturing nature, right? Here's this cat that's not particularly well-behaved. Here are all of these houseplants that she keeps alive. And what we do know of Beth as fans of the show is that this is kind of a look into her relationship with Rockford a little bit, right? Rockford and that cat have some things in common that I don't think Rockford would admit. Rockford is a little bit like Beth's angel in the same way that... Rockford is to Beth as Angel is to Rockford in many circumstances.

Yeah. And it's because Beth is so nurturing that she allows for that to happen despite being a badass attorney who doesn't need that. And of course, Rockford is charming. badass attorney who doesn't need that. And of course, Rockford is charming. We'll get into that in another episode. I mentioned in the first half about the sense of continuity that isn't metaplot. That's just kind of character-based and world-based. And seeing Beth's apartment in this, it feels right if you've seen Beth in any other episode.

Right? Right. And we see her apartment in other episodes. It's not always the same set, I think. Yeah. But it's always outfitted the same, right? There's a lot of plants. There's a lot of framed pictures.

You know, she's very into art. She has a well-stocked bar. It's her place. She lives, you know, like a single bedroom apartment or whatever. And it ties together what you know of her from when you do see her in, in the flesh in an episode. And this is lovely for those of us who watch, you know, episode to episode and know the Rockford Beth,

uh, relationship, but this episode does the same thing with our two mob bosses in there where we're introduced to them. And yeah, each of their sets is very iconic yeah in my mind i cannot place them at angel's funeral i can only place them either in that dark warehouse or uh out by the pool uh with a cast on right like before when i was tripping over their names and calling

each one the other one i had in my head clearly a picture of what each... And it's on that set, right? It's in that environment. Yeah, exactly. At the funeral, they both have people with them, right? They have flunkies or bodyguards or whatever. And even though Frechette has the cast, in the group of people in the pews, they look like everyone else.

They look anonymous. While on each of their own turf, they're very powerful and very intimidating and then it gets kind of brought all home by angel's desk at the newspaper which is in the basement covered in stuff uh in disarray and always on the edge of just being swept out the door and it fits with uh angel which is which is great and with angel it's particularly telling because angel is actually fairly well dressed throughout um the series so you don't get that cue yeah you have to see him in his environments because then his i

mean you know he's a shady guy and that part of that is that he wears nicer clothes than he probably can afford, because that's how you con people into thinking that you're somebody, is by presenting yourself. And so when he's in these environments, like his desk, or when you see him having a meeting in a bar or something like that, they're always really seedy, they're always really low rent. And Angel actually brings up my final point, which is a bit of a tip. And Angel actually brings up my final point, which is a bit of a tip. I learned it years ago while I was running a game of Dread for a group of friends. And my friend Jim Sullivan was playing the game. And Jim wanted to play that kind of character in the horror game that is the naysayer. They're like, no, no, no, let's not do that.

But he didn't want to put actual pressure. He just wanted that to be the sort of how the character felt. So the danger with playing that kind of character, right, is the plots over here. Oh, no, we shouldn't go do that. That's scary or dangerous. And then you're dragging the weight of the conversation away from whatever the game is and towards, should we even play this game? Exactly exactly so he wanted to avoid that danger so he said at the very onset of the game he told everyone that he will everybody who has a plan every plan that comes up he will resist twice and then if they push it a third time he will acquiesce and go with the plan that's such a great thing it was a thing of beauty to witness during

that particular game everyone knew it so everyone played to it. Right, yeah. Everyone played to it. They would just hit them with what the plan was going to be in a way that was easy to reject, and then a little bit harder. And they were doing this subconsciously. They weren't like, we're not brilliant.

It's just that if we know this, then we know these patterns in all the fiction that we've brought in, that we've consumed in our you know, that we've consumed in our lifetimes. So it was great. And Angel is sort of this same kind of character. If you want to play an Angel-like character in a role-playing game, I highly recommend at the very beginning giving people a rule like that, that you are guaranteed to follow so that the players don't get annoyed with Angel the way their characters are supposed to get annoyed with Angel. The fun of the interaction is the characters being in conflict. But if the players are in that same conflict, that's when

play gets not fun or just doesn't go anywhere. It gets bogged down. And you have a number of negative things that I think we've all seen or heard of in games over the years. That's a great tip. And I think you could adjust it for different kinds of characters, right? Like whenever you ask me a question, I'm going to lie to you the first time. Yeah. So establishing a dynamic of like, no, you have to hound me and then I'll tell you the truth, which is also kind of what Angel does.

And it lets everyone agree to work off the false information for a while right you know what i mean yeah you can say well we'll ask you well we know we've lied you've lied to us let's go ahead with that we know wherever this takes us will be a red herring yeah so the players can choose how to pace those interactions exactly and i think that those kinds of things may be ways to uh capture some of the dynamic that we see in the show where it's written right like someone has decided that angel always needs to get pushed to the next level of fear before he'll reveal the next thing yeah and that's part of the the writing that's but that's a pattern that you could take into a game and be like, this character is always going to hold back one thing you need to know until X happens or until someone pulls a gun or whatever.

And then you can start to capture a little bit of that dynamic. So that's what I had. Yeah, I think that's all great. I mean, this is a great episode. I feel like I have fully experienced it. I am totally satisfied with my Chicken Little is a Little Chicken experience. You know what? I'm going to say this.

It's great. Go watch it. And, like, make a friend watch it. If you want to introduce someone to the Rockford Files, this is a good recommendation for a, you know, hey, just watch this episode. See if you like it. And I can certainly see people, if this is their first Rockford Files episode, going into Rockford Files hating Angel. Yeah. And then having to come around to loving him, which I think might be the best way to experience Angel.

It may have been the way that I experienced it. Good stuff. Thanks again to everyone who joined us for our Rockford Watch. Yeah, thank you. We're going to aim to do one a month for whatever the next episode we're talking about is. So keep an eye on the Patreon

and on at 200pod on Twitter for the announcements of when and where we'll be doing those. We've opened up all the briefcases and we have found our $200 for today. So we're going to go get some vegan hot dogs and we'll be back next time to talk about another episode of the Rockford Files. See you then.