Two Hundred A Day - Episode 14: Pastoria Prime Pick

Episode Date: July 23, 2017

Nathan and Eppy discuss S2E11 Pastoria Prime Pick. Jim's car break down in New Pastoria, and a series of coincidences quickly turn into a plot to charge him with a serious array of crimes - and the whole town is in on it! This episode features great pacing and Rockford character moments as the plot unfolds, revealing an all-too-relevant tale of government corruption. 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 Kevin Lovecraft and the Wednesday Evening Podcast Allstars And thank you to Shane Liebling and Dylan Winslow! 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 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.

Hey Jimbo, Dennis, really appreciate the help on the income tax. You want to help on the audit now? 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 Epidio Ravishaw. Which twisty, turny, intriguing episode are we talking about today epi this this is a twisty turny episode uh we're talking about season two episode 11 pastoria prime pick which is an episode uh very apt for today's audience it's about government and police corruption it's a scam it's a it's a scam on top of a scam within a scam it's i like that it's a Russian nesting doll of cons going on here.

Not on the behalf of Rockford. He's the victim of these cons in this one, which is an interesting reversal. The main thrust of it is that he's an unwitting participant in a larger con. Right. This episode was a suggestion from one of our listeners. So thanks so much to Sean for emailing in with a couple, a couple of his favorite episodes for consideration. We've recently gone through most of the major side characters in the show.

This is a great landing point to get back to some, some core Jim attention. I particularly love this episode, so I want to doubly thank Sean here. I think I remembered it immediately when I saw the opening montage. And I was like, yeah, I dig this episode. I also remembered this one as being a good one, but not all the details, obviously. So super fun to revisit.

This episode was written by Gordon Dawson, who was also a contributor to Maverick and later Walker, Texas Ranger, among many other things. The spectacular resume there. It's a good resume, right? Yeah. And also the writing credits of the series creators, one of which I've been doing a grave disservice due to a video that you sent me,

Eppie. I know now that his name is pronounced Stephen Cannell, not Canal, as I have been saying it. And also, it has been brought to my attention that we say Garner with a little hard consonant in there that other people don't. So if you hear the occasional Gardner, that's just how we talk. We're not trying to say his name wrong.

I apologize. One of the reasons why I should never be on a podcast is because I don't know how to pronounce words. And I'm from the Midwest. We'll blame the Midwest for this one. know how to pronounce words and i'm from the midwest we'll blame the midwest for this one uh i like to think that it is a uh an endearing tick uh to our listeners at this point because it's taking us however many episodes to address it yes sorry sorry mr garner garner moving on to other names i'm not sure how to pronounce this one is also directed by lawrence doheny uh or doheny who directed the farnsworth stratagemagem, as well as Chicken Little is a Little Chicken.

Oh, good. One of our good twisty-turny directors, I would say. There's some weird editing in this one. We can talk about that when we get to it. I wonder if it was a little long and they had to trim some scenes down. But you already mentioned our preview montage. Eppie, what do we see in the preview montage? Oh, man. This preview montage hit me like

a ton of bricks. I think it starts off with Jim flipping a table on a guy. This preview montage is wall-to-wall action. So it's a little hard to... If you're just sitting down for the show, you know that you're in for wall-to-wall action.

But it doesn't really give you a whole lot of insight into what the plot itself is going to be about. Which I think is probably good. Because the plot takes a while to immensely nod it. It'll take quite a while to tease out what's going on. Yeah, the montage is mostly him getting roughed up or fighting uh with cops yeah that's the other takeaway i think is that rockford is going to be in conflict with the police in one way or another in this episode in glorious conflict with the police let's let's get to that stuff because it's good

200 a day is supported by all of our listeners, but especially our gumshoes. For this episode, we have five of them to thank. Thank you, Kevin Lovecraft. You can find him 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. Thank you, Lowell Francis. Check out his award-nominated blog full of insights and historical analysis of role-playing games at ageofravens.blogspot.com. 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 200 a day and see if you want to be our newest gumshoe all right we'll get right into it uh i'll do a quick shout out to our to the opening answering machine recording which you heard this episode as being particularly appropriate for for you epi yeah right now it's a week until the very end of the tax season in the U.S. as we're recording this episode. And the whole thing is a great tax anxiety joke. What's his name? Becker has left a message for Jim thanking him for his tax advice and wondering if Jim will also be as helpful when it comes to the audit that he's clearly pulled down. Yeah, poor Becker. I think

over the course of many episodes, you can put together a picture of Becker's finances and they're not good. Well, we go ahead and start this episode off with a tow truck towing Rockford's poor car, which obviously is in some kind of trouble, to the fine on the up and up town of New Pastoria. Yes. So we have a little conversation between Jim and our truck driver. A lot of the names in this episode, again, in a style that I really like, are not really introduced when we first see a character. They come about later.

But this driver is a soaper. Yes. Jim and soaper are talking. Charging him 50 bucks for the tow. This is great because you just start off with sort of a Jim and somebody haggling the whole way. And it's the very put upon Jim who is fairly certain he's being scammed in some way or another, but doesn't have the evidence, can't quite nail down what it is. Right. And the other person who's trying to be as friendly and peaceable about it as he can, which only infuriates Jim more. Yeah, I mean, it's less of a scam and more he has him over a barrel, right?

Right, right. The whole upshot of this is that there's no other option. He's lucky that the tow truck was out his way in the first place right and rockford is out here because he's on the trail of someone named ronnie brown he's he's trying to track down a missing person or whatever it's not particularly important actually it's more just the excuse that for him to be out here for the episode yeah but yeah so soper gets him into new pastoria recommends the cafe to wait while he's checking out the car to see what's wrong. We come into the cafe where Rockford is finishing his meal, ordering a slice of pie to finish it off.

In the background of a conversation between an older sheriff, who we eventually learn is Sheriff Bird, and the waitress in the cafe. There's a lot about the first third, I'd say, of this episode that makes a lot more sense in retrospect. Yeah. As you're going through it right now, it could be just a slice of life thing going on. This is what Rockford's life is like. But you know, because you're watching an episode, that stuff is happening. So you're paying attention to what's happening, but you don't have the context yet. Right. So we don't really have the context for why any of this is important but the locals

the sheriff and the waitress are having a little conversation about how things are so much better than they were five years ago um i think uh soper said something in the tow truck also about how the town's really turned around you know used to be just Pastoria, and now it's New Pastoria. And the rest of the country is in a recession, so they're standing out against the backdrop as well. Rockford does introduce himself as Metcalf, one of the pseudonyms that he uses in many episodes, actually. And as an insurance agent, still looking for this Ronnie Brown. So he has a picture. The sheriff hasn't seen him, says maybe you should go check out the municipal building or something like that on the other side

of town. The sheriff's really grumpy about how well the town is doing. I guess that's kind of an important point here is that when he mentions the municipal building, it's definitely a back in my day, we didn't need a municipal building kind of conversation. And we learn eventually that he's retired. He's kind of like. And we learn eventually that he's retired. He's still, he's kind of like an honorary sheriff, but he's technically retired. They don't know anything about this Ronnie Brown fellow. Soper comes back with a whole story about how the car's really jammed up. There's a specific cable that was sliced clean through by hitting something underneath the car.

The transmission's all messed up. It's going to need a new transmission and that he won't be able to get that from, I think he says from LA, but he won't be able to get it from wherever until noon the next day. This has a great little back and forth where Rockford kind of shows his car expertise.

Soper's kind of running down a thing, I think with the expectation that the person's just going to nod and say, okay. And then when Rockford comes back with like a specific line about how the car is constructed soper's kind of like yeah that cable it's a nice little character moment for for jim so you know it's not looking good for rockford's car he's gonna have to stay the night he takes one bite of his pie and then we cut immediately to him in a payphone. They cut to him, and there's a title credit over him, but it's a still shot.

Yeah. Right? He's not moving. And there's a few more of those cuts in this episode, and I'm not going to read anything into it. I just wanted to point them out because they do feel a little weird, and I didn't know if that was intended or if it was unintended or it was an artifact of us watching a streaming version of a show that would have commercial breaks at different spots than what they do now or you know so over this whole sequence the credits are kind of playing during shots where no one's talking like there's kind of credits overlaid in between these uh these

interactions but yeah there are a couple of those weird shots where it cuts to a to a freeze frame and then the action starts maybe because i had to trim scenes and editing and that was the best way to do it or something right yeah it was just odd it was a thing that stood out to me and i couldn't quite if it's intentional it does add to the overall kind of weird vibe that starts to build. But it's not so intentional that I'm willing to say that that was part of the idea. Yeah. This phone booth bit is setting up a thing that we need to know now and then a thing that we'll need to know later. The thing we need to know now is that the guy that he's looking for, Ronnie Brown, came back to wherever he was missing from.

And the guy who hired Rockford to find him doesn't need him to do it anymore. And so that gig is off. The way that Rockford finds this out isn't by talking to the guy, it's by calling his answering machine and then getting the answering machine message played to him. Now, being a child of the 90s, primarily, Now, being a child of the 90s primarily, I remember a time when you would have voicemail and you could call your number and then you'd hit a certain button or put in a passcode and then you could listen to your voicemail. Right. And through cell phones, that was how it worked for a while. This is older tech. This is much older tech.

This is older tech, which I'm assuming is just how it worked at this time. Yeah. Viewers at this time would know what this was, right? But I actually think that it is a bit there to let the viewers know that this is how this technology works. I think it's a little high tech for its time. Definitely people would have this capability. basically has like a little recorder that has a tone, a specific tone to his answering machine that will trigger the answering machine into rewinding and playing his messages for him. Right. That's absolutely a thing that existed. It wasn't like they invented some piece of sci-fi

technology for Rockford. But I don't know how common it was during that time for some, like, certainly my parents never had something like that it definitely is here to introduce this method of listening to an answering machine yeah for the viewing audience and it doesn't well i wanted one so he plays this tone here's his message played back and it's from the guy calling off the gig finishing with you're gonna i'm not gonna pay you anymore for this you're gonna have to sue me to get the rest of the money yeah and rockford goes oh i'll sue you or something like that he's not happy about it so rockford's having a bad day his car broke down it's going to be expensive to fix

and the gig that he's out here on is is off he's not going to get paid for it so he checks in to the only hotel in town one presumes the pastoria arms or something like that yeah he's still working off of um uh soper's recommendations soper has been guiding him this whole time he's like eat at that restaurant and stay at that hotel they got a five a coupon for five gallons of gas in the bible yeah and apparently he's checking into the last room and so this this younger woman very cute very attractive is is checking him in she's working the desk or whatever and this is where things start to get weird yeah they go into the room rockford finds a suitcase that was left in the room and he's like oh hey someone left this she says well i'll take that but then it's heavy so he's like oh i'll help you

with it she opens the door then they bump into each other each each trying to leave the door at the same time. And there's a camera flash and someone outside with a camera is taking a picture of them facing each other, kind of touching each other in the doorway and then peels out, shooting out of the parking lot. I'm hooked at this point. Yeah. So what is going on here? You're right. Yeah. There's a little, they retreat back into the hotel room, if I remember correctly, and she has this sort of mini breakdown. Yeah, she has a little bit of a breakdown. She's kind of crying and she says that there's someone after her mom. Yeah. Rockford tries to comfort her and she kind of throws him off and just storms out of the room.

I don't know the exact quote, but it's something about they're after my mom, she's a woman, and that upsets them. After my mom, she's a woman and that upsets her, upsets them. As an audience member, I feel like it comes across pretty clearly that her mom would be in a position of power. Otherwise, why would you be blackmailing them? And it upsets them that she's a woman in a position of power. But Rockford's response to it is this sort of weird, like, why would they be upset that she's a woman? And this is another little element that comes back later

in this moment it's kind of part of this weird interaction and then she storms out from there we cut pretty much straight to a shot from our preview montage where this guy in a county sheriff's uniform is hassling rockford his gear hands up and it's like patting him down and all this stuff there's a little bit of confusion about why exactly this is happening. But then the girl, her name is Rita, comes running back up. Pete, Pete, he didn't do anything. And the cop, Pete, you sure he didn't touch you? Like that kind of like...

Yeah. This kind of aggressive, protective behavior. And she says, no, he didn't do anything. There was someone taking... I don't know if she says there was someone taking a picture but the rockford definitely says that he's in a green station wagon he's only like three minutes ahead of you you can catch him if if you get out of here now uh and pete then runs runs off with the party line of like i want you to get out of this job at rita yeah so dangerous so pete's mad because he and Rita are engaged. Yeah. He thought that

Rockford was hassling her. Rockford obviously is like, what about the creep who was taking pictures of her? Maybe that's who you should be bothering with. And then he goes off, presumably to follow that up. And then in that scene, Soper comes in with the estimate for fixing Rockford's car. Yes. And this is a great moment where there's much suspense for me because we don't get to see what that estimate is. It's on a piece of paper and Rockford just looks at it

and he's like, you must be joking. I think this is the moment when Soper tells him that, well, if he doesn't like it he can get it towed to someone else. Yeah, exactly. So there's all that kind of like chaos that goes on with this cop Pete. And then he runs off and then the mechanic comes back in and we go back to dealing with the car. So we're starting to see the weird interactions in this town.

And there was a little bit with Rita at the very end being upset with Rockford's reaction to this. Because it's clear that Rockford doesn't want to be involved. And she's like, well, I'm sorry to inconvenience you or whatever. Yeah, she says it's a long story about her mom. You don't want to be involved with this or I don't want you to be involved or something. He says, I don't want to be involved either. I want to keep it that way. And she gets a little miffed.

Anyway, back to the garage. I love Sper here i mean like in general this episode he's he's a um a great character for uh rockford to play off of yeah he's a good foil yeah he's got power over rockford has possession of rockford's car he's this sort of character that won't be easily swayed by rockford's charm or aggression but he's just like a kind of a dopey local tow truck driver, right? Like he's not, I mean,

we recently did the portrait of Beth where Rockford was up against this incredible criminal mastermind. And now we see Rockford pitted against Vern Soper, tow truck driver. His power comes entirely from having control over Rockford's mobility. Yeah. And being the only tow truck driver for 70 miles. Which is also important to the plot of this episode.

So the last scene cut off with Rockford saying, no, I'm not going to pay that and being mad. And then this scene just cuts immediately to him saying, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said that. It's good. I can pay you. We can work this out. Because he's determined that there are no other garages. There's not another tow truck for 70 miles in any direction.

But now Soper has been offended. So he's like, well, you know, that's your problem, buddy. Get your car out of here. I'm going to start charging you storage fees. Right. And they go back and forth until finally Rockford says, well, look, I can pay cash. There's an interesting thing about this. If you've seen the whole episode, you know what's happening.

It's important to Soper to keep Rockford there. It's not important to Soper to make money off of Rockford. But when he says he can pay cash. Right. That might be a little bit more important to Soper, right? Yeah. Soper's definitely interested in getting his, even though he's also part of this larger scheme. Yeah, that's good stuff.

So Rockford needs to pay $500 in cash up front for Soper to fix his car. And then there will be a balance due of $162.49 unless he finds anything else wrong with it. So this total bill for this car is $662.49. Plus the $50 tow. Right. It's getting up there. That's a significant amount of money for a guy who is not being paid to work right now. But ostensibly, he got a coupon for $ dollars a gas out of the dell bible right so you

win some you lose some rockford does happen to have and this entirely is just so that the episode can continue i'm sure happens to have five hundred dollars in cash on him which seems like a lot for jim rockford but who knows maybe he didn't know how long he's gonna have to be rolling around in the in the hills of cal of California looking for this guy. This would have been like you may have credit cards, but this is not an ATM on every corner, right? Like you would carry cash. Although that said, that would be like carrying around $2,500 worth of cash nowadays. While Soper goes off to make out his receipt, Rockford jacks up his

car real quick to take a look for himself as to what's going on with the car. I'm an adult human being and I would never ever do that. Like that, I would never go to a mechanic and just be like, yeah, no, hold on. Let me just jack up my car and take a look under it using your equipment. Well, I think Rockford's starting to get a weird feeling about what's going on, right? No, I'm not saying that it's weird that he did it. I'm saying that's all Rockford there. That's one of the many ways in which I fall short of being Tim Rockford. He gets the car up so he can take a look for himself.

And sure enough, the cable they were talking about is broken. But it's not cleanly shorn like Soper had told him. It looks like it's been frayed, Rockford says. It looks like it was splashed with acid. Soper's like, oh, well, I didn't really get a good look at it. And just kind of like passes off like, I hadn't really looked at it yet because you hadn't paid me. But Rockford thinks there's definitely been some monkey business. And someone in wherever he was when he was looking for Ronnie Brown sabotaged his car.

We cut back to the cafe where Sheriff Bird is still there. Rockford wants to make a complaint. I think this is where he makes clear that he's retired or he doesn't have jurisdiction or something like that. He says, well, for anything like that, you're going to have to go see Sheriff Gladish at the municipal building. In a very economical use of the scene, I think, we cut from there to the end of the conversation where Rockford and Sheriff Gladish, who we will be seeing much more of as we go on.

Obviously, he's laid out whatever, and we cut into the end of this conversation where Gladish is like, oh, well, we'll look into it. Thanks for bringing this to our attention. We can't do anything if no one reports problems. Gladish is played by richard hurd who is a another one of those that guy actors that when you see him you'd be like oh that guy

that yeah i've seen him in a thousand things i'm pretty sure we saw him in the preview montage as a uh you know roughing up rockford or something so yeah we definitely know that this is not going to go well for their their relationship is not going to be a positive one. He has a line in the scene where he says, you know, I like to keep my boys busy or something like that. And then he says, nothing worse than a cop with an emotional problem. From there, we cut back to the hotel where Rockford is sleeping peaceably in bed. That'll last. As per usual, we just see a nice, peaceful scene.

No. Suddenly the door bursts in. Three masked goons run in with guns, tip the mattress over, trapping Rockford underneath it so he can't fight back. And they're looking for someone named Ramsey. Yes. We caught someone else. He didn't have the suitcase. It's still here.

Rockford's like, I'm not Ramsey. He canceled this reservation. That suitcase was already here. It has nothing to do with me. They're having none of it. They open the suitcase. Sure enough, there are some bags of drugs, which we later learn to be heroin. Two of the masked guys

give some criminal patter about, uh... Oh, planting him. But they say, uh, fertilizer. Yes. Fertilizer for the oranges. Yes. And then they leave the one guy behind to take him out to presumably execute him somewhere. So the threat here is that they've already tortured and killed a man.

Right. And they're going to do the same to Rockford. They leave a man behind to do just that. And throughout the whole thing, Rockford is reasoning with them. It's Rockford-style reasoning. He's sort of frustrated and disappointed that they don't understand the truth of what's actually happened. It's not like angel style reasoning. You know, tell them everything that he can, hopefully to get a better position.

Rockford, it's as if he was talking to children, right? That just didn't get why they couldn't have candy. You don't get it. This isn't my briefcase. Therefore, you shouldn't kill me. Yeah. And then when it becomes clear that they're not listening to him he switches to like i didn't want to blow my cover but i'm actually a

narcotics officer and you're going to pull down big trouble if you get rid of me so he does eventually switch to uh trying to run a little game on this guy and this guy's reaction to it he has this line because i hate a talky hit yeah do me a favor and just shut up and i should comment on their disguises too because this is the classic all black with pantyhose and i would be able to pick these people out of a lineup no problem they've chosen the most see-through of pantyhose right it's like you think you'd pick like something black i don't know i don't know if that's just what they chose for that day of shooting or if there's supposed to be some kind of meaning to that we're not going to see these guys again so it doesn't really matter but you

can clearly see the one guy has a mustache yes this is broken up by rita uh coming to to pound on the door and the the goon with the guns like open the door two inches and get rid of her or i'm gonna kill her too so he cracks open the door rita is saying that whoever took that photo showed it to her mom her mom now thinks that she's having an affair with rockford and told pete the cop and now pete is on his way and that's when we start to hear sirens of the approaching cop car they're trying to bury him under an avalanche of problems, right? Yes. I love it.

There's just this great moment where he has a gun to the back of his head. The person with the gun is under orders to kill him. He has just been found with a whole bunch of heroin. This young lady has come to the door and says that a surreptitious photo of him and her has been used to blackmail her mom, and now her raging cop boyfriend is on the way. There's no good news anywhere right now for Rockford. And his car is in the shop. And so Rockford closes the door and kind of rolls his eyes like, oh my god,

and then opens it again to talk to Rita. She's like, you have to get out of here before Pete gets here. Yeah. And his car's still in the shop. She says, well, you can take my car. It's around back. There's a gas station in Holdville. You know, meet me there.

Right. Her car is a brown and white Maverick. It sure is. By the time she tells him to do this and he turns back, the goon with the gun, presumably because of the approaching siren, has climbed out the bathroom window and is gone. You just laid out all the different things that are happening to Rockford right now. Right.

They could be unrelated or they could be related. There are episodes where he's just under all these competing pressures and has to play them off against each other. And I think when the guy climbs out the window is where, as an audience member, I was kind of like, oh, that's probably been part of it the whole time. Yeah. Because otherwise you'd think he'd like, I don't know, do something,

take him prisoner or... Right, right. Have a line of dialogue about, you know, it's not worth the cops being here or something. And it also has this feel of Rita's... The snappiness with what Rita tells him to do. But it also fits well with what happened earlier where Rita was like, you don't want to be messed up in any of this.

And just like puts a cold shoulder on him. Except for Soper, everyone that interacts with him in these situations, well, Soper and the sheriff, they want to cut him off and step away as soon as they can. Right. Like I've delivered my lines. I need out. Yeah, exactly. I can't be examined. Well, and the other thing here is also if you're if you're a raging, jealous boyfriend and you're going to beat someone up, why would you have your car sirens on to alert them that you're coming?

Right. Like that's kind of the last piece for me as an active viewer being like oh okay this is all part of some some scheme also i've seen this before well yeah it's coming at you fast which is the point right like that's what they're trying to do is they're trying to keep you on on your like in the story in the fiction they're trying to keep you on your heels sure enough uh rockford runs to the to the maverick gets out of dodge uh we see pete following in the car with the siren still on rockford manages to get enough of a lead to be alone on a on a highway where he pulls off into a field and turns off his lights and pete goes speeding by missing him entirely unfortunately he gets the car stuck in the field he can't uh get it out he abandons the car. After he leaves the car,

there's an ominous shot of the backseat of the car where there's this huge suitcase sitting in it, and there's a close-up of the latch, which has the initials RM inscribed on the latch. And it's a very long, pay attention to this, this is important, camera shot. Apparently, this is important camera shot apparently uh he had some idea of where he was because we next go to the back door of sheriff bird's house where rockford is coming up through the wilderness and we get to come in through the kitchen into sheriff bird's place which i can only describe as bucolic yes this is when the the episode won my heart because this is a turn where he has decided he needs an ally and he's assessed everyone he's met in this town. And this is the ally that he's turning to, which is the old retired sheriff. We'll talk about where it goes from here, but this is a type of plot twist or maybe just more like a character maneuver that's in

these sorts of stories that i dearly love i want to talk more about all this in the second half but i wanted to put a footnote on that well there's a quick one too here because um rockford comes in and it's like someone is trying to kill me yeah just lays it out and then because he's a retired sheriff uh he has a police scanner in the house and a call for an arrest warrant for Richard Metcalf for Rockford's alias, which is what he's told everyone his name is still. Comes over the police scanner. Even though the sheriff is retired, he still has an enormous gun. Rockford's sitting there drinking coffee at the table. This comes in over the scanner and Sheriff Bird turns around to him with this gun drawn i i gotta

call it in i'm still an officer of the law and rockford looks so betrayed he's got this great line where he says they may have retired me but they didn't take away my momentum rockford is trying to explain his situation the sheriff the former sheriff says you're not listening which is great it's this old man moment what i have to say is more important exactly they retired me and i hate that this is some important stuff that is i think is easy to miss because of what's happening story-wise which is he calls in and says i have him right here and then he gets a reply of oh we're we're by your place we We'll be right there. And then he's saying about how they retired me,

but this modern police force, they have all this, you know, they have these guns and they have this special gas station and it's easy to miss how this all kind of infuriates him. Like he's kind of mad about this because you're more worried about Rockford because he's in real trouble.

We hear the tires crunching on the gravel outside. Bird looks to the side and that's when he takes opportunity to literally flip the table up in Bird's face and run out the back door. Unfortunately, he comes around the side directly into Pete and Sheriff Gladish, who take him into custody on a whole roster of charges, including that the car that he abandoned had a suitcase with his initials, RM, and it was full of heroin. And that's when he says, those aren't my initials. My name's Jim Rockford. I work closely with the LAPD. And Gladysh, you can see that he's wrong footed for a second. And he's like,

well, it's still your suitcase. Yeah. yeah yeah there's this whole sequence here where we start to see the the trap starting to to spring we're still not really sure what the motivations are but apparently there was two hundred thousand dollars worth of heroin in that suitcase in addition to uh grand theft auto and a list of other charges this uh narcotics charge isn't viewed too too highly by the people in this town this is when rockford goes like okay i'll bite this is a shakedown right right yeah what would it be to get me out of this charge 2005 and the sheriff's like, try $10,000. That's when Rockford says, go suck an orange. Jim Rockford, not willing to pay a $10,000 bribe. Yes.

And then we cut to Rockford in county jail with his father, Rocky. Yes, I was super excited to see Rocky here. And this is where we've learned that Rocky has sacrificed his pickup truck. And this is where we've learned that Rocky has sacrificed his pickup truck. Rocky sold his pickup truck for $3,000 to bail him out. And then Beth, his lawyer and best friend, if nothing else, arrives. In this episode, they have much more of the lawyer relationship than the romantic relationship. It's not very, it's not germane to this episode.

But if you've listened to our Portrait of Elizabeth episode, you can hear much more about Jim and Beth. But yes, Beth arrives and she says that there's no bail because of the severity of the charges. So they're not

going to release him on bail at this time here we have kind of a beat where it's like jim's in trouble he's in jail there's all these trumped up charges against him we're still not really sure why and then we have a scene where rita's mother karen saunders arrives in addition to uh being concerned about her daughter and worried about this photo that she has, she is the mayor of Pistoria and is on her watch that the town has really turned around. Jim wants to know,

what does this have to do with me? You know, like, why are you here? And she pulls out the photo of the two of them in that doorway. And the photo is not particularly incriminating in that, like, it's just two people. They bumped into each other and kind of laughed. And that's when the picture was taken. So they're both smiling and looking at each other's face in a hotel window.

And she says that, oh, well, I just paid $1,000 for this print and the negative. She wants him to cop to the charges. Well, there's one element from the previous scene. Jim says, I have a witness. I'll prove that's not my suitcase, Rita. That's the key to this whole interaction. Yeah. He's on to the fact that Rita is in on the whole deal.

So he knows that she's not going to be a cooperative witness and that Beth will have to break her down on the stand. Exactly. And so when Karen comes in, her deal is, He's not going to be a cooperative witness and that Beth will have to break her down on the stand. Exactly. And so when Karen comes in, her deal is, I want you to leave my daughter, Rita, out of this. And I'll drop the kidnapping charge, which was apparently is part of the long list of charges. Kidnapping, destruction of private property, assault, blah, blah, blah. There's a bunch of them.

Like, I'll drop the kidnapping charge, and you leave her out of this. Or, if you leave her in this, you can add statutory rape. Right. She holds up the photo. Rockford's like, oh, no. How far does this go? Right.

This is the mayor. I find her not a particularly convincing actress. I don't know how she seemed to you. I think there's two things going on in the story right now. From the point of view of the creators of the show. They need to hold up the con, but they also need to just keep signaling to the audience that it's a con. So it's not horrible that she's not she's not emoting clear motivation she she's just presenting rockford with his options ostensibly her reason in the con for

being there is that she's trying to protect her daughter but she doesn't play that that well she plays it a little bit arch but not even that it's It's just... Yeah, it's very workmanlike. I don't know. But I get what you're saying. It's not even really all that sad. Well, we'll get into that. That said, it is a rock and a hard place for Rockford. We then cut to another room, presumably in the lockup somewhere,

where Sheriff Gladish is listening in on headphones to some recording device that's in Rockford's cell. This is all constructed, all artificially made for this purpose. So we hear some dialogue over the earphones, and then we cut into the cell to see them talking. Rockford is talking to Beth. Rocky is there, and also an attorney, presumably the county prosecutor, is there. Rockford reveals that he cannot provide a witness about the suitcase. So we see what his decision was. He doesn't want to be up against a statutory rape charge, even if it's falsified.

And then there's some posturing between the attorney and Beth about the charges and the severity and there's no proof and stuff like that. the charges and the severity and there's no proof and stuff like that. And so finally, the attorney comes up with the key element here. If Jim pleads guilty, if you have your client plead guilty to grand theft auto and bribery, the county will drop the rest of the charges and let him off with a fine. $15,000. Cut back to the little office where the attorney comes out and he and Sheriff Gladish are basically celebrating.

Like, Gladish is like, yeah, $15,000. We thought we were only going to get 10. They listen in to the cell again and hear Rockford talking to Beth. He wants to go in front of a judge because none of these charges will stick and he's not going to pay a fine for things he didn't do. She's like, it's your decision, Jim. He's like, I want my day in court. And that's when Gladge goes, well, I guess we got to go all the way with this one, buddy. There's a couple of points in this where we've definitely

seen how much Rockford trusts Beth. The first is with Rita, where he says, like, you're going to have to tear her down on the stand. He knows that she's capable of that. We'll get Rita and that'll solve the problem. You'll be able to make it happen. And then the second is he's deciding whether to pay the fine or go to court. He asks Beth what she found out about the judge and beth says that he's a strict judge he's a firm judge but he's not he's not crooked and so rockford is like okay then i'm gonna trust in the judicial system here which is kind of a leap of faith for a character like rockford who has been sent up the river for the wrong crime right like he's he's an exonerated ex-con. He knows that the system

isn't always going to work in his favor, but it's what he can trust now. And it's based on Beth's word, which is good. We'll see how well his faith in the system holds over the next couple of scenes. So we go to a courtroom where Beth on behalf of Rockford is pleading not guilty on all charges.

If you have not seen the episode yet, pay close attention to Rockford's face during the reading of the charges. The prosecutor, Gilbert Univaso, gets up, and there's just this pile of bags of white powder. And so it's like, here's all the heroin that was in his bag. Beth pleads not guilty. It is the intention of the defense to show that the evidence is circumstantial, fabricated, or otherwise trumped up, essentially. The judge is deciding on bail and the trial date

for which charges are going to go to trial. Before he can make the final ruling, Sheriff Bird gets up and says that he wants to drop his charges, which were the assault and destruction of private property. This exchange here is this great exchange between the prosecuting attorney, Bird, and the judge. Everyone in this town, not everyone, but like everyone in the current political structure of this town is exasperated with Bird because he won't stay retired, basically. We told you you're not allowed to use the official police channels anymore and we'll get more of that later on in the episode. But here in this moment, the prosecuting attorney doesn't want to drop these charges,

even though Bird says so. And it's the judge who just kind of a, and? Yeah, he just gives him like a look. Because the judge and Bird are peers. Like they're both older men. And we get a little more of them later where they're friends and so the prosecuting attorney's like and out of deference to the the many years of service yeah yeah we will drop those charges uh and it's great it's this good moment it cues the audience in to the fact that there is an older power structure here that hasn't quite

disappeared yeah and that while bird did sell out rockford in that earlier scene yeah he may not be in on the con the judge sets 25 000 of bail and a trial in five weeks time i i know nothing about bail but apparently if you can pay 10% of the amount, that's what you need to go free. Basically, that's what he would pay a bail bondsman who would then be responsible for the whole $25,000.

And if Rockford skipped town, that would be so, yeah. So so they use 2,500 of rocky's three thousand dollars from his truck to pay the bail yes they have 500 left over not a good episode for rockford's bookkeeper so they wait for rockford to come out he comes out and they're also waiting for bird who wants to talk to j Jim because he has Jim's suitcase, his actual suitcase that he had had with him when he showed up at his house. They have a conversation of like, why did he drop the charges? And he throws out a couple of details that link into the first couple of scenes that we saw that are making Bird think that there's something shady going on. Bird has seen and heard a couple of things that don't add up and doesn't think that Rockford has done all the things that they're saying that he did.

We now transition from Rockford in flee mode to Rockford in fight mode. Yes. Where he's making some phone calls to find out some stuff. Beth and Rocky are there with him. So he kind of lays out these things to him and also to us as the audience to bring us up to speed with what all has been going on and what what he thinks is happening he explains that his original contact that sent him towards pastoria must be in on it must be the roper he's the person that he asked about ronnie brown that said oh i think he might have gone to this town pastoria yes so that must have been the first contact and also the person who sabotaged his brakes.

Soper lied about his reason for being out where Rockford broke down. He said that he's picking up a load of radios from someone. One of the things that Bird noticed was that the person who said he was selling radios, he knows doesn't have any radios. So Soper was lying about why he was driving his truck around. He runs a little con on the phone to presumably a hotel or something like that, nose doesn't have any radios. So Soper was lying about why he was driving his truck around. He runs a little con on the phone to presumably a hotel or something like that, pretending to be Creekmore to get the phone number that he was calling that particular day. Beth and Rocky's

facial expressions in the background while he's making this call are amazing. And we should point out that this is, again, a microcosm a rockford khan where he's just a working stiff trying to fix something that went wrong with whatever he was supposed to do so he just explains enough of of the jam that he's in and just lets the person know that they could just help him out if they just bend this little rule a little bit just get him this one phone number rocky's response to the whole thing is great, because Rocky's just like, I don't know why you aren't in more trouble than you're already in. But he does

get the number. It turns out that it was an answering machine. He calls it and gets a beep. So he can connect Creekmore to the machine. He needs to connect the machine to whoever listens to it to connect Creekmore to the town. Beth says, how can they keep something like this quiet? This is obviously a system.

Jim suspects that they run this on lots of people all the time. And that's why that's what it feels like to him. That they do different sets of charges and people drop different things. It's hard to find a pattern if you go through the court record or whatnot. And that's the people that make it to the court. A lot of people would bribe out early. Therefore, in order to keep this all copacetic, it has to all be official county people, which means official county records run by official county crooks.

It's a great line. We then cut to some breaking and entering where Rockford is sneaking into the prosecutor, Gilbert Univaso's office. A little touch that I like. This is the first time we learned his name just through the big sign on his door. Rockford goes through some files, finds the little box in the desk that plays the answering machine tone. So good thing we had that scene earlier

so we know what that means. And he records the tone onto his tape recorder that he borrowed from Beth, actually. He hears something, goes to the door. Someone comes in. I believe it's Gladish. Is it? No, I thought it was Peter.

We'll have to rewatch. I would invite our listeners to tell us who it was. A cop comes in. Rockford punches him in the face, leaving the unconscious cop. So satisfying. Just cross the jaw. Lights out. It's great.

So he has gained some kind of physical evidence about what's going on. We then go to Univaso and Gladish arguing about this. You should have had someone on him since he made bail. Gladish is like, well, we have three operations going on, so everyone's busy. And so we're starting to see the full scope of this whole thing. Karen, the mayor, arrives. She is not happy with being called. She has so many busy things going on. The flower festival is in four weeks, so she's pressed for time. So the three of them talk about the problem that's in front of them and how to solve it.

And the problem is that Rockford seems to be capable of exposing their operation. Karen wants Gladish to put out an APB for Rockford, and then once he gets brought into county, kill him. The other big element here is that they have a big score coming in. They have someone that they think is worth... 50,000. Yes. If Rockford blows up the whole thing, they'll lose it.

So they kind of have a choice of, like, let him go, and don't worry about him and just focus on getting the 50k or sit on it and don't do anything until it blows over or arrest and kill rockford and get their 50k score the mayor says well we're almost around the corner so right we need that 50 so we're doing it all rockford has these incriminating documents he goes to roust rocky and beth out bed. Time to go. I have evidence. Let's get out of here. So he has a file folder full of documents. It's like they even kept balance sheets.

Over two years, there's been over 500 felony charges in this town, and they've collected $2.5 million in fines, and that's not even including anything that was paid as a bribe before it went to court. This is where the representatives of the judicial system cannot believe that this is happening, and Rockford explains how it's happening. They lay so many charges against someone, and then they only prosecute for some of them, so there's no pattern.

It's not like everyone's Grand Theft Auto. them so there's no pattern it's not like everyone's grand theft auto right 90 of the people that they entrap plead guilty to lesser charges and pay the fine so it never goes up to the judge um it's all municipal records there's no county or state records unfortunately the cops who are now out on this apb for rockford arrive just as they're about to leave. Beth and Rocky are in the car when these cops pull up. Gladys pulls Beth out and arrests both of them. She's appropriately horrified, I think. They

open their trunk and she's like, you need a warrant to search the car. And they just ignore her. Total abuse of police authority. A hundred percent. Gladys says, charge them with aiding and abetting a fugitive and I'll add some other stuff later. Yeah, it's too much of a hurry

to make it all neat and tidy at the moment. But in all of the confusion, Rockford manages to just escape clean out of the situation. They look around and they can't find him. Starting to get pointed. Like now, Beth and Rocky are on the horns of this particular scammy dilemma we go back

to sheriff bird's house where he's listening to the police scanner we get a little bit of exposition via scanner uh how they were in pursuit but found the car that he was driving abandoned suspect is on foot that's when rockford out of breath comes into Bird's house again, mirroring the earlier scene where he came in in daylight. Sheriff Bird picks up the little speaker to call him in again. And that's when Rockford says, don't call the cops. I want you to arrest me. I need to go somewhere that's not in this county. It's like, if you arrest me, can you keep me out of the county jail?

I need to get to Detective Becker in L.A. He basically lays out how if he is stuck in the county, then they're going to be able to do whatever they want to him. He needs to get outside of the control of this police department. Bird finally comes around to his side and says that he knew something funny was going on around here. But before they leave, Rockford needs to make a call and confirm the answering machine, I guess.

He calls and uses the little tone that he recorded and hears a message on the answering machine. He's like, this is half in code and it's a bunch of numbers and you can't really hear it anyway. Yeah. So to me, I was like, this will get explained later. I'm not going to actually listen

to what's on this recording. I'm not going to try and figure it out for you, Rockford. That's your job. So Sheriff Bird takes Rockford to see Judge Klein, who's apparently just hanging out in the middle of a forest. takes Rockford to see Judge Klein, who's apparently just hanging out in the middle of a forest. I feel like, like many fictional TV and movie judges, he has some outdoorsy hobby where he either hunts or fishes. I feel like that's a trope for judges, that they spend their whole day

contemplating things, so the way they relax is to do something contemplative the scene is just in a clearing in the middle of a forested area yeah this is judge klein who was the judge of his rockford's hearing we go through another edition of rockford laying out what's happening and saying here's the material evidence and judge klein representative of the system saying that's impossible there's no way that saying, that's impossible. There's no way that that's happening. And Bird, who at this point is firmly on Rockford's side, it seems, says, look, just hear him out.

Whatever you want to do, I'll respect that. While Judge Klein is looking through all these documents, Rockford is playing around with his notebook and listening to the messages that he recorded. He's kind of deciphering what the messages mean. Bird is talking to him this time, this whole time too. I mean, I would have found tremendously annoying. But what I do like about what Bird says is, I think this is the point where he says that it's always been a speed trap town.

Yeah. Kind of hinting that, yeah, all right, we weren't always the most up and up. I feel like this scene, like the last two scenes, these scenes with Bird and Klein, there's a lot of dialogue that doesn't really move things forward. It's mostly about convincing each other to do things. So the upshot here is that Klein still doesn't really believe Rockford and tells Bird to take him back to jail. And then Rockford's like, I think I figured out the system from the messages that he had.

A semi-obscure set of codes and numbers that refer to certain crimes. And there's a front end and a back end. So it's like, here's what they get them with up front. And then here's what they're going to threaten them with if they don't plead to the thing that they got up front. And then they even have estimates

for how much they're going to make. And there's a hammer too. In Rockford's case, that the the um the statutory rape charge yeah yeah so it's the thing that if they're just not going to do it we're going to hit them with that rockford has the recording that applied to him and that included the time he was going to be rolling into town and then he has the most recent recording about this new target the fifty thousand dollar one and it has a time and a and a place where they're supposed to pick him up. So he says, look, judge, this is a way to prove that this is really happening. Let's go to this place at this time. And Klein agrees to do that. So they go out to this stretch of road.

And sure enough, Soper's tow truck is just hanging out. He's hanging out with binoculars, looking at the road, waiting for a car car to arrive we see a car driving up said road and then it stops moving the person gets out and raises the hood that's when the tow truck starts moving in to make the uh lucky save of our poor stricken motorist and this is enough evidence for klein you were right all all this was correct. You're right all along. And he re-deputizes Bird to have the authority to make an arrest. And he wants to move in right now. And Rockford's like, shouldn't we just go call other police? And Klein's like, no, we can take care of this ourselves. Yeah, I would be a little panicked in Rockford's even if I were Rockford. Here's a couple of old men who want to relive their glory days.

Exactly. So they pull up behind the tow truck, confront Soper who shoves Bird and then runs around to his cab to call. He makes a distress call on their CB radio that there's trouble and Rockford's with them.

And then they pull him out and put him in handcuffs. And so now they know that the crooked police are going to be coming up to their location. Rockford's with them. And then they pull him out and put him in handcuffs. And so now they know that the crooked police are going to be coming up to their location. Rockford hatches a quick plan. Oh, God, this plan. Which is to stretch the tow cable of the tow truck between two trees, essentially. And when Gladys and Pete,

who, of course, are the ones who are going to respond, come up in the car, the judge has his hand on the lever to pull the tow cable taut, and it rips the top off of their car. They crash into the side of the road, and then Rockford and Bird can make the arrest while they're dazed from the crash. Let's talk about this plan for a moment here, because this is...

I thought about this one. My initial note, when the whole play had started, I wrote down, holy shit. This is a Robin Hood plan, right? This may have even happened on Maverick. Some people on horseback going through a forest at a gallop or at like a nice trot, but not full speed. And you pull the ropes up and it knocks them off the horse, knocks the wind out of them. They're stunned, banged up, but not beheaded by a f***ing cable as they speed along. If this cable was six inches lower, it would have just decapitated these two guys.

Yeah, the timing on this is utterly impossible. So part of this, and I'll get more into all of this in the second half, possible so part of this and i'll get more into all of this in the second half but so much of this episode makes me think of the the style of pulp story that kind of get tossed around between different genres where something works very well in one genre and then you switch it over to the other one and you don't quite think through the consequences of what happens. It's fine. It's a glorious ending. I loved watching it happen. It's a great moment, but it's also kind of a, like, for an episode that promised us a bunch of kind of fighting in the preview montage, there really hasn't actually been anything super exciting.

Yeah. This is the big culmination of the episode, and you can kind of feel the writer going, like, all right, we need something to, like, pop at the end. Sure enough, is literally ripping the top off of this car with a towed cable. They're in shock. Oh, yeah. When it happens, their car goes off the road and then they cannot, they're so discombobulated, they can't regain their senses. To some extent, physically, I can see that happening. You're in an accident.

You're literally in an accident. And also, what a terrifying accident to be in. Right. But, oh, man. It's intense. It're literally in an accident. And also, what a terrifying accident to be in. But, oh, man. It's intense. It gave me the willies. Yeah. Fortunately enough, nobody is decapitated.

We finished this episode out in the courthouse. The mayor and the prosecutor are handcuffed together by other cops. We know they're statees because they're wearing bike helmets, motorcycle helmets. And there's a little back and forth at the end here where Karen, the mayor, defends her vision. She uses that line that we're about to turn the corner again. The whole country's in a recession, but we would be the envy of the country. Rockford says, you know, you're building your town

on the bodies or something like that. And she says, what city isn't built on bodies? LA, Chicago. The old Chicago for these writers. I'm with Karen here. A little bit. She's not wrong. She's just a bad person.

It would be tremendously easy to read this episode in a very poor light as far as having, like, conservative and backwards message. Because it's the old boys that saved the day it's the the woman mayor who was the corrupting influence but i don't think that that's the intent of anyone involved in this show i don't think that that's anything that they're actually commenting on not to leave anyone hanging but after they they take our villains away in handcuffs rockford does have a final exchange with Judge Klein. Speaking of bills coming due, there's going to be a lot of people getting in line

and he wants to settle his up before the rush. Then he gives the judge a piece of paper, which presumably is all the fines and bail and all the stuff that he's had to pay erroneously. Plus probably his $200 a day. One would hope. Klein puts it in his pocket and then we end on a shot of Rockford exiting the courthouse a free man.

Yay, Rockford. So this does play a little bit to the reoccurring Rockford theme of the police being a force to be respected, but also a possibly corrupted force. a possibly corrupted force. There's some very realistic views that Rockford, the character, takes towards the police force in his show that obviously other characters don't take. Judge Klein is an idealist, even if I probably don't agree with Judge Klein's ideals. He has a line somewhere in there where he says

that soft judges are a problem. Like, he's a hard judge because he thinks a lot of crime is enabled by soft judges, not giving the full penalty. On the other side, you have Beth, who is a defense attorney. She's an idealist as well.

She has, she has trouble believing that this is happening, that this is a thing that's, that's real and kind of ties up Rockford a little bit towards that ending part where he's trying to get them out of there. I do like that the episode kind of jugglesford a little bit towards that ending part where he's trying to get them out of there. I do like that the episode kind of juggles those things back and forth. I agree with you.

The mayor was not particularly well. Like I was trying to say, but kind of suggested before, is that it's not particularly satisfying to see her in handcuffs. Like we say in so many episodes, the things that aren't super great stand out. Her motivations are there. Like the writing for the characters there i just was not very compelled by the actress and her delivery i had a thought that that another actress like uh diana moldar who was the foil in charlie harris at large she's great and she also had a really good subtle portrayal in that episode about you know her motivations will

still not really being a good person but still being compelling that kind of performance would really have elevated karen in this episode to that more memorable villain that you really feel good about seeing her go away it's probably also a difficult thing because we have a cast of thousands here. We have Rita, Soper, Peter, the sheriff, and the district attorney, all of which on top of this woman who was only kind of in it a little bit. She's the mastermind behind it, but it's the rest of them that we see in action. Yeah, so to be totally clear, in case it didn't come across, this whole system was put into place to enrich the town. She has this idealistic vision of the town as this standard bearer of

what, I guess, a small town can be. Once the town's enriched, it'll never go back. Exactly. The idea is that there's an idealistic motive that's just being achieved through terrible means. But you don't really see the source for the idealism in this episode it just comes across as kind of deranged yeah yeah but the rhythm and

pacing of the episode is great so a lot of episodes have the the story and then the real story right this one only really has one story but it kind of it makes you think there might be two different stories but then there's really only the one, like with the guys coming in the middle of the night to threaten Rockford. And I think that's good. Like I think it adds texture and makes it exciting to see when and how Rockford is going to figure out the plot. It's also nice that their con isn't entirely sensical, right? They've got five or six irons in that fire.

It's the drugs. It's the weird blackmail angle. It's these charges and those charges all thrown together. You know, like the drug guys show up and then they disappear and we never see them again because they've done their part for the con. They've done what they've had to do. Everyone's a different little cog in this wheel. They're running three of them at the time that Rockford is there. And that's not even the $50,000

one that rolls in at the end. Yeah. There's some reviews of this episode where the criticism is the unrealistic nature of the con. No one would ever do this, you know, call the state district attorney and make it all go away. But what I actually find kind of compelling is the fact that it is such a weird rickety set. And the fact that it's been succeeding is a testament to how hard it is for someone to be in that situation and say, no, I want to go to the judge. Right. I'll read this into it. You know, it's also just for the sake of this one episode, it's a story, but I'm willing to read into it and say that when you're faced with a power structure that you don't really have much control over and you're given an out, pay us this money and this all goes away or go into the system. There's a lot of compelling emotional resonance to the idea of like, I'm just going to take the

out because you don't know what's going to happen if you go into the system. And you already see how it's stacked against you. It's hard to imagine overcoming what's already been stacked against you. Right. So in that way, it's almost real feeling of like, once you get people convinced that you're on top, all you have to do is keep convincing them. And not to get too political,

but to get really f***ing political here. On a national scale, we have a problem with this when you bring race relations into the context, right? We have a system that is systematically doing this. I guess what I'm saying is that, like, there's two things I can say about this. One, I'm going to say in the second half, which is where I think the sort of history of this sort of fiction is coming from. But in the more realistic one, when you look at it, we do have problems here. We have people who are convicted of crimes that they haven't committed all the time. Usually that's done through this same sort of system

where you hit them with a lot and then let them deal themselves down. You can tune in to any episode of John Oliver's Last last week tonight watch him rant about the latest system that does this exact same thing right and if there's not a big plot that's the thing where it's like constructing this plot that involves all these people and they all have to be working together that's actually the most fantastic element of the thing but there are so many systematic incentives for this kind of behavior like police departments have quotas of arrests and convictions so there's a reason to arrest people and try that you know and charge them with things they have the seizure laws that allow them forget what it's

called but forfeiture civil forfeiture yeah like you can see so the police department sees assets all the time sees cars and houses and money as part of investigations, and they just get to keep it. And so that's where a lot of the funding for their department comes from. Yeah, and it gets darker when you find out that there is legitimate evidence that white supremacists have been trying to infiltreat the police department, right? You can complain because it doesn't seem realistic in the context of what we believe realistic fiction should be like. Sure, yeah, yeah. But when you actually compare it to reality, you get a little like, oh, God, I wish it was that.

I wish it was as simple as the scam that they're pulling, and it's not, you know. Yeah, it would be nice if you could just point to the bad guys and say, these are the bad people taking advantage of the system in a bad way. And that's actually the most unrealistic part where it's like, it's not that the system is being used corrosively, it's that the system is corrosive. Like those are two different things.

And I think to bring this back to the episode, I think the Rockford Files as a show is aware of that. Like we've mentioned before the episode that we'll do eventually, was essentially a psa about this problem in american court courtrooms and it affected real change on how the nation viewed it like that was a moment when television could step up and save the day to some extent so i don't think that this episode is ignorant of that context and so in that way there is a real like holy feeling to seeing rockford be entrapped into all of these things and all the mechanisms uh that keep them there so good episode yeah a little overstuffed i think again some of the transitions are a little weird

the end is a little like oh we need to get something exciting in right at the end but uh yeah as a episode of rockford on his heels needing to deal with a set of problems it is it's a good one it's also a real easy one to slide into too right like if you just start watching it it's the fun back and forth between him and and soper and then there's the the guy who takes the picture at the hotel and you're just like i need to know what this is about it's well crafted to drag you along through all the stuff it's going to take you through 100 well with that i think we need to take a little breather get our blood pressure back under control then we'll come back in the second half to talk about the lone protagonist walking into a town and creating problems. Excellent. While we have you here, there's three ways you can support us. First,

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and my new project codename Linking Green, Robin Hood roleplaying game. You can find all you need to know about that at digathousandholes.com I'm excited about your stuff as well. Oh, that's so nice. As always, you can check out my catalog of fiction and role-playing games at ndpdesign.com, including the worldwide wrestling role-playing game. If you want to see my newest stuff, check out the playtest page. That's where I have free downloads of all my fun new projects. Thanks yet again for listening. As always, we deeply

appreciate your support. And with that, back to the show. Welcome back to 200 Today. We've just been talking about the episode Pastoria Prime Pick from Season 2, Episode 11 of the Rockford Files. So I hinted in the beginning that I wanted to talk a little bit about what I see as the literary roots of this particular style of story. A sort of story where you have a town that is somewhat isolated from the rest of the world. It has to be isolated in order for the plot to move forward the way it does. Somebody from outside the town comes in, and that person happens to be our protagonist,

and they shake things up. So the town has some set structure where things are moving along in a particular way, and that outsider comes in, shakes things up, and the town has changed because of it. I'm not going to say they're better for it, although in this case they probably are. There's a status quo that gets destabilized by the arrival of the protagonist. This is a stylish story that is really popular in the pulps, but it goes way back. I would probably, if I really wore my lit hat, I would argue that the Odyssey follows this quite often. In slightly more contemporary, you can see this in like the samurai film Yojimbo, which is based on the noir story Red Harvest,

and then in itself inspires Fistful of Dollars, which is just a Western style. What I saw while I was watching this episode, what I was seeing kind of bleed through here, was that the story, even though it dealt with some very 70s contemporary things, including the answering machine technology, sort of the political dynamic and all that, it still had these callbacks to these older stories and how they would have dealt with or resolved this sort of thing. You isolate the town, which is easy to do, say, in a Western. You just have any town is isolated in a Western. And then the gunslinger can walk into town and find out that the local sheriff is corrupt

and be on his heels for most of it, but eventually work things through. In this episode, there are some legitimate call-outs to that sort of thing. And it's not like this is a rare type of story for the Rockford Files either. When he goes out of town, he doesn't go out of town often. He doesn't go out of town a lot, but what it does in the context of the Rockford Files is it puts him in a situation where he doesn't have his usual support network to call upon.

Right. So he becomes more of a loner figure. In this case, he's able to call Beth and Rocky, but they're not really assets in this. They're important to the script to like move certain things along and they're important as audience stand-ins for rockford to explain some things so that we're all up to speed but they're not resources in the way that like beth is a real asset when they're in la and becker's also there and, you know, all that stuff. He has to read the town and figure out who is in on what.

And aside from the judge and the former sheriff, maybe the waitress wasn't in on it. So he doesn't have a whole lot of options. And I like that, like, you know, thinking about Yojimbo, which is this ronin who comes into town and sees this sort of corrupt power structure. Here's one of the areas where I saw something that might have been an illusion. We have the mayor who is at one point concerned about the upcoming flower festival. And that in Yojimbo, they have an upcoming silk festival that's pressure on the town. The idea of an event that is a pressure on the small town is a pretty easy place to go for this kind of thing. Also, in this particular story, it's not that important other than it kind of gives the mayor an avenue to show her ambitions for the town.

In addition to making all this money also we need to look good or also we have to plan this event or whatever it is i suspect it's an allusion to yojimbo i think that they know what they're they're saying here and uh i love that it also reminds me of jack vance's sword and sorcery stuff where he uh his dying earth stuff where he's got a character who is more angel martin than he is james rockford this character like the whole kugel saga is just this character being flung out in just wandering through all these different isolated communities and each time he comes to that town there's a way of life that they have that they're all engaged in and he will mess it up and leave them worse for it every single time and that's just i love those sorts of stories i love that that idea this

outsider just coming in and laying bare all the stuff that you take for granted right this town every when he comes in this town everyone is talking about how great this town is right i'm sure if he came here looking for a job, he found one. Yeah. They talk about how everyone's hiring. Anyone who wants a job can get one in this town. And in this case, it's a great use of standard foreshadowing. Let us paint this picture with details that will become relevant later because you learn

why the economy is doing so well. Right. You know, entrapping travelers into these felony charges and then getting them to pay bribes or fines to get out of them. You have to envision this town a year after Rockford leaves it, right? Right. Even says at the end that I'm sure there's going to be a big line. There'll be people who are suing the town for

their money back. This town is going to be such a wreck. Oh yeah. It's a happy ending for Justice and for Rockford, but it is not a happy ending for New Pastoria. It's a very, shades of gray is the wrong term, but it's a dynamic where the best interests of various parties are so crossed. It's an ends and means kind of thing. That's what makes, I think, for these more compelling societal kind of stories, the ends of we want a prosperous town where everyone who wants a job can get one, where we're the envy of the nation. Like that's an admirable goal, but then the means to get there are terrible.

This is a contrivance that has a lot of power. And then when you cross it against the character of Jim Rockford, he just wants justice, right? Like at any point, he's willing to just leave until they start making him pay all this money, basically. Right. And then it's like, in addition to not going to jail and declaring my name, I also want my money back because it is an injustice for you to take it from me in this manner. And that's a cross purposes with this like idealistic vision for the town. So even though our hero, we're on his side, we think he's been wronged and we're with him the whole way. Thinking about it on that next layer is where you start to get the wonderful motivations for our villains um which we like so much in the rockford files yeah though you do see different motivated like the mayor is set up as the idealist and then you get the sense that the

uh the sheriff like that he's lording his power over people and that he likes making the con work and that the attorneys kind of likes the mechanics of it. They're working out the details and they have a certain pride in getting him up to a $15,000 fine. Exactly. They thought it was going to be a $10,000 fine. So having the villains have different motives for all being involved in the same scam is a nice little takeaway here, I think. We don't see Peter, but what little we know of Peter, he probably just enjoys the physical aspect of it.

He enjoys throwing people around. And Soper, obviously... He's just getting paid, I think. Yeah, when Rockford offers him cash for fixing his car, you have to think that Soper probably contemplates just fixing Rockford's car for that money. Or both. He'll take Rockford's money, because Rockford pays him the 500 bucks. He'll take Rockford's car for that money. Or both. He'll take Rockford's money.

Because Rockford pays him the 500 bucks. He'll take Rockford's money, fix his car, and get paid. He can work it on both ends. Yeah. So one of the things that I really enjoy about this style of story is that you have this town full of characters that are already involved in something. And I'm being vague and generic here. We have a concrete example in this particular episode. If you look at, say, Yojimbo, you have these two warring crime bosses, and everyone is kind of caught in between that structure there.

And that one falls through. You see that one also in Fistful of Dollars, and you see that obviously before in Red Harvest. Anyways, one of the things that I really enjoy about this structure is that you do have an entire town full of people who are working within the system that they have constructed for their own reasons. And also, they're going to behave in weird ways at first when you come across them. Because you, as the audience, you don't know that town. You're not part of that culture. So you don't know what it is that's making them do the things that they're doing. And you get that at the beginning of this episode.

I think that's a really, that's a critical tell for this genre, I guess, or this structure of story is creating that sense of questioning. Is this behavior because of something nefarious or is it because of something I just don't understand because I'm an outsider? Right. Yeah. How the character goes around addressing that question is where the plot starts happening, is where you start to see things develop. One of the joys is watching our outsider, who in this case is rockford suss out who in the town he can work with he turns to the old power in the town because he he needs an ally and there's a possibility that he can get them to help him out and uh i i love seeing that sort of

interaction where you look for where the the weak spots in this structure are and you try and put pressure on it the way you can the arc of bird of sheriff bird is really a nice one in this episode where he isn't on board with all the progress right like everyone else is like our town is so much better and he's like i kind of liked it when i was in charge and like i was the one who was making these decisions. When people moved here and worked hard on starving to death. Was that what the line was? Something like that. There's some angst to the character, right?

Right. And then at our first question of are you going to help Rockford or not? He doesn't. He betrays Rockford. Yes. And it's like, oh, that Sheriff Bird. But then once he learns more about the situation and compares what he knows what he's seen with what the attorney is saying he decides for himself without any outside intervention

something is wrong here rockford might need help and then he becomes the key element to making the resolution happen to to bridging the gap between Rockford and the judge. And so his character arc is well constructed. It makes sense, I think, given what we know of the character, just from the little snippets that we see. And having that question of like, is this potential ally actually going to help me or not is a nice early story question. The other bit that this, and this is so seamless in this because this is how Rockford operates anyways, is that there's often this outsider that comes in, is in the town for some reason unrelated to what's going on. They're not here to fix things. One of my favorite

examples of this kind of story is a movie called Bad Day at Black Rock, which is well worth watching if you haven't seen it. This guy walks into this town to deliver a letter that he's been entrusted with. And he's going to deliver it to someone who is no longer in the town. It's a big mystery as to why. He shows up to deliver the letter. And the people that he first meets try to strong arm him into leaving the town. And that's all it takes to make this main character say, I'm going to stick around and f*** you up.

If you don't want me here, I need to be here. We see this in regular Rockford file stories where he'll often be like trying to reject a case until somebody tries to take it away from him. And then he's like, wait a minute. Right. If you don't want me investigating this, then that means it must be worth investigating.

Exactly. And we don't have that particular turn in this episode. Because often that's just a mechanism to keep the main character in the town, right? It's a wonderful character trait to have for a main character. But it also does lots of work to keep the plot on track. We see that in so many other Rockford episodes. That this is actually a departure where Rockford is tricked into being into the town. And then he's perfectly happy to leave, but he can't.

And then so he has to use his skills to determine what's going to spring the trap, as opposed to what's really going on here. Like, I mean, those go together, but he's not investigating anything. There's no case. It's more about his personal freedom. He's trying to get out. Yeah, he needs not investigating anything. There's no case. It's more about his personal freedom. He's trying to get out. Yeah, he needs to get out. You know, we talked a little bit about the reviewers

that they found that it was lacking in realism. And I think the other half to that is that the style of story that they're telling here, it's rooted in Westerns and old noirs and in sword and sorcery, in all of these kind of pulp stories. So there's certain turns and twists that make sense for this style of story that may not feel natural set in Rockford's world. And one of them, which we talked about at the end there, is this way of running that line across the road to stop the cops i can't at the moment come up with a western where i've seen it in but i know i've seen it or it's in like cartoons right like yeah it's in like looney tunes cartoons and usually when that shows up that sort

of thing shows up it's when the character is most on their heel that's not the case in this episode in this episode rockford manages to convince the old guard maybe a not the case in this episode. In this episode, Rockford manages to convince the old guard maybe a little too well. In the episode, I was kind of like, huh, that's interesting. Like, it's a little weird. But when you mentioned that they're reliving their former glory, and that makes a lot of sense. In that context, it makes a lot more sense, the decision that those two guys make. The blood's flowing, and they're seeing how, you know, they're remembering, you know, the good old days or whatever, and they want to do something. The part, I mean, aside from the recklessness with the physics at the end there, one of the parts that doesn't quite come together for me about that is how much Rockford is in

charge of that particular solution. Yeah. Well, he's like, I have a plan. I think I would have probably enjoyed it more if Rockford was trying to talk them out of this crazy solution and they went with it. But this comes back to why I want access to Maverick. So the car that Rita sends him to is a Maverick, right? I feel like there's an episode of Maverick that's being alluded to throughout this.

I could be wrong. So one minor correction talking about the writing and Maverick. I stated earlier that the writer Gordon Dawson wrote for Maverick. He wrote for Brett Maverick, which was a follow-up series in the early 80s. He did not write for the original Maverick, which was pre-Rockford Files. It could be a Roy Huggins connection because he was the Maverick guy. It could be a James Garner connection, whether there was an intentional callback with that scene. But it definitely feels like it would be real easy to layer this onto a Western. Oh, yeah. Yeah, absolutely. More so than other Rockford Files episodes.

There's a bit of, not irony, but a bit of kind of interesting tension there because there's some technology important to the plot, right? Like the answering machine stuff. And that's very 70s. But the structure could definitely be like an old west, western kind of setup. I do really enjoy this type of story. I do really enjoy this type of story. And it's the kind of story that the moment I recognize that I'm either watching or reading it or, you know, however I'm engaging with it, I sit right up. I can't wait to see how the town structures itself. I can't wait to see why the people are acting the way they are.

And then I cannot wait to see how our protagonists will just mess everyone up. Like just by being who they are and just being the wrong element in this particular mix. There's kind of like a related, perhaps inverse version, which is like the Star Trek story. Right. The Enterprise comes to a planet. The planet is having some kind of problem that they don't want to tell the Enterprise about. So they destabilize it because they have all the abilities to figure out what's going on and then they fix it and leave right like they're like oh this is what we think the solution is now your society is going to be

great and we're going to leave and we'll never speak of this again yeah and i think that that's calling back to the same reference material right like i can see old sci-fi stories playing out especially the the like the sort of space opera swashbuckling ones that play out that way i mean i brought jack vance up before but he does this all the time in his fiction one of the fun things about jack vance is that his characters that are these outside protagonists aren't anywhere near as dashing as james garner is I mean, it's great. This is a great example of it. I think a great gaming example of it is simply to get yourself to your nearest copy of Dogs in the Vineyard.

Your friend and mine, Vincent Baker's game of gunslinging fake Mormons in the fake Old West. No, I think that's fairly accurate. I think he's probably described it that way the frame of that game the conceit of the game is that you're a group of religious orthodox gunslingers rolling through different towns and uh uncovering and then dealing with the problems of those towns which are rooted in various heresies which may or may not map to what your characters think are actually heretical or what you as a

player think is actually heretical the way that the gm sets up towns in that game is exactly to create this kind of structure where there are a bunch of people and they have their ways and it's mysterious as to why they act the way they do and then as soon as you scratch the surface things just start bubbling up and then the protagonists uh have to deal with the consequences whether those are helping the town right like solving the problems in a way that is helpful for people or whether it's eradicating the source of the problem or what they think is the source of the problem but that basic conceit of there's something going on there's a status status quo, our principles come in, destabilize the situation, all hell breaks loose is basically what that game is built on. So I can't think of a better reference point for bringing this into your gaming is basically read and play Dogs in the Vineyard and adopt the ideas therein as well you can.

It's a very compelling story when you look at it. You don't feel like everything's going to be a-okay when it's over. You know, you see a world that is stuck, that won't move, and you see a character that just kind of comes in and just does things for good or for ill. It's going to change how things are. The only thing you know going into that story is that things just can't stay the same. So that's, again, getting to the trade-offs of who is hurt, who is helped, and how do those cross each other. There's no ultimate, this was good for everyone outcome, which I think is part

of what makes it a compelling story. As I mentioned earlier, is the relatability of that wicked set of outcomes where some people are hurt, some people are not. Justice is served, question mark, like for who? Yeah. And that's what makes it feel real and feel relevant today. And it also has, like, on a more, like, say, visceral level, it definitely has that satisfaction of, oh, you messed with the wrong person. Those are always fun, too. Do you have anything else to say about Pastoria Prime Pick? I quite enjoyed the episode. Like I said, it fit right into a slot of style of story that I really enjoy. Yeah. How about yourself? It's real good. I could see this being another like real sticky two-parter like there's actually enough

there that uh it could have been like a really compelling probably slightly darker two-part episode um as we discussed in the first part there were some aspects that seemed like maybe got trimmed a little bit or kind of forced forced down a little bit from maybe what originally could have been but uh yeah i mean it's it's good. I can't not recommend it, as with so many of the episodes that we talk about. Like, yeah, you should watch it, like all the other ones. A little cartoony at the end, but you know, you got to have something exciting

to show how great Jim is at getting out of trouble. So can't really fault him too much for that. Exactly. All right. Well, with that, I think we have earned our 200 for today. Go to the judge, give them our receipt. Wait in line. Thank you all so much for listening. Please feel free to get in touch. Tell us what you think about this episode or any of our other episodes at 200aday.fireside.fm. And we will be back next time to talk about another episode

of the Rockford Files. See you then.