Two Hundred A Day - Episode 19: The No-Cut Contract

Episode Date: October 8, 2017

Nathan and Eppy discuss S2E15 The No-Cut Contact. Rob Reiner guest-stars as a "second rate quarterback on a third-rate team" who nevertheless drags Jim into trouble, caught between the Mob and the Feds. Can Jim figure out what's going on before "King" Sturdevan pins the whole deal on him? We break down how the chemistry of the leads and our beloved tight writing make this a great episode to watch, and go over protagonism and MacGuffin's in the second half. Highly recommended! 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 Mike Gillis and the Radio vs. The Martians Podcast And thank you to Victor DiSanto, Dael Norwood, 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.

Welcome to 200 A Day, a podcast where we explore the 70s television detective show, The Rockford Files. I'm Nathan Paletta. And I'm Epidaio Revisho. And today on 200 A Day, we're going to look at one of our most recommended episodes. Yeah. In terms of people telling us, telling or asking us, when are you going to look at one of our most recommended episodes yeah in terms of people telling us telling or asking us when are you going to do this one season 2 episode 15 the no cut contract yeah i was just about to say it's a good episode but obviously it's a rock profiles episode

it's been highly recommended that goes without saying so i don't have to say that maybe i'll just go into the opening montage before we we get into the episode, I'll call out why this is often recommended, I think, which is the featured guest star is a wonderfully mustached Rob Reiner. I envisioned him as a man that was just born a little old. Not like really old, but even when he plays young, he plays a little old. As a child of the 90s, primarily, He plays a little old. As a child of the 90s, primarily, I know him as a director. Right.

So actually seeing him on screen in an acting role was interesting and fun. And I know him as Meathead. So that's the thing. I've never seen All in the Family. So my understanding is that this was a bit of a departure of role for him. Is that true? Sort of. Yeah. I mean...

I believe that the timing of it is such that he was on hiatus from all the family while he did this episode i don't know if there's a story there or if it was just a timing thing but ron reiner i mean he'd been he was an actor first and he'd been acting uh in tv and and like short films and stuff from the 60s onwards so it's not like he was a neophyte uh in this role and i think this is probably the high watermark his all-in-the-family appearances before he started directing and right before his his directing career which kicked off in the 80s he did a couple tv movies but then there's a spinal tap 84 was his you know launching pad for that and then goes on to the whole list of

great movies that people probably are familiar with and know and love. So that is definitely one of the standout elements of this episode. There's also a fantastic and higher build than Rob Reiner cameo from the football player Dick Butkus. Yeah. Who is still apparently revered as one of the most intimidating football players of all time. Yeah. Who is still apparently revered as one of the most intimidating football players of all time. Yeah. So I am a teeny bit older than you are. And I am not a sports fan.

Not, you know, got nothing against sports in general. Just never really caught on to watching it with the exception of sports entertainment like wrestling. That would be the sport of kings. Yes, the sport of kings. But other sports. Yeah. Non-regal sports like sports like football right i think i'm in the same boat nothing really against it but i just don't follow it i don't really know the trivia or players the history that kind of stuff though i have heard of dick but yeah i was gonna say like just growing up in the era that i did i just knew who dick butkis was i, his name alone is enough for a kid of that

era to know who he is. But I knew he was associated with the Chicago Bears. And that was... Yep. Chicago Pride. A lot of Chicago Pride in this episode. Yeah. Rockford Files, as we've noticed, always likes to code the mob as either from Chicago or from Jersey. This is a Chicago-centric mob appearance in this one. And Nathan is broadcasting from Chicago right now, so he might not be at liberty to say much. I'm in a circle of violin...

What is it? Violin artists? Well, yeah, I have it written down. Make sure you ask Nathan if he knows any violinists from South Chicago. Not that I know of. And let's keep it that way. This episode, in addition to the cast, is directed by Lou Antonio, fourth of the five episodes of the Rockford Files that he directed.

He was also an actor. And I was looking at this because his IMDb profile pick is of one of the half and half aliens from Star Trek. one of the half and half aliens from Star Trek. So in the original series, there's that episode where the people are painted half black and half white in a way that is, has not really aged well, but he played one of those, one of the main half and half aliens.

He was also in the fugitive in a couple episodes and had a named role in cool hand Luke among other acting credits. Those jumped out at me. He went on to have a long TV directing career of tons of stuff and tons of shows. But yeah, good solid hand here, I'd say. And the writing, we know we're in for a solid one because we have Stephen Cannell with executive story consultant Juanita Bartlett. This is our core Rockford writing team. And it shows. It's solid. So we know from the get-go that we're in for a good one. What do we see in our preview montage? Right away, they tell Eppie that he's going to love it because they give us Angel. He's trying

to, he's warning Rockford. That's where the whole business about the South Chicago violinists and other dubious people who are out to kill Rockford. The other big thing I think the preview montage gives us that I really enjoy is it ends on a pool shove. Oh, yeah. This is, I mean, we've talked about this before. It's a classic Rockford move. As soon as someone's distracted, nothing fancy, just give them a shove, send them somewhere they don't expect to be, and then get moving. This episode has a lot of what I think we'll end up referring to as classic Rockford moments. Yeah. It's not that they're the first time that we're seeing them, but this is in season two,

and I think this is a good baseline for here's all the fun, neat, iconic, perhaps, things that Rockford does. In addition to the shove, there's also a J-turn in the preview montage. Yeah. We're going to get some driving, we're going to get some fights, and we're going to get Angel. We're going to get it all. We're going to get Dick Butkus, we're going to get everything. And the phone message.

If you don't have the time to just quick check IMDB to find the translation of the phone message. The joke here, I think, is that there's no joke. I did not look up a translation. It says, fantastic savings, the only chance in your life to appreciate Rosario radial tires. And I went looking.

I couldn't figure out if that's a reference. I think maybe I went a little too deep in hoping that it was anything other than he's getting a message in a language he doesn't understand. That's the whole joke. 200 a day is supported by all of our listeners, but especially our gumshoes. For this episode, we have eight of them to thank. Thank you to Mike Gillis. Check out his pop culture discussion podcast, Radio vs. the Martians.

It's the McLaughlin Group for nerds. Radiovsthemartians. It's the McLaughlin group for nerds, radioversesthemartians.com. Kevin Lovecraft, visit misdirectedmark.com to hear him on the Wednesday evening podcast, All-Stars Actual Play Podcast, part of the Misdirected Mark Productions Network. Lowell Francis, check out his award-winning gaming blog, ageofravens.blogspot.com. Thank you to Shane Liebling, Dylan Winslow, Dale Norwood, and Victor DeSanto. 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.

So we start off with Angel talking to Jim. As Jim makes himself a sandwich, which I'm already in. Yeah. You put Jim in a fridge and there should be a Latin phrase for opening a story that way. Angel is trying to pitch him on a con for trying to sell someone a fake racehorse. Right. Well, it's not a con. Not exactly. It is, as he says, creatively speculative because Angel doesn't know for sure that there isn't a racehorse matching this description out there in the world somewhere. However, whether it does or not, he wants to sell it to someone. He has a horse.

And so he hasn't thus far proven that the horse isn't a descendant of Secretariat. Right? Right. So you might as well say it is because we haven't proven otherwise. He says it's not strictly illegal. Rockford is not a big fan of this plan. He kind of makes fun of Angel. We get good Angel Jim banter in all of their scenes in this one yeah uh

this starts us off on a light-hearted you know kind of fun note which is interrupted with a knock on the door two guys who as seasoned rockford viewers we know their trouble push their way in the guy in the lead is uh is a gum chewer yes snackacking on a big hunk of gum, which is gross and memorable. They know that Rockford is working for King Sturdivant, and they want the tapes. Rockford and the audience don't know anything about this. We don't know King Sturdivant.

We don't know anything about these tapes. Rockford is very insistent about not knowing any of these things. We get some back and forth where the gum chewer gives him a chance to come clean before they start getting physical. Rockford is, his sense of justice is affronted. Yeah. He hates being accused of things he didn't do. So he gets more and more sarcastic. The gorillas end up keeping them under one gun while the other guy tosses the place looking for the tapes. There's a great physical bit in there where our gum chewer goes to backhand Rockford. Rockford catches his hand.

Everyone is taken aback a little bit by this resistance, which is good. It's not that Rockford has won any sort of battle. It's that he's forced the scene to treat him with like slightly more respect than it would have. Yeah. We usually see Rockford take a punch and then get up or something like that. And so it actually stands out as a moment where he just shut someone down before they can hit him. Angel in this scene. So they did a good job of establishing right away the kind of character that Angel is and the relationship with Rockford and how Rockford feels about that. And all that's over the sandwich as they talk about this con they're going to do. But then Angel throughout the scene is acting as if he knows what these

tapes are because Rockford knows what these tapes are, right? He's acting as if he has a secret with Rockford and he's trying to reveal it and what he's clearly doing is he's got two guns on him and he's presenting himself as valuable so that he cannot be executed and such amazing instinct. Angel always gives you what you ask for whether he actually knows about it or not so he's feeding them more uh suspicion of Rockford and rockford is getting increasingly angry about it the guy tossing the place just breaks a bunch of stuff just being a jerk yeah and then goes into rockford's little bedroom area and sees a stack of tapes of audio tapes he grabs them here they are four tapes just like we were looking for and they uh peace out with the tapes angels like oh there you are

you that you said you hid them good i don't think that was very a very good hiding place telegraphing to us that this is not right the tapes that these guys are looking for but they take them and rockford uh says that he hopes they enjoy the ella fitzgerald and uh there's some count basie on those as well so rockford confirmed as a jazz aficionado. Yeah. So the goons have left, and it's Angel and Rockford, and Rockford's revealing to Angel that it's just jazz on the tape. And Angel wants to leave. Once they find out that it's not what they want, then they're going to come back for us. And Rockford's like, I don't know, maybe the Count Basie will be good

enough for them. I don't quite recall what Angel says back to him, but they both laugh at it. We've just seen Angel lying and kind of selling Rockford out a little bit. Throwing him under the bus with this whole. And then we get this moment

that just says, yeah, but these guys are friends. Yeah. Here they are. They're just enjoying a joke. That's all it takes. I'm really emphasizing this because I want anybody

listening to this who wants to do any writing to just realize that. That if you just have this real human moment where people enjoy each other and laugh, you can get away with a lot between those characters. Otherwise, it just falls apart. I totally agree. And I think there's multiple points in this episode that bear that out. We get our title, the no-cut contract, over a shot of Angel eating some

mustard while Rockford gets his stuff together. They leave the trailer without Rockford having the chance to eat that sandwich. Unfortunately, Rockford wants to go down to the station to see Dennis to make a complaint. We get our title credits over a little moving, driving around LA montage.

And then as they're heading out, Rockford asks Angel, hey, so who's this Sturtevant guy, King Sturtevant? Have you ever heard of him? Right. And Angel first demands a bribe of $20 to tell Rockford who Sturtevant is and then spins out an obviously fake story about him being an African tribal king with a Dutch name who's in town for an art exhibition. And this is just more of the banter. And also you can see Rockford being frustrated with Angel.

But also this is the kind of thing that Angel is good to keep around for. Right. Though he does say that if he turns out to be wrong about this, he's going to want his $20 back with interest. Yeah, that was a particularly fun scene for me. We have an accounts payable and accounts receivable situation. We're on track here. Rockford, of course, is being followed.

He notices this as they wrap up that conversation, and we go into, again, as we said, many of the moments in this are going to be classic, into a classic Rockford car chase. Not long, but gives you everything you want out of a Rockford chase. We get to see him making some split second decisions. We get to see him taking advantage of his environment. We get to see a nice little reveal because at first we don't know who's following him. And then midway through the chase, we go to the other car and see a guy calling in for backup.

And he's clearly a law officer of some kind. So as audience now we know, oh, the law is after him too. There's real trouble going on if he's getting the goons and he's getting the cops coming after him. I enjoy the camera angles in this. I'm kind of juxtaposing this with recent movies that have had a lot of driving in them that I've seen. This one, it's actual driving. James Gardner himself is doing the driving, presumably, because that's what we know that he did. And the cars have weight to them when they take turns. It feels, it's not very high pace, but you can feel there's a chance of hitting things.

And the camera angles kind of accentuate that. And one of my favorite moments is there's a part where they end up going through a drive-in theater, right? So you've got all these posts with the speakers on them that you would, if you were going to the drive-in theater, you'd park next to them and listen to them. And the camera angle, they're running down the rows, but then when they start going diagonally through the rows, they set the camera in a spot where it just, it looks like they're going to smack into these posts. Yeah. And they look like they're bottoming out because there's a bunch, there's like troughs kind

of in between where you're supposed to park. Right. They're clearly driving where they're not supposed to drive. Yeah. It's a great location. Yeah. And I really appreciate it. Like this tension built into just the momentum of the cars and these obstacles, which they

don't hit. Right. Yeah. That's the thing. You're kind of waiting for one of them to end up sideswiping through a bunch of these posts. Yeah. And neither of them do.

We do get our beautiful J-turn from the preview montage as Rockford gets cut off by his pursuing car, does the J-turn in the middle of this drive-in movie lot, and then that gets him enough space to get out towards the exit. But there were multiple cars in pursuit, and he ends up pinned between two more pursuing cars. Yeah, so they're arrested by federal officers and they're also going to impound the Firebird, which is a shame.

Oh. So we go straight to the federal building where Rockford has been being interviewed for two hours. He's been stuck there for two hours. There's a bunch of context clues around this conversation and some stuff that doesn't actually get shown to us until later in the episode, but for the sake of clarity it's the uh the fbi are these particular federal officers and rockford's in a room with uh the lead agent who is in fact agent shore who we've talked about

before on the on the show another in the lieutenant deal lieutenant Chapman kind of mold of higher echelon officers of the law who keep having Rockford getting involved in their thing and want him to do what they want or stay out of it. And of course, Rockford always has his own agenda. And by this episode, there is a relationship with Shore, between Rockford and Shore. They know each other. It's not like he's talking to a stranger here. Right. And we don't actually hear the name Shore until like the last third of the episode, actually. There's enough context that you know the position of this person. We just don't really hear his name if you didn't already know the character until later in the episode, which is

one of my favorite things about the Rockford Files, how they don't feel the need to create contrived reasons for people to give their names they kind of trust you to be like you'll learn it when you need to know it or it doesn't matter because their position is more important than their name so this scene does two things first it establishes that rockford still doesn't know what's going on doesn't know these tapes has never heard of sturdivant and he is more and more angry because he's being poked and prodded about this thing that he just honestly has no idea what it's about. Right. In trying to get Rockford to give him more information, Shore lays out why they're there.

Right. This fellow Sturtevant apparently called Rockford, met with him in a bar at the team's hotel, whatever that is, gave him the box with the tapes and paid him to hold those tapes until someone with a signed affidavit showed up to reclaim them. Rockford still doesn't, he says, none of that happened. I still don't know who that is. What team are you talking about? And Shore goes along with him and says, Sturtevant's team, the Southern Illinois Warriors. Larry King Sturtevant is the quarterback and he has these mysterious tapes that everyone wants. This moment is another one that I really enjoy because I feel like it's a moment where Shore stops the interrogation. I mean, he's ostensibly still in the interrogation,

but now it's people that know each other talking about the thing that's just happened. It's the moment that Shore just lets it all down and says, all right, I'm now maybe not officially convinced that you aren't involved, but convinced that you aren't involved. Let's figure this out. Let's work together a little bit. Or at least I'm willing to go along with you. Yeah. Maybe you'll go along with me. The acting in this scene is, I really enjoy it because you could see the weight drop off of him. Yeah.

Where he's like, okay. They do have some tough talk as part of that. Shore threatens to club Rockford's head between his knees, to which Rockford responds, you got to stop reading those crime fighter comic books. They're turning you into a cluck. Yes. The language in this episode is exquisite. I was thinking about this. If I had read the dialogue, I don't know if I would have understood what some of it was supposed to be saying because of the slang.

And I think a lot of the slang is just invented. Rockford's called someone a cluck before, and we thought it was hilarious. I think in Charlie Harris at Large maybe is where we first saw it. And I wonder if that's just a James Garner-ism. Yeah, there's a few other ones that show up what makes you think i won't go tapioca yeah he means i guess go become violent like tapioca uh because he says what makes you think i won't go tapioca and throw you out a window or something like that so the the whole episode has got that top to bottom lovely lovely, lovely slang that none of it is difficult

to understand because it's delivered in a wonderful context. And none of it is objectionable. Right. None of it's like dirty language. Yeah. It's still family friendly. It's just funny. Like this is a very funny episode.

I also want to pause here for a moment and I want to ask you a question. Can we now officially place this in your taxonomy of Rockford episodes? Is this Rockford in trouble? I think it definitely is. So we recently recorded and released a discussion special. So by the time you're hearing this episode, it'll be back in our archives. It's episode 13. But we talk about the different varieties of Rockford Files episodes. And this, I think, is a great example of the Rockford's in trouble. He's not being hired to do anything. His friends aren't in trouble. Right. It's not an issue episode. And he's not running a con game in particular. Just people walked up to his door, wanted to beat his head in, and he has to

figure out why. And's uh sent home by the end of the scene which is where rockford you know you don't have anything to hold me on book me or let me go and uh shore says that he'll be dead by morning because right there's some tough guys out there who are looking for the tapes i i would like to say that we officially have our first recommendation within one of the rockford subgenres here. This is the Rockford in Trouble prototypical episode. This is the one you could watch if you were like, what do they mean by this? Yeah, definitely. There's very little of the other elements. It's almost all Rockford's in trouble. He needs to get out. Once Rockford, once Shore lets him go,

Angel's waiting for him because Angel was also brought in and interrogated. That's not really followed up on other than Rockford wants his $20 back. Yeah. Now that he knows that the Sturtevant story was a lie. He gets it back minus the money that Angel used to buy his soda, which we don't know how much that is. I'm going to guess 50 cents. Right now I have Rockford at down 50 cents in this episode. Rockford makes a phone call to find Sturtevant. There's a lot of, I'm going to do this thing, cut to result of the thing in this episode. We don't see Rockford running like stories or con games or anything. It's a lot of good elision of the process because we care more about the product, I think. Yeah. So Rockford makes a phone call. He manages to find out where Sturtevant is right now in LA.

I should point out, and this is a thing that I completely forgot, and I think this is the most important Angel moment of this entire episode. Early on, when those two thugs came in through the door in Rockford's trailer and they pulled the guns on him, Angel describes himself as the local handyman and tries to like blather off like, oh, i just need to get that kind of wrench or whatever angel wearing a ascot is trying to play a handyman big lapels bright red ascot it's amazing anyways that's my favorite angel moment of this episode so we now get our first view of larry king sturant, played by Rob Reiner.

He's in a TV studio yelling at some production person about how he was supposed to be on some show. But she makes it very clear that he was an alternate guest and there was no guarantee. He has so many good lines because his whole character is revealed to us in like this 15 seconds of seeing him. And then it's just compounded as we see him every time throughout the rest of the episode. He's never been an alternate in his entire life and then goes off in a huff. Rockford comes in, asks her,

oh, is that Sturtevant? I need to talk to him. And she says, oh, don't worry. He can't get out that way. That's the fire door. It's this wonderful undercut of his authority that he doesn't have. He claims that he's a big shot and

then he's immediately undercut it's great his mustache is great his lapels are amazing rob reiner is great in this role and he's going to do a lot of delightful things as we as we get on but his co-star in this scene and for the next few scenes is turquoise. Yes, he is wearing so much turquoise jewelry. I mean, it's astounding. Yes. So I grew up in New Mexico. I was waiting for that. New Mexico and Nevada and Arizona all export a lot of turquoise. So it always amuses me when I see the use of turquoise as a affectation or some kind of like affluence signifier. Right. Because when I grew up, you could literally walk down the street and just buy giant turquoise

necklaces off of Native American women selling them on blankets. Right. That's just how things are. I think in this instance, it is supposed to show that he has bad taste. Yeah, it's supposed to show that he thinks he's wealthy. Exactly. And I think it works. I mean, Turquoise can be beautiful.

Don't get me wrong. But like the huge profusion of it is, it's a lot. And to me, I was like, oh, I know this guy. Yeah. This guy thinks he's hot. But he clearly is not. All right. So Rockford, being very direct, as we know and love him to be,

confronts Sturtevant about the tapes. What are these tapes that I'm supposed to have? Why are these guys coming after me? Sturtevant denies that he knows anything, doesn't know him, what he's talking about. Rockford notices that his teeth are capped, asks him about them, and then threatens to break those caps if he doesn't tell him what's going on. Which is something that gets called back to again throughout the episode. I was thinking about this line because it feels like a little bit like that moment in Just By Accident where he knocks on a door and the woman has a Polish name and she opens the door and he says, how? How do you pronounce it? Right?

Like it's a setup kind of thing. But this works. Like that other one I felt fell flat. But this one works because of how Rob Reiner's character is more than willing to brag about the wonderful dental work that he got. Rockford says, caps, and he's like, oh, yeah, I know a guy. Blah, blah, blah. I can hook you up or whatever. I thought it worked.

Yeah, it works. And they, like, Rob Reiner and James Garner have chemistry in these roles. They are fun to watch even while you're watching Sturtevant be a jerk. Oh yeah. And we'll get into that. So with all this questioning, he realizes, oh, you must be Rockford and finally gives in to like, okay, I'm going to this party. You can ride along and I'll tell you all about it. And then this is the greatest brush off, which is they go out of the studio, go over to a Rolls Royce that's waiting with a driver. And as he's getting in, Sturtevant goes, get rid of him.

And then this driver, who's also a huge gorilla, gets in Rockford's way and won't let him get in the car. So Sturtevant, he's kind of a poser. He's kind of a jerk. He doesn't really know what he says, what he presents himself as knowing. But he does have some kind of survival instinct, I think. And we see all that in this whole scene. So we go to the fancy hotel party, which one presumes that's where he was going. And Rockford probably just followed him because it's not like he tried to hide or anything. And here's where we see the next, perhaps the final element of Sturtevant's character, which is where he is trying to chat up an attractive woman

at this team party. This is different in 2017 than it was when it came out, I think. Yeah, so I don't think this was the language at the time. I hope not. I actually don't know. But our current parlance, he tries to neg her, right? Yeah. He just comes up and just insults her to start off.

You're beautiful, but your teeth are all jacked up. And I know someone who can do caps and immediate call back to his teeth. Yeah, he's pulling the whole bag pickup artist routine. Yes. He's Rob Reiner and he's charming to us as audience members. And I think in the original airing, we would have watched it and been like, look at this guy. No luck with the ladies.

He keeps conveying this false confidence about having luck with the ladies, but he's got no luck with it. Nowadays, that makes the character tougher to kind of work with his charm, right? Yeah. Because of the horrible internet mobilization of this particular behavior, this makes it more sinister than I think it probably... Yeah, I think he's supposed to be kind of just dumb. Yeah. But it reads in our current context to me as more toxic. Yeah, exactly. More of a predatory kind of thing.

And I don't think that's the intent for the character as written. It's just that part hasn't aged. It's not that it hasn't aged well, because I do think this episode, it follows a good wrestling practice, which is we have a villain and he does villainous stuff and then he gets his comeuppance. Right. If he didn't get his comeuppance about because every time he goes after a woman he gets shot down right and that's fine like i can watch that yeah because he has enough charisma as an actor and he has enough interesting stuff going on that like i still want to watch him but this particular the treatment of how he tries to pick up women has

has more of an edge to it now than it would have when it aired. This is presented as like ostentatious, you are dumb for doing this behavior. Right. But now we're in a world where people legitimately do that. Yeah. And argue that that's what you should be doing. Right. So, well, I'm glad that we're on board about that.

However, this woman does shut him down multiple times, which is great. And then once she peaces out, we see our two goons on the balcony, the ones that came after Rockford earlier with another woman. And they basically are like, all right, now's your chance. They send her off to obviously, quote unquote, seduce. I use that term lightly because it's not like she has to do it. It doesn't take much. But just walk up to him. They need to get him downstairs.

Don't take the elevator. In the background, we see Rockford appearing. And I love this. There's just one line where he is talking to someone. I don't think we even hear the setup. He's like, oh, I'm from the Long Beach Gazette or whatever. Right. He just like, he's like, oh, I'm here.

I'm from a newspaper. Because it was a press event. And there was a line earlier about how the reporters are gone. But he's there posing as a reporter. Doesn't matter for the rest of this scene but it actually comes up later and i love that's just the one line yeah and it matters so we know why he's there and who he's posing as but he sees sturdivant and this uh unnamed woman leave he follows them downstairs and while they're walking downstairs sturdivant is still giving her patter about how great he is. And you see her roll her eyes and all of her body language is so like, I can't believe I have to put up with this goon.

Again, the treatment of her response to his approach deflates him. It puts the pin in his behavior and tells us that he's a jerk for behaving this way. And maybe even pitiable. We'll get to that because later on that really plays in, I think. So they go to a hotel room that's on the lower floor. The two goons are waiting for them in that room. We go to Rockford's perspective. We hear a crash.

He runs into the room. The two goons are beating up Sturtevant. One of them turns around. The gum chewer sees Rockford. And in another great moment goes to punch him and Rockford ducks and he punches the wall, yells, holds his hand and that's enough opening for Rockford to just give him a couple blows, push him over, punch the other guy in the gut and hustle Sturtevant out of there. Another classic Rockford fist fight. Yes, over and done with almost straight away the king here throughout it

does the classic well it's a good thing you showed up because i was just about to lay them out or do something i would have regretted be careful about uh punching with his throwing arm right that's it yeah you got to protect these hands because he's a football player he's a quarterback so rockford hustles him into the elevator they start heading down to the parking garage and they're in this elevator for a long time which is great you see sturdivant getting more and more uncomfortable being stuck in this elevator with rockford where he's like i'm on the sixth floor or something like that and rockford's like yep and they still are just going down to the garage and so here's where you get this might be the iconic line from this episode so he he says like i have to watch out

for my arm i throw passes for a living there's a beat and rockford goes i noticed yeah there's another beat and sturdivant goes not not with the women not like that so like we know exactly how rockford just dunked on sturdivant is this the spot where he then starts hypothesizing about like because rockford lets him know that she was a lure right yeah and then he's like, oh, but I mean, that must've been a great job for her. She got to meet me. So even in this, he's self-centered. He's in his delusional world about his appeal to women. Uh, Rockford finds an unoccupied utility room in the parking garage, gets Durnaman in there and now he really wants answers and he's getting more physically threatening and uh we get a little bit of exposition here in terms of the story structure

this is amazing yeah everything that has just happened to Rockford leading up to this moment happened to the king he uh had some thugs come after him he had federal agents coming after him uh he's just laying it out as if this is a sob story, that this is how horrible his life has gotten. You can't imagine what that's like. And of course, Rockford has just gone through all of it. So it holds these two purposes. One, it just gives us the whole backstory from his point of view. And not the whole, it doesn't fill in all the gaps, but it gives us enough to get him to that point. But it reminds us of all of the stuff that Rockford has gone through to get to this point. And as you're watching it, you're just watching them get ticked off one after another, like that and then that and then that.

And then he ends it with the revelation about how Rockford gets involved in all this, how he passes this curse on to Rockford, which is while he's being investigated by the feds, he wants to make a phone call and finds a quarter page ad in the phone book, one that we're familiar with as Rockford file fans, an ad that he said was a pretty good ad. It was a good ad. So he called, he told them that he had given the thing to Rockford because is this, this is the moment where he delivers it like better to you than me, buddy. Yeah. Literally just picked his name out of the phone book and that's why rockford's in all this trouble i also like how as he goes through the story which is beat for beat the same as you say we get to see here's

the same story and it's happening to someone we like and it's happening to someone we don't like and we like to experience that i don't know if that's irony that that dramatic tension yeah this is the same set of events it's happening to a to a goofball and it's happening to our favorite pi and how the feeling is different because we feel like he deserves it right right i felt like he deserves whatever's coming to him but rockford it's not his fault he didn't do anything it's a compelling set of emotions for for this viewer so rockford of course is like well let's go to the feds and straighten this all out. Sturtevant does not want to go to the feds because in addition to all this stuff, he's in some tax trouble. He cheats on his taxes. He can't go to the feds. When he brought this up, I thought

it was, I thought he was laying a con on Rockford. And I have a theory about this episode now is that like he is shifty, but he's not lying here. I don't think so. Yeah. I think in addition to all the other things, he also cheats on his taxes. And that comes up a little bit later as well. Well, Rockford's trying to get him to his car and he's like, look, this isn't going to work for me because I'm just going to tell them my story and say that you sold the tapes

and now you're just lying about it. And who are they going to believe? Rockford takes the next step toward threatening violence he pushes him against the chair goes to punch him in the face and finally that's too much for sturdivant uh he really doesn't want to get his caps broken uh he has this whole monologue about being a football player and being good at reading defense and he doesn't figure rockford for the type to really hit him and then he's just proven wrong immediately which is great but he has a new ideaford for the type to really hit him. And then he's just proven wrong immediately, which is great. But he has a new idea.

His manager, the manager of the team of the Southern Illinois Warriors, Dale Fontaine, he knows about the tapes. If they can go talk to Dale, they can straighten this whole thing out. Rockford's like, well, why? So what are the tapes? Why does this matter? And it's like, well, he's kind of in the mob. And really the whole franchise is owned by the mob. So that's what the deal is with the tapes? Why does this matter? And it's like, well, he's kind of in the mob, uh, and really the whole franchise is owned by the mob. So that's what the deal is with the tapes.

Oh boy. Now we know why Chicago's involved. Rockford. Another thing we know about him, he's involved with the mob. He wants to get it straightened out. Right. He knows that going to the cops won't necessarily save his life.

If the mob wants him dead. Right. So they're like, okay, fine. Guess we'll go see Fontaine. Dale Fontaine apparently works late. They go to his office, won't necessarily save his life if the mob wants him dead right so they're like okay fine guess we'll go see fontaine dale fontaine apparently works late they go to his office which just looks like it's probably in like a gymnasium or something yeah they go in the place has been tossed before we get into that i i want to say how they go through that door because i think

there's an interesting thing that happens here where where Rockford goes to knock on the door, and the king just pushes it open. So Rockford doesn't even get a chance to knock. Now, after seeing this scene, we know why. But in that moment, when he does that, I felt like that was a nice character. This is showing us more about how the king just thinks everything belongs to him. Yep, yeah, the world revolves around the king.

Yeah, and I thought that that was, like, a really great bit of physical acting going on there. But like I said, we're going to have some truth laid on this, which is that the place has been tossed and Dale Fontaine is lying dead on the floor. You've been hit in the head with a, with a football trophy. It was a bloody football trophy on the desk. Rockford sends Sturtevant to call the cops, which I expected him to just peace out, but apparently he does actually call the cops. So Jim stays in the room with the body. When King comes back,

he comes back with his gun, which he keeps in his pocket. Rockford goes, I wonder who killed him? And Sturdivant goes, you did. Reveals the gun, and Rockford has this great look on his face, and then literally says, why don't you just shoot me and put me out of my misery? Sturdivant is going to tell the story about how he was working late watching some tape. He heard a fight. He came in. He saw Rockford hit Fontaine and he's going to finger him for the

murder. Sure enough, the cops show up led by our good friend, Dennis Becker. Dennis arrests Jim on the statement of this witness. Sturdtevant gives what I call in my notes, the least convincing statement ever made. And Jim asks for his attorney. Jim also, as he's being let out, he says, did you really just pull my name out of the yellow pages? And one of the things that I like about this, I feel what's going through Jim's mind right now

is that this is amateur hour. Yes. Right? It's not that Jim's like right now is that this is amateur hour. Yes. Right. It's not that Jim's like, oh, I fell for some big con. He's like, we were going to fix this. Or maybe not we were going to, but we were going to get to the bottom. We were going to find something out. But instead, you did this play.

Great. It's not going to help you. It's not going to help anyone. Speaking of being a child of the 90s, in a reference to the movie Clerks, it's a very, I wasn't even supposed to be here today kind of situation, right? Like, there's no reason for him to be involved with this at all. But he just gets pulled in deeper and deeper. Yeah. All right, we go to the police station.

Sturtevant is giving his statement, and he's giving it to Dennis in front of Beth. This is amazing, because Beth, Rockford's attorney, gives him nothing. Gives him absolutely nothing. And he tries to hit on her. He tries to kind of schmooze with her. And she just shuts him down. Doesn't even answer him. Gives him these one word responses.

It's fantastic. It's incredibly badass. It's hard to describe. It's a fun scene to watch just because she's in a position where she's been there before as far as the police and Rockford and all of that. She's the expert in the room. Right. When it comes down to it, the one person in that room that knows what's going on and how to deal with it is Beth. And she just completely controls and owns the room without having to say hardly anything. Yeah, she's amazing. I also wanted to contrast this scene a little bit with one of our previous episodes, the Oracle in a cashmere coat, cashmere suit, whatever the title of that one is.

In that case, we get this bogus testimony from someone who's really good at lying. In the scene, we see how the listeners to his story kind of believe him or buy into it or give him the benefit of the doubt yeah in this scene you can see dennis and beth thinking yeah this guy is full of the entire time but they're kind of bound by the rubric of the law to let him say his piece dennis is almost apologetic whenever he says, no, you know, not till morning. Yeah. Beth ends her part of it by saying, like, this guy is obviously a flake. Gretchen Corbett, you're the best.

Yeah. Thank you for everything you did in this show. We go to Dennis and Beth springing Jim from his cell where he spent the night. And this is another great little scene because we get just enough to see each of their relationships with jim without overstaying their welcome and while still delivering important narrative information for the episode dennis is excited he's like hey all right jim you know you're free to go uh so he's like excited to bring the good news to his buddy jim and jim is still mad about all this false stuff going on and just responds with sarcasm. And then Dennis immediately gets defensive.

He's like, what are we supposed to do? Someone made a statement, you know? Yeah. You know how we have to treat these things. And Beth brings the details that someone at the party remembered Jim because he gave them his bio. Yeah. Because he was posing as a reporter at 10 30 and the uh the time of death was established at nine o'clock so they're not treating him as a suspect anymore because of that actual factual

information as as jim points out oh you didn't think that i would kill the man go to a party and then come back to hang out at the murder scene he's like all right well is there an apb out for sturdivant he made a false report he implicated me i was falsely accused i want to see someone out there bringing him in to jail and dennis and beth both try to downplay it and jim susses out that something's going on yeah so beth's like look there's special circumstances that i had to agree to to get you out so we see like she had her own whole thing she had to do. Yeah. She's looking out for Jim's interests, but she doesn't want him to fly off the handle. So she's not going to give him all the information. But there's orders from upstairs, as Dennis says, not to bust Sturdivant just yet. And here we get an uncharacteristic Jim Rockford

moment because he says, it's OK, Dennis, I'll bust him for you. And this is against Rockford moment because he says, it's okay, Dennis, I'll bust them for you. And this is against Rockford policy. He's not supposed to get involved in active cases, but he's already involved. And also this is for revenge. Yeah. This isn't about a case necessarily. This is getting his, his own back. Uh, they pass shore leaving the, leaving the station. Rockford is like, Oh, so I see what your upstairs is all about. Dennis likes to refer to it as interdepartmental courtesy. Yeah. And then Beth and Jim leave the station. Rockford is very angry.

Possibly the angriest I've seen him. Yeah, no, he's... Especially in an interaction with Beth. The body language here is amazing. He pulls his elbow away from her and is like, don't push me! Like, as she's trying to calm him down and guide him towards the car. Which is precisely a move that Rockford would have done. Right?

Like, this is, I love that. It's a, I don't even know if it was intentional, but it was a nice mirror, or reversal of that. Yeah. But Rockford finally wears Beth down and gets her to spill with, uh, why Shore, you know, wants Sturdivant to stay out he apparently owns a nightclub in southern Illinois the king's castle yeah uh which burned down

overnight they think it's arson and so they think Sturdivant's involved with something they don't know what but it's these tapes there's this arson there's this murder and also Fontaine the manager uh there's this tidbit about how he brought a replacement quarterback from Canada, but the guy never joined the team. So Rockford thinks that Sturtevant has some kind of leverage over Fontaine. So that's his angle to try and figure out what's going on. But he does assure Beth that he's going to stay out of it. And then she tells him that Sturtevant's not at his hotel. And he says, well, you saved me a step.

This sort of interesting thing, because Beth has done more than lawyer work here. Yeah. She's done detective work, which is probably something she's used to doing, working with Rockford. And she's done the detective work, and she knows what his next step is. She knows what he would want to do. And she's controlling, but revealing. She knows what Rockford would do so she

can kind of you know head off the useless play right i kind of read that just as this is all stuff she learned from shore i mean that's possible but like when she said she already checked to make sure he was out of the hotel or something to that effect so i feel like she's probably she learned a lot of it from shore because I think also that's a man who can't keep his mouth shut. So this scene could be two things. It could just be shorthand for let's get the plot moving. So let's feed Rockford the information we need to get. Or it's here's Beth anticipating what Rockford's going to want, resisting because you got to.

You can't let Rockford do this, but you can't stop him. So here it is. Yeah. Well, in terms of the plot continuing to move, we go to Rockford connecting back with Angel at some like a bar. Right. Angel's been making phone calls and then tells Jim that he can't help him because Jim's in trouble. And if Angel helps him, he's going to be in trouble, too. Now, Angel's trying to tell him this serendipitously. he's standing next to the booth at rockford city right he won't face

him directly he's like talking out the side of his mouth i hope no one sees us talking body language the most suspicious thing if he just sat down with them nobody pay attention but because he's not doing it obviously everyone in the restaurant's like what is going on with these guys so angel's like i can't help you and he leaves and rock Rockford follows him and threatens to lean on him. Angel, I'm in real trouble here. If you can help me, you need to help me. Yeah. Angel's like, well, I don't know.

He's like, if I have to lean on you, I will. And Angel's like, okay. So come on, just tell me what you found out. Con to con. Yes. Pulls on their mutual bond of being con men at their core. Also, maybe because Angel's a little more comfortable since they're in like an alley doorway instead of in the middle of a bar. Right.

I do think the con to con thing was an attempt by Rockford to put him and Angel on equal footing. Yeah. Most of their conversations, Rockford tries to hold a moral high ground and try to drag Angel up. And here he really needs Angel's help. So he's like, I'm just as lowly as you are. Or exalted, depending on how you feel being a con is.

So Angel found out that there are two contracts out on Rockford over this tape thing. There's a local one. And then there's one with the violin players from South Chicago. Everyone thinks that he has fontaine's tapes and there's some kind of mob related underworld info on them so no one wants those tapes to go to the feds right so that's why there's both local and chicago related pressure to shut him up and keep those tapes out of out of shore's hands he also found out that sturdivin has a pad in hollywood so maybe that's where he went but before rockford leaves angel wants to get his camera back because you know those estate people they'll lock everything down

and he needs that camera it's uh yeah and it's a camera that he borrowed that he needs to get back to someone or something like rockford borrowed, but he pawned it or owes it to someone. It's a very Angel situation. You're going to die, so I should get my stuff back from you. I mean, I appreciate your situation, but also I have a situation. I will be inconvenienced by your death. And Rockford, being gracious for the information information he got tells him where it is in his trailer and then angel wishes him hasta la vista clearly does not think he will be seeing jim

rockford again the sad farewell rockford uh arrives at sturdivant's hollywood pad as he's leaving he has a garment bag with him he's clearly planning to to get out of town in a moment which demonstrates just how not great of a football player he probably really is. Sturdivant throws the garment bag at him and tries to run away. Rockford quickly catches up with him and tackles him to the ground. This scene, it could have been played out by young kids, right? Yeah. Like Rockford has a very bully position. young kids right where yeah like rockford has a very bully position he's on top of the king and holding him to the ground and uh the king is just saying whatever he can to get out of this i

wouldn't be surprised if rockford just suddenly if he like hawked a loogie and like yeah dangled it so that it was gonna go in his mouth or something yeah it's totally that kind of situation it very much has that that look to it rockford has has the king totally in his power he finally admits what he did with the tapes he gave him to a girl uh down on the strip and they're probably still there so that's where they have to go to get them right rockford lets him up and uh he punches rockford in the face to no effect rockford punches him back, sends him sprawling. And he's like, well, I had to try.

Oh, it's so good. I love how there's that exchange. And then his response to say, well, I had to try almost elicits forgiveness from Rockford. Yeah. This is actually where you start to see Rockford, maybe not like him, but start to kind of play off of him. Yeah. Pity him maybe, or be more interested in him as a person, as opposed to just someone causing

him all this trouble. Right. Because the next scene is the two of them driving down to get these tapes. We have Sturtevant lying out his sad history in kind of a monologue. He was always passed over. His sister was picked for the football with the kids before he was. And he just hates that feeling of being passed over. So he worked as hard as he could to beat that.

He became a high school football starter. He knows that he's on a second-rate team in a third-rate league, but at least he's a pro baller. That's all he wanted was to be a pro, and he's a pro. And he spends all this money. He has this Rolls Royce that he can't afford, and he has this in hollywood that he can't afford and still no one actually cares about him and while he's kind of whining and complaining this is all we need to get a little bit of human understanding of him and make him a more compelling character yeah and that's all rockford needs too because one of the fundamental pieces to rockford's soul is that he's a human

character right like he can hold empathy for people even if those people have brought this pile of to his front door and set it on fire and also we're past the the pivot point right Rockford's no longer trying to find out what happened now he's trying to solve it yeah so I think once he's in solving mode he has more empathy than when he's just reacting and i enjoyed that in this scene the king wants to brag about what he has discovered right wants to tell rockford the secrets of the mob yeah rockford's like no don't i don't want to know this so sturdivin the connection to the mob is that he bugged the conference room in his restaurant and that's where fontaine and his mob buddies would meet and talk about you

know putting hits on people and mob stuff so he has all these tapes of those conversations and he has a line where he says it makes him feel important to know this stuff and that's why he's trying to brag to rockford rockford's like no don't tell him he's like but it makes me feel important to know this that's why i kept doing it and that was his leverage over Fontaine that if he got replaced by this Canadian quarterback he'd reveal these tapes because he's the star he doesn't want to be replaced the key to the whole thing is that Fontaine was selling info to the feds while he was working with the mob so Fontaine had had turned Sturtevant knew that he'd turned, and that was the threat to keep his job as the quarterback. So we now get to the resolution of our story.

They drive to the apartment. As they get there, we see an ominous shot of two guys in a black car with a gift box of chocolates. That one of them opens the lid to show a pistol with silencer that he starts screwing on. These guys obviously are violin players from South Chicago. Yes. While they're getting all prepped, Rockford and Sturtevant go to this pool party. He tracks down Lisa, the girl who he left the tapes with, who of course is hanging out with top billing for the episode, Dick Butkus.

Yeah. So you've waited this long, dear viewer. We finally got it. This goes exactly how I thought it would go. Yeah. So you've waited this long, dear viewer. We finally got it. This goes exactly how I thought it would go. Yeah. Knowing that this was a cameo appearance and the Sturtevant character as established, King is impressed and taken aback, quickly recovers. I'm King Sturtevant.

You might have heard of me. I play on the Warriors. And Dick Butkus just says very politely, I'm afraid I've never heard of you. Lisa, the girl with him, says, that's all right. Nobody has. So yeah, undercut, undercut, undercut. But he deserves it. King tries to bond by saying they both have mustaches.

Right. It's amazing. So this is right after he retired from the Bears. Yeah, he played for the Bears from 65 to 73. He retired after knee injuries. So this episode aired in 75. So, you know, he's a pop culture sports name. Right.

You know, he's not playing anymore, but he's doing these kinds of appearances, I'm sure. But he's still in his prime age-wise yeah yeah he's not an old man here you can clearly see the legit versus kind of amateur hour yeah consideration there so lisa brought the tapes down with all of her other tapes for the party so they're just in a box of music tapes that are playing over the sound system sturdivant calls her a dipso, one of our favorite insults. Call back, or call forward. And then they look through the tapes.

Rockford sees the two hitmen coming in, thinks fast, and puts the one tape that they found on the tape player. The two guys come over to take them away from all the people, and then as they're passing the pool, suddenly the music changes from music to a kind of Goomba mob accent talking about putting a hit on somebody.

Everyone quiets down and kind of stares around. Yeah, there's a couple that's about to jump in the water out of just sheer joy about being in love that stop short because they hear the icy cold voice of a South Chicagoan speaking about planning a murder. This little construct here is, I would say, just the weak point. Yeah. I think it was great seeing Rockford switch the tapes, but then how does it go from music to this after they've left the room? Right. Is it some kind of automated system or something that we're just assuming? Like, who knows? How does the audience react to the context there so swiftly? It's not that it's horrible or anything like that. It's the, you know, the fridge moment where you're like, later on, if you think about it, you're like, well, that didn't make sense, but that's fine. We got here. We're going forward. Right. And the point is that one of the guys recognizes the voice. It's like, that's whatever boss. And then runs to stop the tape.

Yes. And that distracts the other one for our final great moment from the preview montage, the Rockford pool shove. Yes. So that gets them away from those goons. They run outside and then the local goons are pulling up, have tracked them down and just start shooting at them. I appreciate the detail of the gum chewer having his hand all bandaged up from where he punched the wall instead of punching his face. This is when the cops show up.

One presumes that Rockford, as he so often does, called ahead of time and said, we're going to this place. Someone's probably going to try to kill us. You should be here. Yeah. And sure enough, that's what happened. Dennis and Shore arrive.

They arrest everyone. And our heroes are rescued. So in our final scene, we have Rockford and Sturdivant in the federal building, cooling their heels, waiting to hear what's going to happen. And they're doing some dollar a goal wastebasket shooting. They're crumpling up paper and throwing it into a trash can. And they just have great banter about kind of the last little details about like what was on those tapes. Oh, lots of stuff. Lots of guys are going to go to jail, that kind of thing. This is another one that feels like when he had, when Rockford had the king down in his yard,

in the king's yard, this feels like the principal's office, right? Yeah, definitely. This is the two of them bored to death waiting in the principal's office. And they've had enough time together where they can interact as people and not as adversaries. Yeah.

Like I said, there's some banter, but it's kind of lighthearted. Yes, exactly. They're not trying to scam each other or screw each other over. There's some good interplay with making the baskets. Sturtevant banks one off the rim and goes,

rim shots count for half. They end up even. And then before the next one can be thrown, Rockford's like, I have a last question for you. I have to know. Right. Did you really just pick my name out of the phone book? And Sturtevant says that no fooling, just picked your name out of the phone book and sort of in says that no fooling just picked

your name out of the phone book and we end the episode with freeze frame on rockford as he goes son of a freeze frame end of episode oh it's a good episode a lot of fun good stuff all around yeah we got i mean i got some stuff i want to talk about in the second half but i i think that we went through and said most of the stuff we want to say about the episode proper there so as you pointed out earlier this is a great rockford gets into trouble episode there's no client there's no money involved he's out of money here like so he loses 50 i'm assuming 50 cents on the soda right uh he never earns any money good like you said there's no client he's now being investigated by the IRS.

He says that Shore is getting him audited. He's sure that Shore is behind that. Yeah. And then, of course, he's going to owe Beth for all that's happened. On a whole, he's lost quite a bit of money doing this particular episode. So, yeah, he's just gotten himself out of trouble. He had two hits on him, and now those are taken care of. A bunch of mob guys are going to jail.

So it's kind of a things end up well, but because it's Rockford, it's always back to his status quo, right? Yeah, I think this one just has a really great balance. It's funny, which is nice. It's dramatic. It has all of our favorite characters in just enough amounts. It introduces details and then follows up on them there aren't really loose threads other than like you said like that tape gambit was a little like what would be fun to do here but it gets us there yeah i like that they

decided to give the tape a voice a little bit so that's not just a a mcguffin right right it's an actual tape though i have a little bit more to say about that in the second half as well but uh yeah we got to see some goons that are memorable the gum chewing goon is great and uh other than sturdivant's pickup behavior having more of an edge to it now than i think it probably is intended to but to the character's benefit seeing a little bit of his humanity at the end yeah makes him a more understandable he's not really even a villain he's just a schmuck but we understand why he's a schmuck and that makes him watchable he's not totally not totally toxic i think it's an interesting spot that he because so he's the antagonist of the episode

yeah there's some heavies and things like that but they don't even answer to him he's the antagonist of the episode. Yeah. There's some heavies and things like that, but they don't even answer to him. He's just dragging them along in his wake. Yeah. He's more of a foil than anything else. Yeah. And so he occupies an area that is most often occupied by Angel, right? This is the stuff that Angel does. And I like that we get another person doing this.

And we've seen that a couple of times before, the one in every port episode, where the Antigonus is another confidence artist, right? Like that's not exactly what the king is here, but the king is just, you know, kind of a f*** up who had just happened to hook Rockford as he went along. And I think what makes him fun to watch is that you under, like all of his decisions make

sense given what we know of the character. Yeah. Like we know that he's a character that makes poor decisions. So when he makes a poor decision, we're like, yeah, yeah, that was a stupid thing to do. And every one of them is purely selfish. Yeah. So every time Rockford gives him a chance not to be purely selfish, of course, you're going to get bitten. That's what we want. So that's a fun person to want to see get their comeuppance and then he does he's probably not going to come out of this great but with his tax trouble and his proclivity for lying and all this other stuff uh though probably better than if the mob went after him so right and i don't think he quite knows yet how badly the situation is going for him. So he ends a little jollier than he should.

He might never know. But yeah, great episode. Totally see why it's been, we've been asked to do it. Yeah. Thank you. Everyone that recommended it. Yep. Go watch it.

That's all I have to say for now. Yeah. Go watch it. And then after you watch it, come see if what we have to say in the second half makes sense to you because we're going to pick out some things that this episode made us think about that we can use for our own writing and game design purposes. See you then. While we have you here, there's three ways you can support us.

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Welcome back to 200 a Day. We just went over the no-cut contract episode, a wonderful episode about Rockford getting hooked into a situation that he did not intend to have when he woke up that morning. Now we're going to talk about some of the lessons that this particular episode have taught us that we can use in our various applications of fiction, be they in writing or at the table as you play role-playing games. Our two favorite applications of fiction as those are the things that we do. Yeah.

I can't speak with any authority to what you would do if you were to say, write a television episode, except I know what I like in a Rockford files episode. Yeah. So what did you, what was your, your main thing coming out of this one that impressed you that you think is worth us exploring a little bit? One of the things that happened in here is a,

uh, think is worth us exploring a little bit. One of the things that happened in here is a Rockford applied a protagonist tactic that I enjoy reading and enjoy experiencing through iFiction. And that is the protagonist that goes with the flow. Now, it's not immediately evident that that's what he's doing because he's angry about every step of it. He does have an emotional motivation, He's angry about every step of it. He does have an emotional motivation, which is I'm mad and I want to both understand what's going on and then make whatever is going on stop affecting me. If he were, say, Robert E. Howard's Conan, what he would do is he would draw a sword and just create a river of blood out of everyone he encountered in this whole trail. But that's not who he is, right? Those aren't Rockford's tools.

And that's not how his character works. His character is, he wants to find out the truth. He wants to know what really happened. And he is in a world where there are forces stronger than him. The mob is stronger than him. The feds are stronger than him. The cops are stronger than him. The only person who isn't is King.

So what happens in this episode is that Rockford, he complains along the way. He puts up a fight, a struggle with what's happening, but he goes with the flow each step. He doesn't try to get obstinate where he might in another episode where something else is happening uh we have this beginning part where he is obstinate where the they show up and they say don't you have the tapes and he's like no i don't know what you're talking about and that has the like sort of classic rockford i'm not dealing with this this is you've got the wrong guy keep going and then that doesn't work for him. They steal his jazz collection. They're the real villains of the piece.

From there on out, he's, you know, trying to pick up the trail, but things happen to him and he just kind of goes along with it. Yeah. He's cut off from King when he gets to the limo, because King tells the limo driver. And instead of socking the limo driver in the mouth or trying to jump in the car you know like getting wily and jump in the driver's seat and drive off with him like there's a there's a couple things that he could do here that's still rockford but

more active than what he did which is i'll fall back and follow well he he just follows up on the other piece of information he has which is there is he's going to be at this party. So I'll just go to the party. So he kind of follows that pattern throughout the episode. And I feel like, you know, I don't want to make this like a diatribe because it's not. Like, I'm just this is a thing that you can have a protagonist do that's interesting. I feel like this is a particularly apt pattern for the solo, obviously the solo protagonist, but also kind of like the investigator. You know, this is a trope from lots of detective fiction where it's like a thing

happens, the investigator is fictionally placed in a world where they can discover things. So they just go around discovering things until they, you know, break the story or figure out the case or whatever i think the iconic like you you go to the sting when we talk about con games for me this particular style the iconic one i can go to is the big lebowski oh sure in the big lebowski all right so i've done some creative writing classes in college that that's what i got my original degree in and there was a thing that they taught you over and over again because there was it was this problem that plagued 101 courses in creative writing which is you want a protagonist that does something you don't want a passive protagonist right there's

good reason why they they drill that into you because in those one-on-one classes you just get so many passive protagonists so many people sitting in coffee shops, wistfully wanting to fall in love or whatever the college experience is. You get boring stuff. Yeah. But the big Lebowski breaks that rule in such a glorious way. The protagonist in that movie, the dude, does nothing proactive. He's dragged along by his friends.

He's dragged along by his friends. He's dragged along by his enemies. Everything happens to him and he solves the case. Right. It's a thing, a thing of beauty. And I think that this is not as far as it doesn't go as far as the big Levowski goes here because Rockford certainly is proactive at points in here, but he strategically bends in the wind to let things happen so that he can get to the next point.

One of the points where that happens that is an extremely Rockford Piles feeling moment is when King reveals that there's a mob influence. That these tapes have something to do with the mob. And Rockford, up until that point was like we're going to the feds we're going to the feds and then once that's revealed he goes all right well now we need to find out why those tapes are important because if the mob's involved i can't go to the feds because that won't solve my problem of the mob might want to kill me yeah exactly so yeah that's a moment where like that bending of like here's a new piece of information we're going to go down that branch now but it's

also a very character relevant decision there's micro moments of that too like when he comes first shows up at the the tv studio to find the king and the woman the production assistant that stops him and says oh he can't get out that way rocker doesn't chase him he's like oh yeah you're right okay i'll just wait here for him like i'm not saying that that is a brilliant decision but i think that that is great because it shows how he's going to react to some of the future things down the line like oh okay i know how to do this so this episode is a good example of showing us a protagonist who does that. I totally agree. I do feel like I had this kind of thought while I was watching it, especially the first third or so. This could be a very dangerous setup for a role playing game because there's a

secret. There's a mystery. You're presented with an action. Guys break down your door. They're looking for the tapes. You've never heard of them. you don't know who they are you don't know who this person is what do you do right in many role-playing games the impulse is not i'll let them do what they want and see where this goes the impulse is i'll fight them or i'll chase them or i'll pretend that i know or you know something more proactive yeah do you think there's ways to make this happen in games or do you know, something more proactive. Yeah. Do you think there's ways to make this happen in games? Or do you think this is a more like constructed fictional conceit? Yeah, I think that when watching this episode, the two things you want to kind of look for

depend on whether or not you're looking to use this in fiction that you're writing, where you get to, like you were saying, like a... You get to construct it. You get to construct the response. Yeah. In that case, then what you want to look at is, is, like a... You get to construct it. You get to construct the response. Yeah. In that case, then what you want to look at is, is the audience going to get bored with this character doing it?

And so that's one concern. But when you're doing it as a role-playing game, your audience gets frustrated, not bored. That's what I was thinking about. How like, if you're sitting at this table and you're like, this secret is being kept from me. Right. And I want to find out, not because i want to experience the story but because as a player i need to know more of the context so i can make a character decision one of the solutions to

the audience being bored versus the players being frustrated is to put the protagonist through the ringer because that's fun to watch. You get to see the protagonist get strung along and wrung out and all of that. But that is precisely what is going to frustrate the players more because they're closer to this character. They can't hold this ironic distance from James Rockford. They can, but they need to be aware up front that they are going to be holding that ironic distance and i think that that might be the key to solving it when i play a role-playing game i often i i enjoy playing the king not necessarily the whole creepy pickup artist

thing but here's a character who is more confident than he has any right to be and in a dangerous situation and flying by the seat of his pants and i know that that character is going to get their comeuppance and i am begging for it right you're playing towards yeah i want that to happen like so i think you do need some player buy-in but i don't think that's the only or rather i don't think that's all the solution because i don't imagine if i were playing jim rock, I would still be frustrated with this. Yeah. So I was thinking, like, if I was going to do this as a scenario for some game, I'm presenting this to my player who's playing Jim Rockford.

I might start the game at the TV studio when he chases down King. That whole first couple scenes, like, that's all preamble. Here's the scenario right these guys have broken in they want this stuff that you don't know what it is you finally track down the name of this guy and you found him right because that's where jim starts making more proactive decisions and has context within which to make those decisions and has another character to bounce off of right and my other thought is just which we've talked about this a lot and i think it's something we both do in lots of our games you know these

guys break down your door they're looking for tapes you don't know what the tapes are but here's what they are the player so that the players know here's the backstory up to this point now let's see your characters react to these other characters and i think there's, this is going to get dangerously into design here. All right. Since Dogs in the Vineyard, right? We have games that will incentivize people to take Fallout, to allow bad things happen to them for a currency that they can hold on to, or some sort of something that will deliver for them later in the game. You take some kind of either narrative or mechanical drawback now so that you have juice to do something you want to do later.

Right. I don't want to get too much into like what can and can't be done with that sort of design and what to look out for or whatever, because I have strong opinions there that I may not have six months from now. But anyways, what I am saying is that like, I think that that little bit of spoonful of sugar helps that medicine go down. So that's another thing that can be done. Even in something like Dread, where you have the Jenga tower, in the beginning, you're just flowing in the wind and not pulling, then you have a nice solid Jenga

tower for years at the end. No guarantee, but it's something that you can play to. It's a tactic that you can take. Yeah. So if you have or make a game that incentivizes the players to be reactive at the beginning in order that they get some kind of currency or bonus or ability to be proactive at the end, then you get more of the arc of this episode. Yeah. But I don't think that that's the only way to do it. And there's certainly other ways where you can just withhold the chance to be proactive. You could just say at the beginning, this is going to be a reactive scene. This is going to be a reactive scene.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Or lay that blame on the dice. We rolled reactive. You got to be reactive. I'm a big fan of laying the blame on the dice. I think that there are ways to do it, but I do think it's difficult because failing to do it for your group leads to frustration, I think, faster than other problems. Yeah. Coming down on someone, the way that they came down on Rockford at the beginning of this episode can lead to some frustration. Yeah. I

think if there's not some kind of player level, either knowledge or buy-in, that that's going to happen, it feels unfair. So watching it on TV, we're excited to see Rockford, who is aggrieved at this unfair thing, get revenge, essentially, right? Find out what's happening and get his own back. But in a game, that feeling of aggrievement needs to be managed before you get to it as opposed to after it happens yeah yeah i think this uh this episode does a lot of interesting stuff about proactive and reactive kind of uh elements and one of the things that it made me think about was the idea of the macguffin yes which in this case are the tapes. So we're all good media consumers. We know the idea of the MacGuffin

as like the thing that is supposed to drive the plot regardless of what it actually is, right? This is the term from Hitchcock and the conceit of it doesn't really matter. It doesn't matter if it's tapes or if it's an oil painting or if it's a phone

number of a mob boss or if it's an oil painting or if it's a phone number of a mob boss or if it's a file folder full of documents, it's a thing that its pursuit or its treatment is driving the narrative. Right. The character motivations and what they want and all that kind of stuff. But what I think this episode does is the tapes are the MacGuffin for the episode, but they're not just an X that you could slot anything else into

and the episode would still go as it goes. They have an active component to them that actually drives what the characters want as opposed to being an empty space around which you could construct any character motivation. I don't know if that, am I splitting a hair weirdly here? Let's split it. Let's split it for the sake of splitting it. I think it know if that, am I splitting a hair weirdly here? Let's split it.

Let's split it for the sake of splitting it. I think it's a good distinction here. Yeah. I might be being overly pedantic, but what I'm trying to get at is that part of the tightness of the writing of the episode, right, is that they are these tapes. They're not something else. And not only do they have a role in the plot, which is that the goons mistake them for something else because tapes look the same and they're not smart enough to realize that these valuable things are just going to be sitting on a shelf, which tells us something about the goons. But also, they're part of King's backstory and they play into his character, which isn't just that he's involved with the mob.

He actively recorded them because he likes to know things that he's not supposed to know that makes him feel powerful that's part of his character that's not just part of the story he has aspirations to be in one society or another that isn't accepting him right he can't be a real pro baller uh the women don't all love him he can't really afford his limo he can't be one of the made men so he's pretending by listening to these conversations but that gives him some real power right because that's the leverage he had to keep his job and that's the leverage he has to blackmail fontaine so that all serves a double purpose of both being a part of the plot and also being part of his his character that also being part of his character.

It naturally grows out of his character. Why there are tapes and not anything else. And then there's an active component to them at the end, as we talked about how Rockford actually activates one in order to distract the goo. Yes. Which is a little weak in its kind of cause and effect relationship. in its kind of cause and effect relationship. But the choice made there was to emphasize the tape and connect that back to the very first scene where they wanted the tapes, right?

Right. So I guess those elements all make those more part of the texture of the show in a way that, you know, a file folder of incriminating documents that could be any file folder and that we never learn what the actual documents are, that could still propel the same plot, but it wouldn't feel like a natural outgrowth or a natural part of the fabric in the same way that these tapes do to me. Yeah, the tapes sit in kind of an interesting situation because like Rockford, we don't

even care to know what's on the tapes. We just know that it's incriminating, right? We know why people want it. Rockford has a different reason than we do for not wanting to know what's on the tapes. Right. We just know that it's incriminating, right? We know why people want it. Rockford has a different reason than we do for not wanting to know what's on the tapes. There's that situation where he decides that he doesn't want to go to the feds. He knows that everyone wants these tapes, but then when he finds out that it's the mob bosses speaking,

being recorded, then he changes how he's going to deal with it. And that doesn't happen if it's just whatever. Like, do you have the files? And it even leads to that great conversation in the car where King wants to tell him what's on the tapes and Rockford doesn't want to know. That's a character interaction

driven by the nature of the tapes. And it's great. And it's great to watch. And it's great to see this character be so desperate to show what a big shot he is. And Rockford be so desperate to not want to know because he knows it's not healthy. So yeah, I don't know if I really have a great takeaway here other than I appreciate whether it was accidental and just kind of slotted into place or whether this was a thought out element. Right element right stands above and beyond some other episodes where there are a little more generic of motivators because there is that active component to like the

nature of the mcguffin is has a reason beyond to drive the plot and it has implications and that makes it feel rich and like we always talk about this this real vibrant world that they're sitting in. Agreed. Yeah. Think about what it is and then the ways that that can hook and reinforce what you're doing, right? Like I don't even think like you can approach it from saying we need a MacGuffin. It's a transistor radio. Okay, well, why would they want that?

You know, just enough to make people interact with it in a way that makes it more than just a generic blob that drags people along yeah you can build out from it yeah it could it could create its own space and add its own you know yeah additional narrative weight once you decide to go down that path i just like this idea of that thing or person or whatever actively pushing things along as opposed to being excuse for the narrative to be happening yeah it's actually part of the narrative happening i guess that's the best way i can try to pull those those differences apart yeah i think that that's a good distinction there uh so i want to talk just say something about the violence and this will be very quick

um one of the things i like about uh some of violence in this episode, we think we're going to have violence. How does that end? I guess you have to subdue one or the other. You have to knock out somebody. And we do get that. And that's a common thing that happens in Rockford Files. He does sucker punch people and knock them unconscious or what have you. Or hold them long enough for the police to come and arrest them.

Yeah. knock them unconscious or what have you. Hold them long enough for the police to come and arrest them. Yeah. But I really like this moment where the king throws a punch at Rockford and Rockford just throws another punch and lays them out. And he's like, all right, I had to try, but you won. You can beat me up. And one of the reasons why I like that is that Rockford himself does that from time to time in Rockford Files episodes where somebody will do something he's like okay I'm outclassed this fight is over and I like that because you can see that happen like if

you watch nature videos you'll see animals do these negotiations all the time like one that really stood out to me was a moment where it was I think it was like a baboon or something that had an animal that had been killed and a bunch of meerkats came up to it. And the baboon was like, okay, that's yours. When it's so much bigger than these meerkats. But what it was is just doing the same calculation we're all doing now, which is I don't have the health insurance to deal with this. They can make this not worth my time. So let's do this other thing instead. I find it really refreshing when that happens in fiction, where instead of a

fight being until somebody gets knocked out or whatever the shorthand for the getting knocked out is or killed. I think I might've talked about it before, but the show Person of Interest, I can't remember how many seasons it went on, but it took me several seasons into it before I realized that they lulled me into thinking that shooting someone in the leg, first of all, was safe, which it isn't. You've got a major artery there. And if you get shot in the leg, go see medical attention right away. Second of all, all shut them up they would shoot people in the legs and they would fall to the ground and just hold their legs that'd be the end yeah and that removed them from the scene it was this shorthand for safe violence but it's not safe if you got

shot in the leg you'd be screaming like there's no no human being reacts to being shot in the leg by rolling over and just going into a fetal position. So, and I don't mean to be just complaining because that just was the shorthand that that show was doing. We're used to that. We grew up on cartoons like G.I. Joe and whatnot, where you shot a plane and everybody parachuted to safety. You know, violence had no consequences. But I really dig it when you have something like this in the Rockford Files, where a fight

is ended because somebody involved in it they're like oh I've lost yeah so we're done it's a nice separation of like violence as the reason for the conflict and violence as a method for the conflict right yeah not to be too I don't know critty about it but like it's super easy we have a lot of cultural momentum behind a conflict is a fight and a fight is its own reason for being and teasing those apart and being like they're fighting for a reason that reason doesn't need to be one-to-one with someone winning or losing this fight or being incapacitated or whatever uh jim and king when they just punch each other that's not about who's

going to win that fight that's about showing to the audience that King really can't back up his game and that Rockford really is more physically imposing than him. And that all of those threats that Rockford was giving him earlier in the episode, he was fully capable of carrying out and that King made the right decision by going along with him. Yeah. And the fight in the hotel room is just about getting King out of there. Yeah.

And showing that Rockford's a little smarter than these guys, following up on them being so dumb that they thought that his tapes were the real tapes. Right. So each of these moments has like a character reason for like showcasing something. It's doing, it's almost a callback to something that happened earlier. It's not taking up a ton of screen time and it is violent, but it's not about the fight, right? Yeah. Yeah, just teasing those apart is really, it is refreshing because it's not something we see a lot.

And there's another bit in there where that fight between Rockford and King, the fight, the two punches, the exchange of the two punches. That is the beginning of them getting along. Right. Yeah. Well, they've established their hierarchy at long last. And there is a long tradition of this in fiction. I've been working on my role-playing game based on Robin Hood and been doing a lot of Robin Hood research. And that is just the standard Robin Hood story where he comes upon a stranger.

And we all know the Robin Hood and Little John one where he is trying to cross a river and Little John is also trying to cross the river. And so they fight and one of them bests the other. And then they become the best of friends for rest of time. And there's story after story after story of Robin Hood doing this. But that's not just Robin Hood. That goes all the way. That's the epic of Gilgamesh is about two guys fighting and then they're like, we're best buds.

Right. So that's a fun result from this sort of conflict. But you can't have it be this final thing. You can't have it be this like death. It can't take one of them out of the story. Yeah. I agree. like death.

It can't take one of them out of the story. Yeah. I agree. And I think this is the ratio of screen time to effectiveness in this episode is delightful, right? They're very short, but they're very concrete and do exactly what we need them to do. And then we move on with the rest of the episode. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, as always, that's all super smart stuff. And I thank you for sharing it with me. Thank you. Do you have anything else to say about the no cut contract again i mean i think i said this before but thank you everyone who's recommended it i mean we were going to end up watching it but it's exactly what i needed this week yeah we bumped it up the list a little bit uh and i'm glad we did because it's great well then thank you all so much for listening uh i think we've earned our 200 for today. So we're going to go ahead and roll around in the fruits of our labors.

But we will be back next time to talk about another episode of The Rockford Files.