Two Hundred A Day - Episode 22: The Four Pound Brick

Episode Date: November 26, 2017

Nathan and Eppy discuss S1E20 The Four Pound Brick. An old friend of Rocky's is convinced that her cop son's death was no accident, and Rocky hires Jim to look into it! A straight-forward detective mystery written by pulp author and screenwriter Leigh Brackett, we find the combination of genre conventions and iconic Rockford Files characterization to be well worth the watch, and it gives us a lot to talk about in our second half as well! Want more Rockford Files trivia, notes and ephemera? Check out the Two Hundred a Day Rockford Files Files! Find out more about Leigh Brackett, the "Queen of Space Opera" Wikipedia | IMDB | ebooks on Project Gutenburg 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, Dylan Winslow and Bill Anderson! 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.

This is Shirley from the bank. The answers are no, no, and yes. No, we won't loan you money. No, we won't accept any cosigners. And yes, your account's overdrawn. I get off at 430. Welcome to 200 a Day, the podcast where we explore the 70s television detective show, The Rockford Files. I'm Nathan Paletta. And I'm EpiDye Ravishaw. And we are going back to season one yet again for this episode. Yeah. Epi, which one are we talking about and why did you propose this episode? Right. So this is season one, episode 20.

The story behind this is that I'm working on the 200 a day Rockford Files files, which is our database that we're setting a database spreadsheet that we're setting up for fans of the show and fans of our show to kind of put together notes about the different episodes whether they're episodes of rockford files or episodes of 200 today and that's happening because we hit a we hit a funding goal on our patreon yes so by the time this episode comes out it will have been out for some time there will be a link to it from our website, 200 a day. That fireside.

Dot FM. And also from our Patreon, patreon.com slash 200 a day. And it's a resource for all the weird and fun things, um, that listeners like about the Rockford files, as well as the things that we like and, uh,

vital statistics as well. If you're, if you're a, uh, accountant or a nutritionist who worries about, uh, Jim Rockford's financial and bodily health, it's a good one to, to check out. We'll, we'll definitely be talking about his money and his food quite a bit on there. I was putting together sort of the skeleton of it. And part of that skeleton involved

copying over information that already exists on the internet and i discovered that lee bracket wrote an episode uh this episode in fact the four pound brick and i am uh i'm a big lee bracket fan and we'll probably talk more about her and what she's done in the second half of this episode but i was over the moon uh i was super excited about this i was not immediately familiar with Lee Brackett, but you were like, she's the one who wrote the original treatment for The Empire Strikes Back. The one where Vader is in a castle.

And I was like, oh, tell me more. Yeah, we'll talk more about her in the second half. And I'd also just want to put the standard apology out. I don't know how her name is actually pronounced. I'm sure it's Lee Brackett, but it could be anything else. Yeah, so Lee Brackett, this is the only episode of the Rockford Files that she wrote. She's more well known as a screenwriter for some feature films, including some great westerns, Rio Bravo and El Dorado, and also some great Noirs, The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye.

So we'll go a little more into how that all kind of combines for us as an interesting case study, I guess, of the influences on the Rockford Files. I don't know how intentional any of this is, because I'm sure it's just a part of the writing for tv beat you just end up writing for whatever shows or you have a script and take it around to shows but uh yeah it's an interesting cross-section of all those plus her fiction work which is what epi was very excited about yeah yeah uh this episode was directed by lawrence doany uh again apologies if we've if we do not pronounce his name correctly,

we still don't know. We've still never heard it pronounced in front of us. He's all over the Rockford Files, the first couple seasons in particular, and this is the fourth of his directorial episodes that we've talked about, joining some of our pantheon,

I would say, of favorite episodes, including the Farnsworth stratagem and chicken little is a little chicken um he also directed pastoria prime pick which i think we liked a little more than some other uh than the consensus on it um this episode while the plot is actually very straightforward a lot of the directorial choices are very thematic and pull it together i I'd say. Yeah. I've come to really, really get excited when I see his name in the credits,

because like, all right, you're someone who really knows what he's doing. And yeah, and Juanita Bartlett had a hand in script doctoring as well. So yeah, it's like a dream team. It's kind of funny because we have this little bit of a dream team here. This episode is in between two other episodes that we've talked about. Charlie Harris at large, which was good, but a bit of a weird one. It doesn't fit into the Rockford Files formula as well as some others. And Just by Accident, which is one of our least favorite episodes that we have talked about.

So this little cluster of episodes right at the end of season one is an interesting, it's a bit of a roller coaster ride in terms of quality. They're still kind of figuring out the show, I think, still figuring out the creative staff. And I would say that at this point, we are on board with the idea that the show really hits its stride in the second season. Yeah. And this is kind of one of the episodes that shows the promise of the second season. One of the ways this show sort of plugs into that is that it's a really good episode just to showcase the relationships that Jim has with his father, with Becker, with Angel and Deal.

Yeah. In that way, I feel like the show has its stride here. These are how these characters view each other. This is how these characters fit together. And I think it's ready at that point. The characters all fit really well, I think, in terms of what makes for a memorable Rockford plot. You know, we don't have the wacky stuff that Cannell or David Chase would do. We don't have the very plugged into what's happening in society kind of angle stuff that we see from like when Juanita Bartlett starts writing or when we get Meta Rosenberg really

having her hands on it creatively, at least. And also in comparison to those two I just mentioned, this one has most of that supporting cast and thus it feels more like a Rockford episode. And those other ones have less of the supporting cast and feel more like generic detective stories. It's an interesting contrast with those other two episodes. But speaking of the generic detective story, let's get into the preview montage. Oh, the preview montage.

Which I think is very straightforward. Yeah, it's straightforward. In fact, it sets up all the beats you want in a Rockford Files episode. How is Jim going to get hired? How is his money going to be in question? How is he going to try and not get the job? Also, we get a great look at, I'm going to say, artistically faced goons in this episode. I feel like they are memorable goons. If nothing else, this episode has facial features on these guys. Like you see this guy's face and you know,

immediately that his whole job in this episode is to do physical harm to Jim. And it's just by looking at his face. We also have a good recording machine message that you just heard that is right up your alley. I would say. Oh, so good. Financial troubles. But of course, she wants to she wants to take Jim out.

Yeah. 200 a day is supported by all of our listeners, but especially our gumshoes. For this episode, we have nine of them to thank. Thank you to Mike Gillis, a host of the Radio vs. The Martians podcast. It's the McLaughlin group for nerd of the Radio vs. the Martians podcast. It's the McLaughlin group for nerds. Radiovsthemartians.com Thanks Kevin Lovecraft, part of the Wednesday Evening Podcast

All-Stars Actual Play podcast found at misdirectedmark.com Lowell Francis, with an award-winning gaming blog at ageofravens.blogspot.com Thank you Shane Liebling, Dylan Winslow, Dale Norwood, Victor DeSanto, and Bill Anderson. And finally, a big thank you to Richard Haddam for his very generous support. Find him on

Twitter at Richard Haddam. If you want to get a shout out for your podcast, blog, or anything else you do, check out patreon.com slash 200 a day and see if you want to be our newest gumshoe. All right, so we start this episode at a funeral. There's a nice pan into the mourners as the priest is giving the service. We see a bunch of cops in uniform. So we see it's a cop funeral. This whole beginning sequence has no music.

Yeah. There's no background music. There's no score. So it sets a very somber tone right at the beginning rocky uh jim's father is also in attendance at this funeral again this whole beginning sequence is about rocky we don't see jim for a couple scenes the deceased is uh david philip banning he'll be referred to as dave or banning as we go forward and rocky apparently knows his mother he's there to support her in her time of grief and we get a nice kind of sequence of close ups on people that are going to be important people to the plot giving us the visual cue of

like here are the four important people the mother um her name's kate Kate Banning. She is quite the character. Yes. She's played by Edith Atwater, who was in a million TV shows from the 50s onwards. And she has a very, what strikes me as a very theatrical kind of presence. Like, she seems like she came from the world of the stage. Yeah. The way that she speaks is very, I don't know, actorly. The character is very well-possessed, right? Like she owns the room when she's in it,

which I think is part of that stage sort of thing. Like if you don't have a camera up in your face, but you have to attract the whole audience, you know how to stand to hold the whole audience. And she, as we'll see throughout this, she makes for a great headstrong character and she's got she's very well written too i mean i don't want to spend my whole time talking about how much i love the writing here but i love the writing here her dialogue feels more like a

hollywood noir film yeah yeah while the rest of the episode is a little more kind of normal everyday dialogue. That feels like how it is in Rockford, where it's very lived in and everything. Absolutely. Because you've got Rocky being a supportive friend, which we see a lot in the show. And it's one of my favorite features of Rocky is that he's got all these old friends. You could see why they're friends with him. He's a good guy to them. And so he's he's he's a good guy to

them uh and so he's rocky and he's talking like rocky and then she has these sort of like ponderous meditations on existence right like there's this one line i'm sure you wrote it down too i think graves should be a little bit untidy like lives are yeah she she feels of another time yeah she has this golden age hollywood yeah feeling to her which i i don't know how well that translates to people who aren't fans of those films which i am so i liked it i could see how it would stand out as being weird if you're not familiar with that kind of acting and that kind of line delivery she delivers that great line about i think graves ought to be a little untidy like lives are. Again, just seems to come straight out of like Sunset Boulevard or Double Indemnity or like, you know, anything like that.

Anyway, we also as as Rocky is walking with her back to the car to go back to the house. Lieutenant Deal, a good friend and Jim's adversary in the department. Lieutenant Deal with an astonishingly great mustache. I can't recall if he has it in every episode. I don't think so. I don't know, actually. I think it comes and goes. We'll have to do a review of the Deal mustache.

We could put it in the Rockford Files files. He comes up just to offer condolences on behalf of the department. The camera shows us and then Deal points out Sergeant Wilson, who was Dave's partner. Importantly, Wilson keeps his distance. So we have a long, slow take of the car pulling out and going down the street, adding a little gravity, I think, to the whole intro scene. So that's what I'm talking about with some of the directorial choices. Like the beginning of the episode has lots of these longer, slower looking at the screen while things happen. Yeah.

Things that, again, are a little noir-ish to me. We go to the Wilson house. Kate, the mom, and another woman who we saw at the funeral. We don't learn their relationship till later, but she was Dave's fiancee. Are having a conversation about how they're going to have to learn to live without him. Kind of showing that there's some warmth there, like they're on the same wavelength. And Rocky is there as well, still, you know,

giving comfort and accompanying her back to the house. But Mrs. Wilson does not think that Dave's death was an accident. He took care of that car. It was just in the shop recently. The brakes were totally fine. We never hear the details of the accident. This is all we have to know that something happened with his car the brakes didn't work and he ended up in a crash or something like that but in addition to that he'd been acting strange for two weeks before he died and mrs wilson is convinced that someone killed

him so rocky is kind of here as the voice of reason, being like, he was a cop, they're investigating. Right. If there was any chance of anything, they wouldn't let it go. The police look after their own, but she's convinced. She wants to find out the truth, but she can't afford professional help.

And this is where Rocky offers his son, Jimmy, to do it for free. Oh my God. So Rocky is in a lie right now. He's in a web of lies. Rocky spins a web of lies, I would say. Yeah. He wants to be able to help.

And he knows that Jim has the skills to help. And I think Rocky would normally take pride in having Jim help. But he's clearly told her in the past that Jim drives a truck. And I almost forgot about this, but like the early seasons, there's always some sort of tension between Rocky and what Jim does for a living. Mainly that tension is about how dangerous it is for Jim. But there's a little bit of shame there. Aside from the fact that Rocky has great pride in trucks and trucking and

would dearly love for Jim to have fallen followed in his footsteps. I think that there's something else there. I think he, he thinks that he's a little ashamed of what Jim does. And this comes back in this episode actually. But yeah, so he says that, well,

he has this PI thing as a sideline, as he says, when he's not pushing a rig. And Miss Wilson, Kate, says, well, would he do it for free? And he says, of course, he's my son. All I got to do is ask. And we know that he is wrong. We know specifically from the opening montage that he is wrong, which is great. So we go to Rockford's trailer where he is defrosting his theoretically frost proof. He says refrigerator.

He's defrosting the freezer. Yeah. And he's telling Rocky how the warranty just ran out. And that's always the way these things always break just as a warranty runs out. So he thinks he's just going to get a new one. I like this little moment because it both is a very jim rockford's life thing yeah but also rocky asks him how is he going to afford a new refrigerator and he says that well he can he can swing the down payment so as per usual he could use some money what i like about this problem i mean there's the ongoing joke that jim can't get no luck right like there's there's definitely that. But also this is

an absolute understandable, people have this problem. And this is a very human down to life thing to happen. It's not so much that Jim's life is falling apart. It's just that things fall apart. Yeah. It's a relatable issue. Yeah. And you're just, you're going to have to deal with them at some point or another. And we see Jim do that all the time to kind of give you this feeling of treading water that is life. That is the untidiness of life that should be reflected in the graves. It's all coming back. That's good. Well, Rocky gently introduces this concept.

Kate being convinced that her son's death was not an accident. Jim met her once and met him once, but doesn't really consider them friends. While Rocky's like, it would be like you're doing, I forget the quote, but it's like you're doing someone very close to you a favor. Right. Jim's not having it. No, he's like, so she's my client. And Rocky says, no, because she can't pay you. Oh, so you're my client. Well, you're doing something good for someone close to you. Jim does not want anything to do with this,

as I think he clearly sees the destiny before him. I was going to say, this is also like a very relatable thing. If you have a skill or a talent, you know, this is the thing where presumably if you go to med school and you become a doctor, every party is going to have someone say, oh, I've got this pain or I've got this, you know, blah, blah, blah. You know, to some extent, you want to be helpful, but you can't give away your profession for free all the time.

Right. So two things. One, I have a friend who's an oncologist and his thing is whenever anyone asks him for medical advice, he's like, look, that sounds like cancer to me. Because all I do all day long is look at cancer. Every symptom, all I can say is it looks like cancer to me. And that stops people asking. But yeah, number two, this is definitely a, for lack of a better term, a gig economy problem. Rocky's trying to talk Jim into doing it for free. And Jim's like, look, when you were pushing a rig, did you ever do any long hauling for free. And Jim's like, look, when you were

pushing a rig, did you ever do any long hauling for nothing? And Rocky's like, well, that's different. And Jim just looks at him dead in the eyes like, no, it isn't. Because that's the thing, right? Like your work has value, whether you are a PI or a long haul trucker or a writer or an artist or a plumber. Like if you're going to do work, someone should pay you for it. That's how capitalism works. As a side note, I just saw a little interview with a, not an economist, I think he's an anthropologist. But anyways, the point is, he says the more intrinsic value we see in somebody's work, the less we feel they should be rewarded for it,

right? So if you see somebody who is just driving a truck, we're like, oh yeah, well, he's working hard all day or whatever. But if you see someone who is a teacher or an artist or something that we think they get something out of it, then we think that they're greedy. And this has been used by politicians. If you want to def defund a school you don't attack the administration of the school because we look at the administration we don't think there's an intrinsic value there you attack the teachers they don't need to be paid because they are getting so much self-actualization out of yeah the value they're providing to society and this this is, I mean, clearly that's bullshit, but it works.

Like it really works when you want to motivate at least the American public. That's how you do it. And it's horrible. And we're seeing this happen. I don't think as a commentary on that, but I definitely felt that commentary. This conversation resonates strongly with me.

But how it ends up going is that rocky gets frustrated and it says fine i'll i'll hire you i'll be your client and you'll have to do what i say for once once rocky says that he'll hire him that's when rockford's like look i can't take your money right like then we go back to the family relationship. But Rocky is insistent. He will pay Rockford. And Rockford has this great look of resignation on his face as he allows his father to hire him for his rate. $200 a day plus expenses. Yeah, I love that he just knows it and angrily shouts it at him. Going to the next scene, Jim and Rocky driving back

to Kate's house, we get our first music. So this whole, that whole opening sequence, none of that had any music or score, but we start getting the harmonica coming back in. The Rockfords pull up, go into the house, and we get a shot of the two amazing gorillas from the preview montage

watching them from another car. There's the blonde one who looks like he's wearing a rubber mask yeah and there's the one whose face looks like a potato those are our gorillas so the blonde is william watson so go to his imdb when you get a chance folks because yeah this guy's got a face you want to pay. His character's name is Ross, which we hear eventually. But yeah, you'll recognize his face if you've seen him in any of these 60s and 70s TV shows and some westerns and stuff. And the other guy, that's John Quaid is the other one. Oh, he was in Werewolf.

I forgot about that show. He's the one whose face looks like a potato. Yeah, they're both wonderful. Later seasons, I think, up ante in terms of like the plots and stuff like that. But I feel like these first couple seasons really do the great goons. Yeah, they start to get a little more generic towards the end of the run. But man, these two are great. Anyway, so we just see them and then we go into the house. So we know that Rockford and Rocky are being watched. Talking to Kate, Jim plays along

with Rocky's story about, you know, having downtime on his long haul trucking. So he just does this to keep busy. Lots of good hamming it up in the scene with every time a new lie is revealed, you can tell. Yeah, he raises eyebrows, he gives a side eye. It's all good stuff. I'm curious what you think about this. My assumption here is that Rocky didn't warn him about anything and just tried to cover as it happens, because I think Rocky is not an accomplished liar. Yeah. And doesn't know how to deal with this. That's how I read it, that Jim was just rolling with it.

Because she brings up, it's so nice that you followed your father's footsteps and became a trucker like how dave's father wanted him to but he went to the military instead did two stints i guess two tours or something as a marine i think she says and then went to the cops so we get a little bit of backstory about him he's an old rookie he didn't start with the cops till 30 which actually is a little relevant later but she's basically reiterating her her conviction that it wasn't an accident. And she also says, like, oh, it's so it's so nice of you to take this on when I can't pay you. Well, I like to stay busy.

Significant look at Rocky. They go back out to the car and we have just a short conversation. That's kind of the heart of what we're talking about earlier earlier about how Rocky's a little ashamed of what he does. Like, Jim's like, why do you tell people that I'm a trucker? And Rocky's line about it is that, well, people don't really understand the PI business. So it's just easier if I tell them that you're a trucker. Jim asks him, well, do you understand? And we get like a full face shot of rocky just being like no not

really this is something that i've experienced with you know some family members that i'm not in close touch with or anything like what do you do like well i'm a game designer and i'm a publisher and this that and the other thing you can tell when people know what like have some framework for knowing what that entails or when they don't and when they don't it's kind of like i'm basically a graphic designer which isn't really accurate but that's an easier conversation to have yeah dear listener i can attest to this having attended nathan's wedding recently and being part of the table that are referred to by several relatives as so you're the gaming friends it's just how it's how it worked out. Yeah, no, I run into the same thing.

It wasn't I think I've told you this story, but it wasn't until I published what is a role playing game that my parents actually had any clue what it was I did. But yeah, yeah. If you have a job that your parents don't quite understand, they take liberties with what you do and explaining it. Which is totally understandable. And in this scene, I think we kind of see Rockford chiding him a little bit about it. Yeah. Just because you don't understand what I do doesn't mean you need to make up stories about what I do. That's where, like, the shame part seems to come in. Anyway, like you were saying at the beginning, another of the elements that just makes this a very strong character episode.

So Dave was a was a cop. So Jim goes to the police station to talk to Dennis, his friend at the station, Dennis Becker. And he sends his dad, I think, in a little bit of retaliation to take the bus home. Yeah. And he says if he doesn't have the money for it, he'll advance it to him and include it on the expense report. And Rocky doesn't want anything expensed unless he can see it first right i'm really enjoying that they're going forward with this ostensibly a fiction at this point it seems that rocky is treating it far more real than jim is this this expense report and the money right like rocky is like i'm doing this this is happening so i'm treating it

like a serious thing where jim is clearly using it as a way to yeah he's needling him yeah yeah i think it's safe to say that jim does not necessarily expect to get the money out of this so at the end of this little scene we also see the gorillas still in the car still watching them and they take down rockford's license plate number. Backwards, which is weird. Yes, it's just a goof, but it's funny because it's right there in front of you as an audience. We go into the station where Jim is talking to Dennis. Dennis is eating a ham and cheese sandwich

and complaining about it. It's sitting in his stomach and he can't even wash it down because the coffee's so bad. Dennis does not seem to eat very healthily. No. He's super happy to see Jim, though. So, again, production-wise, this is between two episodes that don't have Dennis in them. Yeah.

That have that, the other character, Tom. Oh, right. Yeah. So, who knows if this was a, like, the actors literally hadn't had a chance to do their shtick for a while. Right. Because Dennis is 100 in oh so good on his scenes yeah aside from maybe the farnsworth stratagem this might be my favorite dennis incarnation yeah he just seems so gleeful like he's not so as beaten down as he is in other

episodes yeah but he's still really giving giving it to rockford needling him it's good but yeah so he's saying look if there's anything wrong with his death the whole department would be on it right jim's like look i know that but i need to look into it i'm looking into it for his mother what is it he says that the lapd operates without fear or favor yeah but we spend half of our time in cold sweats and every case file or every crime that comes across but if the victim is a cop you got to be sure that we're going to dig into it right uh so it's a great line dennis is amazed that rocky hired him and does not think he wants to be there when he tries to collect yes on the

bill because he doesn't think he's going to get a cent out of Rocky. Oh, it's so good because he's like, are you saying that Rocky's cheap? Dennis is like, I am absolutely saying that Rocky is cheap. So that seems to be a dead end. And Jim goes to talk to Dave's fiance, who I don't think we ever get her name, but it looks like she works in a flower shop or something like that. Laura Smith. She is credited, but I'm not sure if they ever speak her name. or something like that. Laura Smith.

She's credited, but I'm not sure if they ever speak her name. So she also thinks that her, you know, almost mother-in-law, that Kate, is overreacting. Right. And that there isn't anything wrong, both because she is a little more on the side of the cops would not let it go, like would not say it was an accident if they didn't really think it was an accident.

But she also has a different i guess grieving process than than dave's mother she basically just wants to like bury him and move on right yeah this is my life now i need to move on with my life while his mother is more like i need to know what happened and jim brings her around by pointing out that if the fiancee if laura helped jim get any information to bring back to Kate, the mom, then that would help the mom to move along. And Laura decides to go along with this because she's a decent human being. Right. And as we saw in the first scene, essentially, her and Kate have a good relationship. She wants her to have closure. And I think that this is kind of an important choice

with this because you were talking about earlier about the, you know, it's kind of a straightforward plot. And one of the things that helps that plot being straightforward is the elimination of suspects. If this is a murder mystery, Laura is a suspect by the nature of her relationship to the deceased. Right. And this scene, I think, swiftly puts that to rest for the audience. Don't worry about this. This isn't a red herring. This isn't. And we can point towards where we're actually going here. So even though she wants to just move on, she does, in fact, have some critical information for Rockford. She confirms that Dave was jumpy for a couple of weeks before he died.

And she says that they had a fight a couple days beforehand which is unusual it was because he took a phone call that he tried to keep secret from her which was also unusual uh they didn't have any secrets from each other uh but then there was this phone call he went in the other room to take it which was weird so she went to to listen he sounded upset and frightened and said that he would meet whoever it was at the usual place, which he then very, very thoughtfully detailed apparently. Section C

and D, the right aisle of the Greek theater. This is, okay, let's talk about this, because this I think is a shaky moment in the episode, right? It's a lot of convenient things to remember and have a conversation about. Exactly.

And if we get to the end of this episode, we'll talk about it. Because I think that there's stuff at the end that kind of puts this in a different light. But I think the part where this feels the shakiest to me is that she has all this information and she thinks that Kate's suspicions are bogus yeah and and so getting from like oh it was just an accident we just need to move on to here in a one two beat was a little too swift for me that is sure if i'm going to be critical about any part of this episode and i'm going to be this will be the only part that i'm critical about. It is definitely just narrative convenience. Like, what is the easiest way to get this information to Rockford? Have this conversation?

I think it is countered a little bit by her being so like, I need to move on. I think she was presented in this scene as someone who, as soon as she learned that he was dead, was like okay that door is closed right and doesn't want to revisit it so maybe he is the kind of person that's like i'm going to ignore these things that would trouble someone else but we just don't see enough of her for that to really be a strong character thesis the other bit here and i'm we're just gonna spoilers i feel that the the amount of information she has probably makes sense because she's probably related this to the cops already. So following it, I'm guessing the cops have this information that they interviewed her at one point. She told them this stuff.

And so by the reiteration of it, she probably, she's had to remember it before this scene. So she's not, you know, just trying to recall it before this scene so she's not you know just trying to recall it she's already recalled it it's been recorded somewhere uh because of what we'll learn later about the cops dun dun dun sure sure yeah that's a good point but that's also not telegraph right like that's not really no this is me reading into it well i think we we swiftly move on from here once we have that information to jim rockford going to this greek theater which apparently was an old amphitheater that has since been been torn down but anyway it's a cool location for sure uh going to section cnd and looking around so he finds a bunch of cigarette

butts on the ground implying that people were standing there smoking for a long time and he finds a bullet a cartridge a undischarged bullet in the in the crack of a i wrote down shell casing because i just don't know anything about guns and assumed but we learned in the next scene that it is in fact a full cart yes rockford goes back to his trailer uh rocky is waiting there for him to come back he has eaten rockford's steak Such a gandy move. Really, when you think about it. They have a whole back and forth about how there was no sign on it

and he didn't want it to go bad. And Rockford is like, well, it wasn't going to go bad before I got back for dinner. Next time I'm going to monogram it. And Rocky goes, ha ha. And he has this big look of glee on his face. It's like, ah, we have the same initials.

Waka, waka, waka. They're just kind of hamming it up. And it is, it's great. Yeah, it pays. Of course, Rocky ate Jim's steak while he was waiting. Of course he did. But Rockford carefully empties the cartridge and weighs the powder. Because, as he explains to Rocky, the police use a light load so that the bullets don't go too

far and hit i guess bystanders and and whatnot uh so there's less powder in them than in a typical bullet right just buy at an ammo store i guess i don't know i don't know how guns work obviously or even if this is a true fact uh but yes but this is a very detective-y kind of little moment where he pulls out a scale and he opens this bullet and pours it out and measures it and sure enough there is a light load in that cartridge so you know that that puts a cop there and uh why would a cop be going and meeting people at this out of the way location and yada yada so rocky is like well are you trying to say that dave was crooked that he was on the take?

And Jim, just in a couple sentences, has this great little thesis statement about how he works, which is when you're driving a truck, you know the destination. But what I do, I never know the destination. I just need to find out each thing. He's not forming any conclusions yet, but it could be. Right. And Rocky very clearly does not want that to be the case. Yeah, he's got a great line about i'm not yeah it ain't what i'm paying you to hear but rockford says that he is going to stake out that area that's the only lead he has and rocky gets uh head up about paying him to go

on this stakeout that's not going to have any result it's going to be paying them straight time till the year 2000 and you still won't find anything out and that he'll do it himself rockford however very cleverly never told him where this stakeout location was i do like the distant year 2000 i also like i feel like rocky doesn't understand what 200 a day means. Right. Yeah. He's not paying him by the hour. He already worked this day. But anyway, the money, the back and forth money stuff between them is golden. Like this whole episode throughout.

And there's a nice point at the very end we'll get to. But like, this is just I love all of it. So Rockford stakes it out. And in another nice, like, directorialial choice like there's a lot of time where we see him settled in and waiting and the music is kind of going with him as he's thinking about it and you know it's not all back-to-back action right in this one there's a lot of these kind of slower lead-ins and lead-outs but he sees two men in suits come up to the spot that had the cigarettes he has a little camera and he's taking pictures and someone in a cop uniform

comes up to talk to them. They hand him an envelope and Rockford takes pictures of this whole thing in a really great effect. The camera is showing us what Rockford's seeing and then we see it

through the camera and then he takes a picture and we see the black and white as if the picture was taken. But those are blurry because he's so far away. so we see the clear picture that rockford's seeing and then that immediately goes to the freeze frame black and white fuzzy picture from the camera and it's just a great device that keeps it all moving very fluidly but shows us that sure he's taking these pictures but they're not really gonna be be great. I made a note of that, too. I thought that was, it's such a great way to just tell the audience

that this isn't going to help them without telling the audience, you know? Yeah, it really uses the visual media really well. We go from there to another good moment, which is Rockford talking to Angel in a bar that, as Angel says, has the best chili in town. Watch the episode for this guy they opened the seat on. He has nothing to do with anything. He's just another great face.

You expect him to be one of the gorillas, one of the goons, but he's not. And his reaction to the chili when he gets it is priceless. So Angel's trying to steal silverware. He has a relative's wedding coming up. Waiter comes up to take their order. This waiter is our favorite background, at least one of my favorite character actors, Bruce Tuttle.

He's back. The guy with the mustache. We talked about him in just another Polish wedding. He's in that one. And I think he's in at least one other one that we've talked about. Pastoria Prime Pick., he's in that one. And I think he's in at least one other one that we've talked about. Pastoria Prime Pick. He's been in six episodes.

Anyway, he comes to take their order. Rockford thinks for a moment, goes through a couple things, then just goes like, you know what? Nothing. I actually don't want to order anything from this establishment. While Angel gets a beer and a bowl of chili with lots of onions. Through the rest of this conversation, his food arrives and he crumbles all the oyster crackers onto it until there's a huge mound of them. Then the last scene is him just taking a huge bite of this extremely gross looking chili.

Tells you all you need to know about Angel. Watching this scene, I just finished my lunch and I wanted nothing more than a beer and a bowl of chili with extra onions. There's something about chili and Jim Rockford. We've seen him disgusted by chili before, which is weird because he likes hot things. Right. It's a garbage food. So you'd think he would like it. I feel like it's right in his wheelhouse. This is a nod towards my universal theory of TV detectives and food, which is none of them cross over.

And Columbo is the chili guy. Oh! Columbo eats chili. With beans, without beans. He scavenges from buffets and he eats chili. That is very interesting. Jim Rockford, tacos and hot dogs. Yeah.

No chili. Hmm. Hercule Poirot doesn't eat garbage. No. He only eats very fancy, tiny Belgian foods. I don't know if I've added to your theory or not, but if you've ever seen Foil's War. I have not. Okay, so that's another TV detective worth checking out.

It's a more recent one. Takes place during World War II. His thing is whenever he goes somewhere to interview someone, they offer him a drink and he refuses. His whole thing is refusing drinks and hospitality from people in a very polite, very British way. But like everyone tries to. Would you like some tea? No, thank you. Not going to do it.

Not going to fall for it. You will not poison me. Maybe we'll add it to the canon. So anyway, that's my fan theory about TV detectives and food. Hit us back if you have any additions or thoughts on my CliffsNotes version right there. But anyway, not only does this scene have food, it also has money. Because Rockford offers Angel $50 to ask around about these two cops, about Wilson and Dave Banning. Angel says no chance because he doesn't want to have anything to do with cops.

Alive, dead. Yeah. Straight cops on the take. Doesn't want anything to do with them. But 50 bucks is 50 bucks. After the big bite of gross looking chili, we cut to a montage of Angel and then Rockford asking around on the streets. They're not together.

They've split up. And the beauty of it is how Rockford is just a man of the people. He just gets along with everyone and is personable. There's nothing spoken. You could just see in the body language and how people are talking. And Angel like steals a nudie mag. It's good. It's good.

steals a moot nudie mag it's good it's good the very last shot of the montage is the the blonde gorilla the one who looks like he's wearing a rubber mask coming onto the screen to to look after rockford who just exited this the shot uh so we know that they're still being followed yeah and then the next scene is him calling an old guy his His name's Maury. He's sitting in an armchair. And it's a call from the blonde guy. His name's Ross. That says this guy Rockford has been asking around about Banning and Wilson. What should they do? And Maury says to take him off and hangs up the phone.

So Angel and Rockford are in Rockford's car, giving Angel a ride home from their night of hitting the streets. And Angel says that those two guys, or wilson in particular is into everything uh has a half a dozen scams and some of them are pretty good uh but that angel won't be a witness don't tell anyone i told you kind of stuff he starts telling jimmy that he's fixed up his place real nice and that's when jim sees that they're being followed so we get a nice nighttime car chase where jim tries to lose them through this hilly neighborhood he can't quite lose them so he lets them kind of come alongside on a straightaway from the perspective of jim's seat we look over and we see the gorillas with a gun yeah next to them and that's when he spins the wheel to shoot

up an embankment like in front of a couple other cars up on top of this hill. There's no road. Yeah, yeah. He just goes up. Off-road it. So not only has he off-roaded it in a manner where it would be very difficult to follow, it's also right in front of these other cars with people in them. So the pursuit car breaks off and the goons get out of there before anything can happen. And then we get the dramatic angel get out of there before anything can happen and then we get the dramatic angel gets

out of there so during this chase one of my favorite things about this chase all we know is the chase has begun we don't know anyone has a gun or anything like that and certainly angel doesn't know and he just inches down into his seat like and but but yeah when they get out rockford's looking at the car and he says i wonder what it did to my undercarriage. And Angel's like, wonder what it did to mine. Dear listener, Angel has pooped his pants. I didn't even think about that. I thought that was a weird thing to say.

Watch how he leaves this scene. He waddles out. Oh, it's so good. So good. he leaves this scene. He waddles out. Oh, it's so good. So good. This is the second time we've seen this for 200 a day, where Angel refuses to stay

in the car and just leaves, just runs and leaves Jim in the car. Was the other one the girl in the Bay City Boys Club? Might be. I'm trying to remember. There's the one where they're supposed to leave the hotel together, and Angel stays behind and lets Jim go across the parking lot to get in the car.

I think that's a hotel of fear. Yeah. But yeah, he waddles out of there angrily. And that's our Angel for this episode. So good though. Yeah. It's kind of funny because in a way he's unnecessary. Right.

It's not that he knows someone in particular. And like the montage is even both of them. It's not just Angel finding out this information. but he just adds so much Rockfordness. Yeah. The fact that that character is there and he gets to have the banter with Jim and we see him doing Angel things makes it more fun to watch than if it was just Jim doing all that stuff by himself. Yeah, absolutely. All right. Rockford and Rocky are in Jim's trailer.

Rockford's making an omelet for Rocky. He keeps asking him if he wants onions, but Rocky seems to be pretty upset because he's looking through these blurry photos. Rockford is explaining that, um, he saw Wilson take that bribe. And between that and all the street talk,

he and angel picked up on, uh, it's a circumstantial case that wilson's on the take yeah and it seems pretty reasonable to assume then that dave was two and that's probably why he was killed rocky doesn't like hearing that yeah and they get to this interesting question which i think is the most narratively interesting question in the episode which is if jim takes what he knows to the cops it's going to hope and open a can of worms because no one wants to hear about a dirty cop is that what kate wants yeah it's not about what's the right thing to do or what's the legal thing to do the question is rocky you're doing this for kate what do you want and what does she want and it

rests on rocky's shoulders because rocky is the one who hired jim exactly like it's not even like a weird moral thing this is within the context of jim's professionalism he's got hired by someone to do a job that someone is his boss it just happens to be his dad yeah and rocky hymns and haws but he comes down on the side of he wants he says he wants the truth so rockford kind of pushes again is this what kate wants right do you want to do this to kate basically because we can either just end it now just bury it or we take it to her yeah and uh rocky ends up deciding with a sigh that they should tell kate what jim has found out rockford goes ahead and makes his omelet with no onions yeah

so yeah they go to to talk to k. This is where Rockford actually has the line about opening a big can of worms, etc. Kate says that she does want to go to the police. She wants Rockford to continue. She has a great statement of kind of encapsulating her character and her worldview. Because Rocky's kind of like, are you sure that's what you want and stuff?

Like, well, you both want to protect me because you're worried about dave's memory right but she wants to know what happened yeah she's like i love dave and i'll love him no matter what so that's not in question here she doesn't care what people how they remember him because what matters is whether or not she loved him and after that the next most important thing is the truth his memory will take care of itself. She's a great character. So Rockford takes it to Dennis, but Dennis bumps him straight to Lieutenant Deal. Because as he says, we live in a structured society and Deal is Wilson's superior.

So Jim is taking his photos and what he's learned on the street about Wilson to the police. And we have just a great Rockford versus Diehl argument. Watch the episode. This is a good scene. Make sure you're paying attention. As we might expect from how the photos were already telegraphed to us visually, Diehl shoots down Rockford's, quote, attempt at photography. And he points that out that since Rockford took the bullet apart

to figure out if it was a light load, he's tampered with the evidence. So that's not admissible. Rockford has a great line where he says he deals with hostile better than condescending. Yeah. Deal's like, all right, well, let's get hostile. Rockford's point is he's a witness. Not only does he have the picture, he saw Wilson take that bribe and he knows that Dave went to that place. So he basically wants Deal to take it to Internal Affairs. Deal is not only offended that Rockford would besmirch the memory of an officer in this way, he also doesn't like how Rockford's a two-bit detective who has something out for his department.

They've investigated it thoroughly, and if they say that there's nothing wrong, then there's nothing wrong. And then he ends with saying that he's going to stop Rockford if rockford keeps poking around he's going to stop him cold however he can which i like because unlike many of deal and like chapman and other like cop authorities where they threaten rockford with something specific like i'm going to throw you in jail for obstruction of justice right and so rockford can come back with like well you can't actually do that because i know the law just as well as you. This is a vague threat that is also within the bounds.

Like, I'll stop you however I can figure out how to stop you. I will find a way. And that's more threatening. Doesn't he even say like, he says, I'll take this to roll call. Yeah, like I'll tell all of the cops that you're trying to mess with us. It's a huge threat. It's not Rockford, stop messing around with this. It's Rockford, I will ruin you if you mess around with this.

Rockford stalks out, goes back to meet up with Rocky at the car, is waiting outside. And then two cops come over to talk to Rockford and basically do the retail version of Deal's Threat. We heard about your story or whatever. Rockford's like, that's funny. I haven't been around here very long. But they threaten to jerk his ticket if he doesn't drop it. They'll be able to cash him for something.

Yeah. No matter what. And when they do, they're going to pull his license, right? Which again, is a threat that can be carried out. I feel like this moment brings it home when they tell him to drive carefully. Yeah. You are always breaking a law at any given moment. So the cops always have an excuse to do something about it.

That's a problem that we as a nation are really facing right now. But I think it's really chilling the way they brought that home with just saying, be very careful how you drive home. This, of course, puts up Jim's back. Yeah. As we know, Jim Rockford does not like being leaned on and does not like being pushed off of a case. And he makes this explicit when Rocky asks him,

you know, well, you're not going to forget about it, are you? You're damned right. I'm not going to forget about it. It's so fun that this happens so late in the episode too, right? Yeah. This is when it transitions from being a favor and his professionalism to him being personally invested because he's not going to let these cops push him off of this thing that he knows is happening. At this point, did you think that the cops were being weirdly aggressive about it? Or did you

feel like this was still within the bounds of what you would expect from you know the cops who don't like rockford i thought this was within the bounds okay so i have obviously seen this episode before but it was years ago when i saw it so i couldn't remember how it all went down and i did didn't it did not occur to me that they're out of bounds until the episode was over at which point i thought oh this is the episode trying to tell us there's something else going on here. And I guess maybe in the back of my mind, I thought perhaps these two that weren't Deal were dirty as well. And that was their thing. That's kind of what I thought. Yeah. When we get to the end, we should talk about the cops. I think this is the moment where I was like, okay, so that's the second level of this plot,

right? Like maybe these guys are dirty or there's some kind of cover-up yeah so the next scene uh is rockford in his in a rental car uh because his car's in the shop because it's something did happen to the undercarriage obviously but uh rockford in a rental car at night following who i assumed to be wilson and we find out pretty soon is sergeant wilson who's his cop uniform, but driving like a civilian car, pulls over in the dark at some kind of unoccupied park area. Rockford watches with binoculars

as another car pulls up. He gets into the back. He gets an envelope from two guys in suits and then he goes back to his car and Rockford follows the two guys in suits in their car. He follows them, which I think is back to the police station. Yeah, yeah. There's a sign there. The two guys in suits in their car. He follows them, which I think is back to the police station. Yeah, yeah.

There's a sign there. The two guys go into a door with a door sign that says, Detectives Only. There's a beat while Rockford is processing this information. And then our two gorillas surprise him and just get into the car on either side. Open the unlocked doors and just slide in. They have a little bit of banter. Rockford says, oh, I was just thinking about taking a vacation.

And the potato-faced gorilla who is holding a gun says, oh, I should have thought about that earlier. I don't know what it is. There's something magical about when clearly somebody intends Rockford harm and the interaction just seems so small talky. So now we know something weird's going on, right? Like these two guys apparently are detectives and they just gave Wilson money. Our gorillas take Rockford to some barn somewhere and they get out of the car and Maury, the guy who said to drop him off earlier in the episode is there. He tells one of the guys to keep an eye out for Wilson and the potato face goon hustles Rockford off. Rockford tries to be like, Maury, are you in charge here? Let's talk. And he says what I think is kind of an interesting line. You want to keep

quiet or do you want some help? Yeah, it's a good threat. So I didn't really remember how this episode resolved. And for a second I was like, oh, wait, are these guys cop? Right. Yeah. Like, is that the reveal that like Maury and these guys are cops? You want to keep quiet? We want some help. Like, we're going to give you help. Yeah. Like, that's kind of how I read it in the moment.

I think it's just how my brain interpreted it. I don't think there's... My thing was like... We want some help to keep quiet with my gun. It felt like a dad threat, if that makes any sense. Like, you want to quiet down back there? Do I have to come down and quiet quiet down back there do you do i have to come down and quiet you down or do i have to come out yeah exactly spoiler alert on this uh

they are not no uh wilson does arrive in a police cruiser as opposed to the civilian car he was in earlier and he asks you guys have the hash for me and they do they in fact have a four pound brick it's the title of the episode wilson has the envelope of cash i forget if they specify how much it is mori goes to take it and wilson says what you're not going to count it and they have this weird standoff yeah but once he takes the four pound brick then the blonde gorilla jumps him grabs for the inside of his coat and sure enough he's wearing a wire so that little weird standoff was like i need you to say how much money it was for my recording equipment i guess so wilson's wearing a wire these goons figured it out and have now caught him with it and then we cut to deal

waiting in a car and another cop saying that the line went dead and deal ordering the the rest of them in mori wants to keep rockford and wilson as hostages so they grab them and uh kind of uh shove them into the car while everyone's kind of running around trying to figure out where the cops are going to come from rockford and wilson have a little bit of conversation and wilson says that i forget the term he uses but he's like it's hard to be like on the take i didn't't know that about Dave until after it happened. And he seems genuinely bummed out. The cops surround the barn. They head out the back and managed to break through the cop cordon or whatever.

But then in the pursuit, they get pushed down an embankment. And once the car kind of stalls in some like, it was like a drainage ditch. The car hits it and stalls. kind of stalls in some like it's like a drainage ditch the car hits it and stalls wilson and rockford are able to jump the guys with the guns and get control of them while all the cop cars swarm in from every side and uh our bad guys are brought to justice yay yeah so good guys win and we go back to rockford's trailer to get the the button on our episode Rockford Rocky Dennis and Kate are all hanging out sharing some some laughs so Dennis explains I think for everyone for the viewer as well as for Kate that uh Wilson had been on the pad right yeah for a while but that Dave after he

became Wilson's partner discovered that he was he was crooked and reported it to Internal Affairs. So then Internal Affairs had him go undercover to start taking bribes and stuff as well. And this moment is a good moment because an early theory that Rocky had thrown out to protect Dave's memory was that Dave was undercover. So when Dennis mentions undercover, Rocky's like, see, was that Dave was undercover. So when Dennis mentions undercover, Rocky's like, see, I can do your job. Maury found out that he was going to snitch.

And so Maury and those gorillas are the ones who murdered him. Wilson didn't know about it until after. And so once Dave died, then Internal Affairs basically flipped Wilson to being an informant with the same goons that he'd been, you know, taking bribes from. And that's the story. So let's talk about the cops here. My question for you is Dennis. Does Dennis know all along?

Rockford says that, you know, you really gave me a good line back there or something like that. And Dennis says that internal affairs have thrown a blanket over everything right so i think the implication is that dennis either knew that there was something knew that there was some kind of operation or maybe knew the details but once rockford started sniffing around that made them everyone nervous so they locked it down and that's why he didn't say anything and why deal was so aggressive about trying to get him off his back. Because, because my question in my mind was, did Dennis know from when we first see Dennis,

there's something about Rockford saying that Dennis gave him kind of the run around, whatever sounded like that might've been something that happened after the arrests. I thought that was referring to, uh, when Dennis just bounced him directly to deal, which is, I guess the second time that he runs into Dennis, right? Yeah. I thought that was referring to when Dennis just bounced him directly to deal, which is, I guess, the second time that he runs into Dennis, right? Yeah. Because in that he's

kind of like, look, it's out of my hands. You have to talk to deal. He doesn't give any any opening for Rockford to try and get anything out of him. Yeah. Might be reading into that a little bit. But everyone keeps saying if there really was a problem, wouldn't we, as cops, have investigated more thoroughly? Like, that party line feels like an attempt to just shake off civilian attempts to investigate from the get-go. I don't think there's any text either way about it, but I can see a situation where Internal Affairs did the investigation. Right. And they already knew, you know, so there's a smaller cadre within the police that's like, we investigated and it was an accident. So the rest of the police aren't

going to keep poking at it. There's that, or there's the, this is an active thing. We can't let the civilian authorities know about it because it's going to get back to the people we're trying to sting. Those are both plausible. I don't know if there's really text for either. I just think that's an interesting thing to keep in mind if you, for some reason, have listened to us before you've seen the episode, or if you ever go back to watch the episode to just see how the cops are reacting to things

and to see if there's a moment when people know, right? Because there definitely is a moment. When Rockford talks to Deal the first time, Deal knows. Deal's definitely shoving him off as hard as he can because it's not that he hates rockford he hates rockford but he doesn't want to ruin what they got going and so i guess the implication with that is also that those two cops who came to see him so soon after he went to see deal they couldn't have heard from deal right it was too quick there was already this word out that

rockford was poking around next time he he shows up, go scare him off. Something like that. In one way, it doesn't really matter because the outcome of the story is kind of the same either way. In another way, it's kind of part of why this one feels so straightforward. It's just kind of fact, fact, fact, backfill to explain a couple of the facts. That's the story. All right.

But let's get to the most important part of this episode. Which is how they handle Rockford's bill. Oh, yes. First of all, the scene opens with Rockford and Rocky arguing over expenses. Rocky's like, no, you should put all these things, like you should put the car repair and the car rental on my bill. Rockford's like, no, I'm not going to do that. I'm the one who knows what should be expensed.

And also, I know you're not going to pay for this anyway. Yeah, it's the rabbit season, duck season gag. And it's so good. And then Rocky and Kate argue about the bill because Kate's like, you did this for me and I pay my debts. Give me the bill. And Rocky's like, no, I hired him.

I'll pay him. Give me the bill. And so Dennis gets to be the voice of reason and come and be like, hey, I have a great idea. Why don't you split the bill? be the voice of reason and come and be like, hey, I have a great idea. Why don't you split the bill? Ever the voice of reason. Everyone's like, oh, what a good idea. So fine.

They're going to split the bill. And then apparently Rocky and Kate are going to go get dinner. They leave. Dennis and Jim have some banter. And then we hear in sequence each of them making an excuse to come back into the trailer and tell Rockford why they can't actually pay him right now. Kate is a little short on cash. It's going to take her a little while.

Jim says perfectly. Okay. That's fine. We even get a moment with Dennis where, you know, Dennis is like, ha ha. And Jim is like,

well, I knew she wasn't good. That wasn't in question here. And then Rocky comes in and he, he spent a little more on that fishing trip than he thought. So he should go ahead and just put that bill into accounts receivable. And then he leaves. Rockford's holding the bill. And we just see him slowly crumple it up in his hand, throw it in the wastebasket.

And then Jim and Dennis laugh and laugh. It was disturbing to see dennis laugh by the way well it's paying out on earlier was like i need to be there to see you try to get the money out of out of rocky and i thought for a moment that they were going to freeze frame on dennis laughing instead of jim but we got jim at the end and that's the end of the four pound brick a very straightforward story story with wonderful character interactions. I definitely would recommend this episode and I would recommend it. I would say watch some Rockford, then watch this episode so that you know those characters and can

just enjoy those characters. They just seem like they're having a good time in this episode and it's it's fun to watch i'd say this is a good blend of our our rockford genres um it is both a rockford is hired rockford gets a case and also a rockford's friend is in trouble kind of like a 50 50 the elements of both are present in a way that don't really interfere with each other and then pays out with the character moments of him not actually getting paid and also his friends aren't really in trouble in the same way like no one's under threat this is all about finding out what happened to the the son so in a way this one also has very low stakes it's not like super comedic it's not like a real laugh out loud episode but it is kind of a it's an easy watch it's late season one, but well-rounded season one episode.

Agreed. So I was about to ask, how did you feel your expectations based on the writing credit? Right. How are those fulfilled or not? But I think we're going to go ahead and talk about that in depth in the second half. Sounds good to me. So do you have anything else about the four pound brick? Uh, no, except that I wonder if the title is about the hash or about Angel's undercarriage.

That answer we may never know. But we'll be back after the break to talk more about Lee Brackett and all of the many genre influences, perhaps on the Rockford Files in general, if not this episode in particular. Excellent. While we have you here, there's three ways you can support us. First, rate and review on iTunes or whatever service you use for podcasts. Second, you can support us directly for as little as $1 an episode at patreon.com slash 200 a day. If you want to help us shape the direction of 200 a day, the Patreon is the best place to go. And finally, both of us have other projects going on pretty much all the time.

Epi, what are you excited about right now? I'm excited about swords and sorcery. The type of swords and sorcery you find at worldswithoutmaster.com. And my new project, codename Lincoln Green, Robin Hood role-playing game. You can find all you need to know about that at digathousandholes.com. I'm excited about your stuff as well. Oh, that's so nice. As always, you can check out my catalog of fiction and role-playing games at ndpdesign.com,

including the World Wide Wrestling role-playing game. If you want to see my newest stuff, check out the playtest page. That's where I have free downloads of all my fun new projects. Thanks yet again for listening. As always, we deeply appreciate your support. And with that, back to the show. Welcome back to 200 a Day. This is the second part of our episode where we discuss some of the lessons that we may have learned watching this show and how we may apply that to our own

fiction. But special episode, this one's going to be about Lee Brackett. We'll get into the lessons in a little bit, but let's talk about Lee Brackett here. Yeah, so we touched on some of her writing credits for films and stuff, but I was not aware of this until you brought it up when we were talking about doing this episode. But she also is a planet and sorcery or sword and planet sub sub-genre uh author right so she is uh like fairly pulpy genre fiction author and uh so you'd read some of her material before seeing like oh she wrote this for the rocker like you recognize the name on site yes so uh the the material that i'm most familiar with of hers is her second Eric John Stark series. These stories are about a man who was raised on some alien planet by some, you know, aliens that have to deal with a much harsher world than we do. So he's got finely honed instincts. And originally these stories showed up

in the 40s and that alien planet was Mercury and he was on mars and venus and you know all over our solar system in the sort of sci-fi of the 40s kind of thing uh and then later in the 70s she did a series of novels and these are the ones i'm most familiar with i don't know if these are like in in today's parlance a reboot of the eric john stark stories or if because in the pulps you just wrote and you just sold what you could sell so this sort of modern conception of continuity uh i feel like is a more well i just already said it was a modern conception like i feel like the desire for continuity and to make sure everything fits in well with the past is these two series don't necessarily have real connection between them other than they're about

the same character and they're written by the same person right yes the the later series the skathe trilogy or the it starts with the ginger star and it's about a planet its star is dying the the whole planet's got some problems with i don't want to go too much into it because i it's not what this whole thing is about but the main thing is that this planet is filled with all these interesting cultures that want nothing to do with the rest of the universe but their star is dying and they're going to need to get off the planet so a friend of eric john stark he works for the interstellar federation or whatever they are goes to the planet to say, hey, we can help you out and gets kidnapped. And so in comes our hero, the man with finely honed instincts that's, you know, very strong and a very pulpy hero. And I ate up these books.

I just love them because they technically they're alien worlds, but like spaceships don't show up until the third book there's no ray guns people have sorcerous powers i think he runs around with a sword most of the time it's very like sword and sorcery just to put it into touch points of mind because i'm not familiar with the series like so it's more john carter of mars less conan yes but a lot of conan too so here's the thing that I have to say about this, and this is, I'm sort of painting all this stuff with extraordinarily wide brushstrokes here, but a lot of the pulp authors wrote in whatever genre they could get paid to publish in, right? And so you will see the same style of story. And we've talked a little bit about this in a previous episode.

I don't remember. Yeah, in Pastoria Prime Pick, we talked about how Westerns and samurai films kind of have this. Yeah. There's a genre of them that kind of has a similar antecedent kind of story. And even though the trappings are different the the core story is pretty similar and that episode kind of followed the same model and so this one i feel like i don't want to say like it follows the same model or anything like that but there's definitely more so the rockford moment that we all know and love where rockford stops saying no and starts saying

you can't stop me feels definitely of that genre i'm just wandering through i have incredible powers or i'm very skilled or in the case of rockford i'm just a really good detective who just can't keep his life together if you keep bugging me eventually i'm going to turn my eyes on you and that is not going to be something that you want it's the kind of reactive protagonist right where it's like yeah if this story wasn't happening, I would just pass on through. But because someone comes and pushes me, I push back. That's how I get into the story. Yeah. So there's a lot of other things that come out of these sorts of genres that obviously Rockford is a commentary on detective fiction that has come before him. and it's probably not a coincidence

that lee bracket has wrote screenplays for raymond chandler novels who are we going to look to to write for a rockford files episode we got this brand new series like this is the end of the first season this isn't like they've created a name for themselves yet we want some somebody hey there's lee bracket here i'm assuming this is how this went i am definitely inventing fiction yeah we don't really have like the production history uh under our belts to know how this all went but one thing that some of our listeners who are more keyed into how these things actually work than we are have told us for some of the episodes we've done uh i'm thinking particularly here of just by accident which uh is back in the

archives and was is not a great episode and one of the theories about that from from a listener was that it was probably a air quotes detective script that was being shopped around and was going to be molded to whatever show picked it up so that's why there are no other fun rockford characters in it like there's no room for them because it's kind of a generic solo detective oriented story and doesn't fit the tone of the rockford files as well as you know scripts that were written from the ground up for production and i buy that argument i don't know if that's true but i think that happens right like scripts get shopped around and then they get turned into their final form for whoever picks them up.

I've seen that happen with horror films like the Hellraiser series. Just putting Hellraiser on it will sell it. So we've got this other horror film. Let's just say that Pinhead's involved and we'll go from there. And what I think is interesting about that idea with this one is that this story was so stripped down that yeah if it came into cannell probably or meta rosenberg whoever if it came into the producer's hands as like here's a detective story and they look at it they're like okay like everyone's available that day right we can put all the characters in like angel as i said in the first part like angel

doesn't need to be in it for any plot reasons we just like seeing angel dennis is a cop it's about the cops so that makes sense so it's really just the rocky gym relationship that pulls them in together but the actual plot is about starts with kate so you just need someone to have a relationship with kate to get that story started and k Kate feels to me like that's a Lee Brackett character. Like you were talking about before, this is the part where we can maybe examine that a little bit and talk about that. So one of my loves, one of the reasons why I love the Pulps is because they do borrow from each other so often, sometimes blatantly, where, you know, I've talked about it before, where you like turn the corner and there's a gunslinger in the middle of Hyboria or whatever.

But also by taking this plot and moving it over here. But this character of Kate who, except for in this last scene that we see in the show where it's a wonderful sort of comedic thing going on with her and Rocky and Jim and Dennis. She feels like she's living out a different genre than they are. And it's good. I like it. There's something delicious about that. And I think that there may be something that we can kind of tease out of that as something to use. Yeah.

So one of the things that Lee Brack i guess infamously was write the original empire strikes back script i've read part of that script i loved it i'm not even going to compare to the to the actual like what she wrote was very true to the inspirations for star wars uh if it's not true to star wars which it couldn't be but and there's a lot of things from her script that ends up in the movie that you now are iconically star. And there's a lot of things from her script that ends up in the movie that now are iconically Star Wars. But there's a bit where Luke lands on Bespin, or Crashlands there,

or something, and has to learn how to fly on the backs of these flying critters so he can get up. Like, oh, right? So beautiful. And, like I said, Vader and his castle and all this. So, the point is, what's happening there is that she's throwing sword and sorcery genre at sci-fi. And it's sticking in ways that really appeal to me.

Just like in her books, they're on alien planets, but the stories are very sword and sorcery. But what those are, are sort of the aesthetic tropes. And there are other tropes like we see here with Kate, this more of a dramatic trope. So like you're saying with putting some sword and sorcery into sci-fi, when you look at her screenplay credits, that's like two other peanut butter chocolate genres, right? Like you have Westerns and you have noir films. Yeah. westerns and you have noir films yeah if you want to learn more about the relationships in american cinema between westerns and noir uh i'm sure there is a cinema studies class near you this is not a groundbreaking theory or anything yeah but there's a lot in common there are a lot of of tropes that

carry through your lone protagonist you know your women of ill repute the the twisted motivations of you know how you get into and then out of repute, the twisted motivations of, you know, how you get into and then out of these situations and all that kind of stuff, both of which feed directly into the Rockford files. The PI idea kind of grows out of a lot of the noir films. The people who are in Rockford are growing out of Maverick. Yeah.

There's just a lot of arrows all kind of pointing in towards the same thing. The thing that is exciting, the thing that's like, oh, why is this so interesting to talk about to me from this, is the idea of saying you don't need to stick a genre necessarily. You don't need to pick one thing and be like, this is a noir, this is a western, this is a sci-fi, whatever. You can pick and choose your elements out of adjacent things and then that's where things start to get their their own character out of their own essence out of the rockford files

is the rockford files because of the combination of influences not because it's just the next evolution of the pi absolutely yeah so i think that this kind of nexus of like lee bracket is a great place to talk about this because because her work seems to contain all of these different influences and have great outcomes. El Dorado is a great Western. It's not flawless. It's certainly critiquable. But like The Big Sleep is a great noir. You know, like these are good touch points for those genres.

But she wasn't just doing those genres. good touch points for those genres, but she wasn't just doing those genres. That's a lesson that I take to heart of like not having to stay in a genre just because it's something you like or something you do well in, like using that as a launching point to be like, how do I take what I'm good at and bring it into another context and make something new that way? Just as like an executable exercise, right? Like something that you can go and do now. If you look at Kate here, and if you think, okay, we've got a Rockford Files episode where Rockford just has fun with family and friends. It's kind of how I characterize this. And then you say, from Kate's point of view, this is a noir. Her son has died. The cops won't investigate. If we followed her around,

in fact, even when she's on screen, there's no soundtrack for the beginning part of it, right? Like it's... That very stripped down kind of ominous feel. Yeah. And if you look at like, say, the original Star Wars movie, A New Hope, we've got a science fiction action film here. But from Obi-Wan Kenobi and Darth Vader's point of view, they're wizards. They're in a sword and sorcery film. That can be very fruitful, right?

To just say, I'm going to write a science fiction story or I'm going to write a detective story. But this one character, it's not that this character has wizard powers, although technically speaking, they do in Star Wars. But if I wrote it from this character's point of view, which I'm not, this would be this style of genre. So let's let that character live in it and see how that flavors everything and i think that that would is kind of a neat exercise and there are some other episodes that do this with their characters

and hopefully we'll do some of them soon but one that comes to mind is from season four it's called the mayor's committee from dear lick falls and this is the one where these midwestern businessmen come to la and hire rockford to do a thing but it's kind of a cover because what they really want is they want a hitman there's a young woman who's in la that they want to they want to kill and a lot of the episode is from their perspective and their various opinions on what they're doing but they behave like they are in a crime thriller. Right. It's not even really noir, though it's a little noir-ish, but they behave like they've seen people behave on TV

when they're doing this kind of thing. And a lot of it is Rockford rolling his eyes and being like, did you really just say that? People don't actually behave this way in real life. So they're in one genre, right? And he's in his own um and their clash is what creates the drama yeah and that's an interesting technique because i think you you want it to be something where the things blend right like you don't want two things that are

just going to crash into each other and make the reader go like what am i even reading right right you want to find the interesting parts where that blends too right in the episode we just saw kate grounds everything right they come to some points where they're like how do we go forward with this information and she comes out with this very well thought out stark morality about what's going on like i love my son no matter what my son was up to. We just need to know the truth. Yeah, that's an element from that kind of character that works in the Rockford Files. Exactly. Yeah. And it's fun because it pushes it forward in a way that like, if it was another type of character, if it was a more Rockford Files-y character, they may back down or refuse

to believe something bad of their son. I think this episode does a really good job of being an assemblage of parts that all work well together. I mean, a lot of the Rockford Files episodes that we really love have this like cohesiveness to them where they everything leads to another thing and there's callbacks and that kind of stuff. This episode does that on the script level. But it's also easily separable in a

way that others aren't and i think it's you know testament to all the elements the direction the actors and the script yeah that they actually work and they don't just feel like they're just sitting next to each other and i'm thinking here of both what we've already kind of said about how you can see the rockford characters just kind of added into this script. But also there's an element that at the end of it, I was thinking, and let me know if you agree, that this is one of the few Rockford Files episodes where if Jim didn't get involved, the story would have happened the same way. Right. Yeah. You wouldn't have had closure for Kate. And that's what we care about because we care about these characters but in terms of the undercover operation the crooked cop turning and becoming a plant and

then busting the crooks Rockford did not need to be involved for any of that to go down the way it did yeah he may have even put it in danger more specifically if Rocky didn't get involved yeah and I think that that's one of the fun bits is thinking of rocky as starting this episode in a noir film and then being like my jimmy can take care of it yeah um i think you're right and you're not implying this but i just for the record it doesn't detract from the story at all like it's perfectly fine what i wanted to pull out from that was was an idea of using this straightforward story as the chassis right it's the train that yeah of your story yeah like there's nothing wrong with saying

this is the story that is being told but then how do you turn it into your own thing by going to other genres bringing in the characters that you feel very strongly about and this is good for games right where you can take this basic idea and be like here's the story that's going to happen here are these characters that are opposed to each other here's the lead-in for our characters someone needs to know this woman you know have a positive relationship with her her plight is constructed to bring in rockford right her being suspicious about her son's death is something that rockford can come into right that's what he can what he can do you know and then they're off to the races and all of the side characters that are part of the death is something that Rockford can come into. Right. That's what he can do. You know, and then they're off to the races.

And all of the side characters that are part of the plot, the cops and Maury and the bad guys, they're all doing stuff in the background while Rockford's doing his thing. So there's always a point for him to maybe intercept or maybe bounce off of or maybe get snowed by. They're not just sitting there waiting for rockford to show up right yeah he doesn't bust it wide open which is right like what would normally happen with a show where the cops are like stop investigating i i've seen that done a little poorly and i'm that's a thing that's worth thinking about like how is it done well

and how is it done poorly i think one of the reasons why it works here is because we do have kate's desire to see the truth as the the main thrust like it's not whether or not somebody is brought to justice the the stakes of this story are will kate find out the truth yeah her son is already dead yeah no one's under physical threat until like Rockford is abducted at the end. So what's in play is the truth, specifically whether or not Kate will ever find out the truth, because the cops may know the truth from the beginning of the story or very early on. But the story is not from their perspective, right? Like this would be a different story if it was from their perspective. story if it was from their perspective that's another genre right where it's like uh a cop drama right where you're trying to keep keep people guessing about who knows what until you

can make the big the big sting yeah no absolutely choosing the point of view of the story here is important and not necessarily the point of view character because it's clearly rockford for most of this but it's what is your story aimed at you You know, not the end point, but the sort of central question that you're going to try and resolve by the end. Particularly if you're writing something of genre, like this kind of genre. Yeah, because other episodes play with that question a little bit more. Is Jim going to be able to get Dennis off the hook, right? In the Farnsworth strategy. Dennis off the hook, right? And the Farnsworth stratagem. Is Beth going to realize what Dave is really after in Portrait of Elizabeth? Or what is Beth going to do once she realizes,

right? That's kind of a core question there. The dramatic question is not necessarily about, are they going to find the murderer? Are they going to find the money? It's more about which character is going to have what outcome or what choice is which character going to make. How far down can Angel drag Rockford? So I had one other bit that we can kind of learn from here. I'm ready to learn. This has to do with Rocky and Kate and Rockford. And this is about how we use pressures. One of our favorite things. Yes. And this plays out in real life all the time too. And it's something that we kind of all know about. You have someone who's very close to you, maybe they're a spouse or a sibling or a parent. And because you're close,

that person treats somebody further away from them better than they treat you because they have come to rely on you in the same way you've come to rely on them and then they think oh this person needs someone that they can rely on and I can rely on this other person so let's just pass it down the line this episode does a good job of using that as this motivation it It's not that Rocky's in trouble. It's that Rocky has this assumption that his Jimmy is going to help him out no matter what. So he goes out on a limb for Kate in a way that Jim just wouldn't. Yeah. He doesn't know her. Yeah. And I think that that's a neat pressure to apply there instead of having it come directly because it could have. She could

have been an old friend of Rocky's that Jim knew. right and she comes to jim because she knows he's a pi exactly so instead of having the connection directly to jim the connection is to somebody who can expect that from jim but it would be an imposition to do so and that's great i think a nice lesson to take from that for playing games is if i'm playing jim and i have rocky as this you know maybe a character i came up with or someone else came up with they're like okay that's my dad being open to treating your relationship with them like how you would act with a family member into that i just see situations in games sometimes where it's like oh well this character is asking me to do a thing. They're my character's dad.

But like, I don't want to do that thing. So I'm like, no, dad, I'm not going to do that. And sometimes that doesn't really ring as true to how those dynamics can work. I guess I would just say embrace the dynamic that's going to get you sucked into things because it has a lot of resonance with how people work and makes for yeah more more ways to get involved with the story and it gives you more hooks within that story like okay so you you've gotten someone in but once you've got someone in there's another moving object to make it interesting right it's not just jim and kate

it's jim rocky right and also rocky trying to figure out his relationship with jim right it's not just jim and kate it's jim rocky right and also rocky trying to figure out his relationship with jim when it's mediated by this relate by the business relationship it's just as interesting as watching jim have to figure out right what he can expect from his dad because we could have fairly said that this episode it wasn't about finding the truth for kate but the episode was about defining Jim's career, Jim's job for Rocky. So that's something I didn't think about. But it is there in a very skillful way. Where it's set up with Dave and out of the line about Rocky's like, do you understand what I do?

And he's like, no. But then once he hires Jim and he wants to be there every step of the way because he's cheap. But also it's illustrating to him what jim does he sees the futility of going to the cops he sees the bills he sees what happens to the car like it all kind of plays out and he understands a little bit more about what what's involved if it's rocky thinking oh jim's job is easy or jim's you know like it's just something he could just do for me. By the end of it, he doesn't think that. He literally has a bill of goods that tells you how expensive it was for Jim to do it. But he also has seen Jim go through these trials and tribulations. But then that bill goes straight into the garbage. Well, it's accounts receivable.

That is yet another fun thing about this episode. Thanks for bringing us there. That's a good one that I missed. I think I'm all out of things to say about the four-pound brick. What about you? There's something I figured out halfway through the episode that I was trying to find an elegant way to say, and I don't have it. But we were talking about the gig economy. We were talking about how people will say, oh, you're just going to do that for free.

Or, you know, you can do that for free, whatever. And it made me appreciate our patrons. And so I just want to say a big thank you for not being Rocky. For not assuming. Wait, maybe we should just edit that out. Because that sounds like I'm saying all the other people who aren't our patrons are Rockies. But we love Rocky. We do love Rocky.

We understand. We understand. We understand. Hell, we even love angels. Well, I will agree with you for sure on this point that our patrons are great. Yeah. And you can become one of them at patreon.com slash 200 a day. All right.

Well, I think with all that said, we have earned our 200 for today. We'll go directly into accounts receivable. So I guess that just about does it for us but we will be back to talk about another episode of the rockford files