Two Hundred A Day - Episode 26: The Dark and Bloody Ground

Episode Date: January 28, 2018

Nathan and Eppy are joined by special guest Emily Care Boss to talk about S1E2 The Dark and Bloody Ground. Featuring the debut of Beth Davenport and excellent action sequences from director Michael Schultz, we have a lot to gush about beyond the slightly-too-convoluted mystery plot that centers on dual identities, obscure copyright law, and love lost in the pursuit of big Hollywood money. In our second half, Emily leads our deep dive conversation into building dynamic relationships AND dynamic action sequences in fiction. Thanks to our Patreon supporters for enabling our first guest appearance! Find out more about our guest Emily Care Boss at blackgreengames.com, and check out the Living Games Conference at livinggamesconference.com Want more Rockford Files trivia, notes and ephemera? Check out the Two Hundred a Day Rockford Files Files! Support the podcast by subscribing at patreon.com/twohundredaday. Big thanks to our Gumshoe patrons! Check them out: Richard Hatem Victor DiSanto John Adamus, The Writer Next Door 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 Dael Norwood, Shane Liebling, Dylan Winslow, Bill Anderson, Adam Alexander and Chris! 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. Special Guest: Emily Care Boss.

Hey Jim, this is Louie down at the fish market. You gonna pick up these halibut or what? Welcome to 200 a Day, a podcast where we explore the 70s television detective show, The Rockford Files. I'm Nathan Palletta. And I'm Epidaia Ravishoff. And I'm Emily Karabas. That's right. For this episode, we have a very special guest. Emily, why, oh why, did you decide to join us here to talk about the rockford files uh well first off james garner is a national treasure we were lucky to have him i love the show too i've watched many

an episode with epi and uh just really really admire the writing that went into the show the thoughtfulness um some amazing issues they tackled. And it was kind of ahead of its time in a lot of ways. And it's a real classic that I'm glad to be able to look at in depth with you guys. Awesome. Yeah, you're a bit of a ringer because we happen to know that you are also a very accomplished narrative designer yourself. And so appreciate a lot of the same things that we appreciate about the show. Do you mind telling us and our listeners a little bit about your work? Thank you very much. I also write and publish role-playing games,

tabletop, analog, paper and pencil things like you both do. And I wrote the Romance Trilogy, which has three of my early games, Breaking the Ice, Shooting the Moon, and Under My Skin, which have, surprise, a romance theme. My games are focused on finding the heart of characters, seeing what matters to them, and then putting them in a juicy situation. And that's really what Rockford does amazingly well. Yeah, totally. We're glad to have you on board for this episode. Thanks for having me. Emily is a silent contributor to most episodes, too, because I happen to be married to Emily.

And we often talk about the Rockford Files here at home or while in the car being chased by gorillas. I'm working on my Rockford turn. We're only able to have guests because of the support and generosity of our Patreon supporters. We will develop our guest program as we go throughout the next year, I suppose. Yeah. Try and get a diversity of guests. But I think we're starting off strong with Emily. Thank you to all the Patreon supporters.

I'm so happy to be here and be here with you too thank you folks so uh so epi yeah what episode are we bringing emily on board to talk talk with us about this time right so uh the episode is from the near the very beginning of season one this is the earliest episode we've done i believe called the dark and bloody ground imdb is saying it's episode two so we're gonna you know we go with the imdb convention i think just for ease of linking and yeah access and stuff so by that it's season one episode two but if you were watching if you you know were excited to see this new james garner vehicle this would be the fourth episode because there'd be the two

the two parter pilot and then the first episode and then this. And then to add another boring and confusing layer, if you're on the 200 a day Rockford Files files, I believe it's episode three because we treat episode one as one episode. Right. So there you go. That is the least exciting part of our show. This is the earliest one that we've talked about. And I think we'll, we see that a little bit in some of the characterization of some of our recurring characters. They haven't really settled in as much as in later seasons. And also just little things like this was the first location for Jim's trailer where

later it went to the beach. But right now it's in this like parking lot. There's some interesting shots of the inside of the trailer in this episode, too, that don't that you don't see that often. Yeah. So this episode was written by Roy Huggins, a series co-creator. and under his pen name. Almost all of the first season episodes are attributed to John Thomas James, which was Roy Huggins' nom de plume for when he wrote his own script.

The teleplay credit goes to Juanita Bartlett, who would go on to have more and more of a free creative hand in the show as time went on. And the director is Michael Schultz. I saw the name and it rang a vague bell. And then when I looked him up, this was near the beginning of his directorial career, went on and the director is michael schultz i saw the name and it rang a vague bell and then i looked him up uh this was near the beginning of his directorial career but through the uh 70s and 80s he had a bunch of uh i guess historically important films that he directed he's one of

the great pre-spike glee black directors so he directed cooley high and crush groove which i don't know if listeners are familiar but those are kind of iconic uh black lead films uh of the era um he also directed the last dragon which is a martial arts film anyway great director uh and then he kind of went back into tv and he's still working today interesting guy guy. And I just wanted to note the caliber of his talent. Because I think we see a very cinematic look at a lot of the scenes in this episode. This is a less of a talky and more of a looky episode. There were long sequences where we were like, wow, have they spoken in how long? But was gripping good stuff from director michael schultz but speaking of great visuals epi yeah what jumped out to you from the preview montage for this episode well my description of the episode also applies to the preview montage uh so it was a nice

synecdoche of the episode itself a lot lot more looky, a little less talky. The notes that I wrote down for it were action, action, action, threat, sex joke, chase. Dead man in pool, chase, Beth and Jim chemistry is how I noted that. Yeah. And then more chasing. I guess that's another thing we should probably mention before we jump into this episode. I think this is the first Beth episode. It makes sense that it would be. I was amazed at how early she was introduced. Just thinking back over the series, there's a period where she's a regular character, but earlier on, she just appears occasionally, usually bailing Jim out.

And I hadn't realized that she was a character who was, you know, in the first few episodes. That was really awesome to see her start. I believe it's the debut of the character and of Gretchen Corbett of the actress. She did not appear in the pilot and really quickly became part of the fabric of the show. And I think to this day, a lot of, a lot of people, men in particular who grew up watching the show, like just in IMDb comments and stuff, you see lots of like, I still have a crush on Beth Davenport. She's one of my favorite characters. And I definitely put a plug in when you guys were choosing which show to look. My thought was, let's do a Beth episode if we can. So I'm glad to do this one. Yeah, it's good. And

she's also kind of fully formed. Like all the characters, we see little bits of character development over the course of the series. But I feel like all the things that we really love about the Beth and Jim relationship, which we talked about a lot in a previous episode we did, the portrait of Elizabeth, we see all those seeds, or not even seeds, we just see a lot of those dynamics in this episode. Yeah. 200 a day is supported by all of our listeners, but especially our gumshoes for this episode. We say thank you to John Adamus, the writer next door, find his go-to resources for storytellers and creatives who want to tell better stories at writer next door.com.

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AgeOfRavens.blogspot.com, Shane Liebling, Dylan Winslow, Dale Norwood, Bill Anderson, Adam Alexander, and Chris. And finally, big thank yous to Victor DeSanto and to Richard Haddam, who you can find on Twitter at Richard Haddam. We've recently updated our Patreon with new

opportunities for sponsorship, so check out patreon.com slash 200 a day and see if you want to be our newest gumshoe. We, in fact, start the episode off with emergency response sirens, fire trucks, ambulances.

Talk about immediate res. Straight into responding to a fire at the Regal Motel. And this whole first sequence, like you were saying, more looky, less talky. There's sirens and there might be some radio chatter. I don't really remember. But there's no dialogue as we see these first responders entering this hotel, throwing out this mattress that's all burned,

and then coming down the stairs with a body on a stretcher as a woman in a coat pushes past the police, twitches the blanket off, sees the face of the man on the stretcher and just screams, No! I'm laughing here. I don't want to sound callous. What I'm laughing about is the cut that they pull off right there at that moment.

Because she screams no, and then we cut to, I think, Rockford saying no. Right. About taking the case, right? Yes. The most important no. Yeah, we go straight from this very dramatic, intense, a man just died. Right. Right into some lighthearted comedy.

One of the signatures of the show in the first season, I think there was a lot of this kind of balancing the heavy subject matter of murder and death and crime with the comedic aspects of the character. Yeah. But yeah, as you say, we cut from there to Rockford saying no to Beth Davenport. So this whole sequence is great. This all plays out as Jim is taking his fishing pole and going down to the seashore to just cast into the water, very obviously doing his best not to be interested in what Beth has to say. But she's taken on this client who's poor and can't pay, but really needs help. She wants Jim to work for her on this client's behalf.

And I think maybe crucially, this woman owns property in Arizona, so she doesn't qualify for a public defender. So Beth is just basically doing it for free and just wants Rockford to do the same. She just wants Rockford to meet this woman and Calhoun, just meet her and talk to her. That's kind of what she backs down to from, you know, work for free. Of course,

Rockford says no. And then we cut to him in the room, talking to the woman at this point, this is probably the first one of these. Cause this is the first time we've seen Beth, but in the 200 a day continuity, this is one of our favorite cuts from episodes past where Rockford says no to Beth

and then the next scene starts with him doing whatever she wanted him to do. Yeah. At this point, in my heart of hearts, I hoped that the rest of the episode would only cut when somebody said no. One detail out of this, though, that I picked up on

that explains a lot about Beth is that Rockford says that she can afford to take these cases on because she picked the right grandfather. Right. And I think we've remarked on this before, how Beth seems to live a lifestyle that's a little higher caliber

or a little higher class than Rockford does, even though she's also never making any money. And I, so this is kind of just, just a line to kind of give us the sense of her heart's in the right place, but she comes from some kind of money family or something. And later in the episode, we get a little bit more about that, uh, with her, like knowing what schools are good and stuff like that. Yeah. There's some good class dynamics in this episode. It's interesting. Okay, so now we've just seen the introduction of Beth. And I think they've done some really good things with this.

Well, first of all, there's clear chemistry between Gretchen and James Garner, not Jim Rockford. Well, I mean, both. But they establish her not as in, like, this isn't a Beth origin story or anything like that we we see them as if they've always been friends uh and this is a reoccurring pattern that they're in we've obviously in our own uh podcast here we've jumped around quite a bit and we've come back to this spot and And it feels just like any episode would be. But they are just right away establishing some of the important dynamics between them as soon as they possibly can so that we can see them play out during the episode.

Yeah, when they're on the beach, there was some kind of comment that made it clear that they used to be in a relationship. There's a kiss later on in the episode. And it's very relaxed. It's not like there's any tension about that. It's just that there's an intimacy between them. And I love how Becker's discussion with Jim helps establish a character,

like what you said, Nathan. And also he had this great line about her collecting lost causes like rare coins. It makes sense in how she's kind of pushing this on Jim. And maybe, you you know the rare coins is like a date to her having money as well yeah the kind of trifecta there the jim becker beth triangle is really nice because they all have a professional relationship as well as being friends yeah yeah but jim does meet ann uh the woman who we saw in the first scene, the bereaved Anne Calhoun. She's being blamed.

She's being charged, essentially, with her husband's death. That's the man who died. She's distraught, obviously. In this scene, it's pretty brief where they're just talking, but we see on Jim's face that he's doing his best not to feel bad for her because he doesn't want to take a case that he's not getting paid for. She starts openly crying. And instead of leaving the camera on her, they turn it to Jim and you just watch him squirm. And it's not the typical kind of squirming that you would expect. It's good James Gardner squirming. With empathy. Oh, this woman is in

pain. And you can see his struggle in his face. And you can see the moment when he's like, I'm going to do this. He gets reeled in on the hook. The resignation. Yeah. From here, we go to Dennis's desk at the police station. Yeah. He has a heavy workload, of course.

Always has a heavy workload. And he says that the case is closed. And he runs down for Rockford and thus for us, kind of the salient facts about what happened. Right. There were witnesses at the hotel, other occupants who heard them fighting. They heard him storm into his bedroom. There is a 15 minute period where she could have done it. Then she left and then the fire broke out. The coroner's report says that he was smothered before the fire started. So he did not die in the fire,

but there was a cigarette in his hand and it was all staged to try and cover up the murder. Rockford uses his keen legal mind to poke holes in this case, that the opportunity is wide open. Anyone could have walked in in that 15 minutes. The motive's a little shaky like lovers spats they don't always turn into murder and becker this is when he uses that great line that you that you called out him he calls out jim for saying that beth davenport must be behind this

and you just want us to reopen the case so that you can't do it because as we know, Jim Rockford doesn't work on open cases. Yeah, this is good stuff because Jim's con here is great. All he's doing is kicking up as much suspicion as he can to try and get Becker to open the case. Doesn't he even suggest that the body might not be the victim? If it got burned, you can't even make a positive ID. His face was not burned. She identified him. So he's reaching for whatever he can

in the hopes that some way this case will be taken away from him and he doesn't have to do it. Right. And while he's doing that, you also get to see, like you said, not only the relationship here between Jim and Dennis, but also that Dennis knows Beth and knows that dynamic. And that is an ongoing dynamic.

And that's something that has existed in the fiction. And also just a really good example of something we talk about a lot, which is the scenes doing multiple things. It gives us all this plot information about the death and insinuates all the weird things about it while also delivering the character information and a little bit of the back story of their, you know, of how they all know each other and they all kind of have this professional relationship. And it's funny. And it's a moment of, like you were saying, Jim is doing this manipulation or attempting to put one over on Dennis to open up the case to get him and himself out of it. And meanwhile, we're taking all this wonderful exposition like sugar.

You know, it's not like, OK, tell us about the plot. Let's move on. Yeah. And it ends with a great wink. Jim winks at Dennis on his way out. That's when we know he's taking the case. Right. We go from here to Beth and Jim sharing a meal.

Yeah. We open with Rockford asking for the hot sauce and Beth giving him some side eye because he knows that that's not good for his stomach. More about their history, right? Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. She, you get all these little clues about how she knows his personal habits, you know, just in that way that when you spend a lot of time with someone, you know, you know how they, they operate. And I think like you were saying, Emily, it's, it's not overt. It's just kind of in their, uh, comfortable relationship. That there's a history there. Um, as far as I

could tell, Rockford was eating chowder, not chili. So still keeping to my separation of detective food universes. But I'm pretty sure he's putting hot sauce in chowder, which is a weird choice. That is written in my notes. I was like, hot sauce and chowder? Which I think then takes chowder from being like, oh, okay, that's like a normal food to like, that's a garbage food once you put hot sauce on it. Well, and he doubles down because he just covers it in oyster crackers too. After he

makes the face about putting so much hot sauce on it. Yeah. So in addition to some good food stuff, we also get some good money stuff as Rockford. He agrees to take the case if Beth will pay his expenses. And then if he proves that that Anne is innocent,

then he'll take his $200 a day. Yeah. So this is a, I don't think I've seen this formula in other episodes that we've done where he kind of tries to split the difference. There's different kinds of arguing about money that he does with different people, right? Like with Beth, it's often she's hiring him but can't pay him or doesn't want to pay the full rate. And he's like, well, 10, can you lend me 10? But like, I don't think we've seen this specific, essentially a gamble, right? Unless it's just,

he knows she's got money and, you know, he figures that she's going to win the case. And so he's like, well, I'm just going to make a safe bet and it'll sound like a deal to her. Yeah. I mean, I think he's kind of talked, this is how he makes it right with himself. Yeah. Fine. I'm going to do this thing, but at least pay my expenses. And then if we're successful, you know, like. Right, right.

Kind of kicking off that eventual payday down the road. Yeah. If that's what he has to do to sleep at night, you know, more power to him. The only other thing here is that he asks Beth to get all the information from Anne that she can about Kevin Calhoun, her former husband, the one who died. Yeah. I got a quick question about that. He arrives at this deal. If we win, then you pay me the 200.

And then he just follows it up with, do all of this detective work. He just dumps it in her lap. And so that was my other theory for that moment was that he thought maybe he can get her to do all the work and just sit back and collect the 200 a day. But that's immediately changed, I think, by the next scene. Yeah. So the next sequence of him investigating. So first of all, he gets her to agree to, by the next scene. Yeah. So the next sequence of him investigating. So first of all, he gets her to agree to pay for his expenses regardless. Yeah.

And then he immediately goes to Arizona. I just want to make a comment too there about Beth in that scene, because it'll get called back later. But, you know, she's fighting and fighting with him. And then she gives. And she's got this very thoughtful look as she's giving so it was just an interesting turn to in her character where jim feels like he really has the upper hand in this argument with her at that moment yeah so yeah uh we go from here to parker arizona uh we

have jim driving a blue rental car around throws me a little bit at first same here he's not going to drive the firebird all the way up. I had to actually see the Arizona plates to realize what had happened. Like, why is he driving a blue car? Did they replace it? What's going on? And it wasn't even that the plate was an Arizona plate. Like, I recognized that it wasn't his license plate.

So he's kicking around Parker, Arizona, going to all these locations to follow up on whatever information he got from Beth. So it goes to Parker City Hall. He goes to the Central Valley Press building, I guess, a newspaper of some kind and the DMV. So this is all just shown to us through the camera without any dialogue or him interacting with other people, really. He's going into buildings and coming out and writing stuff in a notepad. Eventually, we do see someone wearing a very nice looking watch, observing him from kind of the foreground of the camera. So it's kind of over his shoulder almost.

We know that he's being followed. This watch will come back. So we get a good visual clarity on this guy. Where's this watch? But yeah, so Rockford leaves the DMV. He makes some more notes. He gets in his car,

he drives out of Parker, Arizona, and then we get an extremely suspenseful musical sting. As we see this big rig tab pull out and follow him onto the road. This all leads into this very long but really compelling chase sequence. I just have to say too that the fact that it was a rig felt so Rockford to me. There's so much that's done in the series with trucks because of Rocky that it just felt like, oh yeah, it's a truck that's going to chase him. Yeah. It's so intimidating.

Yeah. And then that pays off with rocky as well too and it's also this giant truck because he's in a little you know sports car reminiscent of his own and then there's this massive monstrous thing that's going to be bearing down on him well it's nice kind of visually because it really fills the screen right like they're in they're in the. They're in these like desert roads, mountainous terrain, lots of land and lots of sky. And then you have this giant cab that's filling the screen every time

the camera kind of shows us them in close proximity. I do want to point out my favorite shot in this scene, which we see a few times, Rockford's loafers putting the pedal to the metal and how almost impotent it is in this car we're seeing moments in this car where we will see the um speedometer and the car is having trouble getting up past 70 it adds to a lot to the tension of the scene we see that and also his facial expressions do so much to carry the scene. Yeah.

So the A to Z is pretty straightforward. This cab tries to run Rockford off the road. He manages to keep on the road while they're in a dangerous area where there's a cliff and then it pushes him off in a more dirt filled area. He goes off the road.

He gets stuck. The rig comes after him again. He manages to get out just in time and then they continue this pursuit up into the kind of the hilly part of this uh highway where finally rockford's able to use the incline to his advantage to get a little space and then finds a finds a sharp turn onto like a smaller little bridge over a gulf or something that's too narrow for the truck to pursue and then he's able to get away from there that's the storyboard but the

the way that this whole thing is shot and the music the cuts and like everything make it really exciting it's a very tension-filled encounter uh at the end we were talking about how there's long sequences with no dialogue this is definitely one of them where you're just watching jim's face and the guy who's driving the um cab got this grim expression on his face and these giant glasses, which you can see even when the truck is far away. So you're just like looking at his eyes. But the thing that I was struck by

was James Garner did so many of his own driving stunts. And when he passed away, it was mourned and beloved by the driving community. It feels real because you actually have the stars. Yeah. They're doing something that's pretty athletic and pretty skillful and dangerous. And it just adds to the tension as well. Yeah, for sure.

The way that, you know, they occupy the car, it feels real. We say that a lot. And that's because it is, right? Because they're in those cars doing those sequences. Probably not at the speeds that they're showing us, obviously. But when he like spins out into the into the dirt area, or make that hard turn onto the bridge, the camera shows us the entire sequence. It's very, almost documentary, like, right. But then that's combined with all these great dramatic shots showcasing the different scale between the two cars and how close they are and how there's nothing else around. And I think that's where a lot of the why it's kind of surprising that there's so much drama is that it's not really a chase. There's they're together the entire time. It's always a question of like, can Jim save himself

for the next quarter mile until he can find some kind of opportunity? The moment to moment of it is are these here is the immediate thing we need to deal with here's how the road isn't going to help jim here's a car yeah it is now in front of jim that he has to get around you know like to describe it you're just like here's a chase encounter here's a chase encounter here's a chase encounter or whatever but it's not those and it's not the sum of those. It's like how it's conveyed that really pulls this together. It still has a great attention to it. Like it just it keeps hitting that part of your brain that can't let you not think about being in that car with that giant truck barreling down on you, feeling the gas go out from underneath them while he's doing it or being stuck in the dirt. If you've driven a car for any amount of time, you've been stuck somewhere where you have no traction. That's a sinking feeling. And that's when you don't have a truck trying to kill you. Yeah. Well, it's all very visceral. You can feel all those feelings. It's

good. We're gushing over this thing that you really need to appreciate. But I think it's worth it. It also takes a lot of the screen time. It's like six or seven minutes, maybe. Like a long sequence. It's totally worth it. But Jim Rockford does get away. There was a commercial break once he gets across the bridge.

And we have the shot of the guy who's wearing the watch. The same guy who's been following him. Frustrated that he can't get over the bridge. Then it cuts to commercial. Then we come back, Jim's pulling into a gas station to get some help. This is great. Jim's life intersecting with the life of someone else who has their own life moment.

Yep, yep. Mechanic out in the middle of nowhere in Arizona, refusing to help him out until Rockford threatens to... Give me, what is it? Give me a dollar or I'll crack you up with like a piggy bank. A dime. A dime. That's right.

One of the things I love about this exchange here. Well, there's a few things. Number one, that Rockford's first instinct is to call the authorities. This is a really sort of standard thing about the heroism of Jim Rockford, that somebody's job is to deal with this. It's probably not me. So we'll let them do it. If there's anyone whose life Jim feels very strongly about, it's his own. So when it is threatened, he wants something to happen. He's arguing over this dime. He has a dollar that he gives the guy for the dime.

This argument does not need to happen. He does not need to threaten this guy. The guy says, put some gas in the tank and then maybe you'll have a dime as change. The deal that he comes up with after the threat, after he strong arms the dime out of the guy, is to give him a dollar and tell him to put 90 cents in the car. This is an argument that doesn't need to happen. But clearly, like you said, this guy has a life that he's having. He doesn't necessarily want to interrupt it by Jim. And Jim has his heart has got to be racing.

He keeps making comments about how his life was in danger, how he was almost killed. And you can see that nobody is really caring but for jim he like almost died and the whole world should recognize this exactly and this is the first of a little callback loop about no one taking jim's as seriously as he thinks they should be taking him about the fact that he his life was put into danger the the highway patrol is of no help. You know, they found the rig had been stolen and abandoned.

Uh, there's some, some banter about, did you check for fingerprints and stuff like that? And, uh, it's very much big city boy coming out to the country and making unreasonable demands.

So he gets no satisfaction from the highway patrol. Yeah. We have a, just a cut of a plane uh landing back in la so another one of those good expenses i would say and uh heads back to his trailer so this whole gag that comes next i think is entirely premised on it being early in the series run but it's still good right yeah rockford goes into his trailer it's dark and someone in there is like stop put your hands up i immediately knew that it was rocky yeah yeah but it's still a

pretty good humorous reveal because we get jim uh putting his hands up and then turning around and turning on the light and then just being like rocky glaring at his dad who is holding a gun yes uh it's rockford's gun not rocky's but neither of them have a permit so uh the cookie jar doesn't make an appearance so i don't remember that or did i miss it no no yeah also that gun was way bigger than the one that we see later in the series it was probably too big to fit in a cookie jar. It is established that there is no permit for this guy, which is an important bit. And the great line that Jim has, there's two people who are trying to kill me today. It turns out one is my dad. And that sets off Rocky into the, again, for us, one of our favorite recurring bits,

which is that Rocky is both worried about his son's safety and also thinks he should give it up and just drive a truck like he wants him to. Yeah. Yeah. Rocky's got the line, for a man who doesn't like to get stomped on, you're in the wrong line of work. It's a thesis statement for Jim Rockford. Yeah. I loved how this is sort of turns into rocky's forensics because he starts grilling jim on was it a mac was it this other kennel worth what kind of cab did it have and jim's like i don't know i don't know but then as as rocky pushes him and says but i raised you you you grew up in trucks jim says well it had this and. And so he did know and notice. I loved having Rocky be able to bring in his specialized area of knowledge and get a few more details. And it paid off what you were saying earlier about how the fact that it was a truck, not only did that make it an exciting visual chase, it pays off here because Rocky gives us an important little piece of, it's not really a clue, but it's more of a...

An interpretation about what was going on. Though I guess at the end of the day maybe he was wrong yeah but we can talk about that later rocky's saying that the kind of cab that rockford has described is so heavy and can go so fast because it has certain gears uh if that guy had wanted him dead he would have killed him so he must have just wanted to really scare him to death. We go from there to Rockford and Beth arguing over expenses. Yes. The point of contention is about some toothpaste. But what we kind of quickly get to is that Rockford, he's angry again, because no one seems to be taking it seriously that he was almost killed. Like Rocky didn't seem to take it very seriously.

He just wanted to talk about the kind of truck. And now Beth isn't taking it seriously. She just wants to argue with him about toothpaste. Rockford's feeling magnanimous here because he does tell her that she doesn't have to pay for his new jammies. This sequence struck me as another of the, they're having this little bickering business going on. So it's their relationship that's far-fronting instead of the input.

And most of the actual dialogue is the bickering. But when they drive away, we have the dramatic close-up of the liquid that was underneath the car. And then we go into this sequence where his brake line was loosened. And so they're going over this hill. And then all of a sudden he's out of control because the brakes stop working. Which does kind of immediately undercut Rocky's idea that they weren't trying to kill him. Exactly.

Yeah. That's pretty serious. And also, this is where we get to see James Garner, driving expert, all the things that he's doing to try and slow it down. Like, those are actual driving things. Like, he pulls the emergency brake. He starts shifting the gears. Everything he can do to mechanically influence the car's speed without brakes he's just kind of doing uh just as part of the shot which i really appreciated yeah the other thing

i really like about this is that when we hit the danger when when the brakes are out he pushes the brake all the way down and it is very clear to everyone involved that the brakes aren't working. We're done with dialogue. It feels like the chase sequence we just saw, but also has a bit to do with their relationship here, where they had the bickering, and again, nobody's taking him serious. And then it's serious. We're going to let Jim try and solve the problem, because this is a thing that Jim does professionally,

which is avoid getting killed with another choice you might have had beth yelling at him stop it do something you know which either undermines her character or has this weird effect of overlaying tension on tension where if you have another character pressuring somebody to do something they can't do then you're distracting from the danger that they're actually in. And that might work better in like a comedy or something, but it kind of pulls away your attention from just the fact that they probably are going to die. They focus on what's important in that scene rather than using the bickering, which they do in other places to distract from things that might be

a little boring. They let it go here go here yeah it kind of seamlessly goes from the bickering into the real danger he ends up managing to pull the car uh through into this like construction zone and hit a big pile of dirt and that's what brings them to a stop without anyone getting getting injured and then uh book ends the scene with beth she gets out of the car and she's visibly shaken and upset like anyone would be, right? Yeah. And Rockford gets to have a, gets to pithily cut her off when she tries to talk about how shaken she is. I forget the line. She asks a rhetorical question and he just like says no or something. He just walks away, but they get out okay. And they do note that no one even knew that he was going to be in Arizona except for Anne, Beth and Rockford and whoever killed Kevin.

So, right. He is now convinced that Anne didn't do this murder, I think. So it ends up being a motivating point for Rockford where it's gotten serious and gotten personal. Yeah, I think that's a thing. If you're ever in a situation where you're looking to hire Rockford or Rockford-like PI and they're telling you no, just fake an attempt on their life. Rockford does go with Beth to talk to Anne again and reveals, here's the big reveal, before they were married two years ago, there is no record of a Kevin Calhoun. That was awesome.

Yeah. No birth certificate, dmv records nothing in the town he claimed to to have grown up in or lived in we get some of the most exposition exposition here from anne filling in our backstory they met he was this romantic soul who was a poet they ended up in la and then we quickly go to rockford asking her about this kind of it's not really an alibi but it's another another thing. It had come up earlier, but now we really get into it, which is that one of the reasons they were arguing is they'd been at some party. And then later Anne said that they didn't know anyone else in LA. So it was like, why were you at a party if you don't know anyone? And he was apparently invited. He called her and told her to come, but he was drunk then they left and so and doesn't know who he knew doesn't recognize this uh picture of these society people that rockford shows her that were the ones that threw the party but they said that they crashed and she says that he had an invitation

this is the the thin end of the way for rockford to start following up on yeah this episode kind of goes from a lot of visuals with not a lot of talking to like a lot of semi-complicated plot in the second half, which is a little counter to how most of these episodes are written. You just mentioned this thin edge here. When this gets delivered, it certainly clicks to me in hindsight,

but watching it, I'm like, oh, that's odd. And I don't think of it as like the starting point of the investigation, which it is. I don't know if I had at the time any theories in my head about what was going on because it just seemed. Well, there's no information before this point. Obviously, something is going on. And now we're starting to learn about the something. Also, we were kind of suspect less before this.

Right. Because it was just Anne. All of the arrows pointed to her. So this is where we start getting to some place where there could be somebody else involved. Oh, and before we leave the scene, Rockford has this great line. He says, only two people are above suspicion, and that's you and me to Beth. I guess that must be after they've left Anne. But I just loved, again, they're reinforcing the relationship and the trust between Beth and Rockford.

Even though there's a lot of tension and there's a lot of maneuvering and positioning, still, he always sees her on his side, regardless of what else, whatever else anybody else is doing. Yeah. And it also shows just how much his trust in rocky has been shook by the gun incident yeah no that's good it's a it's a nice again understated but in context just very strong moment for them they uh get back in his car yeah he checks it he checks the car i love how she kind of argues with him a little bit like like what's going to have happened? And he's like, what are you talking about?

But as they drive, they talk over this new information. So the party was thrown by Elizabeth Gorman and Clive Russell, who are kind of new in town, new money with some kind of connection to this movie production of a book called The Dark and Bloody Ground. Yeah. And Beth says, that's the biggest movie since Birth of a Nation. Wow. Oh, boy. Thanks. And she recalls that someone named Gorman wrote the original book.

But that's kind of the B-plot of this back and forth. Where the main thing is that Rockford wants to go to the police because they have information about this case. And you get the sense that he knows that they'll hold it against him. Right. If it comes up that he had information and didn't go to the police, Beth does not want to go to the police about this. Not yet. And this is,

this is when they're stopping to stoplight and she reaches over and grabs the keys out of the ignition and puts them in her bra, it looks like. And we get the moment from the preview montage of Rockford saying, oh, like you think that's going to stop me? Specifically, it's an indication that he's already been there. He says it never has before or something like that. The two of them are intimate enough. So it's not like he's just making a statement out of the blue.

The description of it makes him sound like a real creepo, but on the screen, it's more about, there's a little bit of a playfulness to it where it's like, okay, if you want to play that game, and it doesn't read as creepy, at least not to me. Well, she uses that moment to say, you're not going to take this. And that actually was a really common line that people, that women would use in fiction at the time, put something in their bra. And this is yet another moment where we're showing the history between Jim and Beth, because that line, short memory, that's when he says that. And he says, you must have a short memory if you think that I'm not

going to touch you. And so, yeah, it's totally creepy now. Nobody would ever do that. But that's what I read from it. She's calling the line there for him not to cross. And then he's saying, well, there's actually a different part of our relationship here that means that I have those privileges. So, whew, really weird watching it today. Yeah. I'm not even sure if it's not that it's aged it's just

something that it's like that is part of a moment in time yeah yeah we have we have moved on but i do think it's a clear indication that they had yeah been together and then what actually ends that standoff uh because he kind of moves towards her and then stops and then someone starts beeping because they're in traffic yeah not a stoplight and uh so he's like look you don't have to tell me tell tell them and so she rolls her eyes and gives him the keys back but then uh she gives him all this stuff about like look since you're working for me it's privilege information you don't have to go to the police with it okay technically it's not part of the penal code but it's like an unwritten law jim rockford does not believe in unwritten laws but she wants him to find out who calhoun really was before she says before confronting gorman and russell about it because

she knows that that's where he's going next and we end on a on a gag about going elsewhere for legal advice yeah he wants to cut he wants to call an attorney because he doesn't trust what she's saying which which is good. From here, we go to that confrontation that was set up for us in the last couple of lines there. We're at a very fancy club of some kind. There is a racetrack and horses. And in a nice visual move, we see our watch wearer with binoculars looking at a horse. And then we see Rockford with binoculars looking at a horse. And then we see Rockford with binoculars

looking at the guy with the binoculars. Yeah. And we get Rockford running a little bit of a con just to get in and find out some piece of information. He walks up to this table where the three of them are watch wearer, whose name we learn is Elliot. The other two, Elizabeth Gorman and Clive Russell, they're all at this little table and he just walks up and he just has this patter from the first moment that just takes it as assumed that they all know each other. Yeah.

He's like, you know, I almost walked right past you. Can you believe I didn't see you there? I like that. And there's this nice moment where it shifts because they're pushing him away, pushing him away. and then he throws the question off onto elliot or something and and he just like sits down smoothly and the conversation goes on yeah he really masterfully takes the dynamic in both hands right if i just act like i know you you'll hesitate long enough for me to convince you that you just forgot me so he claims to have been at the party and

that's where they met. Forget about all that Mr. Rockford stuff. Just call me Jim. I thought we settled that at the party. Yeah. And they're kind of like, well, if anyone has this much confidence, they must be right. But the face of Elliot this whole time, because Elliot's the guy who tried to run him off the road in Arizona. Yeah. So his face in the background is a masterclass. Yeah. So he gets this convo this conversation kind of going by apologizing for his friend calhoun there's an interaction that sets off elliot where he's like look i know you weren't a guest i know he wasn't because i made the list and there were guards at every door and i know exactly who was there and no one who wasn't

invited was at the party but we have now determined they all knew that Calhoun was at the party. Yeah. Therefore, he must have been invited. So beautifully done. Not a gay crasher, like they told the police and the press. This is, so this is the thing that I really like about, I guess, like a Rockford con, as opposed to like some of the more modern takes on them.

This just has to get the conversation going until he gets some information. And then if he's found out, it doesn't matter to him, you know, rather than this becoming a long drawn out thing where the drama is, will he be discovered? It's not that it's just, what can he learn before he gets discovered?

We get a, just a really quick little scene with Rockford and Beth. After this, Beth says that she knows elliot he arranges parties for rich people and he went to all the good schools yeah another reference to like how she grew up maybe a more elevated social circle and then rockford asks if she's embarrassed to be seen with him in public because he doesn't even have new money yeah because she makes a distinction between money and new money and then he's like i doesn't even have new money. Yeah. Because she makes a distinction between old money and new money.

And then he's like, I don't even have new money. It's a joke, but also the scene ends right there. Yeah. I think it's the point in the episode, like it's really short and it's not necessary for anything plot wise. But I think what it does is it shows us a little bit of Rockford's vulnerability about Beth, how it does matter to him what she thinks of him. about Beth, how it does matter to him what she thinks of him.

I have a money thesis here because like this whole episode has been about how much he's supposed to make, 200 a day, and also his expenses. And he's like, well, you cover the expenses and then otherwise I'll, you know, if we win, I'll get the money. Because Rockford is neither new nor old money. Just living costs money. He can't just wander about being in Beth's world or anything like that without it being a burden. What he was going to do before Beth showed up was to take his fishing rod out and fish. Not only is that like maybe he'll catch a meal.

So there you go. There's some money he's saving, but also he's not spending any money that hasn't already been spent doing that particular activity. That's something that he can do pretty much free. And anything you're doing free when you're living on the economic edge there is important. There is a tension here that isn't on top of the whole episode, but is underneath it between those two worlds that Beth won't. She's like, Oh, I'll just do this for free. And he's like,

I can't do this for free. I don't have that option. I just, I just think it adds so much to the richness of the characters just to have this 30 second scene. And then from here is where we get to the, to the good bedroom scene and the next round of exposition rockford's in bed wearing his jammies maybe the new ones he bought we don't know yeah reading the book the original book the dark and bloody ground yes by steve gorman uh there's a knock on the door as a Rockford watcher. It's either the cops or who.

So I appreciated how she actually goes, it's Beth. This is where we get another round of expositions here. But it's interleaved with, I think, Emily, what you were saying about the blocking of the scene. It's funny with the door opening and closing and them arguing. And then eventually they're talking through the door. And it's here that she makes the comment about for $200 a day, you could at least put some clothes on. Right.

Right. Yeah. And there's business with like her saying, this would be easier if I wasn't talking through the door. And he's like, not for me. So I think that's all in service of, you know, keeping us engaged in the scene while we get all this info dump, which briefly is that Beth looked into this

guy Russell's background and he was a copyright lawyer. And it turns out that there's this aspect to copyright law. If you're an author and you sell your rights to a publisher, but then you die before the publisher can renew the copyright. The rights go back to your estate, not to the person who paid you for the rights. So, um, in this case, they go to the widow and this is what happened with this book,

dark and bloody ground. The author, um, Gorman died mid production of the movie. And then the lawyer, this guy, Russell swooped in and made a deal with her before the studio could, I guess that's kind of my read of what she said. Um, and then turned around and resold the rights to the studio and made a tidy profit. So there were a lot of details in this exposition. That's kind of my summary. The scene is great. And I

think I get caught up in the sort of entertainment of the scene that I feel like this is one of those moments where I didn't quite get the information that I needed to get when I first saw it. But I will say that this information is classic and wonderful Rockford Files style. Our mystery hinges on red tape and bureaucracy somewhere. And it's legitimate. It's a murder over some strange law. And this is a real law. Yes. So this apparently was a plot, like a plot twist that Roy Huggins had wanted to do a story about for years. Oh, wow.

It was in an episode that never got produced of a show he did before this called Trauma. It was in a two hour like TV movie that he did that never got produced. This particular copier and Beth calls out the part of the U.S. code that has this provision in it. He had this twist in his back pocket waiting for a project to come together. Finally, it could go into the Rockford files. When we were trying to search around for different Beth Davenport episodes, I believe I saw someone say that the particular code number or the section number that she stated wasn't the right one. Apparently, this part of the code was revised later in the 70s. Oh, maybe it's a timing thing. It is no longer.

Yes, it is no longer the case. According to our textbook here, Ed Robertson's 30 Years of the Rockford Files. Oh, wonderful. But yeah, so I just love that factoid and this whole scene kind of bears out for me like this is this idea that he was so excited about but in context it's a little overwrought like there's a little too much going on with it to really be compelling to me i'm kind of like okay uh where is this going um and also as the end of the scene shows yeah that doesn't actually explain why this other guy uh kevin calhoun was killed yeah so it's pertinent to our story but we

don't know why yet and it doesn't make sense that beth really knows why yet she's not actually saying she even says she doesn't know how it adds up, but it seems relevant. Right. And so this whole thing is interrupted by a phone call. So after Rockford finally gets his day clothes on, there's a phone call. He answers it. And it's Clive Russell. Sketchiest invitation ever.

Come to my fancy mansion in Bel Air. Come to the pool house. That was sketchy. Yes. And Rockford's like, yeah, this seems about right. Beth is talking to him the whole time, right? Like he's. Yeah.

Like while he's on the phone. Yeah. And the guy's like, don't come to the front. Come to the back. Please, please step under the anvil. Over the spiked pit. Don't wake up the leopard. Yeah.

Yeah. But this does set up a great uh gag that ends the scene where oh yeah he tells her where this place is and she's like oh i know that place you couldn't even get in the back gate and he says bet you ten dollars so we go to uh russell's house beth accompanies rockford they walk in through a conveniently open back gate. I kind of wish that there had been a follow-up to the gag here. I was expecting it, but they just go

in through the gate. But we get this extremely dramatic shot from the bottom of the pool of the body floating in the pool that they come across once they get to the pool house. And sure enough, Clive Russell has been drowned in his own pool. Then the lights go out and there are shots. I just wanted to say that

I love this underwater shot. It's from underwater. You hear Beth and Jim talking about the body and you can see Jim kind of crouch down to try and fish the body out. And I don't know what it is. kind of crouched down to try and fish the body out. And I don't know what it is. I mean, like it's a really neat angle, but I think it's also how long it sits at that angle that really like sinks home. This is a dead body. We're back again in the serious realm.

Yeah. It's a tone shift. Yeah. Rockford tells Beth to find a phone and then there's these gunshots and our main man, Elliot, is taking pot shots at them from the darkness and then runs off, jumps into his little white speedster and speeds away to which we get an angry Rockford in hot pursuit. In his own firebird, right? Yes.

It is unleashed. This is a really great kind of little chase that is a counterpoint to the big chase that we had earlier now it's at night it's in street cars it's in an urban or semi-urban it's kind of suburban environment and rockford is the one pursuing so we have all the elements of the first one kind of flipped it wasn't too much chasing for me for an episode that had like three separate car sequences. And I think vitally, Elliot's car is so small. Whichever patron is updating the car stuff on the Rockford Files files.

And you are doing the Lord's work, calling out all the production cars in all these episodes because it's amazing. I'm waiting for that because I don't know what kind of car this is. But like, this is like a tiny 1960s James Bond car. The exact opposite of that Mack truck, like you were saying. And it's a convertible and there's a vulnerability there. You're sitting behind the wheel of a Mack truck high above your prey.

You look invulnerable. Then he's in this tiny car with this canvas top and the inevitable happens. This chase is all about Rockford just keeping with him until he makes a mistake. In this one, we're seeing him confident. Yeah. I just need to keep with him. I know this guy is going to mess up. And he does.

He comes around a corner, gets blinded by some oncoming headlights, spins out onto this kind of vertical uh side of the road and flips his car and we get a last little shot of elliot kind of falling out of the car he's all covered in blood he's really messed up and we see his watch that got unclipped by the force of the impact fall off of his wrist and be just laying next to his hand as rockford comes up to check him out. His time is up. Rockford returns to the house where Beth has been waiting for him for so long because he had to stay for the police and give a statement.

He says that Elliot is in the hospital. He's pretty messed up, but alive. He hasn't said anything like to the cops, but they're going to start putting things together pretty soon. And Rockford wants to get there first with the facts as he sees them kind of falling into place. I do want to say something about this line, because this is, I think, an interesting contrast between Rockford and maybe some other detective heroes. If I figured it out, they're going to be close behind. To him, investigation is work and not genius.

You do the things that you're supposed to do, like the same way you would if you were cleaning a bunch of dishes or building a house. You do the things and you come to the conclusion. Rockford isn't a genius who knows how to make connections better than the police do. He's operating under that assumption. And I really appreciate that about this character. It's not that Rockford is the world's greatest detective. It's that he is Rockford. And that's why we watch him. He's able to take advantage of the differential in knowledge, right? That's always his thing. If I know this, that gives me an advantage until someone else knows it. So he'll milk that difference for all

it's worth. And in this case, he milks it in order to get to Elizabeth Gorman's first before the cops decide to go talk to her. Elizabeth Gorman lives in a very nice house as well as one might expect from how her character has been presented so far. Rockford knocks and then does not let her close the door on him as he tells her that Elliot is not just in the hospital. He's in the prison ward of the hospital for the murder of Clive Russell. He doesn't have anything left to lose, so he's telling the cops everything. They'll be there soon. anything left to lose so he's telling the cops everything uh they'll be there soon this is all to put pressure on elizabeth i think to tell him something because he's still operating on some

kind of on clues and supposition i like how she turns around is like i don't believe you i don't believe anything that you're saying i don't think he's dead i don't think elliot's in the hospital nothing uh i don't know what you have to gain by lying to me but you're lying and she's not wrong yeah but then rockford shows her elliot's watch which he apparently took from the crash as proof that he was in this accident and then he lays out what he thinks happened to put more pressure on her but also to finally tell us the viewing audience what the hell has been going on this whole time steve gorman the author of the book, his body was never found. He was lost in some boating accident off the coast of Mexico.

Yeah. So he thinks that Calhoun, who didn't exist before two years ago, was Gorman. And once he learned about the film, he came to LA to get his cut. So Elizabeth Gorman, who had been courted, I guess, by Clive Russell, they were engaged technically, but she also had a relationship with this guy, Elliot. So Elliot killed Gorman to keep him out of this picture deal to protect their interests. Again, this is a little overwrought. Right. Yeah. So we're assuming Steve Gorman faked his death, right? Right.

Just to finish that out, she breaks down and says that she truly thought he was dead. Right. And it put her through hell that he showed back up after faking his own death and that she just couldn't stand having him be part of it, I guess. I mean, and also now she's engaged and she has this big movie deal and whatever. But there's a little bit of, I guess, motivation that's still a little unclear to me about some of what happened. So the timeline is this Steve Gorman fakes his death, convincing his original wife that he's dead. Right. And then she gets the rights to his

book because of this copyright loophole. And that happens while that's being made or that's before the book is being made? It sounds like that must have been before the movie actually happened, but when it was going to happen, it's a little unclear. They use some different language at different points that makes it unclear about when the movie is actually being made. He then goes on and tries to become a poet. Like we don't see him at all. We get nothing of him.

So we don't really know what his motivation is. She says that he would rather fake his own death than just get a divorce. So they apparently were not happy together. But other than that, we don't really. Yeah. I mean, obviously the motivation for killing him the second time when he shows up again is clear. If he shows up again, then.

Then he gets the rights and he gets the movie and. Then she loses everything. Right. Yeah. It's a little bit of a convoluted plot. Not the episode is a convoluted plot. This backstory kind of motivation. Yeah, yeah.

Well, and also, I think there's a line in there about how Elliot didn't know about the copyright law, but Clive Russell did. And so that was the motivation for Elliot killing Russell was so that they wouldn't get married, I guess. And so she would still have like so they could be together. I guess it was a little that part also didn't telegraph well to me. So this is kind of the exposition that tells us here's why all the things happened. Yeah, I think the emotional reality is strong. Like she is distraught, but also angry. And she clearly has real feelings for Elliot. Yeah, that all makes sense. But the logistics of who did what, why are beside the

point at this point in the episode to me. Yeah, I think I feel bad about bringing this up at the very end of our discussion of the episode, because I think I really, really enjoyed the episode. I just had a little trouble with the motivations of the man who was dead at the very beginning of the episode. Yeah, because we never get to hear anything from him. It's all filtered through his wife and she clearly didn't know his real story. And we do get this kind of nice dramatic end of the scene where she essentially confesses to at least conspiring to murder her former husband while the sirens approaching sirens are going i appreciated getting the getting all the pieces all put together into one conversation but also it's not a very compelling set of pieces to me yeah what is

much more compelling is the next scene and the last of our of our episode which is where we get rockford and beth back together on the pier yeah going to get tacos yes so we uh come back to arguing over expenses as well 10 cents a mile not seven cents a mile. Yeah, it's great because it's literally nickeling and diming him. But yeah, so we get a couple little final bits and pieces.

Anne will be okay. She's back in Arizona. She'll get over it. They kind of haggle over these expenses as they go up to the taco stand where he orders two tacos. And then he's like, you know what? Fine. Let's just forget about the expenses. How about just pay me for my time? And that's when Beth says that she will as soon as Anne pays her. Did he not understand that she meant that she would pay him once she was paid? Exactly. So this is getting

back to your thing, Emily, right? About how she very carefully phrased her exactly you know she she accepted she saw that jim was gonna stay hold the line she in her mind decided how she was going to be agreeing to him and uh and here's the payoff right and he's like all right her small amount of land that's going to take her a long time to sell and who knows how much you'll get out of it um So how about this? How about retain me on this new defense case you have? Because I recommended you to Elizabeth Gorman, who apparently is now keeping Beth as her defense attorney. But Beth says that no, no, she has a brilliant defense and she doesn't need Rockford. Yes. But there's this other hard luck case. This old man doesn't have a penny, but he's really nice.

He's in a real jam. And Rockford just turns, leaves the tacos on the desk and walks away. We end our episode with the freeze frame on Rockford waving jauntily, waving goodbye as he walks out of the situation. Now, I'm not a lawyer, but given what we've learned about the law in this episode, Anne might be due some money because she was married to Steve Gorman when he died.

It might be an illegal, I'm like, I don't know. Like it might take a while to untangle this but yeah if he didn't die well no because then the publisher still has the rights and then he's actually dead oh he's actually married to ann yeah but that marriage might be illegal because he never got a divorce what a terrible we weep so yeah, that's the dark and bloody ground. I'd like to make sure we hear from our guest here, Emily. What did you think? What did you have jump out at you that we didn't really talk about?

Or do you have anything else you wanted to discuss or add about this episode? My big takeaways from this really were the things we talked about the most. That it did a really great job of having tense action scenes and introducing a character that would end up being a very important part of rockbird and something that i love about the rockbird show is that they give a lot of attention to the side characters that come in for the various different cases every episode i always feel like they're a person they're a character um but they did a little bit more with beth i presume that it was always planned that she was going to be a regular or a semi-regular character that was that was well done even if they weren't planning

it well apparently it wasn't like they were planning to have this character necessarily be around for four seasons but once they had her in and did this role they were like okay yeah we should keep going with that like because she had such good chemistry with garner and took the role so as such a strong performer so it wasn't like we need to cast this person for the next four years my understanding from the kind of write-up here is that because she did such a good job they're like oh well we have to keep going with that. That's awesome. That's great to know the background of how she became part of the show. One of my favorite characters.

Yeah. I mean, there's a great quote here from Gretchen Corbett. So again, from here, I'm saying this is Ed Robertson's book where she says, there was something about the character, Beth, that I knew. It spoke to me because I'm a reasonably intelligent woman and they didn't write such roles at the time. That is, there weren't as many strong, smart female characters on television as there are today. And back then, women were usually limited to playing the wife or the girlfriend. I just want to say that Rockford really doesn't fit that mold. In many of the episodes, there's either the person who gives him the case or there's a strong female character that he interacts with who have a wide variety of professions and interests and you know they might be flaky they might be professional or who knows but it feels really like this show particularly leaned against that and uh gretchen corbett

responded to that in a good way yeah that was a good a good pairing of role and and performer for sure yeah i think we went over all the uh things we really liked yeah again just the sense of like here's this great idea and then i felt like the idea itself wasn't as great as he thought it was i do want to say like i absolutely appreciate the idea like i love these kind of quirky they are to me more interesting than if it was like some invented new way to kill someone and you had to figure out. Or it is more interesting than like just sheer like jilted lover revenge. Right. Yeah. And it does feel very Rockford to be built around this kind of quirk in the law or bureaucracy. Yeah, that's true. I wonder if this would have been better as that like two hour TV

movie than as an hour files episode to kind of tease out that weird tangle a little bit more, but I might also just be hung up on it. It is a super fun episode and it's great to see Beth and Jim get their start. Yeah. Speaking of starting, perhaps we will wrap up this segment of our show before we go to our second half. Emily, is there anything that our listeners should know about you or your work or upcoming projects? Sure. You can find my games at blackgreengames.com, including the Romance Trilogy that I mentioned before and a bunch of other games that I've written or worked on. a bunch of other games that I've written or worked on. And also this coming year,

I am chair of a conference happening in May in the Boston area called the Living Games Conference. And it's focused on LARP, but it's going to be an international gathering of people talking about and playing and learning about a wide variety of different styles of play, including LARP. And also we'll pull in related fields like interactive theater, ARGs, tabletop. There's information about that at livinggamesconference.com. I hope some folks might think about coming and joining us. Right on. Excellent. Highly recommended. All of those things. Hopefully you'll also all stick

around for our second half where we go into how these relationships and ways of constructing exciting action scenes, give us tools to steal for our own work. Yay. 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 worldwide wrestling role-playing

game. If you want to see my newest stuff, check out the playtest page. That's where I have free downloads of all my fun new projects. Thanks yet again for listening. As always, we deeply appreciate your support. And with that, back to the show. Welcome back to 200 a day. This is the second portion of the show where we talk about the lessons we may have learned while watching this particular episode and how to apply those lessons to our own narratives and fictions that we write and design. So we're going to start with our guest here, Emily, Emily Kerbos. What would you like to talk about? What are some lessons that you've pulled from this here? One of the most central pieces of this particular episode partly because it's such an early episode from rockford was taking a character who is essential to the plot

and then building them into a character that's interesting enough to carry you through in this case multiple seasons of the show yeah so i thought we could maybe talk about how they did that with beth and really one of the things that Rockford always does, in my opinion, is they draw their supporting or their temporary characters really strongly. You know, we know immediately who Beth is, both from how she acts with Jim and how Becker talks about her. We get a sense of the class differences, the experience differences, and also that she's really devoted to helping people who don't have a lot of resources.

But the way it plays out with her is that there's this dynamic where she tries to pull Jim in, and he and she end up having lots of negotiations about how that's going to function. I like how, as a character, because if we know treating this as the first time that we see beth she's like a certain venn diagram with different aspects of rockford's character right yeah there's certain things that that kind of apply to both of them and there's certain ways that they're opposites may not opposites but they have conflict over and that's what creates their dynamic relationship so like they both have empathy for the downtrodden which is expressed in slightly different ways i think but they share that they both have this kind the downtrodden, which is expressed in slightly different ways, I think, but they share that. They both have this kind of super attenuated sense of money and owing people and getting compensated for your work.

But they have the class difference of their backgrounds about money and how much they have in their lives, it seems. And then they have different kind of opinions about the law and when it's appropriate to interface with or skirt around or play with the law. Maybe somewhere to start is like kind of that if you have your central character or your protagonists bringing in someone who you intend to be a long running participant in that dynamic, there's stuff that you share and there's also stuff that you need to be able to fight over, right? Right. She also matches well, sort of in a skills suite, if that makes sense. Because earlier you talked about the trifecta of Jim, Becker, and Beth. And she's the attorney.

So she sort of bridges the gap between Jim's skills and the official police. She's another really interesting note that fits beautifully into the PI genre. And it's great that she ends up being this person who has her own agenda, her own desires. You know, she wants to help the downtrodden, but in a different way from Jim. And she's got a history with him, which eventually turns into, again,

an active relationship between the two characters. Spoilers. Well, the history part, I really think, is like the crux of the lesson that I could pull away from this. So if we just threw all of the Rockford Files episodes into a hopper and pulled them out at random, and we ended up watching this one, I would never have guessed that this was the first Beth episode. This episode, the way it plays out is as if she already has the relationship with Rockford that we will then see play out in future episodes. That of itself is fine, but what I think is really neat is how all the things that you were saying

before, Emily, about establishing all these narrative hooks that you're going to hang the relationship on underneath the assumption that it already exists, it's a neat exercise to just be like, hey, let's just pretend that these characters know each other and not go through the process of having to show how all of these things started up, but just showing how they operate in their day-to-day life with these things happening. Well, then you build on that, right? Whether it's a role-playing game or it's fiction that you're writing, where that opening place gives you an ability to later on go,

oh yeah, I remember this is like that time when you bailed on me at dinner or something like that. Right. Or had an argument about something that's similar. So that you can then layer on top through the characters past so that in the future of the narrative, you're able to reach back in and say, oh, well, this element here ties back into something that never existed in the narrative before, but that it has the legitimacy and it has depth for these characters because you're locating it in the past. There's something i really appreciate with how uh the rockford files does this in particular because i feel like they use this

technique a lot of introducing a character you've never seen before but referring to the history that they have usually with jim whether it's because they were in jail together or they ran a con together or they had a romantic relationship but the details or the specifics of those relationships they're either very vague. Like in this case, it's actually pretty vague. Like we just know that they had something and it kind of implies through the context that some of them were legal and some of them were personal. I love the implication that the personal is extra legal. Some of the things they did were legal, according to the law. Well, you see, it was an unwritten law.

Yeah. I think that's good for doing it that way for a character that you then are going to have in more and more episodes, I think is probably good. Because the past can then be this eternal well of new things. If you ever need to refer to something else in their past, like you haven't blocked out certain elements or, or pin down everything. And then sometimes what the show does is there's some very specific reason that Rockford knows the person. Like I'm thinking here of hotel of fear,

where there's the guy in the park, the guy who deals in stolen guns and, but he hates the pigeons. They establish that both with all these weird character details, the guy in the park the guy who deals with stolen guns and but he hates the pigeons they establish that uh both with all these weird character details but also they have a couple lines about the last time that rockford needed to talk to him about a gun thing and that's so specific that it's like well of course rockford needs to have those kinds of people in his life right but if that guy came back in every episode it would become like a kind of one note.

But in that one moment that they needed him for the story, using this very defined reason that they had a history together, created an interesting character in that moment. While in this case with Beth, it's like they could refer to all kinds of stuff that they've had a history about. And it would all kind of fit as long as it worked in with their dynamic. The story we're not telling here, right? Like the story that they don't do for Beth's first story is not the one where Rockford solves the murder of Beth's brother. What's happening is Beth, in the course of her work, has come across somebody who can't pay but needs a PI.

And we learn as we watch the very beginning of this episode that this is not the first time that this has happened. And she gets Rockford involved and it plays out probably how it's played out in previous times. But what's kind of great about that is then it preserves that feeling of continuum, right? This isn't the very special Beth episode. And we will actually get a couple very special Beth episodes. We've already done one. A Portrait of Elizabeth. Which is a 200 day favorite. I really appreciate that. Although Beth is like a main character in this

episode, this isn't like a turning point in Beth's life anymore than it's a turning point in Rockford's life. And I think that that's good. It's not overly dramatic or melodramatic. Yeah. It just, she enters as a person with competence and connection and she exits the same way. And then she comes back in. It's a kind of a light touch, right? Where the show was centered on Rockford. So like kind of by definition, most of the plots center on Rockford, but that doesn't mean that everyone else in the episode also centers Rockford as their focus. Beth actually is centering her client. That's like why she's in this story is because of her client and because of her empathy for Anne. It's not to give Rockford a job or to reflect his greatness back at him or something like that.

Though, I mean, there's a lot of greatness to reflect, don't get me wrong. No, no, no. I think that that's a really critical thing because there's a lot of greatness to reflect, don't get me wrong. No, no, no. I think that that's a really critical thing because there's a lot of shows, there's a common thread in many narratives with characters like Rockford who solve mysteries or solve situations for people where there's a lot of reflected glory back. And the people in the story obviously appreciate Ruckert for his skills, but they're doing it because they need him or because they know him and they know they can trust him. Or because they're his friends like Becker and they just can't get him out of the office soon enough. But, you know, Ruckert has to find his way through all of this. Nothing's handed to him and he's not some larger than life glorious person. He's just a guy with some skills. larger than like glorious person he's just a guy with some skills um so that just adds like i don't know the the verisimilitude of their relationship if you will uh that they still have a dynamic

that's not just the work dynamic also and it's not just the romantic dynamic and it's it's the combination of all of them i think that there's some uh fun concrete ways that that can be deliberately done right like if you feel as you're writing or if you're playing a game and you feel a character becoming as important as Beth, the advice I would give is to stop and take a moment and figure out like why you're feeling that way and what you can do to just lay that foundation before you move on so that you can do what they did with this episode, give us a character so that the next time this character comes up,

you're not like, hey, we really like this character, so we're just bringing them back. We don't remember what it is we liked about this character. We don't remember what it is about the relationship that worked out. I've got a game example that reminded me, that I was reminded of by uh maybe when you're talking about the venn diagrams of overlap and difference between uh beth and jim in shooting the moon yeah romance uh love triangle game the way you made the characters is first you start with the the beloved which is the person at the center of the triangle

that two other people are trying to you know become. And you figure out what's interesting about them to all the players, and everybody's making these characteristics together. And they're derived from what are characteristics that would be desirable in the setting. So if it's a sci-fi fantasy, maybe they're an amazing pilot. And then when you make the other characters, you actually spin off aspects of that main character and then give them to the two suitors. And then also the players take turns giving aspects that are actually opposed to the characteristics that are the beloved so that you have differences and overlap and weaknesses and strengths that the players can all play on. And that's just one very specific structural way to do it when you're building a role-playing game character. But that kind of concept of the overlap and the differences, I think, is a really fruitful

one in terms of thinking about how you mesh people. I was actually thinking about that very same game. And I wasn't thinking about it in terms of the love triangle that's in that game uh because i don't see that present in this story but the characters having these traits that are related to each other and i think nathan was saying stuff about this earlier and i was thinking about the gun when um rockford gets home and rocky has the gun on him and then we learn just through a little throwaway line of dialogue that it's not registered. It's not,

it's not a legal gun. So here's a moment where Jim is absolutely willing to break the law. And then later on, we have the whole scene where Beth pulls the keys in the car to get Jim to do something illegal that he's not comfortable doing these two traits would be just like a uh sorry shooting the moon traits like related shooting the moon traits where they're both illegal activities or quasi legal activities that uh the two characters share uh but they're clearly the same kind of trait but they're not they're not seeing each other as having that same trait.

Jim's like, oh, I've got a gun and I, you know, it's not registered, but I am definitely going to go and tell the cops this. I'm not going to hold this secret back. They're filtered through the relationship with the person and that kind of highlights and connects them. And there's another kind of trait in Shooting the Moon that relates to this, where you give the character a trait and then kind of highlights and connects them and there's another kind of trait in shooting the moon that relates to this where you give the character a trait and then you modify it so you say like say you're talking about jim and you say willing to break the law is his trait and then you modify it by saying but only to a point or uh in ways that aren't going to hurt anybody or um for a specific altruistic reason or or to protect himself you know like

you you say this is the thing that i'm willing to do or that's this character has but then you change it slightly and that means that in some circumstances it's going to uh be okay like to have the gun but then if you go beyond it and you're like wait a minute i'm going to be crossing the police then you've crossed a line and you can't go there. Yeah, definitely. Should we talk about the chase? Yeah, let's talk about chase. We talked about the chase a lot in the blow by blow.

One of the things that I was just really impressed with about how it was constructed in this visual narrative, that it was really excitingly presented. There's the visual contrast of the small car and the big truck. There's so many close-ups of their faces. And also just the way that it's shot, you're getting the feel of the speed and the pressure of the two cars against one another. And there's no special effects here. That's another nice thing about it. It's just cars on the road.

Another chase that it reminded me of was the Casino Royale chase with a Daniel Craig version of that James Bond movie. In the very beginning of the film, there's a parkour chase where they're going up a construction site. And the stakes are low. They're not like jumping from a plane in the middle of the sky or skiing down a mountain. But there's this constant sense of frailty of Daniel Craig's body because he can't do the crazy things that the other guy can do. And so it's just a matter of what he's willing to do. And in this chase, Rockford, what Effie talked about earlier was that you're seeing the gas gauge and you have a sense

of what the economy of what the resources are. And I guess Mad Max Fury Road did that really well too, where you have a really good sense of what on these trucks the people have ability to affect in order to get just a little bit farther ahead of the people that are chasing them.

And it all matters. And it all builds the tension in a really visceral kind of way. For the sake of discussion, all of those use the visual of watching it on a screen to create a lot of that tension and to communicate all that information. So if you're working in a medium that's verbal

primarily or the written word, how do we translate some of those concepts? Because the camera does so much work in this scene to establish how much danger Rockford is in. How do you create that kind of thrilling sense of danger without having the camera? There's a neat trick that I think that they were using in the first chase where it's a long one. And chases we think of as things where you get your heart rate up and this is going to be like an exciting thing. And when they don't hit well, they can go on too long. And you could just be like, yeah, we get it. You're trying to get away.

But why this one worked, I think, is that at every given moment, instead of escaping the truck, we had something right in front of us that needed to get dealt with. something right in front of us that needed to get dealt with. It's the moment where the truck is coming up behind them. And in the very beginning where we don't really know what the truck is up to, or at least Rockford doesn't know that the truck is even up to anything until it puts the pressure on. But then we get going uphill and maybe you're losing some speed or you go around and you have to go off road and you lose your traction and you can't go forward anymore and we have the tension between if you can get out of there before the truck does or you get stuck behind a sedan this is a chase but it's actually a sequence of uh physical challenges yeah yeah there's there's like a sequence of small obstacles. And the obstacles aren't just jump over this or something like that.

They're like, here's a tiny chase puzzle to solve. Here's your situation here. What are you going to do about it? You don't have to be a genius to solve them. You don't have to like, ha ha, I'll do this or whatever. What you're doing is you're just bringing the stakes close to the moment rather than this kind of far away thing. And so if you're writing it, I think you can kind of present that. Although I think if I were writing it, I would want to have something else going on somewhere else to cut to

in between these different digestible sizes of chase. Or I would just list all the things and just get it done in one sentence, one breathless chase. I think there's a couple of different angles to take on that. Looking at an example of a story that uses character interactions to put the pressure in, it's a nice break. Because if you have, like in Mad Max Fury Road, the characters within the cab actually fighting over how many guns and bullets they have, or who's going to risk their selves and put their life on the line in order to give them just that needed break and distraction so that they can get away. It means that you're thinking about the tension of the mechanical objects. And then also you're having this narrative relief of having characters that you care about taking personal actions. And I think that that will vary up the narrative enough so that you don't just feel like, okay, it's another procedural step. It's another procedural step.

I think it's notable that we talked about this sequence as one that we liked, even though it was long and narrative-less, because normally you would get bored by that. So it's a testament to how well they did with the visual elements of this chase that they were able to bring us along. And I thought of a couple of games that do these things in different, not necessarily about chases. Yeah, good. One of which is World Wide Wrestling, actually.

Ah. When I think about wrestling, right, it's like the most boring thing in the world if it's just somebody hits somebody, they're doing sort of the same movements that everybody does. What matters is how they do it, when they do it in surprise, or when they can telegraph that they're going to do it so they get the crowd all whipped up.

And what you do in worldwide wrestling is using the commentator and the mechanics that you have to make that interesting. So there's something in wrestling that I think does apply to this particular way of looking at a chase, which is you create an expectation and then you either fulfill it or you deny it. Right. And that's what creates the rise and fall of tension during a match. In this chase is kind of similar where we see Rockford mashing the pedal and we see this his speed not going up and that creates an expectation, right? He's going to get overtaken by this car or by this truck. But then they hit an incline

and he manages to get just far enough away and he's in a lighter car. So that expectation is then denied. We don't get to see the truck catch up to him. But then he comes around the bend and we see this other car that's in the way. there's going to be another car that's going to create a way for for him to get out of the at least i thought like oh now he can get out of this by just following this car because this other guy isn't going to want to kill him when there's a witness right yeah that happens in lots of things but no then that's denied by they both honk and swerve to get around the similar car so they can continue the chase they pass that car on both sides right like yeah the most obnoxious way to pass a car yeah and terrifying yeah yeah so that kind of rhythm of like set up something and then see which way it goes set up something and

then fulfill it set up something and then deny it. That creates the ebb and flow within the scene. And I think in this one, if you were maybe writing it, what you could actually do is have Rockford, have Elliot, you know, have some point of view stuff from Elliot driving the cab. Because you see him get frustrated. You see him try to outwit what Rockford is doing. Yeah. Even though he's in a larger, less nimble vehicle.

And then what about whoever's in that third car that has no idea what's going on? And these crazies just swoop up on them. That's actually a really tension-filled moment for that person. And we didn't need that point of view on screen, obviously. Right. But if you're writing it or playing it out at the table

and you're cutting back and forth between the two people in the chase and the one person who doesn't know that they're in the chase yet i feel like that could be a way to uh to add a little more dynamic kind of back and forth to the flow of the narrative what i would love there is for that person to then after all the chase and everything, pull into that gas station. Yeah. Just want to tell the attendant about it. And the attendant is just like, I cannot deal with another one of you today.

It occurred to me that the other technique you use in worldwide wrestling to tighten it up is the commentator, which, of course, comes straight from wrestling. But when you think about races that people watch, they're full of commentation. And that's the way that you layer on narrative and tension by giving someone, having somebody who's informed, give voice to what's happening. So people aren't just squinting at the track, but they know this person's ahead or, you know, this person's coming up or or this horse is in the lead or even sports commentary like football in particular not that i watch a ton of football but like the pace of it compared to the commentary like the commentary is carrying a lot of the weight of keeping people interested

in what's happening because the actual action is so is in such tight bounds you have someone bringing up all the stuff about the players and their pasts and their schools and ephemera about them that isn't actually about the game that's happening yeah yeah i mean i think in a lot of games uh like if you're running a game and there is a chase if there's a single gm in this game a lot of the time they take on that job that's true calling the action right um you do mechanical things and they kind of translate that into the narrative. So if you want to steal that technique, you know, you just make someone else have that job and they can be in charge of putting together the pieces to create that flowing narrative while everyone else is concerned with mechanical things or pithy one-liners or whatever the other things are in your game. Yeah.

I think we've talked about this every time we've talked about a car chase in Rockford, but the situational awareness and having things around the chase that Rockford takes advantage of is also very strong in this. Terrain matters. Yeah. It's a fairly featureless area, but it's very much the terrain, where there's dirt versus pavement, where it falls off into a cliff versus where the road is uh and then he gets away by finding that bridge yeah he takes his smaller

size as an advantage uh to get away so the other game i wanted to call out is um yusaki ojimbo adaptation done by um sanguine oh yeah it has a really good way of modeling the the mood dimensions and the interactions between actors in a fight and just what feels so good about that is that it you really care about whether somebody's scared or whether they can take the next action and the choices that you've made about how your character interacts with a military or a fight situation can change the way the action plays out. So in terms of thinking about chases, you know, it mattered that it was a Mack truck. Rocky was right. It mattered that it was a Mack truck or, you know, or the tiny little car in the final chase it made a difference to us watching and but but there's textual information there and it feels different depending on what they're chasing

in and what the relationship is and also like in one jim's the chaser and when he's the chasee it's a totally different dynamic as well yeah we see we see elliot being the like grim-faced like i'm gonna kill this guy to protect my interests. And then his panicked, oh my God, how am I going to get out of this one? And it's also really great that that's on the tail end of him taking some pot shots at Rockford. So he has a gun. Yeah. He just ends up killing someone with that gun.

What has changed this status was just rockford's willingness to run after him and uh when he does that it changes everything and that is a great beat in a story like the thing i'm calls to my mind is that scene in uh tombstone uh if you've seen that movie where uh wyatt erp you know they're pinned down and then he just stands up and just starts walking out with a gun, just shouting no. It's just a great moment where just having somebody behave in a way that the other character didn't expect change that character's situation and dynamic so swiftly.

It's good stuff. And I think that brings us to maybe the last big thing we want to talk about, which was how this episode does a good job with tonal shifts. Because that's a story beat. That's also a tonal shift from let's find out more about what's going on to let's chase this guy down and the threat of danger to us. Yeah. It happened a couple of times with Beth and Jim bickering

and then going into a situation of extreme danger, which kind of like cuts through all the bulls**t, immediately preceding the car chase, or rather not the car chase, but where they're driving in his car and the brakes have been tampered with. And then the final sequence where they're going to where they end up seeing

this dead body. And it's a technique that it's really helpful in a lot of ways, because if you just have one tone for a work, it gets really heavy or it gets too light. It's, it's, it's just like having multiple tastes in a meal. You want to have multiple feels in a film and uh also having comedy uh immediately preceding

darkness or danger it enhances the surprise for the viewer or the reader because they are just going along just like the characters and then boom this thing happens it means you're you're not guarded you're open to whatever might happen. So it might enhance the fear or whatever the suspenseful reaction is. And then of course, maybe think of Swords Without Master, which with the tone dice, it makes it a central element of having the narrative shift. And it's like, now how I see it is, it's a springboard, you know, because you're improvising this narrative in the game,

but you're having the tonal shifts help inform what's going to happen. And then you even in the game, and I'm sure we could see this play out in the game, but you're having the tonal shifts help inform what's going to happen. And then you even in the game, and I'm sure we could see this play out in the show, you have contrasts between one character who is in one tone and the rest of the scene that's in another. One thing with the tones that is also kind of good is that you use the tonal shift as a punctuation. So you want it to happen when you want a shift in the story as well right like you're not jumping back and forth in the same scene here right like during none of these chase sequences that we just spent a lot of time talking about there's no like a gag

in the middle of the chase sequence but we have this really dramatic opening to this whole story where the rescue vehicles are showing up at a fire and the body is taken out and the woman is crying out and she's crying out no. And that just cuts to Jim saying, no, I'm not going to take this case, which is a joke, but it doesn't ruin what just happened. It just resets us for the discussion we're about to have. This is the next step in the story. You don't have to shift the tone every time you go to the next step. When you do, you're making a big statement. Yeah. You're saying, yeah, chapter two. Something different is happening now. In that transition specifically, it's very much telling the audience,

you're going to get a little bit of both of these yeah it feels weird when it's serious for the first two thirds and then there's a comedic yeah like that is kind of a weird shift or it's a comedic episode we've had we've done a couple episodes where it's been relatively comedic and then the very last scene is a big down note even if it's like a satisfying end of the story it does feel like a strange tone shift yeah when it's the only one or it's like a satisfying end of the story, it does feel like a strange tone shift when it's the only one or it's counterweighting the entire rest of the episode. So in this case, I think it's not just that the tone shifts, it's that the frequency and pace of those shifts is good. Like it has a nice rhythm to it. You get the serious, then you go into some comedic stuff. So you know you're going to get both.

You get the serious, then you go into some comedic stuff. So you know, you're going to get both, but then each scene kind of knows what it is and saves the shift. Like you were both saying, either as the punctuation at the end or as the springboard for, you know, for the next one, that's going to be different. Yeah, absolutely. All right. Well, I think we've explored most of the strongest things from this episode.

Is there anything else anyone wants to make mention of before we wrap up our first guest appearance here on 200 a day? I would like to thank our first guest for joining us on 200 a day. Thank you, Emily. And I'd also like to thank our patrons for making it possible for us to have our guests. Thank you so much for having me. It was a blast. possible for us to have our guests. Thank you so much for having me. It was a blast. It's such a pleasure to watch Rockford Files. It was really neat to get to delve into it more deeply with you and to share my thoughts about that and other games and fiction and stuff. Well, yeah, thanks so much for joining us. It's excellent to talk to you, of course, and also to get your thoughts on the episode.'s super fun again uh if you're

interested in anything that emily has mentioned check out her work at blackgreengames.com and the living games conference which uh is coming up in you said march uh may 2018 in the boston area so interested in interact in doing the interactive version of any of this stuff uh then you're going to want to check that out. I think, well, this time we're going to have to split our 200 a day three ways, but I think that's okay. Oh, that's tough. Oh, that is really tough. We're going to have a guy with a penny left over. Hey, what about if the case comes out all right, then you can pay me. Sounds good. Sounds good to me. All right. Well well hopefully the case will come out all right and uh either way we will be back next time to talk about another episode of the rockford files