Two Hundred A Day - Episode 28: Local Man Eaten by Newspaper

Episode Date: February 25, 2018

Nathan and Eppy discuss S5E12 Local Man Eaten by Newspaper. Jim goes undercover at a scandal rag to figure out why his client, a doctor to the famous, has been burgled; meanwhile, a local mob boss is facing pressure from inside the family due to rumors spread by that very newspaper. This episode features two separate storylines that intertwine as the pressure mounts on each side, focusing on the increasing dissolution of Natalie, the woman driving her husband Augie to take over the mob family. This episode doesn't give us as much Rockford as usual but it paints a compelling portrait of the villains of the piece, making it a compelling episode of television and giving us a lot to talk about in our second half! 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.

Sonny, this message ain't for you. It's for me. I just want to remind myself to pick up the big ladder at the paint mart. Welcome to 200 A Day, a podcast where we explore the 70s television detective show, The Rockford Files. I'm Nathan Palletta. And I am Epidio Ravishaw. And today we are diving into the seedy underbelly of the gossip rag business. Yes. Season five, episode 12, Local Man Eaten by Newspaper, which is one of my favorite Rockford titles. Yeah, this season has a lot of good titles.

Yeah. And this is one of them. We mentioned this in our first season five episode, which was White on White and Nearly perfect, that this is the season where Stephen Cannell was like, we're an established show. We've won an Emmy. We're going into syndication. We can start being weirder. So a lot of the episodes, like the titles are a little more weird. Some of the premises are a little more high concept. But this particular episode, I think, is less so on that meter. It's closer to your mythical standard Rockford episode in some ways. Right. Although I would point out that one of the things that's going on in this episode is that it's a story about the villains

almost as much as it's a Rockford story, which I think is an interesting, playful way to do this particular episode. So this one was written by Juanita Bartlett and directed by Meta Rosenberg. Nice. And that was kind of why we picked this one was on the credits alone. Yeah. I had actually confused this with a different episode

in terms of the plot. So I really didn't remember how this one went down. So that was nice. That was a nice little journey to go on. But yeah, no huge guest stars or anything like that in this one. Just a straightforward assemblage of experienced TV character actors for the most part. And a bunch of our favorites reprising all their roles as our various friends of Jim Rockford. It's also like, well, maybe not more so than a typical Rockford

Files episode, but it has a healthy helping of goons, of apes, of gorillas. That's what I'm looking for. We're going to deal with the mob in several different ways. And this is lots of Rockford Files mob outfits and attitudes. In a lot of ways, the mob is kind of a central rockford conceit that i wouldn't put on a big list necessarily yeah but i do feel whenever an episode involves the mob it feels like a rockford episode it's a little more comfortable um as kind of the general utility bad guy uh setup but uh speaking of setups how did you feel about this uh this preview montage murder um this is a good one i was thinking about the montage because there's a part in it where they have a nice joke a little juxtaposition here where uh becker says to jim

they're just a gossip rag do you think they'd try to rub someone out? Or I can't even remember what the phrase was. You think they're going to go blowing people away, I think is what the phrase was. And then they cut to Rockford being shot at from, uh, from a car and, um, lots of good action cuts in it. No, I enjoyed it. Um, yeah, it seems like it's going to be an action-packed kind of episode. Yeah.

What I think is slightly more interesting is Rocky's method for working his calendar. I like the idea that Rocky, for whatever reason, finds it more helpful to leave messages on Jim's answering machine than to call his own. Though I don't think it's ever established if he has an answering machine. Right. He might not. Yeah, he probably doesn't actually. That's... Yeah, because that's one of the things Jim's answering machine at the time that

this was before everyone just had them. That was because he was a PI whose business required a little more communication than normal. So yeah, Rocky's probably just taking advantage of his technology uh the tone of his voice in the beginning is rare for rocky and it felt a little bit like he was scolding jim so this message ain't for you i feel like there's a an argument somewhere where where they've talked about this, don't fill up my answering machine with your own business. Maybe this will just go into our headcanon of their relationship because as we've established in the past,

most of these answering machine messages were off the cuff and pretty much like, oh, we need to come up with something for this week. 200 a Day is supported by all of our listeners, but especially our gumshoes. For this episode, we say thank you to John Adamas, the writer next door. Find his go-to resources for

storytellers and creatives who want to tell better stories at writernextdoor.com. Mike Gillis, a host of the Radio vs. the Martians podcast, the McLaughlin Group for nerds, radiovsthemartians.com. Kevin Lovecraft, part of the Wednesday Evening Podcast All-Stars Actual Play Podcast, found at MisdirectedMark.com. Lowell Francis with his award-winning gaming blog at 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 kick off

our experience of Local Man Eaten by Newspaper with an exciting newspaper montage where we see the the printing press going we see uh editorial stuff happening the pasting up and the cutting and editing and stuff like that circling of things credits roll over the uh over this montage and then we come into the newspaper office where we see our your friend and mine jim rockford walking in and we shortly learn that he is undercover he is in a role as a newspaper reporter originally from

pittsburgh named hanley he's going in to see the editor of this particular paper the national investigator which is a a thinly veiled national inquirer stand-in. Rockford, as Hanley, is being slightly reprimanded by the editor of the paper over his killer bees story. Killer bees are passe. No one cares about killer bees. And we get a little lecture setting out the philosophy of this paper. Like I said, it's a gossip rag. It's a if-it-bleeds-it-leads kind of operation. They want stories with a high grab

value like this one, a 14 year old girl who fought off a Kodiak bear. One thing I enjoy about his high grab value is he's listing off the things they're competing against. And he's like TV, movies, and at the end of the list, newspapers. Yeah. Which is like a clear indication that this editor doesn't categorize his own newspaper as a newspaper, right? Like he's in competition with newspapers

in the same way that a magazine would be in competition with novels. Yeah. And I also like the little glimpse of there's always a saturated media environment, right? It's kind of the same set of pressures that, you know, newspapers today are competing with. Cell phones, web pages, IRC. Their challenge is dealing with AOL Instant Messenger.

Rockford, as Hanley, takes these research materials for this story about the 14-year-old girl fighting off Kodiak Bear and goes back out into the press room and kind of overhears another reporter talking on the phone, clearly trying to bribe someone for some kind of information. Yeah. Before we jump into that, I do want to mention the stink eye Rockford gets when he comes out of the office, because there is another reporter whose fashion is much like my own today um but he is going through this narrow doorway at the same time that rockford's coming out and he is glaring at him we'll find out why in a moment but when when i first started watching this episode

it hadn't occurred to me that he had a reason to i had thought that this is just a weird character this is the kind of crazy person that works at this sort of newspaper. But we'll find out that there's a reason. This episode does a good job of visually telegraphing things, I think. And this is the first of those moments where when the thing happens, you realize that's why that shot was there. Yeah. Which is nice. But yeah, so Rockford, after this other reporter hangs up, starts complaining about how he needs leads.

He needs leads for bigger stories, not this silly 14-year-old fights off bear kind of stuff. Right. But since he's from Pittsburgh, he doesn't know anyone. And he gets the other guy talking about all these front page people, these celebrities and actors and whatnot have. They all have money. And so look at the money managers. And he uses this to lead into, doctors, right? What about their medical stuff? And he has a line about published shares last physical and circulation will go up four to 5 million overnight. As true

then as it is now. Yeah, I was thinking about this because I mean, not being an actual lawyer, I don't know. But I feel like this part of the investigation would approach entrapment, right? If it were actually conducted by police officers, like suggesting the crime, because he's clearly trying to see if this reporter who's willing to bribe someone for a story, who's willing to bend their ethics that way, is also willing to engage in this other type of crime. But he's literally suggesting the crime to him. Nathan here. Unfortunately, we had a bit of a audio corruption issue and lost a couple minutes of our show right here.

When we come back in, it is after our good friend Rockford's cover has been blown by the man in the ugly suit who gave him the stink eye earlier. And the publisher, Mr. Wipbeck, has called for the proofreader to deal with him. So we will drop back in with Eppie telling us about the proofreader.

The proofreader, well, has a nice liberal arts degree, an MA in writing. He has the Chicago Manual of Style memorized backwards and forwards. And is probably at least one, maybe one and a half heads taller than Rockford. James Garner is six,

six, two or something like that. This guy's like six, eight. He is big. Uh, but you have to be to rub out mistakes like that, right?

Like, yeah, I just, I love that little detail. And the proofreader literally tosses rockford out the door like hand on collar hand on seat of the pants like a cartoon yeah and then we cut to our our second plot yes so we have plot a with jim cut to it's not not a b plot in the sense of secondary but just in the sense of there's two threads that are going to intertwine so now we get to our the first scene for our second thread a lot of this scene makes sense

in retrospect because you don't really learn who a lot of the people are including their names until later scenes so to summarize we have johnny we have good names we have johnny we have Johnny. We have good names. We have Johnny. We have Vincent. We have Augie. We have Natalie. We have Margaret. Leo. This is a mob family, which becomes very clear as we go. It's Rockford Files mob too. Maybe that's what I want to say. It's the kind of mob in the late seventies with the unbuttoned shirt. This is beach Mob. That's what I want to see. They're not from Chicago, and they're not from New Jersey. This is Beachside, LA, local mob. Yeah, SoCal mob.

That's what this is. SoCal, yeah. So Johnny is the main guy. He's the head honcho. He's extremely tan, and he's kind of the center of the dynamic, which is actually spelled out really well by how all the incidental stuff of the scene. Oh, yeah. So his his squeeze, whoever, whatever their relationship is, this woman, Margaret, had a cameo appearance in some schlocky film.

And so he's setting up this whole screening just to to show the five seconds of her appearance over and over again i i read it as this kind is this kind of symbolic we're gonna get in with the real fancy people now right this is the first in to like hanging out with the movie stars the enthusiasm is well beyond what is warranted and uh she tries to play it down a little bit like oh it's, it's just a small role. And he goes, they call those cameos. Yeah. And throughout the filming of it, the loyalties of everybody involved is very clear. Yeah. Obviously, Johnny is in charge.

And because she's with Johnny, everyone is talking about how amazing her performance is. Right. This film starts with the camera on her feet as she's walking through a graveyard. I'm not sure. It seems like it's supposed to be some sort of scary thriller. And people are like, are those your feet? Breathless. Yeah.

Even this is great. In my notes, I said that everyone wants a curry favor with Johnny. Right. Yeah. And the route to do that is complimenting Margaret. Everyone that is other than Natalie, who is our oppositional figure so margaret is this young blonde uh ingenue type natalie is a little older has some more wear and tear on her i think is how she's presented and she's lying on this couch on the other side with a strand of pearls clearly distanced from

everyone else and then augie is coming over and trying to get her to say something nice yeah uh everyone's noticing that you're not with the party yeah you know come over here say something nice be part of the group and she's like it's like i don't have anything nice to say yeah yeah so this is all setting up this this dynamic of johnny everyone is there to do what johnny wants natalie doesn't like johnny yeah thinks he's doing things wrong and augie's caught in the middle because augie is married to natalie but related to johnny it's a little unclear he works he works for johnny and then there's also some familial stuff that's a little hazy you get a very mcbeth lady mcbeth vibe from uh natalie in this in

this scene and you'll get more of it later on too but like her intentions become very clear that she yeah is going to use augie to to gain power over uh the family here there's no hemming and hawing around this the audience is let in on this particular concern right away. Yeah. She has some lines about how Johnny's been making mistakes of some kind. Yeah. Augie says something about how that newspaper prints lies. Everyone knows that. So we get the first reference to the newspaper. But Vincent, who is another one of the lieutenants, essentially, he doesn't think they're lies. He's going to make a move.

Yeah. The causal stuff here is what will be revealed later in the episode. Right. So this is all, this is all meant to whet your appetite and be like, Ooh, what's going on? Where,

where is this all going to come together? Which I think it does effectively. Yeah. It whets your appetite and it gives you a very clear understanding of the pressures. You don't get the reason you don't get what she's talking about like so much it has something to do with the paper maybe uh but you do get the pressures here you know that she is pushing augie to try and to and to take over uh johnny's position or somehow challenge johnny

yeah she's inferring that if augie doesn't do it, Vincent will do it. Right. So you can see what her desires are. You infer her motivation, but you don't see her opportunity yet. It isn't quite spelled out yet why Johnny might be at risk. Right. Why this is a good time to do it. It's just indicated that it is. That that paper is publishing lies that... That somehow make johnny vulnerable yes

this is also where she talks about how she's prayed for guidance um and we'll see more about her praying uh as we go that's how she knows that this is the time because saint lucy talks to her she i think she mentions a couple different saints over the course of the episode but yeah uh part of this is also about um this is just a reference that we both appreciated which was freshette so she was at one point involved with a freshette which may or may not be related to marty freshette from uh chicken little is a little chicken uh that's right i think is maybe the Rockford file episode. We point back to that episode more often than any other episode. And she's using that as leverage against Augie as well.

It's like, well, for Shet would have done it. And Augie's like, you said you wouldn't bring him up again. And yeah, for Shet is the gardener, right?

The urban horticulturalist. Yes. Okay. That's Marty for Shet. Tony for Shet, we don, right? The urban horticulturalist. Yes. Okay. That's Marty Frechette. Tony Frechette, we don't know. Could have been a florist. We go from here back to Rockford. He's in his trailer reading a copy of the National Investigator with a wonderful headline of dog pays over $500,000 in Texas.

He gets a phone call. It's the client who he was was actually working for for this whole newspaper thing who's a doctor of some kind his office was burglarized and he wants to talk to rockford but not over the phone so this is just to give us that context for rockford going to meet dr richard hagins at his office Higgins does not want the police involved because no one ever wants the police involved. Because it turns out that he is a doctor to the stars. The break-in has made him nervous

and I guess his clients wouldn't like it if the police start poking around, which I guess makes sense. It's a confidentiality thing. He just doesn't want it to be in the papers because if it's in the papers, then it'll scare away his clients. Right so so this break-in was the original reason why he hired rockford was to find out who and why and and whatnot um how that led to the paper we actually

find out later but for now he wants rockford to check his like filing system and see if it's secure because he paid a bunch of money for it and wants to make sure it's it's correct they go in to to take a look and there are two guys poking around at the filing the filing cabinets i sometimes have trouble with faces and i didn't realize that i had just seen these guys yeah no i'm with you i i had the thought in my head were these the guys we just saw but like in the previous scene with all of the mob family there were five or six men and they were almost all close-ups like they're almost all on people's head or head and shoulders now i know who they are obviously but like and the other thing i wanted to say about this there is this

moment before they go in there when the doctor says, oh, the cleaning staff left the lights on or somebody left the lights on again. And Rockford's like, don't go in there. And he just goes in. Yeah. So nobody listens to Rockford. Right. Here's the thing. I wrote in my notes specifically, when the apocalypse comes, I want Rockford on my side.

Right. We've spent so much time in so much fiction following heroes making bad choices. Rockford's thing is that his bad choice is to work with other people. Like that is it. Rockford keeps making the smart, safe choices and people just blunder their way into problems and bring it down on him. And this is one of those cases where you don't really expect that from a doctor,

but you should because that doctor is already saying, don't get the cops involved. We don't see him other than this scene, but like we see the full scope of his arrogance. Yeah. Yeah. He walks in, there's these two guys.

I think we're supposed to see who they are. I think I just didn't really make the connection because of how my brain works. But it's Augie and Leo, who is Natalie's brother. Now, we probably won't know that it's Leo until later. That's true. Yeah. But he's very nervous and skittish. Yes.

And so there's this frozen moment after the doctor opens the door and sees them and kind of freezes. And he pulls this gun out, but his hands all shaky. You can tell that he's not a cold hearted killer. So he tells him to get into this other room. Rockford follows orders and gets into the other room. Because he's smart. Right.

He knows how to deal with the situation. The doctor, first of all, he has a look on his face of like, really? Yeah. This is really happening right now. And then when he passes Leo, he tries to grab the gun. There's a brief scuffle, the gun goes off, and the doctor ends up shot. Our two mob guys flee, and then Rockford comes out of the room where he had been placed and sees the doctor on the ground. It is entirely due to this guy's arrogance that he got shot. I want that to be clear. And it's also the classic TV moment.

I kind of wonder where this all begins. It probably goes all the way back to early movies where there's a struggle over the gun. And two bodies are obscuring the gun and it goes off. So who got shot? The suspense isn't held for very long. So we're at the police station we get uh a billings sighting so everyone drink yep uh dr hagan is on life support dennis becker would like to know what is going on uh because this clearly is now a police matter

rockford lays it out for for denn Dennis. He was hired two weeks ago. The paper tried to buy some kind of info from one of Dr. Hagen's lab assistants, and she turned him down. And then there was the burglary. That's why Rockford

was checking out the paper, because that's the obvious connection. There was nothing missing from the burglary. Like Dennis asks, like, did they take any drugs or anything like that? And the answer is no, but he is a doctor to the stars and he has these medical files on all these famous people. And those had clearly been gone through. We kind

of end the scene with a bunch of good banter about the paper and Dennis wouldn't read it, but that doesn't mean he hasn't read it. Right. Because when you're standing at the checkout line at the grocery store. The shame around this paper is pretty good. So this is the thing. Nobody's looking at your browser history, right? Well. Well, yeah. Nobody outside the government is looking at your browser history.

You mean like socially? Yeah, socially. Yeah. Among your friends and family. Yeah. There was a shame involved in these magazines. And it's interesting that they were such economic powerhouses despite that. I know my grandparents bought them like crazy.

You know, I can remember being at their house just leafing through these things going, this can't possibly be true. None of this stuff can. Why is this legal to even print? Like, it baffled my mind as a child, like there's no way a Batboy exists, right? Right. Please someone tell me that this is not a true story. And so there's a few moments in this with Dennis and then with Rocky a little bit later, where they're like coming up with an excuse for having bought or read the mag the the right yeah the newspaper which i think held true for the time but i think might be lost today i don't think i don't i don't

know if we have an equivalent today yeah i mean i guess like listicles right like everyone rags on like the listicle as the stupidest form of web content but also people keep making them because they're what get clicks and drive ad revenue. So like someone's clicking on this. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Well, we like to read dumb stuff. That's that's part of the human condition, I feel. So good banter in the service of Dennis agreeing that there's enough to connect this to the newspaper. And he's actually going to have Rockford come along with him as part of the official investigation. It surprises Rockford. This time he's an actual witness and can actually identify these guys. Yeah.

So we go to the newspaper with now in more of an official capacity. Rockford and Whitbeck have a good little sparring session about his misrepresentation of himself as a reporter. And we have a reappearance of the proofreader to whom Rockford makes quite the reference. Right. He says, Klaatu Barada Nikto. This is a reference to The Day the Earth Stood Still. It came out in the early 1950s sci-fi film.

I don't want to spoil anything, but it's a very Twilight Zone-style sci-fi film. An alien spacecraft lands and we don't know what to do with it there's one alien whose name is klatu who's disguised as a human and tells a woman that he has fallen in love with because it is 1950s so he gives her this phrase klatu barada nicto which we don't know the translation of but is to tell the giant alien robot to not kill all humankind, I guess. So this is the long way around of Rockford trying to tell the proofreader to stand down. It's another way of him calling him a big ape.

But, you know, with a pop cultural reference. Good one for the nerds. So Whitbeck denies everything, of course. We run medical features in every issue it's part of a public service but uh becker brings it back down to earth with uh well there was a shooting mr rockford was a witness so rockford then jumps in with all we want is a complete record of your employees and then which leads to a great bit where becker is like hey you're not in charge here i'm in charge here turns to whitbeck and says i'm gonna need a complete list of your reference like classic

chuckle bucket comedy the thing about it that i like is that it's whitbeck that um instigates it he turns to becker and says oh is rockford in charge of the department now or something like that whitbeck is a particular type of character. Another reference for our nerd friends. He's a very J. Jonah Jameson kind of character. What he does in this scene, it's that moment where he's retelling all the facts of what has gone on, but he's emphasizing all the things that make Rockford look bad. Well, he falsified his resume, and he doesn't do it in a defensive way. His worldview is that Rockford is a criminal and the police should be dealing with him, not Whitbeck, who we should point out is probably guilty of the crime. He's an

interesting style of character that is a little dangerous. I think he works very well in this particular situation. But if you have a world full of Whitbecks, you're going to have some problems. So he says he'll have that for them in the morning. And then after they leave, Whitbeck makes a call to Ken to get all the info he can get on Rockford as soon as possible. So we go from here back to Natalie, who's standing outside on the beach in the dark, looking out to sea. And Augie comes to find her. Kind of the real emotional weight of the episode is in this Natalie-Augie relationship. Right.

And we get a number of conversations where he comes back to her to talk about whatever's going on. And then he leaves to go do a thing. For me, there's an unveiling of Natalie as it goes along. Yes. In the beginning, she's manipulative. She doesn't bring up Tony Frechette if she's not trying to manipulate Augie. So in the beginning, it's easy to say, oh, she's just power hungry. She's trying to use what she has at her disposal, which is her brother and her husband.

But now I think it's not evident in this scene, but we start discovering that maybe she is troubled in some way. I think the filming of this scene, more than the content of this scene, is starting to hint that it's not as straightforward as you think right now. Yeah, in this scene, she's isolated. She's alone. It's dark. She's looking away from civilization, right? Like, these are all kind of visual cues to not only does she have a some kind of power

issue she also might have some other disassociation yeah from her world so uh this is where we we learned that the other guy was leo and that's natalie's brother uh leo shot the doctor he's probably gonna die yeah is what they're saying so natalie's like oh well then we don't have to worry about that she's very worried that people will know that they were there doing whatever they were doing, which is still mysterious. But if he's going to die, then that problem solves itself. But there is this other guy. I think Augie is also very practical in this moment where she's like, oh, if he dies, then our problems are solved. And Augie's like, if he dies, then it's a murder rap.

I don't think he says it, but it's... There's the line here about Natalie doesn't want to see her husband and her brother in jail i think so she's feeling that pressure too she wants them to be safe right but she doesn't see consequences out very far right again not much is revealed here we we know that augie and leo were doing whatever they were doing without Johnny's knowledge. And it's important that they not be ID'd mainly so that Johnny doesn't find out. We go from here to Rockford's trailer where we get our Rocky appearance of the episode past his message. He went to the store. He got milk, eggs, and bananas and also picked up the new edition of the National Investigator.

There's more business here where he has to come up with an excuse for why he's picked it up. He liked Rockford's bee story, his killer bee story, which apparently actually ran in the paper. So he picked it up, you know, to see if he had any more stories in it. I think what he was saying was that Rockford had told him about the B story. And he, because I think he says, and that just sounded so good that they probably publish it anyways. Gotcha, gotcha.

Yeah, he comes up with a convoluted excuse to have picked up this paper. Yeah. But it's good that he did because it's running a story on page three about Rockford's criminal past. Yes. It calls him a spy revealed in newspaper office

and it goes into how he's a he was a convicted felon who did time in a maximum security prison so this is all the worst possible reading of his past right yeah he did go to prison but then he was pardoned and rockford always finds it unfair that people hold that against him. And so part of that is that they couldn't actually find out why he went to prison. Right. They infer that it could have been.

Right. It could have been first degree murder. Yes. This is where we actually get the shot from the preview montage of Rockford going first degree murder. So Rockford gets real esteemed and he says that it's libel, you know, and he should sue

sue this newspaper for what they're saying about him. We cut outside of the trailer to Augie and Leo sitting in a car waiting for Rockford and Augie's holding a shotgun. So we see them see Rocky and Rockford leave the trailer, get into the Firebird. They don't have a clear shot so they follow as rockford leaves i did wonder how we got from augie not having any idea who the other person was in the last scene to sitting outside right rockford's house later in the episode i guess there are a couple little threads that make it reasonable that maybe he read that in the paper. Right.

Yeah. But it's never given a line. Like even if he's like holding the paper folded over to that story or something, I probably would've been like, Oh, okay. I mean,

we might be able to take it as given that because he's part of the police report involved in the, like that, that his name may come up that way. But even then, I don't think there's anything in it that takes us from point A to point b with with augie here which is a shame because it does seem like there could be just one or two lines to connect it um so rockford evidently was going from here he probably dropped off rocky on the way because he pulls up outside the office of who we know as Rockford viewers of his new erstwhile attorney, John Cooper.

Yeah. Or Coop, as he is referred to, who's coming out of this office with his own copy of the paper. Because Coop was also referred to in the story as an associate of Rockford as a disbarred attorney. And this has already cost him a case. So he's mad as well. So before we get more into it. So Coop, this is already cost him a case. So he's mad as well. So before we get more into it. So Coop, this is the Beth replacement. Yeah. He's introduced in an earlier episode in the season, the Jersey bounce. And then he appears in a couple more,

I think among among Rockford Files fans. It's a shame that Beth Davenport stops appearing in the show after the fourth season. And apparently this was all a contract thing. Right. To where Gretchen Corbett couldn't be in the show anymore. So Rockford Files was produced. I'm not sure if that's exactly the right term, but was part of Universal. Okay. Universal Pictures was the company making it available to TV.

But it was, I guess, literally produced. It was done by Garner's production company, Cherokee Productions or whatever it was called. Of all the actors, Gretchen Corbett was the only one who had an actual Universal contract. So Rockford's company had to pay Universal to use her. And Universal was the one who had the contract to produce the Rockford files. And Universal was the one who had the contract to produce the Rockford Files. So when they came back for each season, they kept raising the rate of how much they wanted for Gretchen Corbett. To where between four and five, they wanted so much that Garner's production company wasn't willing to pay it.

So she couldn't be in the show. That's a shame. Yeah. So that's why she wasn't in it anymore. It was just a pure money contract issue. So her kind of narrative role ended up being filled both by this character on the legal side. And then there's also a new recurring love interest who we have not seen on our show yet. So John Cooper, Coop to his friends. I actually like him.

You know, like I think he's a fun character it's it really is a shame that there's no beth in this because that is you know four seasons of you know watching that relationship develop and and she's just a great character and but it's interesting to see how coop deals with things in contrast because he is incredibly laid back yeah uh i don't know if that was like a conscious choice on their part or like we need to make him stand apart from Beth in certain ways or anything like that. He's put on the spot by this newspaper article

and it's like a moment where he says that he has and then he's like, yeah, what are you going to do? Yeah. So his deal is that he was an attorney and he was disbarred for something, but he has this like brilliant legal mind. So he is able to influence Rockford's cases usually by applying legal logic in a way that helps him out. But he's not literally going into court for him the way that beth you know used to and yeah so he has been uh disparaged in this article as well the two of them are going to go get a beer and talk about it which is when augie sees his chance and uh does a drive-by with a shotgun on the two of them luckily rockford's able to dive behind his car and coop is able to duck into the building and no one is shotgun down.

But it is very exciting. It's unprofessional. And I think Augie fesses up to that a little bit later. We're not supposed to think that Rockford and Coop here literally dodged a bullet. Something sloppy was thrown at them and they got out of the way. Yeah, for sure. Of course, back to the station. Another crime has been committed. and they got out of the way yeah for sure of course back to the station another another crime has been committed rockford and coop are looking through mug books which were referenced earlier

actually by augie like how would he ever know me unless he saw me in a mug right so i kind of like that connection the police just have these giant books full of headshots and it's like here's all the criminals we know see if this was any of them rockford thinks it's it's silly because uh clearly this hit had to be from the paper because he was sniffing around but then we get our our we get coop applying his his legal mind here yeah those guys were working for the paper they just went from a breaking and entering charge to attempted murder yeah why would they do that doesn't make sense just for a story uh coop posits that the first break-in might have been the paper, but then this one, the one where the doctor was shot, was a result of that story, not the paper again. Yeah.

So, which of Hagen's patients have been in that paper in the last two weeks? Once he lays all this out, Rockford's like, oh, of course. Obviously, that's what's happening. all this out rockford's like oh of course obviously that's what's happening whatever explanation will get him out of that office and back yeah in an active role i think is is where he'll is where he wants to go he just doesn't want to be looking through these massive books of photos anymore yeah becker he doesn't want to lean on the editor both because he doesn't really have anything to go on and also because they'll just write a story about it. Yeah, he's clearly gun-shy after what has happened to Jim. But what he can do is get a list of patients.

And compare it to the papers for the last two weeks and go from there. And so we get a nice scene of teamwork in action. It's fun to watch. So from here we go back to Natalie. She's lighting candles in a church, emphasizing again, this, her connection to the saints. And again, very isolated in this kind of alien environment. Augie appears again, coming to talk to her. And there's one other person in this church, a woman who keeps her head down praying, I guess, the entire time. So a new, weird, out-of-step environment for Natalie.

Yes. And we learned that Natalie has not been eating. Right. She'll eat when it's over. Whatever it is. She says that she was directed to that paper by her prayer. And now that things are in motion, Vincent's going to make his move. That means you have to make your move.

End of scene. Atmospheric. Augie again is, this is where he's like, I missed, like I took a shot and I missed. Here I am shooting a sawed off shotgun out of the car with your crazy brother or whatever it was.

And it's very clear that he, I have a theory of Augie that I'm working towards here. My theory of Augie is that he is dark Rockford. Because he's skeptical of everything that Natalie is telling him to do. The same way that Rockford is like with the doctor in the beginning where he's like, don't go in there. Rockford has, he's going to make the right decisions. Augie would make the right decisions, except Natalie keeps throwing him in harm's way. And if Natalie's not

doing it, then he's working with Leo and Leo is doing it. Now, all of that could be bullshit. All of that could just be Augie throwing blame on Natalie and Leo because Augie is still making the decision to do the things that Natalie's doing. And if he knows that Leo is such a nervous Nelly, And if he knows that Leo is such a nervous Nelly, then he should deal with Leo in a way that doesn't involve guns and high speed chases. And, you know. Well, his deal is that, like, he's going to do anything for Natalie. Right. And Natalie will do anything for her brother.

Right. You get the sense that she kind of needs to take care of him. Like, he's such a snaz. So Augie's stuck in that. Like, I can't actually solve any of my problems with Leoo because that will hurt natalie right i can't do that yeah he just has to put up with it i do like how he kind of gradually gets we see him getting more and more pressured over like how all this stuff is just piling on him and piling on him over the course of the episode which is really good um and he kind of goes from a goofball in the beginning to a

pretty tragic figure at the end his pressures are building up as as we're saying natalie's the way we view what's going on with natalie gets darker and darker in the beginning she's just power hungry but now like she's been fasting like she's not doing that just to get sympathy from because she can get augie to do things without having to fast like that's not what's happening here she's in some sort of downward spiral yeah I love all of that juxtaposed against uh Johnny and Vincent and the rest of the the gang who are oblivious no complication yeah yeah Natalie keeps bringing up that Vincent Vincent's gonna make his move at any time there is no indication of that anywhere yeah They're loving life. Well, and we see that in the next scene where we cut from this to Johnny doing pushups with his shirt on and all the guys counting along with him because he's showing them all that he's healthy.

And here's where we kind of get the reveal. The paper published a story that he has the big C and that he's dying. And he's like, I went to see the doctor. I have skin cancer. Everyone in California has skin cancer. It's the sun. But if people think that he's weak,

then they're going to take it. You know, they're going to make moves. They're going to try and take, take over his business. So that's all kind of exposition here, tying together our, our story so far. But yeah, he's surrounded by all his guys. So that's all kind of exposition here, tying together our story so far. But yeah, he's surrounded by all his guys. Vincent's there and Augie and Leo are there.

Augie keeps on saying, like, did I tell you that Natalie's sick? Right. You know, she's really having trouble. He's like, yeah, you told me, you know, why do you keep bringing this up? It's your problem. I got other concerns. Yeah. But there's a story. The story about Rockford in the paper interests him because in the story, it talks about how Rockford was there working for the doctor. PI's at the paper. He's working for my doctor. I think there's something there, which is all the connection I really wanted for Augie

knowing where to find Rockford. And I guess that's implied, but. Yeah. A little earlier would have been nice. So he tells Vincent to go pick him up and take him to take him to Mama's. This is after Augie and Leo were like allowed to leave because they want to go check on Natalie because she's been sick. Yeah. He's like, yeah, it's fine.

I don't need you around here. You know, go. But they hear him give the order to take Rockford to Mama's. So, you know, the camera is doing this work of showing the opposition between augie and vincent they're on different sides of the room uh vincent's making fun of natalie like how she talks to the saints and stuff like that get some digs in the uh johnny and vincent and that whole part of the gang really feel like like they're right out of greece yeah a little bit just the whole bit of him doing the theless pushups while everybody counted along.

With the high-waisted pants. Yeah, yeah. That just spelled out everything you need to know about the schism in this group here. Like, Leo and Augie are just falling apart because of what's happening. And the rest of these guys are on, like, summer break. They're just enjoying it. We end that scene with Vincent saying, that family, they're out to lunch.

Cut to... Tables at the Beachside Cafe where Rockford and Augie are finishing their lunch. Rockford and Coop. I'm sorry. Yes, Rockford and Coop. We have a couple lines defending Angel from the accusations in this article that he had been swindling an orphanage.

Like, that was never proven. He was. He was. We know Angel was swindling that orphanage. Rockford says, you know, I want to sue these guys. This is all libel. And Coop lays out how, I mean, it seems like pretty in a pretty obvious case in a court of law. But here are all the reasons why it's a dumb idea ranging from you can sue for a lot but the court might only give you a dollar and then

right you're on the hook for all the attorney's fees to their defense of their story might put you in deeper water because they could make a very good case that we are men of such low moral character that nothing they could possibly say would make anyone think less of us and that would stand in court yes and i think like implied in there is just the the attempt of making that case right like it's not even that they have to be men of that low standard or whatever but like they can as a defense start piling liable on top of liable to create that that situation i'd like to contrast this actually with the end of the oracle in the cashmere suit right where the the the fake psychic detective used rockford's name in his book and

rockford gets an injunction for using his name without permission. And in that case, it wasn't that he was being libeled. It was just that he didn't like the guy. The guy used his likeness in a way that was defensible in court as impacting his business, because if people know about him, that impacts his PI business versus this newspaper that can print these libelous claims. But because of his business, there are enough things in his past that they could make a pretty solid case that they're not actually slandering him, right?

I mean, it's libel because it's in print, but anyone who knows him already knows that he's this bad person in all these ways. Not that Rockford necessarily has to have this consistent level of legal battles going on, but I just thought it was an interesting contrast. And he has a great line in this. He wants to tie something to their tail. Yes. He goes, I don't know what yet, but I want to tie something to their tail. I think that plays right into what you were just saying about it's stuck in his craw.

And so he's like, well, here's what I can do. I'm going to do any petty thing I can. And Coop's like, well, I'll hold the string. Coop's in as well. And then Rockford pays for the bill. So in many ways, Coop is also the opposite of Angel. So they go off to

whatever their next adventure is, but they get picked up by Victor and his associate two's company four is a rocket line there's a nice reflection here of rockford and someone else being confronted by two goons yeah coop takes the opportunity to grab one of the guys and like twist his arm back you know to get him in a hold. Then Vincent produces a gun and Rockford's like, okay, let him go. You know, let's just do what they say. And Coop's like, all right, my bad.

Yeah. Much smarter than the doctor. Somebody listening to Rockford. Yeah, it's nice. They go to Mama's house, which is apparently a mausoleum of some kind in a graveyard. Johnny is waiting for them. doesn't not know coop so he has him wait the the blocking of the scene yeah really nice uh coop shrugs and turns around and then the two goons uh went back into the car so coop's the only one who sees this uh approaching

truck which we see is augie and um leo and he sees that they're either coming fast or I'm not sure if we see a gun or not but he yells he yells for Jim to get down so Rockford dives off the steps and Johnny's still standing there and so Johnny gets shot uh out of the window of the truck Vincent's car speeds off Rockford and Coop reconvene they see that the other car is still there and is turning around. So they run over to a funeral that's happening. This is the best escape. It's so good. They usher people into a limo and then they get in themselves. Yeah. And then they just drive past Augie on the way out of the of the funeral with a funeral procession. Both kind of like leaning back in

the car trying to. Oh, it's good. It's a wonderful thinking on the feet moment. Yeah, yeah. The whole bit where they run up to the funeral and they get to this limo and they just usher these two old ladies into the car as if that's what they're there for. Yep. It's so smooth. This episode starts with Rockford undercover, but it's otherwise pretty much devoid of a Rockford con. But this gets it. This, I think, hits both that and also elements of a good Rockford car chase,

even though there's no real chase. Yeah, it's just that thinking on his feet and using the environment. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, well, they got Johnny, but did not get Rockford. So we go to a final Natalie and Augie scene. He's packing her up.

He wants her to go to a hotel. He's going to lie low for a few days, tell people that he's off on a business trip. And Natalie says, well, now that Johnny's dead, the family has to give you the organization, right? It's all of Southern California. Yeah. Because it had to be done, you see,

because of Johnny's condition. He was sick. He was on those pain pills. And Augie is like, he looked pretty healthy to me. He was doing those pushups. It's like, and those pills were all vitamins. And she said, no, they were pain pills. He was sick and he was telling family secrets because of the pills. We finally see the divergence between Natalie's ambition for her husband, essentially, and her understanding of the reality of the situation. Yeah. In the very beginning, as audience, we can take her understanding of the situation as gospel. When she says, you're going to have to make a move, when they're

watching that video, or sorry, film, they're watching that film and she's saying that he's weak, hinting at the paper thing, all of that stuff, we don't have enough information. We can just take it on face value that what she's saying is probably true, even if we don't really see evidence in how Vincent's behaving at that moment. And slowly up to this point we've been kind of getting hints but this is where augie comes out and just like like there is a way to explain everything that you're seeing as a conspiracy right i think the important thing is we see augie realize that she's not in the same reality that he is yeah and so how this comes about is they get a call it's leo he's arranging for a for a hotel room but he has this friend this friend who does sandwiches he was at the the paper selling sandwiches and he saw that they're doing a story about johnny's health

augie's like well they already ran that story he's like no this is a new story it's about how that cancer thing was bogus they messed up and it's a new story about how he was healthy he didn't have cancer um and we see augie all of the weight it was just lifting right off of his shoulders we see it all just drop back on yeah natalie sees that he's upset so he tells her johnny wasn't sick the council's going to kill us yeah i just murdered my boss for no reason yeah and she's kind of doubling down like no he had to be sick that's why he was taking all the pills and stuff finally augie comes to know you wanted him to be sick yeah because you wanted him to die he had to be sick is got this wonderful desperate logic behind it where it's like he had to be sick otherwise what we did was wrong and clearly what we did wasn't wrong because we did it so he's sick

and Augie was willing to go along with it because he cared about Natalie so much until now, when the consequences of it are something he just can't ignore anymore. So, yeah, other than the narrative convenience of, I have a friend who sells sandwiches and he saw this thing that is the one thing that would make you do something right now. And it's like, that's fine. Mm-hmm. At least it's dressed up a little bit. Oh, yeah, no, it's a good bit clearly

augie is like just leo get to the goddamn point but leo's like you have to understand the story around it uh but yeah it's it's a little convenient but uh not the worst thing in fact it's yeah it's so convenient that in the upcoming scenes i spent some time wondering did rockford set that up there's no indication that he did i was just waiting for some indication um well we we go from here to rockford and coop going back to the paper and we get a little bit of a con here they're in a phone booth and across the street you see the little security guard of the newspaper office coop calls him and rockford has done this a couple times you call someone to say hey this other person is going to be there i'm supposed to meet them but i am going to be late yeah so when they show up tell them i won't be there and then

rockford goes in he's like hey i'm whoever like oh this other person can't meet you like oh okay well thanks for letting me know and like establishes that veneer of, if two people are expecting the one, then obviously it must be legit. So they con their way past this underpaid security guard, I'm sure. Oh, this guy. I'm so worried about this guy. We can talk about that in a little bit, but I am worried about this guy.

Well, contrast it with the way that Augie and Leo get past him, which is punch him in the back of the head with a fistful of quarters so yeah this is a boring conversation anyway moment right like they come in well no actually no their plan is to punch him from the beginning right Augie distracts him with this like hey we you know we work for the printer or whatever check the list and so when he looks down to check a list then leo punches him in the back of head with the roll quarters augie has a line about how we're just going to get the story it's just buying us time we'll figure something else out because leo's like just taking the story like everyone still

knows what's in you know yeah that's not the point the point is we need to buy time i can't think because all the stuff is happening yeah which felt very satisfying to me as a character motivation in that moment where it's like there is no end game yeah yeah we like we're just taking it one step at a time um so rockford and coop are in the office rustling around they're looking for whatever the newspaper has on johnny so they're implying that they went through the process of that becker said and that's who popped up. They have a line about, shouldn't we wait for Becker to go through the known associates? Yeah. No, we need to, we need to do something now for whatever reason. And then we get a shot

of a fire starting in a pile of rags, like in some other location. Augie and Leo come in in the dark, surprising Rockford and Coop. there's kind of a standoff augie keeps going like don't shoot don't use that gun i think he's so pent up he he couldn't stand another right on top of everything else right so there's this kind of nicely shot but not particularly interesting to relate standoff where uh everyone's trying to get position on each other in the dark and then rockford finally gets to jump on them by throwing a wheeling, a wheelie chair over to them. And our two heroes managed to get the gun away from Leo.

Throughout this sequence, we see these shots of smoke coming up underneath the door. And then once they get the upper hand, we see the fire out in the hallway behind them and behind the glass. So there's a fire. How do we get out of here? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

There's this kind of panicked moment where they all realize that whatever reasons they have to all be there don't matter because there's a fire and they have to get out. They want to live. Yeah. Or more specifically, they don't want to die in a fire. Right.

There is conveniently enough, a nice art deco. Yeah. Ledge around the building that they can go out onto and the police arrive as they all descend a ladder on the side of the building to the sidewalk. The most lenient police

officer of all of the Rockford files Rockford's like, I'm a private investigator. You can find my ID in this pocket. That man is my associate. He checks the ID and goes, it's like, all right. It's exactly that kind of professional courtesy that we see throughout the opera. What's great is you get a little bit just before that with Rockford handing the gun over to Coop. I think that's just to get the criminals down the fire escape without losing control of them but because the camera

lingered on that situation i expected these cops to come down on them much harder yeah there's no particular reason for the cops to go harder or easier on rockford and coop here i think it's mostly so that we can have the end of the scene which is where as augie is he hasn't been handcuffed yet but he's being you know held he looks across the street and we see natalie standing across the street in like a pool of street light again isolated away from everyone else yeah holding a gas can then augie says you know officer that's my wife can i go talk to her i'm not going to be any trouble and our len lenient officer is like, yeah, sure. Why not? He accompanies him. And it makes sense in the context of no one's being violent. There's no shots being fired or anything, but it would be

weird. Right. If he was like, arrest them all. Oh no, you can go talk to your wife. Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, uh, Augie goes over to talk to Natalie. He's like, why did you do this? She says that, well well what they printed they killed johnny so i killed them you know i talked to johnny it'll be okay he's like what do you mean you talked to johnny like after you left he came to me but he didn't say anything he just looked at me and we have now gotten to natalie fully disassociated yeah right like fully in her own world with the saints and these ghosts and these impulses that she's acting on and then creating an explanation for afterwards. Yes.

And they end this on her almost begging, like, he's not going to come to me and look at me that way again. The note that they have here is like a classic horror ending and the music like it goes to that like a moaning kind of sharp noise and there's kind of like a slow zoom into her face yeah it plays like a uh an old horror uh i guess like again like a twilight zone or even a noir like a like a particularly dark noir or whatever then we switch over to jim and um coop and they don't shake that tone which was very interesting to me they even had kind of an opportunity to do so well they even tell a joke but it's still with the same music yeah and it's like a tight shot on them with like the flames kind of flickering behind them.

And this is the end of the episode. Coop says like, you know, so what happened? Yeah. And Rockford's like, well, sure, we'll read all about it, but not in the National Investigator. Yeah. And Coop goes, ever try to kill a cockroach? Freeze frame. Right.

So what I like about this is that it's unsettling, right? Like it feels like it tries to end like a rockford files yeah with like freeze frame on our heroes yeah but and and have like a little bit of a joke a little bit of a you know one up on that newspaper or whatever but they cannot shake natalie i kind of dig that like i think that that is whether that's intentional or not i don't care i enjoyed it because it just felt like this is the point where it's just completely solidifies in my head that this is started off as a Rockford Files episode and it wanted to end as a Rockford Files episode, but instead it's Augie and Natalie. And that's the

story that we're told. Like they literally say, well, we don't know what the actual, we're incidental to the tale that's being told here we talk a lot about the the different modes of the show uh in terms of point of view yeah and in terms of audience uh knowledge versus character knowledge this is one of the most audience knows more than rockford that we've done in a while you actually forget that you know more than he does right like you the there's moments where you're like oh that's right he doesn't have this salt when when coop gives the answer while they're while they're going through the the mug shots yeah of course we know that's the answer

we've been watching this all along but like rockford didn't know oh that's right they don't know that this is the answer yeah and like And like this big, tragic, emotional ending, Rockford's never seen her before. Yeah, it does. It feels a little bit like not to this big of an extent, but you know, like those moments where somebody is like, I'm going to come in here. There's a group of people I know, Hey, I got a joke to tell. And it's like, we just heard that so-and-so's mother died. This is actually kind of inappropriate right now. Yeah. So yeah, I really, really dug how that ended there. So past that, what did you think of Local Man Eaten by Newspaper? Well, I will tell you this much. I would say it was, I enjoyed the episode. I'm a little

disappointed on the utter lack of any funds exchanging hands at any point. any funds exchanging hands at any point. Okay, we saw Rockford pay for a bill, but we never saw the bill or saw what he was using to pay it. So that was lunch. Yeah, almost no food in this episode either. Except for that lunch that we don't see eaten. And then Rocky bought some groceries.

Bananas, eggs, and milk. The three food groups for The Bachelor. So I, like I said, I didn't remember this one and in fact, confused it with another one. So it was all new to me in a way. The reviews on the IMDb page were pretty down on this one. Really? Yeah. And I was like, oh, interesting. So watching it, I was like, I wonder where those are coming from. So I like the episode and I think it's good. It does not have as much Rockford in it. Yeah. I mean, that we're definitely in agreement about that. So there's that element, I think, where it's a little disappointing because you're not seeing Rockford solve the case with his wits and get into scrapes and stuff like that. It is really kind of secretly an episode

about this descent of Natalie into madness and what Augie does as a result, but not so much that it's like a backdoor pilot or anything like that, right? Right, right. The story is actually about them and our route into the story is Rockford. Now this one, I mean, this feels like an experimentation of some sort.

So this book, The Book, that I've started referring to, 30 Years of the Rockford Files by Ed Robertson. So it has all these little write-ups of each episode. And it's interesting, this one, it refers to Chicken Little as a little chicken. Of course. And you know what? We were wrong earlier. Oh. Chester Sierra was the urban horticulturalist.

Oh, so this is the horse. Frechette was the horse guy. Yeah, okay. All right. But it talks about how one thing that people like about the show is how it shows a Los Angeles that doesn't exist anymore. Right. And a lot of the location shooting and stuff uh was like from stuff that just by the

early 80s or whenever was just gone it's because some of the locations and stuff that this that was in this one you know made people think about that but also it calls out so i'm going to quote here because i think it's a good point that we talk about a lot as vile as the villains may act on rockford almost all of them have a peculiar quirk that makes them interesting to watch none of the heavies walk around thinking, gee, I wish I didn't have this black hat on,

added Bartlett. We tried to give them characteristics that made them real. So it's nice to hear from the writer's mouth about this idea of our villains have

their own worldview that they're exercising. They don't think of themselves as bad people. Right. And that's kind of the point of the episode. Yeah, yeah. You kind of get as bad people right and that's kind of the point of the episode yeah yeah you kind of get the feeling i mean i kind of get the feeling that if

augie uh and uh natalie had not gone the way they did that uh southern california would be kind of okay because johnny would be more interested in like his girlfriend's movies and his push-ups yeah then then actually running a crime empire. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I'm not sure if I would hold this one up as a great, like here's everything that's great about the Rockford files,

but it's a good episode of television. Yeah, no, I agree. And I, I do have a soft spot in my heart for, for episodes of ongoing series or long series that depart from the standard. I mean, this isn't that big. This isn't that dramatic. That isn't, it isn't like it's a musical, but it, I do enjoy

when you, you already have a good baseline. You're enjoying what the character is doing. And then suddenly you find yourself in a slightly different, uh, not genre and not world but just tone yeah it's almost just you're just following some different characters in this world yeah we'll probably have a little more to say about following characters yeah um and the various tones of the story in our second half excellent so we'll take our break and then we will come back to talk about all those things break 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

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As always, we deeply appreciate your support. And with that, back to the show. All right, welcome back to 200 a day we just reviewed the episode local man eaten by newspaper when we come back from these breaks i say that as if somebody just switched over from another channel maybe in the future of podcasts people will be able to switch from one to the other midstream yeah i mean this presumably is going to stick around forever so i don't know how you're consuming it. So this is the second half of our show where traditionally we talk about the lessons that we learned watching this show, lessons that can be applied to whatever our narrative designs

happen to be, whether they're stories, books, TVs, or role-playing games. I've got a few things. You got some things here too that you... Yeah, I think there's a couple good things that jumped out to me that are particularly role-playing relevant. Yeah? It is a dramatic, stakes-filled episode that doesn't revolve around money.

It revolves around ambition a little bit. And it revolves around ambition a little bit yeah and it revolves around love in the sense of strong feelings one person has for another person and what that means but it's not really about money it's not really about sex it's not really about um a reward of any kind except in this very amorphous way of the like reward of becoming the new boss. But that doesn't even come to pass, right? Yeah. And I think even the ambition is not as necessary as it's the fear.

So we have this moment where towards the end where Natalie reveals concerns about the pill popping, thinking that he's spilling all the family secrets. In the beginning, it feels like ambition. You should be in charge. But towards the end, it feels like you should be in charge because this guy is going to destroy us if you aren't. Well, and even that reads to me as a rationalization for you should be in charge because I want you to be in charge. But I have no good reason for Johnny not to be in charge. There must be some reason. Oh, he's sick.

That's the reason. And then everything else follows from that. It's an interesting mindset for these characters, because I think it's one that's a little hard to reproduce at the table. Many characters in a role playing game are centered on competence and on goals right yeah you have some set of skills uh you're jim rockford right you have a set of skills um you have this set of competencies and those kind of define your role in the story and then one very common thing to do is is goal. My character wants this. And then you take characters that want opposing things and run them together or want the same thing and run them, but only one can have it or whatever. These characters are almost more centered on neurosis.

Yeah. And that seems like a harder thing to just sit down and be like, that's how this character thinks. Though I think it can come out of play you know you can get into character and start to see how they slide into these patterns of thought that aren't about achieving goals but i wonder if there's anything we can take from this about like using that kind of character approach in your game. Well, I mean, like, I think you hit upon an interesting thing, which is the, so you got Natalie, who's got a desire that can't be justified by the code, right? Whatever the moral code of the situation is, you can't justify this desire to have her

husband in charge. So then she has to manufacture an excuse inside that moral code. And that may lead you to where to make, how to make this character behave in that way, right? Sure, yeah. Starting with what you think the character wants and then saying, how can I make the character do that

by denying that the character wants that? It seems extremely contextual to me, right? Like it kind of depends on what else is going on in your game world or in your plot or your ongoing characters, where maybe you can reveal opportunities to do this kind of thing. I mean, it's pretty compelling once you start getting into the twists and turns of like, how does this person rationalize what they're doing it's also interesting because there's like she's a relatively passive person until the very end and augie's the active one that like goes out into the world to do

things and then comes back to report and see where things stand for the next thing so that's an interesting dynamic too where it's like maybe you take this one set of character motivations and split it into two actual characters right give them uh a dynamic that that ends up pursuing the the motivation yeah between them not that they're seeing eye to eye but that the way one interacts with the other creates this this thing i like that i mean like that certainly makes for a very rich story and you do have these moments that i i really kind of enjoy in stories where you're like oh if only they're causing their own misery um one thing

i really liked about natalie and the way she was motivated was that she wasn't motivated by a tragedy yeah like that was kind of nice because thinking about the same things you were saying before, where like we don't have this money thing either. Like we're not hitting the same notes that everything does here. She isn't trying to avenge a dead family member. She's broken in some other way, you know, and it's not it's not that pat. It's not that easy to just say oh okay uh she doesn't like johnny because johnny killed this person or whatever the the way that her story unfolds

is part of that right when we first see her we just see that she just doesn't like these other people and then as we go on there's no inciting incident i don't like them because this reason right it's more i don't like them because i care about these other things and i already have my own kind of reality that i'm living in and those two things are just chasing their own each other's tail around in my mind um or it becomes its own motivation. It becomes its own reason. Right, right. He has to die.

Therefore he has to be sick. That's why he's sick. That's why he has to die. Yeah. That feels more three dimensional to me. Then, you know, Johnny killed my first husband and now you must avenge him for me or

something like that. That would be pretty easy to mechanize too, right? Like if you, if you just drew a triangle. All right. So I want to be motivated to kill Johnny. So Johnny has to die. Well, why does Johnny have to die? Well, he's sick. Well, that's really cyclical. Actually, you don't even need a triangle there. That's just a loop, but you could do that.

Well, it's kind of like goal justification and motivation. like the motivation is i want my husband to be in charge i think augie should get all these accolades and get this exalted position in the family therefore johnny has to die what's the justification for augie to kill johnny well if johnny's sick then he has to that still has to be embedded in some kind of like moral context right like yeah the justification to make that kind of that more circular loop. I mean, again, just thinking about physically representing that, you could write that down. My husband should be in charge. So Johnny has to die.

Well, now I need to know why Johnny has to die. Well, he's sick. Now you can cross out my husband has to be in charge and just ignore that from there on out deep down you know i want my husband in charge but that's not your that's never your stated goal that is never a thing that comes up like so you leave it on the paper it's just crossed through it anytime anybody asks why johnny has to die it's because he has because he's ill yeah and he has to be ill otherwise why would he have to die and so in this story like the real inciting incident is the newspaper story right yeah one thing. One thing that, you know, the Rockford

Files does so well is take these two seemingly unconnected plot threads and then crosses them to get this new exciting result. So you can kind of see the, that being static, I want Augie to be in charge, but that's just not going to happen for all these reasons. Oh, oh, Johnny's sick. Okay. Like, and then that's what gets the loop going. Yeah. And I love, I love the, just the tightness of having this doctor be the, the tension point, right? The same doctor that Johnny, or that Johnny goes to also has Cher or some other celebrity.

And therefore he's concerned about the situation and hires Rockford and that gets him involved in it. Yeah. All the character motivation stuff in this episode, I think is really nice and tight. Yeah. Because I've been in this place where it's like, I have this idea, but I don't want it to be another, all the character motivations to be around revenge. I don't want all the character motivations to be around revenge i don't want all the character motivations to be around money for whatever reason that's trite we just did that it doesn't seem satisfying but you don't necessarily want it just to be a character study yeah how do you use that broken mental process to fuel action this might be a good place to start there's that thing that um we learned that this in the accounting school it. I think they call it the triangle of fraud.

The fraud triangle. But it's just these three things that you want to avoid in order to keep certain crimes from happening. You want to avoid opportunity, so you don't leave money lying around or blank checks where people can get them. You want to avoid motivation, so you don't hire people with gambling habits.

You don't hire Natalie's husband and brother because Natalie has ambitions. Right. And then you want to avoid justification. And that's the one where it's like, well, if the company is going to treat me like that, then I might as well steal from them. So I think that's actually

a pretty interesting way to look at this right you just say she has this motivation um that is that she wants her husband or somebody related to her in charge uh she has the opportunity show up because the newspaper article and then that also provides her with the justification and we can go forward from there like once you get all three of them going, then not only do you have clear path for the character to take, but also you have this interesting overlay of the justification to present to the audience. I think thinking about justification ahead of the act is an interesting, like pre how,

how does this character pre justify what they're about to do yeah versus how do they justify what they just did because those are two different kind of characters that you get to see hopefully there's something in in there that's helpful for people as they're figuring out their their character dynamics you said you had a rant i have a rant i would love to hear it let's talk about whitbeck the editor-in-chief of the National Investigator. So this scene where Rockford comes with, this is not an unusual scene in the Rockford Files, but he shows up with the police and then everything about him is put into question. Everything is presented in a way that makes his motivations, his background, everything shady.

Because he's got plenty of shady shit in his background. Like, it's not hard to do. I do enjoy these sorts of scenes. I loved it when it happened in this episode. I do kind of like when these things happen. But I feel like there's something that needs to be cautioned against here. I see this happen all the time now

in a lot of shows and whatnot, where you have characters do this and I just end up going, yeah, this guy's right. What this hero is doing is ridiculous and it's bad. I don't want to, again, I don't want to call out specific shows or anything like that, but I'm going to say on a whole i think superhero fiction suffers from this pretty badly super villains tend to monologue occasionally about like like you were saying about not wanting to get rid of their black hat they'll present you with a worldview that justifies what they do right in the course of doing that they they often denigrate or in some way make the hero look bad. And nowadays, when that happens, I often find myself going,

yeah, yeah, that hero is the villain of this story. I'm falling for the supervillain. To generalize it, the critique of Batman where it's like billionaire industrialist bruce wayne chooses to dress up and punch thugs individually instead of spending his money on like uh in in systemic positive change in gotham there was a snl skit about thanksgiving at wayne manor uh where he was handing food out to the needy. And they all happen to be people of color. And they're like, Oh, this is great. This is like that time that the Joker attacked a fresh direct truck in our neighborhood and just left it there. So we ate. Then they're like, you know, Batman, right? Why does he always in our neighborhood? You know, it just and it's a great it's a great little skit and i think

it it kind of gets to the heart of that is that uh sometimes we're asked to engage in this sort of fantastic fiction of heroes and then we give them a wheatbick you know this guy who's going to then say yeah but and then the audience can end up going, ah, goddammit, you're right. You can't necessarily insulate the hero from this because you don't want just lily white, perfect, untouched, pristine heroes. Why this works for the Rockford Files is that because the Rockford Files does so much other work to give us Rockford's moral core. much other work to give us Rockford's moral core. Now, that may not exist a whole lot in this episode, but this episode is also in season five, right? We can assume by this point, you know about Rockford's moral core and you can see where the cracks are and you know where he stands. The characters in this episode are much more like actual people you actually know than like superhero fiction.

Right. So, yeah, it's easy to see Rockford and be like, oh, yeah, he has he has to tell some lies. He has to misrepresent himself every once in a while. But we also saw him working for a client who was wronged, who was then shot. So I am, you know, talking to the police and being friendly, like even just in this episode. Yeah. So when Whitbeck is confronted with here's this criminal act

that you may be responsible for, we see him as at worst doing what Rockford would do in that situation. Yeah. Rockford can levy all of these charges at Whitbeck. Whitbeck can levy

these counter charges at Rockford. They're both engaged in shady behavior, but it's understandable human shady behavior. Yeah, I think actually what I'm probably ranting against is not the character of Whitbeck. Because again, like I actually do enjoy these sorts of things. You know, this often happens in game design

where we're like, oh, there's a problem here. Well, you feel that the problem's here, but it's deeper. We got to go deeper. All right. So there's the trolley problem. Sure. A philosophical problem where you got a trolley on a track and it's going to hit five people if it goes the way it's going right now, but you can flip a switch. And if you flip the switch, it just hits one person. Do can flip a switch and if you flip the switch it just hits one person do you flip that switch right the purpose of this is to get you thinking about the problems about thinking about ethics in that manner there's moral issues even if you say well five people are going to live and or instead of just one or you know the question of choice like what happens when you make an active choice versus when you let what's going to happen happen okay so that's there that is a tiny little capsule of

what the trolley problem can do and that's just a mental game right like that's that's you sitting there thinking it through then we bring that over into fiction and people this is a thing that happens to spider-Man and Superman. Again, I'm going to the superheroes, but this happens to superheroes all the time where it's like, do you save the city or do you save your girlfriend or boyfriend or whatever? When it used to be ported over to there, what happened then and what was the joy of reading that kind of story was seeing our hero figure out a way to do both yeah you want to see how spider-man figures out how to do it and then occasionally he doesn't and that becomes a mistake that you have in your comic forever and ever um and then it progresses again into our fiction where we try and get grim and dark yeah we have our characters make the choices

and the choices have horrible consequences right and we do it again and those consequences come back and bite them and that can be juicy and then you throw whitbick harold good old harold you throw harold into it and harold is like look at all of these horrible choices this person has made and harold is not wrong this person has made all these horrible choices because that was the fiction we were eating up. That was what we wanted to see. And I think that that's the part where I get into like a little bit of a problem.

Well, I think this gets back to the moral universe that the character is in, right? If you do this whole setup of this person's lives in a moral universe where they make agonizing choices uh and then have to face the consequences then they're a monster right like yeah they're in a monstrous universe yeah yeah and no character is going to be unstained by that monstrosity right and then when we get the whip back asking that question, that's kind of the the audience zooming out and be like, oh, right. The world is a monstrous world that they're in.

While in the Rockford files, his world is not monstrous. Right. When he makes choices, the consequences are not the same. You know, they're not world shaking consequences. He gives up the shot at making good money off of this instead of helping out the friend that needs the help right like those are the kinds of things so so when that's thrown back in the audience's face we're kind of like oh yeah he does i mean he he's not a boy scout yeah but like he does the best he can because he's in a world where what you do is the best you can yeah i think actually i think you hit upon it. You want to make sure you

know the kind of story you want to tell here. Do you want the audience to rally with Rockford? Or do you want the audience to be like, no, he's a monster. Everyone's a monster. It's all monsters all the way down. Both of those are perfectly legitimate, but don't write yourself into one when you want the other. Yeah, it's no great rhetorical victory to shine the flashlight on the ethically compromised character when you've been watching them be ethically compromised through the entire movie, right? Or something like that. And I think sometimes it is treated like that. Like, oh, here's the moment when you realize that maybe superman isn't so super right i've been watching this movie i've seen him not be super yeah you know yeah you really got me

there yeah um the the flip side of that coin right is that it can be a good laugh right yeah you could do this with angel and they kind of do it's like here's this line item in the story about you know defrauding the orphanage or whatever. Yeah, but he did actually do that because he's really actually terrible. Yeah. Okay. So if you're writing this and you're like, okay, but Angel's got to be worse. Okay.

So it's orphans. He's doing something with orphans. Yeah. Well, that was my rant. I think that that character is a good implementation of a situation that I've seen poorly implemented a number of times. Well, and I think it does kind of connect to some of the other things we're talking about because this episode contains two different moral universes. Yeah. There's Rockford and Coop and Becker.

And then there's Natalie and Augie. And Natalie's in particular, she is a monster. We see that clearly demonstrated by her actions and through the tragic figure of Augie as he tries to reconcile what she wants to do with the parameters of correct behavior in his own world. It would be different if that story was centering on the mob murdering someone, like someone not in their circle, someone outside. Then there would be a different weight to it. It might feel like it's more correct because by killing Johnny, they're preventing this

other tragedy. Right, right. But that's not the case. It's all inside their world. And that is a messed up world that is highlighted by the fact that she goes even farther out of it. Like she gets more and more disassociated from it. Just on the face of it, it's a messed up world that a guy can get cancer and that would threaten his life from the outside. The fact that they're physically ill means that the sharks are ready to move in.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's a lot of big picture stuff about, I was about to say, a relatively straightforward episode. It's not super straightforward. I think it feels straightforward because as audience, we see everything. Yeah. So, like, we see the connections before the characters make the connections. Yeah, yeah.

And we can separate them into two stories, both of which are a little more straightforward on their own when they're not intertwined. And so like we're looking to see the reveals of the mystery of why do these intersect and what are the motivations behind it. But if we were just with like Rockford's point of view the whole time, it would be a mess. Yeah, it would be. I was thinking of the backdoor pilot. Gabby and Gandhi. Yeah, just would be, I was thinking of the backdoor pilot. Gabby and Gandhi. Yeah, just another Polish wedding. Yeah. Thinking about that episode from Rockford's point of view.

He goes to two places and then has a fistfight at the end for no reason. Yeah, yeah. Like it is completely straightforward from his point of view. And then it's a Polish wedding that he's at where everything just falls apart. And it's just like, wait, what? So that's one of the good uses of dramatic distance right yeah so that your audience can keep track of a convoluted plot without having to stick with the point of view of one of the people in it and i think that that's actually like i think they they handled this quite well i think it's worth

going back and looking at this episode uh and checking out how they paced giving you each side. Yeah, because it kind of just cuts back and forth. It's almost like one scene here, one scene here, one scene here, one scene there. And they draw closer and closer together as they're doing it. The whole bit with watching the film. That's really good, too. But it's weird because you're like, wait, that other part was this episode, too, right? Like Rockford getting caught undercover at a newspaper was this episode.

And then you go to this and you get like partway through this whole deal with that. And you're like, wait a minute. One good thing in that too was that the music from the screen, like the music from the film that they were showing. Yeah. Was the dramatic undercurrent of all the significant glances back and forth and stuff like that. Yeah. In the show that we were showing yeah was the dramatic undercurrent of all the significant glances back and forth and stuff like that yeah in the show that we were watching so that was a nice directorial piece yeah that's good stuff yeah well i think uh that's what i wanted to talk about coming out of local man eating eaten by newspaper you have anything else on our way out no i think uh i

think we we earned our 200 for the day. Well, we hope that you'll come back next time. Help us earn our next 200 when we talk about another episode of the Rockford Files.