Two Hundred A Day - Episode 31: In Hazard

Episode Date: April 15, 2018

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, Chris and Dave! 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.

Mr. Rockford, Ms. Miller of the Bartlett Book Club. Great Detectives of America is not in stock, so we sent you Cooking Made Easy. Hope you enjoy it. 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 Epidiah Ravishaw. And which episode of The Rockford Files are we talking about today, Epidio? We are talking about Season 2, Episode 18, In Hazard. And I'm going to start this off with an apology for my sexy flu voice. Yeah, I am also getting over a bit of a cold. So hopefully we won't be too gross for our listeners. Yeah. But I for our listeners.

Yeah. But I think our listeners can deal with a certain amount of gross. Yeah. So we're looking at this episode thanks to one of our detective level backers over on Patreon who suggested it. So thank you, Victor, for throwing this one our way because I think it's a good choice. There are many admirable traits about this episode from most of the ensemble cast. The writing's really crisp.

The action moves right along. And I was interested to see that this was directed by Jackie Cooper, who is a actor and director and producer. I feel like if I recognize his name, that means he's famous because I don't recognize many people's names. So hopefully people have an idea of who Jackie Cooper is. If from, for our audience from the Superman movies,

if nothing else. Right. But he had quite the directing career, which I didn't really know about. Not only did he direct five episodes of the Rockford files, he also appeared in two different episodes of the show. Uh, and then he's also at the center of all these other crime detective shows, uh, that I love so much. So, uh, he played the Senator in the Columbo episode where it's about the Senator candidate for crime. He was in, uh, an, a murder. She wrote two parter, uh, and he directed two episodes of Magnum PI. Wow. He's all over the 80s. Yeah. Good work, Mr. Cooper. And I think, and there's a lot of the camera work in particular in this episode that I really appreciate.

So I think it's nice that he, you know, seems to have a good eye and a flair for framing and for leaving things off screen, which we will get to in our conversation. And this one is also written by Juanita Bartlett. So good, good, solid Juanita script for this episode. I'm just saying yeah to everything you're saying there. That's my job. Well, now we can turn it over to you, Epi, because we all want to know what you thought about the preview montage. I thought that was a pretty good preview montage. It delivered some of the best punchlines of the episode, I think.

The first one being the, I'm an eccentric. I have a peculiar aversion to violence, which is great to the heart of who Rockford is and the life he's chosen to lead and the irony thereof. And then the wonderful exchange between, uh, Rocky and Rockford about Beth being in jail. Rocky's like, what for? And Jim's like, I don't know,

three days, but it does tell us, uh, it certainly sets me on edge right away because I get happy to see that Beth's in the episode. And then I'm like, Beth's in jail. Yeah.

And that even leaves out the worst part of it which we'll get to yeah it's a pretty good opening montage but I don't think it's as good as the opening no no it's the credit shot that I'm thinking of here we'll get to that though

the only other thing from the montage is that I think it clearly communicates that we're dealing with the mob in Oh, yeah. In some regard. There's a lot of wise guys making not-so- veiled threats about putting people away and stuff like that. So we're feeling right at home

into our comfort zone for the Rockford Files. 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 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, Chris, and Dave. 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. That said, this episode actually takes a little while to get to Rockford because we start with Beth in her office. Yeah.

And she's talking to a client. So we get to see a little bit of lawyer Beth, which is always nice. I have a, I have a bit of a drama that plays out in my notes here because I, I have Beth's office question mark and then crossed out and then Beth's office exclamation point because I was super excited to see Beth's office. And as this scene played out, the guy that she's talking to gets this

phone call. I'm like, wait, is this his? There's no way this is not Beth's office. The idea is floral. It's nice and green. It's you can see her serving tea to her clients. You can see her serving tea to her clients. It's very Beth-y. Well, this client is Mr. Arnold Bailey, and he is under indictment for tax fraud. And so he has retained Beth as his lawyer in this case. He wants her to do something to get them off my back. He's feeling the pressure from this indictment. And they have a bit of introductory back and forth where he's like, you think I'm guilty of this? How are you supposed

to defend me? She has a good line or that she's an attorney, not a judge. Right. She'll defend him the best that she can because that's her job. But also he clearly is a scumbag. Yeah. I think that's communicated pretty well. One of the things that I enjoy about Beth is how when those lines come up, she just defines them and holds them like that. Like in her professional life, they hit every so often. And she's like, I can believe you're guilty and still give you the best defense you can possibly buy. That's no problem. And I think that that's a great contrast to how sometimes when the lines come up in her personal life, they're not quite as well defined.

And therefore, she can't quite hold them as well as she does here. She has to get to court. So she sets up, they set up a meeting for later that night to actually go over his case. And he gets this phone call, as you said, he gets a phone call directed to her office that he answers after she leaves. It is from someone named Metcalf, who has to see him right away. As we are early in the episode, we don't really get any details yet, but there's, they're in to something it's ominous. There's some kind of threat and, uh,

it's very important that they meet, um, before something bad happens. So they're going to meet at the usual place. And we cut to, uh, the interior of a church, which I think I'm starting to see as a go-to mob in Rockford Files meeting place.

Right. This is season two and we're doing these out of order. So it's hard to tell if it's happened multiple times before this, but it does feel like a really wink at the audience when you say the usual place and they end up in the church, right? Like it's, I'm not gonna,

I'm not gonna to judge the mob. That's not my job. Right. I'm just a podcaster, not a judge. So Bailey and Fred Metcalf have a short conversation. They're into some kind of deal together. It's Metcalf's deal, but Bailey's the broker. He's taking 50%, but they think that Jordan's found out, and he doesn't like getting ripped off.

Something is going to have to happen. Bailey leaves it with, you know, this is your deal, so you have to deal with it. Yeah. So we follow Metcalf as he leaves this church, and then immediately two gorillas jump out of a car, chase him down, and then grab him. And we get a closeup on the terrified look on his face while there's like very dramatic music. His eyes are just shooting back and forth and we see that he's scared for his life. In the alleyway by the church. Yeah. And we cut from there to peaceful waves and birds with the camera on our good friend, Jim Rockford, with his fishing pole in the ocean, spending some blissful moments alone.

The camera slowly zooms out away from him, showing us more and more of this deserted beach as the titles of the episode play over this idyllic moment of Jim Rockford's life. This shot, I love the angle of this shot. We're out over the ocean, right? We're probably on a crane. I don't know the technical details of how they handle this. But it's just, I don't know, it's just gorgeous. Like, it's just like a nice, gorgeous, and like you said, very relaxing shot.

And it's filled with that wonderful, dramatic irony of, like, we just witnessed all of this happening. Imminent peril tied to a character who's tied to Beth. Like, so all of this is going to crash down towards Rockford. And all we've got here is him out here fishing in his backyard. Of course, in short order, he is interrupted by Rocky. He's been waiting on him for half an hour because they're supposed to go up

to Oxnard to take a look at a semi that Rocky's interested in buying. And you can see that Rockford thinks this is a bad idea and thus has been putting it off as long as possible but rocky's finally tracked him down and insists that he uh goes with him up to oxnard and so the scene kind of ends by coming back into to the two of them as rockford reluctantly picks up his fishing pole and walks back with Rocky to the trailer explaining to him that what with all the expenses and fees and competition from the big freight liners what does he think he's going to do with this uh buying this semi from some guy up in Oxnard Oxnard presumably a real place uh but also has a very Dickensian feel to it is it is if you needed the name for a place where somebody could

buy a rig from another individual, you would call it Oxnard, right? Like that's well, and also the way that Rocky says the word Oxnard is just beautiful, beautiful. Unfortunately, they are interrupted. Jim is getting his coat to leave. And then there's a phone call. Clearly someone is in distress with something important. Yes. And it's Beth. He's dropping everything and going over there. Rocky's like, we need to go up and see the truck.

He's like, Beth's in jail. For what? This is that line from the preview montage. What for? For about three days. So we get the drama, but then we get the little punchline that's like, we're not too worried, I think. I feel like it's also a little bit of Rockford's ex-con side, too. The question to us is, why is she in jail?

But the more important question to him is, how long does she have to be in jail? Right? Like, that's... So we go to Rockford sitting with Beth in the visiting area. She is in fact in jail for contempt of court. Can you believe it? I like how we never learn exactly what it is. She just says that there's this bad tempered judge who has to penalize someone. So she went into court, she got the dismissal, but then she got the book thrown at her for contempt. If this judge can't hang the defense, she'll hang the

prosecution. And then we move on and never speak of it again. Rockford has a nice line about she should avoid the spaghetti because he's never been in a jail yet where the spaghetti sauce wasn't a killer. Which is a bit of foreshadowing. It is. It is. But it's also, it's very Rockford to have an opinion on spaghetti sauce. Especially in jail. Yeah.

I just, it just had a feel of a Rockford food moment. He's a connoisseur. Yes. I feel like he's a connoisseur of every jarred or canned sauce that you can buy at the store. He's not going to be making the sauce from scratch, but he can tell you which brand is the best to microwave and dump over your pasta. So, of course, Beth is upset. And I like seeing that we get to see her be justifiably angry,

but also she probably did say something sarcastic or make some comment, even if it was an unfair punishment. Right. But her problem is that she can't wait three days in jail because she has this tax case that she needs to prepare and is time sensitive. And so the real reason that she's called Rockford, you know, not just for emotional support. She needs him to go to her office and get the the envelope with all the stuff for this Bailey case out of her safe. And when he asked why she can't just have the office sent it over, they're closed because it's too late in the day.

And he's the only one that she can trust with the combination to her safe. Yeah. And we end the scene with a, not poignant, but like a meaningful little exchange where she says, I trust you. And he says, thanks. Yeah. I have in my notes here.

I read. Aw, shucks. Thanks. It's a very sweet moment, right? Like she says, I trust you. And he looks genuinely almost as if he's blushing because of it. Yeah. So one thing I noted, and we'll get a little more of this, I think, throughout the episode.

This isn't like Beth and Rockford romance front and center, but there are these moments in it that are very much Beth and Jim and their romance, right? So she says, I trust you. Yeah. He is beaming like a school boy when he says thanks like he's he he's done well yeah i kind of noticed that as well the majority of the episodes with that focus on beth that we've talked about so far yeah we've talked a lot about their relationship yeah because those episodes do a lot to showcase it. This episode isn't really

about their relationship. It's about this case. Yeah. But we have this line of like how they have this on again, off again relationship throughout the series. And this is one of the episodes that cements the on again part. We just see that they have sweet and tender and romantic in a couple spots feelings for each other without it being the focus of the episode right yeah before we get to the safe though we have a brief interlude of a shady shack uh at night where an older gentleman in a nice car is waved into this kind of broken down barn. And these two gorillas have Metcalf tied up. He's been beat up and tortured essentially. And he's currently passed out. We just see his feet sticking up on this desk.

This older gentleman asks the guys if they have the info that they're looking for. And it turns out that when you hurt someone the way that he's been hurt, you give up the info. Yeah. Uh, so they're now tasked to go get it tonight. Um,

and it is left unclear what Metcalf's fate will be, but it does not sound good. No. And this is a sort of beginning, uh, I don't want to say it's a theme, but torture comes up again in this episode. And maybe this is something we can kind of talk about a little bit later in the episode.

But this is there's a nod to the artistry of the torture in this one. Yeah. Yeah. The guy is given a compliment for doing such a neat job, not, not leaving a mark on them and that kind of stuff. Yeah. It's kind of, I mean, it's horrifying.

It is, it is. And it's kind of the first instance of one of the things that I think is again, not a theme, but is a style, may a stylistic choice of leaving things off screen. Yeah.

You know, we don't see the guy getting beat up. We don't see him getting, you know, whipped across the bottom of the feet or whatever they did to him. We just see the aftermath. And then we know that these guys are like real problems. Like they're,

they're not messing around with whatever they're after. And also that they're professionals, right? They have, there's this veneer of, of professionality about this. We go back to Rockford. Rocky is still riding around with him in this vain attempt to get to Oxnard,

but Rockford can't let this wait. Rockford leaves Rocky in the car while he goes into the office to get this envelope, which he does. He has the combination written down on a piece of paper. There was music playing while he was doing this, too. And I kept trying to figure out what he was whistling. At first, I thought he might have been whistling the Rockford Files themes, which would have been a little disturbing for the Rockford Files.

But and I think it also plays a little bit into what we saw in the previous scene where he was super happy to be of help to Beth. Yeah, it's a downbeat before the next thing, which is that he closes the safe, goes to head out, and then is jumped by the two gorillas. We get this really interesting fight scene. Yes. really interesting fight scene. Um, yes. In the first of a couple occasions where we keep a still camera on the scene and then our, our, our principles come in and out of the frame as they do the business. And a lot of it is also carried by the sound design or by the Foley. Right. Yeah. So we hear the thumps and the grunts um and the crashes as these three guys tumble around but we don't really get a clear look at who's doing what to who until we see a

couple bodies go flying through this uh across the camera and then one of the gorillas come lumbering after them and then they leave yeah uh or Uh, or no, and then it just cuts. We don't even see who gets up or anything. There's a couple seconds of just, of no one on screen while this fight sound is happening. It was just really, it was really interesting because I, I don't recall seeing a fight shot like that in the Rockford files in other episodes.

Yeah. I can't, I can't think of another one either. I think it's a really good technique. And I can think of some examples outside the Rockford Files, absolutely. But in fact, this is one of those things that goes all the way back to Greek theater. That used to be how violence was done in the very beginning of the art form that eventually evolves into the perfection that is the Rockford files. I have a question for you about this. Watching it, did you think Rockford was winning or they were winning? I thought that they were winning. Yeah, me too. So I was thinking about this and how they did the scene because hiding what's happening usually says that somebody is getting their ass kicked,

right? Like you don't hide an even fight because the even fight is maybe more interesting on screen or you hide it because it's a little bit like covering your eyes because you don't want to see the bad happening. Yeah. We'll talk more about keeping why and how you keep violence off screen in in our second half but uh i think it's used really well here yeah i think it actually adds to the surprise of it like it seems more chaotic done this way yeah um it has that frenetic energy of like a cartoon where like everyone's rolling around with the dust cloud. Yeah, exactly. And then we cut from there without seeing who wins or what happens. But then we go to Rocky back in the car, obviously impatient.

And he finally goes in to check on Rockford and Rockford's lying on the ground. Yeah. Clearly the loser of the fight. Not only is the envelope that he had gone, they've opened the safe and taken everything out of it. Yeah. So of course, Jim goes to talk to Dennis Becker and file a complaint. Speaking of ongoing romances. As per usual, there's not a lot to go on. Two men about my height. Not too helpful. As Dennis says, oh yeah, we'll be sure to bring those two in by morning.

Rockford needs some aspirin because he hurt his hand punching one. And this I noted because I thought it would come back later and then it didn't. So, yeah, it's just like a thing. But he says, don't don't go for the jaw. And there's the business with Rocky and the truck, right? Right. He's like, the only witness is Rocky. And Rocky's like, well, I didn't see it.

I was waiting. We were going to go up to get a truck from Oxnard. And that's when Dennis is like, well, can you describe it? And he's like, well. No, he says, can you describe them? And Rocky says, oh, there's just one. And then he starts describing the cab over. Yeah.

Rockford gives him a great face. Like, yeah, I cannot convey this over audio, but, you know, stop. And then starts laying out how, you know, all right, Dennis, well, let's work backwards from like what was in the safe. And then we can see who would have wanted to get it right and uh we get into banter uh between rocky and rockford about no this is an open case and this is your rule that you don't work on open cases yeah and rockford's like it's my rule i can change it which again great heart of Rockford and his philosophy. Yeah. I just love how pleased with himself Rocky is when he comes up with this.

It's an open case. I solved it. You can't be involved. Yeah. Rocky's the, what's a good word? He's kind of the fool in this episode where he's to kind of bounce things back and be pretty comedic, though he's not really involved with the plot. But in a way that really makes Rockford's life seem lived in. One of our favorite things. Yeah.

Well, so Dennis is like, all right, so our next step is to talk to Beth. Where is she? Well, Beth's in jail. And then we, we hold this shot on Dennis's face for just long enough. His just flat expression on hearing that Beth is in jail. It's great. Yeah.

Yeah. So Rockford and Dennis go to talk to her, but it turns out she's not there. And we get the line from the preview montage of she is no longer with us. And Rockford says, you're going to need to be more specific about that. Uh, so this,

um, front desk official at the jail, I like how she obviously doesn't want to put up with Rockford's, uh, attitude, but since Dennis is there, she reluctantly will do, you know, She obviously doesn't want to put up with Rockford's attitude. But since Dennis is there, she reluctantly will answer Dennis's questions because he's a fellow officer of the law. He's like, we're going to need to know where she is.

This is official police business. And it turns out that she was transferred to the prison ward of the hospital because she was poisoned. Poisoned. transferred to the prison ward of the hospital because she was poisoned poisoned and then we get the musical sting that's a little like wah wah i don't know why i don't remember it being out of place to me oh okay i think it was just dramatic like a dramatic sting yeah but maybe it was a little comedic it's kind of it's a kind of a weird interaction because i think the intention of it right is to dramatize this moment of finding out that beth has been poisoned but it is kind of done in a comedic way so the tone's a little weird and it's also like uh we're gonna do that classic 200 a day thing where we take a small bit and throw it completely out of proportion.

But this is one of those rare instances where the character is not a character. She's just a wall for them to get through to get to Beth. And it's important. You can't have Beth in jail and then suddenly have them visit her in the hospital. You have to see them come across that information. I'm not saying that this is bad, that this is here or anything like that.

Yeah, there needs to be a transition of some kind. It just isn't exactly the way we've seen it happen in previous Rockford files where the character is something interesting not to complain about it let's just say I mean we can we can move on it's a pretty pretty minor beat to get us to uh Rockford Dennis and Rocky he's still still tagging along uh going to the hospital um they'll only let two of them in at a time so rocky waits in the hall uh and again in a just a nice piece of camera work we see we follow rocky as he crosses the hall over to the chairs

sits down and we see that he's sitting next to bailey who you know we didn't know was there until he sat down so it's like a nice visual reveal right but yeah so bet Beth is in bed. She's clearly in bad shape. They wake her up. She's all groggy. There's an incredible amount of tenderness in this scene. Yeah, this is a good scene. Rockford warned her about the spaghetti. She gives that as much of a laugh as it deserves. Right.

The doctor says that she'll be okay, but it was really close. And then in a, a deft, tell us the thing that you've said before. So the audience knows you've, you've given your statement, but tell us again what happened. Right.

She had her meeting with her client, Bailey at the jail said that the matron brought in coffee during the meeting. She hadn't asked for it. She just thought it was a nice thing for them to do. She had about a cup and a coffee during the meeting. She hadn't asked for it. She just thought it was a nice thing for them to do. She had about a cup and a half of the coffee and then got sick. Bailey did not have any of it. Dennis is kind of asking questions to kind of, you know, get a little more out of her. Could it have been Bailey?

Well, that doesn't make any sense. He's my client. I couldn't testify. Could it have been Bailey? Well, that doesn't make any sense. He's my client. I couldn't testify. Even if he told me something, I can't testify against him because of attorney-client privilege or that relationship.

This is where Rockford tells her that the safe got everything that's stolen out of her safe. And then Dennis is now on board with this working backwards theory as they don't have anything else to go on and wants a list of everything in the safe. backwards theory as they don't have anything else to go on and wants a list of everything in the safe while we're getting that exposition about getting all those kind of details in line we're seeing rockford being very gentle beth kind of being appreciative that they're there yeah no one is trying to give anyone any crap no one's bantering the the tone is very realistic, I guess, in that regard. When they leave, Rocky points out Bailey. Rockford goes over and introduces himself. Bailey wants to know, when is she going to be out? Right.

And Rockford's like, she almost died and you don't even care how she is. You have a lousy set of priorities. Yeah. We see that they do not like each other and then uh from here we go to one of the episode highlights i would say which is we cut directly to a shot of rockford biting into a big old breakfast taco this is gratuitous is what it is oh it's so good so good it's making up for all the times we don't see him eat anything. You can't watch this scene and not want a taco for whatever meal you're having. You're like, I want a taco and none of this soft shell crap.

And the only person in the world who could possibly resist that is Dennis. Rockford literally says these are the best tacos in town but Becker's like taco? For breakfast? I'll stick with coffee. Oh, Becker, you don't know what you're missing. So it's mostly just establishing

that Becker is taking it seriously. He's got the list from Beth, but she has a lot of the questions are just answered with attorney-client privilege. Yeah. But you stay out of this. We're going to take care of it. It's police business. Rockford, who at the beginning of the scene had offered

to treat Becker to breakfast, not only does he order a second taco during the conversation after Becker tells him not to interfere with the case, he then sticks Becker with the bill as he goes off to to do his own investigation i suppose so it's a scene that pleased both of us detective food critic nathan paoletta and rockford's personal bookkeeper who is always worried about his bottom line yeah yeah i love

the i love the scene it's a good uh dennis rockford scene right like it's yeah it's just a good good character scene that gets us seeing seeing rockford eaten and then going back to talk to beth who of course has made a copy of that list and gives it to rockford so here we go through rockford going through the the names and like the document so it's like this person last will and testament yeah um and then asking beth for more information and her just invoking attorney client privilege which is seems totally fair yep no it's legit there's certain things she she can't talk about so it goes through this whole list uh there is a document from metcalf uh a letter so it's like what kind of letter she says that she doesn't know but she literally doesn't know it's sealed

and right left it with her five years ago so rockford's like oh that can't that can't be anything keeps going through the list and then goes, you know, maybe it is something. Like it's a nice little head fake, I think, in the writing. Yeah. You know, how long is Rockford going to ignore this? You know, what we know as audience members is the clue. Because we know Metcalf is involved and we, yeah. Right.

So it stands out to him as being weird because it's not a legal thing it's just this letter yeah so he comes back to it uh she says that metcalf is a union vice president she names the union there are a lot of words in the name yes she represents him personally not the union but he left this letter with her with instructions to open it if anything happened to him. And so Rockford decides that this is worth following up on because maybe something has happened to Metcalf. Right. And then this scene, it's a little more businesslike, right? Because they're actually going over, you know, important things. But then it ends with a very romantic, full mouth kiss.

One that is preluded with a look both ways. Yeah. To see if they're alone. Right? At first, I interpret that. I was like, what's he? Why? What's?

And then I thought, maybe he's not allowed to kiss her. Maybe that's part of the, you know, treatment for cyanide poisoning. No makeouts. But it was good. I liked it. It was nice because, again, it felt like just part of their relationship. Yeah. And it wasn't like particularly gratuitous or like weird.

It was just like, oh, sometimes there's some makeouts. All right. So we follow Rockford through a short sequence. He's leaving a building and I didn't go back to double check, but it's either the same or almost the same shot as when we first saw Metcalf. Right. We see him hang up the phone and leave a building and there's something on the window and we see it in reverse. Yeah.

Here we see Rockford just walking out of this building with that same shot. So to the attentive viewer, oh, he was where Metcalf was. Like, it's not a big thing, but I noticed it because it was a callback that established that he's successfully figured out where he should go next in about a second of screen time.

And then we follow him as he goes into the Firebird, opens his notebook, and we see that he's written down an address. And here we have a fade, actually, a rare fade. So I just noticed it because almost every transition is a cut in this show. Anyway, it's just a Rockford pulling up to the address. It's this nice house. He rings the bell. There's no answer. He goes around to the back, rings the back buzzer. There's no answer. He goes over to open the garage, which is unlocked. There's a nice car in there. And then we see him poking around the car and then he opens the door. That's when we hear the car horn as Metcalf's body is slumped forward onto the wheel. He is dead.

When Rockford opens that garage door, he pulls out a hanky, right? Yeah, he knows. He's got some suspicions. I actually don't know if that was the horn or just the door is a jar buzzer. It might have been the buzzer just because we didn't hear a horn before he opened the door. You don't feel comfortable with what's happening. Yeah. yeah so yeah so we cut to cops on the scene dennis is saying that he should be throwing the book at rockford uh i think this is where rockford literally says like he's just trying to help um yeah because he thinks that beth is still in danger right uh and as soon as

she gets out of the hospital she's going to be a target again Dennis in a classic exchange where Dennis is like well if you have something that we can actually follow up on give it to me and Rockford says all I have is a hunch and Dennis says alright we'll lay that on me I got nothing so his hunch is that Metcalf

was this union vice president and he was in charge of the pension fund for the union. So that's a lot of money. It's certainly possible that he might have been skimming or otherwise embezzling. Maybe he had partners. And if they found out that Beth has this letter from him that was some kind of insurance for him, then the attempt on her life makes sense. Because if he's dead, he left her

this letter. She may have read it. So a wild hunch that just happens to be basically what's happening. Straight up what's happening, yeah. Rockford's usually right. Yeah. It's not even that he's usually right. But I think that rockford knows the criminal element right it's not even that he's smarter than becker i think he just is paying attention to different details he's he's putting together the chain of evidence that is being presented to the audience as like here's all the important details right yeah like we don't like we actually didn't know about the union connection until the characters told us right but we did know that metcalf and bailey were in on something and that metcalf was killed by guys who are obviously mob guys so like the

two the narrative causal chain it makes sense to us that rockford is reading the tea leaves correctly. So we then go to what must be the next day because Beth is out of the hospital and Rockford is walking with her through the parking lot. They have good banter about how terrible the food is and how Beth is going to make an omelet when she gets home, mushrooms, maybe a little bit of cheese. There's a great opportunity for a Rockford eye roll when she says, you don't know how good it feels to be out of county hands. I think he says, I have a good idea or something like that.

Well, Rockford says that they're going to need to get some eggs because he doesn't have any. He's taking her home with him. It's too dangerous for her to to be alone and this is really kind of flirty for what he for what he's saying right like he's yeah um i think maybe there'll be another attempt on your life uh so guess who's getting the key guess who's moving in right well and he says i think you might this might take a long time to to work out uh so he's apparently uh you know feeling pretty pretty good about having an excuse to spend more time in in beth's company which is it doesn't read as creepy yeah at least to me it's more like on the pendulum swing of

their relationship since she actually needs help like she was physically harmed and like cyanide poisoning i mean like that's she really needed help so he's in that role as the one who will help yeah i'm going to take care of you and that means that you know we're gonna have a chance to make out some more i don't know it kind of i'm explaining it badly it works in the scene yeah he's it's he's trying to make the best of a bad situation uh however we see that as they pull out uh our two gorillas have them staked out and follow them in their own car i believe this might be the first incident of gorilla gum. The gorillas in this episode do a good job of chewing gum in a menacing way. So our next sequence, Beth and Rockford are in the car.

Beth is trying to talk to him about some things, but he's obviously distracted. And I like how we see him realize that he's being followed. Yes. Like often he says, oh, we're being tailed or, you know, expresses it verbally here. We actually like see him looking at the mirrors and realizing that there's this car right behind him. Right. It's really well done. And then we get another static camera through some action where we have a static camera, obviously, I think, sitting on the car, you know, hood area. stuff move behind him and the other car following and coming in and out of the shot as Rockford gets in and out of traffic and makes turns, which again is a really interesting way to shoot this in the context of the Rockford files where we're often seeing the entire car and seeing the physicality of the entire car as it moves around the streets. In this instance, we're seeing the relationship between the two cars more than

anything else and how Rockford can't really get that far away. And then he even says, there's too much traffic. Someone's going to get hurt. And that's when we zoom out to a wider shot and see him take a sudden turn through a parking lot and the chase is on. And I mean, that's another bit that we don't normally get is him thinking through his options, right? On one hand, he's just telling the audience what's happening. Oh, there's too much traffic. Yeah, we need to get out of this traffic. But I think he's legitimately saying what his character is thinking.

Like, it's not just this is why we're making this turn in the fiction it's i need to figure out a way to take this away from the general populace right but yeah he's he's definitely uh letting us in in this particular chase like letting us in on on what is going on in the head of rockford during the chase or the, and the music. It's good chase music. Yeah, I know. We get good chase music as he leads the goons into a scrapyard. Yes. We get some dramatic derby-style driving as they're kind of weaving in and out of piles

of scrap and kicking up dust. And we get a shot from the dashboard of the following car of like a bunch of dirt getting splashed against their their windshield now i feel this is me being an old fogey the moment they went into this junkyard i knew that there somewhere in this junkyard was a giant compactor and there was a crane with a magnet with it like a big big ass magnet and that may have fallen out of our common parlance right like this so the crane features prominently in this chase uh and it's something that like i don't even know if they showed it to us or anything like that it's just part of that was 80s shorthand right like that's like saying going into a library you're gonna find books

well i feel like that was something it was in like cartoons yeah it was in uh james bond film it was in goldfinger it was like a big you know had a big sequence with the junkyard trash compactor and and i feel like we're maybe we've lost we've lost that. Yeah, we've lost that. That's a little bit of culture that is disappearing in this age of millennials and Twitters and Bitcoin. All right, old fogey time's over. As you say, the crane is important because basically Rockford manages to shoot in front of a rail car

that's just moving a bunch of scrap around. While the vision is obscured, he jumps out of the car and tells Beth to drive in circles, but don't leave. So this pursuit car is just following her in circles while he runs to the crane, climbs up the ladder,

talks to the guy running the crane, and apparently talks him into doing this incredibly dangerous thing guy running the crane and apparently talks him into doing this incredibly dangerous thing. So the crane has the big magnet with a big pile of, of, uh, scrap attached to it. The first car goes underneath the crane, they release the scrap and it, and it makes a big crash right in front of the pursuing car. And that's when the cop cars with their sirens on come pouring into the scrapyard so there's an important detail in that exchange while up the ladder hanging outside the door to the cranes operating suite whatever those are called rockford has to get his wallet out. Oh, I didn't notice that. Yeah. He's bribing the crane guy. That makes much more

sense. We don't know how much, but it's just great that in the middle of this chase, he's just pulling out, I guess, 20, 40 bucks. I don't know. I don't know. I just have a big question mark. It's one of those variables that we have on his ledger at any given moment. So I apparently missed the wallet happening. So now it makes sense. Now I have no quibbles with this whatsoever. And so the cops show up. They arrest everyone.

We go to our friends talking to Becker down at the station. So we saw Jim and Beth getting arrested. And then here we get lines about they also arrested the other two guys. So they learned their names, which don't mean anything to our heroes. But they have high-priced legal talent because they've both already been sprung.

And so they don't really get anything else to go on here. But Rockford does turn to Beth and go, Do you think you could do the same for us? Yeah. Oh, dear listeners, go find this episode. If you're not,

you should watch this episode, but if you don't feel like it, fast forward to, to the chase scene and then watch through this just to see Beth's expression in response. It is indescribable how hilarious the face she makes. It's both obviously

and maybe if you're good and you know what, you want something from me now like all wrapped up into one shrug. It is in the Academy Awards of glances. It's so good. Well, after that high point of the episode, we go to Rocky wearing a suit in his home where shortly Rockford and Beth arrive before he can leave because he was going to head up to Oxnard to see this man about this semi, but Rockford plays on his sympathies to, to say that he needs someone to stay with Beth for just a few hours while he chases down some ideas. And, uh,

Rocky reluctantly agrees. I like this again, as a combination of, of character moment where she won't let him leave until he tells her what he's doing yeah and you know how many times have we seen rockford say i'm gonna go check something out and then just leave right and in this case beth is like this is a literally about me i need to know what you're up to rockford says that uh thanks to basically fast talking the secretary uh he found out that uh this guy bailey was metcalf's stock broker so he's established that they know each other right um and also that bailey has dropped out of sight uh nobody knows where he is from his his office his his day job office you know but now that he knows that they know each other that's the next thing to follow up but how is he going to find him since he dropped out of sight well beth what was the name of bailey's bail bondsman for this uh tax beef and i was excited

because i remember how excited you were the last time that we saw solly the bail bondsman and there was the line about uh now it's murder or something and Sully just leaves. Yeah. Yes. Oh, yes. Oh, so good. Done with it. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So Beth tells Rockford, actually tells Rockford that first and then gets the rest of this explanation out of him.

And so satisfied, apparently, she lets him leave. So we go to Jim Rockford talking to Bale Bondsman Sully. We never sleep. There's a lot of good money stuff in this this is this is such a fun con that he runs on this one here yeah i had a question about that but we'll yeah we'll go through it so first of all rockford interrupts him as he's trying to eat his lunch because Sully goes to a drawer and pulls a sandwich out and then never gets to eat it because Rockford comes in and says that he has he has info on a possible skip but he doesn't want to tell Sully who it is because or how much it is right

because then Sully will know so he wants $500 up front to tell Slly about this person who may be skipping on their bail. Solly, you know, is like, I'm not going to give you $500. Yeah. So Rockford runs the numbers on potential bail bonds amounts. Right. Yeah. $500 is half of what it would cost him to recover the money through his insurance and all these other things. So it's a deal.

But what I think I love about this con is that he's coming to Sully and Sully has all the information. He's got his hunch. That's all he has. And then that's what he's selling to him is a hunch that this guy's trying to skip out. But like, you know, pretending that he knows more about the situation than Sully does. Then Sully just starts revealing stuff about the situation that Rockford needs

in order to keep going. Yeah, for sure. So finally, so Sully gives in and gets $500 out of her drawer and offers it to Rockford. Rockford says, Arnold Bailey. And then Sully grabs it away from him. He's like, what are you talking about is skipping town he's a first timer right uh it's a it's a tax thing so he probably doesn't understand how serious it is uh he's a big risk he's not like i believe it was a prostitute who has a whole bunch of clientele in the area right like he's not leaving a job behind he's got nothing tying him down and he knows that sully

gets all the information he can about these people the first time that he has to put up their bond uh this was the only part that didn't really connect for me he basically is like so tell me where he is and so i was like okay fine right yeah he has this uh this mistress or yeah or this woman that he sees sally gives rockford the address of uh of this woman and says if he's not at his house or office, that's the other place that I know that he goes. So Rockford knows that he's followed him for a few days or had him followed, I should say. I think he's basically saying, if you tell me where he is, then I'll find him. I'll make sure he doesn't skip town. Yeah, exactly. Like I'll make sure he's where you think he is or he's at one of his usual spots.

So you don't have to worry about it. I'll set your mind to ease. Although they never really say anything along those lines. So it's a little hard to judge if that's what actually happened there. And then Rockford takes the money and leaves. Yes, he pulls it right out of the drawer where he tried to put it away. I was like, I don't know if he actually earned that money. Not from Sully.

I mean, at $200 a day, somebody owes him some money. It's good from Rockford's perspective, don't get me wrong. Maybe knowing more about how bail bonds work would make that connection. It doesn't matter. It really isn't. And it's not a big flaw or anything. It's just that the speed at which this stuff went for me, I kind of lost a little bit of the cause and effect.

I think what happened there was that Rockford says, I have a hot tip. And Sully said, all right, tell me what that tip is, and I'll tell you what it's worth. And that's not a bargaining position Rockford wants to be in. Then they bargain and they agree upon the $500. Then Rockford gives him the tip and he's like, that's not a good tip. And he puts it away and Rockford argues that it is a good tip and he begrudgingly agrees.

And then Rockford physically takes the money as a sign of, I mean, I think in business law, we can say that that was a contract fulfilled that there was nothing wrong with it. I just, I don't know if Sully wanted him to have that at the end of the day. Everybody is, is an angel to someone. Rockford might be Sully's angel.

Well, and it's the only money here ends this episode because he's not working for anyone. And he had to put out a bribe for that magnet guy. Uh, so Rockford goes to this apartment suite to 2716. Written out. And we get a great shot of favorite appearance guest,

Bruce Tuttle. He of the magnificent mustache and flared haircut, sitting in a car, watching the apartment building. Chewing gum. Aggressively chewing gum. He sees Rockford talk to the manager and then head over towards an apartment. And he makes a call from the car phone to the older guy that we saw earlier that someone is coming to talk to Bailey.

And he receives orders to sit on them unless they move. And our friend bruce makes some declarative statement about like yes that is why i am here so uh yeah the the door is answered by this uh this this woman that bailey sees um who i don't think ever gets a name bailey has a suitcase he tells her to go finish packing rockford confronts him with Metcalf and his death. First, he denies knowing Metcalf. Then he denies wanting Beth or Metcalf dead. So, like, Rockford keeps accusing him of doing things.

And he keeps denying them, but in ways that slowly reveal, I mean, we know, but like, you know, show to Rockford that he is involved in something, but then he kind of stands firm and is like, I don't have to talk to you. I'm going to the airport. You know, I'm going on a business trip. Right. I'm leaving. Not at all. Skipping town. Not at all. And so Rockford goes to one of his favorite techniques, which is to say, well, I'm just going to tell the cops all that and see what they think in response to which bailey hits him with the suitcase and runs which is such a rockford move yeah it's like a sucker punch but with a suitcase rockford pursues him they run around the pool that's in the center of this apartment complex then uh rockford in his own very rockford moment grabs the long extension pool cleaner thing and uses it to reach ahead

of him and just whap Bailey until he falls into the pool. He hit him with a pool arm. It's a pun on pole arm. It's a role playing joke. It's funny. It's a pool arm. I get it. I get it.

Well, once he's in the pool. Yes. He yells that he can't swim, even though he's pretty good at treading water. Yes. As a practical measure in order to finish filming the scene. In my notes, I say that Rockford leverages this situation to his advantage. Right. Yeah.

So this is a Rockford I don't approve of. This moment here. This is the torture moment. Yeah. So this is a Rockford I don't approve of. This moment here. This is the torture moment. Yeah. So he crawls out onto the diving board, puts out his hand to grab Bailey's hand as if to help him, and then gets him into like a knuckle lock so that he can, by exerting pressure, dunk his head under the water and then pull him back out. water and then pull him back out it's interesting i because i was thinking about what where my line is here because i could see rockford bargaining with him and being like i can get you out of this trouble but you need to fess up and tell me what's really going on or whatever and i may let that happen but the dunking that's the part that i'm like oh god damn it he's basically waterboarding yeah essentially like what this is and it's i, I don't want to express like grave disappointment because this is also in the 70s and I guess a less enlightened time. But I guess I mean, the gag is that the guy can't swim.

And so Rockford is able to use that to his advantage. Yeah. It's a different version of like dunking someone's head in the toilet. Right. Like, I think this is played a little bit more for humor. Right. No, I agree. I agree.

I'm being overly sensitive about torture. No, but I also was like, oh, I don't really like this. It kind of ends up setting up the very end. I don't know. Yeah, no. They get a lot of use out of this pool, I think, as part of it. What happens next with the pool, I absolutely with so i'm like not complaining yeah like narratively it's like we have the pool how much can we get out of it right and they get a lot

out of it but yes this could have been accomplished by like i'm going to let you tread water until you tell me what i want to know yeah up to you as opposed to this active i'm dunking you right exactly pulling you out i'm dunking you anyway more of a quibble than anything else, but it did rub me a little bit of the wrong way. Anyway, so there's a sequence where Rockford dunks him, he gives him a piece of information and then stops talking and then he dunks him again. And then he gives the next piece of information through which we learn Bailey and Metcalf were skimming from the pension fund. There's the scheme about bonds where they reported a certain percentage, but they kept the other percentage. And they ended up skimming $600,000 of profit out of this deal split between the two of them.

Martin Jordan is this mob guy we've been seeing. The mob has took over the union. Yeah, that's the problem here. So Martin Jordan discovered the scam and the mob doesn't like getting ripped off. So he's the one who killed Metcalf. If he knew about Metcalf, he must know about me. And with that information, I think Rockford is satisfied. He's like, all right, well, let's go downtown and make this official. He pulls them out of the pool and they turn around and who's there but Martin, Jordan and Bruce with a gun. Yes.

Chewing his gum, holding the gun. And they are going to take our two wet protagonists into the car for a bit of a ride. They get our guys into the car and the staging of this is important, right? So Jordan tells Bailey to get in the back and to scoot over. And Jordan has the gun. Bruce is driving and he tells Rockford to get in the front seat. Bruce backs out. And then we see Rockford dive like over to the side, grab the wheel and jam his foot down on Bruce's foot so that the car suddenly accelerates, shoots through the entrance to the apartment and then crashes directly into the pool before anyone can do anything about it.

Perfect. I was completely delighted when I realized it was before it even hit the pool. When I realized where it was headed, I was like this. I cannot wait for. And I did not have to wait long because it was a car speeding towards a pool. It promised and it delivered within moments and it was beautiful. And then Rockford manages to be the first one out of the car. Somehow he gets the gun. He gets up on the edge of the pool and as the three of them are all kind of getting out of the car and treading water, ends with the line, okay, everybody out of the pool. There's also a handy collection of bystanders and witnesses showing up at this point. I mean, you hear the crash of a car going into the pool.

You come to check it out. Yeah, I'm going to check it out. Yeah, so our villains are apprehended. And we cut to this wonderful shot that is the reverse of the first shot of Rockford on the beach. When we first saw Rockford, we had the close in that slowly zoomed out. And here we cut to this big panoramic shot of the beach, clearly Rockford with a fishing pole in the middle of it. And over the course of this dialogue, it slowly zooms in on them as they have this discussion. So Beth is with him as he's fishing.

Turns out that once they got them all downtown, Bailey turned state's evidence. The reason he had the IRS beef in the first place was that he was spending money out of proportion to his income, which was his profit from the skim, in contrast to Metcalf, who hadn't spent any of it, and Jordan had it. He had taken the money. So it's a neat package for the prosecution with, you know, the mob guy with the money from the skim, the murder, Bailey turning evidence on him, et cetera. Puts a nice little bow on our murder mystery.

Again, mirroring the initial sequence, Rocky comes out onto the beach and walks down to where Rockford is. Rockford doesn't want to hear any more about this truck, but Rocky wants Jim to stop bossing him around. What if he has something that he wants to say? This exchange is this weird, like, where Jim is apologizing and rocky is saying oh don't worry about it i'm i don't care about it because no

no it's that and like rocky is upset that jim won't let rocky let it go yeah exactly well turns out rocky heard from uh this guy p, that earlier he had been complaining, what if Pete, whatever, buys this before I can? Well, that guy went up to Oxnard and turns out that the semi was a bust. It was totally rusted out. It wasn't worth anything. So it's good that they didn't waste their time going up there.

Yeah. But he heard about one over in Lancaster. And we end our episode with a freeze frame on Jim Rockford casting into the sea with a pained expression on his face. End of episode. Yeah, that was a lot of fun. I want to thank Victor for recommending that one. He, we recommended it. He noted that, and I'm paraphrasing here,

it's not really funny. It doesn't have a message, but it's a good, solid example of a typical Rockford Files, but with many great moments and a good Bartlett script.

Also, it has Bruce Tuttle, just saying. And in addition to that, he filled out a little more in the Rockford Files files. Oh, nice.

You can find a link to those at our website or the patreon or tinyurl.com slash 200 files to go right to it he lists 10 reasons it's a great episode uh so i thought maybe we'll leave leave those for the for the reader to go uh to go look at them but i think we hit all of them in our discussion. Though he does call out one thing that I think is interesting that maybe we can talk about a little bit here. This is an episode where Jim is the smartest guy in the room. Yeah. Which wasn't something that I really thought about because I think we always assume that Jim is right when we're watching these. But especially in the second season, and we've talked about this a little bit before with some of the early second season episodes.

A lot of them put Jim in the position of not knowing what was going on and being made a fool of. Like in Aaron Ironwood, you know, he's getting scammed by his his foster brother, that kind of stuff. Even Chicken Little's Little Chicken, Rockford's kind of the victim of the scam. Right. This was a problem kind of creatively because the viewership really fell off in the second season. And a lot of the people at the studio thought that it was because people were used to seeing Jim Rockford as being the smartest guy. And then they were watching these shows where he was getting conned. Right.

So this is much later in the second season. And I think this is a good example of maybe writing that ship, right? Where, where Rockford's the one, as we talked about his hunches are, are right. He's connecting the dots in a way that nobody else is that kind of stuff. I'm generally, I have no problem with Rockford being wrong. Yeah. But it is interesting to think about this one as one where rockford is the smartest guy in the room it's also it plays into this moment i had where on the internet i was like hey i'm gonna go uh watch rock for files to prepare for my podcast about the rock for files so that you know that i'm a rock for files fan and that i do a podcast about the rockford files as you do i did this and somebody was like

oh jim so smug and i never really thought of him as smug but i could see if you'd seen a few episodes where it is this sort of episode where he is the smartest guy in the room uh and this one it didn't i don't think it came across that, but if you see him interacting with just with Dennis and Angel and just like beleaguered with people who aren't paying attention or listening to him, then he could come across that way. And like I said this about a previous one where there's a moment where he just did the work and reached the conclusion. He goes, I figured it out. So the cops will. Though that's the sort of Rockford paradigm that I enjoy. Yeah.

This is a job. There are ways to proceed and do this job. I don't have to be Sherlock Holmes to solve these crimes. It's just that he's ahead of the curve. Right, yeah. In a lot of ways. Or he has information that other people don't, so he's able to be a step ahead. Yeah.

Yeah, the crimes don't come to he's able to be a step ahead. Yeah. Yeah. The crimes don't come to him because they're unsolvable. They come to him because he has a bunch of people that he knows that get in trouble. And he also advertises in the yellow pages. And to that, this is a very, very clear Rockford's friends are in trouble. Yeah. Episode. Right.

Like Beth was literally poisoned. Yeah. It's just a solid, solid episode of the Rockford Files with a lot of those, a lot of those shots, a lot of the framing. And we'll talk about this

in the second, in the second half about leaving things off screen and stuff like that. Those elements do make this one stand out. Like, I think I'll remember this episode a little more

because of those elements than i would other strong but not particularly groundbreaking uh you know mid-season rockford files anything else you wanted to to get in here what we know of money he wasn't hired by anyone so what we know about the money situation here is that um he left dennis with a bill for two tacos and a coffee uh he bribed the magnet crane operator we don't know how much and he got 500 for his tip to sully uh and i'm actually gonna say he uh saved uh rocky some money for dragging up do's Nard. And I mean,

he, he made more money in this episode than he makes in most episodes where he has a client. Yeah. Well done, uh, Jim. Well done.

Cool. So yeah. Uh, thanks again to Victor. This was a great, a great pick. Uh, we really enjoyed it.

Recommended as a good representative. Hey, what is the Rockford files? This would not be a bad, like, this is what the show is. Yeah, no, this is a good entry point. Well, shall we take our break and then we'll get to our second half where we talk about the specifics of this episode and how they help us with our narrative design and fiction? Sounds good to me. We'll see you then. 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 one dollar 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 Linking 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. We just got done talking about In Hazard, a recommended episode of the Rockford Files, recommended by one of our patrons at Patreon. Thank you, Victor. And now we're going to talk about some of the lessons that we learned watching this episode and how we might apply them to the not real life lessons that we learn. Although, I mean, there are real life lessons that we learn.

Although, I mean, there are real life lessons that we could learn from the Rockford Files. But in this case, the narrative lessons that we learn that we can apply to however we interact with fiction, whether it's writing or playing role playing games. That's it. Those are the two ways you can interact with fiction. Those are our two ways you can interact with fiction. Those are our primary ways. I feel like we mentioned it a couple of times in the first half about this idea of on and off screen, which I think is probably the main thing we should talk about. But before we get to that, I just wanted to mention how this episode is a nice example of the differential of information

between audience and character. Yeah. And this is something that the Rockford files plays around with all the time, different episodes treat this differently. And in this one, this is pretty far over, not all the way over,

but it's pretty far over towards the side of the audience, knowing things that Jim doesn't and kind of waiting for him to catch up. Yeah. But as we noted at our end of our discussion there, not because Jim is having the wool pulled over his eyes, just because the sequence in which he discovers things is later than the sequences that they're shown to us as audience. And I think that's highlighted particularly in the moment where he skips

past the name on uh best list and as a viewer i'm like you know how long until he realizes that that is important and it's about 15 seconds like there's a moment of tension and then it's resolved but that moment could be longer it could be another scene it could be another character that realizes it. So I liked how that expectation was like created and then immediately subverted. Yes. And I think there's kind of a nice purpose to that. I don't know if this is like the intentional purpose.

But OK, so we've got this dramatic irony where we as the audience, we don't have the whole scam figured out, but we have, we, we know the players, which Jim does. Yeah. Right. So having Jim skip over that, even for that brief amount of time gives us reason to believe that the cops won't see it. Right. It gives us a chance to let the cops not see it and not think of them as bumbling idiots. There's not a ton of respect for the police force in Rockford Files, but they're not Keystone cops, right? Like there's always a reason why the cops can't see the whole story. It's not that they're just incompetent. They're clearly dealing with more than Rockford is.

They're more beleaguered. Yeah. more than Rockford is. They're more beleaguered. Yeah. So I think that that's a great moment because as audience members, we do know more and we can sometimes judge characters on not knowing what we know when there's no reason why they should know. And I think maybe a takeaway for it is not just the,

the difference in knowledge, which I think is something you always need to grapple with when you're you know presenting information um and you have characters in that world uh but also the way that this slices which information you know in this case like as you said we know the players but we don't know the plot yeah we know who's involved we don't know what they're actually doing a different episode could do that the other way, where maybe the first couple of scenes are us seeing people in action, scamming someone or robbing something or whatever. But we don't know they're wearing masks or maybe there's something else where we don't know who they are. And the tension is, when are we going to find out which of these characters are the ones that did the thing that we know happened? Which of these characters is Angel and is going to have to run to Rockford for help? Right. The subtlety there of like, it's not just that we know everything and we're waiting for Rockford to catch up. We know some things he doesn't. And

then there's some things that neither of us know that the story is about finding out so we get all the stuff about the the pension fund and the skimming and why the mob's involved like that's all at the very end which the show likes to do a lot where it's like here's the backstory for why all this stuff is happening but the action is already in you know it's what set everything into motion so uh i uh, I don't know, it's like slicing your narrative up into those pieces and then being like, not only who knows what, but like which portion of this is the most interesting for the audience to know. Yeah. I think that's a really, that's an interesting lens to look at that through instead of taking it and saying, what information do I want the audience to know? You can make a category. You know, I want them to know almost thinking about like the game of Clue.

When you're playing it and you're like, I have sussed out what the weapon is and I have a guess at the room. And now you're watching everyone else kind of come to the end and start guessing. You catch your breath when somebody guesses the weapon that you sussed it out as right like i don't know if i'm making any sense with that but anyways i'll use that metaphor the knowledge differential right is what creates the the dramatic tension right how and when i mean there are other ways of creating the tension but this one is very powerful and i think you kind of do it naturally a lot of the time, but it's something to harness. This episode is a good example of slicing it a couple different ways and having it very naturally all kind of unspool.

There's a neat thing, too, when it comes to Rockford's concerns and our concerns, right? I think as audience members, when we're presented with a mystery in this nature, we start off wanting to know what the plot is. We want to discover that, oh, they've been skimming from the union, which is mob owned and the mob is coming after them, but when you think about it, Rockford and Dennis, while they certainly will want to know that, what they really want to know is who's trying to kill Beth. And that's a bigger question. And we're not quite as invested in it as much as

we like and care for Beth. That's also a function of we are pretty certain that Beth is going to be okay. Yeah. Like as audience members watching a serialized show, but in the world of the Rockford files in, in the world they've constructed, uh, the characters don't know that Beth is going to be okay. So that's where they, you know, that's where we invest in them and we,

you know, care about what they care about because they, they have the pressure on them to figure it out before something else happens. Yeah. So, yeah, I just wanted to call that out.

Uh, but past that, I think the standout element of this episode is this idea of framing and putting things off screen. And we see that in a couple of different ways. Well, okay. So I said before,

this is like, this goes back again to like the, the Greek plays. This was violence. Wasn't supposed to happen on happen on stage. So it always happened off screen. And then you saw the consequences of it. The impact of that is often more than having witnessed it, right? I can think of quite a few instances. I mean, the one that is really fresh in my mind is in Mad Max Fury Road. It's the bullet farmer.

They shoot his light out, but he's still shooting at them. There's a great distance between the two of them. Max walks to him, and we don't see what happens until there's an explosion, and Max comes back, and he's got blood on him. And it's not his blood. And that's it. It's a moment of badassery more than anything else. It's just to say, that's how badass this guy is. That's how he survived.

We don't need to know what he did. We don't need to see the hand-to-hand fight. There's plenty of action throughout this whole film. Right. And, you know, classically, that's the famous thing from psycho the shower scene we don't see anyone being stabbed we see someone grabbing a shower curtain right and we hear that this music or whatever so it's it's a fairly common technique and it's and it's done well and i think stands out but what i like about in particular i'm thinking about the the the fight around the safe

yeah i just knew he was getting his ass kicked right right and there's no indication of that you don't hear him yelping it's the context around it because so first like it's unusual for the rockford files to film a fight that way so it's already kind of like oh what's going on here and then all the framing of it puts jim at a disadvantage he doesn't think anyone's there we do see him get sucker punched as he like goes out a door he's outnumbered and we just saw these guys in in another example of putting something off screen narratively uh in the aftermath of like torturing a guy to death and then getting complimented for it right like they're clearly dangerous men uh so you have all that context going into then seeing a dark room hearing grunts and you know seeing bodies going back and forth while it wouldn't be totally

unexpected for rockford to come out of that okay Okay. The fact that it's in the room and he got punched first makes it like, yeah, he's getting beat. If we saw him, he's walking out and then suddenly slams the door on one of their faces and then runs into the hallway. That would be more of like, oh, Rockford's getting one over on them and getting away. But in this case, all the context around it tells us exactly what's happening, I think, while not room or cutting to a camera, looking at the window from the outside and seeing like silhouettes and the light move around is like a flashlight gets knocked. Instead of doing that, it sits in the room on perturbed by the violence that's happening around it. Right. Like not looking the way our eyes would look to see what the action is. I think that is also another part of how it makes our eye guy, Rockford, in trouble. It feels more helpless on

the audience side than it would, I think, from more of a distance. I'd agree with that. I mean, I think it's clearly intentional, but I think it's such a controlled shot. Yeah. Right? Not moving at all. We don't need to see them. We do need to see that it's chaotic. I think it's fairly rare, especially on television, that the camera isn't moving in some way unless you're looking at someone's face. unless you're looking at someone's face. So having that suddenly be this jarring, like, whoa, makes that feel even more out of control, to me, at least.

Later in the show, he uses kind of the same technique in the chase to, again, show chaos without having to shake the camera everywhere. Yeah, yeah. If it was a longer shot shot if you were farther away then you're the like omniscient observer right watching this all happen right but when you're in the action and not moving that like is much more visceral to me about i don't know conveying uh something happening that you don't want to be happening yeah so that's all like kind of the visual technique in this show, how it does that. What can we take from that for prose fiction or for things that are not visual? Yeah. I was

thinking about role-playing games and bringing this to the table and, and, um, this can be done, I think to highlight a moment in a game, right? Okay. So first of all, I wouldn't do it with every single piece of action or fighting that you have right like this is a tool to use for a moment when you want to make it stand out against the other ones it would be interesting to say if you're you know role playing out an action scene whether it's a chase or a fighter or something like that and you have someone making a role i think oftentimes we're like that, and you have someone making a roll, I think oftentimes we're like, okay, so what does that look like?

Let's talk about the fiction of it. And it's not enough to say, just let the roll stand and move on. You're not getting any details or whatever. But to ask what the aftermath looks like is interesting. Yeah. The wizard goes into a room that's supposed to be full of goblins before the rest of the party does and cast their spell. Instead of describing what happens, have the rest, you know, everyone come into the room afterwards and see the result. And I don't think that this is like a new technique or anything like that.

I'm pretty sure I've used it and I know people who have. But it would be interesting to use it consciously. it and I know people who have, but it would be interesting to use it consciously because in that case, in the case of this wizard with these poor goblins, you know, you could make that decision after the role or you could make the decision before the role. You know, the wizard rolls the dice over here, leave them under a cup and you're not going to know the aftermath until the rest of you enter the room and we don't know what it is. And I think that that one is a little bit closer to what we saw in this Rockford Files episode. This is kind of talking about jumping around in the fictional time, which we do all the time,

right? To cut to another scene, to find out where people are while this character is doing this thing. But usually the unit of the role is kind of the atomic unit whether you're rolling and saying what happens or whether you're rolling and and using that to justify what you just narrated or whatever but i like that idea of decoupling actually looking at it from the person who, who actively is doing the thing. Right. I think that's the interesting thing to me where it's like you roll the dice, but nobody knows what they are,

you know, until my character in the fiction interacts with whatever you've done. And then you have that tension of not knowing usually just, there's no tension, right? Like you roll and you know. So like suddenly introducing that tension of not knowing and then having to backfill in uh you know how it went down or whatever is a really interesting that's a really interesting thought and i i would imagine it would be fun to chew up the scenery a

little bit too yeah like just describing the sounds we're getting that in this rockford as episode right like you hear violence but you don't know for certain who's committing it and who's receiving it yeah like what if you said you roll the dice and you see what happens they're like all right describe this but describe what we hear don't describe what we see you know describe uh what the room looks like but don't describe what the people look like give us a blind spot for us to fill in with our imaginations um which we're doing when we're role-playing anyway. But like, I mean, I know when I play games and run games,

I do a very cinematic kind of like, tell us what the camera sees kind of approach to a lot of the time. And so kind of limiting that in the way that, you know, scene had a limited scope could be really powerful, just either to shake things up or to create this sense of, you don't know quite what happened all the time. Yeah. Another vast aspect of this, you know, we're talking about this in terms of your what's happening in the fiction.

But this is also a technique that is used for safety. This idea of drawing a line or putting something behind a veil is the a term of art for um a number of games generally you're saying that you know here's something that is is past the line of what i want to have in my game like i like i don't want to have anyone be waterboarded right unfortunately this this episode went past that line um yeah, a lot of the time this is described, this is used as a safety technique in games that have subject matter that can get close to, or be directly addressed at sensitive topics, right. For, for, for players on a player level. It's also a technique used in movies and whatnot to get past sensors. Um, if you wanted a sex scene you had to heavily imply that there was a sex scene

then cut away yeah uh and then this other idea which is a little closer to uh what this episode does is the veil which is this idea of we lead up to something that is going to happen and then we draw the veil over it it happens off screen we know that it happens, but we don't go into describing it in detail. Right. It's important. It happens, but we don't need to dwell on it. And that's more like the actual torture of Metcalf. Right. We saw the fallout of it, but we didn't need to see it. I don't think it would have been good for the narrative or would have been good as an audience member to see it happen. But seeing the aftermath of it had a lot of weight to it.

Yeah. Obviously, we're not talking about anything new because we're talking about a television show that came out in the 70s and early 80s. But I think it's worth being conscious about making these sorts of – because these are easy decisions to make unconscious. I think we do it all the time. You can even think of it like in jokes, right? Where, uh, there's, I'm, I'm, for some reason, one of the things I'm a big fan of is almost barfing humor, right? When people are like, that's exactly what that humor is right like it brings it up to an edge and then we we cut and we're not going to yeah you know so it's a thing that we we will do often instinctually but to sit there and think about it as a conscious effort uh and then to think about what what that does to the story that we're telling yeah i think like you can really make something stand out if

you're making a a decision about when to draw that veil what that leads me to is a hair maybe i'd like to split about um lines and veils which is that uh they were for games in particular they're you know introduced as safety techniques but you can also use them for narrative content if you want to have a super serious game you know we are all working together to save the world from this great threat you know it is totally legitimate to be like hey guys no monty python jokes right right uh or organic moments of humor are fine but please don't name your character fart smelson you know like while in another game it's like you know only poop joke names please yes uh and that's the

same kind of idea uh where you're cut or you're saying uh what what content is gonna throw this narrative off track right and sometimes you know that up front and sometimes it occurs during the game and you're kind of like let's not have any more of that please uh? Or, okay, sure, you do that. That happens off screen. Yeah, yeah. Having that in your toolbox, I think, is a strong set of techniques for keeping things on track and keeping the story that you're telling going in the direction you want it to be going. When you're writing fiction, you have the advantage of being able to revise, right? Yeah, yeah. You don't have to worry about other people obeying it. But you can still use,

use these ideas, you know, putting stuff off screen, obviously putting stuff behind a veil, implying what happens rather than stating what happens. That is, that's strong in every medium. Um,

do you have anything else you wanted to pull out of this episode? I have a weird theory. Go on. About our moment trying to find Beth at the jail and discovering that she's at the hospital. I developed this theory while we were creating and recording this podcast. I developed it because I had IMDB sitting in front of me. I developed it because I had IMDB sitting in front of me. Okay, so for those that may have forgotten, Dennis and Rockford go to the county lockup to find Beth, and they're being kind of stonewalled by a woman. And we said, this is a little weird or a little out there because it didn't do the Rockford Files thing of making this character be their own character.

All it did is got them from point A to point B because they were trying to go to point C and they needed to go to point B. You said, Beth, when she describes what happened when she was poisoned, Beth said the matron brought in a pot of coffee. And in the credits, the IMDb credits, this woman is credited as the police matron. She's working for the mob and is the one who poisoned Beth, which is why she's so resistant to offering any information because she knows she's in trouble. Huh? I buy it. All right. Whew. I don't know if it's supported by the text of the episode, but I buy it as a read. I would highly recommend to our listeners to go back and rewatch that scene alone to see just how guilty that woman is behaving or not. I don't know.

I have to go and rewatch it myself. Well, I think this one would, it's going to say reward or rewatch. I mean, all Rockford to say reward a rewatch i mean all rockford files reward a rewatch i think this one in particular would reward a rewatch uh if you generally don't pay as much attention uh or don't notice things like framing and camera work right because this one does a lot of really interesting things with it i'm not sure if there's more to the story that you're going to pull out on the second watch. Like it doesn't have one of those really layered mysteries that like, you know, you can pull more out of, but as a lot of just really solid standard Rockford things that are

done well and really moves along really nice. The pace is really nice in this one too. Yeah, I agree. Good job, Jackie Cooper. Good job, Juanita Bartlett. Thank you, Victor. Yes. Thank you, Victor. Good job, Ep Cooper. Good job. One, you a Bartlett. Thank you, Victor. Yes. Thank you, Victor.

Good job. Epi. Good job, Nathan. Good job. Everyone who listens, we appreciate you as always. Thanks yet again for sticking with us. Um,

we have earned our $500 from tipping off the bail bondsman. So, uh, I think it's time for us to go enjoy our ill gotten gains, but we will be back next time to talk about another episode of the Rockford files.