Two Hundred A Day - Episode 32: So Help Me God

Episode Date: April 29, 2018

Nathan and Eppy are joined by special guest Jess Banks to discuss one of the most memorable, and perhaps influential, episodes of The Rockford Files: S3E7 So Help Me God. Jim is called before a grand jury to testify about a case he knows nothing about, and when he invokes his Fifth Amendment rights he is jailed on contempt of court! This "issue episode" dramatizes the use of grand juries to compel witness testimony and exploit the mechanisms of justice to deprive innocent people of their rights, in a way that is compelling and educational, not preachy. Jess brings in the perspective of an activist for criminal justice reform (among other things!) and really brings a lot to our discussion. Enjoy! Find Jess Banks at her blog (profbanks.com) and on Twitter @ProfBanks. 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 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. Special Guest: Jess Banks.

Dr. Soder's office. This is the third time you've canceled. Now you have to have that root canal. A sore foot has nothing to do with your mouth. Welcome to 200 a Day, who is both involved in the role-playing game industry and a social justice paladin. Jess, welcome. Hi, I'm so happy to be here. Yeah, we're always excited to have an additional voice for our discussion of the Rockford Files, as the show itself contains multitudes. In particular, we're excited to talk to you about this episode, because this is one of the most on-the-nose Rockford Files issue episodes about a social justice issue of the time. But maybe before we

get into the episode, Jess, could you tell us a little bit about your relationship with the Rockford Files? Why you're with us today? Yeah. So I like talking about interesting things. I remember, this is what I remember. I remember the opening sequence. Nobody in my household or my grandparents, anybody really watched the show. But I remember catching bits and pieces of it at various points in my childhood. So I was born at late 74. So it's one of those shows. I wasn't as enraptured with it as I was with Emergency. Yes. That was a big one for me when I was that age. Um, and, uh, I don't know why,

but high drama. And so I, I don't have a ton of experience and I certainly haven't seen an episode in full for maybe a couple of decades. So this was, this was coming back and figuring out sort of the places and the people who sort of make up the landscape for the show. Well, that's exciting for me because I think Epi and I, we are so immersed in the Rockford Files at this point that having a fresh pair of eyes to discuss with, hopefully will reveal some things that maybe we take for granted or haven't noticed. Can I ask what got you guys into this project? The 200 a day project. I was watching, rewatching the Rockford Files and tweeting about it, I guess. I guess Nathan has a better idea what I was doing at that time. Yeah, no, you were tweeting about it. This was a couple of years ago now, back in the good old days when Rockford Files was on Netflix.

Oh, yes. You were tweeting about it and talking about what great writing it had. Right. And I was looking for a new show to watch, so I started watching it. I'd never seen it before. And I started watching it because Epi was talking about it, and I trust what Epi has to say about storytelling. And I just was totally enraptured and then um my last podcast project which was a design games podcast that I did with Will Heinmarch for a while came to its natural land I was looking for a new podcast to do because

I really liked doing that so I approached Epi with the idea of hey there's so much good stuff about storytelling and about how to put narratives together that also applies to games do you want to be a nerd with me about this show and also we can pull some some useful info out of it maybe for people in our audience and it's been uh 15 months maybe 15 or 16 not so we talk about it. We still talk about it like a newborn. But it's shocking. I'm still kind of surprised that we're doing it, right? I'm enjoying it quite a bit. And to get a little bit honest with this, the timing was perfect

because I needed James Gardner to soothe me every so often over these past years. That is very true. Yes. Yes. Cause we started our first episodes went up like in January of 2017. Yeah. Everybody's laughing then.

Yeah. It was, it was a dark time in a lot of ways and having something to look forward to that we, that was exciting and fun. and having something to look forward to that we that was exciting um and fun uh in addition to the soothing presence of uh mr garner was was pretty strong i feel that the thing i had to look forward to is that i managed to get my bitch planet non-compliant tattoo scheduled for the week of the inauguration god damn if i go into this administration without a signal of resistance.

So and I was involved with it for some time after. So it really did ease my first couple of months there. So I respect that. That's a that's a strong move. Yeah. And I think also, speaking of having fresh eyes, I mean, you know, if anyone's listening to this that has come to the podcast in the last eight months, maybe probably haven't heard that story. Because we talked about it on the first episode. And we talked about it on a special episode we did at some point. But yeah, we definitely are so in it that we don't think too much about people coming to it fresh. So to the project. So good question. Thank you for asking. Thank you for answering. Just on the Fresh Eyes thing. This is good, good too because i do know the fact that we generally our audience not the audience for

the podcast but the audience that nathan and i have uh in the gaming world there's a lot of people out there who never bothered to watch the rockford files that are watching it now because we do uh so it's we've spread the good word it's good to have somebody every so often involved that can speak for them. Oh, God, no burden there. 200 a Day is supported by all of our listeners, but especially our patrons at patreon.com slash 200 a Day. Patrons get to add to the 200 a Day Rockford Files files, help us pick which episodes to cover, and more. Each episode, we extend a special thanks to our Gumshoe-level patrons. This time, we say thank you to Mike Gillis, a host of the Radio vs. the Martians podcast.

It's 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, check out 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. Check out patreon.com slash 200 today and see if you want to be our newest

gumshoe. Cool. So, you know, I alluded to it earlier, but so this episode, So Help Me God, season three, episode seven. One thing that we both very much enjoy about the show and that I think makes it have this kind of timeless quality, at least to me, is how it does care about things going on in the world outside the world of just the show, if that makes any sense. It cares about issues in varying degrees and varying episodes, obviously. We've talked before about how there's kind of different types of Rockfords. There's the con games. There's the kind of character studies.

Rockford has a job. Rockford gets a friend out of trouble. And then there's the issue episode. Those components are usually present in each one, but this one is like, along with a handful of others, is soup to nuts. We are going to talk about this issue.

Yeah. So this episode, we have Stephen Cannell is now mostly producing and isn't writing as many scripts. He's the series creator, co-creator. But after the first season, the main creative force for the show in collaboration with Garner in his role as as Rockford. But this one is written by Juanita Bartlett, who. Yeah, she's great.

She started as a assistant to James Garner, I think. That's how their relationship started in a different show. And at this point, she's now a fairly frequent script writer, along with story editing and other kind of creative stuff. She ends up producing shows later. Many of her scripts are aligned with the issue episodes, not all of them. But when she pops up, she seems to have a wider sense of like, what's going on in the world? What can we put into this show? I was not expecting to see a name pop in the credits that I would recognize. But David Chase shows up. And I was like, Oh, that's super interesting. Yes. I didn't know he was kind of stuff that early on. So that's, that was really interesting. We also talked about David Chase a lot because he ends up kind of taking, not taking over,

but as the series goes on, he started basically writing some scripts and then he ends up becoming a producer later as well. Um, and some of his scripts in this show are the like punchiest, most humorous in a lot of ways. And most like clever wordplay and stuff along with really tight narrative stuff. He's great. This surprises me not. I think there's some interview stuff with him where he kind of gained a lot of chops on this show working under Bartlett and Cannell, Stephen Cannell um that he then obviously took on to all of the other things that he's done excellent this one is directed by I believe I'm pronouncing

this correctly you know Schwark you have a better shot at it than I do he directed an episode we've talked about before uh two into 556 won't go if you remember that one yeah he has another Rockford later in the season um but he also directed a colombo which i always notice when we look at these things because colombo is my other favorite detective show among other credits are jaws 2 and then just a million tv shows uh oh he did um somewhere in time which is a chris reeve um It's fun. I enjoy it. It's a time travels with hypnotism, I believe. But yeah, I think this particular episode, there's not too much exciting camera work. This one's pretty standard, I think.

But that's some really good cuts that move things along really quickly, which I think are nice. But I think we should probably go ahead and get into our traditional coverage of Epi's favorite part of the episode. The opening montage. I've been looking forward to this. I am here for this. We've said before, we talked a little bit about the art of the opening montage. Because clearly at the time, the opening montage is meant to keep you from changing the channel, right?

Like give you an idea of what's coming up, keep you from changing the channel right like give you an idea of what's coming up stop you from changing a channel but it takes on a new form in this day and age of binging and it creates sort of a nice dramatic irony in this one the notes i have written down are just uh angel rocky beth trucks and kit yep and this is because i'm just super happy to see that angel's gonna be in it even though his role is kind of small in this i'm super happy to see rocky in it i'm super happy to see beth in it any episode that has both rocky and trucks in it is gonna be fun and then we have uh william daniels the voice of tv's uh night riders kit do not fool your listeners by suggesting that one of those trucks is in fact a Knight Rider vehicle.

Right, no. No. Unfortunately, the Rockford Knight Rider crossover I don't think ever happened. Opportunity lost, I gotta say. I know. And, yes, voice of Kit and also Mr. Feeny from Boy Meets World. Oh, see, I know him from St. Elsewhere. I enjoyed that.

Yeah, the preview montage I know him from St. Elsewhere. I enjoyed that. Yeah, the preview montage, I think, is pretty straightforward. We know that Rockford is going to be, he's going to have to testify about something. He doesn't know what. And we're deep into the third season here. So I think that probably the key here is that you're going to see characters that you've already seen that you want to see again. Like, that's what they're trying to tell you. Keep you from changing the channel. So Jess, did you get the sense of the kind of ensemble cast

around Jim Rockford from this episode? Yeah, very much so, yeah. Good. Because again, we just assume we know all these characters. So we're like, yay, we get to see whoever. I locked into that sort of net of characters surprisingly early in the thing. I think that's a good indication of good storytelling that somebody can jump in and be like, oh, I see how it ends up.

Yeah. And we get started off pretty quick with all of that. So our episode starts with a nice pastoral shot of the ocean waves with the credits. Getting those out of the way quick directly into one of my favorite features of the Rockford Files. Whenever Jim is dealing with food in any way i have this unified theory of tv detectives and food which i can touch on yeah very briefly here uh rockford pretty much only eats garbage foods and foods that he catches tacos hot dogs pizza things that he steals from other people and then things that he makes other people pay for yeah yeah he's got a whole hunter-gatherer thing going on here he eats plenty of other things but we never see it on screen whenever he's at a cafe or a restaurant it's always at the beginning or end of a meal we don't actually see him eating

we see him eating things like tacos yeah uh compare this with a uh tv detective such as uh poirot for example uh who eats only extremely fussy belgian delicacies uh and makes a big deal over it for belgian delicacies they are goddamn delicious there is nothing wrong with that i'm just saying we see his character expressed. Salt and delicacies are not like a requirement of my personality, but I see where it comes from. Or how Columbo always refuses food unless it's chili. So anyway, that's why we talk about the food whenever it shows up. I love that. And here we start right off with Rockford and his father rocky having some banter around the fish

that they caught and we're kind of coming in on just a normal rockford family day i love that rocky is feeling down because he didn't catch any like and trying to find a way to blame jim for it it can't be jim's fault right like it can't be anyone's fault it's just how the the die rolls here that is strictly a bad move, though. I would have been successful if you hadn't messed it up for me. Yeah, I feel like there's a bone of contention around, you know, where the superior fishing grounds are. This Rockford family gathering is interrupted by a knock on Jim's trailer. We're getting right into the action as he is served with a subpoena to appear before a federal grand jury with absolutely no other information.

Yeah. And we get our first cut. There's there's no like fat in the narrative of this episode. Right. Like it's very beat next beat next beat. Where do we need to get? Yeah. So we cut right from Rockford being mystified that there's no information.

And why does he have to appear to Beth's office explaining that he has to appear. Yes. I did want to say, though, I think there's a trope of character that is not investigated thoroughly enough, and that is the process server. Right. They are tricksy, and they are fairly universally hated, even if it's the first time you've ever been served with a summons. And I think that's worth exploring.

Like, characters hated on sight. Right. You don't know that a person who does this job exists, and you hate him instantly. One thing that we haven't really been treated to that often in the Rockford Files is, like, a friendly knock at the door. Right. If there's someone at Rockford's door, I mean, as far on the scale of people you don't want to see on your doorstep out of people that have appeared on Rockford's doorstep, this is pretty pleasant, you know, because it could be a sucker punch or somebody with a gun.

You rarely get a knock at the door. Like the best you can do is angel knocking at the door, running from someone. You're happy that Angel's there, but you got some danger on the way. But yeah, we are with our friends and Beth Davenport, who is not only Jim's attorney, but also the on again, off again, love interest. I knew it. Yeah. In case that wasn't, i was wondering at what point that became clear uh for you i wasn't 100 sure but when he gets out of prison and she like and he puts his arm around her shoulder and she puts his hand his arm around her weight wait no i'm getting my

but anyway there are shoulders or waist and arms and then i was like okay all right all right yeah it's actually kind of an interesting i I mean, we go into it in other episodes, but the relationship is, like, we say on again and off again, but it really, it's more just like the sort of 70s. It's kind of a consistent low level. Like, hey, you're around. Have either of you guys seen Joe Don Baker movie Mitchell? Oh, no, I want to see.

It is absolutely the most trash movie. And the way this woman is poor Linda Evans, and she's just around. And she's legitimately terrible. But I was like, is this a 70s thing? Or is this actually? Right? Well, a lot of Rockford's relationships are, I think we started to say that 70s vibe where it's like, we can have this kind of casual short term relationship. And we don't care about your other partners or really what else you've done or what else you're going to do. But like, we're here together now. But Beth has been around since the first episode as his lawyer as well as, you know, a little bit more depending on what else is going on in an individual episode.

And they do, and they do get pretty entangled romantically at times. yeah. Well, dating your lawyer strikes me immediately as. Right. It has advantages and it has problems. Like she comes and visits in the jail and is all about like,

I'm his lawyer. And she meets him right outside the gate. There's guards literally standing right there. And she's like, I'm like, you know, I feel like Gosselin would get around to this sometime. Well, I think she has that switch. She turns on lawyer mode, and then she kind of like turns it off is kind of one of her character things and in this case i mean this whole scene is is really giving us all the exposition so that we know what this issue is going to be so rockford's been summoned per the law they don't have to tell you why it might not be about you uh you have to appear and you won't know what they're asking you

about right until you're asking and then you won't even like you'll just know the questions you still won't necessarily know exactly why or where they're trying to take it and what what i like here is this this setting up of the the polarity of i think probably public opinion about this this kind of stuff right jim's like i have rights i can take the fifth if i need to and rocky's's like, no, then you'll look like you're guilty. So you shouldn't do that. I went Googling to see if that idea, like when that might have shown up. And it is so tried and true. I'm gonna think it went back to, you know, like the Fifth Amendment itself. Yeah. We'll give people this option, but everybody's

gonna think you did it then. Right. You know, Beth and they're saying like, Jim, that's how it's supposed to work. But in reality, this is how juries and lawyers and judges see it. I also like how Rocky is like, but it's an honor because you're helping out Uncle Sam. And Jim's like, uh, that doesn't mean it's an honor. Yeah. And he must have a real good reason. Like, historically, government has not always had a real good reason for the things that it does.

I found Rocky's sort of blind trust in the government. Yeah. First of all, hilariously naive and also divorced from the current reality. And I think he's supposed to sound naive. Like, I think that's the intention of the uh script here i mean if anyone's going to be like no you should trust the government it would be rocky uh but i think he's also putting voice to that like that idea so that the other characters right can can point out the more realistic version of what actually happens uh what might

be naive is the idea that anyone needs to be told, hey, this is naive. But yeah, so now that we know that the summons has happened and kind of the stakes around it, we cut right to the courthouse. Beth can't go with Jim. He's going to be on his own. He can ask to consult her, but then he gets summoned in before she can finish a fairly important sentence. You can answer when they say your name, but then don't. Door cuts them off. Yes. In the moment, it was just kind of how the scene rolled. But in retrospect.

As a viewer, I get tension when I, like, I clearly know that Beth has an important thing to convey. And you just watch Jim kind of, just interrupt her to say other things. Like, these are always very stomach-noddy scenes from you. I'm like, just shut up and listen, damn it. Just shut up and listen. I had a very similar reaction to that.

In fact, like, a lot of my notes further on, so I just kept a Google Doc open while I was watching. And there are so many notes about, like, stop talking. Like, don't you dare. I'm just watching him dig this hole deeper. And I'm like, they're going to slam the door. And like, I know how this is going to go. So yeah, maybe you can go into that a little bit for us when we get to those points, because it sounds like you have more practical experience with this process than I have, at least.

Maybe no more than other people who aren't lawyers. But grand juries are of particular interest to me because they function so arcanely. And we're only now just waking up to the fact that, oh, wow, this is extremely weird and not a great way of reaching any kind of legal consensus. So not a great way of finding justice. Yeah, or just even arriving at any kind of fact finding. So cool. Well, yeah, I feel like part of that is intentional where the episode is trying to show us how that happens.

But in any case, here's where we get to kind of the meat of what's going on. Rockford is called before this grand jury and he's being questioned by this, I guess he's a federal prosecutor gary bevins who is played by william daniels uh who we're talking about earlier he is so cold and clinical and clipped i really hate him that's a perfect place for a robot car i want machines clinical and cold i do not want

officers of the court to be that way so he so rockford is getting asked a series of questions about his relationship with frank sorvino who is someone that rockford does not know except to have read in the papers where this uh union official was kidnapped in broad daylight apparently uh the theory here that is being pushed by the prosecutor is that Rockford was involved in kidnapping him and then smuggling him out to a Japanese ship to be carried out of the country. The evidence here is that there's a logbook from the office of Frank Sorvino that indicates that he called Rockford and the call was completed so therefore rockford must know him um as we go through all this we see rockford first get confused and then get yeah i

think i say a lot get his backup right in the face of this badger he does not like having his integrity questioned obviously um is something we know from many rockford viewings but then bevins makes the big mistake of trying to bring up his prison record as a black mark against him. Rockford goes to invoking his Fifth Amendment right to not incriminate himself. It's too late. Yeah. How did that read for you, Jess, when Bevins brings up the prison record. So it was infuriating and not remotely surprising. Which I find a lot of stuff in criminal justice reform. Yeah, I mean, there's, there's just so little a person can say in front of a grand jury. And so to defend that, I mean, they'll just cut

you straight off. Like, prosecutors are running the show. There's a judge there, but it is the prosecutor who is running the show. And they are not being cross-examined. They can make any inferences or insinuations they want. They frequently play to their audience. And one of the things that was interesting to me, because I was curious about the location, That was interesting to me because I was curious about the location. But in South L.A., where where Jim is based, the roles of the registered voters did not and probably do not still reflect at all the composition of the population. Oh, yeah.

So that room was filled with the older, whiter, more conservative, regular voters, and did not remotely reflect the diversity. And so they're unlikely to have known that they knew anybody who maybe had a prison record. And that's one of those things that even still today, like if somebody says, I serve time for and there's a little gasp, unless you're in a very specific place where that closed. Yeah. And I think, and later in the episode, Bevins even makes a point of that having been to jail, a thing that neither you nor I have experienced, right? He uses that as a unifying thing with the jurors. Oh yeah. I was so infuriated.

Oh my God. Yeah. And so like character wise, the backstory of Rockford is that he was sentenced to prison. I don't remember if they ever specify exactly, it's for some kind of like right con thing and then it turns out that he uh was falsely accused by someone else who actually did the con or something and so he ends up getting a pardon uh from the governor he mentions that a couple times not in this episode but in other episodes the fact that it was a pardon and not like exonerated also has gotten him into some trouble as well. It's not a reversal. Right. It's not a commutation of sentence. It's not like it's not any of those things. And so, yeah, that's another

one of those things like the Fifth Amendment that goes along with like, yeah, but you did it. Exactly. Right. Yeah. It's still it's still a black mark. But like Rockford takes a lot of umbrage at the idea that his prison record should be held against him because he's like, but I got a pardon. It makes for a really good character moment for him because he's kind of just playing along with everything until that happens. There's a little bit of him that's agreeing with Rocky when he first comes in. I can talk my way through this.

That's not a problem. But when he brings up the criminal record, that's when he switches over to Beth's side of the argument. You know what I mean? Like that's when he says, all right, things are serious now. I need to take the fifth. And up until that point, he hadn't really felt like it was about him. Right. And at that moment, it became about him.

Yeah. And be like, no, there's no need for you to malign me. I don't have any idea what you're talking about already. Right. Right. Yeah. So we learn at the end of that, once he starts pleading the fifth, and that's when Bevan's, he's like, well, since you answered my earlier questions, you waived your right to do that, which is a thing, which is part of a grand jury.

As Beth explains in the next scene, where Rockford has gone before the judge, been told he has to answer because he waived his rights, refused to do so and been sentenced with contempt of court. And that's why he's now in jail. And Beth is visiting with him to tell him that Fifth Amendment, it doesn't apply because that's how grand juries work. You kept talking for so damn long. You dug your own hole there, dude. Stop digging. So this is the issue right here that that is kind of given voice in this scene.

And then we see it play out through the rest of the episode. So he went through that whole thing, right? He waived his right because he answered questions. He got sentenced to contempt of court. He doesn't have to answer the questions, in which case he would not waive his right. he would not waive his right. And then the prosecutor can get a waiver to not even have to respect the Fifth Amendment in a grand jury proceeding, which he can then wait out the term of the grand jury. But then the prosecutor can call another grand jury and summon him again and repeat the process. And so this is the thing, which is that if the prosecutor wants to,

Rockford can continue invoking his Fifth Amendment right, continue refusing to testify for any reason, and he would just stay in jail in contempt of court, even though he hasn't been charged with anything, he hasn't been convicted of anything. There's been no evidence against him for any wrongdoing. It's just an outcome of this grand jury system. I don't remember whether Bevin threatens him with this, if I'm remembering whether he says it or whether it's just something I know. But I think at one point he said, I'll take you into open court and demand your testimony. And the reason for that is that in an open court setting, refusing to answer questions and submit to the court processes and everything like that carries much greater penalties right in the grand jury setting he he says that at the end of the last scene i think that is why

rockford's in jail now right but yeah you're right that is part of the stick we can take it before the judge and then the judge sentences you yeah yeah so that's so we're saying this is an issue episode this is the issue right yeah It's not even a loophole. This kind of feature of the grand jury system and uncooperative witness can basically just be kept in jail in perpetuity through legal mechanisms. The sort of the theme thing that I ended up writing down was even people who deal with daily dangers and don't feel particularly threatened by those. And even people who like manage that system or manage all sorts of daily stresses and things like that. If you get caught up in an inexorable, illogical system, you are food the same way anybody else is. Yeah. And I think part of the indignation that jim feels about that

is um because he hasn't done anything wrong which is irrelevant to the case unfortunately i mean he's in it he's in a position of relative privilege you know he's he's a white dude and he's and he doesn't have like many real brushes of the law. In fact, loosely, he's involved with law enforcement a little bit, you know, as an investigator, kind of a little bit. He has a complicated relationship with the law. And I think we don't see it. Well, I mean, we see this because he's so being hit with a hammer in this episode. But there are many episodes that revolve around him kind of tricking the police

into doing stuff for him and almost getting charged with the same crime. But he's done one thing that keeps them from really being able to get them that kind of stuff. But yeah, he's, he's usually able to work the system. Like that's one Rockford thing. He's usually able to make it work for him. And yeah, I think you're right that his, a lot of his indignation here is like, there has to be something we can do. And this is like the one time that that's like, no, there's nothing we can do. And that the spotlight fell on him in such a seemingly random way. Right. Because he still has no idea why this is happening. I mean, the thing about grand juries also in like subpoenaing witnesses and things like that is that you can have no connection.

Somebody you don't even know can turn the spotlight on you. So you especially feel swept up in a current or in a system you don't understand because you're not even sure what you did to get there. Right. And it's very much the case with the secretary. She's like, I don't know. I don't know him. You're named the logbook.

I punched a button and now you're like right yeah we'll get to her in in a in a minute but uh as it turns out he does get out of prison though because and i think this is the most like narrative excuse we have to make the point about how this works but we also need to have an episode of television, right? But there's a clerical error where they serve this, this subpoena to James Rockford, Jr., which is not Jim's name. His father is Joseph Rockford and he's just James Rockford.

So there was a procedural error. And so Beth was spotted it and got him out of jail that way. Good job. Yeah. I know she detail oriented Beth Davenport to the rescue. So this is where we get, as you were saying, when he comes out of jail and Beth's waiting for him, Rocky is there as well.

And I think we get this little reversal where Rocky's like, well, now that I've seen what the government did to you. Oh, yeah. I don't know why they didn't believe you, but this is terrible. You can't go back there. You can't let them do that to you again. The Rocky 180 here is great.

He's going to start suggesting a run for the border, which is... He was like, you should be proud that you're doing a good job for Uncle Sam. Yeah. They all know that there's another subpoena in the works, but Jim has a little bit of time to figure out what's actually going on. And this is where we kind of transitioned from the exposition issue part to the Rockford part of this episode. At least that's how I felt. I don't know, Epi, if you felt that movement here. Certainly the beginning part was a very, it was, this is what happens when you get caught up in the court system. It wasn't like action oriented. I'm thinking back again to the montage where they gave us these trucks. Just as this promise that there will be some action.

Stay with us. You hold on. You will get there. We'll get there. And this is where it starts to kind of ramp in that direction. Yeah. It's super front loaded with a lot of things to make that investigation necessary. And so, you know,

there are, there's probably a fair percentage of the people who are like, I'm sticking with it for the trucks. That looks impressive. Right. Come on trucks. Well, Jim gets right,

right to work. He, he borrows a dime from rocky for his phone call uh jim rockford always borrowing change for his phone booth calls uh i will also note that that's worth about 45 cents in today's dollars that's my job but yeah so we get a little bit of a Rockford con here where he impersonates a federal marshal, which I'm sure is a crime. Yeah. To talk the name of someone else on the witness list out of Bevins. I appreciated having that little moment of seeing Rockford do the thing he does, which is right. Yeah. Come up with a story,

talk fast, get the other person off of there, you know, not really knowing what's going on and just want to get rid of him, whatever he's doing, just get out of my face. And that's how he gets the information that he's looking for. It has always has that little,

well, not always, but like the added empathetic pressure where he's like, I'm in trouble here. Some invented job stress that anybody he's talking to on the other end can maybe sympathize with, or at least realize why he's just flustered about this and just needs a way that isn't normally within the system to get the thing solved. I feel like Bevins would not have been really open to that because he's like, I'm too important for that.

But he's also important for this phone call to go on. So he coughs it up, but not in an empathetic way at all. Yes. Yeah. In this case, he uses what he knows of Bevins, right? Which is this guy is going to try and get me off the phone as quickly as possible. Also, I want to give a shout out to the broad midwestern accent that is the voice yeah that is that is james garner's go-to kind of folky uh impersonation accent he also the name he uses is also one that he uses for like lots of

characters okay yeah he has the oklahoma oil man when he's like impersonating someone rich. And then he has this more like folky, slightly more Midwestern. Aw shucks. Yeah. Common man kind of persona. That's the name for it. Uh, but yeah,

so he gets the name of this secretary, the one who testified, uh, about the phone call. So we get Rockford going to the union office. Uh, he pretends to be a member of the local and we get the first of our truly memorable minor characters in this goon at the,

at the front desk who says whatever he says, he says left. And then he points to his left, not Rockford's left. So I got to say, I'm like, out of curiosity, I looked up this supposed union IBT TW. Oh, sure. Yeah. On the secretary's door. And I got to say, out of curiosity, I looked up this supposed union IBTTW.

Oh, sure. Yeah. It's on the secretary's door. And I got to say, it's definitely not a union. It has a number of highly inappropriate entries attached to it in Urban Dictionary. Oh, boy. Really? We'll leave that as an exercise to our listeners to track that down. No, IBTTW. Happy hunting. boy really well as an exercise to our listeners to track that down well i b t t w happy hunting but uh yeah once he goes in to see this secretary um he tries to run some patter past her but she

recognizes him she knows who he is yeah he's jim rockford she explains this very bizarre, but the point of this is so that she doesn't necessarily know who he's talking to, right? For this kind of reason. So she probably couldn't like testify about who he talked to. But there's this whole arcane system of she calls, she places the call, but then he picks up. And then if he hangs up and then she knows it wasn't connected or whatever. There's a lot of things, including this first guy that we meet. I guess I would like Jess's input on this. As a seasoned Rockford viewer,

this is screaming mafia at me. I heard the word Sorvino, and after I stopped being excited that maybe Paul Sorvino was in this episode, I was like, oh, so it's a mob thing. And then they're like, union boss. I'm like, oh, of course it is. Yeah, definitely.

I think Jesse was saying earlier, the secretary pawned this whole thing off on Rockford by giving the testimony that she makes very clear. No, I testified that you talked to him. Yes. Which is kind of a lie in a way because she doesn't 100% know. But to her, this is how the system works. because she doesn't 100% know, but to her, this is how the system works. It made it easier for me to say that than to explain that there's this little difference

in between 99% and 100% certainty that he talked to you. Yeah. And part of me was thinking like, you had choices, lady. You could have stopped it. She's kind of the villain of this piece in a way. She's one of those incidental villains that gets the bad things rolling, but like disconnects. Yeah.

And is out. But I wonder also whether that came from giving her a feeling of importance in her testimony. Right. That like, well, I've got a name for you. And this guy, you know, jurist faint and, you know, like the whole thing, like,

yeah. Right. How much of her power is she exercising by doing that? Secretarial power is boundless. Right. Which is a secret of the workings of the world. Like if he'd been able to, if he'd been able to talk to a secretary of Bevins,

then it would all been cleared up. But I feel like she maybe played it for the drama and the impulse, which only made the spotlight hotter on Jim. Which I think brings up a thing that we might have missed earlier. In the same note of like having this moment of like where you get to exert power where you normally don't have it. We get that about the jury foreman and his gavel. And that's actually going to be more important later on. Doesn't Beth say that he probably bought his own gavel? Yes.

Right. Yeah, they don't give it to foremen, but sometimes when a citizen gets excited, they just buy one. I like John Boehner's enormous gavel. They just buy one. I like John Boehner's enormous. But it's, you know,

it's that thing where if you don't have a lot of power in your day to day life, and then you're given it, there's this chance of like over, overdoing it here. Yeah. I think that's a sub theme. That's definitely here. So this,

this party is broken up by a Mr. Henshaw and the goon who come in he's he's another union mucky muck they they want to talk to mr rockford they've been looking for him actually and this is when we finally get to the trucks henshaw and our goon our gorilla take rockford out to some kind of loading dock area and uh there's a very telegraph like oh watch out for that truck you know get out of the way it's dangerous in in this area but yeah there's a very telegraphed like, oh, watch out for that truck. You know, get out of the way. It's dangerous in this area. But yeah, there's a series of extremely thinly veiled threats where basically they want to talk to him about Sorvino.

If the grand jury called him, he must know something. And they want to know what he knows. Which is sad. It's like nothing. That's not a satisfaction right anybody in this entire episode and he basically threatens to torture the info out of jim he's like the way we will ask the questions you won't be able to hold anything back or something like that i didn't catch the word ominous it's extremely ominous and we were like yes these are this is these are the bad

udn guys uh the heart of the rockford files in a lot of ways, is with the working class. But the narrative frames are often casting the Union as the bad guy. Jim, being aware of his environment, I think, is able to end this threatening moment by using yet another passing truck to get a little distance between him and henshaw run around to the other side and then he escapes the yard by jumping on the back and hanging out behind the cab he ran a screen that's what it's called so that was again a very rockfordy thing yeah jim's able to use a momentary distraction of some kind to his advantage but we end with an with an ominous find out where he lives. Right.

Which is easy because he's in the fun book. Yeah, he is. He advertises. So that's on him. We go from here to Jim tapping another of his good friends and resources. Angel. Yeah. Angel Martin.

So we're in the basement of the newspaper that Angel's brother-in-law owns and has givenford's looking for some kind of picture because he's starting to come around to the idea if everyone thinks he had something to do with Sorvino, maybe he did and he just didn't know it. We get a little bit of banter between Rockford and Angel about not being able to find a clear picture of this guy who wears an overcoat in California, et cetera, et cetera. And Angel, there's an important note here for you, Eppie, that Angel has been promised $20. Yes. I did not know what to make of that. That $20 is almost $90 today, right? So it's not a small chunk of change. I went to the calculators,

punched in the numbers, and we got like $89.20 or something like that. So it's money that I wouldn't promise someone unless I was facing jail time again. And this is the thing about Angel, right? He'll help, but he always needs to get some for him, as we see again later. But before Rockford can find anything helpful, in a good sight gag, he raises his hand to get some more information and the new subpoena is handed directly into it. And for some reason,

the second appearance of the process server made me really be like, wow, this guy's really good. Oh, yeah. It solidifies that trope of them as being super tricksy and able to outwit the common person. Aside from the grand jury abuses and everything like that, sadly, the second most recognizable thing about this episode was that file room there are so many legal and police files that are in exactly the same state right now it is just like microfiche and photocopies and stuff yeah and just and deteriorating paper god there are years and years of um of court proceedings and uh you know

testimony records and and police reports and all sorts of things that have just been destroyed sometimes through natural things like a flood or you know something like that but then also they're like oh we had the rats real bad and i'm like what do you have i will say about the process server here one of the things that sells them is angels take spit taker well not, not spit take, but like angel is mystified that that man showed up out of nowhere. He's like terrified even like in, in that lovely paranoid way,

but maybe also wanting to applaud because that was super. Yeah. Yeah. And he looked like he was really satisfied with himself. I'm pretty sure he was wearing the same shirt as the first time we saw him. Like that yellow shirt really stuck in my mind. I was like, yeah, this guy's a pro. He really knows his stuff.

You know the sad weight that implies. We hope you enjoyed that discussion of another wonderful episode of The Rockford Files. Here are a couple ways to support us that will keep us bringing this podcast to you, our fellow Rockford Files fans. First, you can rate and review us on iTunes or whatever else you use for podcasts. Second, you can support us directly for as little as a dollar an episode at patreon.com slash 200 a day. And of course, both of us have other projects. Epi, what do you have going on right now?

As always, I'm working on the next issue of Worlds Without Master. You can go to www.worldswithoutmaster.com or just patreon.com slash Epidaya. Or you can go to digathousandholes.com where I talk about my other projects, including non-sword and sorcery games and fiction. How about you, Nathan? What are you working on? For the year of 2018, I am doing a monthly zine project called Zine 2018. Each monthly issue is a collection of essays, art, photography, and a game in each one organized around a central theme based on the month. So you can see more about that at ndpdesign.com slash zine 2018 and it is available through my patreon at patreon.com slash nd payoletta in addition you can check out all of my games at ndpdesign.com

including the worldwide wrestling role-playing game and the forthcoming trouble for hire which may be yeah interesting to some of our listeners so that's it for now. Thank you again for listening. We very much appreciate your support. And now back to the show. Really close to the top. I have a note that says, Oh, the unbearable whiteness.

Yeah. I think part of my lens is that I look at what's happening to him. And think about all the different ways in which all of this stuff has turned up to 11 for any person of color or really anybody in in an underserved or marginalized kind of yeah thank you yeah not not to give the series a pass that's not what i'm about to say so it's extremely white like on average like if you know looking at all the episodes it is television but it it does take some moments to address itself sometimes like uh the character that isaac hayes plays that comes back a couple times gandy is kind of like he's

basically like rockford but black and with more of an anger issue um which i guess is its own thing and i think the show does tease apart how he has been treated differently by the system because he's also been to jail and been out and stuff like that yeah so it's kind of an interesting thing where like the show is very white and demonstrating that but does every so often kind of address that with its casting and with some of the more kind of again issue issue episodes in a way that is pretty compelling. I think as a modern viewer, that there's still some awareness of that,

at least a little self-awareness can go a long way. Like one of the things that I noticed was that all the voices from the prison cells, when Jim's walking to the cell, they're all black dialect. I was like, Oh, thank you.

Not all the guys in the yard are not all full color, but still I was like, Oh, thank you. Not all the guys in the yard are not all full color, but still I was like, Oh, come on now. Yeah. All right. Well, we'll continue on.

Um, uh, after being served his subpoena, Rockford, uh, returns to his trailer to discover that it has been tossed. Someone has gone through and absconded with his many of his records dating back to the uh to the incident which was two months ago he's in there rocky's in there

you know he's kind of looking through his drawers and stuff and rocky of course is dumbfounded uh why would anyone do this what were they looking for and then we get another knock on the door and mr henshaw and his goon appear there's a tense moment where he tells the gorilla to get rocky out of there and then we hear from from the back of the trailer from the bedroom the uh dulcet tones yes thank you the dulcet tones of sergeant dennis becker lapd yes i gather that that is a popular character with you guys. So Dennis and Rockford go way back.

They're friends and their relationship is so wonderfully antagonistic. And I think this scene does just a great job of showing exactly how it is because Dennis is helping Rockford put his trailer back together.

When a friend asks you to help them move, they usually bribe you. You know what I mean? Like there is not even beer and pizza on the table for this thing. Right. He has been promised a steak. That is made very clear. Rescind my comments.

There's a fair amount I would do for a steak sometimes. But he's doing like, he's doing, it's a very intimate friend thing to do to help them clean up. When it turns out that he's saving, might be saving Rockford's life, he is so upset with Rockford. Because he's clearly been used. Right. And Rockford has the dual inclination to get some help with his trailer but also someone's going to show up and try to rough me up so if dennis is around i have a cop so uh yeah i think in my notes i say a wild dennis appears and uh once rockford introduces him as

sergeant dennis becker lapd uh then henshaw gets a big smile on his face and says, oh, we can talk later. And as you say, then after they leave, Dennis starts fuming because he realizes, oh, this is why I was invited to dinner. You know, if you wanted police protection, you could have asked for it. But I think this is, again, important to kind of the dynamic. Rockford's like, well, would I have gotten it? And Dennis is like,

no, but you could have asked. You know. You could've been straight with me yeah there's etiquette exactly and this is a relationship all over the place like rockford's always asking dennis to run license plates for him asking him to see if this guy you know has a record that kind of stuff that's pivotal in any kind of show like this but dennis also on his you know kind of comes back with needing rockford's help sometimes sometimes he gets into jams that he can't get out of through police work so yeah they do have this kind of complicated uh relationship and it was nice to see him yeah these are all of the ensemble players basically rocky beth

angel and dennis that's the halo of secondary characters around jim it is true that there was at least one good knock at his door in this episode the the final point here is that uh rocky i think is like so was it those guys who ransacked the place but no why would they come back yeah clearly there's someone else who was looking for those records and now that he doesn't have his books so he can't prove that he didn't have this guy as a client or whatever he has no evidence uh before he goes before the uh the grand jury again and so we go back to the courthouse and jim knowing knowing how the system works now, answers his name and then leaves the fifth. And this is where we get the big monologue almost from Bevins, you know, of all of the amendments, the fifth is your

favorite. Unlike those of us who haven't been to prison, you know, you know, the difference between being imprisoned and the sweet taste of freedom or whatever he says. Lady Bastard. One thing I did notice in that second return to the courthouse is that Bevins is getting pressure from above. Right. And it's the first time you see him not in the most powerful position because the FBI is like, dude, wrap it up. Get him out, get him testifying, and then let it go.

So it feels like he's on a short rope from his superiors for the first time. So Bevins uses escalation or the threat of escal rope from his superiors for the first time so bevans uses escalation or the threat of escalation to his superiors to get what he like if you won't give me this i will get it from a person above you kind of thing but that that doesn't usually you know i mean okay let me say like a statistically insignificant number of kind of escalations actually end up in some place like the heroic Supreme court battle. And that's what we associate like going up the food chain in the,

you know, in the federal court system to, to be like, but it is a lot of bureaucracy that almost never ends in anything that dramatic. And I think earlier Beth even said something like, like, you're not going to be take this all the way to the Supreme court.

Like it's just not going to happen. So it's kind of a similar thing from from bevin's side um i think you're right that he is feeling the pressure get this information he thinks he can get it from rockford and then he starts feeling this personal antagonism right through the course of this first of all the foreman at this point with his gavel as we uh mentioned earlier he's like why do you have to badger him? You can see the foreman starting to get on Rockford's side a little bit because Bevins is going so hard against him. And he allows Rockford to make the statement,

which is an amazing monologue from James Garner about being asked all these questions. He's been called a liar. He's been harassed. He's been intimidated. This all culminates with a heated heated exchange with bevins where he tells him to get his grant of immunity because this is the deal he'll get the grant of immunity call him back and then he'll have to testify get his grant of immunity and stick it in his ear

yeah shocking yes a shocking statement to make in front of the grand jury i i was thinking during that that monologue that while like excellent television that dude would have been dragged out of the room like three minutes pops into that it'd be like he would have the prosecutor to try to shut him down and then he would have thrown him right out into contempt well it does say on the end screen that it was a dramatized uh you know thing um i'm sure between this and probably the final scene. But this episode is actually the one that James Garner won his Emmy for lead actor in a dramatic series or whatever the Emmy's called. I can see it.

Yeah, the series won an Emmy in the next season for like best series. But he won an Emmy for this episode, which is pretty cool. But yes, he is found in contempt of court again, and we go back to jail. And now we get this whole sequence inside of prison. I'm going to call it that jail was a community college and no mistaken. Like, I'm like,

I've seen those buildings and I've seen that baseball field. That's either a Californiaifornia high school or a community college right oh good job set locator right they shot these things in like five days each or something like that five or six days so yeah they were pretty on point with like what can we get that all right great we'll make it a jail i I know. So we get Jim in jail, but we kick off the sequence with him meeting Angel. Well, we actually kick it off with Angel coming into the prison and being extremely nervous. Watching Angel walk into the prison is exquisite. I wish I had the young people's abilities to make memes or GIFs.

I guess GIF gifts is what it was because that's one i could use over and over again yeah if anyone can give that for us we'll happily uh uh retweet it endlessly um he's just so like nervous and like oh my god what if i never get out just in his body i don't know the doors from this side yeah but he's meeting with jim he has found a photo a full face photo of sorvino but in the most angel you are the worst move he will not give him the photo until he gets the 20 he's been promised and we go through an entire negotiation of how angel is going to hand over this photo to in a way where he's guaranteed to get his money. OK, to be fair to Angel, he wouldn't normally be.

Even if Jim said, I'll get you the twenty dollars. Jim sometimes doesn't give him the twenty dollars, you know, like that. I mean, that's true. I mean, that's true. But it's this rock and a hard place that he's got Jim stuck in that forces them to figure out this whole plan of him taking it to Beth. And, you know, like that whole it's so exquisitely Angel. Too much trouble for him to go there and get the money. Do you want it or don't you? and i'll read a little bit into this and say that this might be like the only time that angel

has jim in a way that right cannot wriggle out of it or just to deny him something usually jim has the upper hand in their relationship like he's able to either physically you know move angel out of the way and get what he wants or he's able to threaten him or just pay him or go somewhere else it's just be more inconvenient. He'd rather use Angel. This is like one of the few times where Angel's like, no, I have all of the cards. For one, and that is Jim has no money in jail. Exactly. But Angel's a little dumb about it.

And that is also perfectly Angel. And he's also 100% willing to use the guard against Jim. Oh, right. Yeah, the body language of the two of them and the guard is fantastic. So we end that with this plan of I'll go to Beth. She'll pay me. I'll give her the photo and then she'll bring it to you, which we then cut to the culmination of of Beth with the photo. So they'd ended with $30 and her saying $50.

That seemed high. So classic. That's $223 in today's money. Just so you know, I really like updates. This is like easily. This is great. Yeah.

Uh, Epi as Rockford's, uh, accountant has been keeping keeping close track of uh how his money moves around i have a calculator i have a bottle of whiskey and i have a bottle of pepto bismol and that's my that's that's my impersonation of rockford's accountant that's i was gonna say that is perfect scene setting for an accountant's office it's like oh what is it now but she got this picture and rockford recognizes it as someone that he knows as george catman and so it is finally resolved that yes rockford did know this man but obviously under an assumed name

uh sorvino disappeared on the 23rd he met with this guy on the 24th claiming to be an insurance guy and he was uh looking for a couple guys on some kind of insurance beef and he wanted rockford to track them down so rockford then spins out this theory which we expect except as the true story um because we never hear anything more about it that uh sorvino may have arranged his own kidnapping for whatever reason he had to make sure that the goons who did it left town so they couldn't be identified or talk or anything and so he hired rockford to make sure they weren't in town because rockford did not find these guys finally we have some kind of explanation for why this is all happening the mystery isn't so important in this episode.

And that's fine. Yeah, the mystery is really not important at all. So when it's finally revealed to me, I'm like, yeah, whatever. Okay. Like that's... That seems fair. Okay.

Yeah. Let's go with that. Yeah, because this episode is not about the mystery. Yeah. None of the pressures in this episode are about Sorvino or what he did or didn't do right right that's all just the justification for this whole thing with the jury and the exercise of power i was gonna say if there's any decoding that he needs to do

in this episode it's decoding the system right yeah and so i would just contrast this with an episode that's about the mystery right where this whole grand jury thing actually could still happen, maybe, but it would be kind of the background element. And we'd have all this back and forth about Sorvino and this mistaken identity and who did what and who's in danger now. And maybe goons are coming after Rockford now, which we get a little bit of in the next couple scenes because Beth will just go tell tell bevans and rockford's like no because he doesn't like me and so i need this information to get out which is probably true as established in the next scene where we do get bevans talking to the fbi guy as you as you mentioned earlier the feds they don't care about rockford they want sorvino and bevans has this personal vendetta now this turkey belongs in a cage he wants to to let him sweat it'll do him good so this whole uh kind of final sequence uh still takes place in the prison we get a brief scene of these two prisoners at least one of which we've definitely seen before as a gorilla i think the smaller one yeah but they they have an exchange where they're

going to take take this guy rockford out before he can do any talking and then we go to the prison yard or perhaps the uh community college baseball field where the larger of these two goons engineers a situation where uh he's in rockford's way and then gets gets a swing on him. There's a tussle. There's a big crowd. Rockford manages to avoid getting stabbed and demands to see the warden. I think we start to see Rockford trying to play the system as much as he can with what he knows, right? He knows someone's after him.

I will talk to the warden and try to get him to understand that I'm in danger. Which is fantasy land, okay? He gets to see the warden and try to get him to understand that I'm in danger. Which is fantasy land. Okay. He gets, he gets to see the warden on a single request. And then he says stuff with the nerve of like how many, how many men get paroled out of here in a pine box. Oh my God. Okay.

So my notes are in all caps. It says so many days in solitary for anyone else. Right. That's the thing. If he was in solitary longer, it probably would have been fine actually. Not very solitary for solitary though. The rules must have changed. I'm not aware of it.

Well again, dramatized. We get to see Jim with some pithy comebacks. I fell down an IMDB rabbit hole. I apologize. Because you were you were like hey maybe we've seen this goon before and i think this is the bigger of the goons he has been on rockford several times but perhaps more importantly his swamp thing from the movie swamp thing really no his name is dick rock. It's amazing. Wow.

Who knew? I mean, he is a hell of a dude. Yeah, no, he's great. He's appeared in a lot of things where the name of his character is simply so-and-so's thug. Anyways, I just had to bring that up because that, oh, man. That's great. I do like that Rockford here makes an appeal to authority, which is like another standard Rockford move. Even as unrealistic in fantasy land as it is, this is within his character to be like, okay, the first thing is to try and see if the law can solve my problem for me.

Well, he, unfortunately, all he manages to get is the single can solve my problem for me. Well, he, unfortunately, all he manages to get is the single night in solitary just for fighting. And then in the laundry tomorrow, but, but the warden will tell the guard to keep an eye out. Cause that's a comfort. Yeah. And then we get a, a fairly dramatic scene, I think, in the laundry room with all the, I don't know, pants presses and various laundry machines. It's a very good setting for disrupting sensory information. You know, so it's really hard to get your bearings and to know who's coming from where

and things like that. I'm attuned to those scenes. I'm like, wow, this would really be hard to function in. Well, and everyone's wearing the same clothes, right? Because they're all wearing the prison clothes. And they're surrounded by the same color, laundering the same clothes. There's a significant nod to the guy who, it's

hard to tell whether he fakes or actually presses his own fingers in some kind of machine. Loud and steamy. I mean, I presume the actor faked it, at the very least. Well, yes. I would certainly hope so.

Yes, he screams, the guard goes over and rockford again appealing to authority goes to the guard it's like didn't the warden tell you anything and the guard is having none of it and sends him back to work our larger goon approaches him under cover of a rolling rack of clothes rockford takes the initiative to push it over on him we start to get a big scuffle uh other prisoners join in and just start punching each undercover of a rolling rack of clothes. Rockford takes the initiative to push it over on him. We start to get a big scuffle. Other prisoners join in and just start punching each other. Apparently this is a good excuse for everyone to get in, get in some, some grudges though.

There is a, there is a moment on the camera that I think is key, which is the guard starts to go over to see like to interfere and someone swings a laundry cart in his way. So you do see the coordinated effort, uh, between some of these guys. Um,

and we get an extremely dramatic finale where Rockford gets the, the better of the bigger guy, gives him a final big punch against the jaw, turns around and gets stabbed in the stomach by the smaller guy with the shiv. Yeah. No, Jim,

Jim has been stabbed. So our next scene is in the hospital there's been four hours of surgery but he's gonna be okay everyone stand down jim's okay the show will go on one of the things that totally cracked me up was the doctor who was telling them about his like condition and everything um couldn't do it without making gross sound effects i was like you're you're legitimately terrible at your job like if you can't tell this family about what happened without making like gagging noises yeah they're not all winners uh we like lots of the actors on this show but they're not all all, all, all, uh, home runs though.

I will say, so Epi, the smaller guy, the one who stabs Rockford, he, he's the guy who plays Tom little. Oh, okay. That's another Rockford files episode. One of, one of our perennial favorites, but, uh, anyway, yes. Uh, so thankfully we don't have too much of the doctor. Dennis arrives to break the news that they got the guys that stabbed Rockford. So that's good, at least. And they go in to see him.

Jim is lying in bed, recovering from surgery. But, you know, putting up a good front, cracking jokes, trying to put everyone else at ease like he does. And we get a little bit of exposition about the stuff that happened which was that those two guys they were hired by sorvino to shut jim up before he could do more testimony because sorvino walked off with five hundred thousand dollars from the union pension fund rocky's line in this what kind of jails they got around this country i had to stop watching for a few minutes until I could get myself under control because that cracked me up so hard.

And we get the final piece that, so Bevins has agreed to drop the charges, which I guess would be the contempt of court charges in exchange for Jim's testimony to kind of seal the deal and finish putting all the evidence out against Sorvino. Yeah, and I guess here we also see a little bit of, we kind of see a little bit of each of their relationships with Jim, I think,

in how they behave with him in the hospital bed. It's always kind of a good moment in a series. I mean, all right, so in order to get here, you have to greatly imperil a character, but then you get this moment where you have to cast things aside and just kind of deal with the fact that you care about this person. Right. You know, you don't want them all the time, but like every so often, it's kind of a good time to just sit and watch characters caring for each other. You know what I mean? Yeah. I mean, it's a nice moment.

It goes pretty quick, but I think it's it's efficient and it's a nice little kind of counterweight against all the very serious stuff that we've seen elsewhere in the episode. But we go from here back to the courthouse for our dramatic final courtroom. I guess it's not really a courtroom. It's a jury, a jury room, jury panel scene. Beth seems very happy that Rockford is going to be out of it he just has to say his piece and then he's done with this whole thing and we go inside to where bevins is summing up and uh lays out all the stuff that we just heard uh kind of for us as the viewing audience i forget if he says anything but he basically he's like okay mr, Mr. Rockford, you can leave. And Rockford says, that isn't all.

We get a little bit of head-to-head between Rockford and Bevins. We're done with you. You've done your testimony. Leave. But the foreman is interested in what Rockford has to say. And in another soliloquy that I think you really have to watch to really get all the, the emotional weight, right? Like, cause this is Jim finally out from under the threat of imprisonment and

with the righteousness of being proved right, that he didn't know anything. And also the, the indignation of somebody who's not used to being kept down, finally coming back up again, like his autonomy is restored and, and he has things to say about it and yeah so he takes this as his platform to do so so he's essentially he's been treated with contempt

he's been subject to the abuse of power and he wants an apology bevin says that he's been treated with i think scrupulous attention to the law and that the grand jury has no apology and rockford's like i don't want one from the grand jury i want one from you the the foreman allows us to continue and rockford's kind of final bit is that he he recites uh a summation of a case any injustice no matter how small uh is an injustice under under the law etc etc i'm not going to try to repeat the speech but um thematically it's you know encapsulating the injustice that he has been subject to and then it turns out that that is from a uh a closing statement that bevins himself made when he when he was defending some client who had been subject to undue abuse of the law.

And how did he find that quote without the internet? Well, he was reading legal magazines while he was in the hospital, I think someone mentioned. Oh, that's legit. Yeah. There's one line a little earlier where it's like, he's been reading all those legal magazines. Oh, you don't want to stop somebody. To pull that whole quote on the internet is just magical memorized it right he doesn't have notes he hates bevin so much that he committed this fairly

complicated uh long quote to memory but he throws that back in bevin's face and there's a pause and you hear the like awkward rustling and gasps from the jury, which honestly was the most unrealistic part of the entire episode to me. I thought Bevan's looking chastened when he said that was the most unrealistic part. The fact that anyone in that courtroom would be like, oh, he said that. How could he possibly have done this to poor Jim when he said that multiple years ago? Right. Nobody ever changes opinions. But the point is Rockford gets to throw Bevan's own words back in his face. And then he gets up out of his,

his witness box and buttons his coat and strides away. And we freeze frame on serious Jim Rockford walking out of the jury room. And then we cut to the, yeah, the, the title card. It to the, yeah, the, the title card. It said the, uh,

the abuse of the federal grand jury system as dramatized here is currently permissible under existing laws. And that's the end of the episode. There was at least one place that I read that said that one of the reasons why they put that up there, uh, was that they didn't think people would believe that that was a thing that happened. But I don't know, you know,

like stories like that get told and retold. So maybe I shouldn't be spreading rumors on a podcast. So I will say that, like, I'm not sure if that's right. If they felt that they needed to do that or not for whatever reason, I think it's extremely effective. I remember when I first saw this episode, I think back when I was watching on Netflix, I was like, oh, wow. The fact that they took that moment to make that clear was something that I remembered. Oh, I did not know that. In contrast, I think the vast majority of the episodes end with a freeze frame on James Gardner smiling. How we stop a Rockford Files episode is by just saying everything's going to be all right.

Yeah, so that is so help me God. So we have a reference text here, 30 years of the Rockford Files by Ed Robertson, which is a fairly well-researched from interviews with people, blow by blow of many of the episodes and kind of the story behind the series and stuff. And according to this,

James Gardner was proud of this episode, not only because he won the Emmy, but because he thought that they had done something really important in bringing this issue to light. He was under the impression that this episode contributed to some of the changes in grand jury laws that did occur later in the 70s. I wasn't able to confirm that

with any other research uh without getting into legal stuff that i don't really know how to access or read i wasn't really able to track exactly how things had changed but that was a one takeaway at least for the people involved was that what they'd done had had some impact on actually changing something which is pretty cool there are weirder stories of media influencing like an episode or a movie influencing uh politicians that translates into public policy so it doesn't surprise me at all to learn that that's not that's not a ridiculous conclusion to jump to one other thing that that that this points out is that this entire thing was a one year bartlett project She'd read a

New Yorker story about it and thought it would make good material and ran it past the ACLU and the American Bar Association to make sure that like the law stuff was correct, which apparently was, except there was like one thing she had to change to clarify a procedure. But they did do kind of due diligence to make sure they were obviously dramatized in terms of how much, you know, as you were saying, probably how much Jim could say at certain points, but it was fairly close to how things actually worked. I was wondering actually, whether it was one of those cases where somebody reads a thing that really knocks their socks off or whether somebody on the writing or production staff knew somebody who had a brush with the system.

Oh, sure. Because that personal contact is another way that people really look harder at some of the more black box parts of a system. And for all intents and purposes, grand juries are kind of a cipher until very recently. I don't think almost anybody knew anything about them. I mean, I felt like I learned something. Again, I don't know how much the process has changed over the years. It sounds like some of the technicalities probably have, but the general thrust of like, as we were saying earlier, being summoned before a grand jury, who knows why you don't have a lawyer with you, you're waiving some of your other rights just by answering questions.

All that stuff is all part of the system still. Yeah. And the system that they're dealing with in the episode is the federal system. There can be even more arcana down toward your state and local authorities. And that's harder to track in terms of changes over the years. I mean, you know, there's a fairly straight line timeline for evolution of the federal system. But gosh, you'd have to track so many hundreds of counties and states

and it would get really hard to track at any point. Well, so that said, I think it's a great episode. Like it's a compelling episode of television to me, at least. I'd like to hear jess kind of what you thought both as as an episode of tv and as seeing a full episode of the rockford files uh what did you think so i was surprised at because i you know i knew it was like an investigator and you know so there would probably be some investigating and stuff. And so I was surprised by the balance of the episode being so heavily on like expository action and things like that to teach people about the grand

jury system and everything. It felt really intimate. I mean, like you really got a sense of the bewilderment and the, you know, the outrage and all these these things and still the powerlessness of somebody who's not used to being completely powerless. And I felt like that was delivered in a really empathetic way that viewers definitely would feel connected to. And that's not an easy thing to do with something this kind of arcane.

So I agree, the story writing was really tight, as was the screenplay and everything. And yeah, I thought it was really a good episode of television divorced from any other context that I agree. The story writing was really tight, as was the screenplay and everything. And yeah, I thought it was I thought it was really a good episode of television divorced from any other context I had. Well, it was none. Great. Glad to hear that. Like Nathan and I have gone over this in earlier episodes about how like any television show, there is a formula going on in the Rockford Files, but it's not as formulaic as you would expect. They often do episodes that really break the sort of mold that they established or what you would expect if you just, if a couple of podcasters just contacted you and said, hey, you want to watch an episode for us? I did say I want to be on more podcasts and this is, I was like, yeah,

go for it. I'm all about the curiosity, so. That's great. Yeah. And I do, I was like, yeah, go for it. I'm all about the curiosity. That's great. Yeah. And I do, I want to point out that like, I really have appreciated your input here on this one. This is a, it's great getting sort of the inside baseball look at what's going on in the reality of Rockford's world in this episode. My outside inside baseball. I should say I'm not a legal professional in any way, but I have done activist work in the criminal justice around criminal justice reform. Right.

And so this is especially in the last like five years or so, um, the importance and the centrality of grand juries has become really important. Um, and really on people's radars way more because that's where the decisions about how police who kill civilians, especially unarmed civilians, gets decided. Right. So, you know, I'm quite jaded about what I expect from grand jury proceedings.

And one of the interesting developments as far as that's gone is that, especially in officer-involved shootings, there is a fairly hard push for them not to be subject to grand jury decisions for indictments. And to put it solely in the district attorney or the prosecutor, county prosecutor or whatever, to put it in their hands because the grand jury system is so flawed. And because you do, a lot of the people who would be a grand jurist would be just subject to some of the same expectations about like that character assassination piece and the respect for law enforcement and, and everything,

the same dynamics that are, you know, work against Jim and his prison record are also threaded through how grand juries are being used right now in those particular cases. It's one of the areas in which much better minds than I are trying to apply a little more logic and a little less arbitrariness to that part of the process. So still relevant today, this episode of television from 1976. That's not a small thing, honestly.

I think that's one thing that we've really discovered about the show is not just that some of the narrative stuff is evergreen uh but that a lot of the actual drama of what's in the episode is still relevant to things that are happening even if the details are different and some of the fashion which is the shocking part that's outfits have been amazing yeah in this entire episode that i think uh i didn't get to say earlier i thought she looked extremely good on screen without like the Vaseline lens that was often applied to women in the 70s and 80s on TV. So good job, Beth. I think that's a consistent theme for me. Good job, Beth.

Yeah. Yeah. Co-sign that. Beth is a great character. There's a lot of really good, I was going to say there's a lot of really good Beth-isodes. I'm going to say it. There's a lot of really good, I was going to say there's a lot of really good Bethisodes. I'm going to say it. There's a lot of really good Bethisodes. Yeah. You can go back in our archive.

There's a couple that we've, that we specifically were like, we're going to do this Beth episode, but then we, she'll be in an episode and we'll end up talking about her a lot. Cause she's just great. Yeah. I think you could produce a clip show called the Bethisodes. Oh my God.

Wouldn't that be the best? We just found our new uh patreon uh goal level right if we will produce the bethacodes all right well i think uh that pretty much covers it for me yeah it was it's partly an acting thing but i think it is worth keeping in mind for games um in all of william daniels's other roles he plays very similar characters to bevans in this episode in that he's a little drunk on power he has an inflated sense of himself and in other shows like you know in night rider and insane elsewhere and stuff like that it is largely he's not playing it for laughs like the character does not intend to be funny but everybody around him finds it funny that he considers

himself the sovereign of his patch of terrain you know and and so there's there's laughter at least implicit like oh kind of um feelings but the thing about him that's really different in this episode is that he means it. And he does have the authority to back it up. He's not blustering when he says he can do something. He can do it. Yeah, I think that's what makes him such a compelling. I mean, he's the villain, right, of the piece. And that's what makes him so compelling is that he has actual power.

Seeing him be so cavalier about what the fallout of that is, I think, in the beginning, and then how it turns personal is really the real screw that gets turned in his characterization for me, where he goes from just being like, I'm going to compel this guy to testify,

and I'm going to treat him as hostile because he's not answering my questions. But you kind of get the sense in that very first scene that he would be acting like this with whoever as it goes on. And Rockford isn't willing to just give in to what he says. He gets more personal and he brings more and more of the power that he actually has to exercise. And you're right. It's not funny at all. No, I was thinking about that in terms of characters and stuff that get built into games where, you know, where the players have this expectation that somebody who is,

you know, like stuffy and self-important and everything like that, that there's always a, that there's a hitch to it and that you shouldn't take it as seriously as they do. But when that person is in the, like the right situation, instead of being over inflated sense of self is exactly right inflated sense of

power but that that that transition or that that shock to the to a player or to a reader or whatever um is really abrupt and it messes with our uh sort of our threat scale um right to encounter somebody oh shit no he can do this that makes me think like again at that moment when he jim is just feels like he can he control the situation because jim's talking and jim knows how to control the situation when he's talking and then he poisons the jury against him by bringing up his his prison record and then jim's like you can't do that yeah and jim's like oh i do not have control of the situation yeah yeah that's good stuff yeah and he's unaware of how much control bevins actually has right like that's a that's a cipher in this too not only does he not know

what grand juries do or how they work but also he's he does not know the limits of this dude's power so he's less willing to test it later on. It's awesome as the audience to see it in Beth, but just before it happens, right? Like trying to convey to him, you're in trouble. And then to just have Jim behave. I mean, he's got good instincts when he's in trouble. We've seen that when he was in the prison and whatnot. But in this particular case, they were not helping him out.

They were digging his ditch a little deeper. Jim always has lots to say. As a character piece, right? He can't help himself. I'd say the one thing here that I really think I could pull from for some narrative and game use is the like really aggressive scene framing even more than most rockford files it just jumps from the last thing that you need to see to the next thing we need to see for the story to continue it just elides so much in between time in the name of saying here's what's important and there's just no no fat on it whatsoever and uh especially for you

know short form fiction or or one-shot games just being like what's important let's get there because you can still do all the character stuff in the scene you don't need to set it up with a bunch of stuff you can do that along with the plot stuff right so this is a good episode for that yeah and it's a good it's a good way it escalates so quickly that way and so do the stakes uh keep escalating like beyond jim's ability to to cope with them and um and i think that part of part of why that's super effective in this episode is because we are dealing with a person who is confused and thrown off and out of their depth in the situation. And that really aggressive framing and escalation keeps you off balance. So I think that's a good way of

sort of replicating that feeling in a viewer. Good stuff. Well, I think we'll go ahead and wrap it up here. Jess, is there you'd like our our listeners to know about either activities that you're involved with or uh any web resources that anyone should know about for following up on any of the stuff we've talked about here um because i work in the game industry because i'm a long-time gamer and um but i'm also uh working on a lot of justice and equity issues as an activist. I'm constantly looking for ways to use games to, I don't think about it as educational, but stories are where empathy builds. You tell somebody your story, it is the most persuasive tool you have in your kit.

And seeing yourself represented in a story or a piece of your life or something like that is one of the most humanizing things that people can do for each other. And so putting issues or perspectives into games so that people can really try something on that they normally wouldn't do, I think is an area that could be expanded upon a lot. And I just think gaming is a phenomenal sandbox for that to happen in a safe setting. Yeah. And I totally agree with all of that. And my understanding is that you're working on a game specifically framed around activism. I have trouble with saying that I design games

because I have never been the design brain. I am married to a mega design brain with Cam. So that's just not a niche I'd ever carved out for myself. I'm like, no, no, no, I don't do design things. I'm not a designer. But I broke my own rules. It is Robin Laws' fault. I just want to say that right up front.

Robin. Robin. Robin. Envision me shaking my fist. But we did a panel at Gen Con last year about activism and gaming. And it was me and Kat Tobin. And Robin asked me, what makes you step in front of a car at like a march or something like that? And I was like, okay, get ready for the cheesiest cheese that's ever been cheesed.

But here it is. I love the people behind me more than I'm afraid of the people in front of me. And then immediately, tension track. That's how it starts. And I've been working on this game since uh august called the march it's a story game and it's basically letting people put themselves into roles of various kinds of people somebody who's just a regular person but something in the news last night just broke that last straw and so here they are don't know what's happening you know none of the people are in leadership

in this game. They may have more or less experience as a marker playing that role and reacting to the unfolding and the unexpected changes of a march because it is organic in so many ways, and sort of letting them have that experience so that they can explore different perspectives if they are somebody who has an activist background or, you know, does this stuff for important issues to them. Or somebody who's been afraid to do it and maybe can feel like, OK, I've gone through like a progression and felt some of these emotions and stuff. So I wouldn't be completely 100 percent out of my depth if I showed up and just walked in one of these things. So that's my project.

I love that. showed up and just walked in one of these scenes so that's my project i love that i think that's great not just because uh you're thinking of stealing some some mechanics i've developed in the past for it's super interesting how much overlap yeah yeah which is very gratifying but also also that idea of it's not necessarily about people in leadership it's about the people choosing to take action right uh it's very compelling to me because so many games are about people who are right leaders right and whatever it is uh so that's very cool if uh someone wanted to see what was happening with that uh so there's my blog is weird and about a lot of different things but your blog is. Let me go ahead and say if you're interested in a deep bench of

writing about activism and specific issues and personal experiences and a lot of very illuminating things, I would say your blog is a great place to start. Gosh, thanks. That's really great. But I am found way too often at Profanks, like Professor Banks on Twitter. And that's probably the best place to ask me about these things. But otherwise, yeah, go read the blog. Maybe I'll put something up about the game. We'll see how it goes. Yeah.

ProfBanks.com, to be clear, is that blog. And then, as you said, at ProfBanks on Twitter. Go follow Jess. See all the great things that she's doing. I do write social media for Atlas Games where I work. Great. Well, thank you so much for joining us. I think this was a super,

a super fun and educational dive into this particular episode. It's such a great match. Yeah. So good work, Epi, in making the connection happen. Yes, thank you. This was really fantastic and I loved it. And yeah,

just let me know so I can order the DVDs from the library. Thank you. Uh, thank you so much for joining us. Epi, do you have any final thoughts before we round this out? Uh, no, we've, we've, we've covered quite a bit. Um, I'm, uh, just very, very pleased with this episode. Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you so much. This was a really great conversation. I found it delightful, so I'm really glad to. This was a fantastic dive into, I think, one of the most standout episodes in my mind

of the Rockford Files. So again, super glad that we got to really get into it with our outside, inside voice, if you will. You know, you know how we do. We will be back next time to talk about another episode of the Rockford Files.