Two Hundred A Day - Episode 33: The Competitive Edge

Episode Date: May 13, 2018

Nathan and Eppy discuss S4E19 The Competitive Edge. Hired to track down the disappearance of a bank executive by his wife, Jim stumbles upon the secret of an exclusive "health club" The Alphian Way, leading to his own abduction to a rural mental health institution! While leaning a little too hard on the comedic portrayal of the mentally ill, this episode is a tightly-plotted piece with a wonderfully broad cast of character actors, and we find a lot to like inside the fantastical story. 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, Dave and Dave P! 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.

Okay, Jimbo, Dennis, I know you're in there, and I know you know it's ticket season again, Policeman's Ball and all that, so come to the door when I knock this time. I know you're in there. Welcome to 200 A Day, a podcast where we explore the 70s television detective show, The Rockford Files. As always, I'm Nathan Paletta. And I'm Epidaeus Ravishaw. And we are returning to the fourth season of the show, which is turning out to be one of my favorite seasons, I think.

Which episode is this that we're going to be considering today? Yeah, I would agree with you. This is turning out to be one of your favorite seasons. We're watching episode 19 of season four, The Competitive Edge. Are you trying to say that you would not consider this one of your favorite seasons? Actually, I can't say that one way or the other. I have a tough time holding a cohesive image

of each individual season because it's been, I think, longer since I've seen the episodes and we're watching them out of order. So it's been longer since I've watched the entire series through. So like, I remember the episodes but i don't remember them in context of the episodes around sure i think for me a lot of it is scrolling through and we're when we're deciding what to do and like scrolling

through each season and kind of being like oh that one oh i like that one or like oh i remember that one i'd say two well I guess all of them. It's like trying to rank different sunsets, right? They're all beautiful in their own way. But I think the 3-4-5 center, the chewy, niggity center of the Rockford Files run is where my heart lies in terms of what I'm liking the most. Seasons three, four, five, not sunsets, three, four, five. But yeah, so, uh, this is near in the, in the back half of season four, the competitive edge.

Uh, this episode is directed by Harry Falk, who I was disappointed to learn is not related to Peter Falk. I was wondering about that. I thought that that might have been one of the reasons why I watched the episode. No, unfortunately not. I looked into it and that was not the case. And he directed one other season four episode prior to this one. And that was the sum total of his Rockford Files oeuvre.

to this one and that was the sum total of his rockford files um oeuvre uh but the writer here is gordon dawson who we haven't talked about too much of the nine episodes of the rockford files that he wrote we have talked about one before this which was pastoria prime pick which i thought was interesting because that episode and this episode i think have a lot of thematic things kind of similar to them in terms of the plot. Yeah, does he not like Jim's friends? Is that what's happening? Or maybe he's brought on when they're like, we need to do a couple episodes without the additional cast.

Gordon Dawson also, he wrote tons of TV. Probably most notably, he went on to write a lot of Brett Maverick, the reboot of the Maverick character. And then Walker Texas Ranger was like his. He produced and wrote and did a whole bunch for that show. So Brett Maverick is a reboot and not a sequel to the Maverick character? I would have to look into it again. I think I've never seen Brett Maverick is a reboot and not a sequel to the Maverick character? I would have to look into it again. I think I've never seen Brett Maverick. I don't know if it was a continuous string of the character or if it was another telling of the character.

For the listener at home, the reason why I'm curious about this is that I have begun watching the original Maverick series. And I can recommend that with the exact same amount of enthusiasm that I recommend the Rockford Files. If you enjoy James Garner, you absolutely should treat yourself to it. And if you just love the parts of the Rockford Files that involve cons and him figuring out other people's cons and things, just check it out. I guess that's what I'm saying. Check it out.

Once we're done with the Rockford Files, we'll go ahead and transition this into a Maverick podcast so that we still have something to talk about. This episode, we already mentioned, does not have a lot of the supporting cast, but it is full of character actors and some other prolific TV actors of the era. Some of them with some amazing names.

There is also, before we started recording, I kind of, I half jokingly apologized for sending Epi a bummer. Right. Because I picked this one to watch and it is a bit of a down tone to it. Yeah. Even though it, and spoiler alert,

it ends up fine. But in addition to that, I guess up front, It ends up fine. But in addition to that, I guess up front, we should say it also centers a lot of the plot around a mental institution. Yeah. And the portrayal of patients at that institution is pretty cartoony. They watched One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and then just kind of exaggerated a little bit from there so yeah a bit of it is style i think it's stylized for effect and we'll talk about why

because there is actually kind of there is a reason why some of the portrayals over the top that's actually part of the plot but it is not a particularly realistic or kind right um portrayal of people with men with mental health issues. So we'll talk about it when we get to it, but I did want to flag that up front for listeners. But that said, is there anything else before we get into the preview montage? No.

I do want to talk about this preview montage, though, because you said this is kind of a bummer. And I have to say that the preview montage starts off on the most bummer of all bummer lines, which is this is not a sex club. The most disappointing thing you can hear when you're starting up a Rockford Files episode. I was sold a bill of goods it included the idea that i would be seeing a sex club in this episode now i am sad that that is not the case so yeah the uh the preview montage you know i'm starting to kind of treat them as like when will this line come up or whatever but also like do they have a chase sequence boom we're gonna show it to you and they do have a chase sequence in this one, although it's not a particularly noteworthy one.

But we do see a car spitting out of control with a bunch of cop cars around it. Which is important. And it does tell you that he's going to end up in an asylum. So it gives you that up front. You know what kind of trouble you're going to run into there. And I think that's it. Yeah. It's pretty short.

We will not see any of Rockford's standard friends in this episode, but we do hear Dennis on the answering machine. So as you heard at the beginning of this episode, wants to make sure that Jim doesn't hide from him for the donation to the policeman's ball. Pretty classic Jim behavior. Yeah. Yeah.

It just seems like that was kind of a lot of hay for television around that time, right? Like the sort of social awkwardness of being forced to pay for a charity event. Just because your friend was involved. Yeah. Or, you know, a couple of cops show up at your door and just knock on it and be like, we're collecting for the policeman's ball, and you're like, okay, fine. 200 a Day is supported by all of our listeners,

but especially our patrons at patreon.com slash 200aday. 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. We start off the competitive edge with our show titles displaying over a fancy building, which we shortly learn is a jailhouse. Looks like a fairly urban one in this context, where our good friend Jim Rockford has impersonated a lawyer in order to see an inmate at this uh institution he was hired by this inmate's wife to find him apparently his records

were were lost or misplaced and no one knew uh what jail he'd ended up at we learned later that this is perry brooker is the inmate in question. Jim's lawyer gambit was so that he could talk to him before visiting hours and kind of get to him before anything else happened. The first of many cons in this episode. Many, many cons. Yes. Now that he's made the proof positive that this is the guy he's looking for he can tell perry's actual lawyer where he is and we end the scene with perry telling jim to tell joyce i'll be home for dinner yes i i interpret this when he first said it as code just the way he said it just felt that it was it was meant to be some kind of code for like make sure the money's in the right bank account or something like that you know but uh

it turns out it wasn't meant to be that so yeah i think it's just earnestness yeah and also i didn't really read it during the scene but we learned later that he's also a little frantic he's a little tweaky yeah and he definitely makes a little hay out of like i can't like it's horrible in here it's like they took his boots or something. Yeah. I have to get out of here. So he like desperately wants to get out of jail. And now that Jim out cigarettes in an ashtray with a bunch of other cigarettes. Clearly, she's been there for a while, finally picking up the phone to make a call and wake up Jim in his bed in the trailer. This is Joyce, Perry's wife, the one who hired him in the first place. him in the first place and apparently perry never came home after his lawyer met up with him and then dropped him off at the bank which is where he works as we learn uh soon rockford is uh grumpy with being woken up but does tell her to put on a pot of coffee yeah from here we go to joyce's

house or choice joyce and perry's house which is very nice, signaling some wealth just through the set decoration. Not like totally flaunty, just like this is a nice house with people who have money who live there. They're affluent. And she dresses affluent. I'm sorry. She dresses in seafoam green. It is quite the outfit that she wears. So Joyce is played by uh neil or nelly i forget i don't

know how to pronounce it mcqueen uh steve mcqueen's wife so there's a little errata there for you because steve mcqueen and james garner were good friends may not good friends were were friends or at least acquaintances and had both been in the Great Escape. Okay. But they were also both racing guys. Like they both raced. Oh, right. That makes sense. Fun trivia fact. I like that you have leveled up your James Gardner knowledge.

This is good. I think she does a good job here as a very worried but keeping it together person, clearly concerned about her husband. Rockford questions her about the details, and we find out that his car was abandoned in front of one of the terminals at the airport. No one came to pick it up. And here's where we find the crime of which he was accused,

stealing or embezzling or somehow accumulating half a million dollars in bank funds from the bank that he worked. Joyce thinks that it's that charge is ridiculous. He was dedicated to the bank. He was working there all the time, brought his work home all the time. Rockford kind of gets a little more info about his background. Turns out he climbed the corporate ladder very quickly. He was the bank manager or assistant vice executive vice president to the bank manager or something like that by 35. An uncommonly young age to have that position in the financial world, I suppose. Doesn't really have anyone else he would have gone to, though she does remember that he has a friend named Les Shaw,

who Perry met at a health club that they're both members of. And Shaw was also a rising star at his own bank. Yeah, these are just, you know, go-getters. They just happen to know each other, and they're just really good, hard-working go-getters, bringing their work home all the time. Joyce wants Rockford to try and track him down again. So the lead he has is this guy, Shaw. So this first whole section of the episode is pretty quick in moving us right along into the situation. Yeah, I mean, I feel like the car abandoned at the airport, even the call, the phone call that wakes Rockford up

doesn't quite give us the idea of what the trouble is. Yeah. It's when she says that the car was, they found the car abandoned at the airport. That's when, as an audience member, I start to worry that this gentleman is dead. Right. That feels like a mobby thing. And I think we see Jim giving the impression of he's either skipped town or this is a red heron yeah and it's interesting because he presents the possibility that he skipped town

in a very matter-of-fact way that isn't cold yeah uh i think i think it's well done i mean part of that is just that any bad news i get i would like it to be super cut out of james garner scenes yes that would be ideal we we see a lot of his sympathy yeah for people in this episode so uh he has the name of his friend but before he goes there he tracks down mr sloan who is uh perry's lawyer which makes sense uh as he is the last person, presumably, who saw Perry before he disappeared. And he tracks him down at a tennis court where Sloan is handily winning a competitive tennis match against a guy who apparently had been stringing him along in order to play him like

a tennis shark. But Sloan doesn't take kindly to people who play games like that with him. And so he won the match and some undisclosed sum of money that had been bet on it that's another thing that i wonder about because again this is a cultural thing but i feel like tennis was a an affluent sport right yeah golf feels still feels that way but I don't think tennis still has that feel. Yeah. Sloan wins, gets his whatever this bet was. And Rockford comes up to talk to him because he was the last man to see Perry.

He seems surprised that Perry never went home. And then he says that maybe it was his fault because he advised his client to give the money back and plead no contest, essentially, because the government's case against him was so strong. So if he did that, maybe he'd only do a couple of years. And he says that he's not speaking out of turn here. The public case filings contain all of the government's evidence. We get a little bit about what the actual fraud was. There was fraudulent loans that he signed off on or something like that.

It doesn't really matter. We just know that he accumulated money in an illegal fashion. And so he thinks if the car was at the airport, then he probably just went, you know, wanted to cut his losses and fled. We end with a, it's not really ominous, but it's a little ominous.

Sloan says something about like, there's nowhere to go to find him. How would you even start? And Rockford says, well, guess I'll start at the Alfian Way. Yes. The Alfian Way was mentioned earlier as the health club that Perry

and this guy Shaw were both members of. And we know that it's important because we saw it in the opening montage. We heard one a day is the Alfian Way. And then we get an establishing shot of the stone-engraved Alfian Way members-only sign. We come into kind of the bulk of the first half of the episode from here, where Rockford pulls another clever con in order to get himself into this members-only club, which I'm interested in what you thought of this.

So there's a fancy car. I think it's a Mercedes that pulls up. There's a guy at the gate who has to physically open it and let cars in and then closes it after them. As it goes in, Rockford pulls up. He speeds around the corner and pulls up really quick as if he's been chasing this Mercedes. this Mercedes. And then he runs this line about how the guy left his wallet at the liquor store that Rockford works at, and he wants to return it to him. The gate attendant says, well, it's members only. I'll take it up to him. And then Rockford does this whole thing about, there's almost $3,000 in here. I'm sure there's going to be some reward. And they go back and

forth until he gets to, well, I'm not going to hand to be some reward. And they go back and forth until he gets to, well, I'm not going to hand it over at all unless I can hand it over myself. Do you want to be the one to explain to Mr. Sloan that he's not going to get his cash and his credit cards and his license? Well, no, he specifically says like, he'll end up with his credit card and his license. And will you be the one to explain to him why it came back without cash or something like that like just this clear implication that um he would not return all of the things that that this this man is in for a world-class hassle if he doesn't just let rockford through right we've mentioned this in in many of our episodes as a classic rockford con but i think

this is actually a really good little yeah encapsulated example of it he makes it sound like the thing he's asking for is so minor and the potential uh trouble for the other person is so major what's the risk here he's saying the path of least resistance is what I want. So let's just let that happen. And there's no risk to you if I do what I want. But there's a lot of risk to you if you don't do what I want. Yeah, exactly. And he puts a little bit of time pressure on it, too. Where he's like, well, I'll just leave right now.

So the guy has to decide right in that moment. You don't have time to consider this. Got to figure it out. Plus the appeal to a larger authority that has power over the other person, right? He works at the club, but the members of the club are the important people. So he taps that power dynamic too. Yeah, it's good. And sure enough, the guy sighs and says, all right, you run it up there and then you come right back.

Right. And Rockford is in. We go inside the Alfian Way. And so we see Mr. Shaw as he comes in, who is nervous because he has been contacted by the feds because they found his name in Perry's address book. Yeah. Shaw is talking to an older gentleman who we learn fairly soon is Dr. Brinkman. And he is the one who runs the Alfian Way.

We're going to start seeing a lot of actors who are big TV character actors and just very prolific actors from here on out. The guy who played Shaw is Robert Hogan. I don't know if he's been in any other Rockford Files, but he plays a Captain Chapman on Mork & Mindy. And if we can connect the Mork & Mindy universe. And Dr. Brinkman is played by Stephen Elliott, who is just all over TV, was not in any other Rockford Files, but he was a Chicago Hope cast member.

He was on two episodes of Columbo. It looks like Robert Hogan was on Murder, She Wrote several times. So they're both double threats. A lot of people were like, oh, I kind of recognize that guy are in this episode. And Brinkman in particular is played very well. I was very on board with this character and what he ended up doing as we go along. with this character and what he ended up doing as we go along. So we hear about the feds and then Rockford comes in looking for Shaw or Dr. Brinkman as he's done his homework, knows who runs the place.

He claims to be a reporter from the LA Sun. They want to do a sidebar on Perry as part of a pullout on white collar crime. So he's looking for background on this guy who was a member of the club. So we get another good kind of a con game where he's just using this cover as a newspaper reporter to resist their efforts to just kick him out because he could potentially put their name in the press in a bad way bad way i think it's a pretty interesting move on rockford's part because the guise of a reporter allows him to have um pressure on them right like it'll he now has some authority and he's got a voice and like if he's in a situation where he

might disappear people are gonna wonder you know if you're a reporter and you disappear then you have an editor who's like hey my reporter hasn't shown up you know that kind of thing unlike say a private investigator who might just disappear and then that would be it you know but also it creates the sort of persona that they might feel they could control yeah and i think that's an important part of it as we go forward in this scene he uses the threat of while you might not allow me to talk to any of your members here right i can look up their license plates in the parking lot and talk to them at their homes you see brinkman decide to keep him there and kind of try and make him happy yeah yeah he's like

maybe i can handle this which wouldn't be the case if he's like, oh, I'm a private investigator investigating the disappearance of a member. Exactly. We also have the appearance of Councilman Moore, who apparently is a big wig in the local politics. I put in my notes that an attractive woman summons him for his appointment. I put in my notes that an attractive woman summons him for his appointment. Rockford is left with one of the attendants whose name is Gustav. And that's when he starts making notes on his audio recorder. So speaking out loud, both for our benefit and to mess with Gustav, I think, seems like this is all an elaborate cover for a high rent sex club. Yes, maybe we'll get that sex club. But no, Brinkman returns with

the councilman to send him up for his appointment. They're making, they're mentioning some landfill project. I forget if he overhears what Rockford's saying or, or Gustav says something about it, but that's where we get Brinkman saying the line from our preview montage. This is not a sex club, but he says if they go off the record, he can tell Jim more about what it is. So yeah, so this is the, he's like, okay, I can handle this guy. If he's just a reporter, that's good.

So we get a little bit of the background, the Alfian way it was started back in 68, basically as a health sauna, but has rapidly turned into an organization and an institution dedicated to achieving the limit of human potential. They only have 36 members at a time. He downplays Rockford asking how much it costs those 36 members to be part of it. And so he kind of makes it sound like it's this combined fitness, nutrition. Yeah, like a rich people's why

yes but there's definitely kind of a cultish aspect to it as he's describing it yeah yeah definitely he brings rockford into uh where there's a juice bar and orders one high pro green drink for him and the whole deal is that the alphians as they call themselves they get a competitive edge hence the title of the episode. And they're leaders in their fields. So they're up and comers who achieve through this kind of self-improvement, achieve the edge they need to win over their competition in their very important fields of business and life. He says that he's shocked about Perry. He must have misjudged him.

Alfians generally are very model of society kind of guys. And then he's called away for a private phone call. Rockford accepts drinks, but does not seem to enjoy the high pro green drink. I actually, okay, a little shout out to my sister here because many years ago when I first became vegan. Yeah, it's going to be one of those stories. My sister was visiting me and I made her a smoothie. But it was like, if you can remember, there was a time before smoothies were just a thing. Well, they were like a health nut thing for a long time. If you watch a lot of stuff from the 80s, there'll be a lot of jokes about how weird sushi is. If you watch a lot of stuff from the 80s, there'll be a lot of jokes about how weird sushi is.

And nobody from today is going to understand why the 80s were so terrified of sushi. It was sort of along the same lines. It was a new trend that was kind of coming out. But she still remembers how good it was. But it really wasn't good. It's just you expect the smoothie to be horrible by what everything the media was telling you. But it's just fruit. Although probably because Rockford describes this as tasting like the front lawn. So I'm guessing there was kale in it.

There's probably some wheatgrass. Yeah, exactly. I'm sure it does taste like a front lawn. And he isn't like. Some people like how front lawns taste i actually enjoy a little grassy flavor now and then the smoothies i grew up on were orange julius which i think were just frozen bananas and orange juice and they served it to you with a hot dog i think rockford would have enjoyed an orange julius i think i feel like yeah rockford definitely would have been an

orange orange julius aficionado if uh that existed in the 70s if if it did let us know it still exists today in malls in the slowly dying mall industry anyway so this private call to brinkman is from the lawyer sloan warning him that there's a private eye poking around by the name of jim rockford and describing him uh we go back to rockford this is where he's he's telling the smoothie lady that it tastes like the front lawn. And then he starts asking about, so did Perry Broder drink a lot of these? And I thought that he's going to like get something out of her. But before he can, Brinkman comes back.

He says that the tour won't be complete until he meets Jerome, the chiropractor in residence. Yes, I do. I love that pretty clear setup to us. Yes. There's a good use of dramatic irony here. The audience knows that Rockford's covered is blown and this guy is just offering him to torture him. And Rockford's like, OK, sure.

Sounds good. Let's go meet Jerome. Sure enough, we go into the to see Jerome in the chiropractic suite, I suppose. And he is a large, muscly man with a fantastically trimmed beard. Yes. He seemed to me, I noticed this in a later scene, but he seemed to me like if Angel really worked out and really took care of himself. Like his face is kind of similar to Stuart Margolin's face. But yeah, Jerome strong arms Rockford, gets him into like a kind of a chokehold, essentially.

Brinkman tells him he knows what his game is and warns him never to come back. Stay away from the Institute. And we cut on Rockford's like pressured face as he's losing the ability to breathe. He's not getting out of that under his own power. It's kind of a visually striking way of controlling him, right? Like he's not currently choking him, but he clearly has the capability to do so, right? Right. We cut back to Joyce's house.

She is in another fabulous outfit and rockford makes a couple cracks about uh he could probably stand one more of those adjustments uh joyce wants him to stay on the case and i think we come in after it's implied that he's saying that he can't do anything else and she says that she'll pay anything to keep him on the case. And he agrees to do just one more day. And we finally get to someone saying out loud that they think that Perry is dead. Yeah. Joyce does fear that he's dead, but she's holding out hope. He led a good life.

He was a good man. He had 62 vitamins before every meal. That's a lot of vitamins. Like, I was trying to figure out if that was hyperbole on her part like she was just trying to say a big number yeah because holy mackerel choking down 62 vitamins i take vitamins every day and it would just be a really long time yeah that's a lot of vitamins but this is in service of her saying that he started the alfian way because he was he wanted to be healthy and good and and being there uh kind of accelerated his climb up the corporate ladder and that dr

brinkman like saw the potential in him and even allowed him to defer the membership fees until he was successful enough to pay for them right here's where we get uh rockford finally finding out how much it costs to be a member of the Alphine Way, which is, in 1978, $1,500 a month. I've got the math on it if you want. I do. Well, there's another math thing. Rockford runs some numbers in his head. That's a lot.

But with only 36 members, that means he's grossing what? Like $600,000? That's not even enough to rent that place. Yeah. So he's grossing uh 648 000 so rockford good job well done on the math there the 1500 a month in 78 comes out to roughly 71 000 a year in our money that that is not a membership i would buy into no matter how much cocaine it came with you're saying that in order to become a vice president bank uh bank manager at the age

of 35 you wouldn't be willing to spend six thousand dollars a month okay if it could go back in time and make me the manager when I was 35, maybe I would. Maybe I wouldn't shell out that. Because, I mean, that would be pre-2008 dollars. I mean, maybe that would be good. Well, I'll pull back the curtain here. I am not yet 35, and I could not spend that much money on a career accelerant. Unless our fans generously

contribute to our patreon let's make that a goal the alfian way if we get to six thousand dollars an episode then both of us can start going to this exclusive health club let's yeah let's push for the alfian way folks patreon.com slash 200 a day all right so rogford posits that uh clearly there must be something else generating revenue um he's uh still on the case he goes to shaw's office and we get a nicely framed scene where we hear shaw on the phone to his secretary presumably telling her to keep him out of his office tell him anything to delay him and then shaw calls brinkman in a panic what should i do rockford's here again right brinkman says to uh bring him to where there's some kind of work stoppage that's happened some kind of picket line or something i'll take it from there uh shaw seems

hesitant and says like how do i get him there tell him whatever you want and when shaw is kind of like what's going to happen brinkman i don't think he visually rolls his eyes, but with the sound in his voice says, we'll buy him off, of course. Yeah, of course. Of course. So Shaw emerges, pretends to push off Rockford. Rockford insists that they need to talk now or he'll go to the police. A standard Rockford pressure.

And Shaw gives in and says, says okay fine well we can talk in the car yeah in that car rockford starts speculating he thinks that brink brinkman's uh that those b12 injections that they're all taught that they're all taking they're not just vitamins he thinks that brinkman is a doctor feel good and he's lacing these injections with speed and that's the little bit of competitive edge that the Alfie and Weyers are getting. He is, as Motley Crue would say... He's the one that makes me fall back. The kids these days, they know about Motley Crue, right?

Yeah, and he says it wasn't just wanting to get out of jail. Perry was all twitchy when he saw him. He hadn't had his fix. Shaw kind of downplays that without denying it. Rockford pries into why is he going down? How did he get caught with the money? And Shaw, he lays out a thing that I didn't really understand

in terms of the nuts and bolts of what it is. But it sounds like because multiple members of the Alfian Way are all at different banks, they could bounce loans around and make money off the interest without any actual loan being real, without it going to anyone. Yeah. It doesn't really matter, but there was a plot that they colluded to do that generated free money.

And so Brinkman is the power broker, right? There's all these local politicians, there's bank managers, there's, I think you've mentioned someone in the police force, like all these movers and shakers in LA. And Brinkman's the one who brings them together to do these deals. Everyone makes out, no one is hurt, what's the harm? It's just fraud. Yeah, just drug-fueled fraud, that's all. They pull up to this work site where there are no workers picketing, it's just an abandoned half-built building. site where there are no workers picketing it's just an abandoned half-built building and then when uh another car pulls up with gustav and uh jerome coming out of it rockford realizes that

he's been set up before this he mentioned like so why did perry have to die right something like that and shaw was like brinkman wouldn't do that uh he's a doctor that he would never do something like that he's just gonna get paid off just like you yeah and uh through this whole process where rockford is saying oh you set me up uh now you're an accomplice this is what it looks like when you set someone up to be murdered and shaw keeps going why do you not want a payoff what you don't like nice clothes and a better car you there is no better car brinkman uh is with the gorillas the health gorillas health gorillas i like that that's a good term rockford takes a desperate swing at jerome punches him right in the stomach to absolutely no effect so good such a great moment

i love those moments when they just they're like rockford is a pretty physical guy but he's not he's not gonna win every fight and we've i think we've had some pretty choice episodes where the fights go the wrong way for him this guy was ready for it there's just he wasn't gonna take it there's no sell whatsoever he just right dump if you recall a local man eaten by newspaper the proofreader yes yes i would like to see a fight between jerome the chiropractor and the proofreader yes yes i would like to see a fight between jerome the chiropractor and the proofreader that's a worldwide wrestling uh promotion there the chiropractor versus the proofreader sunday sunday sunday that would be amazing yeah so so rockford gets um strong-armed again and kind of marched away he has a parting shot of uh you're an accomplice to this your only

way out is to go to the cops. But I've never heard of a junkie who would turn on his fix or something like that. Right. And we end the scene with close up on Shaw. And he just goes, I am not a junkie. Clearly a junkie. Yeah. Sounds like the kind of thing a junkie would say.

From there, the show cut to commercial. And then when we came back, we're back at the Alfian Way. And Brinkman is saying that the alfians they're not junkies they're only hooked on producing results this is kind of a a james bond villain moment where it's like yes i will tell you my plan because i think that you have no chance of ever escaping his injections or is a specific kind of of speed yeah i believe he says methamphetamine um and maybe a couple other things we looked it up and at this point uh methamphetamines generally were a controlled substance the controlled substances act was passed in 71 so a mere decade earlier you

could have bought diet pills that contained uh methamphetamine and other really bad for you substances. And also, I will say, I don't know if this was intentional or not, but he did specifically say that they started in 68. So it's possible that this treatment started at the same time, was legal at the time. Yeah. And then he just kept doing it because it got results or whatever. That is never spelled out. I just made that part of the story up right this second. But I like the idea that there's a little bit of logic to that.

Anyway, yeah. So part of the treatments is indeed basically giving all these high-powered people speed. Yeah, that's the competitive edge. He had not foreseen Barry's weakness. It's never really clear exactly what he did other than just mess up, just get discovered. Right. This is when Rockford is like, well, so that's why you killed him. But Brinkman is a doctor.

The body is a temple. He could never take a life. Right. But Rockford will be going to join Perry at the Cleon County Home for the Insane, where Brinkman's brother is the chief administrator. He's made some great advances in psychopharmacology, and he has this injection that he calls Head on a Post, which is a mix of multiple things, including PSP and LSD, that he uses to, as Brinkman says, turn transients into basket cases and then charges the county $92 a month to take care of them. To which Rockford has the very reasonable reply, doesn't sound like they make too much profit. Yeah. Like, he's been injected with this drug.

He's starting to lose it. His head is on a post, as it were. And he's like, wait a minute, $92 a month? That's not a lot of money. Yeah, so Rockford is injected with this, as you said. And the end of the scene is this slow fade as this kind of high-pitched noise starts rising. And these more kind of, you know, psychotropic sound field comes up to bring us into the world of of rockford as he passes out and we crossfade to him looking up at a light with the sound of dripping water in the

background and we have our i believe this is the scene from the preview montage where he's on this bed and he looks over and we see these inmates in blue robes waving at him and giggling through a small window set into this institutional door. First time I saw this episode. I mean, I guess I'd seen the preview montage, but at this point in the episode, did not see this coming. This is an interesting turn in the episode, I think. I'm going to talk about it a little bit when we get to the second half here, but the episode we've had up to now and the episode we'll have from here on out,

I may have separated into two different episodes in my head because of the sort of tonal shift and the content of both. Yeah. Even though they're following the same plot line, like the same characters are involved. Right. But if you turned on your TV at this moment and watched the rest of the episode, you were just watching in syndication. And then the next week you turn it on at the start time and watch the first half. You would have no idea, really. Right. Yeah. But yes.

So now Jim Rockford is an inmate at the Cleon County Asylum. I think they specifically say south of the Mason-Dixon line. Yes. So they have flown him to the East Coast. Basically, yeah. They're in, like, Georgia or something. He has been transported cross-country. Right, yeah.

So now he's talking to Carl Brinkman, played by Logan Ramsey. That's a name. Kind of familiar face to 70s, 80s, and 90s TV. Yeah. This is his only rockford files appearance but he was also in a morgan mindy episode oh slowly bringing those worlds together um and he is good as this kind of like cold distant uncaring one floor the cookies and that's ask yeah administrator if we i mean we were joking about the uh drug-fueled fraud as like yeah it's just innocent drug fuel fraud but i mean honestly compared to the fraud being committed here

which is also drug-fueled fraud yeah it is actually kind of quite a bit more innocent than what's going on here this is uh this is some dark stuff This is a horror story situation. Yes. Carl Brinkman, he calls Rockford by some other name, Kaufman, I think. And then he says that he's the only one who knows his true identity and he just forgot it. Rockford has a choice. He can either take tranquilizers twice a day or he can get the head on a post injections. Head on a post. He chooses the tranquilizers. And Carl Brinkman tells him that he is going to stay in that room for 10 days,

and then if he's well-behaved, he'll be allowed into the general population. And we get this whole scene has happened basically just with the diegetic plinking of the sink, the dripping water, and a couple other little sound effects. And then as Carl Brinkman leaves and locks Rockford in there, we get the rising of a plaintive harmonica. As I watched this with Em, she said, poor Rocky. You imagine. Like Rocky must be going insane. Yeah.

We come back to Rockford sitting on his bed. He's getting his medication. But then as the attendant leaves, we see that he's been palming all of his tranquilizers as we would expect yeah and he's hiding them in like a tissue in his pocket but he's pretending this tranquilized affect he's kind of slumped and he's kind of doing a middle distance stare yeah apparently it has been the 10 days and he is being allowed out of his uh solitary this scene also has that dripping water. So that's been like a continuous sound from when he started going under all the way to now, which I thought was pretty good at establishing the creepiness and the distance, the narrative distance over those scenes.

And then we come into the group room with all of the inmates in their blue robes. As I noted, a very stylized portrait of the mentally ill. Very One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Yeah, it's not sensitive at all. No, neither is it necessary, nor do I particularly want to go through all of the people. Right. Well, there's a couple that are relevant to the plot that we'll discuss as we go but this scene is mostly physical business as rockford kind of shuffles around pretending to be tranquilized still and the camera encounters all these uh characters around him we do see one little thing that i think that i noticed and then realized was also kind of important in retrospect we see that that the kind of the plight of some of these people is affecting him.

There's a guy who's just rolling like a Jack's ball around and gets away from him. And Rockford picks it up and gives it back to him. And you kind of see that he feels bad. Right. And this is the little he can do to help. So in his mannerisms, we kind of see a little bit of the decency that he has and that this is affecting him on a personal level he does make his way over to a table where uh three of the inmates are playing

go fish one of them goes by doc holiday and has a black hat he's kind of the main character here probably affecting uh tuberculosis he's got like a handkerchief. He's trying to play the role of Doc Holliday by showing off that he has a debilitating coughing disease. George Murdoch. He's got a face. Yeah, he definitely has that. You've been in lots of stuff. Holy mackerel.

He was God on Star Trek V, The Final Frontier. We need someone who looks like a TV cowboy. Right. That is this guy. This is his only Rockford Files appearance, unfortunately. He's engaged in this game of go fish and Rockford starts helping him cheat by like standing behind the other people playing

and flashing them hand signs, which again is, I think in this moment, is to ingratiate him. This guy seems like one of the more cogent people, and Rockford wants to find out where Perry is. So once he gets on his good side by helping him strip the twos and the fours and the whatnot out of the other players' hands, yes, somewhere, he describes Perry and Doc Holliday points over to the D-van where he's sitting,

and we get a reunification of Jim Rockford and Perry Broder. I want to point out one other player at this table, Rhino, who is played by Dennis Fimple, which is the best name. He's in one of the Rockford File movies, Godfather Knows Best, but was also perhaps most well known to me. Yeah, he's a horror movie guy too right yeah yeah he was in uh house of a thousand corpses as grandpa hugo i don't like i didn't recognize him or anything like that but that name is such a great name dennis fimple and

then the other member of this uh trio is uh haroldata, who everyone would probably recognize most as Oddjob. Right, right, yes. But yes, Rockford goes to talk to Perry. Perry takes a second, but he does finally recognize Jim because he has been taking the tranquilizers because he needs them to deal with where he is. And I think unstated is he's withdrawing from speed addiction right so it's probably hopeful to have something else to to go to he says that uh there's no way out there's locks on all the doors he needs the tranks to function but rockford has an idea he tells him to be as alert as possible and he thinks it'll work but he can't do it right now they'll make their move

tomorrow right see rockford that night he's in the the dorm instead of solitary and he is emptying all the tranquilizer capsules that he's been palming uh so that all the actual powder is all going into yeah one napkin there's this weird moral dilemma that arises for me in what's going on here because that is a lot of tranquilizer capsules all at once and depending on how it's administered how it's deployed yeah he he might be killing people it got me wondering how many people working here know what vile things they're up to right like who's complicit in in this uh this whole thing it's a bad situation all around so it's not like these people are or any of them are angels but you still don't feed a ton of tranquilizers yeah well we'll see how it's deployed i think it works out okay yeah uh we

go to the next day in with all the inmates so everyone's in these blue robes so like the people who work there are in white right and then all the inmates are in blue day robes just like that almost bath robes rockford uh drops the napkin that's full of the tranquilizer to to bury and this is observed by this squirrely little guy who again is kind of like oh i've probably seen that guy in other things and we shortly learn is yes he thinks that he's james bond and that brinkman is m and that everyone else is russians and trying to get them the actor is uh john fiedler that's a great name i recognize the first time i saw this episode i like, I recognize his voice more than his face. He's clearly a character actor. He is the voice of Piglet in the Winnie the Pooh movies.

That's adorable. Piglet, the little snitch. He was in the episode of Columbo with the architect, and he was a doctor who was very concerned about Columbo's heart health. Uh-huh. Anyway, he actually has a bigger role to play as we go on with this episode. Yes. He's kind of like scuttling around and keeping an eye on what Rockford's doing. There's an ominous zoom on his face as he observes the drop of the tranquilizer.

And then Rockford goes back to the go fish table, asks about that guy, finds out he's James Bond. He also asks about the guy playing Jax, who he is told is a mute. Doesn't talk. A passing thing that, again, becomes important later, actually. There's a whole bit of business about him helping Holiday cheat again. But then he, after John Doe, the guy who plays Oddjob, that character, accuses him of cheating. And then Rockford reveals that he's helped him cheat. There is a bit of a disruption.

Yeah. So if he hadn't done this yesterday, he probably wouldn't have been able to do it today. Right. Because he did, he was able to capitalize on it in order to create this distraction. Right. Yeah. It's a nice little synchronicity of whether this was his plan all along or whether he just took advantage of a situation he'd already set up. It's pretty cool.

Yeah, I like it. It's the whole idea of just generating chaos by pulling on the threads that are already there. Like in this case, it's certainly done on the sort of caricature of psych ward patients and whatnot. But it's the same thing he would run on anyone else. Yeah. Like this is, you know, like this is... It's the same skill set. Yeah.

So there's a little staff cage where they're like behind an actual cage door where they play cards all day. This fight erupts after the accusation of cheating and the staff, there's three of them, and they all come out to break it up. That's when Perry pops in there, drops the handkerchief full of tranquilizer into their coffee pot. Yes.

Grabs a set of the keys and then slips back out. There's a lot of tranquilizer, but it is going to be in a coffee pot. It's a pretty big coffee pot. Yeah. They're probably not all going to, you know, they're not all going to get an equal dose at the same time. I think they'll be okay. We end this with a bit of business that kind of establishes how this whole thing is run with threats and fear, right? imprisoned essentially and keep them separated from the world uh one of the attendants he threatens to withhold food from everyone if they don't tell him who who was responsible for it they all point out doc because he was the one who originally literally flipped the table uh yeah classic the guy takes his hat as punishment which clearly he's very attached to yes he gets very sad when his

black hat is taken away and also they're told no cards for the rest of the week. The other element here that I liked was that he tries to accuse Rockford. He's like, he's the one who actually started it. And Rockford's been standing there the whole time with his affect of, you know, being tranquilized. And he just goes, when's lunch? Yeah. Which has been his thing the whole time. Whenever anyone interacts with him, he asks them when food is going to happen.

Or if he's going to get more food or... Right. So I appreciated how Rockford's, the character he chose to play was one centered around food. Yeah. James Bond tries to tell the attendants what he saw, that they're being poisoned, but they don't believe him. Right, yeah. He's like, no, it's real this time. You're being poisoned.

They dismiss his concerns. him right yeah he's like no it's real this time you're being poisoned they dismiss his concerns the dramatic tension of are they going to be sold out by james bond is resolved with no or at least not yet we'll get into our kind of big final sequence here uh we cut to seeing the staff all passed out on their card table rockford goes into their little cage he finds a set of car keys in the nurse's purse he says anyone that wants to come with him can but they're on their own as soon as they hit that front door so there's a little group of them including most of the ones that we've talked about uh that go with him out of the main room uh including james bond who starts shouting as they unlock the final door to run

outside um it probably pulls the fire alarm as they run out an alarm starts yeah rockford tries a bunch of cars and finds a pickup truck that's the one he has the key to people are just kind of running away in the background uh while this is happening scattering in different directions right but um doc holiday and the uh the guy who's mute both jump into the pickup with uh rockford brinkman comes out uh comes running out to pursue he jumps into a car brinkman's got a gun james bond who keeps calling him m is like telling him what happened and where they went you see he says i should drive i have more experience with these things no get out of my way uh calls him a dummy which is uh certainly inappropriate but also totally in character with brinkman yeah james bond jumps into his passenger seat and the uh our last guy

our horror movie actor tries to polish his window the entire time until he drives out of the parking lot and this is where we get our little chase sequence uh brinkman has a uh cb or something and is calling in to the local sheriff about this escape he gives james bond his gun and says to shoot the driver when they get up close they're gaining on rockford rockford's uh in in a slower vehicle and he's also being harassed by doc holiday who's very excited about what's going on he tries to help by grabbing the wheel. This distracts Rockford enough that he either doesn't see or cannot manage the car coming up on him. James Bond does get one shot off after not being able to figure out the safety. It does not have any effect, thankfully. And then Rockford spins out in front of a blockade on the road of two cop cars, which we saw from the preview montage.

Kind of played a little bit for laughs, this chase. Yeah, I don't feel like there's any cleverness going on. There's just more of a panic fleeing, which I mean, it's not necessarily a critique of it. I just don't think that the purpose of it is the same purpose as like, quite often Rockford car chases want to develop the character a little bit while

they're doing it they want to show off how rockford thinks through problems because he's working on the fly he's using what's around him to completely you know he'll often change the tenor of the chase or whatever he needs to get that next step ahead and in this case it's just you know little yakety sacks can be playing in the background and nobody would have... It's just chaos. Yes. And it's fun.

And it's kind of bringing us out of the downbeat of being in the institution. Because I think what's going to happen next, the confrontation with the police, and we have a situation where Rockford just doesn't know where he is. If he can remember that he's south of the Mason-Dixon line, that's as far as he gets. Yeah. So I think really the more interesting part is his negotiation with the police. Yeah. He leverages the few things he does know. So they come out of the car. You know, he's saying we surrender. We're not armed. Right. We have a cigar chomping sheriff. Yes. A fantastic stereotype in this moment. And this is one of the many appearances of Jack Garner. Yeah.

Brother to James. The cigar chomping is not even, I mean, like, he's got a cigar and he is chomping it. It's not even like lit. He's just chewing on a giant cigar. So, you know, he's basically like, so who, you know, what's happening? Who are you people? Rockford says that he should call

the Federal Banking Commission. This guy, Perry, is a federal fugitive. There's going to be a reward. It could be up to $10,000 for turning him in because he's a wanted man. So he immediately goes to leveraging greed in an unknown situation uh and he also accuses brinkman of all the terrible things that he's doing at his uh in his institution he also says that he's you know jim rockford i'm a pi out of los angeles i came here to find this guy brinkman has arrived by now he knows the

sheriff and he's like these are all dangerous fugitives they need to be back under care you can't believe anything they say the kinds of things you would imagine you know him to say the sheriff goes to doc holiday says all right and what's your story and he says that he's doc holiday rockford says he's not with us well yeah he's with us, but the sheriff goes to the mute guy. Brinkman says, he's mute. He won't respond to you. And then he speaks. He's in fact an undercover reporter with the Delta Tribune.

Right. And I'm going to get a Pulitzer Prize for this one. There's been rumors for two years about the kinds of things that Brinkman has been doing, and he's been undercover to find out the truth. So the sheriff says, all right, that's enough for him that he's going to have to take everyone in and take them all to the station to get it all sorted out. Brinkman is looking a little, a little aghast. And we end the episode with Rockford looking to Brinkman and saying, what are you staring

at? You see someone's head on a post? Freeze frame. Freeze frame with the sound still playing. Yeah. There's a long moment of the freeze frame on Rockford's kind of like smirking smile. Yeah. Finally gotcha.

Freeze frame on him. Long moment of the score music still playing. Yeah. And then it cuts to the end credits. Yeah. It's interesting. End of episode. Yay.

I guess everything works out. Question mark. Right. I mean, that is one of the things where it's clearly super tangled. I mean, Rockford had some crazy shit injected into him. Like that is not a thing that you just kind of willpower your way out of, right? Like it's a little like, okay, well, we're done telling this story. So...

Yeah, the story is over. The end. I don't want to, like, characterize the whole episode with that particular thing, because actually I quite enjoyed the episode. But that is, like, I guess one of those troubles. We only have 45 minutes or so to tell the whole story, and we've knotted ourselves up quite a bit by the halfway point or maybe a little past the halfway point that um we probably can't untangle it yeah

like i like i was kind of heading towards when i was saying before he's he's escaped he doesn't know where he is like he doesn't even know what state he's in he may know he's on the other side of the country and you know a lot of that he can start sussing out but when you're all dressed like escapees from an asylum and the word is out that's a whole nother adventure right unless you have this situation with the cop here where he this is a process that he's used several times like there's the episode where he's being chased and he just pulls in at top speed behind some cop cars that are already having someone pulled over. And just like surrenders to the cops so that whoever's chasing him doesn't get him. And he's doing almost the same thing here. He's turning to them as an escape route.

Yeah, that's how he's going to get out of this. Is that sheriff making the call and finding out that yes, this guy is actually a fugitive. Therefore, this guy really is a P.I. And, you know, it goes from there. So, yeah, I like this episode as well. I think it's well paced and I think it's well constructed to be a watch Jim get into and then out of trouble episode. There's not a lot of extraneous stuff to it. And what it does is part of that, I think, is that the actual the criminal stuff, the

actual crimes are pretty straightforward. Like I said a couple of times, like someone explains and it doesn't really make much sense, but it doesn't have to because the outcome is very clear. Like there was this fraud and it's this conspiracy of all these people. Yeah. Explicitly, his job isn't to solve the crime his job is to find this person and and that's the the job he's doing so in another episode maybe we'd have a like a button scene where he's back in la and talking to joyce probably and yeah and

so here's what happened but in this case it's pretty straightforward like perry goes back he pleads state's evidence they They get busted or whatever. Right. Like, yeah, there are only a couple outcomes and it kind of doesn't matter because we were here to see what Jim does. And now Jim's part is done. So I guess what I'm trying to say is I don't feel like that was an unsatisfactory ending. No, it was just the episode ended in a place where many other Rockford Files episodes have a little bit more to wrap that up for us. While in this case, it kind of didn't care whether it was wrapped up or not,

because that wasn't the story. Yeah. Yeah. Did you miss his friends and compatriots? Or did the colorful cast of character actors hold you? I think that's fine. You know, you don't need them all the time, everywhere. I mean, certainly would have loved

to have seen angel trying to run a con on the alfian way right like that would have been that would have been good yeah but um no i think that's good i have some good news i mean we've talked a little bit about how this is a little bit of a bummer but jim has made a lot of money this episode that is true because what was it, 10 days? So he's 10 days in solitary. And then another day. Yeah. So that's 11.

Plus probably a couple days before that. Right. Because she paid him for another day to continue the investigation. Yeah. Called him overnight. So we're looking at... Like about two weeks worth. The question is, does he get paid for those 10 days?

Because it's not like he could have been, like he wasn't working. Right. Like it's not like he was making progress on the case. Well, I mean, he was. I mean, okay. I would argue that he is working because I find that in my own day job, sometimes just pretending to swallow the tranquilizer and then spitting it out is like a full day's worth of work. I mean, let's look at it the other way.

These people can afford the $1,500 a month to be for parrying part of the Alfian Way. Is it worth two months of membership to pay Jim to find him and ensure that he's not dead and get him back? So that's the thing. What made me think of this is we were talking about how the ending, you might have a little bit more and the little bit more to this ending would have probably taken place in LA where they were welcoming Jim back and then explaining how they aren't going to pay him. Right?

Like that's the usually. This is a fairly affluent couple. And she did say, I'll pay anything to get him back. Right. But their money comes from fraud. And this guy is guilty of sin. Right? Like this.

Right. Like we'll pay you as soon as our account is out of arrears. And our funds are unfrozen by the court. So I'm going to go ahead and go to the 200 a day Rockford Files files. And I'm going to put in a presumption of 14 days worth of work at 200 a day. So that's $2,800 with a big old question mark, because we have no idea if they're going to ever be able to pay him for that. All right.

Well, while you do that, perhaps we will take our break. Yeah. And then we'll come back and talk about some of the lessons we can learn from this episode. And I think there are some good ones about changing scenes and the role of power dynamics in a single protagonist story. Some other stuff like that. Yeah. Sound good? Sounds good to me.

We'll see you after the break. 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 dig a thousand holes dot 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 Roleplaying Game and the forthcoming Trouble for Hire, which may be 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. Welcome back to 200 Today. We just got done discussing the episode The Competitive Edge. We're now going to take a look at some of the

tricks, some of the narrative I don't want to call them tricks. Techniques. Some of the techniques that were used in the episode that we can apply to our own fiction whether we are writing that or we're playing it at the table as Nathan and I often do

or perhaps you are somehow weaving it into a song, like some sort of power metal ballad. Which we would like to hear. Yeah, I would love to hear that. All right. I've got a couple things here. One of them is less on the level of narrative and more on the level of character here. The scene that we have when Rockford shows up uh at the alfian way and he first comes in and he's playing out being a liquor store clerk uh shifting into a reporter right um and we

talked a little bit in the first half about the genius of choosing a reporter in this particular case because of it puts him in a position where dr brinkman would feel he could control him right like feel that he had control of the situation but also applies pressure what i loved about what went down in this scene is the way that he applies pressure they're they're threats they're certainly threats they're not physical threats but he's he's threatening to reveal stuff about what's going on. But the things that he's threatening to reveal are misunderstandings, which are leading people to correct him. And he's getting more information as he's going along, right? Like, he's like, oh, it's a sex club.

They're like, no, no, no. No. Did you not listen to the opening montage? Right. This is not a sex club. Did you not listen to the opening montage? Right. This is not a sex club.

Yeah. And there's a nice layering there because there is an element of Rockford really does not know. It could be a sex club, right? He doesn't actually know either way. Right. Once he sees that they get so offended when he brings that up, he then can use that as a tool to keep putting that pressure on, right? While being agnostic as to whether they're just lying or whether they really don't want to be tarred with that brush right right the fun bit here i think is that he's not trying to nail them down with accusations right

he is he's just shoving them to see where they're going to go there's even kind of a line about that where brinkman says something like, let me show you around so you can see the thing that you're trying to torpedo. Right. And Rockford says, that's all I wanted in the first place. And that is 100% true. That is all he wants. He just wants to know what is the place and then what role it might have with what happened to Perry, right, is the secondary, is the real goal. So one of the reasons why this stands out to me, I think, is that quite often, in this case, I'm thinking largely about playing at the table

rather than in writing and whatnot. But although it certainly can happen that way, people will present interesting characters who don't have pressures on them. So you might have a villain that just doesn't care. Actually, we have one in this story. We have Jerome. There's no real pressure on Jerome. And it's great. He's a great character. We loved him. We spent a lot of time on him. And that moment when Rockford punches him, he just doesn't react because that's what you want from that scene. Jerome is a solid wall

that Rockford can't get past. And that is precisely what we need in the narrative in that scene. Jerome is a solid wall that Rockford can't get past. And that is precisely what we need in the narrative in that point. But if Dr. Brinkman was also a solid wall that Rockford couldn't get past, then we're lost. You need to look at the character of Dr. Brinkman. You have to think that he has a house of cards right now. He has built this incredibly elaborate fraud with all of these working pieces, one of which has already done jail time that he had to abduct and hide somewhere. So this is a very nervous man who has to appear in control. So this gives him this opening that Rockford can use.

role so this gives him this opening that rockford can use you know this isn't like a uh sherlock holmes story where rockford shows up reads him and knows that right away this is just techniques that rockford applies all the time but because you've got rockford's techniques to apply this kind of pressure and you've got a character who's going to react in interesting ways when that pressure is applied then you've got a nice story, right? Yeah. As a reporter, he doesn't want to hurt him because that does more damage to this rickety scaffolding he has right now. But the moment it's revealed that he's a private investigator,

then it's time to bring in Jerome. And it kind of shows the value of Rockford choosing that because you see how his ability to leverage things that he finds out is entirely built on the premise of being the reporter right and then once that is gone he's he doesn't have any cards left uh i also wanted to kind of make the comparison between jerome as you said who has no pressures on him and is essentially a piece of scenery, right? Yeah, but a wonderful piece of scenery. Right. With the gate guy who Rockford runs the wallet con on in order to get in, where that guy, even in that brief scene, we do see the pressures on him, his behavior and how it's going to reflect

on the members of the club and the danger that he's in, presumably to lose his job, right? If he messes up this interaction. Yeah. Very simple, but very concrete. Yeah, exactly. Thinking about wording this as, say, advice or something you can take away is not necessarily to build characters with pressure,

although, yeah, go ahead and do that. But to take the characters you have and yeah, go ahead and do that. But to take the characters you have and think about the pressures that they have. Think about where their weak spots are, what they're going to try and pivot around. I think one way to look at it is what do the characters care about, right? That's where the pressure comes from. Brinkman cares about maintaining his house of cards. The gate guy cares about keeping his job.

Jerome, in the context we see him, doesn't really have any, doesn't care about anything, right? He's just following orders. You feel like if Jerome lost this job, he'd just go thug for someone else. Right. This isn't the first Rockford Files episode I'm in, and it's not the last. I checked. I do not think he's in any other ones unfortunately um so how does that play out in the second half of the episode uh are there i feel like because of the transition in power dynamic right uh of of what's happening to jim we get a different kind of set of uh pressures to the characters in in the asylum right yeah i mean like we know that jim

bends like a willow you know like yes he does he does tranquilizer judo yeah exactly it's sort of the inverse that like he is doing all he can okay when it comes to the staff he's trying to apply as little pressure as possible right like now he's looking to see where their pressure points are and make sure that he doesn't agitate them because they have all the power. To them, the response to pressure is a hypodermic needle filled with PCP and LSD. I think this is actually teasing out a little bit of a difference between pressure and weakness, which which i kind of just conflated i think a couple sentences ago but in this situation they are different he doesn't want to apply any pressure to them but he does want to find the weakness in the situation yeah that he can exploit and he certainly knows the pressure that he's applying in that card game right you can see that john doe

is his head had close to his fill of Doc Holliday's bulls**t. And that if he wants to light that fire, that's the fire he can light. It's telling that he is revealing John Doe's cards and not Rhino's. I think he does both. But then in order to instigate the fight, he goes through all of John Doe's cards, so his entire hand is lost. But it's John Doe where he puts the pressure, not Rhino, because Rhino's not going to do anything. He can see that Rhino's not going to do anything, despite the name. Yeah, so that's a pressure that he can take advantage of in that situation.

Yeah. of in that situation yeah um which is in the name of exploiting a weakness which is there's only the three attendants and he knows if he can get them out of that cage then they can get what they need to you know to make the the big escape i basically just wanted to point that out because i think that i kind of talked in past episodes about pressures but i think this episode is a good one to just kind of nail down that this is yeah and also they're in very discreet little scenes you can see all of it in one minute or so of interaction kind of in different places yeah yeah uh and and kind of talking about the the pressures in the asylum leads into something i wanted to bring up the way that this episode takes power away from our protagonist. Yeah.

Which is a model of story, right? Right. Whether suddenly, like in this case, or maybe gradually, your main character or characters find themselves usually with some kind of mistaken identity or intentionally fraudulent identity in the institutional power of some force that does not want good for them that wants to cause them harm or make them do something in particular or keep them away from something or is just completely uninterested in making waves like oftentimes we see people stuck in a situation where the institutional power just doesn't care about them so why would why would it bother changing to let them out right and this is i think you mentioned it in our first half this is almost a horror scenario right because once our protagonist once jim who we've invested so much

of our like as viewers podcast which we've invested so much of our podcast in uh once we see him in a situation where his power to make change is stripped away that's what makes this a bummer right like yeah that length of scenes where you're like waiting to see how he gets his way out of it there's always the threat in the background of any of the people with power like the attendant or the nurse or this dr brinkman can come in at any time and just put him in solitary again yes uh so there's the tension of are they going to find out is he going to get around that in this episode i think it's it's handled relatively well in the sense of he comes out the other side and there isn't too much focus on that question. We kind of just see him get out of it.

But that can be driven home a lot harder. I'm thinking here of there's an episode of Star Trek Next Generation. Oh, yes. It starts out with Riker. Oh, yeah. He's like doing a play or something. And then he starts seeing people that he doesn't recognize. And then things start changing. And then he realizes he starts seeing people that he doesn't recognize and then things start changing.

And then he realizes that he's in a, he's in a prison somewhere. Yeah. He doesn't remember how he got there. There's some kind of break where he's like, Oh wait, the prison is something being done to my mind. I'm actually still on the enterprise.

And then it goes back and forth. And as audience, part of why it's dramatic is you're, you're waiting. You're like, but which one is it? Where is he? What's fake? and what's reality right you you slowly see more and more how he's in the power of some some alien like mental hospital essentially every time he tries to figure out

what's real he is pushed back with another use of their power over him right like so that episode of television is much more directly about this question how do you know what's real when you're in the power of someone who can control your reality in this episode of the rockford files the threat of controlling his reality is what is meant to keep him pliant right the head on a post injection so there's something there between those two kind of poles i think that's a really interesting narrative area for me. Because it didn't go to that area. Like it didn't, he got injected with presumably a potent combination of drugs. And he came out of it with missing time, but as Rockford.

There's no element of like missing his memory or anything like that. Ending up in a situation where he doesn't trust his own senses unless we can form a fan theory about every episode that has happened since this he's still there uh no that would be very that'd be very tragic actually um what's appealing to me about this kind of story is that that's a very visceral tension for me at least of like do you have autonomy right the story this kind of story is all about taking autonomy away and then how do you get it back and i think it's easier to do in scripted fiction and harder to do in a game or other embodied improvisational fiction yeah because when you as a player when your agency and your character's agency are the

same kind of agency uh it's hard to take away the character's agency without also taking away the players yeah and i don't know if this is something you've run into or if there's you've seen this done well in other kinds of fiction so if you can separate the two and you and everyone's cool with that it's something you can do and play to, right? Like certainly if they just gave him the drug and dumped him at his doorstep, right? And then he's hallucinating that he's in this asylum when it's Rocky and Beth trying to take care of him.

If you tell the player that that's what's happening, that dramatic irony can be brought into focus and you can play him reacting not in the way he's reacting now right because what the way he's reacting now is a very in-controlled rockford but if you tell the player you're going to be rockford you know here's your situation you think you're in asylum but you're not you just have this drug in you sure sure yeah and then the player can play them and have them lash out and resist and do all these things, knowing the further context of it. And that's fine. It's where you tell them you're in asylum.

And then when they get done, you're like, ha ha, the people that died in the car chase are really your loved ones that were trying to stop you from hurting yourself i think that's where the trouble is is where you you try to um keep the the player as ill-informed as the character right so i think there's something interesting here in terms of the the mode though which is even though rockford is in this position where his agency has been taken away from him you could also see it as now here's the game you're stuck in this place how do you get out, right? And you kind of have either a fictional reason or some kind of mechanical reason over, like, you're not watched every second. There are opportunities for you to take definitive action. You need to build up a couple resources and then you can make a break for it or something. Yeah, yeah.

So in that sense, it's a very kind of adventure gamey situation how do you escape from the dungeon but i think what that needs to work is that the environment still has resources for the character to take advantage of while he's completely alone we don't watch that because there's nothing he can do it's boring right yeah so we just skip ahead to when he has people he can interact with and that's when he can take advantage of the resources around him, plus the pills that he's been hiding. Right. Yeah. And that is maybe a contrast with that Star Trek episode where the action of it is really about trying to parse what's happening and make a decision and then take action and see if that action results in what you thought it was going to. Right. Because that's what what you're trying to find out. Where am I on these levels of reality?

Yeah, no, I think you're right. And I think there's definitely interesting ground there. It is one of those things where I have this reaction to it. Because I remember 20 years ago, within my particular community of gamers, there was this set of amnes and like all of these things. They were like, oh, what if we did this in a game? And then implemented them rather poorly to just create stress and anger between the players. But I think you're on to like better ways to do it.

I think you can have a functional let's play to find out what the actual thing going on is. Right. Yeah. But there still needs to be something that some link between what the player does, what the character does, and then some kind of feedback into whether that was like a productive thing or not, or a helpful thing or not. Right. I think that's the loop that needs to happen. You need to feel like you're doing something and it's not just capricious what happens to you. Which actually, I just had this thought. It seems to me, as we talk about capriciousness, that this episode has one of the best examples of a low-key deus ex machina event that I didn't even realize at the time, but totally is what saves the day. Which is the mute guy being the reporter.

Yeah. Okay. So I got thoughts about this mute guy. So in the show, they refer to him as he's a mute. I don't know if that is the appropriate term at this point. So apologies if we're using the wrong language for someone who does not have the ability to speak. for someone who does not have the ability to speak. So Nellie Bly, she was the reporter in the late 1800s, early 1900s.

1887 is when she started. She spent four months in an asylum to do this expose on how horrible asylums were at the time. And so this is, I mean, he's clearly a callback to that right like he's pretending to be in need of it so he's a troubling character in this story for a number of reasons uh yeah one that the method that we understand for entry into the asylum is to be drugged picked up and drugged and forced into the situation like it seems like there's a spectrum, right? There's the people sent there by Brinkman. There's the transients who are given the head on a post in order to become basket cases, as he says.

Because that was only the last couple of years. So maybe there's also people there who are like committed for other reasons, presumably. I think we're shown kind of a range of responsiveness in terms of the inmates in the main room. So it's not terribly troubling, but like, how does he get away with it? Yeah, how much thought do we put to how this worked? I think you nailed it. It's a deus ex machina, right?

Like it's sort of out of nowhere, but it basically just gives enough credibility to the story to make the sheriff decide to inquire further. And that's all the sheriff has to do, right? Like, there's no deep conspiracy to cover the paper trail here. He just has to make a couple phone calls. So that's fine. What I was kind of saying is that I think it was effective because in the moment it didn't feel like a total swerve. It felt like a reveal, like at the end of a card trick, right? Like, oh, and this was your card all along.

It works thematically with the rest of the episode. But if you're playing that game, right, that's the GM being like, guess what? This person opens his mouth and everyone's like, we didn't even know we were supposed to pay attention to that person. They were never telegraphed as someone to interact with. Right. Right. So yeah, it's interesting. It's certainly feels again, like we were talking about before, you need to end it now. We can't go to another, another scene. So here's how we're going to end it now. Yeah. I'm not unhappy with it. I just thought it was funny that I just realized that that was what it was. Did you have another bit? Oh, yeah.

Actually, I do. Okay, so one of the things this reminded me of is a bit of advice. I'm doing this from memory. But the old West End Star Wars game. I remember it having this bit of advice for the GM that I have taken to heart and used in many occasions about location, location, location. They were talking about settings and pointing out that in A New Hope, you start on Tatooine, roughly, and then you've got the whole sequence on the Death Star, and then you have the whole sequence running against the Death Star, right? then you have the whole sequence uh running against the death star right one of them is on a desert planet one of them is inside a space station the other one is in space during a space battle three very distinct locations that have uh a different feel to them uh and it feels like a shift each

time and that's great then you go to uh empire strikes back and you've got the frozen Hoth world. Then you have Dagobah, and you have Bespin, the Cloud City. Again, three very distinct settings, three very separate. And then Return of the Jedi, they do it again. Tatooine, you've got the forest moon of Endor, and then you have the whole showdown inside the space station, inside the Death Star again. And it was just kind of saying, when doing your plotting out your adventures, an easy shorthand is to think of three interesting locations. And it's so easy. And this is very applicable to adventure fiction. Like, if you want to give a sense of adventure, having vastly different and interesting locations for the

characters to show up in i recently read a uh a conan book yeah and uh there was a there was like forest like snowy forest vast swaths of swamp and then a castle dungeon right it's exciting you're like oh and this is the new place it's's new and wondrous. Ended up in an illusionary castle inside a rock that looked like a skull. I am down. That's the fourth location. And I'm not saying that this episode itself follows that pattern at all. But one of the things that makes that such a powerful little trick, because it's so simple to do and yet it has such a great effect on how how your story plays out this shift that this story has the beginning part of the story where he's looking for him and he's

investigating the the alfian way feels just like a rockford files episode right like we're just he's going into places he's getting beat up he's getting thrown out of places. And then the move to the asylum changes it. It changes it because of a lot of reasons, but, you know, not to discount that shift in setting, right? It just changes the pacing of the episode. It changes the tonal qualities of it. And like you were talking before, the agency that Rockford has within the episode. And I think that that's a neat and very powerful thing yeah totally agree in terms of the specific handling of it i like that we transition with it as rockford does yeah we get the visual effect of the blurriness the crossfade

the noise happening and leaving one setting and coming into the other. And I think that makes it more compelling and also makes it a little scarier. Yeah, I agree. Like if we just cut and came back, it would be a little like jarring. Where did that come from? You know that this is a bigger deal, right? Because you have that whole transition. Yeah. And I guess the main reason why I wanted to kind of bring it up,

because it's not, I wouldn't say a fundamental part of the episode, transition. Yeah. And I guess the main reason why I wanted to kind of bring it up, because it's not, I wouldn't say a fundamental part of the episode, but then it's such a simple technique. It's so easy to do. And once you think about it, you're going to see it all over the place in the more adventury fiction that you enjoy. Oh, I mean, I think it's good advice. And it's also something that helps break. So I'm going to talk about this and it's not that it's necessarily bad. It's more that when it's a default, it can end up just taking so much time that you don't need to spend, which is playing through each moment, right? Like we don't see Jim pass out and get loaded onto a car, presumably, and then a plane, probably, and then taken off the plane, and then carted to this place, and then strapped down. We just cut to the next interesting thing.

It is easy to have a habit, especially when you're playing a very embodied one-to-one, I am playing this character in this place kind of game. You kind of naturally are like, okay, we finished that. Well, and now we, I guess, go and do this thing or what's the next interesting place and let's go there. And that also moves you in time. But if you frame it as moving to the next place instead of to the next event, I feel like that's something that we as media consumers, that's a little more natural of a like, oh yeah, that's where we cut because that's where the next thing's happening. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Knowing when to cut and knowing that cutting early doesn't hurt you,

I think is an important thing. We spent quite a bit of time on just role-playing techniques here at the end of the, but I think this is another important one is that I think people are often afraid to cut early. They think we'll miss something. On a whole, I would guess that people on average cut too late more often than they cut too early. Yeah. And also when you're playing a game, you can negotiate it, right? Like you can say, all right, let's cut here. And then someone is like, oh, I had another thing I wanted to do. And it's like, okay, well, let's do that. But then everyone knows and we will cut once that's done, right? I think maybe if you're writing, that's part of the editing well, let's do that. But then everyone knows and we will cut once that's done, right?

I think maybe if you're writing, that's part of the editing process, right? You look at a scene and go, oh, this went on a little too long. But there's content here that needs to be there. How do I reframe it? How do I put that in a different scene at the table? That's a real-time edit. Well, speaking of cutting things before they go on too long, thank you, everyone, for listening. Hope you enjoyed the show. As per usual, if you enjoy the show, look us up on the internet. You will find more episodes,

our Patreon, of course, and also the 200 a day files files to look at all the ephemera, including that filled in by many of our patrons. So if you want to find out a whole lot more about the recurring cars that are in the episode, there's a bounty that awaits you on the 200-day Files Files. I think that is our $200 for today. Sounds good. So we will see you next time when we talk about another episode of the Rockford Files.