Two Hundred A Day - Episode 45: The Trees, The Bees and T.T. Flowers (Two-Part Episode)

Episode Date: February 25, 2019

Nathan and Eppy cover our second two-parter episode, a Season Three gem featuring notable character actor Strother Martin as the titular T.T. Flowers, an elderly farmer who refuses to sell his land to a predatory real estate developer. Through a scheme involving his shady son-in-law and an ethically bankrupt psychiatrist, T.T. is hauled off against his will to a mental institution; but Rocky knows that something isn't right. Once he get Jim on the case, it's just a matter of time until he starts to uncover the scheme, but he faces numerous attempts on his life as he tries to find some hard evidence to prove the wild conspiracy. With a genius framing device that unites both episodes as one story, great performances all around and some great action sequences, we really enjoyed this one. Recommended! We mention this Legends of Film Podcast: Gordon T. Dawson during the show. 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 Jim Crocker - keep an eye out for Jim selling our games east of the Mississippi, and follow him on twitter @jimlikesgames Shane Liebling's Roll For Your Party dieroller app Kevin Lovecraft and the Wednesday Evening Podcast Allstars Mike Gillis and the Radio vs. The Martians Podcast And thank you to Dael Norwood, Dylan Winslow, Bill Anderson, Chris and Dave P! Thanks to: fireside.fm for hosting us 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.

Jimmy, old buddy, buddy. It's Angel. You know how they allow you one phone call? Well, this is it. Welcome to 200 A Day, the podcast where we explore the 70s television detective show, The Rockford Files. Coming to you fresh and squeaky clean in this new year. Oh, yeah. I am Nathan Poletta. And I am Eponai Ravishaw. That's right, this is our first recording of the new year, right? This is, uh, yeah. So whenever this gets to you, happy early 2019. This year feels a decade long already. It feels like it's already been about

eight months and it's been about three and a half weeks if everything is already set on fire and fallen around everybody's ears congratulations on still having a podcast player and choosing to escape for a brief bit of time with uh our our hearkening back to the halcyon days of the mid-1970s where nothing was was problematic at all it's funny you you should say that. So I've been trying to consume more podcasts, right? Like I want to see what's out there and enjoy it. And it's hard because my day job is writing and I can't listen to people talk while I write. But as it turns out, I need to go to the gym

to maintain this middle-aged body of mine. This is an audio format, but you can all imagine the bodacious bod that is being displayed to me right now. So I listen to podcasts while I'm at the gym and it turns out that more recent podcasts keep mentioning that people could be listening to their podcast in some post-apocalyptic sense. It's in the air. It is closing in. We have millennial fever. Yeah, anyways, the point is the Rockford Files.

We're actually going to be venturing into a two-parter for this episode. Epidiah, which two-parter did you choose and why? Epidaea, which two-parter did you choose and why? Oh, this was recommended to me by listeners Sam Anderson and Kate Freeman. This is The Trees, The Bees, and T.T. Flowers. And I got to tell you, aside from commanding performances throughout, I do not remember why they recommended it. So now they will tell me. These are listeners to the podcast who also i happen to know irl as they say um and they'll tell me again why why they

did it but i'm very very happy they did i do really enjoy this episode and we're so we're doing a two-parter here and i have a uh i guess a technical question for you. When we go into this, are we going to think about it as two separate episodes or should we just go into it as a single episode? The main area where that might cause confusion for me is that it has two preview montages. Right. And I have some things to say about that second preview montage i feel like we should consider this as one episode that happens to have a preview montage in the middle okay i think it really feels like one long episode yeah and it's actually a little different than the uh the the previous two-parter that we've done for the show which which was Gear Jammers, which though did have a continuous story through the two parts,

each episode kind of had its own little internal arc. And there was a very sharp break between the two in terms of how they framed the second episode, which we'll talk about when we get to that transition here because I think it's a good point of contrast. But this one really feels much more like a continuous single story to me including the the framing device for it which actually is is very very clever i think actually um yeah and is used to construct the two halves for tv without dividing

them into two narrative chunks. Yeah, no, I was going to say that there's this interesting bit where we get the same scene from the framing narrative at the beginning of each episode where the second episode extends it a little bit. Yeah. All right, let's do this. All right. So speaking of the framing device, I think it's worth talking about our writer here a little bit.

Oh, yeah. So the writer of this episode is Gordon Dawson, who we have encountered on our show before. He wrote Pastoria Prime Pick, which was our episode 14, as well as The Competitive Edge, which is our episode 33, among and like five or six more past this episode but what i thought was interesting with this these three in particular is that they're all slightly fantastical stories like the the plot of them is a little like why would that ever happen but they all are around some kind of uh some kind of social dynamic it's not as a full-on like double barrel at the audience here's a social issue as so help me god but they are kind of about a thing that happens to be relevant to uh probably you know like like some kind of systemic issue in actual society through the lens of rockford getting drawn into something and then

having to figure out uh what's going on so i thought that was interesting one of the things that i really dug about this episode was uh there's some bits that are a bit unsettling and you get them from rocky's point of view rocky Rocky is witness to them. And then he tries to get Jim involved. And Jim is being reasonable. But also, if Jim had witnessed what Rocky had witnessed, there's no way Jim would be resisting. Right. I really dig how that is set up because, you know, I'm personally predisposed to agreeing with James Gardner. Anytime he says anything, no matter what, I'm like, oh, yeah, that makes sense.

So there's this point in the beginning of it where he presents the way society can dismiss this thing happening. That's what Rockford can dismiss it in the same way that society does. Like, well, you're overreacting a little. This is, you know, and Rocky's not overreacting. Right, yeah. Some other interesting things about Gordon Dawson, particularly relevant to this episode, he's primarily like a Western writer. Like most of his work is in the Westerns.

He was actually ended up being pretty close to uh sam peckinpah and worked with him on lots of projects um he wrote uh co-wrote with peckinpah bring me the head of alfredo garcia which i have heard of and not seen but want to uh so you know this is all imdb stuff and i was trying to find out a little more about him uh i actually found a podcast interview with him uh from this podcast called legends of film which i found on the nashville public library website oh wow we'll include a link in the show notes this person interviewing him was mostly asking him about peckinpah uh stuff but um there's a couple bits where he mentions the rockford files and he because he was originally a wardrobe guy

like he did wardrobe for really that's like how he started in in in in pictures oh okay like originally not not with the rock it wasn't like he was working on the rockford files and they're like you know what you did a great job with this you know yellow suit jacket why don't you write us an episode no he was working on uh there was a movie that he was doing wardrobe for where like the main wardrobe person like fled to mexico and something happened and he ended up getting promoted to being the main wardrobe person and that was like the first time he worked with sam peckinpah anyway you, you can listen to the interview. But he mentions how, but he also wrote and he wanted to write for TV and movies.

And what broke him through as a writer was the Rockford Files. Oh, nice. And that's what got his writing career off the ground and that there were great people to work with. Another testament to the general sense of it being just a great crew of people working on the show. And also, they talk a little bit about gandalf finch because he wrote the first gandy episode hammer of c block which we haven't done

yet yeah oh yeah why haven't we done that i know right put that on the list so two things well i guess three things first uh he had no say over casting so it's not like he was like bring me isaac hayes right uh so but he wrote the role gandalf was originally randolph and he typoed the r into a g and then went oh that's that's good and just kept it so that's how gandalf finch that's awesome wait wait are you telling me that gandalf finch wasn't named by the elves of Numenor. Sorry. I don't know enough Tolkien to improv that. Somebody's going to say, the Numenorians were human. Thank you. Instant correction.

But yeah, that was in like the second season. And I guess by the time he was pitching more shows for them and they trusted him more, he did have the pull to ask for casting. they trusted him more he did have the pull to to ask for casting ah the reason that uh struther martin is in this two-parter he is tt flowers as we'll get to he's a iconic western character actor uh gordon dawson said i want him to be in this script and like he wouldn't do it unless they agreed to that and they did obviously so that's awesome we can thank gordon that we get the wonderful uh the star turn here uh no it's really which is really fun like uh he's a great character so yeah so that was in this this this random podcast that i found so i was glad to stumble

across that yeah thank you thank you for doing research i'm here for fun facts and you're here to keep me honest that's okay that's how this works okay we could do that this episode is directed by jerry london who we've seen a number of times by now uh tall woman in wet wagon just by accident and one of our most recent episodes uh 43 a bad deal in the valley where we talk about him a little bit more um which i think breaks our tie because we're saying that we like tall woman in Red Wagon. We don't really like Just by Accident. Bad Deal in the Valley was pretty good. And then this one, I think, tips it over into I think he's doing good work on this show. The first one we did is the first one he did, I think.

I think so. Started off strong. So, speaking of keeping me honest, Epidio, we start off this two-parter with a preview montage. Tell me all about it. because there's an amazing thing that happens in that one. And I'd love to highlight that, but we'll wait till then. So this is my preview montage for our episode. Wait for the next preview montage. My quick notes on the preview montage so that we know what we're getting into is that we have some guys yelling, turning out that this is Strother Martin, T.T. Flowers. Rocky's involved.

There's a conspiracy of some kind. Electrocution is involved. Jim is clearly running a con. And then there's an exploding truck. Yes. In this two parter, we are going to get a lot of Rocky. We'll get a little bit of Beth, a little bit of Becker. But our only appearance from Angel is the phone call that he made to Jim in the message that you heard at the top of our episode. Yeah. And then clearly Jim was not able to get back to him because he got involved with all of this. It is, but I mean, pound for pound

is a great character moment for Angel. Thanks for listening to 200 A Day. This podcast is supported by all of our listeners, but especially our patrons at patreon.com slash 200 A Day. If you're digging the show and want to help us keep on making it, you can join them for just $1 an episode. Each episode, we extend a special thanks to our Gumshoe-level patrons.

This time, we say thank you to Jim Crocker. In addition to supporting the show, he also sells our games at conventions east of the Mississippi. See where to find him, at JimLikesGames on Twitter. Shane Liebling. If you play games online, you should check out his free dice rolling app, Roll4YourParty,

at Roll4Your.Party. Mike Gillis, a host of the Radio vs. the Martians podcast. You know it's the McLaughlin group for nerds. RadioVsTheMartians.com. Kevin Lovecraft. Hear him on the RPG Actual Play podcast, the Wednesday Evening Podcast All-Stars,

over at Misdirectedmark.com. Dylan Winslow, Dale Norwood, Bill Anderson, Chris, and Dave P. And finally, big thanks to Victor DeSanto and to Richard Haddam, who you can find on Twitter at Richard Haddam. Help out the show by leaving a rating or review wherever you get your podcasts and check out patreon.com slash 200 a day to see if you want to be our newest gumshoe we talked a little bit about this framing device it's a eulogy right and it's rocky giving the eulogy i i would just like to state that if i had my druthers i would have rocky giving my eulogy

but i think that this is like uh kind of an amazing thing to do here because we don't have any history with T.T. Flowers as audience members. Right. We've we don't know anything about T.T. Flowers. We've never met him by having Rocky be T.T.'s friend and giving this eulogy where he you know, you have that moment where you could just kind of barf some exposition into the baby bird into the audience's mouth. That's fine. But you get to do it through the character of Rocky, which is something you would just sit and watch anyways. Like there's certain people that could just tell you what's going on in the movie. And you're like, yeah, please keep telling me more. But also it immediately endears you to this character who is going to be, you know, obstinate.

He's going to be a problem in some ways. I don't want to suggest that I don't sympathize with T.T. Flowers at all because I absolutely do. I think he should be a problem. But, like, it's always hard to get an audience on someone's side, particularly if the person is of a particular of a demographic that audiences are used to um dismissing right he's he's an older gentleman and and that's part of of the what this episode is about is that he's got concerns and beliefs that he holds very dear that the the rest of society just kind of dismisses and that allows for him to be preyed upon. So having Rocky present this eulogy

lets you know that we're going to be talking about this old guy who's old friends with Rocky and immediately endears us to it. We all love Rocky. Why wouldn't we love Rocky's old buddy? So some of the, as you say, some of what's baby birded to us through this eulogy. This is a friend of Rocky's who loves the outdoors and nature. And he specifically mentions the bees.

The bees are a big motif in this episode. So he headed out away from the city to his farm that he called Freedom. Yes. He was married wife uh his wife died and he raised his daughter as best he could but uh there's this great i think key line here where he says my friend tt said that cities made men poor women old and everyone lonesome yes we we fade from this eulogy so there's like organ music going on, right? Right. And then it kind of fades into like, whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop, whoop. Yeah. Like flashback music. Non-ironic flashback music.

I was there when they took TT flowers away. But before we get to that fade, there are two bits I think that visually stand out that are foreshadowing. Rocky's arm is in a sling. And we do get a picture of TT's daughter. I think when he's mentioning her and she looks like she has used some makeup to cover up some bruises on her face. Right. If you know nothing else, if you've never seen a Rockford Files before, you're going to go, oh, wait a minute here. Like we're at a funeral. Here are two people. And the two things we know about them is that they know the guy who has died

and they both appear to be visibly injured in some way. So I probably, because I was like taking notes and stuff, I actually did not notice Rocky's arm until the next time we see the eulogy. And I remember thinking, was that in the first one or is the camera closer so that we see it now i have to admit my notes literally in the second one says rocky's got a sling i didn't notice that before so so maybe we don't see that until the second one uh i would invite our our listeners to correct me but yes as we go we go, we go back to when they took T.T. Flowers away.

So as mentioned, T.T. Flowers is played by Strother Martin, a Bonanza and Gunsmoke alum, also a friend of Sam Peckinpah, apparently. But he was in Cool Hand Luke. He was in Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid. He was in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. I would not be able to name him, but i'm sure that from now on because i've looked him up i will notice him in every

single western that he happens to be in going forward so and he's just a delight so we're at freedom where rocky and tt are looking after his bees he has his beekeeper hat thing on yeah there's a lot of of business kind of establishing what the deal is with with what is going on tt mentions that uh there's a neighbor that he doesn't like he sees him across the street he's yelling at him talks about how he threw a rock at him once and hit him right in the butt uh which is foreshadowing. But across the street from this farm, Freedom, are these apartment buildings. And T.T. is mad because they keep on trying to take all his land. They want to build more apartments. But he was there first.

You know, every year the county just wants more and more money. But he's been there. It's his land. He's not going to pay all those fees and taxes. And Rocky, of course, is like, well, you got to pay your taxes. Yeah taxes and uh rocky of course is like well you gotta pay your taxes yeah which is funny coming from rocky yes it is uh and this is the like one bit that i found you know the bird and otherwise smooth finish here was uh rocky's intimate understanding of uh tt flower's tax bill and when it's due and like it was obviously

something to present the audience so we understood what was at stake and what was being uh discarded but like i was like wait wait why does rocky know those taxes are overdue but i definitely felt like at one point he had more information than he was letting on yeah i think that's another just piece of exposition uh yeah in this context but uh rocky says that uh you know he should get himself a lawyer right yeah then a uh a couple of people arrive this is tt's daughter kathy um and her husband sherman or sherm as he's referred to often. Yes, so bad. If I had, I'm sorry. I apologize to any Sherman that might be listening to us.

But I don't like Sherm as a nickname. I would not go by Sherm. The Royals. Sherman Royal. A strong villain name. Yeah. No spoilers, but yeah. So they're there, but it's not a social visit.

There's some family business. I kind of like how this is framed where T.T. tells Rocky to go finish milking Spot or whatever. There's a goat. So he has to finish milking the goat while they talk about their family business. And so we have the camera on Rocky milking this goat while we're like hearing the conversation they're having off camera. Like he would be overhearing it kind of. Yeah. I like how that's framed and then it kind of cuts back and forth a little bit um showing that there's something really serious happening yeah you're not invited to it you're eavesdropping along with rocky it's a delicate conversation yeah because they're telling

him that you know they've made a decision and that he can't stay on the farm he's not able to take care of it by himself it's going to be for his own good he needs to go and then this green van that's marked with horizons crest seniors home uh pulls into the driveway and two beefy guys in white coats literally come and grab him by the arms and yeah drag him into the van, kicking and screaming. This is the unsettling bit that I was talking about. And I mean props to Struther who made this unsettling. Oh, yeah. There's something about the nice fine men in white jackets are coming to take me away.

You know, it feels like a joke. It feels like a cliche. are coming to take me away you know it's it feels like a joke it feels like a cliche and then they grab him and the way he pleads for help from rocky you're just like oh god like you you feel all of his agency being sucked out of him right that's it there's there's no uh you feel as helpless as he does which is great this scene gives us all the context we need to feel how bad that is he's at this farm it's clearly his uh there's lots of animals there's all these signs about all the stuff he sells his honey and his milk and his eggs and stuff like it's not like he's an infirm person who can't get around like he's hail and he's having a perfectly fine conversation with Rocky and he's in his home.

And then these guys just literally grab him and drag him away. And it's like, oh, my God. To add to this, right, like this is his daughter witnessing it. Right. Right. Like the son-in-law, Sherm, we mentioned that he's played by Alex Rocco. He's just an actor that i recognize and is often playing this kind of role uh this role is actually deeper than it looks in the beginning but uh but

yeah you when you see him you're like yeah he's the bad guy yeah he's kind of like a slimy mob ish kind of yeah so that's fine you see him you're like yeah something uh nefarious is about to happen but she looks like she legitimately she's not like a scheming villainous right she's like crying she's like in tears and is trying to tell uh tt that it's for his own good and she's telling rocky that it's for his own good but she's like she's clearly devastated at this decision that she made which actually comes back we she talks about that later in the episode yeah i definitely did not feel that own good but she's like she's clearly devastated at this decision that she made which actually comes back we she talks about that later in the episode yeah i definitely did not feel that she was being underhanded she's someone who made a hard decision and is now watching the consequences

of that decision we go from there to rocky talking to jim is making tacos yay the hard shell roll your own family style put your toppings in your taco that's a beautiful thing rocky tells him what happened uh while he's making his tacos uh and jim this is i think what you were talking about earlier where jim's kind of playing the it's not as bad as you like it can't possibly be as bad as you think yeah he can't get involved uh it's all legal you know the the family is basically going through the process to declare tt there's a term for it that he has a diminished capacity and can't take care of himself it's a shame but it's what's happened right like we shouldn't get involved that's a private affair that doesn't you know right but rocky wants him to check it out he has this whole thing about how if it's money that's

the issue if all you want is money he's willing to sell his truck to yeah pay jim to uh to look into this the the way he says that is so wonderfully accusatory because he i think he says something like it's a money thing isn't it yeah like this is why you won't do it jim is trying to play him off as like it's trying to play off as the reasonable one like the reasonable thing here is that we just let nature take its course and that's you know whatever but rocky has witnessed what happened and can't imagine jim dismissing it so he's like well then obviously it's because you're not going to get paid and that's the kind

of son I've raised. But it's not a money thing, right? We know Jim. Jim always needs money, but it's not a money thing. Once Rocky starts saying that he's willing to sell his truck, right? Yeah. Okay,

fine. If it's that important to you, he'll look into it. But T.T. is not, he's not supposed to have visitors or take phone calls. So Jim's going to have to start with the family. I would think that no visitors or phone calls would have been the first thing. Got Jim to go, wait a minute.

But as we'll find out, there's a great way they get jim to go wait a minute this scene i think is also the pretty much the only food and pretty much the only money yeah this is reference in this whole episode so uh thank you for joining us at 200 a day our job here is done just in case you were you were waiting to see if there were more tacos unfortunately no so this episode is not very funny there's not really humor or jokes so there's this technique of of you know doing a cut on the on the word to get us to the next scene and i usually call that a joke in the cut because they usually are humorous uh these ones are not

jokes yeah but in this case jim says i'm gonna have to start with the family and we cut to seeing kathy and he's talking to her at their palatial estate apparently with a pool and a bar with a telephone on it outside i was thinking about this and this this episode also um it adds a little bit to this, but I think you can track somebody's villainy in the Rockford Files by the places they can access a phone. Almost every villain has a car phone. Right. A lot of villains get phones taken to them out by the pool. Or if they're on a boat, they have a phone.

Access to a phone means a villain in this case i mean i think it's no spoiler to say that kathy's not really a villain here no no but that's true she her lifestyle is supported by her husband who is a shady dealer at least aspires to villainy and i don't think we're meant to think that she's villainous like i don't know that's like a reveal or anything um which is a good kind of like restrained treatment of of this character yeah but yeah so jim's talking to kathy and she kind of lays out you know what's happening from their perspective she says that he's he's having trouble he's basically he's getting senile they've had him under observation for a month from a psychiatrist benjamin christ yes and he agrees they're keeping him under observation until his uh interview and in three days which is to kind of rubber stamp

this determination of diminished capacity and then all of his affairs are turned over to the family right to kathy and her husband jim tries to dig to find out like where all this came from first of all she's like no one told me what to think this is what i think right but i think that's important kathy like does not think that she's being conned or anything yeah but the psychiatrist was a recommendation from her husband's lawyer uh because they talked to him because they started getting worried for you know for whatever reasons um and the lawyer said that this is the way it's done you don't confront him directly you go to a psychiatrist and they observe him and blah blah blah blah jim's like oh so it's all behind his back yeah and she's like this is what they recommended this is what the professionals think

and then when he asks about why he can't uh him, she says that Dr. Christ says that visitors interfere with his transition to institutional life. And so there's no visitors until they feel like he's acclimated to his new his new. Oh, God, it's just a horrifying thought, right? Like, we're going to throw you in this room for your own good so that you get used to this room. We're not going to let anyone visit you. Especially not the people that threw you in this room. This portrait is not painted in such a way that I feel like this is being done just based on what we've seen of TT flowers so far. It doesn't feel like this is in his best interests.

No. And I like at this point, I don't want to characterize Jim as not like he's on the hook now. Something doesn't feel right. Yeah. There's a point where, like he's on the hook now. Something doesn't feel right. Yeah. There's a point where they really get him on the hook. Again, I keep foreshadowing this moment.

Well, it's a good moment. Yeah. So in case there was any, any question about motivations here, we, we go from this conversation to an observation room where Dr. Crist and another doctor are observing Titi who's tied to a bed and kind of like moaning and thrashing around. And Crist tells the other doctor to give him

all these like drug cocktails and, you know, uses all these various terms because he wants him paranoid and disoriented by 9 a.m. on Friday. I wrote down, I want him paranoid and disoriented by 9 a.m. Friday. And then I just said, just have him run a Kickstarter then. So, yeah. So there is no mystery here. This is a hoodwink. This is a bamboozle. This Dr. Crist is artificially creating the appearance of senility for reasons.

And the reasons are the mystery. Crist is played by Richard Venture, who we last saw in Inhazard as the guy who gets murdered in the beginning. That's the one where Beth gets poisoned. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Turns out to be like a labor embezzlement thing. Anyway, I just was like, oh, we've seen him in another one. Yeah.

Oh, he's the dude who makes a phone call and then just gets murdered. He's very slimy here. So we go outside this location, the Horizons Crest Senior Home, where Jim is kind of scoping the place out. And we see Chris leaving in his very nice nice red sports car which we will come back to in later scenes um and a quick little cut of jim using his mobile business card press to print himself exactly one business card of all the pieces of technology uh that i wish i had from like these shows that i see and it would be great to just have a mobile business card press to call upon uh actually the first appearance of the business card press was in tall woman and red

wagon which was the first episode we did and also first directed by this director um clearly it's been in other episodes but uh in case you're not familiar, this is literally a little tiny letterpress that Jim keeps in his Firebird that he puts little type into and is able to ink and press exactly one business card at a time to run cons with a fake business card. And quite often with the ink still wet. Right. Yeah. If you're envisioning like a miniature version of an old-fashioned press, you've got it. It's not a fangled machine in any way. I don't know if fangled is a word. It is not newfangled. So he puts on glasses, gets a clipboard, and goes into the lobby.

In this two-parter, there are two brilliant— there's the bureaucratic con and then the pressed-upon poor worker con. This one's the bureaucratic con, and he doesn't poor worker con. This one's the bureaucratic con. And he doesn't vote superbly, but like, oh, I love this one. Yeah. So there's a guy at the desk who, you know, confronts him, wants to know what he's doing because he's just like looking around and taking notes on his clipboard. He shows him the card, but doesn't let him take it. Right.

Because as you say, the ink's probably still wet. So he has this little like maneuver he does where he shows the business card to them. And then as they reach out to take it, he kind of like flips it back into his breast pocket, which is once you notice it, you see it every time he does it. And it's fantastic. But he says that he's a state inspector. You know, he's on a Title I inspection, which is a secret inspection. They're not supposed to know about it. Right. And there's all these penalties for interfering with a Title I inspection, but he and Dr. Crist have an understanding if you know what I mean. So he's just going to go through the motions and he won't get in anyone's way. So this front desk guy I think is one

of the guys in the white coats. I don't remember exactly. He's a goon. We will see him more. He goons for Crist, but he seems to buy this the story at least one of my favorite moments in this con is when jim just starts talking about bu and the guy's like what is b and it's bed units it's just the way that jim effortlessly creates jargon and then pretends that that is a real thing and that you're an idiot for not knowing it. Do they not even give basic training to people these days?

Yeah, yeah. Bed units. And so it puts the person he's conning in this position to go, no, no, I knew that. Yeah, like, yeah, bed units. I understand. Look, you know, I'm only on the desk like three days a week. He starts defending himself. It's good.

This is all in service of Jim finding which room T.T.'s in, which he does. And he goes ahead and gets himself over there. He goes into the room. T.T. Flowers is still tied down to this bed. And there's this bit of business that Jim does does that happens every time jim comes into this room which is where he takes tt's glasses and put them on his face because he's like i can't see like who are you so he like puts his glasses on so they can actually see him and he's like i'm you know i'm i'm jim it's one of those things that's like a very tender physical interaction yeah um

like the least he can do is put this guy's glasses on because he can't do it himself it's nice he does remember jim but he's pretty incomprehensible um he's you know this whole scene is pretty much him uh being all goofed up on whatever they've been pumping into him i do love that the thing that he or the way he recognizes Jim is he's like, you're the kid who always wanted to soup up my tractor. Yeah. He continually talks about going north. Oh, yeah. I thought this was going to turn into something else.

Me too. I thought it was like hidden treasure or something. But it turns out it's about the bees and the bee migration. It's also pure poetry, too. Like just listening to the words he says he's got an entire language built around the bees which i in some ways is maybe a little reductive but in others like just there's a certain beauty to it it he gets some great insults in on people that are bee related and yeah no it's great tt flowers has some poetry in his soul uh we get we

see that most clearly in the second um episode uh i think but again we'll get to that when we get there the guy from the front desk does go to uh get dr christ to check out this inspection quote unquote and so they go into the observation room and see jim talking to tt christ uh it's not that he knows who he is but he's like this is not a state inspector and he has this line i think is in the preview montage where he says our state inspector is going to have a funny accident yes as he directs the goon to get that that tank of nitrous oxide they still have and put it in jim's car the sequence concludes with uh cutting back and forth from jim at the phone booth outside the clinic telling rocky that he thinks that tt is not with it like he went and saw him and he was

incomprehensible rocky's very sad and still kind of not believing that that's what's happening yeah so we're cutting from that to this guy going to the firebird opening up this tank of nitrous oxide and hiding it under jim's seat so once he gets into it he's going to be in a laughing gas filled car this is okay this is leading up to one of my all-time favorite rockford files stretches of film uh i the what i have lit written here on my notes is uh you were almost free and clear like can we get that moment where jim is telling rocky like there's nothing here like you said they keep cutting to these idiots setting up to kill jim that's just going to wet his appetite it's just to put him in a spot where he needs to know what happened.

Like they were golden until they did this. So he gets in the car, we get the gas going and he starts driving and we see a deliriously happy Jim Rockford, which is not a sight we see that often. It is beautiful. He keeps crossing the center line. And it's always a truck of some sort that's about to hit him.

They do this like kaleidoscope lens effect. So we see his vision doubling and tripling. Yeah. And he's just laughing it off and laughing it off. I mean, honestly, I know that he doesn't die here. That's not at stake. That's not on the table. But I was like, you know, they did a good job of making me anxious for Jim in these moments.

There's some kind of peril that he clearly is in. But eventually he runs it off the road and stops just before hitting. He just kind of like rolls into like a concrete barrier that's on the side of the road and then and this is the part that i love the most is him getting out and and sucking in the air and trying to end the effects of the laughing gas wearing off and watching james gardner perform this transformation between drugged up happy jim to somebody just tried to kill me Jim is great it's worth watching this entire two-part episode is worth watching it for that 30 second sequence alone I feel like it's wonderful a little longer than that yeah I had a thought uh kind of towards the end of the first

episode which was that when you get right down to it the actual plot of this two-parter could be one episode right um it's not particularly convoluted there's not even like a lot of character depth that we explore like like in gear jammers we explore rocky a lot um and that was like a lot of the time spent there this episode doesn't really have that. But the reason why it's a two-parter, I think, is both to make that framing device kind of worth it. This eulogy framing, because we're going to come back to that a couple of times. But also, they can just take a little time to have these scenes that are a little longer than they probably would be. And just kind of live in the jim rockford world instead of this being a 20 second he swerves once and then goes off the road like we do spend like a good minute maybe a minute and a

half uh going through this and it's like a piece of visual storytelling that we get to enjoy for a little while um and we get that in a couple other scenes as we go forward. And it's kind of nice because it's this sense of letting things breathe, letting the world breathe. That is easy to lose when you're concentrating on trying to keep pacing really snappy. Or sometimes you can cut too much dead weight and you end up with a very staccato kind of narrative. Right. I think when you're playing a game, right? Like sometimes maybe if you're not really sure where something's going or someone's just going off on a tangent and you want to kind of let that be part of the world. So it's just like, let the scene breathe.

You know, let's not cut away too soon. Let's see where this goes. See what this adds to the texture of our story. So this scene kind of made me think of of that as a as a as an element that was used in this two-parter to make it worth the two parts yeah i would agree you can just see that they clearly enjoyed it too right like the premise is ridiculous there's ink spilled to explain away why it doesn't immediately get them in trouble right like because that's the other thing like you come from this you know this medical facility and it's nitrous oxide that was in your car

the open and shut case like that's just oh yeah it's some some people at the facility did that clearly uh so so they you know spend a little time like making it so it's not open and shut which we get to later yeah yeah yeah but it's it's not open and shut. Which we get to later. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But it's kind of worth it for these kind of like, I don't know, memorable. Let's have some fun.

Yeah. Scene making. Well, Jim does not die. We go to the gas station where his car is getting repaired, I guess. And Rocky's picking him up. And Jim has the line of, someone wants me to die laughing. Yes. As you were saying, he's like, well, well i must have been wrong someone tried to kill me yes he doesn't know like why that would be

but he wants to find out if you can engineer a judgment of diminished capacity is this something that is coming because of observations of his behavior or is his behavior being created in order to get this judgment? This is kind of nice. Cause I'm like, all right, let's get into it. We're going to, we're going to get into solving this mystery,

but really it's just this next scene. Yeah. That Jim pretends to be someone named, named McMahon, who's having problems with his dad. And he's in Dr. Chris's office saying that he's having all these problems with his dad and he doesn't trust banks

and he's keeping his money in the fridge and all this stuff. His family lawyer is never going to do anything against his dad. Can Dr. Crist recommend someone? And Crist recommends Tom Brockmeyer who is Sherman's lawyer who we heard that name earlier as the lawyer who recommended dr christ to do the observation of tt as i am saying this here's a question for

you that did not occur to me at the time is jim good enough at disguises that chris did not recognize him as the state inspector that he had seen in the observation room. Oh, did, oh right, because he did see him. Yeah, I don't know. I'm willing to headcanon this as a context shift thing. Like, he didn't actually look at Jim, he just saw someone. And then in this other context, he wouldn't think to, like, recognize him. Jim certainly wouldn't know that he saw him right

he saw him through one-way glass so it like and on that account that jim would hatch the scheme and and go through with it it makes sense it's the whether dr chris would uh yeah that's a good question i mean obviously he did obviously it worked in keeping with what we know of this character he's pretty he's he's kind of vain and really not that smart when you get right down to it. So I'm willing to believe that he just straight up didn't recognize Jim. But that just occurred to me just now because these two scenes are right next to each other. And there's also the bit where the whole thing that Jim is offering is so much money.

I mean, he hasn't said how much money, but you could see the dollar bills in the cartoon eyes of Dr. Crist, right? Like this lawyer, he's expensive, but this is this he's the best. Yeah. Oh, for sure. So once he gets that bit of, you know, that recommendation from Crist, he's back in the in the truck with Rocky and he kind of lays out this scheme for Rocky and for us as the audience. The lawyer gets paid to recommend commitment chris signs off on it and then chris gets paid to have them committed to his institution and then in the institution they do whatever to to make the patient seem incompetent so that it gets signed off on by the public official and everything is legal but uh jim thinks that someone else must

be funding this there must be money involved these two guys this this uh lawyer doctor scheme only makes sense if someone's paying right for this service someone has to be doing that rocky says that tt thinks that sherman is a con man so maybe he should start there rocky and jim go to freedom to feed the animals oh yeah oh my god i gotta tell you giving the goat the name spot like every time they got there i was like oh no okay i think it's still alive oh no like oh to be clear the animals end up fine yeah they make it clear that the animals are being taken care of by someone every couple scenes, which I appreciated. You never end up going, oh, damn it.

But when they go inside the house, Sherman is there shoving stuff in a trash bag. Yes. And he says that since they're going to be in charge of T.T.'s affairs, he's taken all this paperwork so that their accountant can sort it out. There's some conversation about the will. I believe that Sherman has not found it yet. This scene escalates quickly. Yeah, he's clearly doing something wrong.

And there's a time limit on everything that's going on. And I think they do a good job of just letting you know that there's no talking anyone's way out of this. This isn't like we're beyond that point now. People are physically doing things that cannot be reversed. Right. And this is one of those moments. So in this conversation, they confront Sherman with this accusation. You're using Kathy to get T.T. committed so that you can take over the estate.

And he says that like well yeah because if she didn't do it the county would because he's not paying his taxes yeah and then these three goons come in and they're asking him hey mr royal uh you know where you know where do you want us to start we have a dump truck and a dozer out here and sherman says to haul everything to the dump freedom's been sold uh it's all garbage this anger is rocky yeah we get the sense i mean not only is tt rocky's friend rocky like also loves freedom right like he likes this the you know the the fact that this farm exists is something that he values we get that in the eulogy like he doesn't say it but the way he waxes poetically about it definitely yeah so rocky kind of grabs sherman

sherman just pushes him and he goes he falls backwards into this chair which sets jim off so jim goes and shoves sherman and then these goons come over and just jump jim and just start beating the crap out of him easily overpowering him i as i say in my notes, Jim gets gooned. Yes. There's that moment of like somebody shoves Rocky and boom, Jim is like, oh. Jim is on the case. Yes. And the other thing I have in my notes here is one of the things I love about what they present in Rocky here is that Rocky just knows everything about T.T.'s history.

in Rocky here is that Rocky just knows everything about TT's history. They are old friends that go way back and he just, cause there's the, the lamp that he recognizes as a gift they got from so-and-so. I mean, we go back a ways. If, if, if somebody was ransacking your home, there's very few items. I would go, wait a minute, that's where, that's what Nathan got for blah, blah, blah. I would recognize the shelves that you took from the Design Matters booth. That's the only thing I would recognize in your home. Wait a minute. Those are in my dining room. Nice. All right. So the goons haul Jim outside and we get the introduction of the true villain of our piece, Jack Mullard. Oh, my God.

And this guy doesn't even have to say anything. You know he's the true villain of the piece, right? You just see him and you're like, yeah, okay. I think probably one of the great Rockford recurring villains. He's played by Scott Brady. We saw him in Gear Jammers as the bad guy in the limo. And in Local Man Eaten by New eaten by newspaper he was the newspaper editor uh who hired the proofreader to uh take care of problems i believe he might have been in a couple

more episodes he is a great square jawed slimy bobbed up guy who was born to sit in the back of a limo and give goons orders. In this case, Jack Mullard is a real estate developer. He's the one who bought all the land around freedom and built apartments on it. And there's a whole this kind of comes out over multiple pieces of exposition. The farm originally was like 10 acres and now it's down to three acres. And that's because he's had to sell off parts of it over time. And Mullard's the one who's been buying them and like plowing under his trees and building apartments and all that stuff. Our introduction to Mullard here is his thing about, you know, all of his projects come in on time.

No overruns, no overtime. And now you've made me late by one minute. If you louse up my schedule again,ford you'll get the second chorus oh that's punctuated with a goon uh sucker punching rockford in the gut and uh there's just something about this this guy bragging about being so well organized and on time and later there's there's a uh a different point of view to this that comes from somebody who's worked with him but like yeah i know it's a great great villain piece he mentioned something about like you've had quite the day haven't you rockford and then uh he kind of dismisses jim and goes to talk to sherman and they have some a bit about uh how he hasn't found

it yet he's been looking for something and he hasn't found it yet so Jim he doesn't know what the game is but he thinks they're probably looking for the will and if he can find the will first maybe he can slow down whatever they're doing uh also a key note you know isn't it interesting that Mullard already knew about his the thing with the gas this like accident that he almost had yeah yeah so that connects mullard to uh dr christ for jim and for us i feel like that way of establishing the connection i think that's a really strong thing like i think that technique was very strong just an offhanded gloat from this new villain it's not even a before I kill you, Mr. Rockford. Right. Yeah, it's an offhanded gloat. It's clearly to let Rockford know that there's nothing he does

that is a secret to to this guy. Like, I'm a mastermind. I'm in charge. Everything I do is on time. I know everything you've done. But more specifically for the audience. Yeah, it just ties it all together and it moves kind of the the discovery portion of the story along because now rockford knows something he did not know before which is that mullard must have some connection to chris uh chris has a connection to sherman and sherman has a connection to mullard yeah uh so he can start triangulating to figure out what the hell is going on. Yeah. Jim now has another con.

Yes. This is one of my favorite cons here. But go on. Yeah. This is an all time great. Yeah. So he's back at the institution. He's in a phone booth. He's calling a tow truck company.

And he says he needs a tow. And he describes, you know, what he needs. And he says, I'm going to be inside. So honk when you get here. Yeah. So he sets that up uh and then we see from the outside that uh chris comes to the facility it's nighttime so there's a guard the guard lets him in and then locks the door after him so we know the place is locked there's his guard jim waits we have a shot of uh something dripping from underneath the the green van uh the tow truck

shows up it honks the security guard goes out to talk to the tow truck to find out why the hell this guy's honking and so the door is unlocked so jim slips in so that's the whole purpose of this con right part one um yes so once jim's in there he goes to tt's room he goes into the observation room and he sees chris and the other T.T.'s room talking about what they're going to need to do to induce the symptoms of chronic brain syndrome. I kept meaning to look that up. If that is it just seems like it's not a thing. Oh, it is. So the two doctors are discussing whatever they leave and so this whole time tt's been just like mumbling about like

walking on the seashore and waves and sand and bees and going north and whatever they leave and he turns and just yells after them like yell something i think a bee related insult you foul brooded drones foul brooded drones yes that was'm going to put that right here in my breast pocket, right next to my heart so I could use it sometime in the future. So I was like, oh, does that mean he's been faking his non-lucidity? And I think that's confirmed when Jim goes in and he starts, he lapses back into mumbling all the stuff he was saying and then jim puts his glasses on he's like hey you know it's jim uh finally tt is with it enough to actually talk

to jim yeah and he says they're gonna do all these do all these drugs to him they're gonna try this thing called ect and jim says to him and i think to, to the audience, that's not a drug. That's electroconvulsive therapy. Yeah. What we make holoquially know as shock therapy. I think Jim says like, oh, it's an act. And T.T. is like, it ain't an act, boy. I've been some places today. Yeah.

I've been to outer space. Oh, it's great. It's great. Yeah. So T.T. does not like this idea. He does not want to be electrocuted, which is fair. So ECT, like, I think, look, I'm no expert and I don't have any direct knowledge with this, but my understanding is that it's been pretty conclusively thrown out as an effective

therapy, uh uh for anything i wonder some similar to uh uh another dawson episode the competitive edge where jim ends up being involuntarily taken to this uh mental institution and drugged up kind of a similar way to tt actually so that was also written by dawson yeah oh he's got some he got some demons. He's got something he's working out here. He's got something or something he's very concerned about. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, this whole sense of like, yeah, having your agency taken away and all these treatments that are supposed to make you better, but they really don't, you know, but they're really taking you away from yourself and stuff like that. It is very effectively shown here as not things that we should accept.

Yeah. That said, Jim tells him what's going on with Freedom. And, you know, they're basically trying to sell the land. PT is concerned about the animals. And so we get another moment of like, Rocky and your friends are there taking the animals away. Yes. Like they're taking them so that they'll be safe which i think is great we cut outside the tow truck is taking away the van because that's what jim actually called for the van is broken so the tow truck guy

checked it out the radiator is leaking so he's towing it away and uh the the doctor's like why is that happening the cherry on top of this con is that that Jim gave the name of the orderly that he'd been talking to earlier that day, Steve or whatever, so that that was an actual person at the facility who ordered it. So the guard looked at it and went, oh, Steve Fisher ordered it. It's legit. Yeah. It's like, it's not complex.

Everyone who is wrapped up in it has a legitimate source of authority. It's like if I told you that I had made the perfect peanut butter and jelly sandwich. That's what this is, right? Like it's it's it has no pretensions. It's just effective. It just does it. It just gets it done and does it in a no nonsense way. I love it.

It is exquisite back in tt's room uh jim says he can't just write a new will because he's been declared incompetent yeah so tt tells jim where the deed and his will is which are somewhere in the living room i guess um he says that he doesn't care what happens to him. Just stop Mullard from destroying freedom. And then we cut from this back to our eulogy frame. Yes. In case you were wondering, TT is still dead. Like that's.

And it basically comes back. It cuts back on him being like, I don't care what happens to me. Right. And then we go back to the eulogy. I do not remember the first time I watched this, what I thought about the status of the eulogy right since i've seen it once before i right we know what's coming we know what's coming here yeah but i feel like if you're watching it for the first time there's no reason not to think that this is legitimately a eulogy for tt except for the sense of like they pull this kind of stuff all the time on the rockford files so yeah it's not it's in

it's in his catalog of scams sorry cons the villains do scams he does cons yeah sorry and this is the the time when i noticed that rocky's arm was in the sling yes yes so uh adding to the sense of impending danger uh part of his eulogy gets back around to leaving the city because the city didn't care. And that's when we fade back to the timeline. Yes. Soft focus on Dennis. Where Dennis Becker, representing the city not caring, is laying out for Jim what a ridiculous conspiracy this sounds like. conspiracy this sounds like like so you're saying like a psychiatrist an attorney a real estate developer and this uh lawyer are all conspiring to steal three acres of land from this old guy

in a different county yes and this is where we hear about milt milt milt is the guy at the sec that jim so the reason why i i glommed on to milt here is that dennis lets on that milt has a case open on the uh sherman yeah rockford knows right away that their first name basis this is the sec guy like of course Rockford knows the SEC guy. Yeah, that's oh, Milt. Oh, OK. Yeah, that makes sense. I love it because there's something about the Rockford files where, yeah, he'll get tangled up with mobsters and things like that. But also it's the boring crimes that he's, you know, like I. Yeah, I think we've established, you know, in other episodes that it's like the stuff where Jim actually makes money are the really boring things. Yeah. Right. The in-between stuff where he's he's just running. And this is in the part of the Venn diagram of Rockford Files episodes that overlaps with Scooby Doo episodes. Real estate scam. That's the rubber mask wearing villains. Yes. Yes.

Yeah. Well, that comes up because I think because Jim asked Dennis to check Sherman's financials. Right. And they were already on file with Milt because there's some kind of short selling investigation. There's some jargon. I'm not 100 percent sure what the deal is, but basically he sold shares that he shouldn't have or that he didn't have or something.

And he ended up losing a bunch of money. There wasn't anything to actually like charge him with a crime. Like he didn't, he covered his tracks or whatever. So Jim summarizes for us. So he ended up in $400 thousand dollars worth of debt from whatever this thing was and then he borrowed three hundred thousand dollars like i guess on on the books to make up for it or whatever which means that he would have needed another hundred thousand in a

hurry um and so jim thinks that you know he saw that he could get it out of this land and that Mullard advanced him this loan against the land that he did not yet own. And that's the motivation for getting T.T. declared incompetent so that his wife then can turn the land over to him to sell. Right. Jim also asked Dennis to check out the bottle of gas that was in his car, which had been stolen from a pharmacy six months ago. So that's a cold lead. Yeah. So yeah, that's all the effort that they're doing in the plot here to not have that just immediately point right at Dr. Chris and his facility. And when he, in that scene, when he said, you know, we still have that, right? He says something like, we still have the nitrous from the theft, right?

Or something like that. He stole it from himself. So Dennis is like, all right, well, even if all this that you say is true, I can't help you because it's in a different county. Yeah, cold, Dennis, cold. So, of course, Jim goes to the Hall of Records in whatever this county is. We see him leave. He is being followed by one of Mullard's goons who uses his car phone to call Mullard on his car phone. I like how very direct this all is.

He's like, you know, Rockford's coming out of the Hall of Records. And Mullard just says, kill Rockford. Yeah. There's no masking of it. we're not gonna yeah i appreciate having a clear villain yes there are all these other people involved and there are some shades of gray and there's a little bit of like what's this person's motivation why are they actually involved like this guy we know he's the baddie yeah yeah he's the baddie we know he thinks he's invulnerable so he's just gonna right just do it the next scene is another one that kind of like

isn't really necessary i don't think but kind of lets the whole kind of world breathe a little bit where jim goes to uh he goes to this construction site he's looking for uh this construction foreman or whatever role he is he's in charge of building things in this county. Hank Gidley. He came to find him because this guy is the contractor with the most county red tape issues. Yeah. So Jim's like, so obviously you must not be in with Muller. Yeah, yeah.

They have a little business here of kind of feeling each other out. And then he comes around to telling Jim some stuff about Mullard. Nobody can beat him. When it comes to local government, there's no corners he can't cut. And same with the buildings that he builds. He buys inspectors. He buys assessors. He has assessors over-assess people's land so that their taxes go up,

so that he comes in with a sweetheart deal to buy and then he doesn't pay those taxes because he gets it reassessed. All these slimy tricks, right? All of this. I mean, like, I know that these are all actual criminal efforts that people have perpetrated in the past. Like, they're not just making this up whole cloth. But I got to tell you, they sound like so much work.

And just making sure you're not in over your head with the bribes. It's just, oh, it's ridiculous. It's like, hats off. He's industrious. It's a certain value system, right? Where it's like, I would rather spend the same amount of money in bribes to not pay taxes that I would pay in taxes because I don't think it's right that I should pay taxes. So I will bribe people instead. Right. Right. That's what makes criminals. Yes. Oh, God. Moving on before launching into a diatribe about that kind

of thinking. So Gidley says that and freedom is a prime hunk of land. This guy knows it like he knows it by name. You know, I might even put in a bid on it when it goes up for auction. Yeah. And Jim says, well, it's not going up for auction because someone paid the taxes two hours before the deadline. This is a good example of like showing actions and implying what the lead up to that was. Right. Because it's like we knew that there were taxes owed and we know that this deed is somewhere in play but this is now clarifying to me at least that like oh okay the county was going to repossess this land and no matter who the owner is which would now be you know uh sherman and kathy it would still go to

auction unless someone pays the taxes which someone just did and we find out at the beginning of the next scene where jim is talking to kathy as a check from one of mullard's companies that paid the taxes two hours before the deadline to keep it from going off to auction keeping it in kathy and sherman's hands that's kind of a boring thing to go through every step of but since we're being told the outcomes of this process, we kind of backfill why those are important and what was going on. Yeah, no, it's a signature of Rockford Files. Here's the intricate thing going on in the scam, but it's like totally ordinary and boring scam. So here you go. Yeah, it's exposition by uh implication yeah this is where where it

separates from the venn diagram with uh scooby-doo because this is where they don't put on the masks and fake a haunting just straight up white collar financial dealings uh yeah so this this check from mullard paid these taxes so jim is trying to convince Kathy that something nefarious is going on now. He has all this evidence or he has all these things that he's putting together into a picture of the scam. He says that, you know, who paid the taxes? Sherman's broke like he lost all his money on this, you know, selling selling shares he didn't have or whatever. And Kathy's like, he's a brilliant businessman he would never do that it's like oh boy uh-oh so jim lays out you know what he thinks is happening and kind of asks like so are you sure

that nobody talked you into having your father committed she's saying like no nobody convinced her she made the decision i think this is like one of the real emotional moments that kind of gives this episode weight she says that it was a hard decision but she made it yes she was willing to make it because she cares about her father and she's worried about him and she has to deal with the consequences of having made this decision but it was hers um and that's a really powerful emotional beat. Yeah. And there's a great moment of poetry following it from Rockford,

the counterpoint. I know what you're talking about. It's at the end of this conversation where Jim kind of backs off. He's kind of like, yeah, okay. You know, like fine. But who found the institution? Like, why did he go to there in particular? And she's like, oh, Dr. Christ. Why did you go to there in particular and she's like oh dr chris why did you go to dr chris he's like because of sherman's lawyer who is also the lawyer that dr

chris recommends yeah and he was also the lawyer of um for mullard putting it that way right it's like okay so no one leaned on you and forced you to make a decision but maybe you were guided to this by all these other yeah decision makers and she's like look you don't know sherman i've been married to him for 14 years or whatever you're trying to say i don't even know my own husband i what i noted the line is you hardly even know your father and he's buying a broken heart at 8 a.m yeah oh so good so good it was stated earlier that that's when he was going to get the electroshock therapy was going to be in the morning. But yeah, that's the beat that ends the scene.

We are left inconclusive about what Kathy thinks. Yeah. Yeah. But I'm convinced. Yes. I've been convinced for a while. In case you in case we'd forgotten that Mullard had ordered his goons to kill Jim. Jim goes back to his trailer and before he can even go in, a goon appears with a gun. We're going to go, we're going to go for a walk down the pier. But Jim manages to, he, he waits until the two, so there's two goons and they're flanking him and they're walking next to a car.

And he is making some kind of wry comment and then just grabs one of their arms and throws them into the other guy. So they hit the car and they both go sprawling and he runs away. He runs behind a truck that's parked near the trailer that has a big gas can in the back of it. It's like a pickup truck.

They start shooting at him. We see a shot hit the gas can. So now there's gas spewing out of it. Yeah. We see Jim grab a road flare out of the back of the truck. Then we go back to the goons. They hear him groan as if he's been shot. They go to investigate.

And so I'm expecting Jim to just like pop up with the flare. But no, he runs around the back of the trailer and overhand pitches the flare over their heads into the truck and it bursts into flame. My notes say so much destruction for a Rockford Files episode. That was I think an uncharacteristically destructive move for

Rockford to pull off, right? And also, had that been done 20, 30, or 40 years later, that truck would have blown up and killed those two goons. And we wouldn't have cared. We just wouldn't have cared. This is a truck that the goons brought from the construction site there with the gasoline and the road flares in it. So honestly, if they had died in the fire, it's their fault.

had died in the fire it's their fault right like that but in this case because it is rockford files it uh causes it just causes confusion and distraction and jim is able to peel out in the firebird and make his escape so he goes of course to beth's place yay which we know because of the plants yes so we get uh we get the beth appearance in this episode. He's calling Dennis. He's trying to get some help here because this is the second time someone's tried to kill him. Rocky shows up. So we have this beat here where, first of all, Jim is now wanted because the truck was stolen from Mullard's construction yard. Right. Quote, quotes, stolen.

And since it was at Jim's trailer, he's the suspect for the person who stole it. So now Jim's like, well, I can't go home. If the cops don't get me, Lord's goons will. There's a moment of quiet despair where Jim's like, you know, I'm out of options. Yeah. I've done everything I can, unless I break them out of Horizon's crest.

I have in my notes, revelation, exclamation point, and then revelation music. Yeah, there's a music sting and he looks directly into the camera. Yes. A sparkle enters his eye as he says, break him out of Horizon's Crest. And I thought for certain that this is where the first episode would end. We have been on on a journey there has been so much that's happened i was like we're there okay good but no but no there is an extremely good final sequence yes can i just preface it with a quote yes any man who drives a car like that has got to have a crush on it there's referencing uh chris's, which is the bright red, as we learned, $26,000 vehicle.

Oh my God. The handy rule of thumb with the Rockford Files is just multiply it by five. Six digits of car there. That is not a cheap car. I'm going to take a look at the Rockford Files files

to see if our uh our patreon listeners who keep us up to date on all the car stuff managed to get to this episode uh no unfortunately our car our car hookup has not entered uh anything for this episode so you're gonna have to go to the tape listeners to determine exactly what what car this is but it is a good one okay so we are now on for the rockford files colon the great escape yes uh jim and rocky are going to break tt out of the institution uh jim is giving rocky some instructions and then he heads in with his first of many cons he's from the funeral parlor and he's here to pick up a body and this is where he as you were saying the this is the working man just needs uh yes this needs a favor con or

it's like oh you know i got a lot of these tonight the services are in the morning i have the paperwork right here i'm running late yeah my boss is breathing down my neck yeah so this is the same the same guard that uh we saw when he went to deal with the dump or with the tow truck or whatever yeah i think we now establish is not very smart no jim manages to kind of like keep him talking and he's looking at charts and stuff until this car horn starts blaring from the parking lot and the guard's like okay okay yeah sure fine i need to go check on that he's like okay well i you know i'll just go and do my job then right yeah yeah i'll let you do your job you let we both have stressful things let's just get through this so he uh heads into the institution goes to tt's room uh he sees

all right so he sees the the goons the orderlies in the hall he steps into a room um there's someone asleep on a gurney in this room. Uh, Johnson, I believe Jackson Jackson. Thank you. I have in my notes, let's find out what kind of character Jackson is. And we will not find out what kind of character Jackson is. Jim moves Jackson into someone else's room. Yes. Then he, uh, goesiti's room, who is yelling at the nurse, calling her a barren queen, which at first I was like, that's that's a mean thing to say. And then I realized it must be a B reference, like a queen B, not like barren queen. Yeah. Yeah. No, I was like it felt like a slur, but it wasn't it wasn't what we thought it was. Yeah. So this poor beleaguered nurse just

gets yelled at by everyone chris yelled at her to go prep him for this uh for the therapy because he's moving it up and he wants to do it right now and then he's yelling at her and calling her a barren queen and that he doesn't want to get electrocuted and then she continues to get yelled at rockford yells at her about jackson as we'll see. This poor woman. Jim gets on the intercom, says there's a missing patient. Jackson is missing. The nurse needs to go find him. Stat. Stat, yes.

Chris goes out to see what's going on with his car because the horn is still blaring. I want to point out here that one of the most wonderful bits about this con is that I'm spending all this time trying to figure out how they're pulling off the horn trick right so we've we've had moments where we see the guard trying to turn it off and then the orderly goes out and it's like disconnect the battery it's like i did disconnect the battery and he's pulling wires out so there's just wires everywhere yeah it's just a piece that i love about this is that i am literally with them. Yeah. Because you just you just hear the horn the whole time and you just you're like, shut

that horn up. So Chris goes out there. What are you doing? This is my twenty six thousand dollar vehicle. Yeah. Chris walks around the car, reaches underneath and pulls out an air horn that has been just sitting under the car, making the horn noise the whole time. So good.

So good. So Rocky just put an air horn under the car and walked away. That whole time so good oh it's so good so rocky just put an air horn under the car and walked away that's that's all that happened yeah and they just they tore every wire out of that car and chris just goes rockford yes inside jim is wheeling tt out on the gurney uh police cars are responding because chris was like someone called the police jim hides tt in the empty room uh now people are milling around outside so now there's a bit where the nurse is like jackson is missing and chris says no he's not and he opens the door and tt's under you know in the gurney but facing the other way they're like see he's right there he's tranquilized he's not going

anywhere yeah so after they leave jim then uses a clock radio, throws it in the toilet to blow the breakers so the lights go out. So now it's dark and there's confusion and all the patients are coming out of their rooms. He starts going through the patients and just going like, Jackson is missing. Jackson is missing. So everyone's worried about where Jackson is. And the nurse is going, he's not missing. He's right there. And then she opens the door and the room's empty again and she just and she gives this look on her face

and just goes don't tell dr christ yeah yeah the lights come back on from the emergency backups and jim is wheeling tt under the blanket on the gurney down the hallway towards the entrance the guard is there who thinks he's the undertaker with the body so the guard doesn't stop him uh so paying off that that con but as we go down the hallway we see a squad car pull up and two cops get out of the car come up to the outside of the door and just and we freeze frame on jim's face as he sees the cops at the door just about before he's about to get out of there. To be continued. Yes. Also, I will hint, not the last nor penultimate freeze frame we'll get in this two-part series.

Yeah. So that was part one. Eppie, I need a quick break. I'm going to grab a taco. You tell our wonderful listeners all the places that they can find you and and sorcery fiction and role-playing games. And if you like role-playing games, maybe you want to check out digathousandholes.com where I publish all my other role-playing games.

Oh no, I dropped my calculator. Nathan, while I go pick up a spare, why don't you tell the good folks where they can find you on the internet? In addition to this podcast, I also design and publish role-playing games, including the Worldwide Wrestling Pro Wrestling

role-playing game, among many others. You can find links to all of my games and other projects at ndpdesign.com and, of course, you can find me on twitter.com at ndpayoleta. Looks like you're back. You ready to continue the arithmetic analysis for this episode there, Eppie?

I'm back. I have my DM-42 with me and I'm ready to dig down into Rockford's books again. All right. Well, I'm done with this delicious avocado taco. Well, let's get back to the show then. So that last sequence, like I think i probably skipped like half of the little bits that are in it there's so much go watch it obviously it's a beautiful back and forth i have in my notes like why do i have so much stress in my gut about this like well while i'm watching

it happening i can feel myself tightening up over uh all of this and like i'd seen this episode before and also i have this meta knowledge that rockford sticks around for a few more seasons right right and still it's a stressful one it's a wonderful wonderful like low budget con i keep thinking about like modern day con movies that like or or shows that just you know, they have a hacker and they have like all of this high tech equipment that allows them to perfectly replicate somebody else's face or, you know, whatever. And then it's an air horn and it's a radio clock that, you know, those are the two pieces of equipment they needed to carry off this daring rescue. pieces of equipment they needed to carry off this daring rescue um the other bit that i wanted to point out and it was just a neat little thing that they threw in there in the beginning when he pulls tt out of the room behind them are these two this double glass doors that are clearly leading to the outside they're dark because it's nighttime outside. And why aren't they going out those doors?

Maybe it's an alarm. But then there's a moment shortly thereafter where Rockford says every door in this place needs a key. They have a narrow pathway out. They have to go out those front doors because everything else is locked up and there's no way. Which makes sense if you have a facility where you're trying to lock people in. It doesn't make sense because that's not safe, but it makes sense from like, that's what Dr. Crist would do. Like he would definitely have everything locked down.

And he can only go out those front doors because he's fooled the front door guard who's still there with the keys into thinking that he's this undertaker, right? Yeah. It's all part of the same the same scheme uh yeah i just wanted to shout out how well directed this sequence is because there's a lot going on there are a lot of people in a lot of places and at no point did i feel like i was lost in the action yeah it's always very clear where jim is where chris is what stage of panic the residents are at how far away the cops are all that stuff is all spatially um

distinct uh and and paced so that you know when people are aware and how they just miss each other and all that stuff i feel like that's a very skillful uh thing yeah and and that they just miss each other and all that stuff. I feel like that's a very skillful thing. Yeah. And that they do include all those elements, right? Like that they have. Yeah, that they didn't simplify it. That it was like, no, it is going to have all these little details and we're going to make it work.

Yeah, no, it's great. It's probably one of the reasons why this episode is so memorable. When this episode started, I remembered bits and pieces of that scene yeah and i i was like oh i can't wait to get to that when the scene started i was like oh right this scene yeah yes all right so that is the end of part one yeah hello hello hello hello we are plunging right into the second part of this two-part episode, The Trees, the Bees, and T.T. Flowers. So this is season three, episode 15,

where we just ended the first episode with this fantastic breakout sequence. Because this was a discreet episode of television, there was the traditional Rockford Files preview montage. Fortunately for everyone involved, there was. Because this, I believe, this has the single greatest preview montage moment in preview montage history. Go on.

During all the other things happening in the preview montage, our villain, Mullard, is frustrated with Sherm because Sherm's wife, Kathy, will no longer listen to Sherm. So Mullard turns to Sherm and says, something I can't abide is a man who can't control his woman. Immediately after that, we cut to Beth. I'm Beth Davenport. It's perfect. It is the most exquisite FU to a villain I have ever seen. It is just this great moment that like,

yeah, here's a woman you can't control. Boom. It's my favorite one, two punch of, I think any of these opening montages. It's extremely good. I thought that you might have been going towards the climax of the preview montage, which is seeing the Firebird go over a cliff and explode.

Honestly, there's too much in this preview montage. Okay, let's say it's the 1970, what are we in the 76s now? Yeah, something like that. 77. It's January 1977. You missed last week's episode. And you see this preview montage and you think to yourself, I'm about to witness the greatest 45 minutes of television history. And I don't know what happened up to this point.

Well, fortunately for you, we go back to the funeral, right? Right. How this opens is so we have the preview montage. Then we go to I didn't I didn't check to see if it was exactly the same, but I'm pretty sure it was the same opening voiceover at the church of Rocky giving the eulogy for T.T. That opened the first episode. I believe so, yes. But I think it fades out at a slightly different place. And what it fades back to is the recap.

So where in the first episode, we faded to kind of flashback to seeing the relationship between Rocky and TT and leading up to TT being taken away. This basically fades right back to tt being grabbed because that's like the inciting incident and then we go into a beat by beat recap of you know previously on so i'm going to contrast this with the other two-parter that we did in two ways because in gear jammers that one was organized in slightly more discrete narrative arcs it was one story but each episode kind of was a mini story within that story that just connected to each other.

And also when the second one started, we had James Garner doing a voiceover saying, this is what happened last time on the Rockford Files. Yeah, he's addressing us directly as James Garner. And then there was, if I remember right, it was like a seven and a half minute montage covering the previous episode. This one, it's integrated into the framing device for the entire story with the eulogy flashback, which has already been used twice in the earlier episode. And by modern standards, still pretty long montage to show us what happened. But this one was only about four, four and a half minutes. Yeah. So I feel like they really learned over, you know, over the seasons of processing these two-parters in a little more organic way.

I would agree. I mean, obviously, we watched them back to back. I had a break in the middle, like a two hour break in the middle. So it was nice to have a recap. But so it did feel long by those standards, by like binging standards. But I would I would assume that if I had been watching it on actual television, I would have welcomed every bit of it. every bit of it. I think it does.

I think it did do this in gear jammers where it ends the montage with the very last scene of the previous episode and then just picks up and just keeps going from there. So that montage ends with Jim staring out the windows at the cops as he has TT on the gurney. But then Jim breaks, goes to the security desk where he grabs the keys because the security guard who thinks he's a undertaker has like gone in to help with other stuff he goes and unlocks the door for the cops and says i'm so glad you're here like it's getting crazy in there there's gonna be more

like this one and so these cops run in to go deal with whatever they think's going on and jim is able to scoot out scot-free get tt.T. off the gurney into Rocky's truck and they depart the scene unmolested. Well done, Jim and Rocky. So this is a technique that is tried and true. It's the cliffhanger, right? Like we have this moment that stops it where they say, oh no, Jim's in trouble.

There's all these cops. But like classic cliffhangers, where the ones where the name cliffhanger came from, it's resolved right away. It's not a, oh, he's going to have to deal with that the whole episode. Nope. He just a little quick thinking on the feet and it's done. And he's on to the next bit of adventure. And Jim, part of his deal, right, is that he's quick on his feet. But also in another little nod to how he runs these cons, he acts like he belongs there, right?

Yeah. He gets the keys. He doesn't act like a suspect. He acts like, oh, I'm so glad to see you. So the cops just don't even question. Yeah. So it's just another level of the various levels of of uh of of what he did in that last sequence he couldn't be a criminal a criminal wouldn't be glad to see me

yeah so they get out of there we finally have a jim rocky and tt conversation uh finally tt flowers is no longer being pumped full of drugs j Jim gives them kind of some instructions on staying at motels and staying safe. Jim gives that advice, I think, like three or four times a season. Like, nobody can stay safe in a hotel. So Jim is being honest. He doesn't think that at this point they can save freedom,

but he thinks that they can get T.T. declared sane and then he can sue for all of this maliciousness that's been done to him. Get enough enough for him to get 50 acres anywhere he wants. And Rocky says it's going to be all right. And then we cut from Rocky saying that back to the eulogy for T.T. flowers. And this is where we start integrating the frame into the timeline a little bit i think yeah this time as rocky continues to ramble the camera's moving around and showing us more of the people in the audience we see mullard's there with some of his goons we see that some of his goons have bandages one of them has bandages around his hand another

one has like some on his face or something uh and And Mullard starts rolling his eyes and then just goes, you know, I can't take this anymore. I'm going to go wait outside. And as he leaves, Rocky is saying there was one time. So there's this whole thing in the last the last time we were at the eulogy where Rocky said the city wasn't his friend. And we went to Dennis and Dennis couldn't help. Rocky said the city wasn't his friend. And we went to Dennis and Dennis couldn't help. So now Rocky's saying there was one time the city was his friend.

And we fade to Beth's apartment. Yes. And this fade in. To let us know that we're in Beth's apartment, the camera fades in on a ceramic, I'm going to guess, shih tzu? Some little fluffy dog ceramic bookend. It's like, oh, oh yeah, this is Beth's apartment. I love the depictions of Beth's apartment. That's all. There's no consistent set for her apartment.

Sometimes it's very yellow. Sometimes it's white. Sometimes there's a cat in there. But there's always plants. Yes. And Jim sleeps on the couch. That's the other constant. So, and Jim is there.

Rocky's calling. T.T. took the truck in the middle of the night and left a note that he's going back to freedom. He just can't stand to stay away from his farm. Jim is like, I have to go up there. Something's going to happen to him. Beth doesn't want him to go. go jim jim's a wanted man both for grand theft auto for quote stealing the truck from muller's construction site and for kidnapping because when you get right down to it he did kidnap and also freedom is going to be crawling with people who want him dead right all these other

bad actors that uh we're going to get caught back up. So we cut from there to the SWAT standoff at Freedom. Yes. This is a really interesting scene. I think it's mostly the interplay between the, I think they just call him the commander, the guy who's in charge of this. I mean, it's basically a SWAT team. No, they called it the SWAT, actually.

Beth said that's a SWAT situation. So there they called it the SWAT actually uh uh Beth said that's a SWAT situation so there's this interplay between all of our principles right so TT's inside with a rifle he has all this like World War II era um gear he has like gas masks and stuff yeah he's inside he says he's not coming outside until the machines are off his land, the bulldozers and whatnot. Jim is there as T.T.'s friend. Beth has come with him as his lawyer, as Jim's lawyer. And she also says she's representing T.T. and that Jim's going to turn himself over voluntarily so that he can help defuse the situation. And then our our our villains are also present. So we have Sherman, who is Titi's son-in-law, who is kind of the bad actor in all of this, as we're discovering, in service of getting this land to sell to Mullard, the real estate developer, who's like the mastermind behind this whole scheme. They're both present for this whole thing.

So, oh man man where to begin what makes this interesting to me is how everyone is trying to take action but it's all passing through this police commander who's trying to keep the situation yeah as low-key as possible so that nobody gets hurt that's what he cares about he's he's a great great character because like uh and i love the way uh robert duque i'm gonna have trouble with his name uh oh he was in robocops so uh or robos cop um anyways the thing that i i love about this guy is that his eyes are always on that house he's always watching he's not being distracted by all of the nonsense going on around him and he constantly brings everyone back to that point right like once things look like they're about to get out of control he's like can we pay

attention to the guy with the gun i have a job to do here i don't care what's happened before i just need you to pay attention to what's happening. Because that's what he's paying attention to. And he's a great character because he just kind of cuts through all the bullshit. Yeah, yeah. It was kind of heartening to see an armed standoff SWAT situation where the emphasis is on de-escalating the situation yeah and not on the action of digging out someone who's holed up yeah using your superior firepower and all that

stuff so there's a couple components to this scene essentially what happens is jim gets the commander to let him go in and talk to tt face to face in there we get we get the the emotional heart of tt flowers right he's we go in the house is trashed everything's been pulled down and most symbolically this portrait of his wife who passed away many years ago yes has been like ripped in half and is just dangling on one nail. And because we have seen the previous episode, we know that that might have been done with this nasty looking axe. He's going to help him and he just hands him this, you know, double headed axe like, use this. Yeah. So that's from the, you know, Sherman and the goons ripping apart the house looking for his will and the deed and all that stuff. But T.T. says that his mind is made up. He can't just stand aside while they pave over freedom.

And he has this whole thing. He looks out the window and there's a big tree in the front and the tree's name is Alexander. He planted that tree and he goes on about all the trees he planted and raised from seeds and what happened to the fruit orchards because he's had to sell parts of the land over the years and when he has mullard has bought them and just plowed everything under so like when the orange grove got plowed under all the other fruit trees knew it and all the fruit shriveled up and rotted and and he you know he he said he'd never let that happen again it's really and jim's just like yeah letting him say his piece trying to be

like yes but you're in danger we can fix this you know just put the gun down and come back with me and tt's like why yeah this place goes under i don't have anything left um and it's very sad the the the punctuation on it is he looks out the window again at at Alexander and then he just slumps down and looks at it and is just talking about how how beautiful it is in the soft morning light and he's looking up at the at the light filtered to the trees and and this is the moment when Jim realizes that he's not going to be able to talk him out of it right like this is Jim's like okay here that he's not going to be able to talk him out of it. Right. Like this is Jim's like, okay, here's,

here's a horrible thing. So, so Jim comes back out. He says, you know, he's not going to come out. The commander orders tear gas. He tells everyone to like get,

you know, get hot or whatever. They're going to start moving in. Oh yeah. And then in the background, while he's giving these orders, we hear a car coming up and TG, his daughter,

Kathy has finally arrived. Yeah. a car coming up and uh tt's daughter kathy has finally arrived yeah um so she comes up and is like pretty distraught about what's going on uh my note here is that this poor commander has no patience for the squabbling yeah it's like they all start blaming each other this is like enough of this we have a man with a gun in there right yeah jim says it's t.T.'s daughter, right? Yeah. When the commander calls his troops off because he knows that he's going to, you know, try and have the daughter speak some sense into him. He has this great line where he's like, back on safety, man.

Deal with the adrenaline as best you can. Which is just great it's just this like no this is not a a thing where these guys can just go back and forth between we're about to get shot at to okay we're not like that's a tense situation that's a thing that everyone's gonna get nerves worn on right and like this guy clearly has been through this kind of thing yeah he is a veteran of these kinds of standouts is what it seems like uh we talk about kind of the the feeling of being in a lived world, right? With the Rockford Files. And this is one of those moments that's like, there's a whole story of this commander.

Like we could leave from here with him and see what the next thing he goes to is. Exactly. And so on. So they yell that, you know, she's out there. Your daughter's out here. TT says that he ain't got a daughter. Yeah. And she's like, this is all wrong. Your daughter's out here. T.T. says that he ain't got a daughter. Yeah. And she's like, this is all wrong.

I don't want to see my father killed. And then Sherman says, let the professionals handle it. Yeah, sure. You ass. In my notes, what an asshole. Yeah. It's like, I don't want my daughter to get shot by a cop. Let the cops handle it, honey.

I have like four points in this in these notes where I'm like, sure, I'm the douche. This is where we really see just what a terrible person this guy is. So Kathy's like, OK, look, we're not going to sell the title on this land until we can work this out. Sherman says that it's already sold. Jim, who apparently knows these things, says the title doesn't transfer until the end of the business day yeah oh and so so kathy's like talking and mullard tells her let the men handle this yeah which is like oh this guy just keeps digging his own grave and then the commander again cutting through all this mess says okay so what I'm hearing here is that this is a family squabble

and that the issue is that your equipment is on this land that you don't have title to. So take your stuff off the land until the family can settle their affairs. Yes. And that's what ends the standoff. His guys get the tractor off the land and T.T. comes out without the gun. We don't need to spend a whole lot of time on this but i do want to point out that there was time spent watching that tractor drive up onto a flatbed

which was great it was just there's just something about heavy equipment and the rockford files where they're like this is intrinsically interesting to watch so we're gonna sit back and watch this tractor drive up onto a flatbed because you don't see that every day if you're not in the construction business enjoy yeah it's another part of letting it breathe yes that's why it's a nice two episodes um and so how this all comes out tg comes out they're going to book him for discharging a firearm and then he'll be released and the family's gonna have to handle their business the cops have no more interest in this

now that it is no longer an active situation tt says that he doesn't want to go back to the funny farm um and he doesn't want kathy on his property because he doesn't have a daughter because he is mad at her, which makes sense. Beth mentions that they're going to need to work quick to keep the title from transferring by the end of the day. Jim's like, well, I'll be out of it. I'm going to be safe in a cell downtown. But then the commander says, I just got word. All the charges have been dropped. You're free to go. Ander is standing there with a grin you know because he's the one who's pressing the charges right yeah yeah no this is very ominous i forget he

says something but in my notes i just say mullard crows about it yes so this is another like kingpin maneuver right like oh no i don't want him in jail. I want him out here. And the end of this sequence, we have Muller pressuring Sherman kind of off to the side, away from everyone else. He needs to get that title. This is where from the preview montage line about. Yeah, I can't abide a man who can't control his woman. Apparently he's already paid one hundred and twenty,000 for this land. He doesn't want to be out that plus the quote millions in profits. If Sherman doesn't deliver,

Sherman says, what's the big deal? He's an old man. It'll, it'll transfer when he dies. Anyway, we just have to wait a little while. And Lord says,

you know, if you, if you can't get that title, basically, uh, TT is going to have a fatal accident. Yeah. And just straight out says, you know, if you if you can't get that title, basically, T.T. is going to have a fatal accident. Yeah. And just straight out says that.

The bluntness of this villain. It's great because it just goes to show how I mean, in one in one way, it's how confident he is about his abilities. But also, like, it feels legitimately confident. Like, yeah, every place they've gone, people are like, we can't do anything about this guy. This guy's, you know. Too powerful. He's got everyone, yeah. And he's, yeah, he's a man who's completely insulated from consequences.

Yeah. All right. So we have that ominous note later that day. Jim and Beth return to the farm. T.T. is taking care of his bees. Yeah. My notes for this scene are everything's back to normal. Job well done.

I guess we can relax and move on. Beth and Kathy kept the deed in his name. They have an appointment for a hearing to get this judgment of incompetence reversed. But Jim, you know, it's not over yet. He wants him to stay out of town stay in a motel um but there's this whole thing where he needs to go to ohai to pick up his bees yeah there's uh there's something happening with them spraying it's spring season so they'll try and spray and if you can't get the bees out of there that the bees will die from the pesticide

there's an environmental message i believe i remembered the mention of ohai because there was an episode where rocky was gonna go look at a look at a truck up in ohai yeah there's a little cut where there's some ominous music and we see one of the goons stashing something that looks awfully like an explosive underneath the flatbed truck uh in tt's. And then we get to a unexpectedly serious scene. Like, I completely forgot about this element of the episode. Jim and Beth go back to

Kathy's house. An ambulance is there. Oh, yeah, yeah. Someone, the maid or one of the paramedics, says that they got a call that the lady of the house fell down the stairs. Yeah. So they go in and then Jim and Beth are in there and the maid comes out and tells them that she fell down the stairs after Sherman and the real estate people were there.

And they say, what real estate people? And she says that she overheard one of them saying that he's going to help TT buy that farm today. So Jim's like, ah, you see, you see Beth by the farm means kill him. Yeah. That is code that we in the underworld would use.

One of the, the, my favorite sort of constructions here is this. We've seen her bruised face a couple of times now in the flash forward at the funeral. Kathy's. Yeah. And we've been waiting for that sort of foot to fall. And there have been a couple moments where it seemed like that was going to be the thing.

Most notably is when she showed up to Freedom and there there was the standoff right and people were like oh you could get hurt uh and it was like oh this is where she gets her like you you're constantly waiting for this horrible moment and uh it's it's kind of a good technique to keep your audience on edge like to tease them with the horrible moment a little bit. I know I sound like a monster saying that, but I'm just saying we're doing the same thing with Rocky and his, and his sling. Right. So,

so let's see, Jim calls the motel to tell TT someone's after you, but they've, they've already gone. And when the paramedics comes back down the stairs, he's going to get the respirator because this woman did not fall down the stairs. She was worked over pretty bad and has also OD'd on reds. Reds, yes.

Which I assume are a tranquilizer of some kind. It clearly indicates that all factions of the conspiracy are at work here. We've got the goons from the construction site and we we've got the the medical uh the pharmaceutical armory of uh dr chris so i was like oh wow both but then i think it's pretty much stated that she the od is a suicide attempt oh because that's where that note comes from right at the end of the scene yes this is kind of like the darkest part of the episode. Wow, I missed that. Yeah, no, you're right.

Yeah, because there is this note. Right. So the goons in the presence of her husband beat her up pretty bad. So then she writes this note and then tried to OD on pills. And the note is to TT because Beth finds it. And so she reads it out for jibman for us sherman watched these two men you know beat me up and then said that if she told anyone you know they would kill you kill my father i'm sorry i this is like the only way i can keep you safe

or something like that and she reads that out as they carry her down the stairs on a stretcher it's pretty yeah it's grim. Grim. I mean, we know that she's in the sense of we have seen this in the eulogy timeline. So we know that she's OK. But in the moment, I was like, oh, my God. Yeah. Yeah.

Also, during this business, Jim calls the division commander of the cops that are, you know, in the county that Freedom is at. Yeah. To ask them to send a patrol car to warn T.T. about these. Because there's no phone there. And of course, this division commander literally says, you know, no one in this department would dare cross Mullard. Yep. He is in charge. He's in charge.

He's like, well, can you just send someone he's like you know it's shift change i have no units to spare i think this is the most kind of cartoony yeah kind of part i'm a cop but i can't do anything about this guy threatening to murder people because he's too powerful and pays off all my people and me i will tell you this on the phone i yeah hopefully you're not recording it this is a little scene that I think could have just not be in this episode. But it's here to demonstrate how powerful Mullard is. It also gives a vector for tipping off Mullard about what's happening. Well, even though he actually doesn't need that vector because there's a different one.

But yeah. Anyway, so this is kind of the low point. Well, I guess there's a different one but yeah um anyway so this is kind of the low point well i guess there's another lower point but that's a more that's a more dramatically fictional low point this is the most actual emotional low point for me of like oh my god poor kathy yeah but she gets she comes out okay everyone um jim calls the neighbor that tt doesn't like if you remember way back at the beginning of the first episode, the one that he threw rocks at. He calls this neighbor to ask him to keep an eye out for when they show up and tell T.T. and Rocky that they're in danger from Mullard. Mullard, on his goons, including Sherman, are sitting in a car watching the place.

So the neighbor comes out, sees Sherman, goes over and is like oh you're tt's son in law so can you pass this message on to him yeah a guy named rock for so now we cross cut between jim speeding to get to the farm yeah tt and rocky arriving at the farm and getting into the flatbed where we know that device has been planted uh and then mullard watching them and then following them in their car um jim then arrives at the farm after everyone else was gone he goes to uh zftt's there and then we got first goon with pipe and then dramatic arrival of goon with nunchucks yes i don't say the very first appearance of the teenage mutant ninja turtles this is michelangelo and donatello are ready to work jim rockford over so we've seen at least one of the goons the one with the pipe we've definitely he's been in play the whole time he's been one of the

construction guys that's been beating him up and stuff like that and try one of the guys who tried to kill him at his um trailer this guy with the, this is his moment to shine as he has some dialogue and he keeps calling Jim Old Stick. Yeah, he mentions the other guy and he says he once pulled a train off a trestle for the fun of watching it fall. Right? Like, yeah. Yeah. That's some sweet, old-timey, badass poetry is what that is. Jim holds off these two guys with a two by four.

Why the nunchuck guy is using nunchucks is never explained. It just apparently is what he likes. You don't have to. He's an artist. And he's not like doing like karate or anything. He's just trying to hit Jim with a nunchuck. He's like, I can do this and I can do butterfly dives. And they're like, let's do the nunchucks.

Yeah, why not? So and I can do butterfly knives. And they're like, let's do the nunchucks. Yeah, why not? So there's no music during this. So it's a very serious, grim kind of fight. Jim seems like he's really in danger. Finally, Jim kind of like, he backs away. They've broken his two by four. He's just holding it in one hand. Come and get some.

The two guys charge at him. yeah the two guys charge at him and then they fall into the collapsed uh uh cover of a well that actually had been set up in the first episode because when jim and rocky went to the farm for the first time jim stepped on it and almost fell in and rocky was like oh that's the old well and we get it in the recap at the beginning of this episode as well. To remind us that there's an old well. The moment before it happens, Jim's like, all right, just come at me. Like there's a resignation to that. Yeah. Like that's a classic, you know, broken old man move.

But it's not the move that Jim makes, right? He's saying that he's playing that role to get them to walk over the well and oh it's so good so good that there's that thing about jim's situational awareness like he just like he encountered it so he knows it's there and it's always in his back pocket if he needs to pull it out for some reason right when it suddenly becomes relevant, it's like, oh, right, the old well. I just need to get these guys over here. Yeah, it's great. Jim takes off. We now go through our kind of climactic action sequence.

We have Rocky and TT in the flatbed with this device underneath it. They're driving. Mullard's car is following with Mullardard sherman the guy who planted the device who's the guy who blew up the trestle just to watch the train fall or whatever and then jim is following speeding trying to catch up um so the device is radio activated they have to like pull a little trigger thing that to be within a mile and sherman says isn't says, isn't it supposed to look like an accident? And the guy says, oh, what this thing does is basically it blows some kind of something. Yeah.

It just looks like a mechanical failure. It's like, oh, okay. So the audience understands now. So there's a steep downgrade that everyone is on and this winding, you know, California hill road. Jim catches up to them on this downgrade. And we have a little bit of like chicken as they're trying to keep Jim from getting around them. Mullard starts taking pot shots at Jim with a pistol out the back of his, out the back window. And then this is all dramatized so that's the exterior

action and then inside the car uh mullard wants sherman to pull the trigger yeah kill your father in law and sherman can't do it he finally just says like i can't i can't do this i've sunk only as low as i possibly can they end up fishtailing out, avoiding another car or something, and Jim does get by them. But once he gets by them, they all get out of the car and the other, the explosive goon takes the box. The second part of this is he triggers the device, the brakes go out on the flatbed. Jim catches them and then goes around them and then tries to use the Firebird to physically slow the flatbed jim catches them and then goes around them and then tries to use the firebird to physically slow yeah flatbed i i had written in my notes here is that tt is lucky he let rocky drive yes right because this is this is rocky's brakes have probably gone out uh on a downhill slope at

some point while he was trucking and he just knows how to deal with it uh and then you've got jim it's it's great because rocky's dealing with it yeah and then you've got jim it's it's great because rocky's dealing with it yeah and then he's like hey there's jim behind us yeah so together they they try to uh uh slow the car with jim getting in front of the car and slowing down and then he's got some choice words for rocky like there's some times where he's like no no what's he communicating i don't know i don't but um it's it's clearly a stressful situation and and we end up with another horrifying moment in this story the road is too curvy he can't stop this with the firebird

it's too swervy so the firebird finally kind of like gets pushed, like kind of fishtails itself and is heading towards the edge of this cliff. We have a shot where Rocky turns to Titi and says, you know, jump. And then we go out to a long shot and we see the firebird go over. Yes. From the preview montage, we see the firebird go over the cliff. I think there's a little bit of like some fire. Yeah. Then the flatbed goes

over it, flips over and lands on the firebird. And then they both go up in flames. Oh, that hurt. It hurt so bad. And then we cut back and we see Rocky in the bushes and then he starts moving and then he finds T.T. T.T.'s on his back

with his eyes closed and his leg is bloody and then Rocky starts calling for Jimmy. Yeah. And then we cut from that back to the eulogy. Well, yes. Now we understand the sling and perhaps the funeral. Who knows? I feel like at this point, if you've been watching the Rockford Files, you're probably like, all right, let's see the twist.

Yep. It's not dramatic for the audience i think because we're waiting to see where this is going this is all for the benefit of the characters in the fiction of the show yeah yeah we are now caught up to the framing eulogy timeline rocky finishes his his remarks per the funeral, there is an announcement. There was a new will found of T.T. Flowers, and it is going to be read after the service concludes at the law office that those of us who know at Beth's law practice where she works. Sherman, Kathy and the goons leave Mullard's on his phone, on his car phone. goons leave uh mullards on his phone on his car phone sherman says that a new will won't matter because he was they never reversed the declaration of incompetency or whatever uh and he mentions like that not only tt but also rockford died so there's no one to you know get in the way

and that kathy didn't get the judgment reversed and i think in this shot like however they did the makeup she looks more we see her bruises more than we did in the church and she's kind of standing in the background like nodding when he when he says stuff to her and everything and it's like oh oh dear where is this going uh this is going to uh the law office where brockmeyer uh sherman's, who we have heard of but not met I think, is there. Don't worry he squeezes as much douche into as small of it as he can.

He says it's all fine. He has the only original will. There's nothing to worry about. Yeah. Beth meets, so Kathy, Sherman, and Brockmire go inside and meet Beth. There's a terrible line here where she says, I'm a junior partner blah blah blah. And Brockmire go inside and meet Beth. There's a terrible line here where she says, I'm a junior partner, blah, blah, blah.

And Brockmire says, I don't deal with junior partners. They go into the boardroom and Sherman is shocked because dun, dun, dun. T.T. Flowers and Jim Rockford are both there, still alive. Hail and hearty. Well, T.T.'s in a a wheelchair but alive and well yeah uh sure enough they put out a false funeral notice to buy the da time to look into everything and it was kathy's deposition from her hospital bed that got it all going sherman is shocked and terrified tt has a

great line in here where he's like kind of craw crawls your knee, don't it, Sherm? That man is pure poetry. So we get all of the all of the stuff in exposition. The judge rescinded the diminished judgment. T.T. testified to the grand jury about everything that had happened. The bar looked into Brockmire and the American Medical Association looked into Dr. Christ and they found all the terrible things that they do and the DA put it all together.

That is all this big operation just like defrauding families and not only does the lawyer recommend them to the psychiatrist who then gets them committed to his own facilities. They also buy from a pharmacy that Crist owns. And the homes are all built by their silent partner, Mullard. And then that other doctor, he double bills Medicare.

Right on top of all that. The cops show up. Brockmire is arrested. And Jim lays out in a couple lines for Sherman that if you don't turn state's evidence and testify against Mullard, he's just going to kill you anyway. And then the cops will have a murder rap to pin on him in addition to everything else. Yeah. The way he announces this, he's got this line where he's like, and then the undercover boys will be photographing your death in living color. Yeah, it's a good line.

Just so you know. We go outside. The police open the door and pull Mullard out to arrest him. T.T. yells at him from the wheelchair. And justice is served. Hey. We end our two-parter back at Freedom where the house is all

fixed up on the inside. There's a news story covering what happened to T.T. Flowers and how it highlights the flaws in how we take care of our older generation.

I do enjoy that when that news broadcast finishes, the broadcaster's voice is like, the property tax situation takes a turn for the worse, and they turn it off. They turn it off, yeah. TT apologizes for Jim's car. Yeah. And Jim says, ah, the insurance will take care of that,

though my premiums will go up a little. Yeah. Oh, Jim. What insurance do you have that covers your car being completely destroyed by going off a cliff and then having another car fall on top of it and then exploding that's pretty comprehensive yeah yeah and then we end our episode by going outside tt's saying stuff about bees and then he sees his neighbor that he doesn't like spraying pesticides on the trees across the way that yell at each other and then tt just starts hurling rocks yes we hear

a window break and bigger rocks and there's like three freeze frames i think there's one on the neighbor with a horrible horrified look on his face then there's one on i think jim as he's looking at tt and the final one is just this freeze frame on tt flowers with holding a huge rock with just this look of i am enraged yes on his face end of episode ah it was it i i really enjoyed this episode it had it had some dark moments that had some unsettling moments which i you know i don't count as a bad thing at all um but it also was like it was kind of just a romp in a lot of places and uh it went to a lot of different places and it didn't feel like it was all over the place you know what i mean like there's different parts of this episode where i can cut them out and show them to people and uh they wouldn't give a hint of what the rest

of the episode was like you know the whole hostage negotiation with the SWAT team and the captain there feels of a piece yeah it's its own little drama there the the breaking tt out of the facility like that's its own little great escape kind of piece the the two uh runaway vehicle situations the first one with the laughing gas and the second one with the um the brake line being exploded i guess and then throw on top of that uh a melange of rockford's uh villainous scams right like there's real estate and uh locking up uh old people against their like it's there's there's a lot of going on and yet this holds it all together and i kind of like that it's just straight up a bunch of crooks like it's not the mob it's a criminal empire but it's not. Like it's not the mob. It's a criminal empire, but it's not like,

yeah, it's not organized crime. It's not labor. It's not like crooked labor, like union people. These are all kind of stupid people in positions of power where one smart person in a position of power was like, Oh,

here's how I can use all these people to make myself more rich. Yes. Right. And then once he's, you know, once, once he goes up against someone who's even a little smarter or more clever or whatever than him,

it all comes, it all comes crashing down. Yeah. So yeah, this is definitely in, in my, the echelon of, of favorite Rockford episodes.

I think one of the IMDB reviews is not very complimentary of this episode it says that uh the script is a preposterous mishmash of sentimental melodrama right from the start oh god in the stories one ironic touch rockford's police buddy dennis becker recaps for him just how idiotic the plot is um i think that was I am here for preposterous sentimental melodrama, I guess is what I'm trying to say. Like, yeah, no, I am definitely. I do think that is an ironic moment where Dennis like lays out, like, this sounds like a ridiculous conspiracy, but it's dramatically ironic.

Like it's not ironic by accident. Like it's in there in order to showcase for us how like bizarre this whole thing is and how much work jim is going to have to do to convince anyone of what's going on and it's i mean like that's the thing that rocky was up against it's the whole reason why they're able to take tt flowers in the first place the implausibility of it all uh which i i wouldn't say is evidence that such a thing would exist or whatever, but it definitely worked for me. I was on board.

Oh, yeah. I mean, and the other reviews are more favorable, more in our wheelhouse. I just thought that that was an interesting thing where it's kind of like, on one level, every Rockford episode is kind of a contrived situation. It's just at what point do you find it too

contrived right right it's like some of them we do find too contrived uh if the melodrama is effective enough i'm on board and this one had effective melodrama for me like i found like i think we talked about how tt flowers is poetic um i think the the way that he speaks uh about what he loves is very affecting but if you found that cheesy then you probably wouldn't like this episode right yeah exactly yeah so i don't think it's necessarily a gonna hit it out of the park with every audience member episode but i definitely appreciated watching it i really liked it yeah it's fun and the pace is wild like i'm like oh it's a two-parter it's going to be kind of slow and kind of build up no like from the beginning like that entire

first episode is just like every single moment stuff is happening uh and then the second episode is kind of playing out the playing out the consequences uh i think that um i'm trying to think if i made any notes about like techniques in particular i wanted to use like the foreshadowing uh that they used in the funeral was great and subtle enough that we both had to see it twice to see the sling you know like it wasn't in our face or whatever yeah i think it was constructed to show us more of those elements each time we went back to the to the eul elements each time we went back to the eulogy. Yeah, and I like that the eulogy covered the same bits, but just extended it later.

Like, that was great. It wasn't – you don't get, like, a big, long eulogy. You keep going back to this, which is necessary for what they did. They did it as two episodes that were separated by a week when it originally aired. So you needed a reminder. So you just go back and redo the first part. But there was something about that repetition, even in this semi-binged format that we consumed it in, that just felt good. Yeah, felt really satisfying.

I think because the repetition was both inside each episode and the over the frame for both episodes. Yeah. Right. So, I mean, it wasn't a motif because it was like actually part of the plot and how the story was structured. specific line bring us to a specific point in the history uh to draw to dramatize you know what was going on was i found that very effective yeah i would agree you did find that effective i think maybe the last fun fact for this uh episode that church where they were doing the uh is the same church that they filmed angels fake yeah fake funeral in chicken little is a little chicken that makes sense i kept thinking about that episode yeah and i checked

and yeah same place so it's a good place for fake funerals which by the way is a great title for a rockford files episode a good place for a fake funeral. All right. Well, you have anything else about trees or bees or TT flowers? No. I mean, as we pointed out in the earlier part, all of the money details and all of the food details were handily taken care of right away. And that was it.

It's clear to me that Rockford's out whatever's deductible is and yeah whatever is deductible is is premiums and a lot of gas yeah and however much they had to pay for that uh air horn that sounds like a car horn uh yeah no it was a delightful episode would watch again for sure in my head i feel like this was kind of one of the like, I don't really remember it. The other two parters are more memorable, but I'm glad that you picked this one because it's a delight. So thank you, Epi. Well, thank you, Sam and Kate, for recommending it to me. If you have other specific recommendations for episodes you'd like us, you would like to see us do,

recommendations for episodes you'd like to see us do, our archive of what we've already done is at 200aday.fireside.fm There's also a link there in the top bar to the 200 a day Rockford Files files, which is a spreadsheet

of all the episodes, stuff that is in them, and the ones that we've done and comments from us and from some of our Patreon supporters. So if you want to contribute to that or just support the show, patreon.com slash 200 a day is where to do that. You can also get in touch with, you know,

questions, comments, other episodes you'd like us to do at 200 pod on Twitter, which we will be better at checking. I promise. And 200adaypodcast at gmail.com to contact us via the electronic mail. All right.

So I would say that, thankfully, we do not have a deductible to pay on our destroyed Firebird. One could even say that we perhaps made our 200 for this day indeed so we will see you next time to talk about another episode of the rockford files