Two Hundred A Day - Episode 53: The Reincarnation of Angie

Episode Date: July 28, 2019

Nathan and Eppy talk about S2E12 The Reincarnation of Angie. Jim gets a call from the panicked Angie, concerned about a mysterious call from her now-missing brother Tom. Things escalate after they find half a million in cash in Tom's wall safe, and Jim calls in a friend from the FBI to help track down what happened to Tom, and why someone is now after Angie. A curious episode that showcases Jim's tradecraft, we found that it has a bit of a mismatch between the emotional beats and the narrative, both of which are very strong on their own. We now have a second, patron-exclusive, podcast - Plus Expenses. Covering our non-Rockford media, games and life chatter, Plus Expenses is available via our Patreon at ALL levels of support. 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 Brian Perrera Eric Antener 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 And thank you to Dael Norwood, Dylan Winslow, Bill Anderson, Dave P, and Dale Church! Thanks to: fireside.fm for hosting us Audio Hijack for helping us record and capture clips from the show spoileralerts.org for the adding machine audio clip Freesound.org for other audio clips Two Hundred a Day is a podcast by game and narrative designers Nathan D. Paoletta and Epidiah Ravachol. In each episode we pick an episode of The Rockford Files, recap and review it as fans of the show, and tease out specific elements from that episode that hold lessons for writers, gamers and anyone else interested in making better narratives.

Hi Jim, it's Jamie at the Police Impound. They picked up your car again. Lately they've been driving it more than you have. Welcome to 200 a Day, the podcast where we discuss the 70s television detective show, The Rockford Files. I'm Nathan Palletta. And I'm Epi Dyeravish. And today we are going back to season two for our episode of Focus. Epi, which episode are we talking about this time uh this is the reincarnation of angie not to be confused with the reincarnation of angel which is not a rockford files episode but what i read it as when i first looked at it on my tiny phone screen i was super

excited for that i enjoyed this episode i want to point out there is no angel in it that's fine not every episode of television has to have angel in it but um yeah so this is uh uh like you said uh season two 1975 uh december 1975 just in the 75s. Yep, and I picked this one mostly on a lark. Just kind of skimming through what we haven't done so far. And also with our recording schedule, kind of wanted to pick something that would not lead us into another into a follow-up episode necessarily when we've been doing the early season ones i've been enjoying uh the tone

of them um which isn't to say i don't enjoy the other ones but it's kind of like the the balance of emphasis on what rockford actually does is different. And like this episode has some good like trade craft stuff. Yes. No, this is, so that was really fun. Uh,

with the moment this episode started, I mean, I guess we'll jump into it when we jump into it, but like I, the moment this episode started, I got this warm, fuzzy feeling. Whatever.

I get warm, fuzzy feelings when, um, the, when the opening montage of every show starts. But I – or every episode, I should say. Not every show. But I remembered liking this one. I remember, like, having good feelings about this one. Let's talk a little bit about this one before we talk a little bit about this one. Okay.

about this one let's talk a little bit about this one before we talk a little bit about this one okay uh i i have a theory and maybe as we go through it you can talk me out of it okay i think that there is another story that this started as not like um uh into thin air or whatever the the one where not like a story written for somebody else that got turned into a rockford files but like uh i think that there's more about angie we name it after her we get a little bit about it and then the ending is just lays heavy into this aspect of the story that isn't super pertinent throughout it right and i wonder if they started off one way and then they were like you know what it's fun to just watch rockford rockford up and we'll just go with that so this is a steven cannell script um and i feel like there's a bit of uh a bit of a signature or maybe

a bit of a consideration that he has in some of these scripts that tracks with what you're saying and I think something that a lot of his scripts seem to do is embed I don't really know how to phrase it kind of a

a character driven statement about the world in kind of this like you see it a little bit and then there's a moment where it really gets spelled out for you. Where Rockford has it all figured out.

Not the mystery or anything, he just has the world figured out. Like he knows how things are so you should listen to him right and is and is the voice of like the not the voice of reason necessarily but kind of the he's representative of like the self-actualized person who is like fully cognizant of himself and like, or is able to differentiate their desires from reality. Yeah.

He's not filling reality with his wishful thinking. Right. So he's, so it comes off as sensible. Yeah. I can see that definitely. And it's, it's not an entirely endearing trait.

Right. We often agree with Rockford as we're watching and in fact in this episode quite often i'm like there are moments where he is wrong but has reason to be wrong has reasons to be suspicious of something and so it's he's actually right to be suspicious even though that doesn't pan out to be the truth uh yeah it's an interesting thing to see like in contrast to like the character of angel who again does not appear in this episode uh angel is like the other side of that coin no i shouldn't say that i'll take that back well i think it's kind of a contrast to maybe some of the like recurring

characters that we've been talking about recently yeah so like this episode and i'm also thinking about like uh the aaron ironwood one is kind of does this a little bit um two into 556 won't go might yeah be a closer comparison so those those were both also canon scripts. 2 into 556 won't go as a similar dynamic. The subject of our story is a woman who has lost something and has a rosier picture than maybe what reality is about what's going on. And so in these instances,

we have these central characters to the story that we're only going to see this one time. Yeah. So their characters kind of built on this dynamic of being unaware of something. And then Jim having to either be the, the,

the person who tells them the truth or the person who shields them from the truth. Right. Yeah. This is as opposed to like the, the Rita, Rita Moreno character, Rita.

Yeah. Or Gandhi who are recurring like the Rita Moreno character, Rita. Yeah. Or Gandhi, who are recurring characters that have like a more three-dimensional relationship with Jim. Yeah, they have experiences that Jim... He's not the audience's voice in the story, really, in the way that he kind of is in this episode. Or like kind of channeling what we should think. Right. This is probably a little abstract. We should just talk about the episode. Yeah, yeah, let's talk about the episode.

But now that we've told our listeners that this is the case, we'll now point it out every time it comes up, because it will come up several times in this episode. This was directed by Jerry London. With this episode, we are now one away from a full Jerry London sweep. We have seen all of his episodes that he's directed except for a season three episode.

Sticks and stones may break your bones, but Waterbury will bury you. Such good titles. So we can look forward to that as our final uh bit and this um this one uses some really uh i feel like he does a lot of these episodes um i think one of his little things that he does really well is like allowing the camera to show us stuff without moving it really and letting stuff come in and out of frame in a very fluid way but we've talked about him on other episodes so all that out of the way as you were saying with your warm feelings when you start an episode yes which warm feelings did you uh did you experience

with this preview montage well so this preview montage uh all right i'm looking at what i have written down here uh well first off federal agent it's always great when there's fed the feds are involved uh now that i think about it i's always great when the feds are involved. Now that I think about it, I thought, oh, okay, good, the feds are involved. This is going to be Rockford in over his head. More so than he normally is. But actually, he wasn't in this one. Yeah.

Murdered. But I think my two favorite moments of this montage is the foot stomp. The intimidating foot stomp. Which I'm trying to remember. There was another episode we watched recently where he had a move like that. I think it was the movie. I think it was in If the Frame Fits. I have a feeling that Gandhi's done it once. Gandhi did it in Second Chance.

There's something about stomping someone's foot that is or was more intimidating then than it is now. And also this foot stomp bears the lead on what happens in that scene. And then finally, don't stab the car. When the goon pulled out a knife and it looked like he was going to stab the firebird, I was like like i will watch anything to get to that point to see what happens uh yeah i noted all the same things uh there's a there's a bit where you see jim like trying to be nice like saying like yeah why were you seeing all this violent language yeah but yeah the foot stomp really uh really was my takeaway thanks for listening to 200 a day in case you just joined us we have a new podcast,

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Dave P., and Dale Church. And finally, big thanks to Victor DeSanto and our detective patrons that you can follow on Twitter. Eric Antener, at Antener. Brian Pereira, at Thermoware. And of course, Richard Haddam, who you can find at Richard Haddam. Help out the show by leaving a rating or review

wherever you get your podcasts. Tell a friend who you think would like it. And check out patreon.com slash 200 a day to see if becoming a patron is right for you. We start off this episode with the ring of a telephone. Our whole introductory sequence, this is all pre-Jim. This is stuff that happens before he comes into the picture. A woman answers the phone.

This is the titular angie uh angela paris and she's being called by her brother tom uh from a phone booth and he's clearly panicked two two important details to point out here the first is the psa about phone booths to kiss these days if you don't if you don't remember what a phone booth is it is a place you go just before you're killed you're somehow uh stricken with some sort of emergency where you shouldn't put yourself in a glass cage just before right and yet yes and then we should point out to avoid any confusion with another podcast, 20 a day, which is about the take a package out of a wall safe and take it to the bank. She didn't know he had a wall safe and does not know the combination. So he's going to give it to her, but she needs to go get a piece of paper to write it down.

So while she is off the phone doing that, we have the poor choice of phone booth come into play as a couple of goons barge in, grab Tom and hustle him off into a, into a waiting car. Um, and then we end the scene with the first of a, of a motif, I think in this episode where we have one of our, uh,

who clearly seems to be our main goon and we'll talk about him later, but clearly, uh, uh, the, the one in charge, he picks up the phone and then we see him just holding it to his ear kind of in like a close-up and angie is like saying you know tom tom where are you whatever and he just hangs up but this like close shot of being

on the phone um i i think definitely uh becomes a becomes a motif. Deliberate decision. The credits play as Angie goes and gets in her car and is presumably going to Tom's house. But we see that she's being followed by someone in a green car. We then introduce our hero, Jim Rockford, in the trailer as he and Rocky are fast asleep in front of the TV. I love this scene so much. They've clearly had a comfortable night in and they're both just snoozing with the TV on.

Yeah. I thought this was an interesting choice. I don't think it is significant in particular, but we start with this zoom in on Rocky and then it pans to jim as the phone starts ringing in the trailer it's kind of like okay we know who's important here and it's uh angela is calling him she has a she's at like a bodega or something and she has a phone book open and she is apparently you know because jim is in the phone book, is calling him at random, I guess. This is a great insight into how does Jim Rockford get jobs? Right.

Most often, I feel like we've watched a lot of episodes where it's people Jim knows have gotten into trouble, have gotten into trouble, and that's it, right? Like that's, we haven't watched ones where he's been hired it's either that or he's been hired for the sake of playing a patsy right uh but this one uh this is just yeah his name was pulled out of a phone book she's uh she's calling because she's you know freaked out uh she received this strange phone call from her brother and now she's definitely being followed and she understandably pretty

I don't know if she's fully she's not like terrified but she's clearly in a bad place about this whole thing so having no other recourse apparently she found a PI in the phone book and gave him a call well she's been specifically warned by her brother not to involve the police yes right don't call the police

whatever you do don't involve the cops was part of his message to her. So Jim, like we said earlier, there's a lot of PI tradecraft in this episode. Yeah, this one's so good. This one's good because it's like clearly this is something that he has just set up for this kind of thing. All right. There's a bar named The Colony Inn on Wilshire. Go inside and sit at the bar. Put two packs of cigarettes, one on top of the other, in front of you,

and I'll be there in, oh, 10, 15 minutes, all right? Either this is a trick that he's had in his back pocket for a while or he just has these situations arise enough that he knows. Like he's just crafting in his head. Like, oh, okay, this is how we'll do it. This is what we need to do to meet and not draw attention to ourselves or, you know. Right. It's so good though.

One thing in here, she describes the car to him. She says, I'm being followed by like a green ford something something um this is important later yes so we go to jim finding her at the bar um the plan works and he asks where's the guy who's been following you and sure enough he's come in and he's at a table in the corner just watching uh you can see him in the mirror over the bar which is a nice little visual touch. And he's doing the, like, again, kind of, he has these professional instincts, right? He's like, don't look over there. You know, just, just tell me what's going on.

Uh, she gives him the story thus far. My brother called me. He told me to open the safe, don't involve the cops. Then he just, then he wasn't there when I came back to get the number. I'm worried. Now this guy's following me. Jim asks what he does, and he is the head of institutional investment at this brokerage firm, apparently, or something. And so Jim's like, okay.

So, yeah, he's a stockbroker. Yeah. And she's like, not really, but close enough. Fine. That's close enough. Yeah. Then Jim goes to talk to our goon. This guy is a real wiener.

He is. And cast for it. Mm-hmm. He's balding with this big, obvious comb over. Jim tries to get him to back off. He is having none of it. And we have our threatening back and forth conversation from the preview montage where Jim says that, why are we threatening

each other? This is the first round of a lot of tough guy talk in this episode. But I feel like at no point, at no point did I feel like Jim was being intimidated by this guy. There's one point where i think we're meant to think that um because that's what jim is trying to convey to him the uh you know i really love this conversation there's also a motif that's going to come out of this one uh all right so first like the first thing i have in my note here is just the direct approach right he comes in and so far what we've seen from jim is a lot of finesse right like stack these two cigarettes up don't point them out like describing to me oh we can watch them in the mirror you know all of this like misdirect and

and heidi and then once jim like knows who he is he's like like, all right, I'm going to go have a conversation with you. And then comes over and is just like, stop following her. He's assessed the situation and he's decided that the best way to deal with it is just to come and sit down and have this talk with this guy. Right. And the guy, I wish I'd written down some of the things that the guy said. It was basically, you know, I'm going to put you in basically you know i'm gonna put you in traction i'm gonna put you in county hospital for a broken jaw and jim's like oh who's gonna do that you and and what army or whatever but this moment where jim stomps his foot you know i made fun of it earlier but this is this is great because it's under a table he's not expecting it right like

it's not a um so this whole thing so this this starts our our sucker punch motif right yeah i was gonna say this is it's not a punch but it's the sucker punch because jim is playing what he's he's saying like oh we can work this out you know we can come to an agreement and then once the guy kind of relaxes his guard just a little bit that's's when Jim stomps on his foot under the table and also grabs his head and slams it into the top of the table. And then the whole audience looks, or the audience, everyone in the restaurant looks over, but they don't know what to make of what just happened. And Jim then, like, he kind of rebounds and Jim's holding his collar and then starts brushing him off. Like, oh, what a weird accident. Like, here, I'll help you.

I hope you're okay. And then this guy pulls out his ID. He's a fed. How would you like to be booked for assaulting a federal officer? So then Jim. We get Jim acting. Yes. So we've seen him do this before before which is where he's rough with

someone and then it turns out they're a cop or a fed yeah or an irs agent perhaps and he immediately gets apologetic and you know backs down and it's like oh maybe i can how can i help you some other way you know kind of stuff and here he's doing that it's a fun little moment because as a rockford viewer it's kind of like okay this is how jim rolls and now this is getting more complicated there's a fed involved you know we're off to the races my notes literally said that like it was like oh jim jim changes gears because there's a fed but but he is acting apologetic he He's not actually apologetic, as we find out, because he then says, I want to apologize. If you'd known I was coming, you could have taken me. That was a sucker punch. Yes. Right. And as soon as the guy takes his hand, he then pulls him in close for another literal sucker punch across the face. And and then him and Angie get out of the bar before our, quote, federal agent can recover.

It's good. So that sucker punch number two, just so the audience is paying attention. And when he does that as a viewer, I'm like, okay, he obviously is not a real agent. Because Jim would never do that to an actual fed. So clearly he got some tell that that wasn't the case. Yeah, Jim knows something here that we don't. This episode doesn't really hide anything from the audience. Yeah. And it's one where the viewers

know a little bit more than Jim does. Yeah. And that's established pretty quick, I think. But it's always interesting to kind of see what level audience knowledge versus character knowledge there is in these. Because this one's pretty biased in our favor.

I would say this is maybe the only scene where that happens. Like Jim has figured out that this guy isn't a fed before we know, but that is our clue that he's not a fed. Yeah. And then he explains it in this next scene. Yeah. Uh,

so, uh, they hit the road. The guy can't follow because before that he went into the bar, Jim, uh, because he had the description of the car from Angie, took a rotor out of his engine. Yes.

And they don't run too good without those. So another great little piece of tradecraft. Yeah. It's just filled with them. He explains that he knew that it was a fake ID because the picture was taken against a blue background, like your driver's license, and not a yellow background, like an actual federal ID would. And he knows that because he has his own fake federal ID with his picture against a blue background where it's been cut and laminated into an official ID holder.

So now we all know exactly what happened. Yeah. Now it's time to call the police. And she's no, no cops. My brother didn't want any cops involved. This is a perhaps leaned on a little too heavily. We're like her insistence on not calling the cops is kind of what keeps things going. Yeah. Keeps them from just pulling into a safe harbor and being done.

So she's like, well, now that that's over with, we should talk money. Yes. And please, as the accountant here, take it away. Jim's like, okay, it's $200 a day, right? And as you would be in 1975 when someone said... You owe me $200. You owe me $200 for beating someone up and uh he did work yes but may have gotten her in more trouble than she was in you know like it just uh so she has this reaction to

it uh she clearly doesn't have 200 uh so she offers him 25 for the half hour worth of work that he has. And then this argument follows a pattern that I love. Maybe it's an annoying pattern to other people, but she starts off by saying, 200, I can't do that. And also you didn't do enough work for $200 or whatever, but I have $25. And now Jim is like, I don't want to sell my services for $25 so why don't you just tell me where you live I'll take you home and we'll call it done like let's I don't want the money and she's

like well I owe you money so I'm going to give you money and during this time she gives him the address of where they're going right and they drive there. Which is Tom's house. Which turns out to be more of a house than you would expect from somebody who can only – she's a bookkeeper.

That's an important thing to – Well, so he's operating – he's also operating under – he's like Tom's a stockbroker, right? And then they pull up to this house. This is a big fancy house. So he's kind of acting a little bit like, come like you can get this somewhere like look at this house and then she has her thing where she's like we you know he's my brother we have lived separate lives uh i'm a bookkeeper at a restaurant she makes 220 a week uh but my favorite bit in all of it, in this argument, is that she's $1.26 short. And Jim tries to turn the money away and she throws it at him.

I don't even know why I love it so much. I just love that it's over this little bit amount of money. It just keeps whittling away. It keeps getting smaller and smaller. There's something very human about that. Yeah. I have been in those kinds of situations. I assume many of, if not most of our listeners have, where it's like the money is a symbol.

Right. Yeah. So the conversation isn't really like that. The amount of money is kind of immaterial because now it's symbolic of you know who owes who who's treating who's treating who like an adult it's it's a status play in certain ways it's also a class thing right like you get the idea that she's you know she's living this life where she's acutely aware of having lots of money because of her brother, but she doesn't live that lifestyle. Yes. For,

you know, working class people knowing exactly how much money you have and what it's worth, uh, is that's important kind of core to, um, to, to that identity in a lot of ways.

And so rejecting that money is kind of saying like, Oh, so you don't think I'm a person, right? You don't think I can. Yeah. And this is all handled through her, you know, how her anger spikes. And, you know, she kind of has this seemingly outsized reaction,

but it makes total sense to me as the rest of her character has established. Yeah. It's good stuff. She says that she'll mail him the rest. But he doesn't have a good feeling about this. And when she goes, you know, leaves the car and goes up to the door, he follows her and says that, all right, I have a special sucker, right? It's 2374 and you have me for another 10 minutes. So we see Jim give in to his inability to let someone who is in danger just remain.

Yeah. Yeah. She turns off the burglar alarm, which is in a big box on the outside of the house, which doesn't seem like a great piece of security, but what do I know? I was thinking the same thing. I mean, there was a key to it, it seemed like, but yeah.

So, and goes to find this wall safe uh she doesn't have the combination she asks jim if uh well couldn't we crack it or blow it right like i've seen this in movies jim ever the professional gives it a little listen with it and lists off all the you know all the things about why it's such a great safe. All the tumblers and thickness and German made and everything. You could load it up with plastic explosive and it would shoot this house off the foundation and it wouldn't even be scratched. He's a little needlessly cruel about it, but she's not listening to him telling her she's in trouble. Right. And she has a line here where. The bookkeepers of this world, Mr. Rockford, count numbers.

But they don't count. Tom counts. He counts plenty. And I'm going to do exactly what he told me. If that means chipping away at that safe over there with a kitchen knife. I wrote it down too. It was good. But my brother counts. Yes. Which I think really, again good. But my brother counts. Yes.

Which I think really, again, gets to that class consciousness. Yeah. I have a worldview within which I operate. And you're asking me to go outside my worldview, which I will not do. So she's going to look for the combination somewhere. And she starts looking through drawers. This is a great bit here where jim is clearly uh he's he's joking right and he's saying you know where do people keep the keys over

the door or under the mat so where do people keep their safe combination on a piece of masking tape underneath a desk drawer and she looks and sure enough the combination is in fact written on a piece of tape on the bottom of a drawer and jim looks startled yeah no the look on his face was was brilliant it was very uh it's like a magician who didn't think they were going to pull off a trick and is that not just startled but maybe a little little frightened by the fact that it worked like oh that never works yeah yeah so that's a fun uh bit um he opens the safe i have a note where i'm like fingerprints jim yeah i was thinking the same thing like but uh that does not come back that's not a thing but that's totally a thing that could happen before this this moment he he's when she asks, oh, maybe we should crack

the safe, and he just goes up and fiddles with it was when I was like, what are you doing, Jim? Like, oh, come on. We know better than this. Sure enough, inside the safe is a brown paper wrapped package tied up with string,

and before they can untie it to see what's in it, we hear the sound of breaking glass. And we see it in the frame, and then I didn't realize that it was there until the end of the scene. It's just like a well-choreographed little bit where they turn off the lights, Jim goes back over and grabs the keys out of her purse.

Yes. And then he kind of disappears. And we cut to the guys breaking in, who are the two goons that we saw jumping Tom in the phone booth. They come into the house. We have a kind of a tense moment where Angie is hiding under the desk

and then she starts like raising her head like to see if they're there. Yeah. It's like, no, why are you doing that? But Jim ran outside of the house and turned the burglar alarm back on with the key that he took out of it. And so the alarm starts going off and the goons scram.

As they peel away, he gets at least the first part of their license plate number. I expected this bit to have a little bit more of a payoff. I mean, I'm not upset that it didn't, but like, because that's the thing. I recently had a moment where I saw some suspicious activity outside my front window and I looked at the license plate of the car and then the car left. And I realized that I had memorized one digit of that license plate. And it turned out to be nothing. But like I completely like I have sympathy for Jim in the scene because it scene because it's not as easy as you'd expect it to be. You're thinking about a lot of different things at that moment.

Chicago has transitioned from street parking, from meters where you get a receipt and you put it on your dashboard, to ones where you just do it all on the little machine and put in your license plate number. Oh, yeah. And then they read what is in there, and I don't know. I don't know how it works, but you don't have to get a ticket. It's magic. It's magic. I don't park where I need to get metered parking that often,

but in the last couple of weeks, I've had to do it a couple of times. And each time, even though it's my car and my license plate i can only remember the first three yes here it's a it's a letter in two numbers and then there's four numbers i can only remember the first three and as i'm walking away from the car to find the box i'm saying the whole thing over and over yeah so it's in my short-term memory so i do it at the thing and then i i forget it as soon as i walk away it's gone it's just gone turns out that this doesn't uh go anywhere in terms of like they don't run the plates or anything but yeah i mean he has the plates to hand over to someone but like it's not like he has a partial plate or anything like that which is what i was expecting i was expecting an

argument with dennis how many cars have those three numbers right two five seven i think i wrote them down well but what's actually happening here is angie comes out to start talking to him and it's distracting him and he's getting snippy with her because she keeps bothering him while he's trying to remember this yeah um he's saying okay now now i'm out of it. They're gone. You have the thing. I should just call the cops now. I didn't really understand the logic here. So this is the first time where he says, like, look, for all I know, this is a scam and you're not actually his sister.

And I just helped you break a safe. You know, so I should just call the cops, I guess, in case. And then I can explain it or something. And she turns it around on him and says, like, well, you know, if this is some kind of con, do you really want to explain to the cops how you just broke into someone's house and broke their safe? And this apparently this logic reaches him. It's a persuasive argument. Also, he wants to get his whole $200 out of this somehow. uh also he wants to get his whole 200 out of this somehow so he takes the package and he also gives her the upper arm grab to bring her along back to the trailer because i wrote this down was the uh i'm getting my whole 200 out of this if i have to take the small claims court

that's our rockford back at the trailer uh this package i'm'm going to go ahead and say this is exactly what I expected, which is that it's full of cash money. Jim ruffles through it and says there must be half a million dollars here. So it's 2.3, 2.4 million dollars in today's money. So, yeah, it's a chunk of change. Angie does not look so good. And Rocky goes ahead and cracks her a beer. Take a sip of this. This will help.

Usually that's like whiskey or cognac or something. But this is Rocky. It's just, yeah, it's an extremely Rocky thing. I'm saying if there's this much money involved and those guys were after her, Tom must be dead. That's what kind of seems to follow from what's been going on. And we see that Angie's, you know, freaking out about this. As you would. There's some back and forth here.

What's she talking about? Will you just shut up a minute, Dad? I don't know what she's talking about i'm trying to find out well you're not doing too good a job i know that dad but i'm just getting warmed up so butt out i do love this fight this is a good like early moment of rocky kind of getting an understanding of uh what jim does for a living this is before they've come to any real understanding of it right like rocky openly disapproves of it i think at this point we're still in season two right yeah so it's fun to watch uh because this is this is definitely area where jim knows more

than rocky uh but rocky sees somebody in trouble and wants to be able to make it all right. And Jim knows. It's going to take more than just wanting it to be all right. Yeah. More than just good intentions here. Angie says that she knows Tom. There's no way he could have stolen that money. Whatever it is, it's not that he stole it.

Yeah. Jim is now fully on the side of well just in case if his money's hot which it probably is and if angie if this isn't some kind of weird frame yeah we're still not going to call the cops but what we're going to do is we're going to deposit this money in your bank in an escrow okay um and so we have a little cut to to to that where we are establishing that they have this box at the bank where they both have a key. And so they both need to be present. I dig this.

This is Jim protecting himself through bureaucracy and institutions. Oh, that's good stuff. That's a Rockford I like. I know and love. He leaves her because he's going to go check some things out. And then we get a phone call to Federal Agent Shore.

Is there a joke in the cut here? I think she says something like, remember, no cops. Something like that. I always like, my notes say no police, but the feds. So Shore, Agent Dan Shore, we've seen uh seen seen sure before but not for a long time so if we have any listeners who have joined us fairly recently

we've talked about this character in our episodes 19 the no-cut contract and 11 a portrait of elizabeth however this is the first appearance chronologically, except it's technically the second appearance. Oh, really? Yeah, so Shore is played by an actor named Wayne Tippett, who's great. I think his facial expressions are fantastic. Yeah, yeah. And so he plays this same character in those three episodes, this one and the two I just mentioned. And so he plays this same character in those three episodes, this one and the two I just mentioned.

This character, Federal Agent Shore, was in an earlier episode but played by a different actor. It's a shame that he didn't get his own series. Now that would be a good spinoff. You could say things like, you could be Dan Shore, he's on the case. You could be Dan Shore, he'd get his man. Dan Shore, FBI. You could be Dan Shore. He'd get his man. Dan Shore, FBI.

The proof that we will not invent a time machine within our lifetime is that F.E. has not yet gone back in time to make the Dan Shore, he always gets his man spinoff from the Rockford Files. Will he solve it in time? You could be Dan Shore. Well, Jim calls and asks if Agent Shore knows anything about a federal agent named Bettingen. And this name apparently is of interest. Yeah, Shore just lights up. He's giving him classic cop guff that you get for Jim. When Jim calls, he's like, I got something for you. And Dan Shore is like, oh, is it like a harassment case?

Like, what are you suing us for now? But no, he has info about this federal agent. Jim sets up the meeting at a diner. Where they make a good omelet. Bring your wallet. Yes. And we cut to Jim eating an omelet. Just eat it.

Scooping up some food, putting it in his mouth. Not a hot dog, not a taco, but it is a diner omelet. Does that count as garbage food? Is it outside, though? They're on like a patio. Yeah, I mean, it's L.A., so out of doors. So this is a beautiful second and a half of footage where we see Jim taking full advantage of just a little moment, where also he knows that he is not going to be paying for this omelet.

Yes. You might say he's Dan Shore. He's not going to be paying for this omelet yes you might say he's dan shore he's not going to be paying for this omelet uh the first part of the scene is just what i refer to as tough guy banter yes so there's another agent with shore who jim is like i'm not going to talk to you until he goes away that guy is clearly a gorilla i think this is a great bit of of writing craft here because okay let's assume the audience is predisposed to thinking that dan shore uh agent dan shore is on the up and up because he's with the fbi but the fact that he brought a goon with him i think is the first hint that uh that this isn't

a straightforward thing for dan either right like i Like, I think this is the good cue to our audience that that this isn't just dealing with the FBI. We're dealing with Dan Shore. So this this banter also kind of establishes, I think, for us as the audience that they have had encounters before. Right. Yeah. Kind of sure implying that they can bring them in and you know charge them with stuff and Rockford being like you can't pin anything on me

I'm here as a friend this time just trying to help you out. Right. Just trying to help you out. Once the once the gorilla does leave Jim tries to order Danny Boy an omelet, which he's having none of. Forget it. Jim wants to trade info.

Yeah. He admits that they found Agent Bettingen dead. He was stuffed in a trash can somewhere. That was awful. dead uh he was stuffed in a trash can somewhere that was awful and you know if you don't have anything for me i can haul you in for his murder because you know about him right you you mentioned his name uh jim of course is saying that you can never get that to stick uh but he knows the name because he met a guy who had a phony id with bettengin's with the photo cut out and replaced. This is a little ominous considering that Jim used the exact same phony ID tactic before.

Now, I don't think Jim has killed an FBI agent. But it does like it's a little bit like, oh, OK, wait a minute. You know, this is the murder of a federal agent. This is a very hot little item. I could hit you with withholding information in a murder investigation. What makes you think you can sit there and trade information? I think I can do it, Danny, because I am doing it. Shore gives in and says, okay, there's a deal involving $2 million in forged stock certificate.

Now, what can you give me? Right. And Jim gives him the description of the car and the license plate. This is the guy who had his ID. And as he leaves, tells them to direct the bill to shore. Forged stock certificates is such a jimbo. Sorry, I just... I mean, it could be bearer bonds but yeah it is not uh one last bit

here is uh jim describing the uh uh the goon that is parading as oh as bettengin yeah bettengin uh he's like oh he's like you're you'reon, but three inches shorter and gray eyes. Oh, and he might have a fat lip. And Shor's like, you hit him? That is our Jim Rockford for this episode. This is a Jim Rockford con within a con to get where he wants to go. So the place where Tom Paris worked is Bundy and Baines, this brokerage or investment firm or whatever it is. So Jim, first of all, he comes in, in, in Clark Kent disguise. So he has glasses and his hair is combed. That's exactly what I wrote down. So he comes into this building, goes to the receptionist.

He's from the home office. Uh, he's some kind of auditor and he's trying to find his man, Jim Rockford. Jim Rockford. In Tom Paris's office. And the receptionist calls over for Jim Rockford. Of course, he's not there. Says, well, if he comes back, tell him that this, or if he shows up, tell him that this man is looking for him from his office.

Yeah. And then another piece in here is that this is the fourth audit. Yeah. Going on simultaneously, which is a nice little, I think, moment for us as the audience where it's like, oh, okay, something is indeed up. Jim then goes to Paris's office, which apparently is like on the same floor or whatever, turns into Superman, takes off his glasses and ruffles his hair.

Oh, that's good. I also like the detail here where if, for some reason, someone who kind of vaguely knew what Jim Rockford looked like was in that office, they would recognize him because he took off his glasses. So he goes into Paris's office and he's all kind of rumpled up. He loses his tie and stuff because he's coming in laying down the very relatable complaint about being hung up in traffic. Yes. Why is it that people on the other side of the road are always rubbernecking? What do you think? They're going to see blood on the highway,

et cetera, et cetera, to the receptionist who is in Paris. And so this woman, once she can finally get an award in edgewise, does confirm that he's like, are you Mr. Rockford? Yeah. as he's now set up

the expectation with your order call right brilliant so yes indeed he is he is from the county assessor's office so the the place is called bundy and baines she offers the name and then a little bit later he brings it back as if he knew. It's a very good cold read moment. Yeah. Because he originally when he plays it like that, he's a little frazzled and he can't remember who set it up. And then later he's just like, oh, yeah, Bundy, Mr. Bundy told me this or something like that. And it's just like, yeah, of course. No, I'm supposed to be here. I know this person.

year i know this person and then once she's established to her satisfaction that this is on the up and up uh they immediately fall into like man with authority receptionist running errands like hierarchy like she's he sends her to give him coffee yeah and like i think mindfully creates this dynamic that she's probably used to working for this, you know, important man organization or whatever, because he has more that he needs to find out. Epi, 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 your work on the information superhighway. I'll be right back. One way to find me is to go to twitter.com and search for at epi di e p i d i a h i'm usually responsive there otherwise you can go to worlds without master.com where you can find my sword and sorcery fiction and role-playing games and if you like role-playing games maybe you want to check

out dig a thousand holes.com where uh i, 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 you're ready to continue the arithmetic analysis for this episode there happy i'm back i have my dm42 with me and i'm ready to get in 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 he sets up in Tom's office. He brings up something about Tom's boss. And she's like, oh, Mr. Whitlow. And he starts describing just a random description, right? And she's like, no, no, no. He doesn't look like that at all. He's stocky, gray hair. I'm like, aha, that is our bad guy from earlier. Yes.

Who, if you're like me, you're like, how do I know this guy? And then he hits her with a, of course, you know what's going on. Yes. And so this is all, you said cold reading a moment ago. This is all cold reading where he's just like throwing out hooks and then just jumping on whatever she gives him uh in our main narrative convenience moment she does in fact know a bunch of stuff so that's so that's helpful it feels like office gossip like it doesn't feel unusual that she would know some of this stuff i'm conducting this audit and i want to ask you some questions but i need need to know what you know. So I don't tell you anything that you're not supposed to know.

Yes. And she's like, okay, well, this is what I know. It's pretty simple. Yeah. So the rumor is that Tom was buying forged accounts from somebody, forged accounts or forged certificates or whatever, and putting them in a street account. He didn't come into work today and the fed started an audit at 6 a.m. that morning. That's what she has heard is going on.

And then she also heard a rumor from someone in particular that the feds were working with Tom to buy the forgeries. Yeah. And then she's like, why does the county tax assessor care about this? This is brilliant blather. It is perfect nonsense. Well, that's because the annual prepaid discount on all unlisted but depreciating securities is handled by the county tax assessor's office on all units up to 2457 of the new state tax code, with the exception of the new state tax board's special auditing amendment, which doesn't go into effect until March anyway, you see. Watching this woman's face go from interest to feigned interest is wondrous.

Where's the Emmy? That's what I want to know. It's brilliant just watching this. At first, she's all conspiratorial with the office gossip, the biggest thing that's happened, you know, probably ever. And then he starts going into what he's about. And it's just very expertly removes any desire she may have to know what what the hell his purpose is there. Give Sharon Spellman the Emmy. Yes.

She was a character in a TV series called Angie. So this is the third of her four Rockford Files appearances, but we have not done any of her other episodes yet. So this is our, and not this character, obviously, she bounces around. But yeah, so we'll be seeing Sharon Spellman again. That is good. We have that to look forward to. Yeah, because she rules in this.

So he runs this whole line of bull, and then she leaves. He's left alone. He starts poking around. And then a wild Mr. Whitlaw appears. And now that we have him in full frame with a little bit of dialogue. Yes. This whole time being like, okay, I've seen this guy before. How do I know this guy?

How do I know this guy? How do I know this guy? How do I seen this guy before how do i know this how do i know this guy how do i know this guy how i know this guy and then finally pausing and bringing up imdb uh and finding out that he's the big lebowski and of course i know him and recognize him as the big lebowski why wouldn't i exactly yeah it's uh so david huddleston is the actor and uh yeah yeah it's like oh of course yes he's he's great i don't know what else to say about him but yeah i mean he's been in tons of stuff but i think the the big lebowski is certainly a definitional role yeah that people would know him from uh so it's pretty

fantastic here he's a little uh he's not physically imposing. No. But he is very. Threatening. Yeah. Once he gets going, it's like, oh, this is not a good guy. But even though he's a larger man, he's not a physically intimidating guy. Right. And even though we've seen him be physical in these scenes before, turns out he's the, he's the mid-level boss. There's a boss.

Right. Yes. But you have to fight him to get to the boss at the end-level boss. There's a boss. Right, yes. But you have to fight him to get to the boss at the end of the game. Right. But yeah, so he comes in and Jim runs all the same stuff. He kind of sticks to the story and tries to double down. But it turns out that not only has Mr. Willow not, didn't know anything about this, the county assessor already did their audit.

So struck out on that one jim uh and also when he tries to invoke uh mr bundy mr bundy's retired yes i love when he's like the you know the county assessor's already done their audit and jim just goes for the hail mary he's like and he's back right like the first guy didn't do a good enough job. Will you swallow this? Is this something that I can get away with? No? Okay. All right.

Whitlock goes to the phone to have Mary call security. And that's when Jim gets in, I think at this point, the third sucker punch of the show. Gets him right in the gut. You know, he loses his breath can't get out any more words and then looks like he ties him to the office chair with the phone cord and of course as is contract contractually required in such moments he comes out of the office closes the door and says you know leave mr whitlaw alone in there he's going to be tied up for a while yes buzzing i don't i don't want to pussyfoot around this. Jim walked in there with a gorgeous

antique adding machine and he left in such a hurry that he didn't take it. Now, I like to think that it wasn't his adding machine, but one he just picked up while he was in the stockbroker's office and therefore there was nothing lost while he was doing this but still i am a little worried about that device and who it belongs to and i hope it gets back to its rightful owner um we have a brief scene where whitlaw makes a call to bundy we see that there's the other goons that we've seen so far are with him and he's surrounded by pill bottles and stuff. We're getting this look of he's probably infirm

and it tells him, you know, this guy Rockford, blah blah blah. Bundy says to check him out and I think that's all we see of him. I think the fact that he's infirmed helps make me think that this is the highest level boss. Because that is a little bit of a boss stereotype is the one that's –

and I don't know if it's one that Rockford depends on too much. But like you do see it from time to time where the boss is on their deathbed. And that's part of why they're dangerous is that they – They have nothing to lose or they have a time limit right because they're gonna die uh in this case we don't see him again yeah i think the scene is just to establish that this scheme whatever it is goes all the way to the top right yeah for a rockford files episode especially for a cannel script i feel like there's a lot of kind of floating little things in this one. Part of why at the beginning I said,

I feel like there's something else here. Yeah. Then they made something out of a larger story. Like, I don't think it's like, oh, they shot it. It's not like you were just talking about Easy Rider having three hours worth of footage and they cut it down to an hour and a half. I think that was in our plus expenses patron only feed before this episode. So for more thoughts about Easy Rider, check out patreon.com slash 200 a day. I think this is more along of the lines of you sit down to write it and you probably map out some of the plot it's

a mystery we need some twists and turns here the twists and turns and then you write those but then you don't bring some of them to fruition and then in the end you're like well we have a good episode anyways let's just go with it uh like there's something some stuff that's going to come up about Angie and her brother that also has this feeling of like, well, okay. How does that relate? Yeah. It doesn't feel like it's an unresolved story with stuff that dropped and never picked up again. It more feels like there's these little elements that kind of poke out, kind of like pointing at other things that could be in the story that just aren't yeah and this is one of those so uh we have a bit with um jim and andy now that jim has learned this stuff he engages in some creative speculation uh shore gave tom

the half million to buy these bogus securities and assigned Bettengen to watch him while he was doing this. So perhaps in some kind of, you know, sting operation, right, on his own firm. But then the agent ended up dead. And so now Shore is on the hook for that money. Yeah, he's on the hook for the money and also politically, right? Yeah. If it's an operation that goes south, he's kind of responsible. But, you know, someone already ended up dead.

He wants to stash her in a safe place while he can figure out the rest. And so we go to this motel where we get Angie explaining her emotional attachment to Tom. Yeah. Why he matters to her so much and why she can't believe that he would steal the money and why she wants to keep doing what he said on the phone. Right. So it turns out Tom's – he's 10 years older than her? Yeah, he's definitely older than her. Or 15 years older than her, something like that.

By at least a decade, yeah. He's definitely older than her. Or 15 years older than her. By at least a decade, yeah. She was born late in their parents' lives. Born on a farm out in, I think, Maryland, she says, or something like that. But that her dad got kicked in the head by a horse when she was, and she's like five, right? She doesn't remember this, but this is what Tom has kind of told her.

And he died. And then her mother followed him shortly after. And she has a line here where she says that it's really sad but it's beautiful too which she's not wrong right like there's a romantic there's like kind of a romantic yeah element to this she died of a broken heart but like also we're watching the rockford Files where people don't die of broken hearts. So we're in this spot of like, OK, this doesn't seem right. This is probably somehow suspicious. We're seeing Angie kind of her personal mythology that she's grown up with. And I think that becomes very apparent at the end of the episode but i think even in context to what i was

kind of trying to say in our intro talking about these characters that have their their defining attribute in the context of this individual story is this set of blinders that they have and jim's role is to try and get those to shift somehow uh ang says that, you know, Tom raised her. He made all these sacrifices for her. You just see that he's like rich and lives over here and I'm not, but you don't understand all the things that he's done for me, how much they love each other, and that Jim couldn't understand that kind of devotion.

And so Jim comes back with he doesn't want her devotion to be blind you know it's fine that you feel this deeply about your brother but you also need to face the reality that i am starting to see as an outside observer yeah uh he might have stolen this money uh he might be dead as jim leaves to continue you know investigating witla or whatever, Angie stops him and wants him to tell her that Tom isn't dead. Yeah. And so this is the moment where you're like, okay, is this the comfort her with what she wants to hear moment? Right.

Or is this where we need to hear what we need to hear? Jim chooses the second option and says that sometime she's going to have to start living for herself she needs to face what's actually happening and she's had this life you know kind of wrapped up with her brothers but yeah at some point you need to make your own decisions live life uh for yourself he leaves and we have this slow kind of uh pull pull away shot on angie as she has some some tears dripping down her face and it's very sad he has this great line that's you're going to have to look trouble in the eye and deal with it which i think is sort of the the thesis statement of like rockford's role in this

episode and in these sort of episodes that you're talking about right like this is he his is the job to look trouble in the eye and figure out how to deal with it while other people go on with their lives or try to. And you can be damn sure he's going to deal with it. So this is our emotional low beat here in the middle of our episode. We then go to following Jim for a while.

Jim is making a phone call to a woman in a phone booth somewhere. Yeah. So this whole thing is a tight shot on her, just her mouth. Yeah. As she's speaking into the phone to Jim. Every time we cut back and forth, instead of seeing her face, we see just her mouth. And so this is the, like, that motif coming back with the the phone call the tight shots with the phone calls yeah it's a little uh like where does he what's his number like i think i might have missed the the detail that

like how he got this number he was he's calling her back essentially yeah that like she called and left a message and left a message or something or said call back and call this number at this time. Yeah. Because she's in a phone booth so that he can't track the number. And she says she's been waiting for it all morning or something like that. Yeah. She says that we, she uses

we and our, we have Tom Paris. Jim has half a million dollars of their money and she wants to set up a meeting between the principals to make the exchange we have some establishment of jim not being a novice in these affairs where he's like oh i'm sure you want me to go to a you know an empty lot at midnight and come alone right like that kind of stuff like no no you pick the time and the place so he picks a hotel there's a stairway up to the roof meet there at 4 p.m and if her man doesn't show the deal is off yeah i like that he specifically

says that he's going to be late he's going to show up 10 minutes late um we're gonna see this woman again or we're going to see these lips again yeah who is this she's never explained and we can't figure out i can't figure out who she is on the imdb she is such a mystery that uh she's not even part of the the cast as far as i know well there's a credit for operator i think it's the jenny o'hara okay that okay that makes sense yeah which yeah so she's not supposed to be someone else in this episode. Yeah. And so this is another of those,

like, here's a thing that could be a thing. Yeah. In context, I was totally fine. Yeah. Yeah, exactly.

It felt like an art film kind of moment, you know? Yeah. Uh, there's kind of like a 70 sensibility to that where it's like, here's something that's just part of the fabric of this episode uh it doesn't need to be connected to anything else yeah i think there's one other thing about this that we'll talk about later but it is an interesting challenge to the audience right

like are you waiting to see who this is or do you just let this be an element and move on uh jim goes to this motel for the exchange, but once he gets to the roof, sure enough, there are cop sirens going and police cars arriving and he has been set up. He manages to flee to the Firebird, but he gets blocked in by a couple

cop cars. It's the Feds and, of course, your Dan Shore. Yes. See? It's perfect. You're Dan Shore. It's the Feds. Yes, that's how you do it. Let me guess. You got a tip saying that I'd be here with half a million dollars. That ain't what you got, Rockford.

And they open his trunk, and the body of Tom Paris is in Jim's trunk. Yes. Paris is in Jim's truck. Yes. And again, I don't want fans of the podcast 20 a day to panic. This isn't the same Tom Paris that you're thinking

of. It's spelled differently. Jim says he can explain, but it'll take a while. And then we cut to a housekeeper at the hotel telling Jim and Shore that two men dragged Angie away screaming out of the hotel. Her delivery of this, it was the darndest thing. This woman was abducted.

Like, oh, yeah, that is the darndest thing. That's horrifying, ma'am. Horrifying. My headcanon here is that this is a seedy hotel where this kind of thing would not lead to calling the cops. Because, seriously. Yeah, exactly. And Jim, I think he's got his hands cuffed behind his back. Shore's there with Jim and Jim is handcuffed.

Yeah. So I guess Shore's checking up on Jim's story, right? So we go to Jim's trailer where Shore's looking through his checkbook, which is a mess. We have a joke about that. Oh, yeah, that's a good one. He let Jim talk him into this. Apparently, the story that Jim has is enough to convince Shore that there's stuff going on. Yeah.

They're not just going to haul him in for this murder. And Jim lays out all the stuff we were kind of talking about earlier with, you know, the reason that Shore has to work with Jim is that he's in deep with his superiors because this whole deal has gone south. Yeah. So this is the only way that Shore is going to get out of trouble. Um, they're waiting for a phone call, which Jim receives. And we have the same, uh, operator on the phone saying that we have the girl, you have the key. So we're going to trade you Angie for the other key to the safe deposit box because all they want after all is their money jim does one of his things uh that i always appreciate clearly this is all going to be a setup for the

fbi to make this arrest right like shore is right sure, it was right there, listening to this with him. But in order to make this a convincing statement, he's like, okay, fine, but I'll only do it for $100,000. He establishes that there's a finder's fee that if he just went to the feds, he would just get the- 10% or whatever. Yeah, which is a considerable

amount of money and that they're not going to hurt her because they're already in that's like more trouble than what it's worth which that part i don't buy they've already killed a person right like i was like uh i wouldn't gamble with that jim but But also I know that Jim's not literally gambling with that. Like he's got a plan. And also he's probably banking on them planning to do what they do, which is not going to be holding up their end anyway. Right. So yeah, it's kind of a, he knows that they know that it ends with a, he knows whatever,

however deep that goes. Right. They tell him where to go. He puts the key in his shoe. And Shore says, they're going to find it there. And Jim replies, that's the idea. They go to put a FBI tracker on his car. And when Shore reaches under to magnet it or whatever, there's one already there.

There was a detail earlier where he was sure they weren't followed how did they find angie right yeah well that explains how they found the motel they were tracking me electronically i mean these are for official use only how do hoods get their hands on this stuff just isn't fair is it just not fair is it so we're going to be getting into our finale sequence here. But before that question. Answer. At what point did they put a body in Jim's car? Yeah.

So this, I think, falls under the umbrella of here are things. Because they also bugged his car. Right. So, okay. So they know that he's on the case after he confronts the false FBI agent. Right. okay so they know that he's on the case after he confronts the false fbi agent right uh he gives them his name when he comes into the office right he's jim rockford county tax assessor so it could be somewhere around there there's a lot of behind the scene things happening right i feel like so i think there's one line in our last sequence that kind of addresses

this stuff this is also again with the we we are 100 with rockford as he moves through this story right yeah once we synced up with him uh we've just been with him the whole time so he didn't see them doing it so we didn't see them do it which is fine it's just also like so they killed this guy and then they kept his body around long enough that they could put it in jim's car at them doing it so we didn't see them do it which is fine it's just also like so they killed this guy and then they kept his body around long enough that they could put it in jim's car at least a day later that was the question that i was thinking about was like did they have him on ice was he dead were they or did they have him and then then they killed him they could have used him to get at the money some way i think uh uh angie says something about like he's dead or they have him and they're going to get the combination out of him.

Yeah. Right. And the guys did go to where his safe was. So we can infer that there was some amount of time. They didn't just pull him out of that phone booth and kill him. Right. That there was something else. I did not question it at all in the moment and now just going back over it is kind of like that's pretty that's a pretty

serious uh something's missing there yeah i accept that it could have happened i just like just now i'm like huh i wonder when that happened well jim goes to his meeting we have this nice long establishing shot of this empty lot as jim of slowly pulls in in the Firebird, which is another nice touch that I appreciated. Yes. He is then blocked in from the back by a car and Whitlow and the other goon, I think the comb-over goon. Yeah. And so the Big Lebowski and the fake FBI agent pull up next to him, kind of trapping him between the two cars. They roll down their windows.

Jim and, is it Whitlow or Whitlaw? He's credited as Sherm in the credits. Sherm? That doesn't help. In the Big Lebowski. Yes. They have some banter. All right, you get out and get in this car. I'll take you to somebody that can set the deal.

You don't think I'm going to put $100,000 in the trunk of this car, do you? Nothing doing, Whit. You want to get out of that thing and get in here with me, I just might consider taking you someplace where we could call your principal and meet, but I'm not handing myself over to you on a bet. Combo Ragoon gets out of the car and comes around the front playing with the knife and then goes to stab at the Firebird's tire. And Jim is having none of it. Oh, it's so great. I just like of all the things to be threatened with a knife.

All the things to be threatened with a knife. They apparently didn't think this through because while he's blocked in on two sides, he is completely free to move on the other two sides, right? If the car is forward on both sides. So he is able to hit the gas and break out of this little situation before his tire gets stabbed. And then we have a brief chase sequence. Yeah. The editing here is a little... There's a moment where he's looking to do that. And it's clear that the two cars are very far away from each other from one angle.

And like... But it hurt me. Hurt my soul watching the Firebird literally shove a car into the... Like, oh no. So there's a big empty lot with all these kind of industrial like remnants so they're yeah weaving around like big chunks of concrete and stuff and then he sees a an opening in like a like a rusty gate that's open he makes a break for it shoots through the opening but then we cut to the other side and see that there's like a four foot drop on the other

side so the firebird just goes through and then thunk and just is trapped there, which could not have been good for that stock car. Yeah. Oh, or, or James Garner driving it. So he's stuck. He cannot escape.

He gets out of the car. He's like, okay, fine. I guess I'll come in your car. He gets a hand up to the higher level by our comb over goon. The one who he has sucker punched twice. Yes.

And if you'll remember in that conversation, said something about like, if this was a fair fight, you would have dropped me. Right. So he squares up with his fists up like, okay, let's go.

And the goon just gives him this really heavy looking punch right across the jaw, which drops him. It's a classic formula. formula, the rule of three. You get to do it twice, but the third time it doesn't work or it fails the first two times. And then on the third time it comes. It's just, yeah, it's just beautiful just to see it come to fruition like that. This is a good, and it's also serving two purposes here because it pays that off.

It's a great moment it also puts rockford on the ground so that he can yes he can grab the tracker that shore put under his car without making a big deal out of it and this seems like a weird thing but okay shore was like when you need us to come in break this which i'm not sure how he was supposed to do that from outside the car but that was to set up this moment right sure okay but why put it why not just put it in this pocket right why store it there aside from showing us that they they had another tracker like that like there's a narrative convenience for storing it there whatever this payoff was worth it because it was a little

surprise to me where i was like oh okay like that's funny and then he grabs it i was like oh yeah so uh they're being tracked um we see shore uh following them um and then we cut to uh one of the goons emptying the key out of jim's shoe as promised earlier yes mr bundy will be pleased uh so uh Big Lebowski has Jim and Angie and the other goons in some kind of like garage or something we have the key so now we can take care of both of you like what do you mean take care I mean kill you very direct this is kind of the menace I was talking about with this character here where he gives that

order so like kind of coldly and Jim's like, how are you going to get the box without us? You need our signatures and we need to be there. There's a whole bureaucracy here. It's like, don't you know anything? I think this couple sentences is doing

a lot of work here. We had a very good forgery expert duplicate your signature, which your wallet was kind enough to provide us. I have sent for a very reasonable facsimile of both you and Miss Paris. The gentleman who will play your part at the bank is also a dealer in Las Vegas. He will simply palm the signature card and give the bank the forgery. It is troublesome and highly complicated, but terribly effective. It is troublesome and highly complicated,

but terribly effective. And I think that is doing the work of trying, of like explaining all of this, like where the body came from. These people are willing to do troublesome and highly complicated things if they're effective. Yeah. And it also fits into that stuff that I'm, you know, kind of talking about where I feel like there was a lot of twists and turns written into this that they didn't, they ran out of show to satisfyingly put to an end, right?

Our goons are taking Jim and Angie away to take care of them. And I guess they're going through some kind of nursery or something. So they're kind of in single file. Angie's in front. And then she suddenly drops down. And Jim uses this moment to kind of go to look like he's trying to help her. And then when the goon behind him is leaning down, he pulls a plant off of a rack and hits him with it. And is a definitional Jim taking advantage of a sudden change to make a break for it.

Yeah, they take some shots at him after that, right? Right. change to uh you know make a break for it yeah they take some shots at him after that right right i it's just so simple but it's such a great effective special effect was uh jim and angie duck you hear gunfire you can see in the distance somebody pointing a gun and in the foreground between you and jim and angie uh flower shakes as if a bullet went through. Like, you know, it's just. I don't think I noticed that because I was taking notes. It's, I mean, maybe I'm overreading it. Maybe like Jim and Angie as they duck bump into it or something. But like, it really definitely felt like.

Like a bullet was going overhead kind of. Yeah, yeah. Like a bullet going by would make this flower shake. So we'll just shake this flower and the audience will feel it. i was like yeah i did i'll accept that that was on purpose but yes there is a brief scuffle of action with these shots as you say uh jim as they're scrambling away he breaks the tracker on the he like hits it on the ground or something so then we cut outside and we see the feds moving in um and they basically make a barricade of cars and then Whitlaw and I think the other goons get back in their car and they're making

a break for it, but they drive out of this entryway directly into the barricade of federal agents and justice, we presume will be served. We end the scene with Jim congratulating Angie. That was so smart of you. If you hadn't dropped, we couldn't have made it. And she says, dropped? I tripped.

It was an accident. Then we freeze frame on her. On our first false... False ending. Yeah. Though I feel like that would have been a perfectly acceptable ending. But we actually have an emotional beat to finish. Yeah.

Why? Okay. Let's do it. Let's hit that emotional beat. So just a quick question for you. I assumed that she tripped by accident. Yeah. I don't think it was framed in a way that she looked like she was doing that intentionally.

Oh. Oh, i see what you're saying yeah no i fell for it yeah my notes say well done so she suckered you in too no i i think i thought it because it looked like there was a glance between the two of them just before it happened so i i just had like a moment of like how did they convey that and then it turns out that they didn't like there was no no telepathic command to do this and i kind of like how did they convey that and then it turns out that they didn't like there was no no telepathic command to do this and i kind of like that it was an accident yeah i think it fits their relationship yes so we have the freeze fame but we're not done uh we go to the federal building

where uh we are dan sure that we're going to get some closure. Shore is telling Jim that he told Angie part of it, but not the rest. We don't even really get the like, oh, the company was issuing fake certificates. Yeah. I think it's just left to the audience to be like, okay, they got what's the legal system is going to take its course. Right. Tom Paris. He seems to have turned state's evidence right like right the whole reason why this is blowing up because the whole company is is illegal or appears

to be involved in this illegal operation so it seems that that it wasn't like tom paris got caught doing something illegal or whatever but like that he he at some point the the fbi got some wind of yeah fake certificates being bought or issued or something and for whatever reason tom paris was the one that they approached with the money right to get this sting underway and so he had the money in his safe in his house before he could spend it on the certificates, I guess. Yeah, that could be. Or he was planning to steal it and then the other guys found out about it or something, something. It doesn't matter necessarily. It doesn't matter necessarily, but I just,

sometimes the episode gives us like a couple sentences of here's what was going on. And this one does not because it's more concerned with Angie than with the crime. So the rest of it is that they ran the body's prints and Tom Paris was not Tom Paris. His name was Theodore Kane and he was living under assumed identity because he is in fact wanted for a 20-year-old murder

where it's just like each sentence is like more and more. So he killed his dad because his dad beat up on his baby sister. And he came home from school one day and saw it happening and snapped. Yeah. So Tom killed their dad because he beat up Angie when she was like a child. So she's repressed this or was too young to, to remember it or, or what have you.

So he found that out. And then, so he told Angie about, you know, that Tom was dead, I guess, and about the crimes and whatnot, but then says,

I didn't tell her that part because losing him was obviously hard enough on her and he couldn't do that to her. So we, so here we have the, the person with the knowledge choosing to shield her instead of make her face it. And we end the scene with a, with Jim saying,

you know, Dan, you have your moments. And Dan replies, it pleases me that you think so. I love that reply. There's just something about it. That's just very like both

honest and above it. Like it doesn't matter to me, but it pleases me. Yeah, exactly. So how did you feel about this scene? Well, I mean, this is the thing that drives it home for me. I feel like when they set out to write this one, that was the hook that they set out to write like what if the person that hires rockford thinks the world of her brother uh but because of this tragic past she doesn't know the truth about her brother and they're like okay sure so what is it that she's hiring rockford for is it to investigate the brother no there's something else happening and let's roll on the chart of uh rockford crimes forged doctor's certificates okay so it's forged stock you know like and and then built built an episode out of that about out of that role out of that random

bit of like where we're gonna go and then never satisfactorily came back to hear her until the very end of the episode where they were like, Oh, that's right. We wanted it to be about this thing instead. And so they, they delivered this and there's elements of this. Like you were pointing out,

this plays into the whole theme of seeing the world you want to see and who is it that's looking trouble directly in the face right like this is this is the uh that plays into this but it wasn't integrated into it throughout it feels like i'm getting down on the episode and i'm not if they didn't have this ending bit if they ended on our false ending i would not have left with unanswered questions i mean we discussed a few of them but like you know uh i like to talk about the emotional heart of the story we got the emotional heart in the the scene in the motel where she talks about why she cares about Tom so much. Yeah. Like, we got that. And that was kind of its own fairly contained thing.

So, yeah, I didn't feel like that was leaving things unresolved because we do see her, you know, come face to face with the reality over the rest of the episode. Yeah. But, yeah, and then this elevates that to being more primary in the story than I thought it was going, than I thought it was. Again, yeah, I agree that I don't think it's a criticism. Like, I don't think it's bad, but it is kind of weird. Yeah.

We do have a final scene with Jim and Angie out on the pier, she tells Jim that her brother did once tell her that he wasn't Tom Paris or something like that. Right. He wasn't who he says he is. But he was very depressed and later told her it was a joke.

But if he wasn't Tom, then who the hell is Angie? and so here's i think our you know our title is is getting affirmed here yeah right like angie now has to recreate her own life she says that if he was stealing so i guess he was right i mean the whole company was so it still might just be the whole company uh so if he was stealing he couldn't have been he couldn't have been what i thought he was right and now jim decides the other way instead of being like oh he really it's like he really wasn't what you thought he does his

comforting thing he loved you he took care of you and he was your brother i guess for now that's all i need to know and then we end our episode with the freeze frame on her face as she stares out over the water my note on that one is freeze frame on complex emotion yes so yeah like overall, I really enjoyed the episode. There's like wonderful moments of craft. We get a really good con that falls apart. Yeah. And that's great. We get Jim just setting things up like the meeting at the end and all that. And I don't even want to say this is a criticism. I just, uh,

I am interested to know. Like I'd like to, I'd like to get the cliffs, not the cliff sense. I'd like to get the, you know, the initial outline. Yeah. Like what, what is it that they were like, this is important that they may have switched gears at some point, but then remembered at the end like oh we should keep this in there so sometimes you know we watch an episode and it's like yeah that was you know everything gelled it was cohesive everything you know was running on

all cylinders uh sometimes there's an episode where it's kind of like okay like the themes are are strong we have good jokes the story kind of doesn't make much sense or whatever and here i feel like the only way i would be able to tell whether this episode was doing what it wanted to do is if i knew what it wanted to do i'm not sure that i know what the goal of the episode was so it could have nailed it or it could be off the mark. Right. I just don't know. So by default, I'm going to assume it nailed it and just had these weird things hanging off of it somewhere.

But like, uh, uh, yeah, it has a higher proportion than normal of vestigial elements. Yeah. And then it has like the, the,

uh, the woman on the phone that the more I think about it, that's one of my favorite parts of the episode. Because I do it. I like 70s art weirdness. It kind of reminds me of the not visually, but stylistically. It reminds me there's a the Columbo episode with John Cassavetes as a orchestra conductor. He's the murderer. There's a sequence... Spoilers! I'm sorry.

There's a sequence in it where he's wearing sunglasses and the camera keeps on his face. They use his sunglasses as the surface to play the image... to play the footage. So instead of watching the footage,

it's playing on his sunglasses. And it's weird. Like, it is kind of a bizarre effect, but I really like it. Yeah. Like it works in context and everything. And it's something I feel like you just wouldn't see in other decades of film.

And the operator also had a personality like she had this like southern waitress charm to her that just like she's kind of lascivious too yeah like we got a little like kind of rocky horror style like tongue kind of yeah floating around and close close uh frame and like the casual violence threat you know she is negotiating with him and appears to have some kind of negotiating power what what is her role in this operation like it's but you know they're they're willing to do things that are complicated as long as it's effective which is a nice contrast with jim who is going to do the least complicated thing possible as long as it is minimally effective. Yes.

And the more complicated he gets, the worse, as we know from Chicken Little is a Little Chicken. There is a little bit to Jim where you can tell that he enjoys the cons. So he does go the extra mile for those sometimes. Where it's just like, like in this one, he's like, okay, I'm going to lay all the groundwork and do all this stuff. But also I'm going to get myself to a point where the only way out is to punch the guy in the head. Yeah.

So I just wanted to quickly hit on the IMDb reviews for this episode, because they're kind of interesting. Just skimming them, there is a clear split between people who really like the episode and people who think it's mockish and doesn't make any sense. And it seems to hang on whether you find Elaine Hellville,

the actress who's playing Angie, whether you find her endearing or not or find her sympathetic or not, I should say. Oh, okay. There's a couple of comments. I don't want to read too much into IMDb reviews,

but there's a couple of comments that make me think that if you have a personal story that might echo her story, that she is very compelling. Yeah. Um, and I think that is an interesting split i feel like she did a good like i feel like her performance was very good yeah like i've got no problem with her i have no problem with the episode though so that's not even it like uh just even thinking

about the amount that she's in the episode isn't that much but it's the most uh emotionally important yeah part yeah i don't know if it's going most emotionally important part. Yeah. I don't know if it's going to be at the top of everyone's list, right? Right, right. Well, certainly I enjoyed it. And like I said at the beginning, I had some memory of enjoying it previously because it, you know, when it started, I was like, oh, yeah Uh, but maybe, maybe it's just the big Lebowski. I very much enjoyed watching the episode. I feel like it's kind of its own little unit. Like once I,

when I compare it to other episodes, I don't know if I'm necessarily going to recommend it over. Right. Right. A lot of other episodes, uh, but taken as its own little unit of TV. I think it's,

again, the trade craft is really great. It is interesting. I don't know if it's totally cohesive. Right. Yeah. And I think that's all I have to say about the reincarnation of Angie. Do you have anything else?

No. I think that that about covers it. My last question for you is, do you think that Jim did end up with that finder's fee? Oh, that is a good question. Did he get his $200 for the one day that he was going to charge Angie? I bet you he didn't get the finder's fee. You could be damn sure he didn't get his finder's fee. But I don't know.

He might have pulled off his finder's fee at the very least. I think he, he got 25 and I'd like to think that he also got the dollar. He got the final dollar 26 to round out the 25, uh, uh, that he charged Andy originally. Might've lost the 74 cents in change that dropped to the bottom of his car. He definitely needs to get some work done on the Firebird. Yeah. That is the cost of doing business. Well, speaking of the cost of doing business, I feel like we have earned our $200 for the day.

Thanks again to all of our listeners. We really appreciate it. We appreciate it so much that we're going to keep on doing the show. That's weird. I didn't know we were voting on that today. Okay. Yes. So we will be back next

time to talk about another episode of the Rockford Files.