Two Hundred A Day - Episode 66: Malibu Madness - Round 1!

Episode Date: March 19, 2020

We're taking the occasion of being about half-way through the series to talk about what makes this show so great - through the lens of a March-Madness-style bracketed tournament! There's a lot to talk about, as we go through 64 of our favorite villains, car chases, pieces of dialogue, episodes, and more. Our next episode will feature the crowning of our inaugural Malibu Madness Champion! Enjoy! 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 Brian Perrera Eric Antener Bill Anderson 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 Jay Adan's Miniature Painting And thank you to Dael Norwood, Dylan Winslow, 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.

Welcome to 200 a Day, the podcast where we talk about the 70s television detective show, The Rockford Files. I'm Nathan Palletta. I'm Epidaia Ravishaw. And welcome to our inaugural silly game where we are taking this month, this March of 2020, to go into Malibu Madness where we do kind of a high level overview of the show so far what we like about it, the best moments through the structure of a 64 team

single elimination tournament Oof! Let's do this. So we just finished recording our conversation about what to put in the brackets, which is a Plus Expenses episode for our Patreon listeners and turned out to go a little longer than I think we'd anticipated. I feel like I already sound like I've been talking for a while and we rushed through a couple of things because we feel like we already talked about them. And, uh, we rushed through a couple of things cause we feel like we already talked about them.

You know, we'll do our best to hit all the high points, but if you want to hear a real deep agonizing over certain picks, uh, you can go, uh, go over to our Patreon and check out that episode. I'll also point out that, uh, everything that we're choosing is from our back catalog of episodes that we have reviewed. So if you really need to know what we think about it better than we actually know, you can go back and listen to the episode. I think generally we're pretty good about remembering like the things that we picked are generally things that we have a pretty good memory of. Right. Cause there are things that stayed with us.

There are some things that in the details, you know, we'll be putting in some audio to, you know, get the actual thing as opposed to our bad paraphrasing of a moment and stuff like that so uh hopefully it'll all sound okay so that's what we're doing so uh if you want to visually check out our brackets uh that's a public post over at our patreon um so you can see our seating and how everything is is uh falling out we have our eight categories split into our four regions because

why not go all the way with the metaphor yeah our region one is the critics choice region where we will be looking at the best episode bracket versus the most rockfordishness uh which is a term that we've uh was was coined for us by by emily um Emily in the same way that a Doctor Who episode has who-ishness. A Rockford Files episode has... I think I started talking about the umami of Rockfordishness, the chewy, satisfying kind of aspect. Region two is Jim's World, where we will be looking at the best core character

versus the best Jim Fast Talk to get him into or out of a situation. Our region three is Gas and Gangsters, where we're going to look at the best car chase versus the best villain. I think that will be a fun one for sure. And then our region four, Marks and Gaffs, the best con versus the best dialogue from the Rockford Files. Excellent. So if you couldn't tell, our intention here is not to establish some kind of absolute objective hierarchy. It's to give us a framework to kind of get into the weeds about what we love about the

show in kind of a silly way, because obviously these things don't compare in any like. Yeah. Objective, narratively important sense necessarily. We're just trying to find another way to celebrate the Rockford Files. All right. Where do you want to start? Well, we could just start at the top, the best episode. That way we don't have to have that loom over us throughout the whole thing.

What episodes did we seed into our best episode category? So we have, as in all categories, we have eight episodes here. We've pitted them against each other using the IMDB ratings. This is the one area where we had the least amount of finesse in deciding who was up against who. In the first two slots we have chicken little is a little chicken versus gear jammers we've decided that two parters we're going to count both parts one and two together yeah uh chicken little is a little chicken versus

gear jammers parts one and two uh the next two slots are so help me God versus A Quickie Nirvana. Then we have The Queen of Peru versus The Trees, The Bees, and T.T. Flowers, parts one and two. And finally, White on White and Nearly Perfect versus The Paper Palace. So, like, there's some nice synergy going on with these categories. Like, the White on White and Nearly perfect is obviously a Lance White episode. Paper Palace being a Rita episode and just pitting those two against each other is heartbreaking, but also just thematically correct.

And I think like, so help me God versus a quickie Nirvana is going to be our most contentious of these. I suspect. That's the thing. These are all very good episodes. Hello, listeners. We really appreciate you being here,

and we want to make sure that you know that you can become a patron over at patreon.com slash 200ADAY. In addition to episode previews and access to the 200ADAY Rockford Files file spreadsheet, our patrons get plus expenses, a bonus podcast where we talk about movies we're watching, books we're reading, and games we're playing. 200 a day will remain free to all for as long as we do it.

But if you want to help support us and get access to the new plus expenses audio feed, you can become a patron 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 Jim likes games on Twitter. Shane Liebling. If you play games online, you know, you should check out his free dice rolling app. Roll for your party at roll for your dot party. Jay Adan. Check out his amazing miniature painting over at jayadan.com.

Dylan Winslow, Dale Norwood, Dave P., Dale Church, and finally, big thanks to Detective Patrons. Check them out on Twitter. Eric Antenor, at Antenor. Brian Pereira, at Thermaware. Bill Anderson, at BillAnd88. And of course, Richard Haddam, at Richard Haddam. We follow them too, at 200Pod.

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. Should we start making our argument? Should we start at the top? Yeah, let's start at the top. Alright, Chicken Little is a little chicken

versus Gear Jammers. This one is my hardest because these were both on my list right away we've put me in a boat that's sinking and i can only save angel or rocky and clearly i save rocky but like so here's the thing there's two there's two kind of ways that that'll help me think about these these real heartbreaker ones which is some of them are kind of represented in other categories as well. Yeah. Because

shockingly, the very good episodes tend to be full of very good elements. So there's that. But also, here's a question. The Loser, is it going away forever? Do we never get to watch that episode again? Or...

Like, how high are the stakes for these choices yeah that's uh that is that's well we'll let the uh the listener decide for themselves okay but we encourage the listener to set stakes so we're looking at a great comedic episode versus a great uh relationship yeah character episode. Chicken Little is centered on Angel, of course. Gear Jammers is centered on Rocky, of course. I think my first impulse was like, oh, Chicken Little, obviously. That episode's great.

But it is, as I said, it is one that's represented pretty heavily in the other categories. Yeah. the other categories yeah and i think gear jammers might be more unique as a real deep dive into rocky's life oh god it just it's so hard i i was leaning towards chicken little uh for the maybe the opposite reason why you're leaning towards gear jammers there you were making a case for gear jammers because i feel like chicken little is a little chicken is also an episode that I would be like, Oh, you're new to the Rockford files.

Watch this one. Right. Like, which isn't to say that that's the best criteria to choose best. Best is so such a blank. Right. Thing. But like,

if somebody came to me and said, where should I start with the Rockford files? I would not feel like I steered them wrong with Chicken Little is a Little Chicken. That said, Gear Jammers just has a big spot in my heart. I love watching Jim discover all these things about his dad that he doesn't quite know. It's so tough. For me, it would be an even tougher choice if it was just gear jammers episode one which is weird i don't want to diss gear jammers episode two but i have a one is more

like two two two is where like the plot really kicks in and one is full of mystery where you're like finding out all these things about rocky that you never knew yeah which is kind of wonderful how do you choose here's the other thing i'm i'm not looking ahead. So I'm not like, what is this going to face off against? That's outside my purview here. I think that might, though, change my selection if I were to do that. But I think the idea of, oh, you're new to the Rockford Files, you should watch this episode puts Chicken Little over the top for me. Alright, let's do that. Yeah. We're okay saying goodbye to Gear Jammers and Rocky?

Oh, yeah. I just can't knock Chicken Little out in the first round. That just seems wrong. We knew we were doing this. We knew we were going to hate ourselves at the end of this. So our first winner of Malibu Madness 2020 is the episode Chicken Little is a little chicken.

All right. What's our next pair? We have So Help Me God versus A Quickie Nirvana. I'm just going to every time I'm going to say I love both of these episodes. So let's get that out of the way. Yeah. Yeah. So Quickie Nirvana.

So they're both kind of social issue episodes. Yeah. Quickie Nirvana is much more personal. It's about the woman Sky who is trying to find herself in all these like hippie kind of semi like spiritual kind of endeavors that are all kind of excuses for her not to really address her own problems so help me god is a more external issue where it's very specifically about the problems with the uh grand jury system and keeping people in indefinite confinement if they're in contempt of court before a grand jury uh yeah just context for maybe people who have not listened to us back when we did these episodes what this comes down to for me is uh well one could say so help me god changed the world so it's got something going for it there uh but that's not i don't feel like that's criteria for what's going on here it did have an actual effect in the conversation around grand jury yeah trials

in the 70s but i think that one of the things that is really remarkable about so help me god is not that necessarily that it took that on but it took that on and made a an excellent episode out of it right like it's easy to do an episode about something and do it wrong or just kind of half half-ass it but this one took something that is actually really frustrating and hard to watch happen and made it a very entertaining bit of television yeah it's not a it's not a saccharine after-school special it's a good episode with good acting and a good plot that also is addressing this issue that said like quickie nirvana is also like uh just a well done episode and and like an amazing characterization of a character she's played for laughs but not

entirely and not ultimately like the ending to that episode is yeah it's sad it's ultimately very tragic to me it comes down to like how each one of them handled what they were given. And that doesn't solve our problem. They both do it well. So again, by the, oh, you're new to the Rockford Files, you should watch this criteria. I think I would pick Quickie Nirvana. Yeah, definitely. I think I would pick Quickie Nirvana. Yeah, definitely.

I mean, we specifically put off So Help Me God for a while. We wanted to do it right. And we had a great guest. We had Jess Banks with us for that episode, which was great because she was able to give us, go into some of the real world issues issues around advocating for people in the justice, you know, being caught up in the justice system and stuff, which is, so that was a really, so as one of our episodes, I think that's one of my favorites

that we've done. Yeah. But that's not the criteria. No. All right, I'll go with you on Quickie Nirvana. I don't know. I was starting to talk myself

out of it though, because I'm like, I don't know. Again, are we knocking So Help Me God out in the first round? See, that's, that, though, because I don't know. Again, are we knocking So Help Me God out in the first round? See, that is really, it's a titan. So two things. One, it is represented elsewhere in other brackets, where Quicken Nirvana is not, actually.

Also, So Help Me God is a great episode of television. Quicken Nirvana is a great episode of the Rockford Files. Yeah. Like it has more Rockfordishness to it, I think, in the way that like, it's really about Jim's reaction to Skye. It's about him trying to take care of her, but also getting her to cut her bullsh**. I do.

I want to say, so help me God, but I also want to say that Quickie Nirvana goes the distance. Like this is Rocky 1 and apollo creed wins uh but uh it it doesn't matter because uh rocky made it to the end and everyone remembers it that rocky one i say let's go quickie nirvana okay i agree yeah i think it's it it is more of a rockford if this was a list of great episodes of 70s television yeah it would probably go the other way. But since it's about the Rockford Files, I think Quiggy Nirvana is more Rockford-y.

My nonsense excuse is if we don't do it now, we're going to have to have that same conversation for every single time it comes up. All right. What's our next matchup? This is the Queen of Peru versus the Trees, the Bees, and T.T. Flowers. And my knee-jerk reaction on this one is the Queen of Peru. I just remember moments from it better than the Trees, the Bees, and T.T. Flowers. Though I think that now I can remember many moments from the Trees, the Bees, and T.T. Flowers. Oh, God.

The Queen of Peru has a wonderful combination well they both kind of do they're both really well cast yeah the family from indiana like they're super well cast tt flowers is really well cast uh that like character actor tt flowers is great because it's also about rocky yeah but queen of peru is just this like perfect little gem of rockford files humor yeah it's about money there's like the weird gang from the uk um yes provides a little bit of like pathos because there's the guy who got shot and he's like just lying in their back seat while they're trying to find the jewel yeah the cb radio action let's not agonize over this more than we need to i think we're takes this one but trees bees and tt flowers is probably my favorite two-parter so i

will leave that out there for people to think about um and also the end sequence of the first episode where they're busting tt flowers out of the elder home oh yeah it's one of the great sequences but queen of peru i think has the edge here and so far i'd just like to point out this pattern of ours where like in each category we've picked ones that we would also just say oh you haven't seen the rockford files yet yeah here you go i mean which i think is a good criteria for what's the best episode of the Rockford Files. Yeah. Final pair up in this category is White on White and Nearly Perfect versus Paper Palace. This is Lance White versus Rita. This isn't those characters, but it might as well be. And I, because of that, I am leaning towards Rita, which is not how the IMDB people went.

But this one might win it on the dinner scene alone. But also just there's, oh, I mean, this one, is this the one that they won awards for as well? Rita Moreno won an Emmy for this one. Yeah. And Juanita Bartlett is, we talked about this in our plus expenses we're really not trying to pit real life people against each other right we're not trying to pit this actor versus that actor this writer versus that writer that said uh I mean this is another well they're both made of great cast and crew and stuff yeah I guess my counterpoints would be I think Paper Palace is benefiting a little bit from recency bias.

We've talked about it much more recently than White on White. And they're both kind of showing a different side of Jim. So, like, Lance White brings out Jim's, like, down-to-earthness and his exasperation with people who have all these wonderful things happen to them in their lives. While in Paper Palace, Jim is meeting Rita and getting to know her for the first time. And we kind of see his empathy and his warmth with her. I will also say that we see some good Dennis and some good Peggy. In Paper Palace, all around, we get into characters in some good dennis and some good peggy like there's in paper palaces like all around we get like into characters in some good ways yeah that i'm not saying we don't in white

on white because i can't remember if we do or don't white on white is really like it's really the the lance white and jim show um lance white finds out everything he needs to know when he needs to know it. And that's the joke. Like it's a very meta episode, right? Like it's written to be commentary on itself. And Jim is kind of self is aware of that. But Lance is not self-aware.

And that's like where the drama, like that's where the friction comes in. So I guess going back to the recommend, this is another one where like 70s television episodes. I think we talked about this in that episode. I was like, this is a great episode of television. Yeah. While Paper Palace is like a great Rockford Files episode because it has all those elements of the people around Rockford, the people he knows, him trying to like maintain peace between Peggy and Dennis and Rita.

I think we can't undersell the Rita Dennis relationship. Yeah. I'm leaning, leaning paper palace. I don't know how you're leaning. I've talked myself into paper palace. All right. I had,

I had made up my mind that if we had been in a deadlock, we would just go with the IMDB ratings. So I'm glad you agree. Right. Well, so why don't white and nearly perfect benefits from the Tom Selleck effect, right? Like people are like, oh, Tom Selleck's in this. Oh, he's great, which I understand. But Rita Moreno as Rita Capovit is in more episodes and is more Rockford-y

of a character. Yeah, no, Lance White is interesting because like you were saying, when he's there, it's more meta. It's more as opposed to more media. See what I did there? But yeah, I think that Paper Palace just noses ahead a little bit on that one. All right. All right. So our winners in the first round for best episode are Chicken Little is a Little Chicken, Quickie Nirvana, Queen of Peru, and The Paper Palace.

Yeah. All right. Let's go into most Rockfordishness. Most Rockfordishness. Yeah, let's do it. So these are both specific moments from episodes that we feel are just extremely Rockford-y or slightly larger scale elements that occur in multiple episodes that are like, yeah, very Rockford-y. Yeah. Like I think we left out some super obviously Rockford-ish, like we didn't say the Firebird. And we left characters,

like main characters are their own category. So like Angel's not in here. This is the most wild card category. Let's do it. First pairing, we've got the business card printing press versus Jim revealing in 2 into 5.56 won't go that he once stole a tank while he was in the army in Korea. In the second pair up in this category, have uh rockford and beth their whole deal versus uh the ice rink hostage money exchange from feeding frenzy in the third we have uh the proofreader it was in local man eaten by a newspaper yeah he's just in the one like scene yeah if you're going to keep nosing

around here you have to talk to the proofreader and he's this like huge gorilla of a guy at this like crooked newspaper publisher yeah uh versus uh the chili which has too much garlic in it that jim has to keep eating in uh the attractive nuisance and then the final pair up is uh the rockford and ned baity and their handshaking sequence from profit and loss where they keep one upping each other with how much how strong their grip is versus the hot dog scene in that same episode or a pair of episodes profit loss is a two-parter and i can't remember which part either of these is. I think they're both in the first part, I think. But it doesn't matter. So yeah, we end up with Profit and Loss

versus Profit and Loss at the end here. The hot dog scene being the scene where Jim is trying to get information from a stockbroker about what might be going on and he's doing it over some hot dogs. And well, we'll talk more about it when we get to this pairing. So Leon Fielder is the

Leon Fielder character. So it's a wide, this is a wide open one. So we're going to start off with Jim being a tank thief versus his business card printing press. Yeah. So I think I brought up the tank thief one just because it was this,

I feel like it's a moment. It's from two and a five 56 won't go, which isn't the greatest episode, but has a lot about Jim's background in Korea. Yeah. His old commander is, I don't remember if he dies or if he's killed or it's made to look like an accident that he dies.

And then his daughter is trying to find out what happened. And then there's this whole scheme about uh stealing stuff from the army base something like that but yeah so jim has all this past revealed to us as the audience and one of the things is that he he was given lots of weird jobs like the one time he stole a tank and we never hear of it again on the one hand we have uh sergeant james rockford wounded in action silver star then six months later we have pfc james rockford busted for trading uh 400 cases of c rations for a north korean tank is this going on much longer and then instead of being sent to the stockade for conspiring with the enemy receive a battlefield promotion to sergeant again. It probably doesn't say that Colonel Bowie asked me to scrounge a tank that we needed to blow our way out of a pocket.

I'm sure Colonel Bowie intended for you to scrounge one of our tanks from one of our units. As I remember, he wasn't terribly specific. And I like this because this seems to parallel James Gardner's actual history in the military. I don't know if he ever stole a tank, but he was in some sort of acquisition situations. But it's up against kind of a titan here. Yeah. Like if we don't include the Firebird and we don't include, you know, characters or things like that, it's not iconic. But the first time you realize that he has a tiny printing press to freshly print up each of the business cards he needs for all of his various little cons, it's a moment of sheer wonder and joy.

Yeah, it's like, oh, of course he does. This is perfect for him. Up to in the movies where he starts using a little dot matrix printer in his car to print individual business cards. I mean, yeah, I think the business card printing press has to win this one. Of all the iconic Jim Rockford things that we didn't list this is this is yeah one to pick yeah i'm actually surprised just now it occurs to me that i'm surprised we didn't do the gun in the cookie jar it's too late now this is this is what we have to work with didn't make it to the semi-finals or whatever these are called all right so, so the next one is, this one's going to be ridiculously hard for me.

Rockford and Beth, their whole deal versus the ice rink hostage money exchange from Feeding Frenzy. And much like the previous one, like Feeding Frenzy is a fun episode, but not like one of the ones that we are like super in love with or whatever. But this moment in it, it's just wonderful.

This is like, if you recall, there's a public ice skating rink. People are ice skating. They've arranged to make a hostage exchange for the money in the middle of this rink. And as they're doing it, people stop ice skating and just watch it happen as these mobsters and Jim

walk out on the ice without skates on. And, uh, there's carousel like carnival music playing. Yeah. Uh, there's an accountant with a calculator to make sure that the money is correct.

Um, it's yeah, it's just chef kiss. I think in our episode, we talked about how, while this isn't the greatest episode of the Rockford files, this this might be one of the greatest Rockford Files scenes in the entire series. It's just so good. It's so good.

It's so good. Yeah. That said. That's up against Jim and Beth, their whole deal. I think the reason why this is most Rockfordishness for me is that, like, this relationship resists the gravity of all tv romances right like this is not any other tv romance this their relationship immediately feels real and lived in like not you know fresh and all googly eye over each other it's not the center of everything uh they often are at odds and they

aren't sure where they are with each other uh but it's yeah i don't know there's just something about it that's very very rockford for me and not uh of any other television show and it's complicated by the fact that she's not in the last season and there's she does come back in the movies right she came back in yeah in the third movie i think oh yeah yeah yeah but it's you know it's not a happy ending it's not um yeah there's no resolution yeah it's it's it feels like a real life thing uh so yeah the only thing or i guess the main thing that is tipping me away from jim and beth their whole deal is that beth is in the character bracket and yeah i feel like you know that kind of is part of her as a character i mean

if this was up against something else i don't know i just feel like the the ice rick exchange is just so perfect it's it's hard for me to toss it out in the first round. I am split enough that I will defer to you on this one. And to all the listeners who were rooting for Rockford and Beth their whole deal, you can blame Nathan. Yep, yep, that's my fault. I think maybe that'll lend in her favor in her bracket.

We'll see. Yeah. Maybe I'll shift some credit over there. She doesn't need it. But we'll discuss that when we get to that bracket. It's just kind of like, oh, you want to watch a scene from the Rockford Files? Here you go. Yeah.

Okay, what's next? We've got the proofreader in Local Man Eaten by Newspaper versus Too Much Garlic in the Chili from The Attractive News. So these are both gags. chilly from the attractive so these are both gags I picked the proofreader mainly because he's the most memorable of this idea of the like the heavy that's kind of a joke but Jim

has to take seriously because there's a risk of physical danger what do you think I think he's telling the truth and I'm you want to keep this ape off of me what's the matter you afraid you might hurt him look if a 14 year old girl can trash a Kodiak bear, I'd kick him out of here. Hey, hey, not way.

I know my way out, pal. I think that that's a fair play there. I'd like to expand it out to it being an instance of a greater, of a larger thing. It being a instance of a greater, of a larger thing. I am so drawn to Too Much Garlic in the Chili, though, because it's just a good bit. It's just a good bit. It's a good bit. It also involves, like, Jim and Rocky, because it's like Rocky's friend is the chef. Yeah.

And Rocky doesn't want to tell him that there's too much garlic. So Jim isn't going to tell him. He just reaches into that powdered garlic and throws it in. Yeah. All right. I think we should just go with our gut on this right off the bat. Yeah. Go with the Jim and the garlic.

Yeah. Not to undersell the proofreader. All right. So now we have profit and loss versus profit and loss. We have the handshake sequence with Leon Fielder, played by Ned Beatty, versus the hot dog scene. Yeah, and that's with Arnold Love is the character. And he's like the accountant guy. For some way, we can have just two meaty hands sculpted out of hot dogs.

Okay, I'm going to make a pitch for the hot dog scene. This may not be the most Rockfordishness, but it's the most 200-a-dayishness of all the scenes. This is where you and I and all of our joys come together in a single moment. It's Jim working out the nitty gritty, the nuance of some weird financial thing. It's Arnold Love telling Jim exactly what his time is worth. Right. So that's why he's getting such a deal, getting this advice for just the price of a hot dog.

Yes. And it's done over food. It's specifically done over a hot dog where they're standing. Chili dogs, in fact. Chili thing, if I remember right. Yeah. That said, I do want to do offer some argument for the handshake because that is a wonderful moment of status play.

Right. The handshake is all about status play, which is something we talk about a lot as a well-handled element of Rockford narratives. Yeah. The scripts are always looking at status and raising status and dropping status and all the ways that Jim takes advantage of status. And that whole sequence is like each trying to get the best of the other, but they're being polite with their words, but their hands are really telling the real story. And you get exactly the encapsulation of like,

Jim will let this guy think that he's winning until the moment that Jim is ready to turn the tables on him. Would you let go of my hand? This is very childish. What? Oh. It is, isn't it? We spend a pretty good amount of time in our episode

talking about the sequence because it's like just so well blocked uh blocked i guess and like just well done yeah yeah i mean my vote is for the hot dog scene but it isn't this is a close one i guess for me since the category is rockfordishness that is more rockfordy a drama over a handshake isn't necessarily rockfordy it sounds like you're talking yourself back into the handshake isn't necessarily Rockford-y. It sounds like you're talking yourself back into the handshake as you're going along there. No, I think I'm with you. I think I, when we initially did it, I was like, oh, I think this is one of my, one I'm going to go to bat for.

But as you've made your pitch for the hot dog scene, I'm on board with it having more, as I said, Rockford umami. It's a chewier yes bit so uh that leaves us then in this category the the winners being the business card printing press the tiny business card printing press the ice ring hostage money exchange uh too much garlic in the chili and the hot dog scene and uh i think that that's that next set of matchups. It's a spicy mix. It's a spicy chili. Yes.

Okay. All right. Let's hurt ourselves. On to region two, Jim's World. This category may actually be not the easiest necessarily, but maybe the quickest to get through with the best core character. Best core character, we have Rocky versus Rita. Oof. We have rocky versus rita oof we have beth versus billings

and i'm just i'm just gonna go ahead and give beth the win on that one but we'll talk about it dennis versus gandy an angel versus the combo chapman and deal uh we talk about this in our plus expenses but uh it's not that chapman and deal are the same character, but they fit kind of the same niche. And it would be difficult for us to favor one over the other. Should we start with the most heartbreaking category of them all? Rocky versus Rita. It's the heart of gold versus the heart of gold. Two people that you most want to have over for dinner yeah if you if if this one if this was

the boat and there was it was sinking and i can only save one of them i would just go down with the boat this world isn't worth living in yeah okay that said rocky is more central to the rockford files than rita is yeah he's more central to jim as a character and we already gave rita a win with the paper palace yeah i literally just scrolled up to remember how that went down i'm with you it was rita's bad luck in this category to be uh it's everyone's bad luck in this category yeah this is the most unfair category yeah it will be more difficult next round well anyways let's go on to the next one we have beth versus billings billings thank you for showing yeah we billings this was this was like we want to honor the fact that billings is the greatest minor character um yeah he gets a line

occasionally and it's just so nice. In the movies he's been promoted, I think he's Sergeant Billings in the movies. I feel like putting him against Beth is a little bit like giving him the swift death he deserves. Instead of dragging it out.

He doesn't need to go farther. You lost to Beth. Then it's fine. Most of these people will lose to Beth. But okay. Dennis versus Dandy. This is slightly tougher, but I love Dennis so much. Yeah, it's hard. This is kind of a...

This whole category is a little... Maybe it was a little misconstrued. Maybe this was a mistake to frame it this way. Really, there's like actual core characters. Are we really not going to pass them? Yeah. Or maybe we should have done the matchups a little differently. I don't know.

I guess the other thing with Gandy is just the first Gandy episode. When we did that and had not remembered how that first episode went down. He's a complicated character. Yeah. Yeah. Gandy is a great character. But that first episode went down. It's a complicated character. Yeah. Yeah. Game is a great character, but that first episode makes things difficult. Yeah.

And it's like, what are we going to knock Dennis out? No. Right. Yeah. And this last matchup, I think, I think subconsciously I just did it so that I could give Angel a win over

the cops. Uh-huh. I mean, I think it's worth talking about how we have Chapman and Deal kind of in this, because they're in that same slot. Though overall, like, Chapman is in more of the episodes. Yeah. He's a stronger presence.

He's a more filled-out character as we go along. So, like, if we were doing Chapman versus Deal, I would go Chapman. But, yeah, this is a necessary role in the structure of the show. But we can give Angel a win over the cops. What are we going to do? Not do that? For that one moment, he gets to win. Ironically, next time he's going up against the cop.

Okay. I don't think I used ironically correct there. So yeah, shockingly, Angel, Rocky, Dennis, and Beth are our winners for core character. If you went to the bookies and you didn't bet on this, you deserve that loss. All right, over to our other side of this region with best gym fast talk. Yes. All right, so this one probably is going to take a little bit more explanation. This is one of the categories that we did that was a little hard for us to

nail down what we actually meant by the category. But we've got three pair ups that are very specific moments. And then we have at the end of the category, just two broader concepts of how he does his fast talk. The first one is in the competitive edge. He's talking his way into this health club. The private health club that something mysterious is going on. I forget exactly what he's hired to do.

But this is the one where he ends up in the one flew over the cuckoo's nest like situation. Yeah. Yeah. If you remember that episode. But the specific fast talk is he pretends to be a newspaper reporter to get into the club because he's doing a story or whatever. First, he gets in through the gate with a wallet gimmick that I just remembered where he gets into the gate by saying that he left his wallet and he needs to go in to get it. And he doesn't want to trouble anyone to come down and bring it to him or whatever. And then once he's on the grounds, he claims to be a newspaper

reporter. He uses the fact that he could publish a damaging story to get leverage for them to tell him things, quote, off off the record and those are the things he actually wants to know because he's not actually going to publish any stories right yeah but i just remembered that as being like a really uh elegant con uh or elegant piece of of strategy for jim to be like i'll threaten you with the thing you think i am to get the information that i actually want that is not relevant at all to what I'm telling you I'm here to do. Just because they belong to the same private sex club doesn't necessarily mean the indicted ambassador and the councilman are friends, but the association cannot be denied. I'll own your newspaper if I see that in print.

This is not a sex club. I don't want to cause any problems problems i just want to get some background on very broader now his wife tells me he's a devotee of yours uh you're like a father figure to him hardly we consult only in the areas of diets vitamins and exercise and the councilman's landfill briefing that is uh health related also and we talk off the record sure sure yeah it's a nice misdirect and it's uh it's great in this category because it is um him uh thinking on his feet changing adapting to the situation uh and the second what it's up against is from just another polish wedding in this episode he's trying to find somebody who has inherited money that they don't know about right right the interesting thing about well there's many interesting things about

this episode but one of the fun things about this episode is that we are actually just getting jim's lackluster day-to-day grind of his job intermixed with all the what's going on with gabby and gandy uh and this is a moment where he's talking to a florist because he knows that there is he wants to find out who's been putting flowers on a grave yeah yeah and he's posing as like like some service that does it and he's taking over the account and so he needs to know like what flowers they've sent and all of it is to get an address right he wants he's trying to find out where this, the mother of the person he thinks he's trying to find is buried. Cause he has a name, like a last name and that's it.

Yeah. And I, and I think what I really like about this con and it's a thing, I don't think we talk about a whole lot, but Jim just has this encyclopedic knowledge of like retail jobs, right? encyclopedic knowledge of like retail jobs right like like he knows what their concerns are and their you know uh what how to do the day-to-day patter of them and whatnot and so this is a great example of that where he just is like this seems legit he just makes it up but it feels and seems legit our service gets back to the essentials unfortunately the relatives of the deceased can't visit the graves personally that doesn't mean that they don't want

their love and sentiments expressed in a personal way what would you like me to do i suppose i should look at the accounts and see what you've been supplying. And I may want to make a change. Of course. Of course. And he just skates along with just enough authenticity to get a look at the, like, order pad, which has the address. And that's all he needs to know. And then he gets out of there, like, as the florist is starting to question, like, wait a second. Like, this story doesn't really hang together.

And he's like, all right, thanks so much bye yeah as soon as he gets what he needs he's ready to peace out i feel these are both fast talks that i don't remember all the details because we haven't seen them in a while uh but they just kind of stuck with me where are you feeling i'm leaning a little bit more towards uh the florist one and it might be just because that one's a little bit more vivid in my brain but like i think i may i'm leaning towards the florist one because it of that element of like this is the thing he has to do he's just going to do it and he's just going to put in in as much effort that needs to be done and then just get out all right do you have a you have a preference i mean i think I was slightly leaning towards

the competitive edge one just because the structure of it was so good. But at the end of the day, he doesn't. I mean, he finds out information that he's looking for, but then he also gets drugged and gets shipped off to this facility in Georgia or whatever.

So it's not necessarily successful. I don't know if that's a criteria, though. I don't know if it is, but I'll go with the florist one. I think I'm willing to go with your gut on this one. All right. So next up, we have Pastorial Prime Pick. He does this trick with a walkie-talkie. so this one is the least fast talkie of them right

yeah this is more like a clever thing that he does and this um we might be getting some details wrong and i didn't have a chance to review the scene before we did this oh yeah from what i remember it's where the like crooked cop kind of catches like kind of i don't remember if he pulls him over or he comes upon him while jim's doing something else or whatever but he yeah um is in a situation where it's like jim versus this cop who clearly has ill intentions um and there's this whole bit where he leaves his walkie-talkie out and jim is able to turn it on and off surreptitiously and hear what he's talking about inside the car and that gives him information about like the real person that he needs to figure out,

like the real bad news going on in, uh, Pastoria. Um, and yeah, so that, that whole bit has stuck with me. Uh,

I'll review the scene and we will, if, if this goes through to the next round, we'll definitely review these scenes before our next, uh, our next episode. So that one is up against, uh,

the reincarnation of Angie. And I actually need a refresher on this one too so this is the this is one where he calls ahead i remember this one better um so this is where uh the reincarnation of angie he's been hired kind of by angie whose brother gave her a mysterious phone call and then disappeared and turns out he's been murdered yeah um but he's this like stockbroker or whatever and jim is going to his firm to find out more and so he sets up his own cover hi susan susan this is janet the switchboard do you have a mr jim rockford from the county tax assessor's office there okay well thanks thanks anyway If he shows up, tell him there's a Mr. Stovall from his office looking for him Okay He's not there Well, Rockford had better get on the ball

Or he's going to be balancing figures for another agency Mr. Gorman's on to him already Mr. Gorman? Mr. Gorman Look, I'll be in the coffee room if he shows up. Oh, boy, oh, boy. I am really sorry. I got hung up in traffic. Are you Mr. Rockford from the county tax office? Right, right. Why is it when you're going down the freeway, there's an accident on the other side of the divider. Everybody in your lane stops to look at the accident. What,

see blood or something? Mr. Rockford, apparently there's somebody from your office who's been looking for you downstairs oh that's just stove all he's supposed to run the tapes out of the accounting department anyway oh uh and that's establishes his credibility enough to get him into the room he needs to get into where he gets to talk to the secretary for uh uh the guy who's dead who he then cold reads and keeps kind of pushing to give all of the dirt and all the gossip that's been going on that she knows she shouldn't be telling but he's there as like an auditor or whatever and

he's very like well you know if that's happening or just between you and me etc etc and I think he also gives her a good dose of blather at the end but the whole calling ahead to set up his own alibi, I think, is really the nice bit there. I think that's the one that I'm leaning towards. It's so hard to make these decisions because that was the one that I was grasping at.

Because if you listen to the Plus Expenses episode, it was one where I couldn't remember what episode it was in, but I could remember what was happening in the scene to set it up. And that definitely stuck with me. Yeah, I'll go with that. It's fresher in my memory as well. Yeah. And I remember we really, really liked the woman that he's playing with in that scene. She was really great. All right.

And next up in this category, two more specific ones from Hoof Boy. up in this category two more specific ones uh from hoof boy uh the very first 200 a day episode tall woman in red wagon uh in this one so this is where he pretends to be a funeral director and he puts this sort of pressure on and this is uh i think this one very much sticks with me because this is the first time you and i actually started dissecting the fast talk right this is he uses this funeral directory uh persona to put some pressure on people with one of his printed cards he this is he uses the the printing press in this episode this one's good because it has like all of these elements together and i do think it sits at a high spot in my mind because again it was the first where we actually started dissecting it.

He's telling the person that he's got this job. He's a funeral director. He needs something done. This person shouldn't do the thing that he wants them to do. But also, it doesn't really matter that much to this person. And Jim is able to present slightly more of a troubling, like he's like, Oh, I'm going to be in real trouble if this happens. You know, that kind of thing.

So that's why this one stuck out to me. Now it's up against, uh, six and stones may break your bones, but waterberry will bury you here on out known as waterberry. Uh, it's with all the PIs that they're trying to figure out who's taking out the PIs in town.

Um, it's just private firm, Waterbury. There's this big climactic scene where they're getting the files from their offices. And Vern is on the roof throwing beer bottles around and pretending like he's going to jump. And then Jim and the other detective played by Cleveland Little are coming out at the bottom. And they've gotten the files or whatever and there's two cops that are in the lobby hold it what are you two doing here where's the nearest liquor store i said hold it answer me the man on the roof has demanded more beer now we're gonna

get it you two were up there we're police psychiatrists now stop wasting time i gotta get over the man's home and coach his wife there's barry's wine cellar near camden okay you get on that hank i'll uh get a black and white go over the man's home code three now he wants rocky mountain brand and then literally as they walk out the door they start to seem to be like wait a second but it's too late yeah and i think that one's got my vote in this one oh yeah because i know what's coming up in the next uh the very next pairing okay uh i think i think the first one in this pairing the the tall woman in red wagon is uh it is made up of all the parts sure right that we want to like celebrate but this one is like part of it is just the gall of suggesting that they need to get him alcohol yeah it's like

it's just ridiculous enough that you're like, okay. And then it gives them just the time they need. Yeah. It might be a little bit of recency just because it's been so long since we saw Tall Woman and Red Wagon. But I will throw out a shout out for his, he has a line in there where he's saying

that he's from Mahogany Hall, the Oakland library of slumber chambers which is one of the great rockford files lines oh damn it it's in our twitter bio i may be turning turning around on this well i can be convinced as jim fast talk i don't know i kind of want to give it to to tall woman in a red wagon just to give give us the excuse to revisit that sure it's been so long and we can see if it holds up. And if it doesn't hold up, it'll go down in the next round. You convinced me.

And then I don't have to say Waterberry next round. And the final pairing in this category is the less concrete takes. Yeah. The more global. These are more global categories of Fast Talk. Yeah. And they are the what we're calling the time-pressured working man. This is when Jim, much like we described in the previous category, comes in and just presents himself as just another working schlub who has concerns.

He has a boss breathing down his neck and he has a time pressure. And if you could just help another working man out yeah that would be great uh versus the bureaucratic words view and this is where jim comes in and just starts presenting himself with more authority by saying nonsense that sounds like yeah of course this is like i i need to have a, an X 28 filled out and blah, blah, blah. Yeah. Just as you were talking a couple examples that we haven't already talked about, uh, for the time press, uh, working man, I, my mind went to, um, one with the racing one, just, just by accident. Yeah. So my mind goes to, uh, just by accident, which is not a great episode, but there's a bit where he's using a magazine

subscription to track down and at a new address and so he calls and then poses as being like someone else in the publisher's office and just needs this one favor because you know how this publisher is and blah blah blah um and gets it yeah um and then the bureaucratic word spew in The Trees, the Bees, and T.T. Flowers, he does that. He's kind of posing as a doctor or as an auditor of doctors or something to, like, get in. Yeah.

It's okay, Steve. Dr. Chris and I have an understanding. Of course, I still have to go through the motions, so I guess we can start by checking the BU quotient against the tattle sheet, huh? BU quotient? What is this? Are you new here? Bed units, bed units. Bed units? I'm just the van driver usually, sir, and the mechanic, too.

I only work the desk on Tuesdays and Thursdays, so... Don't even teach the basics anymore. Let me see your room sheet, please. Uh-huh. Okay, okay, that's perfect of course i knew it would be i'll start with jay wing he just spews out all these things that clearly are not real but yes get him past the desk yeah this is a really tough one they're both very rockfordy yeah they're it's they both illustrate just the skill of his in in coming at it from two different categories like like i mentioned before one of the things that makes the working man thing really work is that he just has this knowledge of like how every job sucks and the the other one is just he's dealt with authority enough that he knows how to sound it.

God, it's so tough. So we kind of already have two time-pressed working men and one bureaucratic board spew represented in our other picks. Does that tip you? Maybe. I mean, why not? I feel like I'm so even, whatever it takes. Then I'm going to, oh man. What's more Jim?

That's the thing. They're both like equally, they're like two halves of his whole deal. Yeah. I am more drawn to the time press working man because that is literally what his con is about. Like the time press working man you're supposed to identify with. The bureaucrat you're supposed to fear. And so I identify with the time press working man you're supposed to identify with, the bureaucrat you're supposed to fear. And so I identify with the time press working man, but that's me

just falling for the con and me falling for both cons. I'm going to go with time press working man. I think that's more who, that's closer to who Jim really is. Because at the end of the day, he is a time press working man when he's doing these things and while the bureaucratic word spew is more of like taking on, I'm overthinking this.

I just like it a little bit more. So we'll give that the win. That's what we'll do. Yeah, this one would be really easy to overthink. And also, I would note that this is the most ridiculous choice to make. All right. All right. the most ridiculous choice to make.

Alright. Alright. So our winners in Best Jim Fast Talk are the Florist Patter from Just Another Polish Wedding, the Oak Lime Slumber Chambers from Tall Woman and Red Wagon, the Giving Yourself an Alibi plus the Cold Read from Reincarnation of Angie, and the

concept of the time-pressed Working Man Fast Talk. Yes. So on to Region 3, Gas and Gangsters. Yeah. So here we have the best car chase versus the best villain. So the car chases was kind of interesting because I think we both had specific moments, but it was hard to remember what episodes they were in. Yeah.

So we did have to do a little bit of digging. Some of them might be specific, but representative of a larger category. There might be a more pure example of this kind of chase in a different episode, but this is the one that we remembered it was in. Yeah, we're definitely running up against the limitations of our uh of our resources of our brains our bodies yeah all right so uh the first pairing we have here is uh from the dark and bloody ground this one is uh a desert scene jim is out on his own and he's being chased by a semi and it's i think at the time very mysterious as to why it's happening

he goes to i don't remember if he goes to vegas or if he goes to a town he goes to a town outside of vegas i think um yeah and he pokes around we see a guy in sunglasses follow him in like a semi cab and then yeah there's this like extended chase sequence he's also not in the firebird if i remember right because he rented a car yeah Yeah, it's a rental car. Yeah. And so he's got issues with top speed. It's an interesting chase in how it contrasts against how other chases have been done and maybe how the chase would be done today because we get a lot of pictures of the odometer, we have an understanding of the driver's concerns. Yeah, we see, like, their feet on the pedals. And there's oncoming traffic that they both have to avoid. And then whether they're going uphill or downhill really matters.

Because he's faster uphill, but the truck's faster downhill. It's a really, like, thought out. And it feels like a scene done by somebody who has driven a lot. Yeah. And not, like, imagined what a good chase scene would be. Which is, I think, in great opposition to what it's up against here, which is from the episode Guilty. And this is the helicopter chase. This is maybe the biggest budget car chase scene in all of the Rockford files.

The helicopter tries to chase him into a hangar. Yeah. So this is, so the episode's guilt is the one where he has the very emotionally abusive ex wife who comes back to him for help, et cetera, et cetera. It turns out there's this plot that involves a flight instructor and the

climax of the episode is that this flight instructor has kind of gone off the rails and decided he just needs to kill everyone. So he gets in his helicopter that he gets to fly because he's a flight instructor and starts chasing down, chasing them down in the, in the firebird. The drama of it is seeing the helicopter getting closer to them and jim's going into different places and trying to get away from it and they bump the roof a couple times to like oh

yeah yeah sense of danger and then the big climax is jim goes into a hangar because they're at some like in some industrial area so he goes into this big warehouse and the helicopter follows him into the warehouse but the other side of the warehouse the doors are too closed and the car can fit through them, but the helicopter can't. And so it hits them and explodes. Oh, good times. So that's extremely dramatic and I think memorable because like, hey, a helicopter explodes. Also, totally was really weird because it was like, I guess that guy died. Yeah, I think listeners who haven't listened to that episode, if they watch the episode, should go back and listen to what we have to say about that episode.

Because I think there's a lot of... It's a challenging episode. Yeah, yeah. I'm leaning towards the semi in the desert because of the craft of it. Not to say that the other one was poorly crafted. The other one is technically interesting. Yeah. poorly crafted but the other one is technically interesting yeah like it's shot really well to create a sense of danger even though it's like what is this helicopter gonna do like it's not

like he has a gun right like he's just flying over them but just create a sense of drama and urgency and you do get to see a helicopter explode but um yeah yeah no the the uh dark and bloody ground has a that is a i think it's an all-time great driving sequence. That would be my vote. All right, that's easy then. Next up, we have the girl in the Bay City Boys Club. The way I have it written in my notes here, this is one where he uses the drive-thru. He goes into the drive-thru and has them call the cops.

Versus Second Chance, and this this is what in my notes where he uses a dumpster he pushes a dumpster into another car and i think that this matchup is kind of fun because this is both uh these are both interesting uses of what's available to him in a chase sequence and this is the thing that we i think we do talk about quite a bit on the show it's just that what makes rockford filesiles chase sequences stand out is that spatial awareness is not what I'm looking for. Well, it's like situational awareness. Yes. Yeah.

Like he's using stuff around him more than can he drive faster and turn tighter corners than this person. Yeah. It's kind of like a – I think we haven't talked about this in a while because we really haven't had a really meaty car chase in a while but it's kind of like a tactics versus strategy thing right it's like yeah jim's great at strategy like how am i going to get out of this in the most efficient manner without losing my skin versus like how good am i at taking tight corners which is more like am i going to turn down this driveway or down that one? That's more of a tactical decision versus these like, alright, so I'm getting followed.

It's at low speed. This person clearly just wants to see where I go. So I'm just going to pull into this drive-thru, and then when they ask me what my order is, they call the police. I'm being followed. And then order some food. A taco and some fries. Yeah, so I proposed this one both because I think And then order some food. A taco and some fries. Yes. Yeah.

So I proposed this one both because I think this really stood out to me just as a great little moment. And then what ends up happening is they continue following him through the drive-thru and then they do get pulled over by the cops. And then he gets to observe who gets out of the car and turns out it's this reporter that is trying to figure out the same thing he's been trying to figure out. But also that episode has a great foot chase at the end where the two of them are being pursued by goons through like a, like a, like a Y or something like a boys club, a boys. Yes.

The boys club in Bay city. It's like a Scooby-Doo chase where it's like, there's all these doors and corridors and people keep coming in and out of them chasing each other. But the way that the camera is and the way that it's all cut you see where everyone is and you can follow a very chaotic chase uh i just remember really liking that so i wanted to kind of fold that in with the car chase um in this category that's also the only episode directed by uh james garner oh yeah that's right well i i'm very much in favor of giving it to

the drive-thru maneuver in that one. It's not that I have a problem with the dumpster maneuver, but what really stands out to me is just that he's pushing a dumpster into another car. And I just love that gimmick. That sequence does have some more fun stuff because I think there's a J-turn in it.

Yeah, very tight quarters. Yeah, guys try to get in his car and then he zooms away and then they pursue him um he gets cut off and then he goes into this thing and then he nudges the dumpster like to hit the other car so it can't keep pursuing him so it is a fun sequence it's not just the one move i think the other one edges up just a little bit in my mind okay i'll take it. And because we have to make decisions. That's that is the burden we placed upon ourselves. All right.

So this next pair up is another one within the same two parter. This is gear jammers versus gear jammers. The first one of this pair up is actually Rocky is driving a semi cab in the chase. And this is like the climatic chase near the end of the the two-parter the other one i don't remember if this is in the second part or the first part uh it's in the second part because i think i just looked it up it's near the beginning of the second part so this other one is another a car chase mixed with like some good psychological uh things going on where he's being chased by the goons.

He's getting roughed up outside his trailer and then there's witnesses. So he manages to get away from the goons and they take off in pursuit. So it's like a real like he's being chased by the two goons. One with an amazing mustache. Yes. And they end up cutting him off and forcing him under an overpass into like a fenced area so he's blocked but he had the presence of mind to grab his gun at some point so once they get out he gets to drop on them with his gun and that's enough cover for him to go pull their like tire

gauge thing to flatten their tire and they have banter and everything you know i've been in this business a long time i've run into a couple of guys who can stay with me they got a little sloppy doing it nobody ever made it look easy just like to say it's an honor to be tailed by somebody who can drive as good as you do now get up on the roof One of the important bits of this one is also that this is set up for a sort of car chase rivalry between him and this goon. Yeah, I think they do another chase. Yeah, and it's a little bit like, oh, okay, you're good. And now I have to worry about that. Right, and then so the one with Rocky is that's like the climax of the episode where they're like getting the bad guy.

And Rocky gets to be the hero where he's behind the wheel and like running down the guy in the limo or whatever. And Jim is there also. We have to look at it again. But I remember there being drama with like who's on what side of who and who's getting cut off by who and everything. Yeah. It's a tough call. Which way are you leaning? Which way are you leaning? I kind of want to give it to Rocky. And I know that that's not the

best way to decide this. And the next one is going to be full of J-turns. It's going to cover some of what the second part of this episode did. But I'm like, that is, I'm already overselling my lean here. I'll give it to Rocky.

I think it's fun. It's like there's a moment in the Attractive Nuisance also where Rocky gets to be behind the wheel of a truck and just like save the day. And that's just so fun. And this time he actually gets to drive. That he's just crashing into a trailer or whatever. So we'll give it to Rocky. All right. So next up, this pairing is Waterberry. See previous category for the full title

versus Rosendahl and Gilda Stern are dead. These are both featuring J-turns. This is the J-turn off. Yes, the J-turn off. And so this one, honestly, I already have decided which one i like best in this one uh waterbury has a corvette which should make it my favorite but it's not um in the other one uh the has the reoccurring gimmick of jim throwing his car

into a parking lot so that those pursuers would just drive right by him, which is a great thing. And I think the Rosendahl-Gildersdorn one is just well shot. Yeah, the Waterbury one is kind of more like it's fun because it has the fun car, the Corvette that's following. Yeah. It also has like the goons kind of interacting with Jim a little bit more. Yeah. But if we're looking at car chases, I can't even really remember how the waterbury one ends like we know there's a j turn in it but yeah the rosendahl goes astern where he does first of all it is a j turn from a dead stop which is amazing it's a brief but exciting chase just a yeah rockford all-time classic bit of pulling into the parking lot and ducking down so we'll

give it to that sounds good should we move on to best villains oh wait do we want to just recap who won this this best car chase desert car chase with the semi from dark and bloody ground uh the pulling into the uh fast food spot with honorable mention for foot chase in girl Girl in Bay City Boys Club. Rocky Saves the Day from Gear Jammers and the J-Turn into the Parking Lot Bit from Rosendahl and Gil. All right. So now we're on to the villain category,

which was at one point a two categories, maybe even more. We definitely had some trouble figuring out how we were going to do it, but I think we got a good set here. We're talking about villains, goons. We ended up kind of combining it all. So, yeah.

So at the top of our villains category, oh, God, why did we do this to ourselves? Here we go. The very first pairing that we have to decide here is Anthony Boy, who if you've been listening to the past we have done two episodes of two two-parters yeah so we've talked about anthony boy uh a lot recently so if you're just tuning in yeah if this is your first episode first of all you have a lot of faith in uh our ability to convey what our show is about yeah we we've spent a lot of time

in the uh in the anthony boy world where he is the uh mob hitman from who works for the minette syndicate in new york and has come out to la for reasons uh in the first episode he appears in it's uh he and his his buddy sill are on the hunt for a uh a woman who's kind of left her mob lawyer fiance at the altar and they end up getting all wrapped up with uh with the cops and with the cop uh fan who's kind of the subject of the actual episode um but anthony boy ends up shot by the police at the end of the episode but he blames rockford and so in man he saw the alligators that's all about anthony boy where he's out of jail after three years or whatever and he still has this pathological hate for jim rockford and that's a episode that's all about the his his descent into into darkness

before we introduce who anthony boy is up against let's push anthony boy just a little bit more here because i also one of the reasons why he's such a great addition to this category is well he's i think maybe the only reoccurring villain we have unless you unless you count angel um or chapman yeah yeah he's back from the dead in the second one like in the first two-parter we assume he's dead it turns out he's not he's he's got like a he has a liver wound from his being shot yeah in addition to hating rockford which is i don't want to say forgivable but like i think his greater sin is that he hates la yeahA. Yeah, he hates California. He just really hates California.

And so he's we get a lot of him. And in the beginning, he is like, I'm going to say this is going to sound dismissive, but it's not. It's a he's just another Rockford villain. I mean, if you're a fan of the show, if you've been listening to us, that's actually a compliment. He's a memorable side character from To Protect and Serve. And then he becomes, in this later one, you get more of his backstory. He's trying to get out of the mob. He's blaming Rockford.

He has an ideology. He's arguing this ideology with Syl, who ostensibly shared it ahead of time. It's just a well-fleshed out character who you could see him on his doomed course. And it's not so much that you root for him, but you could see why he can't correct his path. And it's tragic. I mean, I bring all that up because we do have this, like,

he is the most immediate, the most recent villain that we've had so i i want to counteract the the bias there by pointing out that he actually is a really good villain right it's not just that he happens to be the last villain that we saw yeah yeah that said he is up against gary bevins the da from so help me god and i would be hard pressed to find a more infuriating villain in the series he's kind of a wild ball pick uh offbeat pick yeah uh because he's he's not mobbed up he's not a thug he's using his power as a da uh to try to strong arm Rockford. And the whole thing,

the whole episode is around that. I, we talked about this earlier because this one was up for a best episode earlier in this and it lost a quickie Nirvana. And I just want to like, back then I said, one of the things about this episode that really appealed to me was, was that it had a thing to say, and then it said it really, really well.

And I don't think it could have done that without Gary Bevan. Gary Bevans is played by William Daniels or Daniel Williams. William Daniels. William Daniels, the voice of Kip. Also, he's been in other television as well. Yeah, Mr. Feeney or Principal Feeney or whatever. He's also one of the antagonists in the Italian bird fiasco. He's unlike many of the villains.

I think, as you said, he's not a representative of crime or of personal interest. He is a representative of the state, but he's also just a jerk. He is a representative of the state, but he's also just a jerk. Yes. And he also does have some personal interest in the sense that I think one of the kind of sub points about him is that he's angling for the next job up. Right. Like he's a assistant DA and he's angling for state DA. You know, I forget exactly. you know i forget exactly yeah uh he's clearly on has a career rise planned and nailing this case which isn't about rockford um but rockford is this uncooperative witness and so he turns both

barrels of the power of his office onto jim in order to you know get this prosecution underway which is going to help him in the long run with his career uh and so it's just so like so like bureaucratically evil as opposed to like intrinsically or like motivated evil that that makes sense yeah that's like the needle that they're threading with this character which is so great is that they can't convey the message they want to convey with the episode if they make him corrupt right he's got to be just believable in his ambitions and the extent he's willing to go and his ability to not his lack of empathy and it can't be the kind of lack of empathy that you think oh well this guy is just a sociopath or something like that. It's got to be the kind of lack of empathy that you would expect somebody in that role to have. It's a great character crafted for the moment that he's in. And because he's in that position

and because Rockford was put into it against him, that's what makes him the villain of the story here. And I feel like there's something I want to say about that, which is he's the villain of someone's story. We only get it because Rockford just happened into it. And that's the genius of this episode or one of the genius bits of this episode. Right. Yeah. Like, it's just unfortunate circumstances that Rockford's involved at all because he was tangentially related in it's like the labor like the crooked labor guy who like fakes his own death and to abscond with the labor fund like the pension fund or whatever something like that and yeah Jim is hired under

false pretenses by a fake someone with a fake name just to give cover to the idea that this guy was abducted and so bevins is like oh well you must have been in on it and because he's using that tech to angle to get something to actually hang on the guy who's actually after yeah and the arc of both of these villains here is the same and an arc that i find delicious because of my, my love for a certain type of sword and sorcery story is that they, they both have, have turned their will against our hero, Jim Rock.

Right. Right. And Jim tries to give them out every step of the way. Like he's not telling Gary Bevins that he's going to like, Oh, if you do this, I'll tell you he's, he's like,

you shouldn't be this way. This shouldn't be the way it is. Like, I have rights. And Anthony Boy, he spends that whole second two-parter, whenever he's interacting with Anthony Boy, just trying to talk him out of doing any kind of violence. Trying to reason with him. Yeah, you just got to let it go, you know. I think this is a really good pairing. It breaks my heart. It is, yeah. We gave ourselves let it go, you know. I think this is a really good pairing. It breaks my heart.

It is, yeah. We gave ourselves a hell of a task here. I feel like we have, as a moment in time, we have talked about Anthony Boyce so much that I feel like he, at this moment in our show, was kind of like, you know what? Everyone knows what we think about him. He's great. If you want to hear way more,

listen to our last episode. Right. Does he need to also get highlighted here when we already knocked out this is where we start doing like like offset credits from the other brackets it's like well we did knock out so help me god in best episode but to make up for that do we give this to gary bevins because he's a great you know he's a great villain it's like how people talk about the oscars yeah where they're like oh they didn't give it there but they'll give it there uh here's here's

my take on it i'm just looking at the category of best villain which we've not described all of it to our listeners and i apologize uh gary stands out in that he is understated and all the other ones are not overblown but great like they have more dramatic caricature to a lot of them so i i'm willing to give gary it because i i because i want to see gary up against the others okay i think that anthony boy is a great character but um he i think he'll run you think he'll run roughshod over the category? No, I think that, I think that it's less interesting to pit him against some of these other ones later on. I think we should go ahead and make this call for Gary Bevins. Uh, if only on the strength of, yeah, how different he is from the other villains in the category, as you'll hear.

And also like Anthony Boy gets a star for probably the most talked about villain in our show, like over the entire course of the show. So he gets an honorable mention no matter what. Okay. So the next pairing here, these are all going to be tough. This one is Phil the Dancer Gabriel from Rosendahl and Gilderstern are Dead as played by Abe Vigoda versus Dave Delaro from Portrait of Elizabeth as played by abe vagoda versus dave delaro from portrait of elizabeth as played by john saxon and this pairing uh again i don't want to pick actors against each other and i certainly don't want to pick these two actors against each other i would watch anything that had the two of them in it yeah i i want you to understand who the actors are for these, because that definitely helps you understand just how wonderfully portrayed these characters were.

And so these are actually pretty different. So Dave is Beth's new boyfriend in A Portrait of Elizabeth. And so this is all about the sadly losing in the first round, Jim and Beth, their whole thing. Yeah, that's this episode is about about that in this way where it's highlighted by Beth's relationship with this guy, Dave, who starts off being extremely smooth and and interesting and caring. But as time goes on, we see more and more of his like weird like criminal mastermind plan yeah basically all about using beth as cover to get some like ford stock certificates out of the country something like that it's an episode i don't want to spoil it but definitely check it out if you haven't checked it out oh yeah it's definitely one of our one of our favorites um and a lot of it was about dave because in addition to being a

antagonist for jim along the vector of beth's interest he's also this weirdly uh fully rounded character with weird skills like at that time we were doing a lot more direct how to bring stuff into your games from shows. And he was like, here's a character that's been built with all these different abilities, and they just get shown off at different stages, and it's always a surprise and a delight. So it's like, oh, turns out

he's a karate master. Which is a tie-in to the actor, because he was known for a karate movie at the time and whatnot. But anyway, turns out he's a karate master. It turns out he's a very skilled painter. He has all these special abilities that actually are interesting in terms of presenting challenges for Jim to overcome. If somebody said, okay, if Jim is a detective, then who's his Moriarty? And without losing a beat, I would say John Saxon.

And then I would have to think and look up IMDb and go Dave Delaro. Yeah. Which is, you know, but like this character is the Moriarty to Jim's Sherlock. Jim isn't Sherlock. That's one of the great things about Jim. But Dave Delaro is Moriarty. He's just perfect in everything he does. He's got a temper, which is his weakness and one of the things that Jim manages to use against him. He also manages to put Jim in this spot where Jim is right,

but Jim is wrong. And that is great because he's like, this guy's bad news for beth but also jim needs to make a decision about beth yeah and they need to have a reckoning and it's like this is the wrong guy to make that happen obviously but it is one of the reasons why this episode works so well is that he's able to put j in that spot that Jim deserves to be in. And he also uses, especially in the first part, he uses status really well. Yeah. I have these tickets to the opera that, oh, I can't actually use. Why don't you take Beth? Like, you know, doling out the scraps from his table to Jim and it's just like,

pure and it's infuriating Jim, but what's he going to do? Say no. Like all the, pure and it's infuriating Jim, but what's he going to do? Say no? All of that stuff is just so well rendered and it's all pulled off by John Saxon in the role really well. Yes, but we should talk about Phil the dancer Gabriel here. So Phil is Rosendahl and Gilda Stern are dead. So the second Rita episode. So Rita witnesses the abduction and murder of the guy that she was walking out with,

and who was a doctor. So she saw Mr. Gabriel, a Vigoda, in the car, so she could identify him. And this whole thing is spinning out of a botched hip replacement. So yes, Gabriel is an older man and he's this like vague, vaguely very important crime figure. The pressure is that he's going back to court for a tax thing. And once Rita sees him in the papers, she'll be able to identify him as the guy who had the doctor abducted yes he had him abducted because of the botched hip thing because now he's in pain he's in constant pain and that's like his character core all of the bitterness

stemming from being in pain and him blaming the guy who did it who the guy who performed the operation so he blames for everything. And he's got this power from frailty thing going that is so good. And I mean, again, we're going to talk about the actor, but Abe Vigoda just really has the presence needed to make that happen. And I'm not saying he's the only one who has that presence, but it was a delight to watch him do it. He's the only one who has that presence, but it was a delight to watch him do it. There's the whole, there's the scene in like the sauna or whatever, where his, his goons are getting his, you know, getting their marching orders. Yeah.

Lower than them. And he's all wrinkly and just wearing this little towel. And there's these two huge dudes in suits and they're obviously terrified. Yes. Shane, do me no good in the slam. Get her out. We're working on it, Mr. G. Doing what? Right now, we're working on it mr g doing what right now we're sort of waiting see how things go you know

loomy was thinking we was thinking maybe we leave her where she is cops think they got a dead bang i mean she ain't walking away from this in a matter of speaking that's what you thought huh well obviously this is a very dumb broad otherwise she's in cincinnati right her brother hotel knows her what does she do she goes home waits for the cops to pick her up Well, obviously, this is a very dumb broad. Otherwise, she's in Cincinnati, right? Her brother will tell Noza. What does she do? She goes home and waits for the cops to pick her up. What happens when I go to court?

I thought Sid was working on a postponement. The government thinks I had too many postponements. They ain't buying no more. That tax beep comes up in a couple of weeks. I go into court. My picture hits the papers. What do you think happens? I'll tell you what happens. The bimbo sees it and says, hey, that's the guy I saw in the limo.

Ooh, they got dead bang then. This tells us as audience how much power he has without having to tell us anything about his backstory, his history, any of that stuff. At the end, he cannot see that he's wrong. And that's another great angle on this character right like he actually thinks what he's doing is correct but not because he has some kind of like ideological blinders he just no doesn't care about anything else like the only thing that he actually cares about anymore is his pain basically and everything else is not very real to him there's a very specific they do a whole moby dick reference in the episode yeah you know he's the obsessed whaler

you know chasing after this idea that uh he can solve everything by basically killing everyone who caused him pain uh which is really messed up uh he's both distant and personal about it. Like in the beginning, he wants to watch the doctor die. Like that's the thing, but he's not doing, he's like commanding other people to do it. It's yeah. It's another one of these like well thought out characters that just stick

with you. So Dave is like the central figure of that episode. Yeah. While Gabriel is the motivating force, but the central plot of the episode is more about Jim and Rita figuring out what's going on. Right. And then they end up confronting him with the,

there's a video of his surgery that like is kind of the confrontation that happens at the end. He's more of a brooding menace in the background that becomes stronger and stronger. While with Dave, it's like, oh, he's the guy. We're watching him pretty much the whole, I mean, through Jim's presence, but we're basically watching him the whole episode. So does that tip it one way or the other for you? I think this one has always been tipped for Dave Delaro for me.

I don't want to make predictions about the end of this category. But like if I if I were to put money down, you're buying you're buying stocks. And Dave is what you're talking about. Yeah. And it helps that I'm part of the decision making process. But still, like Dave just really is one of my all time favorite villains from from the Rockford Files. Yeah, I'll i'll take that all right again in the test of like oh do you want to see a rockford files episode episode that like really really nails the uh anti jim that's that's one of them there you go yep all right in this

next category we have uh roman clementi which is another little bit of an oddball choice from the Oracle who were cashmere suit versus Electric Larry from Dirty Money Black Light. Now, Roman Clementi is the psychic detective. Yeah, he's the psychic investigator, please. So he's more of a foil? Yeah. I mean, so he ends up planting evidence, essentially, in order to make his predictions about what Rockford knows come true, right? He makes these predictions, and he's working with the police to solve this, like someone disappeared and they're trying to find them. We did this one a while ago, but if I remember right, the kind of not twist,

but kind of the, the, the plot, it kind of is, is that the disappearance is not really the issue, but there is a murder that happened later. And that's what kind of throws everything into, into chaos.

But, but yeah, so Clemente, he like makes these predictions. He works, he's paid by the police departments to consult. And so he makes it his business to always have something to tell them, including planting evidence near Jim's trailer.

So that when he says, oh, I feel that there's something around here that's important to the case. And then, you know, he finds it and et cetera, et cetera. This feels to me like the closest we get to including Angel on this list. Yeah, because he's a con man essentially uh a nudge one way or the other this show could have been i'm not saying this would be a better show uh in fact i don't think it would be but this show could have been like rockford and clementi like at odds with each other over all these different you know what I mean like you could see the 80s doing that

he's not as like he's not as villainous in terms of like pointed at Jim it's more that Jim is a very convenient target for his con and then Jim of course has no patience for as a con man himself has no patience for this particular

genre of con where it's like oh you're claiming some kind of special power to like pull the wool over other people's eyes would you like a cup of coffee for sure maybe you can tell me how i take it hey why don't you and i go find a nice private room and we can discuss all the trouble you've been causing me look i'm sorry about the trouble but you forget it's not me. I am just a vehicle which higher powers act through. Bicycle rack was attached, I imagine. Ah, it looks too heavy to be a bicycle rack.

Looks more like a motorcycle rack to me. But then you're the expert. What do you think about those gadgets? You think maybe somebody tried to take the rack off without loosening it all the way? How much you paying these guys? I doubt if these dents are significant. But what is significant is that you missed it.

I'll send someone after my equipment and to present you with a bill, Mr. Clemente. Yeah, there goes the old ESP. For me, this is not just the character, although the character is great and worth watching, This is not just the character, although the character is great and worth watching, but it's also the character being a specific concrete instance of a larger category of villain, which are the con men that are just on the other side of the alignment, that they'll never actually be buddies with Jim. They're the con men that can hang out with Jim. They're the con men who do it wrong with Jim. They're the con men who do it, who do it wrong. Right. Who, who use their powers for evil.

Yeah. And then the only other comment I think I have about this is that I remember from the episode that just the, the chemistry was really good. Clementi is played by Robert Weber and. Oh yeah. The, the Rockford Clementi chemistry was really good. That really made it.

So I think that really carried it for me as well. They made it work and had me enjoy it. This trope is not my favorite of the tropes, but yeah, they're definitely... And then, so on the other side, we have Electric Larry from from dirty money black light this is one of those episodes that i think as a whole isn't a great episode but it has so many great things in it so the this is the one where uh rocky goes on wins a vacation to hawaii and

then all this cash starts showing up at his house and it's this weird like laundering scheme to launder a bunch of money that was I think requisitioned by the FBI for something. Yeah. There's a lot. I was looking at our notes on the episode and there's like, it has a bunch of plot and it's kind of overstuffed with plot. How far back did we watch this one?

This was a while back, wasn't it? It was our episode 39, which was September 2018. Okay. We've been at this. Okay, yeah. And also directed by Stuart Margolin, which was fun. Yeah, but Electric Larry is a loan shark. And one of the many plots involves Angel owing Electric Larry money, I believe.

And then that being the entree for Jim to try and use the loan shark as the linchpin for his plan to return the dirty money. Because this money has been marked, right? And can be seen under a blacklight. So to return the dirty money to the fbi i think yeah yeah so like return the dirty money so that he and rocky aren't implicated in whatever crime happened with this dirty money so he's trying to use electric larry to like essentially to launder it um yeah and then electric larry is like what's up with this guy and sends goons to follow him he ends up in a boxing ring there's a lot going on

but uh yeah this this uh this loan shark character was just so so he's i don't really know if he's as prominent a villain as some of the other ones we talked about he's on here for his style yeah he stood out for style like uh he's played by uh roger e mosley or mosley he was in magnum pi um yeah it was tc uh for for magnum pi fans i still haven't watched enough of that to have easy references and he was all over tv in the 70s and he's just like a very stylish black actor who can pull off both menace and kind of joie de vivre yeah yeah and like his office was all like crazy 70s prints and he had the dartboard with like the little foam balls instead of darts and he had his goons yeah and the velcro things and he just yeah again kind of as a stand-in for these really memorable side characters side goonsons, bad guys, heavies,

that pop up in many episodes that maybe the episode isn't about them, but it's a lot of the rock-fritishness of the show is these super interesting, memorable villain types. So both villains in this particular pairing are sort of champions for their archetype. Yeah. That's a little bit what's going on here.

Which is an interesting way to frame it because on the one hand, I would say that Clemente is closer to getting my vote because he's a more central figure in his episode. Right. But Electric Larry typifies a more important kind of villain throughout the series. Oh, I just dug us into a hole here. Didn't I?

did that just make it more complicated? It did. It did. It made it more complicated for me. Cause I mean, I was, I was leaving, uh,

Clemente as well. Um, but I think also because I think that for some reason that episode is fresher in my brain than the Electric Larrick one. But I do actually want someone to speak for all of those.

That's kind of where I'm... I was leaning Clementi, but now that I'm thinking of who will be the voice of all of the interesting goons. Right. Let's do it. We'll just go.

We'll say Electric Larry as the as the standard bearer for that whole. Because I'm also thinking there's like the. Oh, God, I don't even remember what episode it is. But the record producer who. Yeah. Has like his his squad from like Brooklyn or whatever that's come up with him. And he ended up killing someone in a parking lot and they're all covering for him. Like there's that guy.

We have a couple of the mob guys that are represented more in another category. Yeah. The urban horticulturalist. Yes. Who I will spoil did not make this list, but it was close. So we'll give as a more holistic villain set. We'll advance Electric Larry in our standings. All right.

And the last pairing here. Oh, God. Okay. So this last pairing is an uneven match. Body count wise. Oh, sure. We have Dr. Herbert Brinkman from the Competitive Edge. This is the doctor that abducts and tries to one-floor the cuckoo's nest, Jim.

Which is kind of a horrific villain thing going on there. Versus the Mayor's Committee from the Mayor's Committee from Deer Lake Falls. And I love this matchup this might be my favorite matchup just because they're so different yeah so dr herbert brinkman is legitimately horrifying yes there is a certain comfortable distance i can have from the mob violence people because i don't have personal experience with that. I have, however, had a doctor. Like, or I've been to the dentist. Like you, like there's, to me,

what happens where he takes away the agency of Jim and is doing this to other people and is drugging them and- And is essentially the people who are standing in the way of his i think his brother is the guy who's running the athletic club and they have this like uh secret society of high achievers where he's basically shooting them up with like uppers and keeping them you know to help them succeed or whatever and then so dr brinkman is the punishment side slash the disappearing black black sight oh this person's in our way we don't want any bodies

turning up so he's just going to get a he's just going to get disappeared to this spot where he's going to be kept under this sedation and and gaslit into thinking that he's crazy, uh, et cetera. I'm a horror fan. And I think that like most things can be nudged in a horror direction, uh, with just a sufficient push. This thing just takes the tiniest bump. It is horrific. What's happening in the episode, but like this could have been,

uh, anyways, the point is that this, this villain is, uh, especially creepy to me. There's something about this that just really... He's super amoral.

Yeah. So now that I've sold that, I want to talk about the mayor's community. Because one of the things I love about the mayor's community also comes from some of my favorite horror which is we have a group of guys with a certain amount of power and privilege who uh because they're a group of them that like none of them on their own would be doing this thing that they're doing but because they're all together they're they enable each other to do to be the worst that they could be. I love that trope, too. I love watching fiction that examines that. In the episode, the mayor is trying to kill...

She's related to him in some way. Yeah, she's the niece. I don't remember if he's the mayor or if they're all prominent Deer all prominent dear lick falls businessmen or whatever yeah there's the main guy the one who's really the motive force and his niece basically uh they've all been in on the on a tax fraud scheme and his niece found out and reported them or said she was going to report them to the irs and then didn't or something but then she left she fled and so he feels so threatened. And he's convinced everyone else that they're so threatened by her that they've tracked

her down to L.A. They have this cover story of buying a fire engine to hire Jim. And then once they're like, he's a stand up guy, then they try to hire him to kill the niece. The fire engine bit is so great because like it starts, the episode starts with them riding the fire engine like little children how wonderful how adorable well and then they're having a big day out in the city right and they want to like find out where they can like find like prostitutes and like where they can celebrities yes and celebrities and eat at the the uh uh the brown derby and like

all the let's do all the famous la things. So they're like, hey, seeds. But then they're like, oh, also, we want to murder this girl because she might cost us some money. It does this great thing of taking what could have been just like one person doing it, breaking them up into, I can't remember how many are in the committee. I think there's four, if I remember right. Each of them has their own motivation. Some of them more strongly connected and they switch as it goes along so you can see this turmoil which is not which you could have written as a inner turmoil but instead they pulled it out and they had these characters doing it and

i think that's this like uh it's it's a wonderful trick it just just works well because there's that one guy who is just so naive. He's so wide-eyed with wonder. He thinks he sees celebrities every time somebody walks by. But still, he's involved in this horrible plot that they're trying to rope Jim into. This is going to be a little bit of a tough show. Okay, so for me, if you have a clear go, I will go with whatever you have to say here. I'm not going to argue against anything here. So I think for me, Dr. Brinkman is more evil.

He is a worse person. And more capable. And more capable. The mayor's committee is more interesting um as we discussed in the episode and as you were just summarizing the fact that they can embody different aspects of this villainous behavior in different characters makes the episode really interesting and there's a really interesting scene that's just them where they're deciding whether they're going to go through with it or not where you see the weight of authority shift from the one who's kind of dragging kind of holding back and being

like maybe we shouldn't do this and then we see him lose his authority to the one who's like no we have to do this that's a really great scene i also feel like the mayor's committee is more rockfordy yeah yeah no i agree with that um while dr brinkman is essentially a take on an existing character in some ways. So I'm leaning towards Mayor's Committee is what I'm saying. Let's do it. All right. Let's do it. I was only slightly leaning towards them.

But if you're leaning towards them, yeah, let's do it. There we go. We've got Gary Bevins, DA from So Help Me God, Dave Delaroe from Portrait of Elizabeth, Electric Larry from Dirty Money Blacklight, and the Mayor's Committee from the Mayor's Committee from Deer Lake Falls. That's quite the rogues gallery. It is. All right.

So that is our Region 3 all sorted. 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 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 Epidiah I'm usually responsive there

Otherwise, you can go to worldswithoutmaster.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 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're 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 means that we are ready to go to region four one of our more difficult set of determinations i think i think this took a lot of our this took a lot of our our bandwidth to uh figure out these brackets but i think it'll be a good time to go through them region four marks and gaffes best con in one side versus best dialogue on the other before we get into the pairings we

ended up talking about what counts as a con oh yeah they're all um episode based so we're kind of saying the con from this episode some of them are the con that frames the episode and some of them are a specific con that happens inside the episode. There's kind of a spectrum of the scale of the con. One of the decisions we had to make is when we created the category of best gym fast talk. That could have bled into this. So the cons here are elaborate plotted out games. They're not like thinking on the feet moment. are elaborate, plotted out games.

They're not like thinking on the feet moment. This is a thing that was planned and then executed however well or poorly they were executed. These are specific con games where there's a mark and there's some kind of subterfuge to achieve whatever the goal is. All right. So the first pairing we have is the necklace swap in Counter Gambit versus the insurance fraud con in The Big Ripoff. Now, the necklace swap, there are two necklace swaps in that episode.

Yeah, this is a kind of a con counter con situation where there's a very valuable pearl necklace that is the subject of the whole episode, and it's been stolen. The thing about talking about the cons is I want to make sure I'm getting it right. Yeah. I have to review the tape, but basically, there's a necklace, there's the real necklace, and then there's a fake necklace that's made to swap with it, and there's a con of trying to pin the theft on Jim. That's the original con.

And then there's a counter con of getting the original thieves to end up with the fake necklace so that the real necklace can go back to the owner and Jim is no longer being accused of the theft. And I think the counter con thing is going to show up in several of these and I think it's fine to mix them. So I going to show up in several of these and i think it's fine to to mix them so i want to just preface all of this by saying we will get these cons wrong the nature of them is that they're they're full of fun details that are a little hard to follow

yeah so yeah we didn't review all of these immediately before recording so um so this one like this this has some very delightful moments i love a con that involves angel uh and bringing angel in as the expert to to examine the goods right was just wondrous because i guess the thing i love about putting angel in a con is that it's not he's good in them but you're just waiting for him to change his mind about what he wants out of the con right and this one does that well right because this one actually plays on that aspect of the character of angel so i mean it works in context of just watching the episode but for longtime viewers i think we talked about it in our episode when there's a moment where the original thieves show up at angel's door and are like, OK, we know you weren't the.

Yes. You're not the real fence. He's like, OK, I'm sorry. It was it was Jim Rockford. And we're like, of course, Angel is going to give him up immediately. But then it turns out that's an element in the con or in the counter con rather to. Yeah. To get the thieves to go talk to the real expert who is now in on Jim's con to tell them that they have

the fake one when they really have the real one. And then they go back to switch them. So they switch their real one for the fake one, et cetera. So the fact that Angel is a weasel is used to help fool the audience into thinking that the con is going one way when in reality it's going in Jim's favor's favor oh you've convinced me i'm voting for the countergabbit so in the big ripoff so this is the one that that starts off with the wonderful uh dialogue lists uh intro jim flies to france wends his way into talking to this very attractive young woman and then then later we find out that he was trying to establish whether she is the wife of this guy who's disappeared.

They claimed his life insurance, but now this woman is living on this fixed income that doesn't seem to have come from anywhere. And this whole thing is an elaborate cover so that, or she can also go and join the guy who died, who quote died, and they can live off of his life insurance that he's fraudulently claimed for his fraudulent death, right? Yes.

And I think the inclusion of this con, and correct me if I'm wrong, but I think the inclusion of this con is for its Rockfordishness. It's an insurance scam. There's a bit going on with the art world, which i don't think is part of the con uh but is part of how jim uncovers him right like yes he's an outsider artist or something a primitive artist if you will and the whole thing is that he would just give it up except that he has this the potential payoff like i think this is one where he negotiates his the rate with the insurance company uh whatever the recovery fee will be and it's like enough to keep him interested basically so the con itself happens off screen because it's the insurance fraud and then jim has to kind of figure out the real story which is just that it's all been that that he faked his own

death um and then figure out a way to get some money out of it for himself. Because he ends up tied up in a cabin while they escape. But then he gets this shipment of original art pieces that are worth thousands of dollars on the open market. That moment, the art pieces was in the running in my head. I don't think I've brought it to the table for rock traditionist but that was definitely one of the ones that i was thinking about like does this ending qualify as as as rock traditionist and it comes very close except it does the exact opposite

of what right it ends up actually being worth it for him yeah yeah i wanted to have it on here just because kind of to recognize that episode. Yeah. Because it has a really cool, there's a whole bunch of cool stuff about it, especially the cinematography in the beginning. But when you get right down to it in the best con category, I mean, Counter Gambit is one of the most specific cons and it's really well done. So I feel like you won't push back on giving this one to Counter Gambit. Counter Gambit. Counter Gambit it is. Yeah, I think that this one is also a nice nod to a style of con that Jim has to unravel that isn't one that he's tied up in. Yeah, he's not the target.

Yeah. Yeah. But sometimes Jim is the target so in the next pairing we have the aaron ironwood school of success uh which is aaron's con on jim versus uh a blessing in disguise which i think is the first of only two showings from the movies yep uh angel as a televangelist. So, I mean, I don't know if we have to explain that second part at all, but let's go deal with Aaron Ironwood and his school of success here. Aaron Ironwood is Jim's adopted brother. Yeah, a friend from way back when he was a kid. Is he literally adopted as a brother or just like?

I thought so. Oh, okay. Yeah, they grew up together. And then Aaron went off his way and Jim went off his way. And Aaron Ironwood is this, uh, uh, is a motivational speaker essentially.

And so he's built this whole pyramid scheme empire on very, very, uh, dare I say Trumpian. Yes. People paying lots of money to go to these, um, to go to these events where he tells them that all they have to do is is is use their power of positivity and they'll get everything

that they're owed in life it's kind of a a bit of a prosperity gospel kind of thing one of the the selling points for me in this one is uh how entangled jim and rocky are in this one. Rocky loves Aaron. And throughout the episode, at least in the beginning, doesn't think Aaron could do any wrong. I think. Sorry, to correct myself. The synopsis describes him as a childhood friend. Well, this one says Rockford welcomes home his childhood foster brother. I really think they're foster brothers.

Either way, it's this family entanglement that's great. Western Brothers. Either way, it's this family entanglement that's great. Jim, if I remember correctly, is suspicious at the beginning, but gives him the benefit of the doubt. And then we see these pieces of like, how does this money fit together? Jim's like, why doesn't this add up? Why is that money tied up there? None of this makes sense as it's going along. He has a cover story for that which is like really kind of the con part yes he has a whole story that he lets jim drag out of him as the reason for why it's weird yeah but that itself is a cover for he's a scam artist and he's trying to get out of his business before it all falls apart look i don't

understand what's going on but i'm getting out you don't apart. Look, I don't understand what's going on, but I'm getting out. You don't understand? That's right, I don't understand. Now, I don't know what you're trying to pull, but you're rummaging up some story about a bunch of old oil buddies. You give me the company and then throw me at the mafia. You must have known I was gonna sell it. I didn't think you'd...

Only a dummy wouldn't sell the... I didn't think you'd turn chicken. Why not? You did. Give me my check. Hmm? I want my check. What check? You don. Give me my check. I want my check. What check? You don't give me that check, I'm going to cause you a heap of pain. I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll make you the same deal you made me on my catcher's mitt.

I'll split it with you. You're out of it now. I want my $20 million. I get the strange feeling that I'm not out of it, Aaron. This whole episode just does a great job. I mean, I remember loving this episode. It does a great job of pulling, Aaron. This whole episode just does it. I mean, I remember loving this episode. It does a great job of like pulling that out. And one of the great con bits of it is that he can't interact with Aaron the same way he does with Angel. With Aaron, he has to take a different tact. There's this sense that he owes Aaron. Yes. For whatever reason. And they kind of imply why

and kind of their childhood. But yeah, there's a couple points where it's like, Jim, would you really fall for this? Right. But I think when we watched it, we kind of forgave it that because it felt like Jim was kind of fooling himself because he wanted to think the best of Aaron. Right. And so that was like a character beat that made it kind of make sense for us. that made it kind of make sense for us. All right. So from to the totally other side of the spectrum,

time-wise and character-wise, in A Blessing in Disguise, one of the 90s movies, the whole plot of Angel becoming a televangelist in a way that is clearly a con, but he does so much to make it sound like he's really changed. But Jim at no point actually believes that he's changed right yes so there's this whole thing we find out eventually that he

was kind of brought into this uh televangelist's inner circle because he pretended to speak in tongues yes and so he kind of got mentored by this guy who ended up dying had like a heart attack or something and so angel was ready to just step into his spot um and take over the church and now he's kind of enriching himself at the expense of the congregants but also he's stirring up controversy by going after a like a blasphemous movie right specifically in order to get more media attention for his church. So one of the appeals of this is to see Angel just absolutely in his element. It's great that this is one of the 90s movies because you can feel just the distance where you're waiting for this moment to happen. Like you just, by the 90s, you're like, you know who would make a great televangelist?

Angel. Angel Martin. Yeah, older Angel Martin with his curly hair and his gray beard. Fundamentally, there's nothing terribly complex about this con at all. It's just, it's only a con in the sense that Angel has

ulterior motives and the ability to lie to enough people just enough to get what he wants to happen but like yeah his bodyguards his like guardian angels or whoever who are clearly just ex-mobsters that he's just paying and when the money starts drying up they're gonna turn on him yeah he's not fooling them yeah i i don't i don't know if there's a whole lot to say about it, which I don't think is necessarily indicative that this is going to lose this pairing at all, other than to just say that this is just a delight to watch. Yeah, this one's a little hard.

So Aaron has more of a con game where Jim's the mark, while Angel is more just running a con, just juicing as much as he can out of a situation. You only get to watch one of these. I would probably choose to watch... Aaron Ironwood. No, I think I'd probably choose to watch Blessing in Disguise again, just because watching Angel is so much fun.

I don't know. What do you think uh i would go with that it's really it's a tough call for me i do think i do lean more towards aaron ironwood here's another thing is angel represented in other cons oh yeah oh yeah and uh he's well represented throughout so maybe just to kind of mix it up. Sure. We'll give it to Aaron Ironwood. Because again, as I think about it, it is more of a traditional con as well. We okay with that? I'm good with that. Yeah. Aaron Ironwood, it is.

Oh, this next one. So this next pairing, there's one in every port. And my note on it is the whole con. That whole episode is, well, it's layers of cons versus chicken little is a little chicken and uh this is the con at the end where they have to fake angel's death so let me start with the second half of that okay let me start with the chicken little is a little chicken it's already won the best episode for us so uh like it doesn't have to sweep but also we shouldn't discount it here sure okay it's a complex con at the end.

It takes up less of the episode than some of the other ones in this category. But there's two bits to it that I think really stand out. And the first is in Beth's apartment, Jim's explaining to Angel how it's going to go down and using like salt and pepper shakers. down and uh using like salt and pepper shakers an angel who we know is a consummate con man is asking jim to repeat himself over and over again and just can't see how it's going to work and we think well of course it's going to work out of the two of them jim's the smarter one and it doesn't yeah it's so wonderful to just see that because Because Jim is so proud of this con. He's so proud of what he's come up with here. It's just a shell game.

It's just a classic shell game. And then the second part is the filming of the shell game and just seeing everyone having these different reactions to what's going on. And just being like, well, for me, I think my experience probably was thinking, well, of course it's going to work. Jim knows better than Angel. And then as it's going down and seeing people reacting the way they are thinking, this isn't going to work. Yeah. This is falling apart. Yeah.

Yeah. I actually did a back on our Patreon. You can see I posted a diagram where I tried to actually track what was happening and came to the conclusion that they did not physically film it in a way that shows you that it could succeed. There's too many question marks in what they don't show you. Therefore, you know, it's just for the effect, right, of getting you to where you're like, oh, no, this isn't going to work, which is great, which is very effective.

Yeah. Yeah, it's a swindle. And it needs all these moving parts, right? It needs Rocky to do a handoff. yeah yeah it's a it's a it's a swindle and it needs all these moving parts right it needs rocky to do a handoff it needs everyone involved in the chain of there's three suitcases and there's two different payloads and an empty suitcase and they all have to end up with the right three people and so everyone involved needs to kind of do what jim expects them to do it needs angel's brother-in-law to print his obituary

which is another like whole deal and then and then there's the whole like uh eulogy being given in the background which is a delight oh yes no this is a wonderful scene that said all right it is up against uh one in every port which is basically the sting the rockford files episode yes jim gets conned by an old girlfriend who's making a plea for money for her dad's uh dialysis or kidney transplant or something and from the get-go this is an old girlfriend who is jim knows as a con artist whose dad he knows is a con artist, right? So this is, Jim's a difficult mark, but they're going to do it. He, I forget exactly what the hook is, but he basically ends up owing a bunch of money. That's the thing.

So again, I don't remember the exact details. There's a rock tradition of the con. Yes. There's a thing about the ship of the con. Yes. There's a thing about the ship actually being two ships. Right. It's under, it's flying under multiple flags. So it kind of like

exists in two places at once. Yeah, and that is something that they create to give the illusion to the other con artists that they might want to be offloading this ship again it's been a while and like we said we're going to get these wrong but one of the the things about it that i remember enjoying was the level at which they kept uh enticing so this fact that the two

ships under the same name are in different ports uh makes them illegal isn't true but it was created to create the illusion that they might need to move them fast which is why they might be conning them into buying them so there was like all these different layers of uh like well the con artists are they're going to see through this layer so we're going to put this layer here. So yeah, so Jim is playing in a high stakes poker game to raise the money and the poker game gets hit and they steal all the money. And that was the con was to like get Jim into this poker game so that they knew where to go, I guess. And then the mobster that he's playing with, I'll remind you, his name is Blast Gillette. It's coming after Jim for all that money because he's like, oh, you worked your way into our high stakes game. You must

have been the point person. And he's like, no, no, no, I'll get you your money back. So he sets up the elaborate ship related scheme because Eddie is involved with the shipping company or something. He's also running a con on them. They're running some con on this shipping company and then Jim comes in and he fakes his whole identity as this high rolling

tycoon who wants to buy this ship that flies under the multiple flags uh yeah etc etc etc there's great business about who can see who at what time yeah who knows who's conning who it would be very difficult for me at this moment to piece it all out, but just the way it all fit together was kind of exquisite. Yeah. When we put it like that, while there is a wonderful kind of delight to seeing Jim's elaborate plan that he's so proud of fall apart, in the best con category, I kind of have to give it to the elaborate revenge con that is also going to get Jim out of trouble that the plan all comes together. And it takes a whole crew of con men, which is another great thing. Angel has to play a role and he actually plays his role. And his role again involves, quote, selling out his boss.

Yeah. That's part of the con. Yeah, it's good stuff yeah there even has to get con con men that that they will the other con men won't recognize oh it's great anyways i'm with you one in every port yeah chicken little is a little chicken that's fine it's one of the best episodes i'm not worried about that episode yeah yeah all right the final pairing here we're gonna go way back in our own personal episodes here with the farnsworth stratagem okay so the episode itself it starts off with dennis and peggy being swept up in uh a timeshare basically like a timeshare hotel thing yeah and dennis needs jim's help getting out of it so uh jim has we see the beginnings of uh our oklahoma oil man uh jimmy joe meeker ends up being the recurring character and he has a different name i mean he's farnsworth he's

someone farnsworth in this episode but it's the same character that jim creates uh and he needs to he creates the illusion that there's oil on this property. The deal is there's oil on the property. He's going to make it so difficult. And he has the mineral rights. Right. So he can drill right in front of the hotel. And he's going to make it so difficult for them that they're going to offer to buy him out to make him stop. And then they'll be able to buy out

Dennis' contract I think is kind of basically the idea. And this one's up against the Italian bird fiasco which is an episode where another episode where Jim is okay, he's not the target of the con, but he's meant to be a hapless

victim in the con. I thought this was an interesting inclusion because there's a, the frame for the entire plot is a con that's happened offstage. Yeah. That doesn't really get revealed until the very end. But then everyone in the episode

is the subject of that con. And so thinking that what, thinking that the certain set of the Italian bird statues are what they are, it turns out they're wrong. But it's what drives all of their things. And then inside that, there are little cons.

There's the guy, again, our good friend, William Daniels. William Daniels, yeah. Sets up this whole introduction to Jim to show off what a wonderful, powerful art dealer he is. to Jim to show off what a wonderful, powerful art dealer he is, and then strikes that set, basically, so that when Jim comes back, he can't find him. And to make it seem, and then as we talked about in that episode, like, probably had the hotel manager working for him in order to gaslight Jim, essentially, into something was, wasn't real. And then there's the woman that he, that's also looking for them who poses as this buyer for a museum.

And it turns out that she's actually a jewel thief. So there's like an identity fraud thing going on. Unlike one in every port or counter gambit. It's not that there's one con that has counter cons within it. It's more like a Russian nesting doll of cons and they all are directed at different ends but they're all revolving around this one major con which is these word statues that may or may not be full of jewels yeah so i guess my big divide here is that i that both episodes are so wrapped up in either one of their cons. And again, the Foreign Sports Strategy is definitely got cons within cons. There's the whole romance with the woman that's trying to con Jim in the beginning.

Right. Who turns around and starts helping Jim out with his con. And it has wonderful Dennis Angel, Rocky Angel moments. has wonderful Dennis Angel, Rocky Angel moments. So what I'm trying to do with my brain here is to separate the cons from their episodes. Sure. Because if they are their episodes, I'm Farnsworth, because it's just a really fun episode for me. I guess one of the things I really like about the Farnsworth is how Jim just abandons his con when the mob shows up, right?

how Jim just abandons his con when the mob shows up. Right. So I guess for that alone, like I'm leaning Farnsworth, but I could be convinced otherwise. How are you? Yeah. I mean, so the thing for the time bird fiasco is that the cons are all kind of the

main con. It's kind of beside the point. It's just the, it's just the plot. Cause it turns out that the original birds were there all along. And that is what has driven all this weirdness happening. The smaller cons are fun within it. The smaller cons are fun within it.

But Jim kind of like figures each one out in turn, right? Yeah. There's no counterplay. So that all said, if a category is best con singular, I don't know. There's something so Rockford-y about Farnsworth. Yeah. So we have, at the end

of this, Counter Gambit, the Necklace Swap goes forward, the Aaron Ironwood School of Success goes forward, there's one in every port goes forward, and the Farnsworth Stratagem goes forward. So these are,worth stratagem goes so these are yeah hard category all solid it's a solid category yeah all right okay let's bring it home all right

so this is the best dialogue category yes this one is also kind of on a spectrum where we have some that are specific chunks of dialogue and we have some that are kind of like a scene that we remember that encapsulates dialogue that we remember being really great. And also some of this is a line and some of it is back and forth dialogue. So this is a bit of a catch all category for like stuff we really like that's based on the actual words that people said. Yes. Monologue, soliloquy, dialogue, whatever it is, somebody said it and we thought it was good.

So our first pairing here, we'll have the second appearance of one of the movies from If the Frame Fits. And this is, we talked about it at the time, I think it will stay with us forever, which is just the moment

where all this stuff has gone down. Jim is helping someone who's been framed, basically, right? Yes. They're at the police station. Dennis is at the end of his rope for whatever reason. And he turns to Jim. Do you know that bees can die of loneliness? Well, they can.

I don't know what can be said about this other than it it is what it is yeah like it just it it just comes out of nowhere it just carries so much weight with it the fact that it comes from dennis the fact that it comes in that moment the fact that it doesn't have anything to do with anything. It just imbues it with a meaning that is so sorrowful. It's like, what does that even mean? Like, be used to have loneliness. And then it's like, I'm going to think about that for a while. Yeah, it's just delightful and weird.

And we just are going to remember it forever. So I think that's why it's on our bracket. We're pairing this with another Dennis bit, and this is more dialogue, but this is also from Italian Bird Fiasco, which we were just talking about. So part of that plot also revolves around the murder of a Lloyds of London insurance agent. And so there's a moment where the L.A. cops

have been asked to help figure out what's going on and dennis is talking to jim jim has called him from a payphone uh he wants uh and dennis wants to talk to jim about this murder hey dennis old buddy how's it going jim where are you buddy oh i'm uh in a phone booth. Yeah, whereabouts? It's, uh, under a tree. Jim, you better come in. Did you send those blue suits out to my place? Yeah.

Why? Jim, you come on down. We'll talk it over and we'll get the whole thing worked out. Well, I'd like to do that, Dennis, old buddy But, you know, I'm trying to stay away from the department You know, I hurt your reputation when I come in there Jim, you get your butt in here

I'm gonna put out a warrant on you What's the matter, Dennis? Can't you ask nice? You gotta send one of those Batmobiles to pick me up? That was Highland's idea What's going on? Dennis, if you don't tell me, I'm not coming in. All right, I'll give you this much. We got a follow-up on that telex.

They found that Lloyds of London agent that was missing. Barrows? Right. He's dead. There's more, but you got to come in if you want the answers. Okay, Dennis, I'm on my way. Right. He's dead. There's more, but you got to come in if you want the answers. Oh, okay. Dennis, I'm on my way. Put out a warrant on Rockford. He said he was coming in.

He's not coming in. How do you know? Because I know, that's all. So this, again, kind of stands in for this whole genre of banter. Yeah. Where something is happening, the cops want to talk to Jim. Jim knows that if he goes to the police station, that's going to be the end of it for him.

And so they have whatever he needs to have with Dennis to give him plausible deniability about whether he's going to see Jim or not. So there's clear tension in their relationship. Like Jim needs Dennis to get things, get information. That's generally a one way thing. I'm assuming Jim is otherwise a good friend to Dennis. That is the impression we get. good friend to Dennis. That is the impression we get. Jim's willing to run an entire very expensive con to get them out of their bad timeshare situation. So I think it's not just the button

in that dialogue. It is the Jim and Dennis going back and forth with their fake voices with each other. It's just good. It's just good,'s just good good good all right so where do you where do you come down on this because we kind of have one exquisite line that needs no context versus this whole kind of typology of conversation that is like core to the jim dennis relationship yeah it's so hard me being who i am i gotta go with the bees die of loneliness i can't like i can't let go of that like i'm already picking out fonts for the tattoo i feel like you feel stronger about that than i feel advocating for the other one so we'll go with uh we'll advance bees die of loneliness to the next round i just want to see where what

shore that one watches up on so the next pairing we have here uh are two sort of complete scenes they're both wonderful moments that i think you don't need any background to enjoy like i can show these scenes to non-rockford wild fans and they would just absolutely enjoy them uh the first one is our urban horticulturalist the reason why the urban horticulturalist did not make the the best villain list is because this scene was going to make the best dialogue list and uh that's what we want the urban horticulturist for is this scene uh there's a lot going on in theorticulturist for is this scene uh there's a lot going on in the scene there's great status play going on there's good uh angel trying to uh

weasel out of things right i am what is known as an urban horticulturist see i have this garden scene it runs from fourth to the freeway and from manchester right up to the ocean now this garden was given me to watch over by Lucas Sporter while he's out of the country cooling off. But before he leaves, he says to me, Chester, don't you never let nobody plant nothing in your garden without you getting something to what grows. Now, you may ask, how come Chester Sierra gets to look over this garden and not some other guy?

And this is a fair question. It's because I am a good gardener. And what I plant grows. And I'm picking up lots of fruit and Lucas Spode is happy. Now along come a couple of guys, they jump over the fence with a gunny stack, they start messing around in my garden, I ask them what they're doing, they tell me

I'm not in the picture. Let me give you a piece of news. You are going to be out of the picture. We got a special place in the garden for guys what don't cooperate. It's called the East L.A. River and nothing grows there of the picture. We got a special place in the garden for guys what don't cooperate. It's called the East L.A. River, and nothing grows there but stiffs.

You remember Tom Little? I took the money back to this guy's apartment, and there were two guys there, and I ran for it, and they chased me, but I got away. And what happened to the 30 grand? You want to tell him that part, Jimmy? No, no, you go right ahead.

Sounds so flaky, I'm beginning to believe it myself. They ditched Rockford's car. I don't know where the car is, but the money's there. You want me to believe this? Well, I know that... I've been very patient with you guys. I brought you over here. I invited you to dinner so we can sit down and discuss everything.

And instead of a little honor and decency, you feed me an ice cream sandwich. Drop these guys in the river and make an example. I don't want no one else to think they can screw with me. You did it, Jimmy. I did it. I never said a word. After you're finished with them, I want to see Tom right here, right now. Look, why kill us both?

Look, just kill one of us. That would be even better, see? You could do Jimmy now. And then I go around and I tell people, well, you don't cheat Chester Sierra. And then later on, if you wanted to scare more people, I'd be available for the engagement. Get him out of here. Right. It's got great menace.

It's got great weaseliness. It's got Jim being defiant, but also understanding the situation. It's got all of that. but also like understanding the situation is it's got all of that and then on top of it i think this is maybe our best example here of the category of uh rockford files jargon yeah there's plenty we can be like uh i'm about to climb your tree or you know like lines like that from throughout all the episodes they sell me an ice cream sandwich is just an example of that, that wonderful, uh,

that, that, that way of turning a phrase that is like, I'm not sure if anyone in real life would say this, but I believe that this person in this show says it. Yes, exactly. This is a very rich,

uh, entry. Right. Similarly. Yes. So what it's up against is when Gabby and Gandy walk into the bar. Gabby and Gandy walk into a bar and it turns out that it's a Nazi bar. You're going to do the talk. Good evening.

I'm Marcus Aurelius Hayes, and I'd like to have a martini. Very dry. It's a nice place you have here. You know the nice thing about this country? That people from all political walks of life can coexist. Democrats, Republicans, Independents, Socialists, Nazis... Communists... As you were. We'll only be a minute. We don't allow no coconuts in here.

Why don't you just get your butts out now? Well, I think I should tell you that my name is Marcus Hayes from the Alcoholic Beverage Control Center. We license bars in case you didn't realize it. So despite the fact that you might have certain ethnic beliefs with which I'm not totally in sympathy, but case you didn't realize it, so despite the fact that you might have certain ethnic beliefs with which I'm not totally in sympathy, but although I certainly respect your right to have, I'm going to still put you out of business, so be nice. Well, if now isn't convenient, perhaps later.

Or I could send my supervisor out, Ernst Kruger. You through talking? It's a cold house man Gabby does his best to talk the situation down um and ultimately does not succeed therefore we get to see Gandhi and Gabby uh wipe the floor with a bunch of uh with a bunch of Nazis which, with a bunch of Nazis, which is extremely satisfying. Yeah. Yeah. This is like one of the most satisfying scenes in all of television. It's just wonderful.

So it's a hell of a pairing. God, this one is so hard. Partly because going into this, the urban horticulturist was just like a, uh, just a go-to example that we kept using when we were talking about doing uh the the this particular scene but also i like i said the gabby gabby versus the nazis is just

so classic so good so satisfying yeah so i guess where where i'm coming so i have two countervailing feelings here one is chicken little Little is a Little Chicken is well represented in the best episode category. And that's kind of inclusive of all of these elements that are standout elements. Yeah, yeah. is so Rockford-y. Yeah. While the Gabby and Gandhi dialogue is extremely character. Like, for those characters, that scene is excellent. But that is a backdoor pilot for a different show.

Yeah. And it's a great set piece scene that could be in any episode. The plot is just, we need to go to this bar to find someone like to find out if they know who this person is and that could be in so many different episodes while uh the uh the urban horticulturalist like the fact that he's who he is and he has a relationship he does to the other mobster in that episode is core to how that episode works yeah even though it's a wonderful scene i kind of feel like, given our project here, I actually am leaning more towards

the giving him an ice cream sandwich. Oh, my gosh. But I'm willing to entertain argument. I am so on the line with this that, like, it's different from being on the line and going, okay, you made a decision, so let's just go with that one. This is like the...

I'm so on the line that i i still can't just commit to either one of them um i'm gonna go with what you say because there's no reason to just quibble about this if i can't raise i like i i will say that the gabby and gandy against the nazis is just it's great i i think i do agree with you, though. It is, had we had a larger Rockford cinematic universe to enjoy, and then this was about all of the Rockford cinematic universe, then I would not be able to make a decision here. But I think you've convinced me with this. It's just so iconic. Yeah, the ice cream sandwich is so iconic. At least for us.

Yeah. Oh, my God. I can't believe we're still having trouble right down to the end here. All right. And this next bit, we're going to pit Angel against Angel. And they're both Angel talking to Rockford. Yeah. So our first entry here is from Hotel of Fear, where Angel is in some deep trouble and going to Rockford, but then unwilling to listen to what Jim is trying to tell him.

And then our other one is, again, from Chicken Little is Little Chicken, but it's the specific line where Jim runs down all of the things that Angel has done to get him into trouble and asks, why should I help you? Jimmy, please, come on. I can't do this alone. I'll be in white satin by sundown. You gotta help me.

Why? Because. Because you put 30 grand in my car without telling me and dragged two underworld syndicates down on top of me because you forgot a half a dozen little details, any one of which could have got me killed, and because you're crazy enough to confide in Tom Little. Did I forget anything?

Yeah, you forgot something. Why? Because you're my friend. One of the brilliant things about this piece of dialogue is how the two act. Right? Like,

I feel like that's a really fundamental thing to say. But, okay, here's the advantage that the Chicken Little Has a Little Chicken dialogue has, and that is is somebody has gone through the trouble to gif-ize it to gif-inate it is on twitter if you if you search up a gif of the rockford files each moment in this bit of dialogue shows up in an animated subtitled gif and so i have over the years watched rockford at the very end of that line.

I've watched his defenses crumble at the end of But Because You're My Friend over and over and over again. And it's wonderful. Yeah. Not to make that the only way to judge any of these categories because because there are woefully few Rockford Gifts out there. I think this is something that comes up a couple times, right? Like, Angel, why should I help you? I don't know if it's delivered this exact same way, but, like, this is a type. Yeah.

At the end of the day, like, we're friends. Like, that's why we're in this together. So the other line, this is from hotel of fear near the beginning. So, uh, angel witnesses, a, a hit man,

a murder, a woman, a woman that he knows at the like CD hotel that he lives at. And so of course, what is his first thing? He runs to Rockford, um, for help.

Jim is trying to give him the very straightforward sober advice normal stuff that normal people do like you should call the police yes angel uh doesn't want to do that and keeps trying to he keeps on asking for help and then immediately pushing back on the help that jim is trying to give him yes and then he ends up in this spiral i was an innocent bystander and you know what happens to them instant bystander gets caught in a crossfire instant bystander gets hit by a semi in a wild chase but you're a witness the cops don't want to talk to you muriel is dead d on the ed now what am i going to do bring her back to life who am i am i god a delightful thing about this is that this is this is angel's internal monologue right like

there's no there's no barrier here in this one he's just telling us what he's thinking as he's thinking it in his frantic state of mind i made this pick and uh one one thing that really elevated it for me was just this this way that it encapsulate not only is it a demonstration of angels monologue it also encapsulates the angel character in his whole like i want help i need help but not the way you're trying to help me yeah i need help but only in ways that i can conceptualize avoiding any kind of danger yeah Yeah, I need help, no consequences. Exactly. Like, no, I don't want to talk to the police.

And then blowing this, you know, making this dramatic overreach to some explanation for why he shouldn't do the very obvious thing that essentially is in his own best interest. It's a very childlike argument. And it's also a dialogue that like, who else could deliver this stuff like this? Like Stuart Margolin,

he just inhabits this character so well. And who else can say these words in this way and have it be this entertaining? And the answer is no one. That's who. I was actually thinking like, this is a great way to reveal some of the character of Angel.

But the thing is, Stuart Margolin just of the character of angel but i like the thing is stewart margaret just reveals the character of angel all the time so well uh yeah uh so it's a tough one my my leaning is towards the because you're my friend we've done this thing where if it's one in one category we've been kind of leaning against it in other categories. And also, I know that Chicken Little is a Little Chicken has been in so many categories. But again, I could be convinced otherwise here. I'm leaning the other way. I mean, kind of all along that track of kind of like, well, because I'm your friend is very core, but it's also that episode is represented in this category already. Yeah, that's true. If part of what's so great about it is that episode is represented in this category already.

Yeah, that's true. If part of what's so great about it is that it is expressing the Angel-Jim relationship, the dialogue from Hotel Fear is also doing that. Okay. In a slightly different way, but where this is actually Jim actually trying to help Angel. Like this is Jim actually being a friend. Like you have come to me in a panic. I'm trying to help Angel. This is Jim actually being a friend. You have come to me in a panic. I'm trying to help you. And Angel showing how he's just such

a hard friend to have. So the exasperation at the end of because you're my friend, even though that this isn't the order that they aired in, I don't think, but is informed greatly by what's happening in Hotel of Fear here.

Yeah. If this is an affront on your core beliefs about this line, because I'm your friend, I can respect that. But that's my argument. I don't trust myself because I've just seen it in the gif so often. So yeah, let's go with the Hotel of Fear. I think that's good. Who am I?

God. So yeah, let's go with the Hotel of Fear. I think that's good. Who am I? God. And then I think very appropriately to end this all, the last pairing we have is Jim Rockford versus Jim Rockford. Yeah, similar to those ones with Angel.

We have one that's like a line and then one that's back and forth dialogue. They're both just revealing to the audience a fundamental bit about the character of Jim Rockford. So the line one here is from Profit and Loss. I think from the first episode, I think it's from Profit. Yeah, I think so. It's part of the whole, I want to hire you, well, I don't want to actually do any work dance. Yeah. You said it was dangerous. How dangerous?

I'm not sure. Yeah, well, well in all candor if it's really dangerous uh i don't think i'd be particularly interested i don't understand i was told that you were very reliable reliable but chicken yes this reliable but, I feel like it belongs right there with, along with plus expenses, right? One of the fundamental features of Jim that I love is his practicality. And he has a healthy respect for violence. He has a healthy desire to avoid being hurt. desire to avoid being hurt and right and this is uh great when this character when he's positioned between these forces of like when he has to go and face something and say rocky doesn't want him to uh or when angel is like a further extension of that cowardice like on a on a on a much grander scale uh but i think for me my

favorite moments are when jim tells people that are trying to hire him this thing that you're doing is too dangerous i don't want to be involved you know i don't know who you think i am but i'm a human being and i don't want to get hurt and uh i think just three words, reliable but chicken, just nails it so well. That said. That said, yeah. This one was one of my picks. And this is from The Countess, whichford's view of the world that I think is never really challenged, not in the sense that it's simplistic, but more in the sense

of like, this seems so intrinsic. Yeah. It's never doubted throughout the rest of the show, really. And we kind of see him come back to it in his behavior over and over. It's at the very end of the episode, Jim's in the hospital. There's been a rough and tumble i think uh he and the the villain of the piece went over a cliff in a car or something like that and so he's talking to the uh the countess uh who originally hired him um and she's had the wool pulled over her eyes by that bad guy i forget exactly the details but to

try and get her money or something like that um And so she's finally seeing the full truth of the matter, which is that he was lying to her and all of the things she thought were real or not. They keep fooling you, don't they? I think everything's real. Then when you get close enough so you can see, it's just made of plastic. Mike was the only genuine article around. But he got hooked on a plastic Candace. How do you deal with that?

We're all scared to death. I guess that's a penalty we pay for living in a world where all the price tags end in 99 cents and they sell mortuary plots on billboards next to the freeway. What you do is, you just keep laughing. They're going to kiss your hand, honey honey because you are a countess stop worrying about it you're playing a big practical joke just just keep laughing is that what you do you bet and that's the end of the episode. I think it freeze frames on his smile right after it. First of all, there's the

Rockfordishness of the price tags end in 99 cents and mortuary plots on billboards next to the freeway. Yeah, they're a bit of Rockford poetry. Yes, but then this idea of we're all playing a role.

Everyone is faking it. You can either let that get to you or you can be part of the joke or you can be in on it. Yeah. in that two-parter where she too is having an entire life fall apart and all of a sudden has to figure out what to do next and he's his advice to her is essentially like you were playing a role in new york yeah and now it's over that doesn't mean that you've changed right like you're still you you still get to make choices uh so it's kind of like the other side of this where it's like just because you are putting on a mask sometimes doesn't mean you're a different person underneath which is kind of like the yin to this yang a little bit um yeah it's just again one of those things that's just stuck with me and just seems so core to the gym outlook

on the world i i offer no resistance on that well i'm i was just presenting it do you well i guess that's my pick then okay i look I like both of them quite a bit. I think they both say something fundamental about the character of Jim. But I think I like the other one, the Countess one better because of, I guess it goes a little deeper. And it just, again, I think you're right on track with the sort of poetry poetry the specific brand of poetry the 99 cents the the mortuary plots uh it's all very rockford yeah i think it's you know uh we may have even said something to the effect but it's got the all the world's a stage and we're merely players it has a bit it's a bit of a riff on some very classic phrasing. Yeah.

So, yeah, this is Shakespearean Rockberg here. Alright, well then we'll advance it to the next round. Yes! Alright, so our final selections for Best Dialogue are the we'll shorthand them as Who Am I God? from Hotel of Fear,

Bee's Die of Loneliness from If the frame fits, uh, the price tags and practical jokes monologue from the countess. And you give me an ice cream sandwich. Chicken little is a little chicken. All right, there we go.

That's our first round done. 32 Rockford things have been eliminated. I feel dirty. So that's us for this episode. Yes. Next time, we're going to go all the way. We won't have to recap them. No.

If you only listen to that episode uh i mean don't like at least listen to this one before i if you listen to that episode then you come and listen to this episode then you get to this part where we say you really should listen to this one first well now you know yes exactly yeah i mean we'll do our we'll we'll cut in some clips and stuff to keep things fresh as we go. But also, it'll go a lot faster because there's fewer choices to make, though perhaps some of them will be more agonizing. And then we'll also get to the part where we'll be crowning our region champions. And that will be ridiculous because what's better, the best car chase or the best villain? We're going to find out.

Yeah, I think we should both plan on being ready to go to bat for things this next one because this early one it's fine things get eliminated but like i i think i think we should start fighting okay i think that that makes better radio uh no more okay this deserves this or whatever like now we're gonna have to start getting cutthroat because we eliminate 32 this time by the end we're gonna have to eliminate 31 more there's just gonna be one left and that will be our our first ever malibu madness champion so yes we can look forward to that and who will it be the only way to find out will be to join us next time for another episode looking at the entire spectrum of the Rockford Files.