Two Hundred A Day - Episode 78: The House on Willis Avenue

Episode Date: December 27, 2020

Nathan and Eppy finally tackle a long-anticipated long episode, S4E21 The House on Willis Avenue. Split into two episodes for syndication, this episode is both a pilot for a spinoff show about young investigator Richie Brockelman, and an issue episode tackling the growing use of private data by unscrupulous private entities (in this instance, a technophile villain played to great effect by Jackie Cooper). Still relevant today, we found this episode to be a well-told story that blended all of its agendas into an entertaining and memorable whole. Highly recommended! We mention the Privacy Act of 1974 in our ending summary. Here's the Department of Justice page (https://www.justice.gov/opcl/privacy-act-1974) on the act itself, and here's the text of the report of the Privacy Protection Study Commission (the text on which we think the final screen is based): Personal Privacy in an Information Society (https://epic.org/privacy/ppsc1977report/). We have another podcast: Plus Expenses. Covering our non-Rockford media, games and life chatter, Plus Expenses is available via our Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/twohundredaday) at ALL levels of support. Want more Rockford Files trivia, notes and ephemera? Check out the Two Hundred a Day Rockford Files Files (http://tinyurl.com/200files)! We appreciate all of our listeners, but offer a special thanks to our patrons (https://www.patreon.com/twohundredaday). In particular, this episode is supported by the following Gumshoe and Detective-level patrons: * Richard Hatem (https://twitter.com/richardhatem) * Brian Perrera (https://twitter.com/thermoware) * Eric Antener (https://twitter.com/antener) * Bill Anderson (https://twitter.com/billand88) * Chuck from whatchareading.com (http://whatchareading.com) * Paul Townend, who recommends the Fruit Loops podcast (https://fruitloopspod.com) * Shane Liebling's Roll For Your Party dieroller app (https://rollforyour.party/) * Jay Adan's Miniature Painting (http://jayadan.com) * Dael Norwood, Dylan Winslow, Dave P, Dale Church and Dave Otterson! Thanks to: * Fireside.fm (https://fireside.fm) for hosting us * Audio Hijack (https://rogueamoeba.com/audiohijack/) for helping us record and capture clips from the show * Spoileralerts.org (http://spoileralerts.org) for the adding machine audio clip * Freesound.org (https://www.freesound.org/) for other audio clips

Good morning. This is a telephone company. Due to repairs, we're giving you advance notice that your service will be cut off indefinitely at 10 o'clock. That's two minutes from now. Welcome to 200 a Day, the podcast where we talk about the 70s television detective show, The Rockford Files, and sometimes the 70s television detective show, Richie Brockleman, Private Eye. I'm Nathan Paletta. And I'm the Richie Brockleman to Nathan Paletta at the Dyer Rabbit Show. I don't know. I mean, are we going by wisdom or by age? Oh, that's true. If anything, I'm the Brockleman to your Rockford. Well, yeah. I mean, I'll give you

that. I've got a little more. I got a few more years on you. You have a little more experience under your belt. As you may have picked up, we are going to be talking about season four, episode 21, The House on Willis Avenue. Yeah. Which is the first appearance of the character Richie Rockleman on The Rockford Files and was basically a pilot for the spinoff series starring Dennis Dugan as Richie Brockleman, Richie Brockleman, Private Eye, which ran for five episodes. Which I think you can find some on YouTube. I haven't tried. I'm sure it's possible.

I think I've watched enough of one on YouTube to know that it's there. Okay. I am definitely curious enough that I will probably end up watching a Richie Brockleman private eye at some point if I can find it. But yeah, I feel like this episode has been like, this has been on our horizon for a while. I feel like it's been a bit of a white whale for some reason. First of all, I think it's because it is squarely an issue episode. And, you know, our other example of that is... So Help Me God.

Yeah, is So Help Me God, which we've talked about ad nauseum. So it's the other example for that kind of show and i don't know and it's a two-parter and sometimes it's like we put off putting two-parters until we're like ready to spend the time with them and we've had requests we've had multiple requests to or suggestions to do this episode yeah so we're doing it and there are more bro Brockleman episodes, right? There's one more, which is another two-parter and actually one of my favorites,

if I remember it right, which I have not rewatched it because I'm saving it for the show, but Never Send a Boy King to Do a Man's Job, which is in the next season. And I think that that's another reason why

this has been on the horizon because I think we both felt we wanted to do this before we did that. Yeah. sure so now we're doing it uh the stars have aligned yes so it's a bit of a misnomer to call it a two-parter it's it was syndicated in two parts but it's one continuous episode it's an it's an hour and a half mystery movie episode of television. There's no spot in it that I felt like, oh, this is where you would

clearly start the next half of it. Yeah, I started kind of trying to find that spot once I noticed it was getting up into the kind of 50-minute area. I wonder where they cut it for syndication. I'm sure we could find that somewhere, but somewhere in there, I wonder where they cut it for syndication. I'm sure we could find that somewhere, but somewhere in there,

I'm sure they split it. I did find a reference to when it's into syndication, it has a recap right at the beginning of the second episode of the first episode. So, you know, maybe it splits a little light later, closer to the 56 minute mark or whatever,

so that there's a little less airtime in that second episode so that it can the recap so there's a couple scenes at which it could split that are in there that would make sense but when you're viewing it as one show as we as it was on my blu-rays i assume it's the same on the dvd yeah yeah it just plays through there's no like i'm james garner and here's what happened on the last episode yes Yes. And there's no, uh, you know, like how gear jammers significantly changes between the two. Uh, there's nothing like that.

Like even plot twist wise, it doesn't have story beats that tell you now we're done with the first half. And now we're in the second half. It is one continuous show, uh, which is fun. Um, nice change of pace uh this episode is uh was written by steven cannell almost restrained to me i think again the premise

has that little outside of the box premise that i associate with a lot of his stuff but the actual procedural here's what happens in the episode is uh it's very talky yeah which is fine because we love to hear these characters talk to each other but it's uh also just pretty straightforward yeah one of the things that i think it was kind of marked by i don't mean that in the bad way maybe i shouldn't say marked but like one of the things that uh i noted about it was that it was um a little more psychoanalytical about rockford than than we're used to which is good i mean we'll get into it but like richie makes a good mirror for rockford in in in uh many ways and and they have like

parallels in the story we're going to find out that they both have the same mentor and there's little bits where richie and rockford do the same things but in different ways and it's fun but they get into what the rocky and rockford's relationship a bit talking about like how rocky views the the idea of being a private eye because richie kind of thinks jim's got it all and uh has the respect of the world when we know that that's not true and and yeah so there's just really interesting things going on there that i thought um definitely elevated the episode it feels a little uh i'm trying to think of the not a the first word i thought of was it feels a little more adult but that's not really the right word. It's a little more sophisticated, maybe, than, I don't know, some other episodes might be.

And that's not a slam on other Rockford Files episodes. It's just like there's a quality of the writing where it's a fun ride to just kind of watch the characters do their thing and listen to their banter. to just kind of watch the characters do their thing and listen to their banter but then the uh the actual content of what they are saying there's a lot of recursion there's a lot of touching back on things that came up earlier and yeah and mirroring themes and like pretty pretty strong handling of the language and the writing and the thematic content, um, that really stands out against the backdrop of a fairly straightforward story. I think. Yeah.

And I think that also contributes a little bit to, uh, the, the sort of like, well, how did they make this into two? Right. Like, uh,

cause it just feels of a piece. Like I was aware of the length, I think only because it was an assignment for us like i i'm like okay i have this delightful thing in my life where i get to carve out time in my day to watch a rockford files episode but i'm still carving out time in my day to do it and um so i'm like i and i knew it was going to be a long one so i had to carve out a bigger chunk of my day to do it but i think if that weren't the case if i just put it in and sat down to watch it i think i probably would have been at least two-thirds if not three-fourths of the way through before i realized it was it was a

long episode i would have been an hour in and been like this seems like it's a little long and then checked yeah yeah i mean it's a it's a movie yeah the whole style is is more more of a feature film, not visually, but the pacing, if nothing else. So that is all to say it is a long episode. We are going to spend one episode on it of our show. So this one, you know, we'll see how it comes out. But this one may be a little longer than usual. But it is also very talky. So we'll try not to get too bogged down in the weeds

of who says what to who win right yeah there's a lot of detail uh so this is a strong if if you haven't seen this one and you're able to and this sounds interesting this is a strong like you should watch this one uh recommendation for sure this episode is directed by high offer back uh i assume that is how you pronounce his name this is his only rockford files episode uh but he did direct two columbos including one of my absolute favorites a stitch in crime which is the leonard nimoy one oh he also directed an episode of murder she wrote but was primarily apparentlyASH guy and directed 20 episodes of MASH. And then just looking at his credits, so he was a director in the 70s and 80s.

He was a producer of TV in the 60s, including The F Troop, among other shows that maybe you'd heard of if you know more about 60s TV. And then he was an actor in the 50s. So that's an interesting career progression to me. Seems like an interesting guy that there isn't a whole lot about on the Internet. So, OK, so here's a an interesting career progression to me seems like an interesting guy that there isn't a whole lot about on the internet so okay so here's the interesting thing about him as long as we're saying he's interesting and talking about interesting things so he did richie brockleman the missing 24 hours right so that was a tv movie pilot that came out a year before yes so he did that before this episode which almost certainly is

why he's doing this episode right like that that makes sense he did some maverick stuff oh interesting it's one of those like if you do the forensics of who was on what show when you can kind of see a story of him knowing you know the people that would bring him into the rockford world but yeah uh that's all I had to say about him. The Richie Brockleman timeline is there's the missing 24 hours that aired the year previously. Then this is the last episode of the fourth season of The Rockford Files, which airs at the beginning of 1978. And then Richie Brockleman, Private Eye,

played in The Rockford Files time slot, I guess between now and when the fifth season started. And it only ran for five episodes. So, you know, I guess it is what it is. That was a really interesting gambit they tried there. And then he comes back at the, I believe at the end of the fifth season for the other Rockford Files episode that he's in.

That's delightful. Yeah. Anyway, so yeah, that's probably enough preamble for what is going to be a lot of show. But thankfully, I would say we have a pretty slight preview montage. If you would like to take us through that, Eppie. My notes on this one. Car, gunfight, computers, helicopters. You're dealing with something way over your head.

Yep. Yep. I mean, like. Sounds about right. Someone's been murdered. gunfight computers helicopters you're dealing with something way over your head yep yep i mean like sounds about right someone someone's been murdered someone's getting spied on there's a helicopter there's there's a car chase we've got a budget for this one so enjoy and yeah that brings us right into it hello listeners this is a quick break before we get into the episode to say thank you to our patrons over at patreon.com slash 200 a day. This show is free to all, but the support from patrons really goes a long way, so we always extend a special thanks to our gumshoes.

This time we say thank you to Chuck from whatyou'rereading.com. Check out the site for reviews of books, games, movies, comics, and more. Paul Townend, who also recommends the podcast Fruit Loops, Serial Killers of Color at fruitloopspod.com Shane Liebling, you're playing games online, so check out his dice rolling app Roll For Your Party at rollforyour.party Jay Adan, check out

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Bill Anderson, at Billand88, and of course, Richard Haddam, at Richard Haddam. We follow them too, at 200pod. Why become a patron for as little as $1 an episode? In addition to supporting the show and exclusive episode previews, our patrons get plus expenses. A bonus podcast where we casually chat about all the media we're currently enjoying and things going on in our lives.

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 200aday to see if becoming a patron is right for you. We start this episode at night following an older guy walking through a construction site. He's being tailed by a security truck. We see kind of meander onto camera

as this guy goes through. And he makes a call from a payphone to a very mustachioed man i would say uh yes this is um what's his name from wkrp yes very mustachioed i think it would be the best way to describe him uh howard hesseman is the actor yes this episode does have a pretty good deal of seeing people before we learn what their names are. Right. So we'll,

you know, just for ease of use, we will call people by their names that we learned later. But, uh, so this is, uh, uh,

Al Stever is our mustachioed man with his little yippy dog, BB. Our guy on the phone is, uh, saying that he's found something out and you're not going to believe it. It's spooky. He wants to meet in an hour after checking out a couple more addresses. So they agree to meet in an hour.

And then we see after he gets off the phone, our older guy gets pinned in by a couple approaching security vehicles and surrounded. I have a lot of notes in here of good banter. surrounded i have a lot of notes in here of good banter so if you ever have a thing where you want to call out some good language a lot of good back and forth uh between incidental characters i would say yeah but uh this guy is taken to a big helicopter that is um waiting outside of a construction company building once he is brought into the helicopter, we meet our, essentially our villain of the piece who is waiting inside. His name is Garth McGregor, and he is played by the wonderful Jackie Cooper. Instantly recognizable to me, at least as a Columbo fan, as he's been on a good Columbo episode. I feel like he's been on Rockford's.

He has directed episodes. he's only made two appearances as an actor oh but he directed uh in hazard uh the italian bird fiasco and counter gambit which right okay we have all done so we actually only have two episodes to go to do the jackie cooper oh nice so maybe we should think about that. He is, and always will be Perry white in my head though. He's from the original Superman films. I shouldn't say original, uh, but the Christopher Reeve Superman films.

Um, so the interior of this helicopter is nicely appointed. Yeah. It was very luxurious. Like the outside, it looks like a military helicopter. Yeah. And then inside it's like, Oh, this is like a, it's all plush and there's an armchair.

I'll be honest, when you started describing the scene, I'm like, yeah, I'm with you. I'm with you. And then you talk about it being inside the helicopter. And my brain went trying to remember what that scene was because I'm envisioning the insides of helicopters that I've seen in television throughout time. But I was like, no, isn't this the scene that takes place inside the yacht? No, no, that is the helicopter. That's what's happening here. This helicopter is the equivalent of a yacht.

Yeah. In other places. Yeah. So we establish him on the phone and he's talking to someone and he says, go kiss a baby. Leave this to me. Yeah. Which I wrote down because it's a fun phrase. But that's actually foreshadowing the person he's talking to someone um and he says go kiss a baby leave this to me yeah which i wrote down because it's a fun phrase but that's actually foreshadowing the person he's talking to go kiss a baby clearly a politician right there they're letting us know that dirty politics are

involved in whatever's going on in this construction site um so our our older guy has been poking around and uh mcgregor wants to set him straight and see if they can come to some kind of agreement and maybe make him right. And then we fade out as the helicopter takes off. Our older man, I think, is very suspicious of anything being put to right here. He's clearly not having it, but he also has no power in this situation. Yeah, when they're ready to take off, he's like, well, I need a parachute. It's ominous. So we fade out from that and then fade into Jim and Rocky in the trailer.

And Jim is getting dressed up because he's going to a funeral. This whole conversation is in the context of Jim looking for his wallet and getting increasingly agitated that he can't find it. While Rocky waxes philosophical about death. It's great. Just going on and on about the older you get, the more you go to. And then you stop going to him for a while. Just grim Rocky. Well, and then he has this whole thing about the Red Fords.

The Red Fords. And take automobiles supposing detroit was to build a hundred thousand red fords well at the end of five years you're going to lose half of them red fords they'll be in the wrecking yard then five years later another 30 of them are going to be gone because of accidents or or bad driving well that means that after that time is all over, you're going to have a couple of hundred red Fords that because it was put together good and driven carefully are going to be around forever.

I'm looking for my wallet, Rocky. Is it on the desk? You know it wouldn't hurt you none to put your own Ford in neutral the way you're always chasing around and working on one dangerous case or another. Okay, so a couple of things I love about this. Number one dangerous case or another okay so a couple things i love about this number one like this just feels so i've in my teenage years having conversations with friends

who had brand identity with certain cars or whatever would have things like this they'll say i mean this kind of reminds me when uh out back of my house i have a shed that's just rotting it's falling apart and humble brag brag. Yeah, humble brag. When my father-in-law sees it, or there's a few other people that have seen it, they're like, oh, this has got good bones. Like, you never want something with good bones. You don't get anything with good bones. Good bones don't help you.

And this is what this, I don't know, this car thing reminds me of. It's like, yeah, no, most of them fall apart or whatever, but then the ones that don't, that's why you buy a Red Ford. It's like yeah no most of them fall apart or whatever but then the ones that don't that's that's why you buy a red ford it's like no but then the other part this is the part that i love is that it's a red ford right the most inconsequential detail about these fords but it's important that we know that they're red because that's the one that um rocky has i think right uh yeah i assume that is Ford. I actually do not know. There we go. As inveterate not-car guys,

we will have to go to the Rockford Files files to double-check. But through this monologue, this is part of the slowing down that he wants Jim to do is because he doesn't seem to have time for Rocky anymore. He doesn't have time to go fishing, doesn't have time to come over,

all those kinds of things. And thenim is getting increasingly irritable and that's why he's so riled up that's because jim just doesn't like funerals yeah but this is special uh is more than a friend this is a funeral for joe tooney who taught jim things that kept him alive the first two years he was in the business we get the line that we'll come back to over and over which is uh what he was doing on that freeway i just don't know he never drove on the freeway so it doesn't make sense that he got in a car crash on the freeway jim finds his wallet finally in the drawer of his desk that

rocky has been blocking by sitting there and talking at him the whole time and uh has an appropriate quip about ah right there in the glove box, continuing our car metaphor. I was just going to say about the freeway thing. There's this lovely bit where he says something about him being able to go across the town on surface streets faster than anybody on the freeway. Okay, so it's important that he's not on the freeway. And it's important that we nail that home. But what I love about that line and the way that does that is that feels like something that jim would aspire to yes or see heroic in a human being right like it it's not

just like we need to do this to get the plot through it also exposes a little bit about jim and uh the kind of person he is and and also shows us that this why this person was a mentor to jim i also really appreciate that he specifically says that the things he learned kept him alive the first two years he was in the business yeah then you know then he figured some stuff out for himself but those first couple years he really needed the help well and that mirrors a bit the red ford thing that um rocky was talking about like if they get past this certain line they'll go on forever is joe tooley the reason why jim was able to get past that certain line and can now as rocky puts it rack up a hundred thousand miles on his dash right and i think the implication is he was yeah so we do go to a church for the service and it's a room

room full of pis have you ever seen so many pis in one place but we we come into hearing an argument from the back pews where who's starting to feel like an old friend of ours yes verne saint cloud my notes are wait i know that voice uh is yelling at a a fresh-faced young fellow next to him who you know is the richie brockelman we've been talking so much about yelling at him loudly to shut up and not disrupt a service and richie inching away from him so we last saw vern in our episode 62 sticks and stones may break your bones but waterbury will bury you which we did a year ago um and that was a a pi team assemble episode we've been kind of going back in time with him because we first saw him in one of the uh in one of the lance white episodes oh yeah

like detective like award conference or whatever yeah so this is a recurring character uh in the rockford files of this like noir era pi kind of persona like messy yeah kind of language and delivery uh who is clearly over the hill in terms of his i don't know skills or what he brings to the table, but not willing to let go of the one thing he knows, which is this private investigator lifestyle. Yeah, he's got a little bit of angel desperateness coming off of him because he's always, he's doing the same thing where he's always looking for an angle and then just assuming everyone else is also looking for that same angle.

And that's how they're all operating. Yeah, no, he's great. And I'm actually really glad. I mean, obviously, you said we did this last year, which means we did this a thousand years ago. uh of having a good introduction to him but also the the pi world that that is rockford's uh greater community that we don't get a whole lot of all the time but like when they do show up i really enjoy it yeah and so if you're you know watching this at the time you would have seen verne i again a year ago or a year and a half ago i guess the middle of season three is when sticks and stones uh came out so you know if you were a long time rockford files fan you would have seen this character before though it may have been a while since since the last time he is a memorable

character is is the point um we cut to uh richie talking to the widow of uh joe tooley talking to the widow of Joe Tooley, talking to her about how Joe was the main reason that he is doing what he's doing, how he got into the PI business. I think establishing for us that this guy, Joe Tooley, was his mentor, right? So it's immediately giving us the, you know, we are viewing a version of Jim's past in a way with this character. But he gets around to asking if Joe was working on anything, and he offers to help straighten anything out that might have been left hanging by this sad event. But his widow says that he wasn't working on anything, just didn't have any cases, he was retired.

But he was just doing a little work around the environmental impact in some housing starts in the canyons just helping a friend out um he then gets interrupted by vern coming in to accuse him of trying to basically pick the bones uh trying to steal the cases from from poor dead joe this happens in the foreground as we see jim pass them we see jim notice them having this conversation and then we focus on jim going to talk to a couple of his other pi buddies and they kind of are swapping stories about joe and saying how sad it was and all this stuff uh i didn't note it at the time because i thought it was just chatter but then it turns out it's important later so i came back to make the note uh one of them mentions how joe uh he got around well or whatever considering his

leg he stepped on a landmine in world war ii i think um in france so his leg was injured but uh he had like a pin in it and got around fine or something like that so i had the opposite reaction to this okay where uh when when he said it i noted it right away and i was like this feels important here's a weird detail yeah it stands out both in this episode and in the rockford files where something important doesn't also do other duty like this might just be we need you to know this so that when it comes up later uh later on it comes up and it's reiterated a few times and the idea that joe would tell this story over and over is important as well to to the character of joe so eventually but at the moment i thought this feels vaguely sloppy just to drop this clue you know in the

open but i think you had the reaction that the writers would have wanted the audience to have. But we learned that Joe was on the freeway and he got hit by a gas truck, which sounds awful. But it's strange. It's not just that he avoided highways out of preference. He also had bad eyesight. And so he didn't want to be on the highway, especially at night, considering his eyesight. Yes. the highway especially at night considering his eyesight yes this little conversation continues uh as various pi buddies have to go and and you know get about their days uh and then we see one

of the guys see vern oh here comes saint claude i gotta get out of this hey sam how you doing rockford getting any so we cut from there to joe tooley's office which we know because of his name on the uh on the glass uh where jim is picking the lock and i feel like he goes into this room and i have a note of like we've definitely seen this set before possibly in waterbury for the other dead pi's office that they have to go into like it just seems very familiar um we kind of cut back and forth a little bit but basically jim goes into this office and then we cut to this establishing shot of a light flashing and then there's a guy on a headset in this big room full of computers oh i love it i mean it's essentially a it's a

headquarters it's essentially a headquarters. It's a monitoring facility of some sort. But yeah, we're going to come back to this location over and over. So, you know, it's the computer room. Yes. And it's always this guy who's going to be on the headset. And he responds to everything with Wilco. Yes.

Maybe we'll call him Wilco. I love seeing this old computer uh with the spinning reel reels and the massive amount and just knowing that the device that i used to like you know oh no actually i wouldn't i've watched this on a dvd player never mind but like you know my phone having more computing capacity than that entire room just yeah it's wild i think as time goes on it gets more and more cute like oh it's adorable look at all those giant computers that probably cost millions of dollars but at what cost but at what cost that's what this episode's about um so the uh this light flashes our our guy um he's like an operator from the Matrix. He's always answering the thing and then dispatching stuff.

So he makes a call that someone's kicked off a dormant mic, and it has a 1016 code. So they have to notify someone important, record and relay, put it on tape. And then we see a car peeling out of a parking garage. Before we go back to jim he keeps poking around and he finds a folder underneath the blotter with some some papers in it including one that says the expenses for the albert stever case and a index card that says 1414 willis avenue and then our title credit comes up over the card oh that's so great and the

credits slowly play over the course of the rest of the scene jim leaves uh and we have a great transition shot where he gets into an elevator the camera stays there the other elevator opens and verne saint cloud gets out of the other elevator. It's such a good gag. I think I was expecting the gag, but I was expecting it to be the, at this point, I'm thinking they're feds, but I'm wrong about that. But I'm expecting it to be this car that has come out, right? I'm not expecting Vern, and I'm super excited to see what happens next. Because as soon as we see Vern, we know exactly what's going to happen, right? Yeah. So Vern goes in himself um he leaves his lock picks sticking out of the lock so sloppy so he

mirrors what jim does jim goes in he opens the drawer he lifts a bottle of liquor and kind of like does a little smile like oh joe and then puts it back and then he starts rifling around vern comes in he leaves hispicks in the door handle. He takes the bottle of liquor out, takes a swig of it and puts it in his pocket and then doesn't seem to find anything. He looks disappointed. He makes a phone call to, like, check his messages or something and says it's a bust. And, you know, there's nothing there. So we're cutting back and forth with the car approaching while Vern's doing this.

And then he makes a call to Tennessee to his brother. I'm assuming because it's going to be on someone else's dime because it's a long distance call. My notes were just like, you just knew he was going to make a long distance call. He's just watching him get comfortable with the room. You're like, OK, it's not a thing we think about anymore. But back then, if somebody was like, can I borrow your phone? borrow your phone nowadays you're like yeah but don't look through the photos on it like but back then it would be like yeah but don't make a long distance call so while he's uh yelling with his brother or right after uh finally our two guys with guns bust their way in

vern tries to blather says that uh mrs tooley asked him to come down make sure all the cases are up to date etc what she for she she forgot that she has a spare key and they have his lockpicks that he left in the door he does ask if they're cops and they do not respond but they make a call saying we got a gopher and upgrade surveillance to 1a we may still be in trouble here there's also a great line where i don't know if he gets verne's business card or something but he just says what is a verne saint cloud yeah i didn't note his name i don't think we hear it till almost the end of the episode but there's like a main goon who's kind of a lieutenant in this organization as we'll learn

and he's the balder one um his name is bj his character's name is bj okay he has the extremely dry delivery and actually combines really well with everyone else with uh lots of good gags in the line deliveries and stuff because he's so dry we go to richie at the the morgue files and records desk, and we get to see Richie Brockleman run a con. Yes. I refer to this as an aw shucks routine, where he is posing as a life insurance claim adjuster, and he needs to see the coroner's report. Because he has this whole long backstory about the new president of the company who made an accidental approved an accidental payout to someone who wasn't actually dead. And so it's a new policy. And, you know, it's the the Richie version of the Jim, just a working man routine.

I had it as the beleaguered working stiff act. Right. But this version is it's a little because he's so young right so he's like 23 i think they establish you know so he's so young so a lot of a lot of his approach is acting like he is like new and just trying to get along and right you know just trying to please everyone and he just needs a little bit of help, which works for him. I'm not even certain the file's still down here. Hey, I know it's a pain, but the thing of it is, is if I don't get a look at that thing, I can't file a claims report. And old Mr. Schusterfeld is not going to approve the payment. And I got to tell you, of all the claims, this company should pay quickly. This is right at the

top of the list. You see, well, Mrs. Tooley, she's out at the Spring Garden Hospital. It's an old folks' home. There's a $4,000 bill due, and they're about to pitch her out onto the street, which is okay, I guess, except for the fact that she's a paraplegic, and she needs a place with ramps for her wheelchair, which lets out most of your inexpensive housing. Let me take a look. I love how this mirrors

what we've seen in jim over the years um and exactly what you were saying like it's it's the version that works for him because he's younger than jim he's not you know he doesn't have jim's smile there's you know certain things that he that jim can do that he can't do but the other part about it that i i assume is intentional but i just love is that it's also a little too complex. Yeah. You feel like that that's part of him being new at the game as well. Like building too much scaffolding into too much detail. Yeah.

And, and you kind of feel like, like, I think there's a moment in here where I was ready for the guy to be like, this is ridiculous. Right. But I think the strategy is moment in here where I was ready for the guy to be like, this is ridiculous. Right. But I think the strategy is he just keeps on, he has more story.

Every time there's a question, he has more story and more story. And finally the guy, obviously just to get him to shut up, it's like, you know what? Fine. I'll see if I can find it.

Yes. Whatever it takes to get you to stop telling me this boring story. He's really good with the blather. He just can barf it. So he does find it and we see Richie looking at an x-ray before we go on to our next scene. And I did not in this moment catch why that was important, which I feel that was one of the moments where I was kicking myself later. Because we listened to the whole thing about having a pin in his leg. I made a note of it saying this is important and then when we get an x-ray of the leg

it doesn't occur to me that that's important to be fair at least from where i was sitting it was a piece of floppy plasticky black paper so i'm like oh that is an x-ray but it's not like they show it's a close-up of it being the leg or something like that. But yes, this will come back again later combined with other information that we have been tipped off to. We then go to some kind of civil government meeting where Al Stever is yelling at county supervisor Nardone. Nardone makes a point of saying that Stever has accused him of every underhanded thing in the book. Yeah.

You know, this is a long-going issue between the two of them. But Stever wants to know why the lots in Dead Rock Canyon are getting cut up. It's supposed to be a wilderness protection area and no housing's supposed to be there without a full hearing.

And they start getting into county codes. And then we fade out of their audio. Well, okay, so first, there's applause from the audience after Stever makes his point about there's supposed to be a full hearing for new housing developments. So the people are on his side. I think that's what we need to know from here. And then we fade out of their dialogue as Jim slips into the back and ends up sitting down next to Richie watching this altercation.

It's clear as Jim is slipping in that he recognizes Richie. And that's why this isn't a coincidence. I mean, it's probably it's not a coincidence that they're both there, but it's not a coincidence that he sat down next to him. Yeah, he didn't go there to find Richie. But since he sees Richie there, he goes to sit by him. Yeah. Yeah. And introduces himself.

And Richie says, Jim Rockford? The Jim Rockford? The famous private eye? He just seems pleased as punch just to be in the presence. As we go back to Nardonone saying that this is over, you don't even live in my district. He has Stever ejected by the security detail

that's in the room. And he literally gets hauled out yelling. So we follow Richie and Jim as they leave the hearing. Richie continues to be overwhelmed by how great it is to meet jim and he talks about how famous he is and starts talking about cases well okay so two things first of all i want i want to know

because my impression at this point is i cannot tell if ritchie is being sincere i think after having watched the whole episode he is but like in the in the moment, I'm like, is he buttering Jim up? And it definitely works to butter Jim up. Like you could see it on Jim's face. Like he is loving it that somebody is a fan. He specifically references how he busted the trucking scandal. Yes. It has to be gear jammers, right?

Yes. This is our first real conversation with the two of them they don't they didn't know each other before this episode right so jim asked richie why he's there richie starts talking about how joe was a good friend he's the reason he's a pi now and he has this whole long-winded thing about their relationship and how much he appreciated him and everything and this all winds up with jim yeah all of which doesn't answer the question oh you noticed yes so they're not just talking there's also feeling each other out right yeah getting a sense for what each other's like bits are their gambits uh you know

conversationally but there's there's like legitimate um admiration there i think you get the feeling that this is the same thing as any other technical expert when they're talking to someone and that person says something that only someone in their field, then they're like, wait a minute, like, you know what you're talking,

okay, all right, we can talk on this different level or something like that. And that's what this felt like, which was nice. Richie is there because someone was hit by a truck but not necessarily joe tooley and he keeps calling it murder and jim's like yes

wait why do you you know why are you saying murder that's an important word and he brings up that the the leg thing and that there's no pin in the x-ray from the morgue file yes it's all coming together it's all coming together you know if they're both working on the same thing maybe they can pool resources and jim asks if richie has a client no he doesn't have a client but joe tooley i guess he's kind of my client in absentia um and jim says that he doesn't you know he doesn't have anything he just has a hunch yes so he's there because he found the expense sheet, and also he found Joe's glasses on his desk.

Not only would he drive on the freeway at all, let alone at night, let alone without his glasses. Maybe he had two pairs. Well, I called his wife, and he only had one pair of glasses. Good old Jim covering all his bases, actually doing the work. The key exchange here towards the end richie has some you know maybe this happened maybe that this happened well would you like a few more maybes yeah well maybe joe exaggerated about his war injury maybe the guys down at the morgue put the

wrong x-rays and tuli's file maybe it's just hard to bury a friend maybe we're just trying to keep him alive by working on this then you are working on it yes so we get to see the the determination at the heart of richie brockleman this is this is great i i really love this scene i often chafe at hero worship in in uh in in in my fiction there's something about it that just plays like the the actual audience talking to the character and i don't know i just don't care for it that much or like the author talking about how great the thing they are writing is yeah but i think one of the reasons why this works is that it's clear to us that jim doesn't think of these cases as great right these are the dangerous cases where he almost dies yeah yeah and and it's not like he's using that as a listen kid you don't know

what it's like it's it's more complex than the than those two two ends of that spectrum right like the one end being golly gee this is the best person ever to the other end being like you don't know what it's like and this middle part where jim is literally flattered but also like a little taken back by it off his guard but not so off his guard that he doesn't have it all together right like it's good it's, I think a very well-balanced scene. I like there's, there's kind of a nuance at the end here where that again is getting to kind of like the real character of these two,

right. Where Jim is self-aware in a way because of his experience knows that sometimes you get a lot of clues, but they don't lead to anything right because there's nothing there you're just trying to assemble a picture because you have some other need to answer so he's like not gonna go off like i know there's something wrong here because he has this experience that says sometimes there is and sometimes there isn't while richie is like i do think there's something here and i see that you think there's something here, too. You just don't want to admit it.

So, again, the two of them are balancing each other in that way. Obviously, considering that we watched the two of them for most of this episode, and it's a fun episode, like, they have good chemistry. But this scene is where we see it kind of starting to come together we go to a mysterious meeting in a parking garage somewhere where where our two our two goons with vern in the car come into an empty uh like an empty parking floor of this garage where a slick menacing black car uh is waiting so there's this whole thing which is very like i don't know super spy ask yeah yeah they take verne out of the car then the car the other car flashes its lights and they bring verne back into their car and they hook them up to a polygraph test

which has a receiver in the other car which they they have to describe to us which is great it's all one step more baroque than it needs to be yeah which is the whole mo of of of uh mcgregor um because as we learn in the next shot uh mcgregor is in the other car and he's the one asking these questions so they hook up vern and they get through some bluster before finally getting him to just answer yes or no to questions. Vern has a great line here where he's like, I tried to help a little old lady and I ended up talking to an Italian car. Yes. Very Rockford line.

McGregor finds out what we know as audience, which is Vern doesn't know anything. Right. And was there to try and steal Joe's cases. Right. Things have been tough this year. I mean, my property taxes went up.

I got to have a double hernia fixed in june this has been a bad year is that statement true oh yeah uh so he appears to be satisfied and he says all right cut him and verne's like what do you mean cut me and bj our dry goon, means we're going to let you go. Like, settle down. So this whole thing with Vern is the avenue to show us how McGregor operates and what he's concerned about. Which is who knows what about Joe Tooley. We cut to an establishing shot of an airplane and then a street sign for Willis Avenue over a menacing sign that says that it's a

condemned area in a airport sound abatement. This will be important later, I suppose. I started noticing now, I didn't go back to check, but I started noticing now that there's very little musical score in this episode. Oh, yeah. I noticed in my notes here being like, there's no score as we see the firebird approach and then from here on i kind of noted when when we got a little bit of a sting but almost the entire episode is natural sound there's very little underscoring that's intriguing yeah yeah and i wonder if that's part of why it feels a little more grounded like i think i was saying how for a candle script i felt like this was pretty constrained i think maybe that's part

of it is that it has a very naturalistic approach it's there's not a lot of music uh we're mostly just watching people talk like uh an interesting choice i would say we see the firebird approaching this address 1414 willis avenue followed by a red mustang convertible which is richie's car which looks kind of nice from the long shot but when we come into the close shot we see it's pretty in pretty rough shape uh i think at some point someone mentions that it's a 1965 ah it's a red ford that's been kicking around for a while yes that's good. Yeah.

And that probably the whole bit there probably plays into a little bit of Richie. We haven't gotten this yet, but we learned that Richie has a little bit of a affluent background that he's rejecting. Right. To become a private eye. Jim doesn't want this to turn into something it isn't. Richie's working on a murder case. Jim's just poking around to try to fill the afternoon uh we then have another great little bit where jim pulls out his lock picks but before he gets to the door richie opens it with a credit card in the just like doing the little credit card swipe on the latch it's specifically because jim pulls out

his lock picks and then thinks i should look around to see if anybody's watching. And while he's turning around, I mean, I'm putting thoughts in his head, but I'm pretty sure that's what's going on. Let me double check before I break and enter that there's not a witness. And Richie is just not thinking about it. He just doesn't. So I love that little moment

again, just as the showing the two of them, you know, their different approaches um this house seems empty uh jim finds a an electrical cable on the ground like a leftover piece of cable and then they find a huge commercial air conditioning unit in one of the rooms um they say it could cool a five-story building and uh jim infers that they must have had some big electronic equipment in here why would you have this huge air conditioning unit that's worth more than the house and the land it's on okay so i'm going to talk about this air conditioning unit for just a minute here it's a giant one uh it's recognizable to me

because i've i've uh seen the top of like strip malls and things like you know we've all played video games where you can run around on the roof of something and you can see it. But the room that it's in, it's in a room. Yeah. That room must get, like, you probably could bake in that room. Right. That's the part of it that I don't get. Like, do they just open the windows and hope? I mean, obviously it's meant to cool other places in the house and not, you know, the

room that it's exhausting into. But wow. I imagine an HVac technician could maybe see if there's a legit reason that you'd have it in that small room yeah or not so two things one it's just there for the stage you know so that we see it they didn't need to actually have it do anything so it's just there for tv thought two uh maybe that's a tell towards how this whole operation is a little more slapdash than they think it is right uh as we all learn this whole computerized operation which we still haven't learned anything about is kind of only hanging on by a thread that's actually one of

my favorite things about this episode as we get into it we'll get into like the the the hints that there are lots of pressures on the the villains of the piece or whatever. I think you're right there. And also, like, it just clearly shows that this is clandestine. That's all we need to know as audience. But I like to think headcanon wise, I like to think it's a little nod towards like, and they really don't know exactly what they're doing. So there's clearly something going on. And Richie says, well, we should work together since I'm going to be working on it anyway.

So why not combine our resources? And Jim finally agrees, says, fine, we'll work together. But we're going to do things my way. It's the next morning. Richie meets Jim in front of Telecommunications Incorporated. Yes. A great generic uh tv name uh richie's been at the spent the rest of the last day at the hall of records digging up the owner of that house and

so they have that name for some reason there's a shot of richie running from his car he runs from his car over the front lawn yeah and it's a delight to watch him run. He has a very childlike run, I think is how I would describe it. He's just very, like, here I am acting it out for a podcast. Enjoy, folks. Yeah, I imagined it in your mind's eye. I guess what it was is I don't know why they had him running up to Jim, so I sat there and thought about it for too long and there's two things i love about one to see that childlike run uh and then the other is it because it's so

childlike it just reinforces this dynamic this mentor child right uh mentor pupil dynamic thing going on and um yeah i don't know there's something about it. It does show a little bit of exuberance that I think Jim doesn't necessarily have. Yeah. A little youthful energy. Yes. But yes. So they're going to try and dig up more about the owner of the house at this telecommunications place. Richie starts up again about how Jim is a living legend.

And he references the financial dynamics case. Yes. Which was on the front page of the times uh and then there's something like sure you ended up doing 30 days for b and e but it was 90 days yeah it's like well that that's not important uh you didn't do them yeah so yeah so that's again another a previous case is that's the one with the chili dog scene, right? Yeah, that's from Profit and Loss. Yeah, a big contender in our March madness, Malibu madness.

That was our episode 55. So yeah, loving the continuity. Yeah, yeah. Richie asks, so how do you get a credit company to run someone? Don't they have tight security? And Jim says, well, that's why I wait until noon and run them myself. And as he says that, he's literally rolling up his sleeves, which is very funny. Yeah.

And then he tells Richie to stay with him and don't say anything. And so now we have the put-upon working man con where they go into this front office. He's using Richie as his source to complain to so he's complaining about this other job that they had to do and now they're late and he apologizes for being late i mean you see the problem is that the ag terminal micro spooled again some good techno babble going on here we get deep into the techno babble because so he's he tells the the uh receptionist that it's the maintenance check on Mr. Davis's terminal. She didn't have any word they'd be there.

And he's like, all right, fine. I'm not going to get any later. Two hours late already. Yeah. You just be sure to tell Mr. Davis that I was here and I'll be back some other time. And so she, you know, getting the message that maybe it would be bad if this did not happen. Right. Tells him, well, if they called you, you can go ahead and go on in.

I do like how she says, well, they called you, right? And he doesn't say yes or no. He just says, well, I wouldn't have come up here all by myself. So they go into this office where there's these computer terminals and they're these like teletype terminals i don't know what the right word would be but they're big hulky monstrosities with little keyboards and they print out a little tiny piece of paper which is fantastic i want one you definitely want one richie wants to know how jim knows all that computer stuff and as you just pointed to jim talks about how oh that's just that's all babble i just make all that stuff up no one knows anything about computers there is a moment of it's all probably there's something in richie's face

here where like as an audience we know two things number one richie just learned something and he loves that he just learned something and number two we know we're going to watch richie try it as soon as he possibly can is this feeling of of like, oh, you can do that? It's like a child witnessing an adult swear and then realizing, I can swear. And then just, you know, just being prepared to do it from there on out. So thematically, we get an important little segment here where Jim says that everyone in the country is in at least 18 computers. You'd be surprised what you can learn by just punching in a name. It's spooky. And I

noted that just because in our early scene, Joe Tooley, you know, said that he learned something spooky. This doesn't come back or anything, but I think it's intentional. I think it's an intentional word choice to link these things together. There's a red herring that's been running in this episode so far where we maybe are meant to think that the central plot here is an ecological disaster, right? Like there's the development that isn't supposed to be happening. That's Al's angle uh al stever's angle like we kind of a cast of thousands there's a lot of things in play here and um it's a little hard to follow all of them but it doesn't matter because it's fun watching richie and jim but if i mean i knew what i was getting into watching this episode again because i'd seen it a long

time ago and then you know all that but if you don't if you're watching it for the first time uh we don't know that this is going to be about this about big data right before the phrase is even used um yeah i do like this callback to the spooky because it it probably doesn't ring in our head now that this is what because this isn't what he stumbled on because what we're doing here is something that jim would have done anyways like jim's not investigating anyone in this building the cross current yeah they're in the same venn diagram of our of like the plot of the show and how jim works yeah in the middle is this like you know you can just look up someone in a computer of One of at least 18 computers. So we watch Jim hunt and peck on the keyboard, which I love.

And we then have a short computer montage as we cross cut the keyboard and the little printing head with beeps and boops and tape reel spinning and lights flashing. Like it's a it's a It's an action montage of computers. There's two terminals. Jim's looking one to look up the owner of this house. Richie's using the other. And it turns out he's using it to look up Jim. Wow. Five years in state prison credits.

Subnormal. You owe the bank $2,500. Jim has a printout for the owner of the house. We'll get back to it. I didn't write down the name. Russell. Yeah. So they have what they came for, and they head on their way out, and the receptionist...

What was wrong? Well, you see, the 1600 docking transfer button was jammed, and it was hitting against the deactivator tripod but you know like he says it's going to be just fine now but you better tell mr davis to degauss every six weeks from now on degauss oh sure that saves the telemetric system you want to come along dick we got a whole building to service oh sure i'm sorry i gotta go bye-bye richie as you say gets a chance to deploy some techno babble since he just learned he can do it. And then we have the shot as they leave of the two of them starting to laugh. Got him.

Yep. There's also, there's a bit there that feels slightly flirty as well, which is, I mean, I love because that's the, that is Jim's go-to. And it just feels like this is Richie learning that he can have fun this way as well. And just it's not all business necessarily. So they they check on the info they got on this Russell character. And there is there's nothing there. The bank he supposedly has an account with has never heard of him and they can't get any more. Like none of the information leads to anything so they figure that the next thing they can do is go talk to al stever and the score kicks in as they ride out you know in the in the firebird or i guess the two of them

ride out to go to see so the two cars depart to go to stever's and the score kicks in for that and then we cut to steververs house and we go back to no score for the rest of the scene i noticed the score pretty much kicks in whenever they're transitioning in a car yeah but then when we actually get into scenes there's just nothing like it's just the natural audio uh all right so this next one's a big one oh yeah so we'll skip it so we'll skip it no i'll kind of hit the i'll hit the highlights here and you can tell me if there's anything you want to go deeper to i'll see if her lives in a trailer and so we get richie bagging on living in a trailer and then j, I live in a trailer.

And then Richie trying to save himself by talking about how, oh, trailers can be great. Yeah. You know, they can be middle class, I think is what he says. They talk their way into Talk to Stever by saying they're friends of Joe Tooley's. But, you know, he's a little suspicious because everyone he doesn't trust what anyone has to say. But he'll listen to them because they're friends of joe's um this is crosscut with another guy in an adjoining house who can see them from the window that is also recording what's happening in stever's place yes and uh there's a gag with the dog is barking the dog's always barking And then the guy who's listening is like, oh, shut up.

But once they start talking, he's recording them. He makes a call. The call goes to the computer headquarters. Our guy on the headset then has to direct the call. And there's this whole thing about patch me through to 216. We have a fire burning here. But 216 isn't available. So record and transmit. And then he gets mad that he can't talk directly but 216 isn't available so record and transmit and then he gets mad that he

can't talk directly to 216 so he wants a data transfer on jim and the firebird he gives him the information 853 okg that's right inside richie and jim talk to stever and we get some backstory of his whole deal so basically he's been fighting with this guy nardoni the councilman for years and years ever since he had him arrested for the first time in 1974 but he knows the guy has been corrupt uh but he's never been able to prove it he hired garth mcgregor who uh you know had made his bones like debugging campaign headquarters or something like that so like you know some kind of electronic security thing richie and jim both recognize that name richie is like the garth mcgregor dcb incorporated so you know he's a he's a name right he's a guy you get the feeling that

richie has an almost complete set of tops trading pi trading cards right exactly but yeah so so mcgregor didn't turn up anything on nardoni and then stever started working with tuli just to like go over all the old evidence and rehash everything and see if they could find anything around the edges and then tells them gives them the story about what we saw from the intro where he gave him the call was going to meet him later had a couple more places to check out and never showed up so stever thinks that he's dead thinks as the the story is true him getting hit on the highway because if he'd been uh you know made an offer or something from whatever he found out he lived too long to sell out at any price right we follow them as they leave stever's trailer and richie seems to be

kind of shaken by that conversation and he reiterates that maybe he is dead because you know that's right he would never sell out so why some plot to replace the body and take him somewhere like he must be dead and we have an important dialogue bit here a minute ago you thought he was alana so i changed my mind I've got a right to change my mind. Don't I? Don't you ever change yours? Never. Uh,

and he's like, ride with me. We'll get your car later. I assume just to get them together in one car for the next sequence. We go back to our observer. Who's been spying on this whole thing. He is on the phone with Nardonee. Cause he hasn't been able to get in touch with McGregor.

Uh, the clowns at DCB wouldn't patch him through. And then Nardone because he hasn't been able to get in touch with mcgregor uh the clowns at dcb wouldn't patch him through and then nardone takes jim's address says that he'll take care of it forget about mcgregor he's probably out having lunch with a computer i mean don't we all now i mean that's so that's that scene yeah that was a lot uh it was good a lot of good uh character moments and things that we get a hint at um coming, I guess, crisis turning point that Richie and Jim have to face, which we'll get very shortly. Maybe the case is too hot for them. Right. Because what we're getting now is the the alibi to get out of it, to say, oh, yeah yeah he was too too honest to to turn so he's clearly

it was just him right there's there's lethal stakes here yeah yeah which i think it's uh impressed upon all of us in the next scene yes as jim and richie pull up to the trailer on the firebird and as they get out of the car a yellow i said a yellow taxi because you can see a medallion, like a, not a medallion, but there's like a badge like painted on the door. It's not a taxi. It is in fact a county vehicle. So a yellow county vehicle roars up. The yellow is really yellow too. It's not a natural color for a car.

It looks like a yellow cab from New York, which is why I thought it was a taxi. Uh, and two gunmen start shooting with shotguns out of the windows. Yes. Our detectives dive under the trailer and, uh, we see that Jim is clutching his leg. So he apparently got, you know, took, took something and he has Richie drive, uh, cause they peel back out of Paradise Cove and Jim needs to get close enough to get the license plate. And we get into a short but sweet car chase.

Yes. It's a delight that they let Richie drive. I think my favorite detail for that is we have a long shot of the Firebird accelerating and getting out of the parking area. And we see it fishtailing around every curve yes it's like oh jim would never do that clearly richie is driving because jim jim would have more control over the car than that yeah what did you think of this car chase so this is the one this is the one where they end up on the overpass yes that's the bit i really enjoyed. And partly because the off-road moment was great, where he turns, Richie, you just kind of, you come to this impossible situation and Richie just turns it off and just says, okay, we're not doing the roads anymore.

Right. And goes off. And then they have this moment on top of the overpass as they watch the, um, the other car go by underneath them and, uh, doesn't know which way to go. And, and you just have that nice, like mentor mentee moment of like,

you did all right. You know, like that's. Yeah. I mean, the bulk of this chase is, is Jim trying to get close enough, getting Richie to get close enough to get the license plate number.

The guys in the, the goons with the guns realize that they're being chased they have a line in that car of you missed him how could you miss him yeah but they're like okay so they they hatch a plan they'll stop and they'll have a chance to shoot them again once they you know slam on the brakes or whatever uh Richie is has enough presence of mind to swerve as they start shooting again. And the Firebird takes a shot in the door, which is very sad. But then it's a car chase the other way where now the goons are chasing them. And that's when Richie finally goes off road.

And as you say, goes up this embankment. There's a little bit of a vision of like exactly how the very end happens because we see them go through a barrier like road closed barrier and then we see the goons follow see the broken barrier and go through it and then we pan up to see them on the overpass watching the car no not be able to find them it's a little bit of a joke moment yeah rather than a because usually we get the details of everything that jim has done in the chase right we usually get a very clear picture of that uh but this one's a little bit more of uh let's let's just get to the gag right a gag is not the right word here but you

know you know what i'm saying let's just get to the moment where we we can have this scene and and it's important to get to that moment because this is where Jim goes, you did all right, son. Yes, because this car chase took place on the freeway, which is probably important thematically to this episode. And because, as I've mentioned in our plus expenses, I have watched five of the six Terminators. When you asked me how the car chase and again, because this is a few days ago since I watched this, my brain had to cipher through, like, is this the one with the truck and the motorcycle? Is this the one with the, you know, like all of these? It's a standard of Terminators for a giant truck involved in some sort of car chase. It just, that's a Terminator. You got to have it.

If you don't have it, then you don't have a Terminator movie. And I had to cycle through all of those to get to the Rockford Files one. No, that's not a robot. Or that's a robot. That can't be. Turns out Richie's from the future. Yeah. We're going to take a quick break so that everyone can walk around, stretch, get a refreshing beverage of choice,

and find out where you can find us on the internet when we're not talking about the Rockford Files. Of course, 200 a Day can be found at 200aday.fireside.fm patreon.com and on Twitter at 200pod. You can also email

us at 200adaypodcast at gmail.com. Epi, where can our final listeners find you elsewhere on the internet? You can find my games at digathousandholes.com that's dig

and then the number 1000 and then holes.com. Or you can find my sword and sorcery fiction and games at worldswithoutmaster.com or you can find me on twitter at epidiah e-p-i-d-i-a-h uh where can we find you upon this internet all of my stuff including my game design my freelance graphic design and layout work and other projects that i do like zines and podcasts are at at ndpdesign.com.

You can also find me on Twitter at ndpeoleta. I'm also on Instagram at the same handle where you can see pictures of my dog. I hope you're comfortable with your favorite beverage in hand as we return you now to the show. So Jim and Richie are laying low in a hotel. Jim's wrapping up his leg we get this great exchange where jim's like i guess things could be worse and richie's like how it goes i'm just making small talk like oh that's good uh richie runs down what they know but with explanations for how maybe they've been wrong so far and joe really was in the car uh echoing what jim said earlier right maybe he lied about his war wound maybe you know etc jim says maybe he'll go to mexico

uh get out of there uh there's no shame in folding so they're both reacting to this oh someone's trying to kill us in different ways it's kind of great because like you get this clear implication that jim knows richie is making these excuses because he's afraid so jim is tells richie like yeah it's scary it is okay to be afraid it's normal to be afraid and the thing that i'm planning to do now is to get away from it right like it's better to live than to you know i really love this moment because it really is like a uh like they don't decide to turn away from it obviously but but um they take it to this brink and it's just nice to have the character of jim not try to rah rah we gotta do this for our fallen comrade but rather to say

as jim would why don't we do the smart thing why aren't we why don't we just save ourselves here yeah this is the big like downbeat yeah getting us into the second act i guess of the of the story um yeah it's a pretty important scene thematically or character wise yeah plot wise they they decide to keep going yeah that's what happens uh richie starts talking about how like the house on willis avenue is a strange item but there's lots of wackos out there and he starts going down a rabbit hole about a guy he knows who's into model trains um and uh he kind of finally runs down after this long explanation if i has trains all through his house he'd send a train to get you a drink and

stuff like that he runs down and there's a beat and he goes boy it just doesn't float does it and so he's acknowledging that like he can't explain away these things there's clearly something going on yeah um and yeah jim they can stay and maybe end up like joe tooley or they can find someone to feed the cat and leave town for a while this is when he looks out the window and sees the bullet hole in the side of the firebird yeah oh boy oh boy would you look what they did to my car and then they have this back and forth where they're both sitting on the mattress, looking at the camera, but like kind of looking

down, you know, but both facing the same way. This thing has county corruption stenciled all over it. You know, down in Cabo San Lucas this time of year, they got broad bills that I'm telling you they run a hundred, a hundred and fifty

pounds. We don't even know where this jerk Nardoni fits in. He could put a lot of pressure on us. You get one of those broad bills on a line, and he's up there on his tail, and I'm gonna shake that hook, and it's a feeling like nothing else. I like marlin fishing.

I say, Joe Tooley was a good guy, but he's dead. And I don't think that he'd want us going, getting killed, trying to solve this thing. I suppose we ought to start at the Kennedy Garage. Yeah, they got logs for these kind of things. Maybe we can get a look at it, you know? And they jump up and they head out. It's so good. The other bit that I like about this is the tinking

of the shotgun pellet in the ashtray. It's clear that Jim is dressing a wound that he has received in this battle without showing us any of the gory details. About the wound. I think we do see some blood or something like that.

There's some blood on the towel or something like that. It's such a great conversation. It's a great scene. You see the two of them are throwing out. The wistful. Here's why we should stop. Here's what we could be doing instead. But they've talked themselves.

And each other into continuing on because neither of them can let it go so we go to the kennedy garage where richie is talking to the dispatcher in a little kiosk in the middle so this is a dispatcher for like county vehicles and another good overwrought backstory for uh richie proclaman uh con like he literally invents a space a moon disease yes he's trying to track down a county car he works like he works for the county coroner and they work with a disease control center in la that's for two semesters and they work with nasa for two semesters and this is my favorite. He's talking to this wrinkled old geezer in a great face in this kiosk.

And when Richie says... And then we work with NASA disease control for two semesters. Oh, I like those moon shots. Especially when they're on the T&V. Those fellas walking around the moon saying, Roger, Houston. It's a great show. Well, everybody thinks so until maybe we bring back a bacteriological strain that nobody can

defend against. So good. And I love how that could either mean it's a great thing to watch on TV, or I think it is a television show. Yeah. Could be either. Oh man, it's a lot of fun stuff so the long and short of it is the county coroner dispatched a car to the airport to take a body and then they lost track of who was in the car and they needed to decontaminate it because his body was carrying the black plague yes so he has all these medical babble disease things and then finally he like summarizes it for this guy the medieval black death yes and that's when the guy's like oh and then he grabs the dispatch book and starts flipping through it the car needs ddw detergent disinfectant wash the driver needs one observation and evaluation and while this conversation is happening we see

jim kind of sneak in behind the dispatcher and start looking at cars so richie's trying to get the name of the driver and jim is checking out the actual car because they have the license plate dispatcher has that has been it was taken out by a david russell and then sees jim on his way back from the car where he dug around and pulled something out of the glove compartment and starts yelling at him like hey you're supposed to sign in blah blah i love how jim has two levels here first he's like it's okay i'm just leaving that doesn't work the guy keeps yelling at him so he's like oh i'm with chase food machines we're putting new machines in the break room and the dispatcher's like oh well it's about

time the contrast between jim and richie's cons is just exquisite richie he goes to the moon he goes to the medieval black death he gets what needs to be done but he's like all over the place it's very elaborate he's he's inventing acronyms for things that he has to then tell you what the acronyms mean. And Jim's just like, I bet you this guy wants more food in his food machine. I can make an educated guess that this will work. Yeah. So they compare notes on their way out. You know, the name is David Russell.

Same last name as the house owner, John Russell. And Jim just crumples up the piece of paper he found and throws it over his shoulder. So I was like, alright, I guess that's more important than this piece of paper he found that we never hear what it is. I mean, unless I missed something. No, no, I have no idea either.

It could just be the same information. Yeah, yeah, that's possible. Alright, so they go back to the same place to run this other name. So I guess they continue, you know, posing as this computer repair guys. Nothing's coming up for David Russell. Let's try the variations. David John, John David, see if it's the same person.

And then the door opens and two guys in suits come in and we get a great, just the great spike on this whole gag. micros pool and see if we're still ghosting at 1600 lps good idea what are you two talking about that's computer talk it's probably a little confusing that's gibberish hey we'll be through in a minute you're through right now mister i happen to have a degree in computer technology oh man so calls their bluff and then richieie, this is great. Yeah. Richie jumps in to save the situation. And Jim backs it up immediately. Yeah.

Which is fantastic. So Richie goes, well, do you have a.38? And he's like, what? He's like, well, he has a.38 caliber automatic. Show him, Jack. And then Jim puts his hand in his pocket and then makes a pocket gun. But he makes like a clicking noise. So it sounds like he's,

you know, cocked a revolver and he gets all like serious. And he's like, yeah, I never wanted to get to this point. I don't like to use this thing, but I will, you know,

whatever. Uh, and it's enough to intimidate our two guys in suits, uh, to get them out of the way of the door and they can walk out. And, uh, I hate to use a cliche,

but don't leave for 10 minutes yes and then we cut to them in their firebird and jim's little 38 was a zippo lighter makes the clacking noise again as he lights a cigarette a rarely seen jim rockford cigarette oh yeah that was wonderful like the moment those two guys came in what's great about those two guys is that they uh have this goon physique that i'm just you just know that they're trouble and then turns out they're just guys that work there yeah yeah yeah no it was good it was good all right so all the information they found on the various russells have different names and addresses and social security numbers but they have the same actual information the same balance

in this bank account at this bank that says they don't know who he is same check guarantees which i don't know what those are i'm i feel like i'm too young to know what a check guarantee is i might be too on a credit report i don't know uh 35 married one child the american average but there are two more addresses so clearly there's this phony character that is being used right for all these purposes we have a good moment of bonding here i think where richie says um you think we should split up do you well i don't want you to think of me as being a chicken me neither and they share a Yes. The next address they check out, we have an establishing shot that it's also in an airport sound abatement zone.

Jim opens the front door and we cut to another flashing light and another alert in the computer command center. Richie opens the garage and there's another huge air conditioner in the garage this time. Yeah, this makes slightly more sense, I think. It's their plan, not mine. This empty house has not been cleared out. It still has a bunch of computer equipment in it. In the command center, the guy says, like, there's been a kick at the relay station.

And then Jim says, must be a relay station. Yes. We are informed that it is, in fact, a relay station. There are guys in the area, so cars pull up outside and Jim sees them. They're like we got to get out of here it is in fact our goons who grabbed verne of course this is the great little maneuver i think that you were thinking of earlier they go down an alley behind the house one of the guys says go cut them off right but they pull into someone else's garage and so they are not to be

seen classic gambit classic gambit we then have uh bj uh the main goon is on the radio calling us in directly to garth mcgregor saying that it's rockford and brockleman uh wants further instructions and so now we get to see some of the pressures going on with whatever this deal is with mcgregor they have two big shots coming into town that day the timing is bad uh so to keep everything moving they're gonna have to consolidate the operation he wants bj to close up the four shops on the russell code and reroute the information somewhere else uh call in nardoni if they have to to get county crews uh mcgregor will handle bringing in uh r pi heroes and through this conversation we see that his like desk and office is outside the computer room like we can see all of those things that we've been seeing through the

big like windows behind him yeah this is clearly all his operation so the next address they check out uh there's two cops there saying that there's a gas leak and they can't go in so they're like okay right this is going all the way up to the top yeah and jim and richie start snapping at each other i think out of frustration uh at the situation uh i feel like we see jim in almost angel-esque peak in this scene because he's just trying to like think and he's also scared yeah yeah now there's cops involved like this is getting everything we find indicates this is more and more dangerous we end the scene with richie are you gonna take my head off or ask another question and jim says no no it's like what are we going to do

now and jim snaps i don't know why don't you try coming up with something for a change there's a great jim line in that scene again getting to the heart of like his self-preservation that's like you're darn right i'm scared anybody with good reflexes would be hopping out like a scalded dog by now we go to an establishing shot of richard brockleman private eye on his own glass door we we see the door then we see a shadowy figure inside i was like that's clearly vern right and then jim and richie come in and uh sure enough, it's Vern. He's trying to hide under the desk, and they just, like, come over to the desk and look down.

He's just huddled up under the chair, which is very funny. He tries to bluster that Richie's trying to steal Joe's cases, which offends Richie, as we can see on his face. Jim threatens to bring him downtown to Lieutenant Chapman on a B&E charge if he doesn't tell him why he's there uh losing his cool grabbing verne's tie and really getting in his face verne finally fesses up and tells him the story of how he was picked up and the whole thing with the car a great line i i didn't get the whole line but it was just he describes them as having narrow ties two guys grabbed me i thought they were cops know, short hair and narrow ties. So he thought if Richie was on Joe's cases, maybe he could sell that information to the guy in the car. Because it's been a rough year.

Jim is like, OK, he believes him. He hustles him out. He threatens him again. OK, Vern, if I see, if I hear about you, if I even read your name in a paper, I'm going to put a bad hitch in your get along now go tough guys everybody's a tough guy i'm not who knows what the hell you are kiddo so good uh i i love that line especially coming from vern it's very good so all the stuff with all the computers and technological stuff reminds Jim of Garth McGregor. Yeah. And we get some exposition about the story behind him, which is he was trying to set up a computerized information center in Massachusetts, but it got shut down overnight. There was government involvement and it smells of invasion of private information he mentions a like a government

acronym program that i looked up and i think it was made up for this episode it doesn't seem to be a real thing but just to establish that idea of like the government has all of our data right so richie opines that what if mcgregor when he was hired by Stever to see what was going on with Nardoni, did dig something up, but instead of going to Stever with it, decided to use it to blackmail Nardoni to get some kind of government backing for another effort at this computerized information thing that he does. Jim says that that explains a lot of the variables in this case. And we have a wonderful back and forth here yeah of course it doesn't explain the houses or the computer people but that's not bad that's not good boy richie good boy hey didn't you forget the pad on the head oh hey what no no that's okay that's okay when you get a little older i I'll call you Pop. Probably won't bother you either.

Now look who's getting sore, huh? Jim takes the rebuke, and so they share a smile to soften the edges of this, what could have been a contentious little argument, I think. Jim is going to call his good friend Dennis Becker, just hoping that the fix doesn't go all the way to the la police and richie i also have a police contact we better call him too uh that's great i i mean my notes are like richie's got a becker yep richie's definitely got a becker it's very funny um we then get a classic uh putting out the apb on jim and Richie with their descriptions for felony breaking and entering, armed and presumed dangerous. And I noted this

didn't turn into anything. I just thought it was funny. Both suspects have extensive police records. So yeah, Richie, extensive police record? Yeah. There's a dark history to Richie, I'm sure. We have to check out the missing 24 hours to find out. Yeah. I feel like this transitions us into the third act of our story here.

We're going to start seeing things come together. We have a scene of McGregor greeting a couple of European men coming off of his helicopter. And they have British-ish accents. Seems a little shaky to me. British-ish accents seem a little shaky to me. I think here we start to see the shaky ground of whatever McGregor's deal is, right? I have sparse notes on the content of this conversation, but what it conveys to us, or at least I think it's conveying to us, is what you were saying before, like how this isn't a done deal this is not a very secure operation there are the way that mcgregor and the other two men look to each other when things are said in this conversation uh indicate power dynamics yeah uh because one of the one of the

these gentlemen is holding mcgregor to account There's a guy who is supposed to be Scottish. Yeah. And he's kind of slightly more friendly. And the guy who's more like British is less friendly. Yeah. And the, the British guy and, and they seem to be deferring to the Scottish guy, both of them,

as if they're trying to blame each other for some sort of mess up. It's clear that there are pressures on all of these people. And there's this whole thing about uh inter wait is it so yeah so they say that they've already sold their services to several international banks and a european government so they have to deliver on schedule uh and then when interpol sees what they're doing they'll change their minds and join yeah so this whole thing whatever this operation is it's whatever was canceled in massachusetts mcgregor brought it to la over their objections and now they think it's things aren't

going well and he's like no no they're going fine everything's great but it seems like they don't really believe him and they all have a lot on the line because they've sold their services of whatever mcgregor's doing already to very important and powerful people. Yes. So they better deliver. There is an ominous note at the end that, you know, they don't want any public outcry or governmental intervention.

It all has to remain unknown for the first two or three years. And then after that, it won't matter much. So true. Our next scene is, I was going to say fun, but not important, but it is important because it has more about Richie. The scene is they set up a place to talk to their respective police contacts. Jim knows how this stuff goes.

So now they're in Richie's car and Richie has a police band radio. So Jim wants to keep an ear on that before they commit to the meeting. And while they're waiting to hear something, they're chatting. At the end of the scene, they do hear Dennis and the other guy talking over their radios, talking about the setup they have to bring these guys in. And so they are able to just ditch and not do the thing. Dennis doesn't like it, but they have a county warrant out. And Jim comes in on the radio.

Why don't you sit on it? But the conversation between Jim and Richie is the important thing here. Yeah, this kind of gets into the sort of the psychological underpinning. Not of the whole episode, but like a nice juicy bit of it here. There's a great Jim line early on where he just says the same thing that makes cops wear gray suits and white socks makes them itch when there's a warrant on the board but the main thing is just uh richie talking about not having support from his parents right and then assuming that jim's dad supports him and we know that that's not the case.

There's another reference to the red Ford. Yeah. Cause he's like, well, when you talk to Rocky, what does he say? He's like, Oh,

well, he talks about red Fords, which doesn't make much sense in context. Cause Jim is avoiding telling Richie that his father also doesn't approve of what he does. Yeah. Right. And, avoiding telling Richie that his father also doesn't approve of what he does. Yeah. Right.

And Richie's envisioning a relationship in which you can just sort of talk through cases, like how useful that would be to just talk through. And in fact, we've seen Jim do this a few times, but it's not a mutually agreeable situation when it happens, you know? Right. So it's good. mutually agreeable situation when it happens, you know? Right. So it's good. I really dig it. It not only kind of gives us a little more look at that, but it gives us a way to have Jim and Richie, you know,

because we've had a little tension between them as of late in this episode. And this is just like a real moment of like identifying with each other, even though Richie doesn't realize he's not identifying like the Jim can identify with Richie in this situation I think that the nut here is Jim taking on kind of the mantle of mentor at the end of the conversation and giving advice because because he starts talking about the red ford stuff and Richie's like what does that mean he's like it's not important you know it doesn't make any difference what anybody else thinks about what you're doing it's what you think about what you're doing it's important oh yeah well I really love it I really do you know even now with all

this all this crazy stuff going on if you think about it we're the only two guys who have a chance to uncover something really big if you're happy with what you're doing, that's the important thing. So, I think Jim being the self-actualizing person that he so often is gives some real advice

to him there, and I think that's important. They avoid being arrested by their cop buddies, and then we have a couple scenes back in McGregor's world. McGregor and Nardoni are having drinks, or at least McGregor is. And we see that Nardoni is super nervous. I think this scene really is about reestablishing where McGregor has power, right? And he has power over Nardoni.

And we see that very clearly. Because I guess Nardoni went off on his own to like send a couple guys with shotguns in a county car after them you know it's pretty stupid which i agree because mcgregor needs to know who they talk to before anything happens to them because it's like a cancer you have to track down all the lymph nodes before you can cut out the malignancy or want to cut out the tumor or whatever. Now, I don't know you only did that because you couldn't get in touch with McGregor, but McGregor says to, you know, from now on, don't do anything without talking to me,

or he'll release all that incriminating stuff, right? So I think that's just to show us their, you know, their situation. And I think there's a little bit there which is indicative of the whole thing where things started going wrong once McGregor was not in direct control. Yeah. And it's like he can only be in control of so much. So as more happens that he's not in control of, the more he tries to tighten his grip, right? Like that's kind of the dynamic here. mcgregor in that he's um introduced to us uh via richie and and and jim as like another private eye who has an obsession with electronics but now he's he's not he's like he's he's a he's a private eye

gone wrong yeah yeah you know he ends this conversation with a blackmail threat which you should you should always end a conversation with a blackmail threat. Always. I have found that it's just good etiquette. But you get the feeling that his surveillance is like he probably has a blackmail ring going on, right? Like you both get the idea that he's a mastermind and way over his head. He was probably going to be a competent PI, but shot way too far for for what he wanted to do i mean i think this is a good this is good casting i think yeah like because jackie cooper is great in both of these dynamics because in the last scene we saw him trying to convince people who have more power than he does that he's yeah that he can do the thing and then in this scene we see him being

like no i'm the one in charge and it's not that he's like groveling or anything but like we see that that tension is there where he feels the pressures from both directions he has these guys who need him to do the thing or else they're all in trouble then he has this other guy who's nominally subservient to him but keeps doing things that he doesn't want him to do. And those are both dangerous avenues. And he's just trying to hold it all together. It seems that he's also taking a more direct hand as he and BJ are in a big black van going out to Paradise Cove to confront Jim. to confront Jim.

On the way, he's reviewing some files where they've inserted a bunch of false criminal records into Jim and Richie's files in among the legit stuff. There's a line where it's like, oh, Richie's, he's, you know, he's a real, real troublemaker. You broke a window when he was in high school and his dad paid for it or something like that.

But the plan is they're going're gonna go bug jim's trailer um but they get there and the trailer is gone yes and i remember then that there was a throwaway line earlier where jim was gonna call rocky to i don't remember if he said call rocky to go to the house i mean i think he specifically said to get the trailer to get the trailer okay yeah and i vaguely recall thinking does he mean his whole house or or like just like a hitch trail you know like well someone uh you know just hanging out along the beach as they do uh says that uh that a guy in a semi came by and took the trailer. That's our Rocky.

That's our Rocky. McGregor is infuriated because this should have been known. And then BJ's like, oh, it wasn't on the computer, sir. We thought it was a residence. It's a little dig at like, well, not everything's going to be in the computer, you know? Yep. Blame the computer. Blame the computer.

Well, I think, again, thematically, it's important because it's like, even if everything is recorded, there's a bit of a futility to it because in the real world, stuff happens that's not going to go into the computer. Yeah. And it's also like, I mean, I think this is the only time we've seen the trailer. I think so. Okay, so far we've seen computers tell us where people live. Like, that's the main thing that we've seen a computer do, is just spit out an address. And it's great that Jim's response said, well, if a computer can tell you where I live. It's to move the address. Yeah, I'm just going to move it. And it's great. I love it. We go to another nice little downbeat scene where the trailer has been moved into the woods somewhere. And Rocky is coming back to the trailer with a fishing pole. And we have our score come back here underneath as we get to our little idyllic scene.

Jim and Rocky have a little bit of conversation about Richie. Rocky says, can you believe that a nice kid like that would be a pi that's great but it's like i know you didn't want to just come out here for some fishing i know you're in trouble it's like okay fine i'm in trouble so rocky of course did not catch jim's breakfast he only caught breakfast for himself. He's going to have to catch his own. That's part of slowing him down. And then we see our second instance of Richie running as he's going for a nice morning run

around the lake while Jim fishes. They have some banter about why are you getting up early and running? And Richie's like, it makes me feel good. Old man. That's unspoken. Yeah. But there's a couple of things they haven't done

yet how did they know that vern was in tuli's office in the first place when they grabbed him uh mcgregor must have that place bugged you figure that one of us should go into the office and bang the drawers around a little bit and wait for the sky to fall in uh not one of us me you're the one that wanted to go to Cabo San Lucas, remember? I changed my mind. I'm entitled to change my mind every now and then. We have a callback to the I'm allowed to change my mind moment from earlier, but now Jim's on that side of it, right?

He's like, don't you ever change your mind? Jim's like, never. And now Jim's like, I'm entitled to change my mind. Jim thinks that if McGregor picks him up, he'll learn a lot more than Vern did, which seems fair. And through that also, we see that, and Richie's like, well, you're not leaving me behind. You know, they're still both going to be involved.

Yeah, yeah. So we cut to Jim breaking back into Joe's office. He leaves the door cracked and starts literally banging drawers around. We see our by now familiar alert at the computer command center uh he picks up the phone i couldn't tell if he made a fake call just to trip the recording or if he actually made a call but he calls for mrs davenport you know he'll call her back oh yes nice little beth reference there i felt like there was a this was indicating that

a lot of time was passing between when he went in and when they the guys got out there to pick him up which again is a little bit of like this whole operations not you know as cut and dried as they'd want it to be when bj and his buddy finally get in there they have some great banter come on take it easy shut up where's brockelman oh it's not my turn to watch him oh i can see you're gonna keep us. Well, I try to stay bright in spite of the company. The car takes Jim out to the helicopter, and we see that Richie was riding in the trunk the whole time. So he's sneaking onto the helicopter unbeknownst to anyone. And we get the Jim McGregor confrontation back in the helicopter.

He wants to know what Jim thinks is going on, ask him a few questions, maybe set him up on a polygraph test, and once there's no secrets between them, he's prepared to make a deal. Maybe an employment contract, maybe cash. Jim is indicating that he doesn't think, you know, that this conversation is going to go that way.

He always does badly on tests. Well, Mr. Tooley was on the other side of this coin he thought he could destroy the project but the project destroyed him so jim finally gets some closure slash confirmation that the yeah the body on the highway was not in fact joe tooley's but he is dead uh he's in northern californ California fertilizing an orange grove. He's gone into the citrus business. That is a good canal threat. Yeah, it's a very urban horticulturalist style turn of phrase.

Yeah. McGregor says he needs to have some leverage over Rockford or he's going to meet the same fate. But Jim replies that he knows he's not walking out of there. So he'll give McGregor some sleepless nights what if he told the press or the old letter to my attorney only to be opened upon the event of my death he knows that mcgregor is putting together some kind of computer information center and he has his hooks in nardoni but he's starting to unravel like a cheap sweater so what's the what's your plan here personal secrets for sale hooked into computer systems to mess with credit ratings and crush the little guy at any moment what is

this going to turn into a private security company with hiring ex-police and hiring out to the highest bidder etc mcgregor says that to my knowledge none of this is illegal but now they've gone too far and he welcomes Jim to the citrus industry. He leaves, his goons come in, and the helicopter takes off with Jim pleading that he was just trying to improve his negotiating position. They can still deal. Again, a lot of talking in that scene. Yes. My favorite little bit in there is that when McGregor starts talking about the polygraph test, he turns to like get the electrodes because he has one there. And then he looks disappointed when Jim's like, we're not going to do that.

He legitimately is sad he doesn't get to do another polygraph test because that's clearly his favorite part. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's a good scene. It's my notes have like, what is the plan written all over it? my notes have like, what is the plan written all over it? Because this is definitely the moment where Jim leaves us, the audience, in the dark and just throws himself into the fire. And we get some Richie in the background, but we don't know exactly what was set up or what Richie is supposed to do. And the fact that he's on the helicopter is is such a threat at this point yeah because he in

fact has stowed away so once the helicopter's taken off he drops some luggage to make a noise one goon goes back there to check on it and richie literally gets the drop on him jumps on him from the top luggage rack bj goes to help jim manages to grab him and give him a good sound thrashing on the way over. So with the element of surprise, our heroes manage to subdue our goons. And now that Jim has his gun, he goes into the front area and has the pilot first go to 10,000 feet and then to go set down on the other side of Dead Rock Canyon. They're going to find out what's going on over there. I don't know what the 10,000 feet was about. Me neither.

I wonder if you knew helicopters, if that would be a thing. I thought that maybe that was like at that height they would attract attention and like the police would have to like dispatch something. That's a classic Jim Gambit, right? Like to just do the obvious illegal thing so that uh the police would come in but yeah i don't know i don't know but at the end of the day they set down near dead rock canyon richie has everyone handcuffed in the in the in the chopper and jim has rigged some kind of radio out of helicopter parts we're getting a little a team here he's handing it to richie as richie's like oh i better carry that it looks heavy yeah and then he puts it on goes maybe we'll switch jim's like yeah maybe

jim's never gonna carry that we we know that no and then we have our music kick back in as they walk off into the wilderness the music being uh the theme from lord of the Rings as played by Enya. If they come out to a building site, Jim thinks that this stuff seems too public and the environmentalists are all already all over this housing construction. But there's another road on the other side of the canyon with a bunch of equipment going up it. So they better see what that leads to.

He again says, you stay here and i'll come back or something and richie's like no i'm i'm coming with you still jim admits that well you have been useful they will go together uh they do wait till night until they do a scooby-doo style we'll just walk slowly behind this piece of equipment that is slowly driving into the secured area on the other side of the guard post that no one sees us and one of them says this looks like an old missile silo uh there's a crate with 1414 willis avenue stenciled on it establishing some some connection but they do sneak underground uh where there's a bunch of stuff moving around they start walking around like they belong there and then then they see McGregor,

uh, and his two European dudes. They turn so that they're not seen, but then there's two security guys right behind them. So they go right back into techno babble. I told you I installed it, right? The computers still have the manual override for the counter-spun serving

system. Well, it won't work. Not until you switch to 2345 conduit i'm telling you now yeah that will be this is a wonderfully staged moment can i see your security passes please sure no sucker punches them in the stomach they start running jim has uh as a bad limp right as we see in this scene and i kind of wonder if the whole thing with the gunshot wound was to give an explanation for why he's limping so much.

We know he's limping because as covered previously on the show, because he did all of his own stunts, James Garner had busted knees throughout the entire series and got multiple knee surgeries between seasons. Yeah. And if this is like the end of a season it means yeah yeah i wonder if this was a i feel like we've seen this in at least one other episode where there's like a in this fiction reason why jim is limping 90s movies did it i can't remember exactly what the deal was but yeah it's very noticeable in this sequence because otherwise that that wasn't anything other than getting richie to drive i guess is, is the other reason. Yeah. Anyway, see, it serves multiple purposes, yet again.

But even limping, this whole sequence is action-packed. Like, there's more punches per minute. As they head out of the area, Richie calls in a monster fire from the backpack radio. Yes. There's a big fire out here. They get to the gate.im grabs richie and starts yelling i got one of them you go in and get the other one and then as the guard passes him punches him out by surprise and that gives them enough cover to get out of there and disappear into the

darkness uh the rest of this scene is watching police and fire respond to this called in fire and surround the gate which blocks in mcgregor's car as he tries to leave jim and richie walk back up and it's kind of covered by the sirens but we end with a great line from richie where he goes i called it in and there wasn't an actual fire but there's been an actual crime yeah and then we uh end with our final scene with jim rocky richie and al stever and his dog are outside jim's trailer jim's handing out cokes and beers as they are watching a news broadcast covering the events yes nardoni has resigned from the city council. McGregor was arrested for the murder of Joe Tooley. First, the press is talking to Stever.

So this is previously recorded. And Stever thanks Jim and Richie. Without them, none of this would have been discovered. This makes Rocky happy to hear Jim thanked on TV. Yes. And it's so funny because he's thanked by someone who's just sitting there having a meal with them. Then there's a little press conference with Cooper Smith,

who's Richie's cop buddy, who makes a statement summarizing the crime. McGregor was, his company was attempting to set up a secret system of computers, which would carry the personal records of 200 million Americans. And then it goes back to the broadcaster who makes this statement of it's one thing to have our records computerized by the

government but why does a government install a secret underground center in one of the world's largest cities makes you think rocky goes back to the grill to finish off the fish that clearly has been caught for this occasion richieie's talking about how great Jim was. Jim gives him credit. It was a team effort all the way. How about you, Rocky? What do you think? Well, I don't pretend to understand why you fellas like to go around private.

But I will say when Mr. Stever came on that TV and mentioned your names, I was proud of both of you. Hearing their names on TV clearly is the thing that tips him over to being joyous. And then we end with a great Jim and Richie moment. Well, it looks like you found a place to come and talk, son. Ah, what the hey, pop. Jim puts his hand around his shoulders. We freeze frame with the two of them smiling at each other.

Victorious in their private investigator ways yes and then we end with secret information centers building dossiers on individuals exist today you have no legal right to know about them prevent them or sue for damages our liberty may well be the price we pay for permitting this to continue unchecked member u.s privacy protection commission that is a text screen that is put up between the freeze frame and the end credits uh anything in those last two scenes you wanted to touch on uh no it was just great it was it was fun to see richie push the angle with rocky to try and get rocky to to admit to being proud of jim and his work like kind of seeing through what the situation is,

or just being oblivious about it and doing it. It's hard to tell with Richie. There's a line somewhere in these earlier scenes, I think it's when they're going, got the radio on Richie's back and they're heading to the site or whatever, where Jim, I can't remember the context, but Jim says something like, people underestimate you all the time. And Richie's like, I count on it. That's the thing that kind of really sells the character of Richie to me. Like, yeah, actually,

I kind of want to watch a television show about a private investigator that nobody thinks is just too gee golly to do it. You know, because it's, I mean, that's also from a different angle. That's Columbo, right? So many people just think, oh, he's he's harmless. Yeah, he's harmless.

He's a harmless old man. But yeah, no, this was a delight to watch. Like I said, if I wasn't watching the time only because I had to schedule the time to do it, I think I would this would have just flown by. I was thinking because sometimes in the two parters, there's a little bit of like padding's the wrong word but there's there's stuff where it's like this could be cut to make this a regular episode and maybe you lose some depth or maybe you lose some background but like it doesn't really change anything so i was kind of keeping an eye out for that i feel like there's there really aren't any of those scenes in this like this is really a cohesive narrative of this length um

i mean there's maybe some little tiny moments but like i was going to say like even you could maybe cut out the scenes where we're staying with mcgregor but you still have to explain mcgregor's pressures somehow right so you can't just cut those like that would actually have to change uh somehow there is a little bit of like composition length that could be trimmed out. Right. Like we don't have to watch the helicopter for as long as we do and stuff like that. But yeah. But yeah.

But no. But overall, it's I think that's kind of what I made up what I was getting to with saying that it's a pretty sophisticated episode. a pretty sophisticated episode like because the thematic stuff and the plot stuff and the dialogue all all comes together in a way that feels like it all has to be there you know we're kind of used to backdoor pilots and things like even though that isn't specifically what this is but this is along those lines the front door pilot yeah it's not even the pilot too it's like uh it's the second pilot yeah um but like in all those cases i think they do a really good job on the rockford files with them and and this is just like another example of that where they uh well thinking about the gabby and gangy one right

where rockford is barely in it and i like i don't mind that he's barely in it. It's kind of fun to have him going about doing a normal day's work with those two sort of in the foreground trying to do the same work. But this one, it's just very seamless. There's nothing about this that feels forced upon the Rockford audience. Now, obviously, I'm not watching it for the first time in 1978. Like maybe that maybe I would feel that way if that were the case. But I don't think so. I just he feels like just another character that exists in the Rockfordiverse. Yeah. The same way that Lance White does.

Or like Susan, the reporter yeah anyone that we're like we're with the two of them for an entire episode so we see their dynamics we see how they bounce off each other we see their chemistry we get a little bit of the history it just turns out we get five more episodes of richie brockelman and then we get another two-parter with him later so you know we get to see even more um yeah so i think from that perspective yeah nothing but good things to say about this one um there is one little tiny thing that just started occurring to me during the recap which was like oh why did they have to do a fake body like why did they have to do a falsified killing of a guy that they actually killed that yeah hold on let's see if we can think that through there because he's gonna disappear right but that just means that whoever

actually died because they didn't kill anyone to cover it up they just they said like some poor like some poor soul on ventura boulevard or something so it sounds like they either found a body or like you know i don't know I think there was an accident that happened and they just paid for, they just swapped him into it. You think? Because it's his car though. Oh, yeah. Because it's a gas truck, right?

Like somebody, that whole bit is very elaborate. Yeah, it's kind of like, I mean, it's there because it's the premise. Yeah. Because it gets Richie suspicious. Yeah. Like that's the premise. Yeah. Because it gets Richie suspicious. Yeah. Like that's the function of it.

But I mean, I guess maybe they wanted to see if they could make a deal with him. And then when he wouldn't deal, they already had this other thing set up. Could be. Or like they did the thing to fake his death. And then they were like, oh, but then you'll if you make a deal, then you make a you know, then you get to come back. And it was all a mistake or something. I don't know.

Yeah, I think you're right. I think it's, I'm throwing it out. I'm going to go and just break that DVD in half and never watch it. No. No, no. It's a little bit of evidence of like McGregor being too smart for his own good. Maybe read it that way. That is a thing.

He does over elaborate things. And it does depend on falsifying information which is kind of his thing yeah so maybe that maybe it's just that mcgregor is not as good at this as he thinks he is for the same reason why mcgregor sits in an italian car and uses a uh uh electronic transmitted lie detector signal fun fun fact that i only know from the uh imdb trivia while everyone refers to it as an italian car because verne calls it an italian car that is in fact a lotus which is a british car ah there we go so there you go a very fancy one which is the point uh speaking of mcgregor um we keep framing this as an issue episode because of this final frame, right? So two things.

One is that statement. Yeah. I was curious, you know, looking up some stuff. So this episode comes out in early, in February 78. So it was, you know, presumably conceived of and written and shot in 77. There was a commission. It's technically the privacy protection study commission congress passed uh the privacy act of 1974 in 1974 which establishes the privacy protection study commission

to study the implications and other issues around what the act you know is putting into law and issue a report um which it does in 77 so you know this thing is being drawn directly from i imagine the report that the commission actually filed the privacy act is all about information practices that govern the collection maintenance use and dissemination of information about individuals that's maintained by federal agencies so this is a report on how federal agencies are going to handle individuals private information so that's the context for this splash screen which is basically saying that the like secret information centers if they're run by private agencies there's nothing right you know there's nothing keeping them from doing all these things if it's federal that's different because there's nothing right you know there's nothing keeping them from doing all

these things if it's federal that's different because there's the privacy act that actually oversees that so anyway the the department of justice website has a whole thing about the privacy act of 1974 and includes a link to the pdf of the report personal privacy in an information society is the title we'll link it in the show notes. I didn't read it. I skimmed the introduction. Fun fact, the two senators who are associated with this were Barry Goldwater and Ed Koch. Anyway, yeah, one can read it if one would wish to. But it's all about examining individual privacy rights and record keeping practices.

examining individual privacy rights and record keeping practices. Although the private sector has been emphasized in our inquiry, we also attempted to assess the effectiveness of protections for personal privacy in the public sector. So it's all about looking at the interests of individuals, record keeping institutions, and quote, society as a whole, and how to balance, you know, how we keep and retain and use people's information which all seems extremely relevant today uh yeah um yeah so that's some context i guess one thought i had was that's the framing for the criminal activity of the episode but it doesn't delve into why it's a problem as opposed to bringing up the like you may have never thought of this. Yeah.

Audience member in 1978. This is happening. It's not the crime they're investigating. The crime they're investigating is the possible murder of Tooley. It's what Tooley was murdered over. But they even admit that they don't know if any of it is a crime. Well, and McGregor says, you know, to my knowledge, none of this is illegal. But it also seems so very shady.

Right. And of course, it is clandestine. Like, that's the other bit about it, is that it's shady to the point where he uses blackmail to get county resources to hide it and whatnot. But again, it's not what Rockford and Brockleman are actually investigating it is just the it is what tuli was investigating and even tuli wasn't investigating it for that

reason he was just investigating it because of al uh stever um told it was like has it out for this councilman so it's like right yeah i guess i think that what seems really relevant to today is less the existence of this because now we're past the rubicon oh yeah right but it's the what what creates the criminal behavior is the fact that there's so much money potentially at stake for someone to use this information in an unscrupulous manner yeah right and that's what causes the problems that the fact that you can sell people's information for whatever purpose you want and that there's a demand for it um that creates the conditions for for blackmail and murder and yeah the other the other crimes yeah and they even say like the the the weird not weird, but the one of the shady bits is that Interpol won't get involved in it until until they can see that it works.

Yeah. But some banks and a European country that they don't name. Right. But the report specifically is about 200 million Americans. million americans so there's this like international espionage angle to it too that is just kind of put out there and then not touched because that's not what our heroes are are about in this in this particular case there's also the thing of like in after two to three years it won't matter and i think that's also very prescient where it's like yeah once once this stuff is established and it's grown it's grown roots into i don't know what a good metaphor is but i'm thinking of i mean this is essentially uh social media stuff right where it's like once everyone's on facebook like it doesn't matter how

how terribly and unethically facebook starts behaving because now it's a platform and now people have their whole livelihoods built on being on Facebook. And, you know, what are you going to do? Like there's a I want to say a rich history. There's a rich history of of that. What's the phrase asking for forgiveness rather than permission in specifically in America? I'm sure worldwide. But like I'm thinking specifically of things like in Wisconsin, they used to have they may still have, but like a law against privately owned prisons.

And so a company comes and starts building a private prison. And Wisconsin's like, wait, that's illegal. You can't own a private. And they're like, oh, it's not a private prison until they get it built. And then they're like, well, it's here. What are you going to do? And then, oh oh i guess we can't do anything because you already built it you know and that's to to do something that's ripped from the headlines uh in illinois um i just saw this last night i don't know what the resolution is but so there's been a a pretty contested state senate i forget if it's the

senate or the state house but whatever a state representative of some kind um where one of the contenders is this real piece of garbage jim overweiss um i think jim's his name if you're in the midwest of the overweiss dairy situation conglomerate yeah they do like milk and ice cream and whatever anyway he's a real right-wing reactionary conservative kind of stuff anyway so this guy he's been in this house race or senate race the state race and he narrowly lost uh you know they've officially finished all the ballot counting and everything and he's lost his race so they were having the like orientation to new members at this capital uh earlier in the week and he apparently just showed up and was like introducing himself to people

and getting pictures and stuff. And so, and it's like, you, you lost the race. You weren't elected, but he's on this whole, like,

well, we have to count all the legal votes, you know, train. So the person who won is there, but he still shows up and is like, Oh, Hey everyone,

I'm going to come join this Congress. You can't just show up and say you're part of the legislature. Yeah. But that's the ultimate asking for, well, I'm already here. Yeah. Like, what are you going to do? I don't know what the resolution of this is, obviously, at this point. Oh, that'd be so wonderful.

Haul him out like hauling Steve out from the city council meeting. Yes. Kicking and screaming. Anyway, this episode is long enough, so I think we can wrap up. But I guess it's interesting from the perspective of it's an issue episode because the entire framing of it is meant to highlight an issue,

but the actual plot of it isn't that different from any other plot. So it doesn't feel like an issue episode in the episode necessarily the issue of the plot is that murder is bad right i mean like that's a pretty standard pretty straightforward but yeah definitely definitely a good one um feels a little more like a movie so yeah make some popcorn have a snack and then maybe see if uh you can track down any episodes of richie brockman, Private Eye. Yeah. We'll see how that went for him.

I am now even more excited for the next one because that one is a very con game episode. Oh, yeah. Maybe we'll take another year before we get to it. We'll see what happens. But regardless of how long it takes us to get to that, we'll be back next time to talk about another episode of the Rockford Files.