Two Hundred A Day - Episode 8: Gearjammers (Part 1)

Episode Date: April 9, 2017

Nathan and Eppy discuss S2E3 Gearjammers, Part 1. Jim's dad Rocky sees something he shouldn't and makes himself a target of assassination - can Rockford track him down before the killers do? In addition to the mystery, the joy of this episode is the reveal of Joseph Rockford's personal life. Plus a great car chase! This is our first two-parter, our next episode will cover Gearjammers, Part 2. We reference this Rolling Stone article about the truckers strike of 1974: The Truckers Go to Washington: Democracy in Action on the Interstate. Thanks to: zencastr.com for helping us record fireside.fm for hosting us thatericalper.com for the answering machine audio clips spoileralerts.org for the adding machine audio clip Freesound.org for the dining audio clip Support the podcast by subscribing at patreon.com/twohundredaday. Big thanks to our Gumshoe patrons! Check them out: Lowell Francis's Age of Ravens gaming blog Pluto Moved On Podcasts and Video Lets Plays Kevin Lovecraft and the Wednesday Evening Podcast Allstars And thank you to Shane Liebling! Two Hundred a Day is a podcast by Nathan D. Paoletta and Epidiah Ravachol. We are exploring the intensely weird and interesting world of the 70s TV detective show The Rockford Files. Half celebration and half analysis, we break down episodes of the show and then analyze how and why they work as great pieces of narrative and character-building. In each episode of Two Hundred a Day, we watch an episode, recap and review it as fans of the show, and then tease out specific elements from that episode that hold lessons for writers, gamers and anyone else interested in making better narratives.

Okay, pal, it's Harry. I just checked my car. You kept the battery charged all right. You also put 3,500 miles on it. Welcome to 200 a Day, a podcast where we explore the 70s television detective show, The Rockford Files. I'm Nathan Pelletta. And I'm Epidio Ravishaw. Which episode or set of episodes, I suppose I should say, are we talking about today, Epi? Well, we're talking about Gear Jammers Part 1. This is Season 2, Episode 3. And as per the demand of our listeners, we're taking a two-part episode and doing it as two different episodes. Yes, that is the result of the poll that we ran on our Patreon recently, asking how you listeners would like us to treat these two-part episodes. And the

overwhelming result thus far has been we'll take a standard episode per Rockford episode. I don't know the situation that you have going into this, but I've watched both parts probably a couple of years ago now, but I've only watched part one in preparation for this. That's what I did as well. Yeah. So there's going to be maybe a little guessing about what's going to come up. Yeah. My memory is not the best. So I get to relive everything as if it's new and fresh. Most of what I remembered about this story, about these two episodes already happened in the first one. So it feels pretty, feels pretty fresh.

And the, and the cliffhanger is a pretty nice cliffhanger. So we say this every time. But this one is a very good episode. And I'm pretty excited to get into it. This is the episode I needed this week. I think that's probably the best way to put it. And you can't go wrong with Rocky. This is a Rocky intensive episode. And we get that even in the preview montage.

We get a lot of Rocky. In the preview montage, it ends with Rockford lying on the ground and Rocky leaning over him going, I've killed him. I've killed my own son, Jimmy. It is very dramatic. And I'm like, oh, yes, I cannot wait to see this. Yeah, so Gear Jammers Part 1 is a written and story by the show creators, Huggins and Connell, and directed by William Ward, who has directed one of the previous episodes that we've talked about and is the trophy holder for most directed Rockford episodes. So the beginning of season two here is in solid.

We found the footing of the show hands, I think. Yeah, the episode just before this is the Farnsworth... Oh. Stratagem. Stratagem, which we've already gone over. And it's a wonderful episode. So we know it's definitely going to be heavily involving Rocky from the preview montage. And we start the episode right with the camera tight on Rocky as he's walking around some kind of loading dock, working class environment.

He's looking for someone. He's asking guys that he sees, hey, where's whoever this person is? I didn't catch the name in this sequence. One of the things that struck me about this is how preposterous this would be nowadays with OSHA guidelines. be nowadays with osha guidelines you wouldn't have somebody off the street even if he knew everyone wandering around with all of these forklifts and trucks going everywhere it was a lawsuit waiting to happen yeah for sure and you you know he he knows he does know everyone like he's being greeted and people are like hey rocky as we know from other episodes he's a trucker a truck driver by trade or was he's a retired truck driver so he knows the trades he knows uh working people in

that field so we definitely get that here as he's looking around we have this really nice camera pan over to a guy that i'm going to refer to as wearing goon casual. It's clearly a gorilla in that very Rockford way, but he's wearing like kind of a florally, kind of relaxed fit, blousey shirt. Seems like he's ready to lounge, but also ready to goon. A shirt whose top three buttons have never been buttoned. He sees Rocky walking through this warehouse

and talking to people and going into an actual enclosed warehouse space. Instead of that, triggers him to get out of his car with sunglasses and cigar in mouth, I might add, and follow him in. It was a moment where the signals made me wonder if he was the boss, even though everything else was telling me he was the goon he was the gorilla uh but sometimes a gorilla likes a cigar right like that's and as we we learn shortly he's there in order to keep people out of the warehouse yeah maybe he was just kind of relaxing lit a cigar but then rocky went in um it's not really that important other than it's a great visual where he gets out of the car and then he just has this huge cigar in his other hand so rocky goes into this warehouse he's looking for someone in particular

he sees them in a little enclosed space talking to another man i want to note something here and i don't know maybe our listeners can help out as he's going through this labyrinthine series of boxes and crates and barrels and there's this one crate that I swear there's a dead coyote on top of. I didn't notice. Like I rewound it. I couldn't quite figure out what was going on there, but it could have been one of those legendary coyote rugs from the seventies. Yeah.

Yeah. I don't know if anyone knows anything about that. You can let us know in the, uh, the comments on this on this episode or or tweet us at 200 pod so rocky sees whoever this is but he's in conversation he doesn't want to interrupt because he is a polite man yeah and they're shuffling papers back and forth and going through all these what look like some kind of shipping records all of our visual

cues are that this is some kind of shady conversation. My notes are literally shady as ****. Oh yeah, it's super shady. He decides that he's not going to be able to break in on this conversation and turns to leave. And then our goon comes in, tells the two guys, an old guy started wandering around, but then I lost him. And the more together, professional looking gentleman, professional-looking gentleman, Mr. Hamill, he tells our goon to go find whoever was sniffing around. The goon goes off, and that's when we see a bunch of money changing hands. As if we didn't know it was shady to begin with,

we then also get the $100 bills going back and forth, and just very clearly some sort of deal going down something something nefarious rocky has bumbled his way out of the warehouse and is going to a the nearby cafe which we know from the giant sign that just says cafe over it yeah he goes in and he finds the guy he was looking for whose name is johnny losalvo we find out why he's been trying to find this guy johnny is they're friends we get from the context of their you know conversation and rocky is selling tickets to the utah ball which is the owner operator trucking association fundraising gala we may have missed the scene between because doesn't he actually sell some tickets to a guy in a truck oh yeah yeah he does sell some tickets to a guy in a truck? Oh yeah, yeah. He does sell some tickets to a guy. Because there's this whole back and forth about how the guy doesn't... I sympathize with this guy.

I mean, I love Rocky. Everyone loves Rocky. I've worked jobs where then suddenly the hat is passed around for something, like a birthday present for someone or whatever. And you're like, oh my God, you don't pay me enough to have that kind of cash on hand that wouldn't have gone straight to my lunch. So this guy, he asks him for $10 for one or two tickets. Yeah, each ticket is $10, I think. And the guy only has seven. So Rocky, being the magnanimous man that he is, is like, well, I'll cover it and you can pay me back or whatever, which is like, again, I feel like this guy just wants out of it. Fine. If you're going to cover it, then I now owe you the extra $3. So you won. Take my money. Yeah, because he's he kind

of sells tickets to a couple of people. And that's where we learn that that's what he's trying to do. But also in that sequence is where the goon lost him, went back to Mr. Hamill and Mr. Hamill gave him very specific instructions to find him and do whatever you need to do to make sure that he doesn't tell anyone about this deal that he saw. So before getting into any real dialogue or anything, we know that there's a shady deal. Rocky saw it. He probably doesn't understand what he saw, but the guys know that he knows. And now they sent a goon after him to keep him quiet. So now at the cafe, he finds Johnny.

He's trying to sell him tickets to the Uta Ball. I keep saying it like that because that's how he pronounces it. It has a very Star Wars character name feel to it. The selling point is that they're raffling off a sleeper cab for the fundraiser. So he talks to Johnny. He talks about how he tried to find him. He couldn't find him anywhere. Johnny already has tickets because another guy got to him first, basically. And that's when Rocky says, oh, well, I saw you talking to this guy, but I didn't want to interrupt. I should have interrupted. And then maybe I would have gotten the sale. And that's when Johnny's face just falls.

Right. And now Johnny knows that Rocky saw something he should not have seen. Like I said before, everyone loves Rocky. Johnny's now about to go through some hoops to try and protect Rocky. Get him out of there. He tells Rocky that he should leave. He's not going to tell Rocky why. So he invents, I assume he invents a story

about somebody getting mugged. Yeah, he says that three guys got mugged out last night and Rocky's walking around. He has $2,000 in ticket sales on him right now. So he's sold 200 tickets to the Uta Ball today, apparently.

So he talks Rocky into going out the back with him because he'll give him a ride back to his truck and he's parked out back. So he kind of slips Rocky away because he saw the goon outside waiting for Rocky to come out the front. The goon finally realizes that Rocky's not coming back out, goes in and gets Rocky's name because everyone knows Rocky. So it's like, an old guy in dungarees came in like, oh, Rocky. I want to describe this waitress because I would describe her as down on her luck Daphne. With the scarf.

But yeah, she knows Rocky. Everybody knows Rocky. He starts describing him and he's like, oh, Rocky. Yeah. Yeah, as we'll see throughout the episode, everyone knows Rocky. So now that Argoon has the name rockford yes now we know that things are going to start to get more complicated and this is actually where the credits for the episode start playing when rocky is driving away in his truck is when we see like gear jammers uh overlaid over

the image and we get the the opening credits which i thought was was kind of cool where they choose to put the opening credits for the show moves around based on the pace of the show. Yeah, yeah. And the style of the story that they're telling. So that was kind of neat. And then, you know, there's like a musical underscore while we see the credits and we see Rocky driving around.

Once the credits are over, we, of course, come to Jim Rockford bringing groceries home to his trailer. And now our two goons,on casual and another guy also uh he has a mustache i believe yes he has a tremendous mustache our first guy is blonde no mustache our second guy is brunette mustache graying both dressed like they're ready to uh go down to the beach at a moment's notice. He gets to his door and they stop him, but I think he knows right away. So he has two paper bags of groceries in his arms, cradled like precious children. These guys come up and ask him if his name's Rockford. And he has a bit of patter about how he has $30 worth of steak in here.

He doesn't want it to go bad. And then that's when one of the guys just slaps the grocery bag out of his arms and the dozen eggs breaks and goes all over the concrete. And then here he tells them that those were extra large. Grade AA extra large eggs, 99 cents a dozen or something like that. So he's upset about 99 cents here. He's got $30 worth of steaks on him. That's either a lot of or a very fine cut that he's preparing. So they mess with his groceries.

He obviously knows that he's in trouble now. And this is when he goes to clock one of them. But the other one grabs his arm and they just wail on him like he doesn't even have a chance they're so ready for his sucker punch as he's winding up the guy behind him just grabs him and that's it uh and then you drag him around the back of the uh the trailer and they just start beating him up to to find out where rocky is they know that jim is his son you know where's your old man? Being Rockford, both unwilling to give information to goons and protecting his father doesn't say anything. And then they're actually scared away by a couple

lifeguards in a Jeep who come riding up over the sand. That lifeguard was ripped. He was shredded. Lightguard was ripped. He was shredded. Yeah. So for context, one of my other regular viewing media is professional wrestling. So I watch a lot of ripped shirtless men. And this guy counts. Yeah.

So basically, we're behind Rockford's trailer, which is facing the beach. The front of Rockford's trailer is facing the parking lot across from which is a restaurant. So the back of it's facing the beach, and they come up on a jeep from the distance right towards them. And the whole time they're coming up on them, these two goons were beating on Rocky. But they let him go when they realize that this jeep is gonna

get there. And they leave. And the jeep pulls up. And this guy, what did he say say he says something like it's a bit early to be hitting the sauce yeah because rockford's all curled up holding his stomach because he was just getting punched in the stomach basically so he's curled up on the ground holding his stomach and the lifeguard treats him like a drunk you should go sleep it off buddy i had assumed that the jeep was coming in their direction because they saw someone getting the crap kicked out of them.

Yeah, I think it's more like they just happened to be there. The guys didn't want witnesses. And so they're like, oh, there's a transient underneath the trailer. Rockford is in no mood and just kind of waves him off. And then we get a nice slow shot of him picking up his groceries and looking really sad as he comes into the trailer. Other than the eggs and maybe something else, like a package of cut meat or something, perhaps ham, nothing else in the bag spilled out. So I think lucky for Rockford, his steak is probably still fine. I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt here. He's out 99 cents at most at this

point, according to my tally. Though I do think there is a possibility that he has more loss because he immediately leaves and doesn't put any of that stuff in the fridge. So. Oh, good eye. Yeah. Just saying. He does, however, reach for the cookie jar.

Yeah. And this is the 200 a day first appearance of Rockford's gun. Yeah. Which he keeps in the cookie jar. Rockford has been beaten up before. He's had goons on his front door. He's had goons inside. He's dealt with them every which way.

And thus far in our podcast, he's not pulled his gun. But his dad is in trouble. He knows these guys are looking for his dad. And the first thing he does is he pulls that gun out of the cookie jar. Well, technically, it's the second thing he does. And the first thing he does is he pulls that gun out of the cookie jar. Well, technically, it's the second thing he does, because the first thing he does is he calls Rocky. We get a dramatic shot of the phone ringing in an empty room that's all in disarray. Yeah. Like the chair is turned over, pictures on the wall are all crooked, and no one answers, obviously.

So then Jim hangs up, starts to leave, turns, goes and gets his gun out of the cookie jar and then goes to go over to Rocky's place. Once he's there, we get that kind of same shot of the roughed up interior as Jim comes in and starts looking around. Both the audience and Rockford don't have any reason to think anything else but that Rocky got beat up or got captured. Yeah, got got. He does pick up Rocky's, like, date book or appointment calendar, see who he's going to, and he starts flipping through it, and every day says, the usual, written on the same... At 11 a.m., the usual. Every day.

Not nothing. Not, I just do whatever and don't write it down. I write down the usual so that I know. So I can remember to do the thing I did yesterday and the day before. The scene peaks with noises that Jim starts to hear coming from the back of the house. He goes into kind of the kitchen area, hears weird noises coming from the bathroom, gets a little statue to use as a weapon. Doesn't pull his gun,'ll i'll add at this point

which i think is actually a little important which i'll get to later but he uh picks up the statue goes in and another first 200 a day appearance of rocky's friend lj who's in who has huge earphones on and is listening to music really loud as he's fixing rocky's shower they're they're like um transistor earphones right like he has an antenna coming off of them uh they're gargantuan and he's clearly oblivious to what's going on yeah he clearly has no idea that anyone has been in the house lj doesn't show up in a lot of episodes. He's referenced sometimes. He's kind of like a sub-supporting character. There's like Rocky and Dennis

and Beth, and then there's some other kind of recurring, very small characters, and LJ is one of them. If there was a Rocky show, The Rocky Files, I think that LJ would figure more prominently. And it's good that he shows up in this one because Gear Jammers is probably the closest we'll get to the Rocky files.

Definitely. So LJ is fixing this shower because he lost $10 to Rocky playing cards, which they do every Saturday. Yeah. And this is where we start to see that Rocky has this routine, which is another thing that we'll see more and more. He's paying what he owes Rocky by fixing his shower, and he didn't hear anything. He's very confused and befuddled by what's happened in the place. There's a little question here, and it's not too important how it gets answered, but there's a little question as to whether or not LJ was in the bathroom working on it with these headphones on when somebody ransacked the place

or whether lj just didn't notice that the place was ransacked because there's there's a moment where he yeah he looks around he goes it doesn't i guess it looks kind of bad like he just doesn't which he had just seen rocky so he wouldn't think oh someone kidnapped rocky right he's coming from the bar so this is where we first get he's at gear jammers go look for him there yes yes so gear jammers tavern is apparently a truck drivers and other narrow duel hangout extravaganza it is hopping it is and we establish the time uh incidentally as we go on it is just after 430 on a Saturday. There's music.

There's a lot of people. There's pool. This is the place to be. Rockford, he knows Gear Jammers. So we start to get the sense of Rockford's presence in Rocky's life, which is kind of a nice undercurrent to the rest of the episode. we start to see what people like who he knows that rocky knows who rocky knows that don't know him or that he doesn't know yeah and some other things that kind of tell us about the the venn diagram of rocky and rockford so he knows gear jammers he comes in here he knows you know some kind of bartender or proprietor or some kind this guy named jack hey was rocky here i'm trying to find

him and this is where we get a little bit more explication about how rocky was there because he's always there on saturday right but also he was there selling tickets to the utah ball and we get a little more exposition about this ball which is that it's the owner operator truck association raising money to send lobbyists to washington to fight the big fleets over things like regulations and stuff that's keeping the little guy down to the benefit of these bigger national trucking organizations. I thought this was a really interesting detail. So for those of us who, like myself, were not around in the early 70s, so this episode broadcast in 75, so it's probably concepted, written, whatever, in 74-ish. In the winter of 1974, there was an 11-day trucker strike, a trucker shutdown of owner-operator trucks. relevant to things going on in the country at the time that I think make a lot of sense in terms of

establishing the character of Rocky at this time and like why he's doing this little this kind of fundraising effort because some other people kind of point out like oh it's kind of funny of like Rocky of all people to be concerned about politics and this is actually a real thing that was going on a lot of tension about the owner operators and versus big fleets versus gas prices and stuff like that. This is kind of a thing that I love about the Rockford Files is that they will do that. They'll take topical things and make it important. This detail here is not... It's important to Rocky, but it's not important to the storyline any more than it puts Rocky in the storyline's way.

At least in part one, I can't remember how part two goes. Like, I love that about the Rockford files. There's these real concerns that are impacting the characters in ways that are real rather than sort of conceptual, right? Yeah. It's not like, let's figure out a reason for Rocky to be doing whatever he needs to do to get into the story. It's more like, given the out a reason for Rocky to be doing whatever he needs to do to get into the story. It's more like given the character of Rocky, what's going on that would motivate him? Right. It definitely adds to the sense of realism that we both, I think, appreciate about the show.

Anyway, there's a little more about that that I think we'll probably talk about in our second half. And there's a really great Rolling Stone article about it that i found that i'm that i'll have in the show notes uh so you can look more into that uh if you're interested in the history there but in this moment the important thing for us as as a viewing audience is that rocky as is his routine on saturdays left at 4 30 to go to the liquor store the usual so we go to the liquor store and we have this great bit where rockford describes rocky to the the guy behind the counter who is a great character in his own right he's kind of he's older he has a big long beard yeah he's definitely a a memorable wizened old man and and rockford is describing rocky speaking of memorable with an old man he's describing rocky as this older gentleman it's important uh he's been described by several

different people as wearing dungarees at this point and the this this older gentleman was like no i don't know who you're talking about i haven't seen him he says like i'm sorry to to bother you but they said that he was coming here his name is i, I think he says his name is Joseph Rockford. I'm his son. Yeah. And the guy's like, oh, Rocky. Like, why are you describing this guy? Yeah.

You're saying height and weight and expect me to know who you're talking about. Should have just said Rocky. And he's like, I've heard so much about you. Right. It's so nice to meet you. This is, yes, this is one of the first that we get of the people that have learned about James Rockford through his father. Right. Like, oh my God, this is the James Rockford, the Jimmy Rockford.

Oh, the Jimmy, yeah. That's great. It's wonderful. And so they have a little bit of banter. Rockford clearly is still worried, so he's kind of trying to move things along. Yeah. You know, he said something like, oh, they said that he comes here every Saturday. And he's like, oh, he doesn't buy much, though. No danger of him becoming an al along. Yeah. You know, he says something like, oh, they said that he comes here every, you know, every Saturday.

And he's like, oh, he doesn't buy much though. No danger of him becoming an alky. Yeah. He just comes in, buys a bottle of champagne for his lady friend. Mary Ramsey. There's kind of a great facial moment of what, what, what?

All right. So this is the theme of this particular episode or one of them. It's my favorite theme of this episode, which is that Jim doesn't know about Rocky's life. this guy who works at the liquor store that Rocky buys a single bottle of champagne from every week knows about James and the name of the woman that Rocky's going to see. And knows her address. Rockford's like, oh, right.

Yeah, Mary, of course. You know what? I forgot her address. And so the guy very helpfully looks it up in his files and gives rockford mary ramsey's address in beverly hills being the professional that he is rockford even takes a bit of that the town that she's in or whatever he's oh that's that's the part i always get confused armed with more information about his father that he didn't know he didn't have he leaves the liquor store and the goons who presumably have been

following either following him or following the same track of information drive by and see him pull a ui to follow him and this is where we get to 200 a day's first full-on jim rockford car chase. This is, oh, this is exquisite. Right off the bat, we get a J-turn, the signature turn from Rockford. Little piece of trivia. This is apparently the first time the J-turn was in the show. Really? This is the first Rockford J-turn. Let's, okay, hold on. We should talk about the J-turn then. I mean, I've always known it as the bootlegger when I was growing up. I mean, I've always known it as the bootlegger when I was growing up. It's called a J-turn because of the Rockford files. It was known as the bootlegger or the moonshiner's turn.

And, you know, like that was during the prohibition era. But I think the reason why it's called a J-turn because it's the Jim Rockford turn. But it also looks like a J. So this is the turn where you're driving the car forward, and then you slam it into reverse while you're traveling forward and spin. Your back end goes out, but you essentially spin in place so that you're facing the other way, and then slam it into gear and go so that you're traveling north, and then at the end of this maneuver, you're traveling south. It's also uh extraordinarily

healthy for your car i highly recommend it and also your body yeah a kind of well-known trivia fact james garner did almost all of the physical stunts and driving in the rockford files one of the reasons the show went on its hiatus at the end was because he was in too much physical pain to continue doing it. Then there was contractual stuff and some rights issues. But part of it was that he was too broken down from doing all this stunt driving himself to continue doing the show. This turn, the forces on your body were enough to break the physical specimen that is James Gardner. There are moments in this particular episode

where you really kind of get a feel for how massive he is compared to some people. You know what I mean? Like he's just got like a solid... He's a solid build on that man. Yeah. So yeah, we see our first J turn. It's very exciting, of course.

So he speeds off the other way and then the uh the chase is on this isn't a really long sequence but there are a bunch of cool little details the practical driving is really great in particular because the chase car the two goons at one point takes a turn so hard that their hubcap just comes shooting off of the car and they left that cut and it adds so much dramatic energy to the chase it's a really great moment it could not have been planned i feel like i don't even want to spoil the trick that jim uses i think he uses it in another episode as well but one of the things i love about it is that they don't fall for it right you think they're about to fall for it and then they're like wait a minute i don't think it's too much of a spoiler because like it's fun to watch even if you know the beats of it but

essentially they they do some high speed going around neighborhood streets and stuff like that but his first big trick is he loses them for just long enough so they can't actually see the car and then he pulls into a parking lot into a spot and then stops so that his car isn't moving anymore. And then ducks so that they won't see him in the car. And this works in a lot of Rockford Files episodes, especially with people who are not as expert as these two guys, as we'll learn. Yeah, so they drive past him and then either realize or see him as they swing around because they lost the car. They don't know where it went and get back on the chase the end of this chase is uh i guess the thing that really stands out

about this particular chase for me he's led them merrily to i guess it's it's like a under an overpass or something like that yeah or the bottom level of a parking garage or something. Something, yeah. And he pulls his car up and slides to a stop, and they come screeching to a stop right next to him, and he comes flying out of his car with his gun out. The gun that we see him take from the cookie jar before, he has them stick their hands up, and then he has... I wish I had written down all of it. There's just this monologue that he delivers.

He basically says that he has been chased by a lot of people and he usually can lose them. And that it's been an honor to be tailed by someone as good as you. Some he doesn't lose, but none make it look easy. Yeah, he says that none make it look as easy as you have or something like that. So you kind of get the sense retroactively that that parking lot maneuver usually works, right? Right. In most other episodes where he does something like that, it does work.

This one, it doesn't. And then after that, they're on him so tight because the whole rest of that chase, they're on his bumper almost. Yeah. And he can't lose him. So he has to escalate to this to end the chase, which usually Rockford wins car chases.

He gets away in almost every other time. But these guys are actually good enough to stick with them. But in a dramatic reversal of how things usually go, he's the one who has a gun and they don't. So since he has the gun, he can end this on his terms. And it's just a great moment where it's like he is so good at what he does. Yeah. He gets them up on top of their car.

He said, you know, get up on the roof, lie down. And then he pulls the stem from the tire. Yeah. Yeah. The stem so that it deflates the tire. Gives them a nice little one-liner about getting that tire looked at and drives away. So Rockford gets away in the end. We cut to a boat tied up at a dock and our friend Johnny DeSalvo, who is coming to see Mr. Hamill, the guy that we saw him making the deal with at the very beginning, who himself is now smoking a cigar in the lounge area of his boat. Yeah. So we know he's a scumbag. Yeah. You can't have both a cigar and a boat.

Right. Johnny wants out, whatever their deal is, which we still don't know what the deal is, but Johnny wants out. He knows that Rocky is going to be in trouble because of all this. And he knows that Hamill is sending guys to put him on ice. And he has a line about how he knew he could get two to three years for whatever they're doing, but he's not willing to go to jail for life. And that's why he wants out. He has a great line where he says, I'm just trying to make a buck like everybody else. I don't want to see nobody get killed.

And the whole time he's having this conversation, a goon has come down from above deck and is standing behind him in the doorway, unacknowledged, but it's wonderfully menacing. It's very menacing, yeah. You just know the whole way through, you're like, oh, this guy, this poor guy. I mean, he's trying to do right by Rockford and just be a decent human being despite having got himself caught up in this. We can probably talk about this more

later, but it's a great demonstration of how the stakes of whatever's going on are different for the different people. He's obviously doing something illegal and he got himself into that because the money was good enough or whatever, but the money isn't enough for him to be party to murder especially someone he knows yeah he has a little throwaway line about uh knowing hamill's dad hamill for his part is kind of like look a deal in so many words he makes clear that i hear what you're saying but that doesn't matter to me right he's very non-committal about whether he's going to tell him to lay off rocky or not dissolvo leaves and then he makes what i noted as a ominous phone call yes from there uh we go to rockford going to mary's house he's

tracked down mary ramsey or gone to her address in Beverly Hills. It's this gorgeous, giant house. No one answers when he rings the bell, so he goes around to the back. And we see Mary outside her outdoor pool, just noodling around. I get the impression that this area might be part of a larger, maybe retirement complex or something. Oh, maybe. Because it felt like some of the other houses all were sharing the same pool. Yeah, and this is the only time we see this house in this episode so may we'll we'll come back here uh in part two and

find out more but there's a lovely yellow color scheme throughout the pool chairs and and umbrellas and stuff it's very pleasant mary is very excited to finally meet jimmy yeah as he also has heard so much about him from rocky who is not there it seems like at first she makes maybe not like a full-on assumption no let's say a full-on assumption that rockford is there to finally meet her right right like there's like oh to finally meet you and blah blah blah. And unaware that Rocky is in any kind of trouble, but completely aware of who James Rockford is. Right. And Jim, for his part, this is the first time he's ever heard of, let alone met this woman. Yeah.

But because he's so concerned about Rocky, he doesn't make that a thing in this moment. Rocky, he doesn't make that a thing in this moment. He asks her about Rocky, not about her or their relationship, which if I remember right, we get more into that in part two. In this moment, the big underlying question here is still like, what's the deal with Rocky and Mary? Yeah, I ship them. So Rocky, he's not there, but he had called her 20 minutes ago, I guess to cancel or to say that he's going to be late or something.

Right. Because he's still out selling tickets. It's left unclear what he's doing. And that's part of it intentionally, I think. Like as audience, we like Rockford don't know where Rocky is or why he's not at all these places that he usually is. Yeah. And I mean, like up to this point, James has just been like one step behind, missed him by 20 minutes, you know, or something like that. But now this is, I think, the first

time that he's changed his plans for the day. He was at the liquor store. And then as anybody who knows Rocky would know that following the liquor store, he goes to Mary Ramsey's place. Right. that following the liquor store, he goes to Mary Ramsey's place. Right. And can we just say Mary Ramsey is an amazing name. We see her for maybe two minutes at most in this scene, in this episode. And she seems like the sweetest person. Right.

She's so great. I mean, I was joking when I said I'd ship them, but I totally, like if I pick someone for Rocky and I'm just like, there we go. It's great. So in this conversation with Mary, Jim learns, where is he likely to be? Oh, he's been moonlighting at the Wilmington docks, moving freight around. Johnny DeSalvo hires him there when they have enough work. So we are now starting to complete the circle of, you know, Rocky, DeSalvo, Jim. Yeah. That picture is starting to come into focus.

And also we get the first mention of if he's working there, then he's moonlighting on his social security. Yeah, yeah. Which we'll come back to later again. James loves Rocky, but he's not above being suspicious of Rocky's motives. I mean, this whole time, I think he thinks Rocky is wrapped up in something he shouldn Rocky is wrapped up in something he shouldn't be wrapped up in. Exactly.

He's both worried for his physical safety, right? Like these goons are after him. And also, the only reason goons would be after him are because he's wrapped up in something that he shouldn't be. Right. So now we go into this really interesting sequence. We start cutting back and forth between Rockford going to these docks and trying

to track down Rocky there and the first that we see of the actual shady deal that is going down so this warehouse is a pacific and western warehouse so that's the company the trucking companies and so we go through this montage where we cut back and forth between rockford talking to people trying to find Rocky and a gang of stalking masked goons hijacking Pacific and Western trucks as they're dispatched out of this warehouse. The setup itself is great. This back and forth is really, really fun to watch, right? Even if what these hijackers are doing is, as you learn watching it, is pretty routine for them, right? Like, each hijacking goes down exactly the same way. Well, and it's relatively rudimentary, right?

Like, this isn't Fast and the Furious crazy driving tricks. People respect guns. Exactly. So what they're doing is they're taking either a convertible or a car with a moonroof, pulling up beside a truck on this curve when they know that no one else is oncoming, pointing a gun at the driver, demanding them to pull over, pulling the driver off into a van, and then driving off with the truck. Yeah. So when this first car does this, you know before anything that the car is up to no good, right? There's a spotter with a walkie-talkie telling the car to go. The car

was hidden up in some bushes off the road. It drives down onto the road. They're pulling up to it. But there's this moment where they open the moonroof and the moonroof comes back and the light comes down and you realize, you know, your view as the camera is from the back seat. So you see a driver and a passenger in front of you. And as that moonroof opens up and the sun comes in, you see that they have the pantyhose stockings over their heads. Oh, it's so great. It's just that this extra level of like, whoa, wait a minute here.

I love that shot too. This episode doesn't have a lot of like experimental cinematography or like weird camera shots. It's kind of just that one. Yeah. It's so just that one. Yeah. It's so just visually strong. Yeah. It's more threatening than the guy standing through the moonroof with the gun in his hand,

right? Like that's what sells what happens later. As we see through the montage, some of the guys are better at pointing guns than others. Like some of them look a little silly in the little scene where they're pointing the pointing the gun these guns by the way also look like assault rifles like they're not shotguns they're not uh hunting rifles which in the early 70s that's some serious hardware yeah right so we see the first one in a little more detail to give us the full texture of how these go down and then over the course of the sequence we cut back and forth and we see another three or four of the same style hijacking. On the Rockford side, he's in this warehouse. He's trying to find Johnny DeSalvo because he wants to ask him about Rocky. But the

whistle blows and they go on their coffee break. So he's just kind of poking around waiting for everyone to come back from break. And then he sees blood dripping out of the bottom of a crate that's sitting on a forklift that catches up to the end of the the montage of the hijackings so not a lot of time elapses but in the episode it's kind of like a the big beating heart of this part of the of the second act essentially of the of the episode uh i want to also just point out that true to the rockford files these guys that are working at the warehouse each of them is a human being with their own character and their own story. Like he walks in on dialogue that has nothing to do with any of the stuff that's happening. That seems natural.

Two guys joking around with each other. And then like when they go on break, the other guy is like, oh, he must be on break. You want a cup of coffee? Like it's just very natural. He's not there to deliver the plot he's got a job and that's to work at the docks and load trucks those characters have their own hour episode of stuff going on that we could have been watching exactly especially since as we learned later the forklift operator doesn't know he even has a line was like i don't know i'm just the forklift operator doesn't know. He even has a line where he's like, I don't know, I'm just stacking them, right? Like he doesn't know what's in the crate. But it turns out, as we cut from the end of this montage sequence that has the same very upbeat music underscoring the whole thing, the dramatic music in this episode is not scary. It's more, it's a little more jangly, which is kind of a Rock for Piles thing. But this episode could be very dark, more like a sleight of hand that we talked about where there's a lot of drama about the disappearance and kind of angst about it.

But a lot of the camera work and music keeps it more kind of upbeat and feeling like we're waiting to get to the next reveal. They'll find out what's going on. In this case, what's going on is that we cut from the end of the montage to a shot of DeSalvo dead on like a gurney or something. And Sergeant Becker is there taking statements from people in the warehouse. And it turns out that indeed

his dead body was in the crate. Right. And if they hadn't called break just then, and if Rockford hadn't seen the blood just then so it would be on a ship on its way out of the country this evening and no one would ever know oh this is such good becker stuff here yeah he is a downer uh even when he's he's not because he's like oh no we'll find it i mean you're gonna smell it yeah he has kind of the gallows humor yeah for sure and and rockford's still

there he's kind of helping ask questions and stuff no one's seen rocky in the in the warehouse recently we learned that de salvo had called mary to tell her to tell rocky that someone was looking for him and to be careful and that call got cut off and so that's kind of establishes the the time of death probably becker knows mary yeah but jim didn't so there's a great little moment there that might be my favorite fact of the episode because it's so casual because i don't remember the exact line but he's just like saturday afternoon on mary mary ramsey like of course of, what Rocky does on Saturday. Everyone's so worried about Rocky that that Jim is still keeping back the expected explosion of like, how come you know this and I don't? Yeah, he still keeps it back.

But yeah, they're all worried about Rocky. They still don't know where he is. And so Jim asks Becker to put out an APB to find him, which is where we get a call back to the social security thing, because you can't give out an APB for no reason. There has to be a charge associated with the call. So he says, suspicion of intent to defraud social security. So good. I love it.

Okay, so there's so much tangled up in this. First of all, the other cop that's there realizes that this is... I mean, I think he even says, like, really? Yeah, like that's a ridiculous thing to put out an APB for someone. Yeah, why are we having cops looking for a guy who may be moonlighting and making a few extra dollars? between Becker and Rockford, where they both realize that this is the best, softest, easiest way to get them to find Rocky. But also, it's kind of selling Rocky up the river. And it's... Right. It's really good. And also, this is a great moment where, which we don't see a whole lot,

where Becker and Rockford are kind of working together to do a thing. Neither of them is trying to get the other one or put them in a hard spot. And neither of them is doing something for the other one. Like in Farnsworth, Rockford was doing something for Becker. And in other episodes, Becker is doing something for Rockford, running a license plate or something like that. In this case, they're actually working together because they're both worried about Rocky. We cut to later that night. Rockford is going back to Rocky's house.

He enters in the darkness, doesn't turn on the lights, and someone in the darkness wangs him on the back of the head with a frying pan. We know from the beginning that Rocky thinks that he has killed his own son. Right. Of course, there he is, Rocky, holding the frying pan, horrified that he just slammed Jim in the head.

I like how his strategy is to go fill the frying pan with water and then pour it on his face in order to wake him up, which is great. When you have a hammer, the whole world is a nail. You've got one tool, it's a frying pan. He does try to blame someone else. Someone beamed you, I guess. But Rockford is having none of it and knows that Rocky is the one who hit him with the frying pan. This is one of the greatest testaments to the temperament of Rockford. I'm inviting the audience here to take a moment and just recall a time in your life when you have hit your head.

And now imagine being reasonable about that. You can be responsible for hitting yourself in the head. And if somebody asks you if you're all right, you're like, no, I'm not all right. I just got hit in the head. Rocky hit him on the head with a frying pan and then is lying about it. And Jim is like, no, that's not what happened. Like, I know what happened. After spending the entire day being worried sick about his health and safety,

this scene is great. James Garner as Jim Rockford at its finest. The heroic thing he's doing here is just being, I guess, empathetic. Exasperated, but empathetic in the face of this this horrible entry but he's still pissed he's mad you get the sense that if it was anyone other than rocky he would be flying off the handle uh and they argue like they have a relationship where they argue with each other they get mad at each other that's not a weird thing but there's like normal getting mad at each other. That's not a weird thing. But there's normal getting mad at each other,

and then there's this, which is the next level. So they have, it's not even really an argument, it's more of a Rockford monologue, interrupted occasionally by Rocky's interjections, where we just see him kind of unspool all of the things that have happened and why he was so worried, and all the things that Rocky has made him do in that day. Right.

Again, whole episodes worth watching this. I'm not going to try to, to recap the dialogue here, but a couple of things that emerged from this is that he's like, you must've done something. What did you do? What are you into?

This doesn't happen if you're not into something. And Rocky's like, Oh, they're after the UTA money. Cause he has the $2,000 from selling tickets. And to Rocky, that must be the motivation. They must be trying to steal it. Rockford has a great line where he says, people just don't get killed for $2,000, not by the

mob. So now we start to see that Rocky himself doesn't realize what he saw or what he did that has triggered this chain of events. And Rockford believes him that he thinks it's about the $2,000, but he knows that that can't be the real reason. So he calls Dennis and says he'll bring him down to the station because they need to talk to him anyway. The only other thing I wanted to point out about this is that Rocky's place is tidy again. Like, it's a little window into the soul of Rocky that he would come home to a

ransacked place and he would just tidy it up. Like, he knows he's in trouble now. He knows somebody's after him. But he wants to make sure that his place, he can't leave it a mess. Alright, so now we're taking Rocky downtown to talk to the cops and we get into our finale

of part one. They go down to the police station to see Becker. There's a bunch of guys wearing blankets who are sitting on a bench outside the door and eagle-eyed viewers will recognize at least one of them as one of the truck drivers who got hijacked. Another cop that Rockford

knows comes around the corner and they talk about how these are the six drivers who got hijacked. He says Pacific and Western drivers. And that's when Rockford starts saying, Oh, Pacific and Western where DeSoto worked and now he's dead. And Rocky, you know,

he starts putting the pieces together. Becker walks into that conversation and like finishes it with him, which is nice. Yes. This is where Becker has the line, you know, you'd make a pretty good detective. Yeah. While he's talking to Rockford, Rocky in the background is trying to sell Utah tickets to these drivers who they had their clothes stolen as part of the hijacking. Right. So they're all, you know, and they're skivvies.

And one of them says, does it look like I have somewhere to put five bucks on me right now? Eternal operator, Joseph Rockford. While they're inside talking to Becker, we go outside and see our original cartoon casual setting up some kind of explosive in Rockford's car. A classic explosive. If we said some kind of explosive in rockford's car a classic explosive if we said some kind of explosive and you had in your mind like a tiny little brick of plastic or something

like that no no this is like dynamite on the train tracks in a cartoon yeah this is like it's a bundle of sticks wrapped with wire with a big uh analog stopwatch timer on the front of it it's very clear to the audience this is an explosive device yes inside basically rockford and dennis fill us in on the events recapping where we're at basically rockford does uh extort dinner from rocky uh as price of dropping the apb complaint which both is very in character and also is very important, as we'll learn shortly. But they have a great little back and forth about, you know, well, I still have this APB out on you

for working when you're on social security. And Rocky's like, you told him about that? And he gets outraged. Yeah, he's genuinely hurt. I mean, he doesn't stay hurt for long about anything, but you could tell, not only that they would tell him, but also that they would think that of him. Right. That he wouldn't

report this money. But Rockford saying that, well, there's reward money in this kind of thing, but I could drop it for the price of dinner. So he extorts dinner from Rocky, drops the complaint. They go back outside, and we have this very drama filled minute where they're talking about getting dinner. He's going to need to do it later because everything is closed because it's three in the morning, apparently.

But Rocky knows a place that has great lobster and it's open now. And Rockford's like, I don't know. Is it like fresh lobster from a can? It's like, I don't know. Is it like fresh lobster or from a can? It's like fresh from a can. Basically, Rocky talks him into it. And during this whole conversation, Rockford opens his car door and that starts the timer on this explosive. So the intention clearly is that he's going to get in the car to drive away. And then after a minute or two, it explodes.

So it's not right there in the parking lot. End of Jim Rockford. He opens the door, starts the timer. We see the timer start ticking. Rocky talks him into getting dinner. They go back and forth about the lobster. He says, okay, well, I'll drive. And you're like, no, don't both get in the car.

But fortuitously, the place is right around the corner and they can walk. Woo. Problem solved. They start walking away. Then Rockford says, oh, I forgot my keys. Goes back. Gets in the car to get his keys. Gets out.

They walk away. And then the car explodes. Right. To be continued. Yes. Oh, so sad. The car. I know.

I do have to say that clock face was gorgeous, though. The font on that clock was right up my alley. Yeah. It's interesting because it's telegraphed so strongly, right? Yeah. The tension of the moment is so clearly constructed by the cutting back and forth. Yeah. You can see the artifice of it, but that doesn't mean it's not compelling.

You're on the edge. And I think about this a lot, like the the sort of tension between because it's a thing now to just kill a main character but you're not going to kill rockford or rocky right in the rockford files but we still feel the tension right as audience members we know that they don't die but we still feel the tension right well and we've seen rockford get shot we've seen him go into the hospital with injuries. Like, it's not outside the realm that he could be in an explosion that doesn't kill him. We started this whole podcast with him getting shot in the head.

Right. To me, it's the third time, right? It's when he goes back to get his keys. That's where you're like, ah, like drop my keys. It turns around and you're just like, oh, come on. So it's kind of taking that trope and kind of just like committing fully to it, which is great. And we know there's going to be a part two, right? But so part one ends, his car explodes. So the escalation of trying to get Rocky has now escalated. It's gone on to full on mob style assassination. Yeah. We don't have time for that to sink in as we're watching because that's the end of the episode.

But that's kind of where we're at, waiting for next week to see where is this going to go. Because we can't binge. Right. We need to wait. Mm-hmm. We still don't know what the actual deal is with this hijacking scheme. Yeah. Because it seems kind of obvious, right?

Like, they steal trucks, but then everyone knows that they've stolen those trucks. These are stolen trucks and they have this cargo. I do remember, like not to look forward into the future, but I do remember something a little keep your eye on the P or where's the queen kind of a three card Monty thing going on. But I'm looking forward to watching the next episode to remember how that goes. Yeah, there's definitely a twist that makes it make sense. There's now the escalation of the physical danger of these two guys. And we still don't know the nature of Rocky's relationship with Mary. Right.

Like that still has not been actually explained or revealed. So there's still this whole feeling of what else is going on in Rocky's life that we're going to learn about. But yeah, that's where we end for part one of Gear Jammers. I have a subtotal. Yeah. Because he's not on the clock here, right? No one's paying him for any of this. So he is out 99 cents for a dozen eggs, possibly $3 worth of steak, depending on whether off

screen he managed to get that steak in the refrigerator or freezer in time. And at some point he does, while he's yelling at Rocky, say that he dropped 200 dimes calling him. So it's $20. Or, I'm sorry, $20. It's a significant amount of money. So he's either out $20.99 or $50.99, not counting all of the gas, because he has gone all over the place. And now his car has exploded. Yes.

So it's not been a good episode for the bottom line. Definitely not. And, yeah, he lost his eggs. You get the feeling he probably hasn't eaten all day, and he's about to have lobster dinner. And one imagines they're probably not going to get to it right this moment so he's uh not doing too well on the food front either yeah i'm super excited to watch part two and see where this all ends up the the other kind of big picture thing about this episode is that just compared to single episode stories less goes on and there's more,

they're able to do more with montages and these longer kind of sequences. But it doesn't feel like less has gone on because I think the heart of this episode, right, is the search for Rocky. And then the next episode, one presumes is solve the crime.

But the search for Rocky is compelling enough that it keeps us really engaged, even as there's fewer things like back and forth dialogue or interviews or, you know, going to this person, then this person, then this person. They kind of scale that back in favor of the longer shots and stuff like that. And it's fun to get the character of Rocky through all of these people that he interacts with.

You almost get a little disappointed when he finally catches up with Rocky because you kind of just keep that string of strangers coming, just telling random tales about the wonderfulness of Rocky and also all the good things they've heard about Jimmy. Right. Well, maybe we'll see some more of them in part two. But I think for our part, we are going to take a little break, maybe we'll see some more of them in part two, but I think for our part, we are going to take a little break and then we'll come back in our own part two to talk about some of the aspects of this first half of a story and how those are, are useful in constructing your own stories. All right. We'll see you then. 200 a day is supported by all of our listeners,

but especially our gumshoes. For this month, we have four of them to thank. Thanks to Kevin Lovecraft. You can hear him on the Wednesday evening podcast All-Stars actual play podcast, where they're currently playing 5th edition Dungeons & Dragons. Visit misdirectedmark.com to find that feed, along with other gaming podcasts in the Misdirected Mark Productions Network. Thanks to Lowell Francis. Check out his thoughtful and extensive gaming blog at ageofravens.blogspot.com. Thanks to Lowell Francis. Check out his thoughtful and extensive gaming blog at

ageofravens.blogspot.com Thanks to Pluto Moved On. Visit plutomovedon.com to find a podcast about tabletop RPGs, video games, and other topics, along with YouTube Let's Plays. And finally, thank you to Shane Liebling. If you want to get a shout out for your podcast,

blog, or anything else you do, check out patreon.com slash 200 a day and see if you want to be our newest gumshoe. Thanks for being the angel beneath our wings. While we have you here, if you like the podcast, there's three ways to support us. First, rate and review on iTunes or whatever you use to listen to podcasts. Second, you can support us directly for as little as a dollar an episode at patreon.com slash 200aday. This enables us to do things like upgrade our audio, and if we get enough support, release shows more often, so it'll be more Rockford for you. And third, both of us have other projects.

Epi, what do you have going on right now? You can check out my Sword and Sorcery fiction and the Sword and Sorcery fiction of other people, along with games and comics at worldswithoutmaster.com. So Nathan, what do you have going on? Well, I'm always working on designing and publishing new games. You can find my current offerings, including the Worldwide Wrestling World Playing Game, at ndpdesign.com. Or check out my Patreon for process and new experiments

at patreon.com slash ndpaoletta. Thanks for listening. And now, back to the show. Welcome back to the show. of lessons that we can draw from this half of a story here. This will be kind of fun, kind of a deeper dissection since we're doing a two-parter. And obviously next episode of 200 a Day will feature part two. We won't leave you hanging for that long. And I want to start with an apology to our listeners. I have made a grievous error in the first half of this episode. Oh no, what did you make a grievous error about this time, Epi?

So let's talk about the J-turn. All right, let's do it. This is a driving maneuver. It is a 180-degree turn. It's pretty fancy because you just completely change your facing. It wreaks havoc on the car and the human body, as we discussed earlier. And I said that it was called the J-turn because of Rockford. That was an out-and-out lie. It's often called the Rockford turn or the Rockford

spin because of Rockford. But it's called the J-turn because it, I don't know, you draw a J. I don't know. Like that part I can't describe. Yeah, it kind of looks like a J. I also erroneously referred to it as a bootlegger. Looking at this Wikipedia entry, it's called the moonshiner turn, but it's not the bootlegger turn. Even though moonshiner and bootlegger are synonyms. Totally thought we were experts here. And by that I mean we'd watch a few Rockford episodes. Put it in reverse and you turn around. Yeah.

So that's the J-turn. The bootlegger, you're going forward and you turn it completely around. Is that a 360? So it's a 180, but you're traveling forward the entire time. Yeah. So in the bootlegger, you go forward and you turn. I'm doing a visual here on a podcast. I apologize. Probably look this up on YouTube if you want to find out the fine distinction and do some research, share some links with us. That would be great. Okay. So

that's the correction. We do as little research as we need to, I would say, but mostly we're, we're just watching the show and talking about it. So, we appreciate things like corrections and further readings if people have them, as we are not Rockford historians in that way. But since we noticed this, I'd be wanting to make sure to

correct the record. More enthusiasm than expertise in this particular moment. A podcast about the Rockford Files, more enthusiasm than expertise. But speaking of J-turns and expertise, there's a little more to unpack, I think, in the car chase stuff from this episode. Yeah. Well, so watching it, like I mentioned in the first half, I am particularly fond of this particular Rockford car chase. But like a car chase, as we understand them, they're generally part of the visual medium.

What makes them exciting is what we're watching take place on the screen, or you can enjoy them in... I know I've enjoyed them in quite a few video games as well. And so there's like two parts of what's going on there. One is that we could bring in all of this information about what's going on just visually much quicker than if we were reading it or listening to someone talk about it or what have you. And then the other thing is that because it happens in this sort of pseudo real time, there's a pacing dimension to it. And both of these elements can sometimes be a barrier

when you try and take something like a car chase and put it in a book or bring it to the table. And so I was thinking about ways to make that work. In particular, I was thinking about it as playing a game

and what would make a car chase interesting. It's definitely a thing in gaming, right? Like how do would make a car chase interesting it's definitely a a thing in gaming right like how do you do a car chase or any any kind of chase but we'll talk about car chases yeah how do you make a pursuit fun i feel like there's a lot of different techniques that different games use but primarily what you're trying to do is take it from being something that uh is mechanically straightforward, but not particularly interesting. Like let's roll a bunch of dice and whoever makes the better

driving rolls wins the chase, right? Or something like that, which depends pretty much entirely on your ability to describe exciting action and very little on what the game's actually doing. If you set guidelines for yourself or you build up a little game around it that helps you describe this exciting action, that will carry some of the weight. Like, I think it's important to have really interesting changes of scenery while you're having it, right? I would go so far as to say that that's more important than, say, having a role to determine who's going to come out on top, right? It's more exciting to have Rockford turn a corner and then suddenly there being standstill traffic than it is to see if he can turn the corner better than someone else.

And even in this one, there's a moment where they turn a corner and then Rockford drives through a drive-thru car wash. I forgot the car wash. Yes. And the other car is right on his tail and follows him through this car wash. And it is an entirely visual moment. It doesn't have any strategic value. It's not like he's able to get farther away because it went through the car wash. But there's a guy and he dives out of the way and the hose goes everywhere and there's water spraying all over and it's a cool little visual set piece that adds texture to the chase exactly and i think that like what would be more interesting than to say the next role has this difficulty and whoever beats it is going to to get this or you get to

set the difficulty you make the role all these are perfectly fine workman-like solutions to the situation, but we don't want a workman-like solution. We want a Rockford-like solution. And I think a fun thing to do would be to be like, okay, now where are we? Are we going through a drive-through, or do you come across a used car lot? Even pulling out Google Maps and just kind of following along an actual street, you're going to get enough changes of scenery, different parking lots you might be able to

pull through or go through someone's backyard and somebody ends up in a swimming pool or something like that. But just have these changes of scenery and then let the various participants in the chase choose as they go through them where they're going to make their stand. Right. So Rockford pulls through this car wash and makes no use of it. And then he comes around the corner and he sees this parking lot and he's

like, this is it. This is where I make my stand. And then that doesn't work, which is great. And then he goes and he finds his spot under an underpass. So we can have a lot of, I mean, I hesitate to say throwaway scenes like the car wash because it's not a throwaway scene. That's part of the pacing.

That's part of what makes it work. But from a tabletop point of view, you're not going to roll any dice at those points. You're just going to say, and then this, and then this. Maybe give people a chance to introduce the guy in the car wash who's hosing down the pavement. The general principle of what makes

the car chase exciting, one of the things is the locations and how to use your environment. Because the car chase is a very restricted context. You're in a vehicle vehicle the vehicle can only go certain places and it is more dangerous to go into certain contexts and less dangerous than others so that's one axis i guess to think about making it interesting is you know how do you use the environment to complicate or give you the opportunity to do cool stuff and then i think the other one or one of the other ones is what is the goal of the chase yeah like what is the

ultimate goal for each of the participants but then also for the narrative in this case the ultimate goal for each of the participants is pretty clear it's rockford knows these guys are following him he wants to get away from them and these guys want to catch up to him and capture him or, you know, for get whatever information they need out of him. But the narrative goal of the chase is actually to show us how prepared Rockford is in this situation and how expert the two guys are. We've said over and over again that every character is a real character in a Rockford episode. But like, this is the moment that tells us that these guys are not your run-of-the-mill

goons. Yeah, they're not putzes. Yeah. And that they're probably, in Gear Jammers Part 2, they're going to be terrifying to us. They're going to be a little bit more threatening, despite the sort of embarrassing end for them in this chase. And, I mean, that's a thing that we can get into.

Maybe we should, because this is a pro wrestling thing, right? Yeah. This is where Rockford cedes glory to them a little bit. You know, he lets them get the better of him up and to a point so that we as an audience don't treat them as fluff. Yeah, he has his line about how no one's ever made it look easy. Yeah. You know, to keep up with him.

And that's when we know like, oh, these guys are like are a real problem. Yeah. Yeah. The car chase has a lot, a lot in common with the wrestling match. So I have written a professional wrestling role-playing game, Worldwide Wrestling. This is one of my all-time favorite games. I can tell already Nathan's a little embarrassed by this, but Worldwide Wrestling is an amazing game that captures pro wrestling in a way that I've never seen in another game. Thank you for that. And I will note that I reached out to Epi to write a little essay for the game about just this thing about how you can use pro wrestling patterns in role playing games generally.

Like when you're going to have a big match with your hated opponent, you talk about how scary and terrible they are. You don't talk about what a doofus they are, because beating a doofus doesn't make anyone think you're any good, but beating a scary, terrible guy does. So that's that aspect. But also the chase has a lot in common with the match in that it's primarily visual and you're communicating character through action. And the car chase does the same thing where at the table, what you kind of want to know is how does each maneuver that each of the participants executes, what does that tell us about them and about their agenda? So like Rockford, his maneuvers a lot of the time are about misdirection. He cuts down a way that you wouldn't think a car can cut down because he's such an expert driver. He ducks into a parking lot and stops the car because the person chasing him is looking for a moving car,

not a stopped car. Those are most of his moves. And sometimes he's chasing other cars, and he's a little more aggressive. But other participants are usually more brute force, just keeping on him, trying to cut him off around a corner, those kinds of things that force him to stop moving. They don't try to trick him in the same way. These particular brute force maneuvers are telling us something about the threat, what these people are willing to do to get what they want to get from Rockford. And in this episode, we also get that other aspect, which is Rockford, he delivers that great speech or monologue there where he says, I've done this a lot and some

people have caught up with me, some of them haven't, but none make it easy like you. He's also telling us the importance of the car to him and what he's doing, which is great for the end of this episode. Right. We're like, oh, Rockford lived. Oh, no, the car did not. Yeah, his identity is so tied up in the car, both as a character. Identity is so tied up in the car, both as a character. We've talked in a previous episode about having a home base for your character and how his trailer is his home base.

But in this episode, it focuses a little more actually on his car because he's doing so much driving. He has this great chase. It does get destroyed. And we're left wondering for the next episode, what is this going to mean for Jim that his car got blown up? Yeah. That's a huge part of not only his identity, but like his day-to-day ability to do what he does. And I do remember watching this episode the first time I watched it and being legitimately shocked by the fact that his car got blown up. How does it come back? It feels like it's something that's off limits.

Yeah, yeah. Like it gets banged up, but destroyed is a different matter. The last thing that I had on my mind about the car chase stuff is that, when you say it's about pacing, I totally agree. Yeah. But most car chases I don't think are necessarily

about the time involved. Like, they can be a countdown of some kind, right? Like, you need to get to a place first. But most Rockford car chases aren't that kind of chase. He's usually not racing someone. And I think a race versus a chase are actually worth

differentiating. The pacing is it's jazz, right? Well, it's more about the rhythm of the scene. You know, like, he'll speed up at times and slow down. And this isn't a Rockford one, but there's a movie, The Way of the Gun. Are you familiar with The Way of the Gun? I've seen The Way of the Gun.

I can't remember it. There's a car chase in that where this one's a far more violent medium than Rockford Files. But they turn the corner. They go down to like a kind of a small blind alley, if I remember correctly, and they put their car in neutral and they get out and they open the doors. So they're using the doors as barricades and they're holding these guns up and they're slowly moving the car and the other cars coming up behind them and very slow. And it was just great because you had just come out of this sort of pulse pounding, fast

paced thing, and you just zoomed right into this slow. So anytime you can change that and make that an escalation by either slowing down what's happening or speeding up what's happening, you're adding to it. Like I think we often make the mistake of thinking an escalation means go faster. And that's not the case. You want to just change. Any change can be turned into a nice escalation. Escalation can often be more about what's at risk and what's at stake than about the literal pace or the literal speed at which things are happening. In a Rockford episode, and those chasing Rockford rarely want to just kill him. Right.

episode and those chasing Rockford rarely want to just kill him. Right. You don't normally see the car behind him and somebody leaning out the window shooting at him. That's not what they're trying to do. They're trying to not lose him. They're trying to catch up with him. They're trying to stop him to find something out about him or to drag him in front of their boss or something like that.

And that gives Rockford leeway to do a lot of things, including surrendering. Right. And Rockford doesn't want to kill anyone. It's so refreshing. Like that's not his solution to the problems. He doesn't see that as a solution. So he's not doing anything like that. He has a gun, this whole chase sequence. And the whole point when he pulls that gun out is just because he's got nothing left. He's like, you did it. You got me. But I have a gun. So this is going to go a different way for you.

So from like kind of the tabletop perspective, he certainly wins the chase. Right. But it's because he ends it on his terms instead of on their terms. Right. Yeah. And there's a couple of ways that could have gone down. One of them is the way it did where he stopped his car and that's what ended the chase. And he gambled on, I have a gun and I'll be able to get it out before they can get theirs out if they have a gun.

In other car chases, that ends differently. You know, sometimes he stops, but he hasn't figured on the fact that they have guns, right? And so they end up with upper hand or he's able to lose them through his superior driving tactics, or he decides to surrender because he's decided he can get more out of going with them in this moment because he's stuck on the case or whatever. So it's more about on whose terms does the chase end? Yeah. The thing about the gun, I think also the fact that he has it limits some of his options too. I can vividly see a car chase he has where he ends it by speeding up and just spinning his car into a parked spot right behind a cop car. Oh, yeah. And getting himself arrested.

He'll do that where he'll speed or perform a moving violation directly in front of a cop. So the cops arrest him. So the people chasing him can't do anything. Or he'll lead them past cops. And then the cops will start chasing them because they're behind him and he gets away. And this is not a tactic available to him if he has an unlicensed firearm in his car, which he does. Have we talked chases to death at this point? Let's just quickly maybe tick off the things that we think are lessons you can bring from this. Having the scene

change, even in small subtle ways, is its own reward, but also will provide you with ample opportunity for more interesting things to happen. Changing the rhythm of your pacing back and forth is also good. It's good to have quiet moments in a chase or speed it up if it's been quiet, bring it to a full stop, that sort of thing. I think it's good that we ensure that the chase sells us a little bit about each of the characters and their personalities. Did I miss anything? I will just add, be clear about what the chase is about and what each person in it wants, or each character in it wants. And then also, especially if you're doing prose writing, what's the narrative goal of the chase, which may not match the character goals of each person in the chase? And then when you're putting together the idea for a chase sequence, making sure that you can determine on whose terms the chase ends and using that to drive the resolution of it or the conclusion of it, rather than it being kind of a simple aggregation of the elements within it because

those two things i think can be fruitfully different uh it doesn't need to be a simple additive whoever makes the most maneuvers wins um kind of thing and watch some pro wrestling yeah i mean i'd always recommend watching some pro wrestling uh but think about if they're cars instead so one of the things that really struck me from this episode, and I talked a little bit about it in the first half, but I think we can go a little deeper, is how well it uses current events of the time to situate the characters in a way that isn't like a history lesson for someone watching. But if you do know what's going on, it's, I would imagine, immediately apparent. Rocky is selling tickets for the Utah Ball to send lobbyists to Congress to advocate for owner-operators against the big fleets. And so that struck me. I did a little research, and at this time, there was an 11 day owner operator trucker shutdown

in 1974. There's a lot of little details to it. So that the historian in me got very excited about it. I won't try to recap the whole thing. In the show notes, I'll post a link to a Rolling Stone article about it by a man named David Harris from 1974. So it's a couple months after it happened that gets into all the nitty gritty. But basically, there was the OPEC oil embargo. So fuel prices were going up. And this was really impacting independent owner operators of trucks. A lot of them were Teamsters, were part of the Teamsters union, but so were the fleet owners and the fleet drivers. And the fleets were able to control fuel costs better than owner operators. So they're kind of squeezing them out of the market. If you were an independent trucker,

your costs kept going up and you had no recourse, basically. This was all kind of came to a head through a magazine called Overdrive Magazine, which was a trucker mag, started kind of organizing owner operators to do this trucker shutdown on the theory, which is still true today, that if trucks stop moving in America, grocery stores run out of food. Right. So there was this strike. There was a lot of violence involved, both between truckers who were striking and truckers who didn't want to strike. And it's a little unclear and law enforcement potentially, apparently two drivers died from being shot in these altercations. The federal government threatened to mobilize the army to drive the trucks if they didn't figure out an

agreement. And these owner operators had negotiators in Washington to get some kind of recourse from the government. So they ended up getting a small subsidy for gas prices and a couple other small concessions that didn't really do a whole lot, but that was the end of the strike. So that's all a lot of rich, interesting, coherent history that is just hinted at by this little narrative reason for Rocky to be wandering around docks. It's absolutely something that would impact Rocky's life.

And it really has this great feel to it because it's also a really elegant way to get across the situation, right? So the show comes out while it's happening or shortly after. Yeah. And you have a character like Rocky. There's not a bad bone in his body. And you have a character like Rocky, there's not a bad bone in his body. And then he's concerned about this and is politically active, which is as much a shock to myself as an audience member as it is to his own son, James Rockford. Yeah, Jim is like, what do you care about lobbyists or whatever?

Yeah. They have a little bit of an exchange where Rocky says like, oh, this is really important for independent truck owners. There's a couple lines in there where you see that he is willing to act out of character because this is an issue that he cares strongly about. And also for him in particular, you kind of get the sense that it's a way for him to stay relevant in the trucking social circles. Because he's retired nominally. He's supposed to be retired. Quote unquote. because he's retired nominally. He's supposed to be retired. Quote unquote. When he's not moonlighting.

But yeah, he still, those are all his friends and his social circle. So you can kind of see this element of it where helping organize for this thing is a way for him to stay relevant for his friends. I just really like that because it just,

I presume if you were watching it when it was first aired, you would know something about this, right? Because this is news, this is big news. Yeah, you probably would have heard about it. It was like national news. One of the things that I love about it is that the episode isn't hinging on this. It isn't going to tell us a moral tale about this. This is something that's important to one of the characters in the story and a character we happen to really like. So we get to pay attention to that. But it's not like, and that's what happens if you don't.

And also it's something where as a writer, here is this research that I've done about this moment. And then here's a character that it applies to. You don't need to use Rocky as an exposition machine. It's more that since you know that that's the context, you can give him this very viscerally coherent character motivation. And I think that's something that you can do for any character in a real world situation, for the sake of argument. character in a real world situation for the sake of argument. Right. But you can figure out what's going on in the world around them towards the goal of making every character have their own inner life in the story or in the game, giving them

an issue that they care about or have them be responding to an event that's happened. Right. It doesn't mean that the event is really important to your story, but it does mean that these characters start to feel, you know, feel alive. And I like the thing that you said, and I think it's very true that it is, it's a way for Rocky to stay in touch with, and that tells us something about Rocky. Here's his rich social life that we're wandering through along with James. And as we're doing that, we're seeing, like, how he remains connected to the world. And I think there's even, like, a moment early in this episode where Jim gets to Rocky's apartment and it's ransacked.

And he's looking through his date book, the one where he has the usual written down at 11 a.m. every day. And he just mutters, like, you old fossil or something like that, right? And so you have this little nugget, this little real life event that's happening that would concern that character. And you can see that character getting involved in it. But you also see this other aspect of the character, the character's social life. And how he uses that to maintain both. And it gives you a couple sides to what's going on like it's it's not just that rocky has this pet project it's how does this pet project fit into rocky's life it it makes us care a lot more about rocky yeah and understand more of what there is to love about him i think

a question i have for you how do you take this idea and apply it to something that isn't like a real world based thing like if you're writing for example sword and sorcery fiction right uh is there a way to use the same idea for that kind of character development yeah okay it gets a little gets a little perilous there because, okay, so talk a little bit about sword and sorcery. I mean, I've said this before that like one of my favorite sentences in all of sword and sorcery is at the beginning of the Fafhrd and Grave Mouser books by Fritz Leiber. He says, sundered from us by g is that that tells us everything we need to know about this fantasy world. Like, he doesn't have to draw a map for us.

He doesn't have to explain to us that winter is coming and then out of the north is a great threat and blah, blah, blah. There are towers, there are skulls, there are jewels, there are swords, and there are sorceries. And I already know all that I need to know. And I think oftentimes you can just drop a line in sword and sorcery and fantasy in general that just references something with enough reverence that people know that it's something important but uh not so much it's it's a delicate edge right like because you can you can go too far and they could be like well i don't know what that's about so maybe i'll stop reading so you can have something like this some event that you can talk about you can say that like this is the sword that drew a

thousand from their slumber what the hell is that it doesn't matter because i know that that sword is mighty then i don't even know what that sentence means to draw a thousand from their slumber all i know is that it sounds kind of kind of awesome i don't know if that gets exactly into what you're saying because you're like oh yeah i yeah, I don't know. That's a good question. These sorts of character details are great. But like when you do them in a world where it's pure fantasy, where it's not just fantasy the genre, but fantasy as in it's not real. You know, if you don't have a real life to base the event in, then it has to just sound like what you need it to sound like. Right.

It's less than explaining it. You shouldn't explain it. You should just have it sort of sound and people go, oh, right, that. I don't know what that is, but I think I heard about the thousand being drawn from their slumber. Maybe you could kind of think about it in this way. So with this specific detail, selling tickets to the Utah ball to raise money to send legislators to Washington, tickets to the Utah ball, to raise money to send legislators to Washington. That's the detail. In the real world, that fictional bit is drawn out of real life events and helps those of us who have some context for it place Rocky more specifically in the world.

If this was a fantasy world, Rocky could still have that be what's going on. In our fantasy world where where our real world has no trucks and trucks are a fantasy thing but then you're kind of reversing the arrow right and saying so rocky is situated in some context where these things are important to him right so like what do those things mean or do or how do other people respond to them you don't need to write a thousand words about the owner operator trucker association but then you're like okay rocky is part of this association what does that mean who else is part of it fundamentally it's the same as watching this episode and not looking up what the ball or what that what what, what he's doing, you know, he explains enough of it that we understand how it is. And we also very much get how the other truckers react to it in the story,

right? Like, and that's really important. Lasavo is like, Oh, I already bought my tickets. You know, you, you missed out. Uh, the other guy tries to talk his way out of a ticket. And then one guy is just upset that Rahi's asking him while he's naked, right? Yeah. It doesn't matter how he feels about it personally. This just isn't the right time. Yeah, exactly. So I think that that also does a good thing to kind of show the position of the whole thing. It's something that they probably all are like, yeah, no, that's a good thing. I just may not be able to do it right now. Right. And that puts it in a good context for us to understand as Rocky probably is also being a little busybody with this because he doesn't have something else to do, right? Like he's retired, quote unquote.

Right. He's got the time to go around. Yeah. I mean, I feel like this is a fairly standard piece of advice, you know, is like use small details to make things feel real. you know is like use small details to make things feel real but i think this is a great example of looking at how you can use current events real world events real world contexts to find those details so that they have that kind of weight of realism to to them but then also thinking about when those details come up in play maybe make some notes about like the larger context that that implies, because calling back to that is also a useful technique.

The thing that I keep dancing around here is say what needs to be known about it and say no more, but know what needs to be known about it. Rocky just says what it is, but obviously the people writing the episode know more about it because they can put it in context with the other truckers who know about it and then and you can build around it that way uh without having to force exposition upon the audience all right do you have any thoughts about this as the first part of a two-part story that's something to probably revisit when we get to the second one but i think it's good to have the thoughts now and then see if they if they're fulfilled the kind of wonderful bit about this

is that we have we have enough room we have an entire episode we have enough room to watch a lot of rocky's life unfold through various angles whether it is seeing rocky do it or watching jim follow behind him that's kind of of nice. Like having that sort of room to stretch. It also has an arc, which is great. Like a complete arc. We find Rocky and the greater mystery that we will be hopefully solving in a part two is just sort of reintroduced at the very end to say,

ha ha, we're not done with this yet, but we do find Rocky. We do have a whole arc. And I can complain forever about, there's a lot of stuff, media we consume now that don't bother with a whole arc for one episode. Yeah, I think that's something

that's actually really important. One of my favorite tabletop games is Tim Kleinart's The Mountain Witch. And I usually pitch that as a game that we're going to play in three sessions or four sessions the overall arc is you're a group of ronin samurai going up fantasy japan mount fuji to fight the mountain witch for some kind of reward uh there's different phases in the game that kind of have different narrative weights. And in my experience,

taking three discrete periods of time, three sessions to do that is really satisfying. But each session itself is most satisfying when it comes to some kind of conclusion and then you're ready to go to the next phase. And in that game, the metaphor of climbing the mountain is really strong. So the first one I usually do on the foothills before you get the real mountain-y part. And then the second one is getting up to the castle, and then the third one's in the castle.

When I run that game, part of my agenda as the game master is to have that feeling of we've completed a narrative arc now and that's part of the larger narrative arc that the whole game is doing and i think that's something you can bring into pretty much anything that's serial but you just have to be intentional about it it's not difficult to do too i think the human mind bends in that way quite often like if you were to tell someone okay we're gonna sit going to sit down, we're going to play a game and let's assume it's a game and not writing a story or making a movie. We're going to play a game. We're going to have three sessions and each session is going to have a complete arc. And then at the end of the three, we'll have a whole arc that goes over all three of them that, that comes to a fulfilling end. I think people can be intimidated by that

a little bit. They can think that, that a lot of things to be juggling. The key is you don't think about it. You play until you get to this moment where you're like, okay, yeah, that is the moment just before the credits roll. It feels natural, maybe not to the human mind, but to somebody steeped in Western culture, having watched and binged television. I think one thing you can look out for and one thing that this episode does is once you've answered a question you've kind of completed an arc right so once we've answered the question of where did rocky go we've completed that art and then the the craft of it is pacing out the answer so that you've done all the fun stuff in between that is not presented and then

immediately answered that there's reasons to to go on the journey to find the answer how do you feel about the one parter here or the two-parter i mean i feel good about it yeah i think like i said at the end of part one the artifice of the ending is very explicit um right with the cutting back and forth of the explosive. And then it ends right after the explosion. It's a big sign that just says cliffhanger. Because we know it's a two-part episode, we're expecting it to end on some momentous thing. There's a utility to that, too.

I mean, there's getting butts back in the seats next week. But there's also, maybe i'll prove myself wrong when we watch this next episode but it gives us the chance to start with a highly motivated rather perturbed jim rockford oh yeah you can cover a lot more ground then because we don't deal with him trying to get out of the oh yeah investigation you know we don't have to come up with a way to motivate him. We've done all that work now and we've ended it on such a, Oh God, I was going to say in such an explosive way that we don't have to go back.

We don't have to retread and get this going again. We can. Part two will open with a little last time on to like catch you up in case you didn't watch it. But in terms of the plot momentum, it's already in full motion down the hill. So it's more about what is he going to do? And I think that's the real question here is we watched this show.

We know how it works. Like the question of, are they going to catch the mob guys? Yes, they probably will in one way or another. But the real question is more like, what is Jim going to do now that his car is gone? Yeah.

How is that going to play out? Somebody tried to kill him and his dad, right? It's right outside the police station, right? Like there's a lot of high emotion things in play. is that the very apparent cliffhanger-ness of it isn't intrinsically compelling, but the fact that everyone has great motivation to go forward is the exciting thing. Like, what are they all going to do? I'm eager to find out what Becker is going to do. Like, you get a little bit of him like, oh, well, Rocky's in trouble. Yeah.

How do we solve this? I'm eager to see more of that. So am I. And so we hope that you will check out our next episode where we find out the dramatic conclusion of gear jammers but until then i think we have earned our 200 for today we'll say goodbye for now thanks again for listening and uh thank you for having this lovely conversation with me oh well thank you epi i always look forward to it and uh i'm glad that other people seem to be enjoying the conversation as much as we are which is pretty fantastic all right well we'll see you

next time see you next time