Two Hundred A Day - Episode 86: The Real Easy Red Dog

Episode Date: June 27, 2021

Nathan and Eppy finish out Season 2 of The Rockford Files with s2e7 The Real Easy Red Dog. Jim is hired to look into an apparent suicide, and indeed discovers some evidence of murder - but he was hired under false pretenses in the first place! Tina, also a PI, just needed Jim to throw the cops off from her own case, but now they have to work together to solve a murder before the killer comes after them. It's a tight episode with great plotting and some wonderful visual flairs, we really liked this one! We have another podcast: Plus Expenses. Covering our non-Rockford media, games and life chatter, Plus Expenses is available via our Patreon (https://www.patreon.com/twohundredaday) at ALL levels of support. Want more Rockford Files trivia, notes and ephemera? Check out the Two Hundred a Day Rockford Files Files (http://tinyurl.com/200files)! We appreciate all of our listeners, but offer a special thanks to our patrons (https://www.patreon.com/twohundredaday). In particular, this episode is supported by the following Gumshoe and Detective-level patrons: * Richard Hatem (https://twitter.com/richardhatem) * Brian Perrera (https://twitter.com/thermoware) * Eric Antener (https://twitter.com/antener) * Bill Anderson (https://twitter.com/billand88) * Chuck from whatchareading.com (http://whatchareading.com) * Paul Townend, who recommends the Fruit Loops podcast (https://fruitloopspod.com) * Shane Liebling's Roll For Your Party dieroller app (https://rollforyour.party/) * Jay Adan's Miniature Painting (http://jayadan.com) * Matthew Lee, Kip Holley, Dael Norwood, Dave P, Dale Church and Dave Otterson! Thanks to: * Fireside.fm (https://fireside.fm) for hosting us * Audio Hijack (https://rogueamoeba.com/audiohijack/) for helping us record and capture clips from the show * Spoileralerts.org (http://spoileralerts.org) for the adding machine audio clip * Freesound.org (https://www.freesound.org/) for other audio clips

Jim, it's Shirley at the Cleaners. You know that brown jacket? The one I said looks so great on you? Your favorite? We lost it. Welcome to 200 A Day, the podcast where we talk about the 70s television detective show, The Rockford Files. I'm Nathan Poletta. And I'm Epidiah Ravishaw. And we are coming to you with, for real, no foolin', we're sure this time. Yes. The last episode of Season 2, Episode 7, The Real Easy Red Dog. Our last episode of Season 2. Yes.

This is smack dab in the first third of Season 2. Episode 7, in fact. Yeah. Yes. If this happens to be your first episode that you're catching we have we skip around episodes throughout the series but

over the last couple of months we realized we were very close to being done with season 2 with our coverage so we then started skipping around with the last episodes that we had not yet done in season 2 and so now here is our last episode covering

that season which clearly uh is not the last episode of the season that was a bad deal in the valley which we did uh sometime last year uh so yeah we're here yeah so i mean normally this is where we would talk a little bit about why this episode was chosen, but it was chosen for us. Yeah, and this is a fairly straightforward on the production side. This episode is directed by Ivan Dixon, who we have talked about before. This is the fourth of his nine Rockford Files directorial efforts. fourth of his nine Rockford Files directorial efforts, and I believe

the last one we did was our episode 58, The Battle Axe and the Exploding Cigar. I did not do the research to double check, but I'm pretty sure we talked about him more in that episode, or maybe one of the ones before that. But he, in addition

to being a director, he was an actor and he was a fairly pioneering black actor and director of the 60s and 70s and 80s. I'm sure I don't have his credits up right this second. In addition to his creative work, he was also an organizer and supporter of black people in entertainment kind of at large so he's a pretty significant figure in uh in the tv and movie industry uh now that i've clicked on his imdb and i see the picture that they have of him up there i'm all i'm certain we've talked i've talked about him before yeah he was in the movie oh he was on broad and in the movie of A Raisin in the Sun and I think also Porgy and Bess I'm not I don't remember exactly

he had a role on Hogan's Heroes that I guess people would recognize him from those are kind of the big ones I think but yeah good stuff good stuff from Ivan Dixon and then this episode is written by Stephen Cannell.

Yay! I feel like it's been a minute since we've done a full... It's a full Cannell episode and suspiciously devoid of the mafia. True. But there is a... I think we'll talk about it towards the end because there is kind of an interesting reveal. But this episode essentially has three. It kind of has like three big gears and the angle that we get into the story as written is one of them.

But then there's two other giant stories that relate with this one that could just be the episode that we just barely see and i'm kind of like i wonder if this came from like trying one of those stories and it not really gelling so it became the background to this instead something like that oh yeah i could definitely see that like yeah the main plot in this needs uh needs another background plot right like it doesn't work without that happening uh and the you know sometimes i think you you your instincts are probably right because it just sometimes when you have a main plot that needs this other plot that's going on in the background you don't do much for that other plot you just have a go and i feel like this actually had something to it

so it would make sense that they uh were trying to build it out as something else uh this was definitely an episode where i you know my memory is not the best so i wasn't remembering it wasn't like one of these ones where i was like oh this has this scene oh this has this scene i was like so it felt fresh and new to me as i was watching it i there was one specific moment where i kind of was like oh yeah i remember this part but other than that i basically did not remember this this one like at all and my notes are like my journey through the mystery yeah which is kind of rare for the rockford files for me because i don't never but like i my notes are full of question marks and like wait a minute what's this and so uh i think it'll be kind of fun if we well i'm

gonna bring up whenever i you know had this moment of like yeah wait a minute uh you watch a show and something out of place happens and your brain does this moment where it's like, well, that was weird. I don't know why they did that. Right. Like you step back out of the fiction of the show and think, I don't know why the creators of the show made that choice. Right. And then you step back in. And each time mine did that in this was actually a moment when I should be paying attention because it's not.

It was a weird moment. It was a thing that like should be paying attention because it's not, it was a weird moment. It was a thing that like got Jim's attention. It's stuck in Jim's head. And so like I was picking up on the clues that Jim was picking up on, but I wasn't because I was dismissing it as like a weird, weird choice, weird directorial choice, weird writing choice,

weird. And I was like, Oh no, that's not what's happening at all. This character is acting weird. feel like we we've we've had a couple episodes recently where we've taken them to task either for giving us stuff that we think is going to be clues and then it's not or like oh mostly that i'm not sure what the other thing i was going to say is um this episode is the kind of episode that we are thinking of when we make that critique of other episodes.

Because I agree. Every single time I was like, I wonder what's up with that. It was a thing. It was. And this one actually has, it is very, I was using the imagery of gears earlier, I think, because this one is very, very finely tuned in that kind of clockwork quality where pretty much every single thing gets paid off. I'm pretty sure there's nothing extraneous in this. Maybe we'll find something as we go through it.

It seems to me before we get into it that either I would notice something and then later be like, OK, that's why that happened. Or something would happen and I'll be like, oh, that's why that happened or something would happen and i'll be oh that's why the thing earlier happened right yes like yeah everything was had that kind of tick tock to it where there was always a setup and then a spike and i think the craft of the episode was in keeping the momentum going between always seeing setups and then you know like it wasn't every single thing i'm like all right i'm waiting for that to pay off i'm waiting for that to pay off it was a nice mix of i wonder where that is going and oh that explains the thing that happened and that was like that was very fun yeah it's very this one has a lot of craft yeah and it's also very much about jim's

craft this is a good episode. I'm going to say that on set here. I enjoyed it. The other thing that you said that I wanted to reiterate was that this is a very Jim point of view episode. There's some dramatic moments where we go away from Jim just to see something from someone else's perspective before we go back to Jim. to see yeah you know see something from someone else's perspective before we go back to jim but from the perspective of the narrative this is a we find out what jim knows when jim knows it and we follow him as he goes through the twists and turns and we it's one of the ones we can try and solve with jim right right yeah though not really because the oh yeah there is a bit of a like oh

so that's what's going on. Yeah, yeah. That I think we never would have come up with. But neither would have Jim until they find that evidence. So as we say, we'll get to it once we get into the episode. But first, we have to get into the preview montage. All right. So three things. No, sorry.

Four things here. And one of them is you have to be in the mind space that I'm in right now. So let me just put deal. I was excited to see deal. Deal, exclamation point. Yeah. Especially because we've just seen him before. And I was just like, yeah, I really like I'd like to see more deal.

And we'll get into deals deal. I believe on our last show, we established the spinoff Deal podcast, The Deal Deal. So we're going to have our podcast within a podcast, The Deal Deal, later. Yeah, because I think that this episode has some good deal as compared to Chapman moments that I think I'd like to talk about. A body, so we know that there's a murderer. And then a deal threatening to jerk Rockford's ticket. And the reason why, because I'm currently reading one of Stephen King's books that he wrote under the name richard bachman called the long road about like young teenage kids that go for a long walk as part of like some sort of government game show kind of deal

they're followed by soldiers and when they're uh fall behind they get warnings and if they get three or four warnings i can't remember which um they get their ticket pulled which means they get killed because this is a Stephen King story, right? But I had just finished reading a chapter of that and I was like, okay, it's time to watch some Rockford files. I'm done with this heavy stuff. And there's Deal threatening to jerk Rockford's ticket. And my brain hadn't switched over yet.

And I was like, well, that's a hell of a threat. But no, it's his PI license, I'm guessing. All right. That was a long way around to just say I was suddenly paying a lot more attention. And then a legit cliffhanger. Uh-huh, yeah.

We end up with a car with a firebird hanging off a cliff. How are we going to get there? We're going to take a quick break to say thank you to our patrons over at patreon.com slash 200 a day. Thanks to you, we are a 100% listener-supported show. We extend special thanks to our Gumshoe patrons supporting this episode.

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tell a friend who you think would like it, and check out patreon.com slash 200 a day to see if becoming a patron is right for you uh well we start at jim's trailer where he is making a sandwich for me it was the first red herring uh i don't know if you had the same thing but it's a shot outside the trailer with a guy walking along with a fishing pole and i was like oh jim's gonna go fishing no that's not that is not the relaxing little vacation that Jim's going to have this episode, but it's done. No, he is having a relaxing afternoon in where he is assembling a sandwich. I appreciate that. So this is clearly a ritual, right? So he has the ball game on.

I think it's football. I think it's the Rams. I think it's what they said. So he has the ball game on. I think it's the, I think it's football. I think it's the Rams. I think it's what they said. So he has the ball game on football, American football, American football. Yes. Uh, and he's on the phone, which we'll get to in a second,

but he's making himself a sandwich by which I mean, he has a platter on his coffee table of individual sandwich ingredients, and he is assembling them. He is stacking them on his bread in order to create his sandwich. And under what circumstances do you go to the trouble to take your sandwich fixings, put them on a tray,

bring them into a different room and then make your sandwich? Other than this is the ball game. I'm sitting down. I'm going to watch. I'm going to make my sandwich. Like this is clearly a little personal ritual

of like you're taking your time i i too thought a lot about this um because this is one of my weird bugaboos where like uh even in circumstances like thanksgiving dinner or you know like where where you it makes sense to have platters full of food i'm not obsessed with this but like are you not obsessed with this well maybe i am i'm like why would i take food and put it somewhere else only to then take it and put it somewhere else right right yeah you know but of course obviously you always do that unless you eat right out of the pot, right over the pot. You know what I mean?

But like the more stages between cooking the food or assembling it or whatever and getting it in my mouth, I'm like, why are we doing this? What is the purpose of a gravy boat? Why don't we just take gravy out of the pot and just pour it over our food and go from there? But I get it. This is the thing. Especially if you're serving a lot of people. But he's not. just take gravy out of the pot and just pour it over our food and and go from there but i i get it this is a thing like especially if you're serving a lot of people right but he's not he's just serving himself and my the conclusion i came to i i like the ritual conclusion i think your conclusion is better than the one i came to the one i came to which i don't even think is supported by the what we see in the scene is that um this is tv not streaming so the game is

on so he just grabbed all the fixings and brought them over there so as to not to miss anything uh but it's funny that i mean it makes sense that you would think about this well i mean i think these can both be true. Right. Yeah. Like, I'm going to watch the game. Let me get all my stuff so that I go over there and I don't miss any of the game. But you only do that when you are going to sit down and watch the game. Yeah, exactly.

But it stuck in my head, too. Like, I saw it. I was like, why is he doing this? You have a whole kitchen right there. Just make your food there. Well, and now we have the tension of Is he going to actually eat his sandwich So he's assembling his sandwich

He's on the phone with Solly To find out the odds For some bet That he's thinking about making I of course wondered if this is the same as Solly the bail bondsman that we see Every so often It is not investigated

further maybe it is maybe it isn't uh but he is interrupted by a knock on the door a woman in a trench coat is uh wants to come in and see him jim ends up not making the bet hangs up the phone starts talking to the woman as he continues messing with his sandwich, including going to the fridge, getting his milk and getting his mustard. Because there's a moment where he starts putting the top layer of bread on and then takes it back off and frowns at his sandwich. So good.

Because he clearly doesn't have any condiments. So he has to go get the mustard. Acting is reacting. Yes. Chef kiss. So good. All right. So this woman says that she is reacting. Yes. Chef kiss. So good. All right. So this woman says that she is Jennifer Sandstrom.

She wants to hire Jim. He thankfully that's, that's the business that he's in. So he seems to be in a good mood through this whole thing. He's in a good mood and also not too bothered by her. Yeah. Like when she did come in, he continued placing his bet. Well, not placing his bet. Not placing, but like having the conversation about it, you know, like, which seems to me like it would normally be not like a first impression you would get if you, but we know about Jim.

He hates getting work. Right, right. He doesn't want to work. So this all goes in his favor um jennifer sandstrom um her sister was found dead um off a pier it's being called a suicide there's even a note in her hand that was left in her car but this woman jennifer doesn't believe it says that his her sister would never have drowned herself even if she was suicidal she was terrified of water.

So she would have done something else. So Jim's like, you know, getting the story out of her while he gets his milk and his mustard. He, you know, he says that, you know, the police should handle it. Let the police handle it. They're calling it a suicide. So she wants someone, she wants Jim to look into it. She starts counting out $100 bills out of her purse and we get a close up on the hundreds.

And then we see Jim as he's clearly looking down at her counting while he's trying to not take this job. This is a wonderful scene, this back and forth where you see the tension between him needing the money, but also this being exactly the kind of job he wouldn't take, but also exactly the kind of job we expect him to take. Right. We as the audience are looking for the thing that hooks him. He's looking for an excuse to take the money, but he's also looking for an excuse to reject the case. Right, right. And like all of that is coming through. He makes a crack that uh three

times that amount of money wouldn't he wouldn't take the job and then he kind of laughs he's like well yeah well maybe three times um but she offers him it looks like she offers him three hundred dollars it looks like she has three bills she's trying to give it to him and is pleading that she needs to know for sure she just wants to get someone other than the police to look into it and, and gives him a good solid, please, I need your help. And as we know that that plus the cold,

hard cash will, will, will warm the cockles of Jim's PI heart. He says he'll look around for one day and he just takes the $200. So that's his compromise. I'll work, but I won't take all the money you're offering me. Yeah. She gives him her sister's address

and then her address where she can be found. And he goes like, oh, that's a nice area. And she says that, well, daddy left us plenty of money. And then she's going to leave. But then she turns, she has a manila envelope and she's like, oh, I want to make sure you have this. I found these things in my sister's room. I don't recognize them.

They may be relevant. And there's a piece of jewelry with some inscription on it and love letters with the bottoms cut off where some kind of final statement or signature or something would be. I want you to keep these. I don't want to lose these. They're important. And wants him to start right away. He unfortunately can muster no resistance to the idea of starting right away.

And so he does not eat his sandwich or watch his ball game. And we see them leave the trailer and get into their respective cars as we go across the parking lot and see two goons in a red car watching. So this thing with the folder, this was my first moment where I was like, I was like, this is a setup, right?

Like, I didn't know for certain. Like, my notes have question marks all over them. But I was like, it's not the stuff that she's handing him. It's the way she's stuff that she's handing him it's the way she's acting as she's handing him i was like this is this is actually starting to be a little suspicious yeah yeah not not that i shouldn't already be suspicious because somebody has come to give jim work but like right yeah yeah it does seem it is significant that he has this particular envelope with this stuff in it that is that is clear so my immediate thought is like oh a setup of some kind where he's going to be in

a place and then yeah this is going to be some kind of evidence and it's uh he's he's going to like like caught by the police or something uh i didn't make a note of it but the opening montage had a few things with Deal yelling at Rockford. Right. And also some cops looking for Rockford by name. Yeah. So I definitely was like, oh, I'm waiting for the frame up. Right, right.

I was wrong, as we'll learn. Yeah, the credits play over Jim getting in his car and taking off. He ends up at a payphone where he gives Becker, our good friend Dennis Becker, a phone call. He wants to know a little more about this suicide case. Becker says it's not his case. It's Deal's case. So we should talk

to Deal. They have a little good solid Jim and Becker back and forth. Yes. Sure I can check on it. I just don't want it. Come on, Dennis. She was a floater on the beach in Santa Monica. There's got to be some reason you guys are calling it suicide.

There is. Okay, what is it? We're calling it suicide because it was a suicide. See how neat that works out? Jim and Dennis, their whole deal. Yes. Jim says, okay, I'm officially letting you know that I'm looking, I'm on this case. this case why tell me tell deal i'm telling you because i'm talking to you you see how neat that works out so this is uh like i said i as we're going through there are moments that i was

like this is a weird decision and i couldn't tell if it was again like just a weird decision made on the creative team level or weird that's happening in the fiction and uh this one where he drives off and then calls dennis from a pay phone that's the weird decision that i this is the one that i don't have an answer for i understand now why in the fiction they have him drive off at that moment because that's what's necessary to get some of these gears running right right but like i'm like why didn't he just call him from his office i think it is just not to undercut the urgency with which he he leaves the trailer with the envelope yeah right um i think that's that's all it is so yeah it is a it is a plot functional thing yeah as it turns out well jim uh arrives at the house of the the house of

the of the deceased uh whose name is alice um so first he sees there's a car in the in the driveway and he pokes around in the car and he pulls out i i could not figure out for life of me what that was at some point i actually paused because i was like this seems like it should be important i think it's a sales receipt i paused as well um and then later on he does a similar thing that i had to pause on uh i it's a sales receipt um because i remember noting that it was like for like 24 or something like that it wasn't like a whole lot of money yeah it was it was for like like service like auto service yeah but it's got the guy's name on it and that's the important uh i this is definitely a thing

where he's just sifting for information yeah he's just poking around he sees it but the camera shows us the what he's looking at and i was like oh this will be important later what is it and it's a sales receipt and it does have this law firm on it yeah and i think that's the important thing it might i think this is like a setup for his little oh oh okay con is a little swindle that he plays on this guy i was thinking at a higher level. Yeah. Yes, you are right. I am overthinking it. Yes. So he sees this receipt with a couple of names on it. He puts it back.

And then a guy with a pool skimmer comes walking out of the, there's clearly a backyard pool. Yeah. And this guy comes walking out with his pool skimmer and muttering about how the filter's broken. And he's going to have to go down to the office to not the office i forget what he says warehouse to get a new one yeah he's gonna need to get some kind of parts to fix the filter jim stops him and asks if there's anyone in the house and he says uh yeah i think there's some guy in there um and he

walks off muttering to himself about the the pool i went through like a whole series of like well it was his muttering where i was like that's that's odd behavior for someone and the guy was kind of you know a little gruff i wasn't thinking i wasn't suspicious of him right i was thinking this is an odd choice in telling this character in this story this just weird incidental character whatever then i was like pool hold on she's afraid of water wait a minute if she's dead why is she getting her pool clean hold on this is my series of like what's going on here uh jim doesn't get to that point yet but he he will well well i'm like oh clearly this pool filter is important. And then that does, in fact, get investigated later.

Yes. I didn't even think about the water thing. So good on you. So listeners, Eppie's questions are all relevant and addressed in this episode. Yes. Yeah, yeah. Unlike some other episodes where we're like, we have all these questions and then none of it went anywhere we're like no no these are actually structured into the narrative of that

these questions exist and then when they are answered and how they are answered are parts of the story yeah and it's satisfying yeah yeah i just didn't even think about the the pool thing because i was i think like all of our like like favorite episodes, it's operating on a lot of levels. You can just watch this and not care about any of this stuff and just watch events unfold, or you can have all of these questions and wait to find out. And it works on both levels. If it,

I think if it weren't even for the fact that that was the, the justification for why she might not have committed suicide given to Jim, um, I would have just read all of this as, Oh, it's a pool. This is a rich person. So, the justification for why she might not have committed suicide given to Jim. I would have just read all of this as, oh, it's a pool. This is a rich person's home. Right, right, right, right. That was what we needed to know. All right.

So we see Jim. Yeah. Picking one of his many business cards out of his wallet and decides to go with the county assessor one. We see the goons still staking him out. They don't know what's going on, but they're going to wait and see. And this is when I was like, are they cops?

Same thing. One of them goes, what's going on here? I'm like, these are cops. These aren't goons. These are cops. There's a weird valence of goon to cop

where the first time we saw them, I was like, I wonder if these are cops. And then the second time I saw them, I'm like, okay, these are definitely cops. And I don't know if it's just like the costuming yeah it's it's weird I mean there's

probably some of that um but for me it's the question itself was presented in a way that like there's the goon way which is more along the lines of like I don't know what the hell's going on around here this way is was definitely like wait a minute what's happening you know it's just um i mean it's not that they couldn't have turned out to be goons as well and they would have been interesting goons with that attitude but i was like my notes say oh they're cops yeah yeah i think we both yeah decided that at the same time um inside this house my main note was there's so much wood paneling. Yeah.

And then Jim hears a noise and he finds a guy poking through jewelry boxes on a bureau. And he turns around and I was like, this guy. Yeah. So this is George Weiner. This is an incidental character. Yeah. But the actor's name is George Weiner. He's a very distinctive kind of character actor face.

We've seen him in A Feeding Frenzy and in Queen of Peru. He's in another episode, I believe. I don't know why. I just go like, oh, this guy. He's just fun. He was in Spaceballs. Yeah. he was in space balls yeah and that is like every time i see him i'm like like it takes me like three beats to remember him in the uh villain uniform from space balls and go oh yeah yeah

that's the guy sidebar a little production note i'm working on editing a recent episode that we recorded that will have come out by the time you're hearing this. But we talk about the show Kaz because that director had done this show Kaz and had this great log line about the... You just heard that episode. You're probably like, why are you still talking about this? The cases of former car thief turned criminal attorney Martin Kaz Kaczynski. Yes. So George Weiner, this this guy is in this show is in kaz and plays a da according to his credit and is in all 23 episodes so yeah the reasons for us

to watch kaz are just mounting they've increased yes doubled at least um but that is neither here nor there. No. In this episode of the Rockford Files, he is, his name is Bryce. And he is an attorney and he is, he works for the law firm that's handling the deceased's affairs. And so Jim's line here is that he's from the county assessor and they haven't finished doing inventory for the county tax records or whatever. And we have just good Jim bluster, just totally cowing this guy with the combination of appeal to authority and also just bullying. He comes in armed with this guy's name and this firm right like from what we got earlier

right so that's what i missed that that yeah text that was on that that receipt is the information that he is using for this con no this is great this is a as as i've said before this is a master class here because he just puts him on edge we were authorized to remove the items that were special bequest in the will who told you that uh i think um no come on i'd like to know who told you that i was uh mr talbot he's in your office yeah mr frieda spoke to him i think talbot told you that so this is a slightly different because usually jim is the one uh he plays the character who is trying to make the best out of a bad situation. Has like all this pressure from on top.

But in this case, I have a good for nothing employee who gave you wrong information. I want his name because I'm going to make sure he doesn't do that to anyone again. And so it puts Bryce in a spot where he just, he doesn't want to get anyone fired. Right. He just wants out of this. Right. He doesn't want to to get anyone fired right he just wants out of this right he doesn't want to make the situation worse yeah and he doesn't feel like he has the authority to just reject what jim is saying yeah um yeah importantly jim and i think this is just a shot in the dark jim says have you found or have you moved the keys to the safe deposit box? Bryce says that, oh, I don't know anything about a safe deposit box,

but I did find these keys. And he does have some keys that are clearly for a safe deposit box. And that's a pure fishing trip, right? Like there's no reason that Jim should know that this is the thing that, but he just knows to look for those things. Right, right. This is just base base pi behavior is there a safety deposit box involved jim gets those keys and then uh hustles hustles bryce out of there

and he keeps calling him young he's like okay young man yeah which is funny because to me they look like they're at least the same age but yeah i don't know know. Bryce does not have a full head of hair. So he reads as older than... Than he probably is. No, he is 20 years younger than Jim. So yeah, he is a young man. He just looks older. That's what happens when you're balding, I guess. Not that I would know anything about that.

But you're the expert in such things. But yeah, I really, really ate this scene up. I just love the way he kept him on his heels the whole time. Didn't let him, you know, like get enough ground to question anything that's happening. Basically forcing him to juggle until he just fled. He pokes around the house and then he goes out to the pool and pokes around the pool shed. And then he does go into like the utility shed or whatever opens the filter as previously uh uh set up for us and finds a bunch of hair in the filter yes

now this is interesting because um we'll come back to this later, but that moment and all the business around the filter was the fatal mistake that the villain of our episode made. Oh, yeah, yeah. I just, in juxtaposition to this wonderful con that Jim pulled off, this is the other way all of that could go down. Jim goes back inside to call Becker again. As he's on the phone with Becker and then Deal, his blocking is such that he kind of idly plays with the door that he's next to and notices that it's open. It's like a sliding door out to the pool.

I think we get a shot of him kind of like pulling it back and forth and you can see it's kind of scratched up this is not mentioned in the text here but it is shown to us and then we it won't be important later again yeah um but what is happening here is uh jim wants to talk to deal because he thinks that she was drowned in her own pool and it was not a suicide he wants deal to come up there check the filter and check the autopsy report and see if the water in her lungs you know is seawater or not um deal of course doesn't want anything to do with jim doesn't want to he's like i've already closed this case um jim threatens to call the city attorney himself if deal doesn't look into it this is when deal threatens to jerk

his ticket yeah and then jim hangs up after giving his uh his hot tip to lieutenant deal so imagine chapman in this situation right chapman would put out a warrant for his arrest immediately yeah exactly um there's you could have this entire scene done with the exact same dialogue with Chapman. And what I like about Deal and Chapman is that they read two different ways, even though they both can't stand Jim. Chapman, it's like a personal thing. There's just something about Deal that just, you feel like you might be able to reason your way out of a situation. You might bring him around to what's right of a situation with with not not you might bring him around to what's right he he doesn't have time for you he doesn't have you know uh the patience

he's he's got other things to do he's got a life to live but he's not unreasonable and now none of that is actually in this dialogue but it's how they you know, what's his name? Tom Atkins plays him. Jim's yelling at him, but this might get through. When they were done, I was sure that he was actually going to look into it. Deal is willing to accept that maybe there's stuff he doesn't know. Yeah.

Yeah. Even if he hates where that information is coming from. Jim then goes to see Jenniferennifer sandstrom with what he's found out but dun dun dun this is a different woman oh no jim was lied to in the first place which i think is uh fulfilling a suspicion we may have had yeah originally she's like hey if you're from the insurance agency i've already talked to you people i don't want to file a claim my sister committed suicide.

I'm working for Friedler, Pike and Morris. Tom Bryce hired me this afternoon. There's some legal matters that need to be concluded. Such as? Well, and then just counters what he's saying with like, I knew all of my sister's affairs. I've never heard of the things you're talking about. There's no way she could have been a controlling partner in any kind of interest, seeing how she's been in and out of mental institutions

for the last two years. What is all this malarkey about my sister being a general partner in some sort of investment? Yeah, Jim's response is great. Well, it's just that. What? Malarkey. It's all malarkey he's like you got me

yeah whatever i got what i needed out of this or all i'm going to get out of this yeah yeah which is which is another i think that's kind of key to why a lot of these cons work for jim i can't imagine pulling off these cons that jim does because to me, I would have this intense fear of being caught. Right, right. Yeah. And when Jim is caught, he's like, okay, I've been caught. Now we move on to the next thing. He doesn't really have this internalized fear of consequences, I think, that a lot of us have, as a character, at least. When he knows there will be certain consequences, he manages that. Yeah.

But the idea of being caught is its own fear right but what does it matter if there's no consequences like the consequences of being caught here are yeah you're right i'm just a random guy who wandered into your house i'm gonna leave now goodbye and that's not so bad there's no embarrassment for what he's doing for him right where i would i would be dying while attempting it and then literally died the moment i was caught like what is this malarkey like the word malarkey would be the killing word from muadib's lips it just slayed me right there uh but not for jim um we have a brief moment with people who are not jim um Back in the red car are following goons,

or cops as we think they are now. One of them had made a phone call and now he's back. They are supposed to stick on this guy. There are two other guys on, quote, the girl. And then we go back to the real Jennifer, who is making a call and leaving a message for Mr. Friedler to call her back when he gets in. It's urgent. Jim is stirring up some kind of hornet's nest. We now get some good Jim tradecraft as we follow him in his car as he realizes that he's picked up a tail. And we see all of this from either outside. We don't hear any any of this this is all viewed either from the perspective of the the cops following him or just from outside the windows he pulls into a motel goes into the little office clearly gets a room and then we go in with him to see him peeking out the blinds

as we watch one of the cops go in to clearly ask the woman who that guy was and jim frowns and then just goes cops before the guy puts his hand in his pocket to pull out a badge or whatever right this is the thing this is so we've been suspicious of them being cops but like yeah no i love that he just the way he comports himself must have conveyed to Jim that he was a cop, right? Like it was just his body language. Yeah. Yeah. My notes were like, is Jim setting up an ambush?

Because in my mind, Jim thinks they're goons. And I still have this shadow of a doubt that they might be goons. So I'm expecting Jim to like go into the room. Like go out the back window and come around or something. Or like put a bunch of the, you know, empty the shampoo bottle on the floor in some way and be ready to like jump the guy or whatever. Like whatever Jim's plan is. I was like, what is going on here? Jim's plan is brilliant and far better than anything that i would have come up with in my head i'm

already trying to build up what his plan is assuming that he's dealing with with goons or you know whatever and then he says cops and then i feel like this is when he changes his plan i don't know this may have been his plan all along, but I really dig what he does here. Yeah. I feel like he's just giving himself options, right? Step one, find out who these guys are. Yeah. And then he's like, oh, cops.

Okay. Step two, you know, you may be right that if they were not cops, maybe he would do something else. But his plan here has beautiful simplicity. I think he's done this. I feel like we've seen him do something similar to this on one of the like, he's out of town ones. But he just calls

and leaves a wake up call for 7.30 because he's going to take a nap. We follow the cop as he goes back to his partner and says, alright, the guy's taking a nap. He left a wake up call for 7.30 and they're like, alright, we'll come back at 7.30 to check in on him. Until then, we have other stuff to do. And they head off and goons would not necessarily believe that at 730 to check in on him. Until then, we have other stuff to do. And they head off.

And goons would not necessarily believe that he's going to go take a nap. Right. But cops will. Or they might take advantage of the fact that he's going to be in a nap. Right. Right. But yeah, cops are, you know, they don't have the time to stick around. Right. Right.

So they buy it. They head off. And then Jim follows them. Yeah, so good. It is so good. And then follows them and then sees them check in with another car. So he stops the Firebird, gets out, kind of hides behind a hedge, watches them because they're in a residential street. They're talking to another car, clearly other cops. And then he sees a car in the opposite driveway and it's the car of the woman

who had come and hired him originally that morning so i have a hypothesis about the creative process here i suspect uh there's a point in the story while whoever's cannell or whoever is writing this it's like how like before this plan of jiming the cop, you know, like doing the reversal, using the nap to get them to leave and then tailing them. There's the question of how do we get Jim to find her again? Right, right. Yeah. Because that's where we need to go. So what is it that, and this solution is just gorgeous. Like I just love this solution to that problem.

On one level, it's very procedural. It's like, okay, we need to get Jim to get back to her. How are we going to get him back to her? Here's the method by which we do that. But it has absolute narrative coherence. Because as we learn more about why the cops are trailing her, it's like, oh, okay. So yeah, that is just follow the logic, A to B to C.

Oh yeah, that is how that went down. Okay, that makes sense. Like it works mechanically, but it's entirely within the narrative flow of the story as we learn how it has gone down. At this point, Jim has no theory of what's happening. Right. He has far more questions than he has any answers. He's probably not even thinking about getting back to her yet.

Or if he is, he's like, that's a problem for the future. That's not what he's trying to solve here. Yeah. His number one issue is why are these cops following? And it's just this natural thing for him to do in natural thing for Jim to do. Right.

Like not a natural thing for me to do, but a natural thing for him to do. And yeah Like not a natural thing for me to do, but a natural thing for him to do. And yeah, it's just great. I just love this. This is one of my favorite moments in this episode. So Jim, of course, sneaks over a hedge to go make his way to her house. Is this the moment with the music? I'm not sure.

Oh, there's this. I think this is the moment where the music is really'm not sure. I think this is the moment where the music is really kind of experimental. It sounds very airy and very jazzy, but also it's clearly suspenseful, sneaking music. it's something that simone would

be humming yeah well he slips into the back and comes into this kitchen where the woman who is clearly not jennifer strand sandstrom is chopping up carrots he He appears. She is not excited to see him. Um, you're upset. I can appreciate that. And, uh, ask him if you want,

if he wants to stay for lunch, she can add some more carrots to the stew. Um, so this whole scene is played out from Jim is righteously indignant. She, uh, we will soon learn her name is Christine, but he calls her Tina the whole

time. So Tina, from her perspective, she just wants Jim to go away. There's nothing to learn. There is no follow-up. She doesn't have an agenda. She's done. Yeah, she did her job. She just wants Jim to go away because he's just a complication now.

While Jim wants to find out, okay, why did you set me up? Because this is clearly a setup. And he's mad about it. So it is a fun scene. They have some good kind of combative chemistry. Jim's kind of a jerk, but you kind of get why. Throughout this scene, first of all, there is this yellow on yellow on yellow color scheme going on in here which is amazing she's wearing a yellow t-shirt with like some like flowers or something kind of pattern

and then her house is almost entirely yellow and it's just a strong strong visual um he digs through her purse uh she is in fact also a pi so the plot thickens. He finds the remnants of the props that she made, these love letters and this engraved jewelry or whatever. She basically made those just as props for her story to give to Jim. This is one of the questions that I wonder about it because she probably grabbed the stuff and slipped him into an envelope because she knew this would be suspicious enough. The question is, did she make up some love letters or did she because these are, she wouldn't have to sign and then cut the signature

off of props. But if she had love letters on hand that she then cut the signatures off of and used them. It doesn't matter to the story at all. But it does matter. There are two characters here.

The one character who goes through the trouble of writing a bunch of fictional love letters and then using them. And the other one that is willing to take love letters that she has held on to for whatever reason and use them to frame Jim. And they're both. They're both interesting. They're both very interesting. Yeah. Yeah. I think from the sense I got from the story as we learn it is that this was

kind of a rush. Yeah. Which implies that she just had those on hand. Yeah. So that's interesting. Right. Like it's the other thing is that the leftovers of the love letters, the cut up signature parts,

like I said, you wouldn't need to write signatures if you were just making them up. Right, right. And they're in her, like, wastebasket. Yeah, yeah. Clearly there's stuff written on them. Yeah. Jim is looking through her closet.

He finds her silver-plated little handgun that is hidden in, like, a jewelry box or something. She's trying to keep him from finding that. Oh, my stew. It's burning. Aren't you coming? You didn't put it on the stove. I noticed little things like that. I'm a detective.

Remember, if you want to get rid of me, you'll have to do better than that. And here he also says, I just want to know why you red dogged me. Remember, I'm the guy that got red dog. Red dog. Yeah, it's a football term. That's where the line opens up a hole and they shoot a linebacker through to sack the unsuspecting quarterback. Right, but in that case, that's not sacrificing the linebacker. Like, I guess maybe I don't understand the term.

I think the metaphor here is that, no, you're right, I don't understand it either. Because I think it's, when I was watching it, I thought of it as making an opening so she can go through. But I – yeah, I don't quite understand it either. This is one of those areas where we have hit upon the limits of our knowledge. Maybe it makes sense if you know football. Don't email us. Under any circumstance. No, no.

I mean, like, I think it's fine if somebody knows how to make the metaphor work. Uh, I, I wouldn't mind learning a little something, but yeah. The point is she, she sent him out as a sacrifice. Yeah, exactly. And he wants to know why Jim, uh, wants to get out of there and find it. I mean, cause there's still cops outside. Right. Well, let's take a little break.

We want to make sure that you know where you can follow all of our other projects and interests online. Epi, where can our listeners find you? You can Google Epidia. I am the only one out there that I know of. You can go to dig1000holes.com. That's the number a thousand.

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if you want more information about the podcast, go to 200 a day. That fireside. And now back to the podcast, go to 200aday.fireside.fm. And now back to the continuing adventures of Jimbo Rockfish. So we cut to Jim and Tina in the Firebird. There's this kind of gross moment where, like, he stops. I think he just pulls over to, like, talk or whatever. And she turns and she's like, you know, I'm out of here. And she goes to just like unlock the door

and he has the lock like pin that he pulled out of the door. So she can't unlock it. This scene I think is supposed to show that Jim is staying a step or two ahead of her. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. I wasn't quite sure what he was showing her and I thought the same thing. I thought it was a lock pin,

but then I paid attention to the door after that and it was still there. So I don't. That's probably just a production. Yeah. Yeah. But I agree. I think the intention is like, Oh,

you can't get out. Right. And I don't love that. Yeah, exactly. Thankfully it doesn't get weirder than that, but that was, that was a moment I,

I didn't love. If he did it to angel, I'd be a-okay so right right well it's all about the power dynamic right and it's like he's already kind of bullying her he's already got her gun right and like is physically much larger and like the dynamic is different than if it's angel yeah it does not get any weirder from there that just that moment really struck me yeah all right so he finally gets the story so she was hired by an insurance company pacific trust that had insured a jewelry collection worth three million dollars that had been stolen some weeks prior the thieves then offered the insurance

company uh an opportunity to buy them back for less than it would cost them to pay out the insurance so she was hired as the go-between to handle this drop because they didn't want any police involved because this is yeah a little shady it's it's pretty shady um i imagine it's probably illegal uh yeah this is actually ripped from today's headlines there's been um two or three things that have happened recently like the pipeline the hackers that hacked the the not the pipeline itself but their ability to charge yeah they ended up paying the hackers ransom and then i think it was an insurance company that paid some other ransom hacker ransom of several million dollars that that's a scandal that's breaking as we speak um so somehow she

doesn't know how the cops did get wind of it and she was being followed by these by by cops so she came up with this scheme she has a manila envelope with the money from the insurance company so she goes and gets that envelope yeah then she has the fake envelope that she's put these props into she goes to jim's trailer does her whole rigmarole in order to get him to leave the trailer holding a manila envelope. And that puts the cops following her on him instead. She goes off and does her thing.

It all goes fine. Jim went off to do his boondoggle and from her perspective, everyone got what they wanted and Jim made $200 out of it. So, what's the complaint about uh by now they've gone to a gas station and jim has asked for three dollars of gas i was like could you just open the tank and cough in it here you go well i mean that's probably

like half a tank now that we're talking about it it's also fun to go back and look at this from the cops perspective who are investigating this insurance payout they follow the money they follow it to jim and then they follow jim to a suit like the house of somebody who had committed suicide and the guy's like what is going on here right right right yeah you're looking up the cast prices yes that's good i should have looked it up uh 1975 i think this is an average as opposed to in california but apparently 53 cents a gallon all right so he's getting yeah six gallons somewhere in there now okay let's just make sure that we're we're being as on top of it. That's a quarter tank for a Pontiac Firebird.

Yeah, all right. Quarter tank seems nice. Now, hold on. Well, because there's another factor here. This is the type of deep dive that people tune in for. He got $3 of gas, which we're figuring is about six gallons, which is about a quarter tank for the Firebird. So $3.1975 is almost $15 today. It's $14.89. Right now at the gas station by my house,

gas is about three, I think the last time I looked, it was $3.59 a gallon. It's just under $3 here. Well, let me put it this way. I know that gas is more expensive in California. Yeah. So right now, according to Gas Buddy... Okay, so right now, the average price of gas in LA County is $4.15. So the almost $15 would get you about three and a half gallons of gas on average in LA County.

So the purchasing power of Jim getting gas at the time was more than it is now. But we have to take miles per gallon into account. No, I'm sorry. I don't think we do. I mean, I guess unless a comparable car these days only has a 12 gallon gas tank, which I think is probably unlikely. I mean, like when I looked into it, the Firebird nowadays has less of a gas tank than it did in the 70s, which makes sense because it's probably more fuel efficient. Right, right, right. We are well out of our depth at this point.

I was going to say the point is there is no point. out of our depth at this point. I was going to say the point is there is no point. We just, we're just establishing that Jim's $3 of gas was getting him about a quarter tank. And today those $15 of gas would probably get him less than a quarter tank. Yeah. I guess that's what I'm trying to say.

So yeah. Well, good on Jim for finding a good deal. Speaking of deal. The only problem with all of this is that Jim thinks that this woman was actually murdered. Right. And Tina is like, what, what, what? Yeah.

He mentions Deal. I call Lieutenant Deal down at the police station. Lieutenant Thomas Deal? Yeah, you know him? Do I? He hates me. Yeah, me too. And we see them start to bond. Yeah.

But from Jim's perspective, I have now gotten Deal to look into this. Let's go down to the station, clear the air so that everyone knows where this is all coming from. She doesn't want to. Jim still has her gun. And in a nice reversal of the things that always happen to him, you don't have a license for this, do

you? So threatens to get her with that if she doesn't go along with his plan. She gives in and we end the scene with. The thing is, the deal is such a clock. Yeah. Yeah. All right. We go to them talking to Lieutenant Deal in person and Deal is not happy.

Jim has sent him. You know how much money you're costing the county uh there's no pool water in her lungs and he runs down all the reasons we've already heard about why it's a suicide yeah and says uh ask jim when is he going to be satisfied and jim says oh about now yeah i'm good so jim at this point is kind of like okay i know what's happening i don't need to be part of this anymore deal has has been dreading the day those two got together. So good. Asks why Tina hired Jim.

She says to get the cops under Sergeant Sherman to follow Jim instead of her. And why? Well, that's privileged client information, but you can talk to that sergeant to get all the information. Oh, look, Lieutenant, why stand around yammering with us? What do you expect to get out of a couple of jerk private eyes? Why don't we just say we made a big mistake and Tina and I'll get out of your life?

In two and a half years I've known you, it's the first thing you've ever said I can get behind. He has a great little smile here when Jim makes that suggestion that I love. It's just like this sigh of relief, like, okay, all right, I'm done with them. Yeah, the deal deal no longer has to deal yes we are back in the firebird and jim well he just can't let it go he wants to drop by the sandstrom house again it'll just take a minute because here's the thing there was no van or truck for that pool guy yeah uh and he noticed that the back door had been jimmied open um they have some sarcastic banter as i note uh but his his he had been thinking about it you think they'd carry

parts to fix a filter with them why would he have to go back to the office or whatever and he tells tina to find the pool skimmer guy in his shirt sleeves carrying a pool skimmer just looks like a pool man it's an instant disguise i love it's it has this sort of almost reverence for it he's like oh yeah that's yeah yeah that's a good one you have to remember that one uh yeah so the two of them uh poke around this house uh so she goes into like this like a study or office or something uh jim calls the pool service and impersonates the uhates the law firm to find out when the last time they had someone out there to clean the pool. And sure enough, it was like last Friday or something.

So that guy was an imposter. A phony, as he says. Tina has him check out a room that had been freshly painted. It's empty. It's freshly painted. It's all blue and has new curtains. And she says, why would you you know redecorate this room if you're gonna then gonna go commit suicide this scene in this room i i just want to

point out the very modern uh color framing going on it's really striking i actually i posted a i this will have been a while ago by the time this comes out. But I posted just a snapshot on Instagram because it struck me so much. So maybe you got the same thing where – Where he's leaning against the blue wall and she's leaning against like a brown door, but she's wearing a blue jacket and blue jeans. That's exactly it. Yes. Yeah. It's really nice.

And they set it up and they just sit there and have this conversation there yeah i feel like in the moment the the director and the cameraman or whatever the people that were there were like we gotta set this up not like they manufactured the whole set to do this but it just works yeah yeah because it makes sense as we'll learn why it's painted blue yeah there's a reason so you know the set needed a room that was painted blue, and then they get in there, and it's like, he's wearing brown on brown. Yeah. He's wearing blue on blue. There's a brown door, the blue wall, they do opposite.

They look at each other, they look away from each other, they look at each other. Yeah. It's just a really striking, yeah, very modern in the sense of, like, I mean I don't know if it's like really contemporary, but very like, I don't know. It would be oversaturated now. Yeah. But it's the color contrast du jour. Right, right, yeah. And has been for the past 20 years or whatever, but like.

No, it's a very every frame of painting uh yeah scene but what they are talking about um is that uh the pool man was a phony um maybe he was looking for the safety deposit box keys that jim still has he's like how did you get those i i choose not to reveal that information they have a bunch of questions but no answers answers. Tina has a line of, you know, we don't need to poke around. We don't owe these people anything. And he's like, oh, yeah, maybe you're right. So they leave. And then we have the music hit as our pool guy roars into action from a hidden Porsche that he was staking out the place in.

And he follows them as they they take off. So in the Firebird, they're kind of explaining things away to themselves, right? Like, sure, it's weird that someone would just kind of walk around with a pool skimmer, but maybe there's some innocent explanation, maybe it has nothing to do with anything. There's all these reasons she could have committed suicide. She was, you know, the note,

she'd been in and out of institutions, all that stuff. We then see the Portia overtake them and swer institutions all that stuff we then see the the the portia overtake them and swerve around them and then go in front of them and pull off the road and he gets out of it and he has a rifle right my my notes are like pool man flying past jim on the road i thought that was like oh oh i guess jim didn't i was expecting jim to recognize him i expecting it to turn to a chase it didn't right right you and then I'm like, is he setting up an ambush? Right. Because I had this thing about Jim earlier.

I'm like, am I just hungry for an ambush? And then he pulls out the rifle. I'm like, it's an ambush. Yeah. Like all caps. So yeah, he, he gets into some trees and we go back into the firebird. Jim asked where she wants to go. She says, oh, just take me home.

Maybe you can come in and help me eat that stew. Yeah. And Jim has this, hmm. Yeah, this is a happy ending to this whole bit. We've been seeing their chemistry develop a little bit now that they're not at total odds. Yeah. But then our pool man, who is now a sniper,

takes out the Firebird's tires, and they go careening across the highway. And we get the very exciting Jim trying to control the out of control Firebird. And then it pulls short, just dangling its front end over the cliff at the side of the highway. The literal cliffhanger from our from our preview montage. They they get out of the car. They slide down the embankment and uh so much for the suicide theory yeah and then this scene ends with you know basically jim keeps telling her to do things and she just keeps doing what she wants to do without

he's like stay down here and she starts climbing up the slope right like it's it's a really good little encapsulation of where he thinks they're at and where she's like i don't need to do what you tell me yeah you're not the boss of me she is an independent contractor in her own right uh we cut from there to deal uh he is by a car that's in a junkyard and behind him we can see the body of bryce in the trunk of a car this was a turd that i was not expecting i just didn't expect to see Bryce ever again, honestly. At first I thought it was the Porsche. Like I thought that they'd abandoned the car or something,

but then it zooms out and we're in that junkyard. It's a different car. Deal realizes who that is in relation to his case. And then he gets on the phone through his squad car, talking to the sergeant that was mentioned earlier about the cops who were following Jim, etc. and all that. His guys did see Jim at the house where Bryce was that morning. We're putting out a warrant on Jim Rockford, suspicion of murder.

And I love that this is in the text. Okay, if we can put Rockford with Bryce this morning, I want a warrant put out on him. Suspicion of murder. We better get a time of death from the M.A. We need a matchup on the time. We need motive. It's a little thin.

Suspicion is just what it says. Suspicion, Sergeant. Pick him up. So he is taking whatever he can, Chapman-esque, I would say, to put out a warrant for Jim's arrest. Back to Jim and Tina. They're finishing changing his tire. He has this enormous jack, but maybe that's just a modern sensibility.

Yeah. Like maybe they just were that big at that time. It is Sunday, so they can't get into the safe deposit box until tomorrow. But Jim wants Tina to impersonate Alice, the deceased. She brings up that the safe deposit box attendant might recognize her. And it's like, oh, well, that's why we go in at the lunch break when there's the substitute during her lunch hour. Yeah. All right.

Good work, Jim. They need to go back to get something with her signature on it, but no, no. Tina had stolen all of her, stolen, had taken all of her canceled checks from her desk in case there was something interesting in them. So she has plenty of examples of her signature. And so Jim

then parrots back the, oh, we don't need these people. We don't need to get involved. And then laughs as he gets in the car and he's like you're a bigger sucker than i am which i think is some self-awareness on his part yeah it's all really good shop talk i like i really dug how they were kind of going back and forth about what need to be done and how and whatnot yeah and his line is is more uh is more self-deprecating of himself than insulting her, right? In the way that he delivers it.

It's like, I'm already a sucker. As we all know. At Tina's house, they're looking through the checks. Tina's practicing the signature. What if she did commit suicide and the gunman was after something else? Jim thinks the murder makes more sense just because there's still so much to explain. Plus there's someone who is obviously willing to commit murder involved.

We have a nice scene here where a couple of uniformed cops are coming to the door. They're asking for Jim. They know that he was associating with Tina recently. So we have a nice little back and forth where we see him overhearing this and kind of getting his coat

and getting ready to do whatever he needs to do while she very politely like she doesn't even have to con them she just has to lie with a straight face and they accept it yeah yeah she's really kind of smooth about it is he here or do you know where he is no i don't but you're welcome to come in and have a look you understand we don't have a search warrant well that's all right if you want to have a look you have my permission well that won't be necessary and i think you get the sense that she's like jim will do whatever he needs to do he's listening he knows what's happening if i invite them in he'll get out of here yeah it turns out that's not necessary so it kind of all works out and he compliments her he's like

that was a nice bit of work. Part of that is they say they have a warrant for his arrest and they mentioned that Bryce was killed. So Jim has that information now and he has a theory to fit everything together. Maybe the safety deposit box has something in it worth killing for. Bryce was inventorying. Maybe their pool guy, their gunman, was trying to find it, was interrupted by Bryce. And so he made up this story about being a pool attendant so as not to be suspicious. Since Bryce was actually inventorying, he's going through stuff.

So he finds these keys. The guy was either already there and interrupted or comes in and Bryce is already there. Thinks that Bryce has found the keys. Pretends to be the pool guy so that he is not suspicious then jim comes in snickers the keys out of bryce the gunman doesn't know that so he follows bryce after bryce leaves they have an altercation ends up killing bryce but finds out that jim has the keys because as we remember from their interaction bryce gave him the keys that he found right uh so now they gotta ditch the firebird since there's a warrant out for jim keys because as we remember from their interaction, Bryce gave him the keys that he'd found. Right.

So now they got to ditch the Firebirds since there's a warrant out for Jim. They should get a rental in Tina's name, obviously. This is I don't know why this is so funny. You know, and then we check into a hotel and then we wait until noon. And at first I was like, OK. And then I remembered they have to wait until noon because that's the lunch hour for the regular person for the safe deposit box but the way he delivers it right is like then we'll check into a motel we'll wait until 12 noon are you trying to corrupt me yeah yeah i think maybe i am and we just cut to the next day at noon at the bank. Yep.

Something definitely happened. Just the lightest sous-sens of implication about how they spent the time until noon. I want to go back to where it is in the season. Because this is informing the whole season to Jim and Beth their whole deal. Yeah. Well, OK, so this is after the deep blue sleep. Right. Where, you know, Beth needs Jim's help specifically because they have a personal relationship that she can draw on to get his help.

And it's quite a few episodes before the portrait of Elizabeth. Yeah. And it's quite a few episodes before A Portrait of Elizabeth. Yeah. This puts the whole Portrait of Elizabeth thing in that whole what's good for the goose is good for the gander. Yeah, yeah. Right? Because in between those, there's also Resurrection of Black and White, where they don't really have sexual tension.

But with the journalist, Susan. Oh, right, yeah. There's Two and a Five Fifty-Six Won't Go, which is his old colonel's daughter that brings him right. Yeah. There's two into 556 won't go, which is his old colonel's daughter that brings him in to investigate. I forget if they might have a moment. I don't remember. And the girl in the Bay City Boys Club, I think

there's some chemistry with the woman that he ends up dealing with there. So yeah, there's a little bit. There are multiple episodes where jim is like in some context of having some kind of chemistry with various various co-stars what's going on here in the greater context of that story is is really kind of interesting because it's it's jim having his cake and eating it too until we get to a portrait of elizabeth and where he has to like there definitely has to be a thing like he doesn't like john saxon uh but he doesn't have a leg to

stand on at all right right yeah uh that all said next day at noon they go to the bank uh they you know wait for the lunch hour shift to to happen uh run run the the con with the fake signature it all goes fine but we see a guy noticing them from another desk suspicious banker a suspicious banker and once they are let in to get this ag deposit box he makes a call to friedler pike and morris and talks to mr fiedler who, who is Bruce Kirby in a mustache. Bruce Kirby is a frequent Columbo appearer in various roles, including one. He's a sergeant in multiple episodes. Oh, nice.

We saw him in the episode where Jim gets those gets the paintings. Oh, yes. Yes i i saw him in the credits i was like yes bruce kirby and then he he's in this one scene and i was like oh is it paper palace or the big ripoff so big ripoff is the one with the paintings paper palace he was the the john that that that was hiding in the closet oh yes yes the one who was like really really mean to rita and then turned out he had been... Yeah. Yeah.

He was the neighbor. Yeah, the neighbor. Yeah, yeah. He's great. I love Bruce Kirby. I just, I don't know. I just think he's so much fun. He's fun.

But, yeah, in this he has a mustache and, like, violet glasses. Both Bruce Kirby and George Weiner being in this in this episode is yeah it's a collection of fun people yeah i i wish there was more bruce kirby that's all i have to say uh the our our pool guy slash gunman pete is there things are getting out of control um feeler is is you know is worried is agitated about this so whatever's going on his law firm is engaged in shady dealing. This guy, he says that this guy, Pete, didn't need to kill her or Bryce. So that's establishing that he did kill the woman in the first place. Not a suicide.

Pete says, it's a rough business. You don't like the risk. You don't get involved. And Mr. Fiedler tells him to take care of it. So, yeah, you get this feeling that Friedler is in over his head. Right, right. He's got a goon, but that goon is far more violent than he is psychotic. Yeah.

So in the safety deposit box, the big reveal, there's a bunch of letters, I guess, or some kind of journal or something like that and records, including a birth certificate. She had a baby, but then she gave the baby up to a Pete Finch. But then she wanted the baby back and threatened to expose, quote, the whole baby racket if she didn't get what she wanted. OK. Yeah, there's some sort of illegal moving of babies, illegal adoptions of babies, I'm guessing. There's a line where they say the sister was probably in on it. Why would she do that?

Well, as you said, she probably didn't want an heir. Right. Daddy left us a whole lot of money or whatever, right? So that would be her motivation. And yeah, so I guess this guy Pete must have been the one who killed her to keep her from exposing this baby racket, whatever it is. And then the evidence is in this box and we kind of know the rest from what they've already explored. But the contents in Jim's briefcase and they head back out to the rental car and they have a little low five. Yes.

I made a note of that too. I mean, that's where my note was like right here in the middle of that Jim and Beth, their whole deal season. Well, at first I thought it was a little like, like hand squeeze. Yeah.

I rewound and watched again. And it's just, it's a straight up like low five like yeah exactly you know she puts out her hand and jim gives her a five and then they separate to walk around the thing it's like yeah we did it it's that had to have just been a thing they did it was so good it was great there are a couple moments in this episode it's not the driving thing or anything like that but there are just this is one of them. These couple of moments in this episode where, from their perspective, their jobs are done and they can just hang out. Right, right, right.

They can just be Jim and Tina on a date. And this is one of them. We did it. We can just be Jim and Tina on a date now. But nope. Where should we go? We shouldn't go to your house because the cops probably have it staked out. And that's when Pete Finch in his Porsche pulls up and roars up next to them and then just takes a shot with a revolver from the driver's seat. Just terrifying.

Jim slams on the brakes. Are you going to my house? There are cops there. I know. That's the whole idea. And then we get a good car chase slash denouement. Yeah. With Jim racing to get to the cops before Pete can do anything dire.

Yeah. This is a firebird-less chase. Mm-hmm. Which is, I mean, not, we see them from time to time. It's not a rarity here, necessarily. But it is, you know, worth noting uh lots of sort of obstacle coursey things that jim puts in their way the read i got of the you know of the logic of the chase was that jim knows he can't outrun this guy yeah so he just has to stay ahead of him

long enough to you know to get to where the the cops can basically pick them both up and and i think you nailed it like the nice tension here is not, can I get away from this guy? It's, can we get to this spot before he does something dire? Like you said, there's this moment where it brings on this Blues Brothers vibe because they just keep picking up cop after cop.

You know, it's not that ridiculous, but like they start collecting cars in the chase yeah they go past tina's house and and jim honks yeah the the plainclothes cops follow them and then a squad car joins them and then it all finishes up with another squad car finally cutting jim off and so he has to stop and then they're surrounded by cops and so you know all three of them get taken out of their their cars and they're all arrested jim makes a point to say uh hey bring my briefcase will you which they do which is nice of them they put the three of them into the back of a squad car jim's in the middle and he turns he's like ah yeah you must be pete finch yeah well i'm not

talking to anyone until i see my lawyer hey p, Pete, you're a lousy shot. And we just have a freeze frame on Jim and Tina just laughing at him in his discomfort. And it's like, you know what? That would be a fine place to end the episode. Yeah, it's a good ending moment. Yeah. But this was one of those false finishes, a freeze frame into another scene. Deal is on the phone.

He's getting Finch booked you know they want to bring in the lawyer guy uh bruce kirby and a mustache um time to call the da this could be a biggie jim's listens to him rattle off all the stuff and then says hey uh you forgot two counts of attempted murder i mean he did try to kill miss do so myself no kidding, I missed that. It's the most, like, satisfied, like, hmm. Yeah. He has enough to get this guy. He doesn't need more.

So why satisfy Jim? I do want to know why they didn't go to the cops when they first got the keys, etc., etc. He plays sloppy ball. Yeah. But Jim's like, look, you know, I turned your suicide into a high profile murder case. You know, this is going to look great for you. Yeah.

So cut me some slack. Deal doesn't know what Becker sees in it, but they just have to sign their statement and then they can go. I do want to state that Jim has a good theory for why Becker likes him, which is, I think he likes me because he can beat me at handball. Outside, Jim kind of

busts Tina for keeping quiet and letting him do all the talking, but she says that he said everything that Deal wanted to hear, so it's not like she had anything to contribute. She's in a good mood. They stuck in the case because their instincts told them they were right. And they caught a murderer, exposed a million dollar baby plot, and may have gotten a little boy his inheritance. And that's when they see a cop giving the rental car a ticket for being illegally parked.

Jim's like, oh, it's in your name. car a ticket for being illegally parked jim's like oh it's in your name so she tries to explain to this uh this this woman that uh she shouldn't get a ticket the the cops are the ones who parked the car which right so at the time i was like oh she's running a line and then i'm like you know what this is probably actually what happened i did the same thing yeah i was like this is like i thought she was trying to talk her way out of a ticket and then i was like no this is a legit complaint this is what legit complaint. This is what they did. Like, they got arrested and they probably drove her car and then just left it there.

And the one's just like, sorry, sorry. You know, she's just doing her job. And we have what might be one of my absolute favorite all-time ending bits of a Rockford Files episode. You know, I try. I really try, Jim. But damn it, I hate cops. And we freeze frame on Jim kissing her. Yes.

Jim leans over, plants her one right on the mouth, and we freeze frame. End of episode. ACAB all day. Good work, Tina. So Tina is played by Stephanie Powers. Like, if you're like, I think i think this whole romantic uh pi duo thing is exactly the thing i want uh she plays um jennifer hart uh against robert wagner's jonathan hart in heart to heart where they're legit that are where there are uh i think private investigators i i really don't know much about this show i just know that they are a married couple that are private investigators. What jumped out to me from her credits was a TV movie, which was a pilot for a show called The Feather and Father Gang, where she plays Tony Feather Danton.

And the premise of this show is that she's a lawyer and her dad's a con man and they solve crimes they see like yeah and her dad is played by harold gould who we've seen in the rockford files but was also in the sting and is like one of those yeah very distinguished early 20th century kind of looking fancy con men. Yeah, so it's Harold Gould and Stephanie Powers as a father-daughter con man-lawyer crime-fighting duo. Well, crime-solving duo.

Yeah. And the synopsis here says that her nickname is Feather. So, Feather and Harry, the father, often sought to sting the bad guys into giving themselves up. On these occasions, they turn to Harry's old partners for help, sometimes using disguises and elaborate play acting. I think we should watch this show. Yeah, this is in my wheelhouse.

It's only a single season, too, which is, wow, yeah, 14 episodes. There is no way this is available for streaming anywhere so we have a lot of good suggestions for further viewing out of this episode but uh other than that um yeah uh uh fun fun episode yeah i i really enjoyed it it was a mystery um that didn't leave me baffled right so the out of the blue thing is the baby racket, right? It's funny because you would expect that to be the main draw of the episode, but it is Jim being pulled in and then just keeps stumbling into bigger and bigger cases as he goes along.

That's how we move into this weird criminal conspiracy that's the motivation behind the murder that jim falls into uh because of a completely different crime going on that has this insurance fraud well i don't know if it's fraud but this insurance scam crime anyways uh there's a lot of moving parts but they're they're very clear and you kind of you know where you are uh even if you're lost in the mystery until they sort of talk it through uh he has jim has a great line when they're talking it through where he's like let's just put this together with a structure that fits yeah yeah and i appreciate that And it's a great moment. But yeah, lots of good cons. A few chases in there.

Lots of action. It's just a well-rounded Rock the Files episode. What I was kind of getting to, I think, in our intro about it being kind of like three different directions to get into the story. Right? So there's the one we watched. There's the from the side of the baby racket. Yeah? Like, so there's the one we watched. There's the, from the side of the, like, baby racket. Yeah. Like, what is that?

You know, how did that get us to where we are in this story? Or the side of the jewelry theft and ransom, right? Like, you could have a Rockford Files episode where either of those other two are the premise and then we get into the rest of it uh and then in this case we you know came in from this direction uh which is which is cool yeah i don't know i feel like we hit all the high points as we went through it um yeah it's good i'd even say it's a good episode for, uh, somebody who's never played or never, uh, seen the Rockford files before.

Yeah, it, it does have, I mean, it's very kind of like stripped down in a way. Cause we get a little bit of Dennis and we get deal as, you know, kind of the antagonist, but, uh, yeah, we don't have a lot of the other characters. Um, so I guess kind of like some of the, the Rockfordish nis. And I think this is kind of also like some candle nis. Yeah. Is that kind of like some of the rockfordishness and i think this is kind of also like some cannellness yeah is that kind of like the baby racket like yeah here's a thing that just never would have been on my radar never would have expected like and it could have been anything it could have been yeah pretty much any other racket uh of some kind but uh specifically

in this case it it is particularly good because it leads to the conceit of having the repainted room. It's blue. They mentioned it's a baby boy. So like, yeah, the room was painted blue. Then we get that wonderful visual scene just growing out of the fact that that's why they had to have a blue painted room. There's a loose bit. I don't know. I'm trying to think of how to word this because it's not a bad thing.

And I don't want to make it sound like it's a bad thing but that filter right the guy comes out mumbling about the filter in order to create cover for himself being there right right right uh i was like this is a weird thing for a person to be doing and not to be more of a character it turns out he is more of a character but he's playing a character he's trying to throw Rockford off the trail. But in doing so, causes Rockford to investigate the filter. Right, right. Finds hair in the filter, which causes Rockford to jump to the wrong conclusion. But makes him curious enough to keep investigating this murder. Because she's not murdered in the pool.

He thought she was because, you know, he found all that hair. But it's just, I guess, just natural hair collection in a pool filter. It's a fatal flaw. Yeah. He kind of stumbles into it through this angle here. But it's fine that he does. Like, it's just, yeah. Yeah, no, it's good.

It's like it kind of balances the here's all the mechanical contrivances to make the narrative work kind of with like, here's some coincidence. And here's some stuff that naturally grows out of the logic of these go to Tina's house. But then it's like, oh, but that is, but there's a huge, there's a big logical reason, like all the steps to how that all came together make total sense. So it's not, oh, that's narratively convenient just out of nowhere to make the plot work together. It's convenient that the narrative is shaped such that that is the natural outcome at this point

that then gets us going into the rest of it. Yeah, it's good stuff. such that that is the natural outcome at this point. Yeah. That then gets us going into the rest of it. Yeah. It's good stuff. I will go ahead and just throw out the, the incredibly sad notion of the baby racket plot. Yeah. This woman who is having, who is,

who is, as we have been told multiple, multiple times was mentally unstable, which is a weird, I mean, there is this whole trope of like, how can you take care of like, how can you take care of a baby if you're crazy? But that's not the focus here. Her story is incredibly sad.

She has a baby. She gives it up. Somehow it's for this racket and then she wants it back and then she gets killed. Yeah. That is so sad i i just wanted to note that that occurred to me as as we got into the last the last bit of the episode it's it's almost a footnote uh even though it is the sort of driving impetus of the whole thing but it's almost a footnote to this fairly comedic romp yeah it's fairly light in tone overall so yeah um but i mean that doesn't undercut anything it's fairly light in tone overall. So, yeah. But I mean, that doesn't undercut anything. It's just like, that's a hell of a place to go, Stephen. Hell of a pull. I tried to do a little look and see if this was like a rip from the headlines kind of thing. There are stories of kind of usually immigration based.

Right. Like adoption schemes. People are kind of like paying to have their children brought into the U.S. and stuff like that. I'm not sure if there was a particular one that this was pulling from. I didn't find anything specifically from this time. I also didn't look that hard. But it seems like the kind of thing that might have been like a news article. Right. In something that set the gears spinning for the story. But yeah, that's about everything I got. It was a fun episode. Not sure about the title, The Real Easy Red Dog. I'm not sure how much was easy. Well, I guess it's referring to the red dog is the maneuver, and Tina

very easily got Jim to do it. Red Dogged Jim. Yeah, yeah. So I guess that's what that means. And it all kind of falls out from there. I would agree with that. I'm with it now. Now I'm back on board.

Well, do you have anything else to say about the real easy red dog? We've solved all of our crimes and now we can let Jim and Tina have their peaceful date. Right. Which I assume that's what they're going to do next. Until the next thing that happens.

So now we are at the end of our season two journey. We're going to do a kind of a retrospective episode in kind of a fun format. So we will be talking more about season two writ large in an upcoming episode. But yeah, until then, we'll continue. Everyone, we hope you continue to put your sandwich platters together as you're getting ready to watch the big game. And we will be back next time. We're not 100% sure exactly how the timing is going to work out.

So it might not be our next episode. So we may be back next time with a particular episode of the Rockford Files or we may be back next time with our retrospective on season two. But either way, we will be back next time

to talk even more about the Rockford Files.