Two Hundred A Day - Episode 98: A Different Drummer

Episode Date: February 27, 2022

Nathan and Eppy take a look at the final episode guest starring Jesse Welles, S5E20 A Different Drummer. Jim witnesses a bizarre surgical procedure while in the hospital, and obsessively tracks down the surgeon to find out what's going on. Starting out a mystery, and transitioning to a character study of a horror-movie-inflected villain, this was an interesting episode to end the fifth season on. Unfortunately, it has the least Jesse Welles of her three appearances, but her airheaded "anti-Rockford" is a memorable character to round out her time on the show. 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) * Michael Zalisco * Dael Norwood's historical research (https://daelnorwood.com/) * 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) * Jay Thompson, Matthew Lee, Kip Holley, Dave P, 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, this is Andrea Todd's Food Mart. Listen, there's a guy down here by the name of Angel Martin who's charged $110 worth of groceries to your account. Is that okay with you? Welcome to 200 a Day, the podcast where we talk about the 70s television detective show The Rockford Files. I'm Nathan Paletta. And I'm Epidaeus Ravishaw. And we are coming to you from the halcyon days of the fifth season of the Rutherford files with season five, episode 20 or possibly episode 22,

depending on how it is noted in various online databases. Yes. A different drummer. Yeah, this is a, we're closing out Jesse Wells here. We discovered that she did three episodes when we did her second episode our last episode right if you follow that we just saw her in roundabout uh which was our episode 96

so that was her first rockford appearance chronologically and then she was in uh the i believe the second seasons two into 556 won't, which we did in our episode 15 way back in August of 2017. Yes. But yeah, we talked about her a little bit in Roundabout. She's a fun presence on screen. Yes. And we're like, you know what? Let's go ahead and do the last one.

So that brings us to a different drummer, which is which like Roundabout, which which was the last episode in season one is in fact the last episode of season five oh synchronicity there as well i hadn't even thought of that should we talk about jesse wills for a second sure yeah let's do it i think maybe we can talk about her characterization on the show when we get into it yeah but i only know her really from the rogford files she was on some other tv shows she also famously was a a voice uh actor for ralph backshe movies in particular uh yes we remarked last time about how she was in wizards which is uh an epi favorite right i don't think i've ever seen wizards i gotta be careful uh i can't really say that a Ralph Bakshi film is a favorite. They are problematic with that pause and everything.

But it is one that I remember from my youth fondly. And her character, Eleanor. She was also in the Bakshi movies, Coonskin and Hey Good Lookin'. Which, honestly, track with your description. Yeah. the Bakshi movies Coonskin and Hey Good Lookin' which honestly track with your description. Yeah. Just from title alone. But yeah, you know, I tried to do a little bit of, get a little bit

more context for her. Per her brief biography that's available online, she acted through the 80s and then retired from acting and became a visual artist. Oh. Everything that I could find about her actual art is on a website that has since died or come off the internet since it was referenced in anything.

There is a line that says that her art style consists of mixed media with old photos drawn with balloons or vibrant colors and i guess one of her thing or one of her things was that she would use found photos and enlarge them and then two compositions over them which sounds interesting i see a couple images of them here they're they're quite nice they look like over colorized black and white honestly it super fits the personality of her character of her character in this particular episode yeah the other fun uh little trivia bit is that she married the uh and then actor now producer uh named stephen nathan um who originated jesus in godspell uh he is now the executive producer of Bones. So things seem to be going well.

I guess in order to do any more actual work on this, I would have to watch her in other movies, or watch her in other roles that are not in the Rockford Files, which I did not have time to do, to get more understanding of her general kind of screen presence and stuff like that. But in the Rockford Files, to get more, you know, more understanding of her general kind of screen presence and, and stuff like that. But in the Rockford files,

she tends to play these kind of, but it tends to as, as evidenced by our three examples, um, she plays these kind of slightly off kilter characters. Yeah. And she has a very bubbly presence that is modulated in different ways in these different episodes.

It's definitely not the same character in each episode. I'm going to, I'm going to send you, this doesn't help with the, with podcasting at all, but it looks like that was just recently uploaded to something, but that's a piece of her art. So yeah,

very something I would expect 100% from this character. Yes. Very bright, very bright indeed. Yeah. Like, I mean, she had from this character. Yes, very bright. Very bright indeed. Yeah, like, I mean, she had a website, but it seems to have gone down. I was able to look up some stuff in the Wayback Machine, but it doesn't have any images

because there are, you know, sites that have since stopped being actively hosted. So sometimes that's how it goes. Yeah, I really enjoyed her in this one. I've enjoyed her in the other ones. I don't even know. Is that oftentimes we, we talk about guest stars and the chemistry that they have with James

Garner. Um, but like, she just has a very, uh, a great stage personality, right? Like she has good chemistry with,

uh, with Garner and also her, her roles in these episodes aren't romantic. Yeah. Into 556 Don't Go, I think there's... There might have been a little bit of it. There's a little bit of it. It's been a while since I've seen it.

I know, right? But if I remember right, there's actually a moment that kind of punctures that balloon or something. a moment that kind of like punctures that balloon or something like there's there's something where that's actually played on a little bit um that uh and that she's she's the daughter of a uh army general general or something that is murdered i think and was jim's commander and so that she goes to jim so she's like younger and has this whole conception of the army and her father that Jim kind of like, yeah, it does not have. Yeah.

It comes into conflict with, um, in, in roundabout, she's this singer who's been drawn into this mob laundering front and really is only really just wants what's best for her. And it just kind of wants what was promised her. And that ends up having,

she keeps on diving into these situations that Jim's like, you're not going to like how this turns out. Yeah. But also you have, I have no leverage here here you have no reason to listen to me i've done your decision right um and then in this one as we'll see she i feel like he he ends up feeling uh not responsible necessarily but like feeling like she like feeling like he needs to keep her from a certain fate right but her character is positioned such that i don't see any way that they would end up having a romantic relationship one of the things about

the character in this is uh so she's not a central she's a i shouldn't say not a central character she's not a client jim doesn't have a client in this one which is a thing we'll talk about i think i really kind of enjoy um whereas in the previous two the first one she was a client the second one she was very reluctantly a client right she was kind of a client by circumstance yeah and in this one um she is caught up in the circle of what Jim's investigating, but she's not, she's an innocent caught up in the circle. And therefore Jim, Jim worries about Jim wants to protect her.

Yeah. But it's, it's not even the central motivating force of what's going on in Jim's life. And I really enjoy, I really enjoy the it's, it's hard to characterize as verbal sparring. There is a little antagonistic, something going on between him and her,

but it's mainly... It's mainly from him. Yeah, yeah. We'll get into it. We'll get into it. But I think it's well done. The director of this one is Reza Badiyi. This is the last of his seven Rockford Files episodes chronologically.

After this, we have two more of his to go. In our chronology. In our chronology. Yeah. We last talked about him in The Becker Connection, which is our episode 94. And the logline on him is that he is extremely prolific. Yeah. This episode is written by Rudolf Borchert. I believe I'm pronouncing that correctly.

Who has five Rockford Files credits, two teleplays, including the teleplay for the finale. And he wrote A Good Clean Bust with Sequel Rights. Oh. Which was our episode 80 and was earlier in season five, and started

his TV career with Kolchak the Night Stalker, did a bunch of Chips and other shows, and I think I said this in that episode, there's very little about him online. He wrote some TV. Yeah, he did, certainly

quite a bit of... Yeah started with night stalker that's kind of nice um someday i'm gonna re-watch i say re-watch i think i've seen like three of them i was gifted some kolchak movies that i need to watch i haven't done yet i'm unclear if they are tv movies or if they were like like or if they're like longer episodes that are packaged into movies i'll find out when i watch them yeah i uh appreciate um a writer who's done a lot of particularly genre television a lot of detective stuff yeah which is a little funny because this is not a very detectivey episode no okay so we'll get into this a little bit later but this episode for me um was definitely it was 100 a rockford files episode felt rockford filesy but the premise and not the pacing but like

some of the turns and things were horror filmy i was thinking before we started recording i should say epi in what ways is this episode a horror film? I found as I was taking my notes, and I'll point them out as we get to them, I would write a note down and then be like, no, Epi, you've seen too many horror films. And I would be only a little bit off. So basically

it would hit something akin to a horror film trope, and you'd expect it to go one way in a horror film. But it's a Rockford Files episode, so it goes the other way. Yeah, the nature of this particular story lends itself to being a horror story. So, which gets us to, there is a bit of a content note, I think, for this one. It is dealing with organ transplantation, not on screen, but it is kind of a medical horror premise right sort of uncharacteristic of the rockford files there is a scene in it where we are witness to a murder uh in the very

beginning and uh it is a surgical murder well arguably right arguably but it we are witness to to some on-screen medical it's not graphic i think this uh but it is like if this is a thing that squigs you out then this yeah we will be talking about some medical stuff and like transplants and stuff like that and what happens to dead bodies yeah and then the other thing is that there is definitely some uncharitable terms for various mental illnesses yes that i don't know if we need to get into they're not actually that important but yeah it's there it's uh uses some terms we probably wouldn't use today and i think that all gets us into our very brief and fairly ununinformative review montage so uh here are the things that stood out to me and it's almost exactly the things that we just went over.

He starts off by asking if they do organ transplants in the hospital. I will be honest with you. I thought that was a joke. I thought, oh, Rockford's in the hospital, and he's just asking if he can get a whole new body, like a tune-up or something. Because he's getting to be old. This is when James Gardner himself's knee is having trouble. And it's actually an important part, especially the earlier part of the episode. And then we do see someone on the operating table.

And we see their hand move while they're on the operating table. Which I got it. That hits a special area in the back of my brain that is like, that freaks me out. I am of the type of person that because it freaks me out i want to watch more so they caught me there they got me into it but anyways there's that then we cut to our other content warning where we have this back and forth between uh rockford and dennis about uh somebody at a va hospital, we find out later, who's like a doctor, no, a patient, an inmate, no, a trustee, and then a slur. And then Jim falls out of a car.

Yeah. We see Jim falling out of a speeding car, which is, again, I'm in. I want to see how we get there, why we got there, what have you. And then the other point, and this is the thing, no Jesse Wales at all. Right. I had that thought too. I was like, and this is only because we're coming to this episode. It's like, all right, we're going to watch the last Jesse Wales episode. And then she's not

actually the co-star like she was in the other ones. She's like the secondary co-star. She's in the credits. But yeah, we don't see her until halfway through the episode, almost, which is a bit of a disappointment off the off the jump but they did follow it up with an amazing answer yes you you heard it at the beginning of the episode but uh the only angel appearance in this episode is that he apparently charged $110 worth of groceries to Jim's account.

That's a lot of groceries. I mean, our rule of thumb here is multiply that by five to get roughly $20. He's having a big party. Yeah. Did you know that we are a 100% listener-supported show? Our patrons at patreon.com slash 200 a day keep us in the podcast business, and in return receive exclusive episode previews, as well as plus expenses, a bonus podcast, where we casually chat about media we're enjoying

and the things going on in our lives. We extend special thanks to our Gumshoe patrons supporting this episode. Dale Norwood wrote a book, Trading Freedom, How Trade with China Defined Early America. It's about fast ships, cheap drugs, and American political economy. Published by the University of Chicago Press.

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Brian Pereira, at Thermoware, Bill Anderson at Billand88, and of course, Richard Haddam at Richard Haddam. We follow them too at 200pod. If you're interested in keeping us going for as little as $1 an episode, check out patreon.com slash 200 a day to see if becoming a patron is right for you. dot com slash 200 a day to see if becoming a patron is right for you. Well, we start off our episode with some great banjo soundtrack. As the credits roll and we see Jim driving Rocky's truck down a country road. I noticed both that there is a 10 mile per hour sign and that when Jim pulls up to the stop sign sign he's not wearing a seat belt as i'm always on seat belt watch oh yeah this is relevant however

yes suddenly a yellow pickup truck shoots down the road swerves to avoid an oncoming car and just rear ends rocky's truck um we have a a nice a nice cut um to show the rear ending from a long shot. There is clearly no one in the cab when this is done, which I appreciated from a health and safety standpoint. It was a little funny to me just that the shot was such that it was like, yeah,

there's clearly no one in that right this moment. Which is good that no one was actually in the truck when it was actually rear-ended because when we get back jim after the cops have arrived quickly on the scene the window's all spider webbed where he hit it with his head and he has blood on his forehead and he's been knocked out by this impact my my notes here are oh no rocky's truck i know oh no rocky's boy i quickly start referring to these guys as the two yahoos in my notes. We have these two yahoos in the yellow truck.

The driver is I forget his name. I guess I can look it up. But he's he's a stunt driver. Yeah. Dave Cass or Davey Cass. Yeah, he was he was a stunt driver and a stunt coordinator. And so this is kind of a gag casting. He's the driver of this of this of this car that's hitting other cars. But these are two guys. They're drunk.

They're hooting and hollering. They're later referred to as the lumps at some point. Yeah, that's a good one. That's a good one. But the cops who respond to this accident clearly see what's happened, and one of them says, Bring the balloons. We've got a couple of deuces here.

We cut to the hospital where Jim is in triage. He's filling out paperwork. And this entire sequence is extremely yellow. Yes. And I guess this is kind of what I mentioned earlier, that there's this real visual difference between this episode at the end of season five and the episode we just did at the end of season one, that episode also had a lot of yellow,

but it was like bright contrasting, uh, energetic yellow. And then all the, all the yellow in this sequence, it's, it's institutional. It's in this hospital.

Yeah. It's, it's very depressing, depressing. Yeah. It's a lot of depressing yellow. And I guess there's part of me that's like, that seems like the difference between 74 and 79.

Put shots of these next to each other with the same characters, same actors playing, you know, and just their surroundings. You would see that these are two different snapshots of time. It's like the Twitter meme where you have one that just says 2019 and then the other one says 2021 uh-huh um so we get the the kind of uh drama that is to come with these guys that hit jim um they uh they're refusing to take breathalyzers um they're all patched up so the cop comes back with them and they have like bandages and stuff. And Jim still has like blood on his forehead and hasn't been seen yet.

Yeah. But they're handcuffed together and the cops telling them that they don't have to take the breathalyzer, but that's an automatic six month license suspension and jail time. He's going to talk to the doctor, see if they can go down to county to get them processed, etc. So they're left alone with jim and they start threatening him what my friend here is trying to say is you dummy up or you start collecting lead for the recycling center officer these two dribblers just threatened my life sir i'll send my partner back to take a full report later right now these gentlemen have a date with the county um he is very unimpressed by their threats so jim clearly needs medical attention but he wants to get to a phone he wants to make a phone call because he's supposed to be taking the truck to rocky and rocky's gonna worry the business with the phone call here is fun there we have

this back and forth i think it might even still be the same nurse each time that comes to talk to him is focused. I was, I was just about to say she's focused on making sure that she's taking care of his injuries, but it's not even that it's like, that's her job. He's her job.

She's just trying to get her job done. Yeah. Yeah. He's, she's just there to manage him. Yeah. It's not really about caring for him it's like yeah exactly fill out the paperwork get the signature all right take your shot and and he just

he just wants to get make that phone call he's just yeah to where once she leaves him alone after giving him his uh his his shot of pain pain meds he stumbles out of his gurney to go find a phone yes before before he got the shot he was alone in the hall and he overheard a conversation you know spilling out from another room which is there's a doctor he's talking to this bereaved couple um their son is dead there's you know there's nothing they could do his injuries were too severe etc but he wants them to authorize a corneal transplant um it is a very important kind of operation and it has to happen as soon as possible no they don't have time to think about it you know are you willing to sign these papers and so he talks these

as i said these bereaved parents into signing this uh transplant order so jim overhears all of this and we see it happen behind him and then the nurse comes back more business with the nurse nurse leaves jim stumbles out of his gurney to go find a phone and he looks into the room where this same doctor is already doing this operation and we get the scene from the preview montage of the the hand that's that's kind of fallen off the off the table yeah and is in plain sight and the fingers are moving as the doc is doing whatever he's, he's doing up, up top.

Then we have a, the camera starts swimming in and out of focus. Yes. As another, uh, an orderly or someone sees Jim and, and takes him away to, to rest waiting for his doctor.

And we get the swimmy, swimmy camera and come back with, uh, Jim in bed and Rocky at his bedside. A couple things that are, I think, left up to the viewer to decide here. One, is Jim's

finely tuned sense of a hustle, like pinging when he sees this guy talking to these parents? This is going to be the setup for the episode, right? Right. There's this, he witnessed this guy somewhat pressure them into, no to these parents this is going to be the setup for the for the episode right like right there's this he witnessed this guy somewhat pressure them into no he pressured them he pressured them into signing the release uh it wasn't like super overt pressure but there was this time pressure thing

that was there and jim witnessed it so like one thing that is like is this jim like wait this feels like a con this feels like a hustle this feels like you know that and he's and we're paying attention to that because of that or is it just that this is the only interesting thing going on that jim has privy to right now in this hallway and we're just happening to overhear it and it doesn't matter one way or the other i think for the episode but i think it's a fun thing to concern because that yeah like it was just that if i remember how it's framed it it feels like what we're doing is we're sitting with jim as he overhears a thing that's happening but he's not necessarily paying attention to it yeah we don't see him turn to look at them or anything right yeah but we do

have jim's like jim has a better memory than i do right right right so he just picks up on those details and yeah so yeah i think what we kind of get is that he he fixates on seeing these these fingers move like he can't get that out of his head as we'll see yeah and then as he goes down the path of what does that mean he then uses this recalled conversation to fill in some context for what he thinks might be going on yeah but i don't think he's paying attention to the conversation first i think yeah like you say i think it's his memory of it that you know yeah he's he's because he's our main character he remembers the important things and then the other bit that uh probably isn't um again

isn't necessarily important but we have this the the fingers moving on the table or or the patient's fingers moving we're going to get expert opinions during this show saying that that's not unusual right um and in the beginning well because we're watching rock profiles episode we know that jim's gonna get into this uh i took that as a conspiracy to gaslight jim uh by the end of the episode i have a different opinion of it i guess we'll go further we'll talk a little bit more about like what's actually yeah yeah see yeah i feel like i had a similar progression um but as we say we'll get into it so yeah the uh what jim comes back to is rocky been there for a few hours uh jim's been recovering from a concussion from this accident um we have a whole

thing about jim asking about the truck rocky says oh there's just a little bit of damage so there's some there's some dents in the back of the cab to get out she was like what do you mean the back of the cab i guess there were some concrete blocks that he had in the bed that he meant for a planter and they flew forward but it's okay it's not that bad and i have to replace the window but you know easier to replace truck parts than parts in his son which yeah which is great and rocky does a really good job of pretending like he's not mad about the truck for now yeah there's a complexity to the scene that i really enjoy i shouldn't say complexity it's layered but it's layered in a very simple and transparent way that's great for us like

jim's concerned about the truck rocky's like no i'm more concerned about you jim's still concerned about the truck rocky's more and then as this plays out we'll get to it but like uh rocky is really rattled by what happened and that's going to come out in his anger about the truck right which is really actually about jim and i love that like it's just it like I said, it's layered. It's all hidden behind things, but it's not really hidden. We as the audience actually, we can see it. It's good stuff.

Jim tells Rocky about the weird thing he saw. Yeah. Rocky kind of doesn't want to talk about it. He doesn't like hospitals. He just wants to get out of there. Jim's doctor comes in and, you know, gives, gives him the roundup of his condition, but tells him he can basically go whenever this is when Jim asks him if they do organ transplants in the hospital.

And he again tells him about seeing the fingers move of this, this patient, I guess this cadaver presumed cadaver. And this doctor also kind of laughs them off. And it's like, Oh, that just happens. Or like, you don't know what you saw or something and i think like you i'm like is there like a conspiracy here right yeah jim wants to ask more questions but rocky

hits his breaking point yes come on let's get going dad i plainly i don't care what you saw now i know you sonny these folks here are good here, and they're trying to do good for a lot of people. But you, you go getting suspicious. You get your back up, and then pretty soon you're trying to solve a case where there ain't no case. Now, ain't it bad enough you wrecked my truck without trying to wreck the whole medical profession?

One thing I love about Rocky is just how he loves his institutions. He loves institutions. He's like, like this is a hospital. They would never do anything underhanded at a hospital. Do you understand? It's a hospital.

Yes. Oh, so good. I also like Rocky's assumption that if Jim asks too many questions, he could wreck the medical profession. I mean, honestly, what's happening here is that right he's like

don't don't ruin my trust in them right right and also don't make us spend any more time here than we absolutely have right yeah yeah um he continues asking this doctor about uh the the transplant thing as they're getting wheeled out and he finally gets the name of that doctor lee yost jim's doctor explains that the patient he was killed in a motorcycle accident and that it is not uncommon for nerves to cause slight movements in someone who's been dead for that short amount of time since he had you know basically just just come in from the accident yeah um there was nothing improper that happened and then he gets lectured by the nurse about if he only knew about what the life extension foundation was doing yes oh i again like to fit that gaslighting conspiracy

thing this nurse feels nurse ratchety she feels very like we don't have a warm feeling about her and uh now she's lecturing him about how great this, it seems to be pointing in that direction. Also, and I cannot let this go. I need to comment on this. It cannot pass without comment. This doctor's eyebrows are so wizardly. They might even each be their own wizard. Each eyebrow is its own wizard. They're extremely wizardly.

I feel like this is probably someone that has been in other things as walter brook is the actor i'm checking him now oh yeah oh yeah he's got a 227 credits goes way back some westerns and stuff dude was in banana oh wow he's got a lot of rockford files yeah i was gonna say i'm sure he's been in other episodes. Okay, let's see. He was Gertmanian in Just Another Polish Wedding. Okay. So that was the flower shop guy, right?

I think so, yes. He was a main guy in The Dark and Bloody Ground. I just don't remember the plot of that one. Have we done The Dog and Pony Show? Yes, that's the psychiatric that one. Have we done the dog and pony show? Yes. That's the psychiatric group. Oh, yeah. So this is a wrap on Walter Brooke. This is.

I'm realizing it as we look at this. I think the dark and bloody ground might be the one where he has the biggest role. Um, I think the NIA agent in the dog and pony show is, uh, just like a one scene character, Dr.

Bosco. We see now, and we'll see him at the end of this episode. Germanian was the flower shop guy. I think in, yeah, I think you might be right. Uh,

just another Polish wedding. Um, where Jim has to find out where someone's buried and he goes to the yeah flower shop yeah i feel like we talked about him in um in our uh malibu madness yeah yeah because that was a really good uh rolling con that jim had to do in that one great character actor eyebrows for days yes thank you for your service yes walter brook well thank you for mentioning his eyebrows yes that's my my pleasure uh yeah but we get the name of the life extension foundation and then a it's not really a joke it is a transition in the cut

um where we cut to someone saying life extension foundation uh jim is is on the phone with a woman at the State of California Franchise Tax Board and he's saying that he's filing a tax return and he needs to know if the Life Extension Foundation is a non-profit or not. She's like, why don't you just call them?

He's like, well, they're closed on Thursdays. Another familiar... This is someone who's been in uh six rock for files episodes again i don't think we're doing we're closing her out yet like that fritzy burr yeah what a name what a name she was in three ninjas i watched that movie so much when i was a kid. Oh yeah. It does seem to be about your era. Yeah. That's definitely my, my era. Yeah.

Her. Yeah. Receptionist made County clerk. Yeah. Uh, um, we're close. She only has one more.

Wait, did we do this? Did we do nice guys finish dead? Oh my God. Look how old we are. We did episode 34, May, 2018.

All right. So wait, we did just we are. We did. Episode 34, May 2018. All right. So wait, we did just by accident? Yep. That was also fairly early, but... Okay. That is... A bad deal in the valley, we did. Six and Stones, Mayor's Committee.

Yeah, we did. All right. So we are, in fact, also finishing out... That's a wrap on... The rare double finish. This is the last of our Fritzie Burr episodes. It's a triple finish, right? Jesse, Jesse Wells.

Fritzie Burr. And Walter Brooke. Wow. Welcome to 200 a day, the podcast where we just go through IMDb. I did have to do a little looking up because we don't remember all of our episodes. But she has been in, just by accident, A Bad Deal in the Valley, Sticks and Stones May Break Your Bones, but Waterbury Will Bury You, The Mayor's Committee from Derelict Falls, and Nice Guys Finish Dead, in addition to

this episode a different drummer and we have done all of those episodes this is just gonna keep happening more and more now we need to not look up the casting and just anyway we've now spent too much time talking about this scene um the the gag here is that rocky lectures jim about making prank phone calls while they're waiting for her to look this up. Yes. And makes a or tells a story about Jim making a Prince Albert in a can joke. So I, as established on our most recent Plus Expenses episode, I am younger than this show. and I never understood the Prince Albert in a can joke until watching this episode and having it explained to me in this episode. Like I know it as a reference, but I never knew why it was a

joke. Right. I knew the joke. I knew why it was a joke, but what I didn't know was that it was tobacco. Do you have Prince Albert in a can? Prince Albert is a tobacco company and it is not a California corporation. Well, then let him out before he suffocates. I had always assumed it was some brand of tuna fish that I'd never seen. And I have no idea why I assumed that, except that tuna was a thing that came in cans. I'd never heard the punchline. I didn't know that the punchline was, well, you better let him out. Oh, okay.

Yeah. Until the day before this recording, when I watched this episode. Because there's a lot of like, like, is your refrigerator running? You better catch it. You know, it's that vintage of. There's a bunch of those that i got introduced to before like when i was a real little kid before i understood the context or understood the construction of the joke like it actually took me so much later that i realized oh okay it's like

the beatles it's like when you look at how the Beatles are spelled and you're like, oh, like the beat of a drum, not how a beetle. Oh, it was that, right? They just existed in my life for so long before I could understand that I just didn't think to even consider that there was a reason why these were jokes. To our younger listeners, people used to do this thing called prank call yes we call someone on the telephone and it would be anonymous because it would be a landline anyway um our subject here uh fritzy um she's not given a character name in this episode uh

comes back to the phone and says that the uh life extension foundation is listed as a medical referral service but it is not a nonprofit. And then Jim, after having all this banter with Rocky, then has a last question. Do you have Prince Albert in the can? Yes. And then he says, well, you better let him out, and hangs up the phone, and I go, that's the punchline.

I get it now. Yes. And Rocky tells him he's never going to grow up. And then there's the fun little joke where he calls her a jerk. Yes. Right after he hangs up, he's like, jerk. And she's like, jerk. It was, yeah, it was very true to life.

I was like, yep, I see how that interaction went down. But it was fun because, you know, here's Jim getting angry at Rocky and taking it out on this poor woman. Who can take it? She seems tough um jim then makes another fateful phone call where he calls to rent a car and then suddenly gunshots come shooting through the trailer from outside just honestly terrifying especially because rocky's there well rocky's like open to the fridge and then jim like dives and grabs him and pulls him down so they're both on the floor the fridge door is just swinging open it's very dramatic so the the trailer gets shot up and then as you know after that calms down he tells tells jim to go call dennis um

but they have an exchange where it's like well you know is it those guys from who caused your accident and jim says like could be but i've also been nosing around that dr yost when the shots first came i would add my notes they're like oh this must be the drunks the lumps if you will the yahoo's the yahoo's one of my favorite exchanges in this year though is rocky going will you please call dennis and jim going i will dad as soon as i think I can get to that telephone without getting my head shut off. Like, I know there's a priority here, but just hold on, just hold on. We cut to just a wonderful framing shot of the camera on the elevator as the doors open and

Jim's just leaning casually in the elevator. I made a note of that too i made a mental note to do that in elevators from here on out it is a powerful pose it is big uh big garner energy yeah if anything ever was it's it's so good but he's at the fun of the two of them is the dialogue um yeah not a lot happens but it's very fun to watch yes so the thrust of what we get here jim claims to be from a medical magazine doing a feature on dr yost trying to to interview him and he keeps on missing him etc jesse wells is playing a character named sorrel henderson and she is the secretary for the life extension foundation she's leaving the office now to get something for the doctor but check back later to see if he's in um or just establishing these this. She is a real, I guess, space case?

Sure, yeah, that's, I think, a good way to put it. There's a delightful disconnect between the two of them. Jim makes references that she doesn't get, and she makes references that Jim doesn't get, and they kind of pile on each other. Well, thank you, Ms. Henderson. Well, my time is your time and your time is my time.

Right. It's a lyric to a song. I forget who sings it, but I love it. Your time is my time. My time is your time. I just love it. I think it was Rudy Gernrich.

Well, see ya. Check back later if you still want to see Lee about that newspaper article. It's a magazine. It's as if his charm is being foiled by the fact that she doesn't understand it. It's a great way to have her just completely baffle his normal attempts to be this charming con that he's running right she is a ambulatory rockford deflection field yeah exactly and it's not out of malice and it's not out of um subterfuge it's just her nature yeah it's just her nature and i do feel like some of what comes through in these scenes is a real joy of having been in the scene with this person. At the end of the scenes, this smile that Jim has on his face feels like a real, like, not a character smile, but like a real actor smile.

Like, we just did that. That was hilarious. One of the fun bits is just the end of it where she's like, I'll tell him about your newspaper. And Jim goes through the trouble of correcting her, even after all of that, correcting her and telling her that it's a magazine. It's not a thing that's happening. It's not a real thing. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter.

And she's just going to forget it anyways. And yet he just can't not do it.'s just going to forget it anyways. And yet he just, he can't not do it. He just has to do it. Rocky is patching up bullet holes in the trailer with little pieces of metal, which is the rockiest thing to do. Jim has rented a car. His choices were this giant land yacht or a Japanese roller skate. And can you believe it? It's costing him $45 a day to rent this car which seems like a

lot it is yes i gotta say as jim's bookkeeper i am sweating this is not a good episode for his for his accounts he has no client he's no client whatsoever this is jim being a rogue right like this jim witnessing something and he thinks something's wrong here and I just need to get to the bottom of it. And nobody wants him to. And that makes him want to more. Right. And I really enjoy that.

He gets a call from Lee Yost, uh, who says that he knows Jim had questions from the hospital and he's kind of seen through this facade of the magazine interview or whatever, but he would be happy to answer any of his questions. Just pick a place. So we, we pick a place and Jim is eating some kind of dessert on a patio.

It's clear to me when he gets that phone call that he doesn't, he didn't expect the message to get through like that. Which is fun. So we have our first real sit down literally as they are sitting down it looks like they've they've had their meal and they have coffee and i think it's pie a little hard to tell exactly what's on their plate but uh yes the first real convo of jim and uh lee um so this is so lee yost is played by john considine it seems like he's probably been in i mean he's been in lots of

things. He was not in any other Rockford's files, which is what I was looking for. So this is a wrap on John Considine. Doesn't count if they're only in one. He was in Knight Rider. I have a suspicion that this man plays villains in a lot of things.

He did write on MacGyver, Kung Fu The Legend Contin legend continues and robocop so oh wow yeah there you go um anyway he is a very and this is the whole thing so i guess here's my my take on this episode that kind of starts with this scene yeah which is this episode is not really a mystery it's more of a character study and the character is this lee yost this is this is um this is a colombo episode right uh yeah a little bit we see him do a thing and now we're watching jim yeah we don't we don't get all of this guy's uh machinations in the background right because we're a little bit more closely tied to Jim's point of view.

Right, right. But it has the verbal sparring. It has the, like, who knows what win, you know, kind of thing. And it even has, we'll get to it later, but it definitely has this, like, it's all out on the table now. What happens next? definitely has this like it's all out on the table now what happens next um i'm loving jim giving buddying up to him in this in this scene here though this is yeah there's a push and pull because it's like in the scenes jim seems very straightforward and above board but then in between

his scenes with yost he's kind of like oh yeah i'm just buddying up to him to find out what's going on. And it's a little hard for me to tell, and I think intentionally so, whether he's justifying to himself the time he's spending with this guy. Right. Or if he's really just doing a really good job of kind of compartmentalizing what he's doing the the moment in the scene that stands out to me is they're they're talking back and forth and and jim's kind of needling him a little bit uh i guess this is the thing that reminds me of colombo the most is that he's doing this not terribly so and then he's like i don't know you're such a relaxed guy, you know, very cool. I would think that a job like yours would be high pressure to the third power. Well, I have a lot of outside interests, things that work off the adrenaline.

I'm a cross-country skier. I'm a freak for basketball. No kidding. Me too. I think it's my favorite moment in this particular scene because it's just, you keep feeling them drift towards, you know, like, oh, I've got tickets to the game. The Knicks play. No, no, the Lakers play. The Knicks will be there.

Feels like, oh yeah, okay, we're getting to be buddies. Hold on. I think you're evil. Yeah. So Lee, his deal is that he, he's essentially a middleman for don't for for organ transplant donors and recipients. So he works out logistics for transplantations and he works with doctors and hospitals to get the right thing to the right person. It's only him and his part time secretary, but he's actually yeah, he has this whole kind of affect.

I mean, he's very cool and calm which is kind of part of the deal but he also has this kind of affect of like yeah i do this thing i'm pretty good at it but i could do something else so that's kind of covering the fact that it's such a small operation i think like he doesn't have staff and stuff it's just him and and um him him and sorrel i'm sorry i just remember her saying sorrel henderson that's with one s yeah like like which would have two s's just great comedic line i i don't know why it just is good yeah um he doesn't need the money he has an army pension check he says he retired a battalion commander, I think.

Um, and he also has some like inheritance that's come his way. So it's more the nature of the work and how, you know, grueling it can be. Jim straights up is like, well, I saw you in that operating room. Those, you know, the fingers of that guy were moving and he has the same line well there's a lot of body movement after death he kind of not laughs it off but explains it away with the same line that he's heard from the other doctors yeah uh jim asking him about where he got his medical training and it's both army and paramedic training and then this is when he hits him with the you know he seemed like a really calm guy must be all this pressure yeah um i was starting

to think i was i was making notes of all things he was saying like army training paramedic training cross-country skier it's like is this another moriarty like right so do karate like is this going to be but um that that that stuff doesn't come up again but uh i thought it was kind of funny i don't know i really i'm i've never been the army. I've never been a paramedic. But this guy is doing corneal surgery. That seems a little above and beyond for what he's describing here. Yeah, it seems. Yeah. He says he's a freak for basketball. And again, I had this mental image of like, oh, my God, they're going to go scrimmage like the two of them playing basketball. But he meant watching basketball.

Yeah, it was a little out of place because the other ones are activities he would do. But this one's just he meant watching basketball yeah it was a little out of place because the other ones are activities he would do but this one's just he enjoys watching he's uh missing the game tonight but invites jim to the the next game where yeah the lakers are playing the knicks will just be there yeah that's it but then after that receiving the invitation jim then offers to pick up the check for their meal, which is great. But then he looks at it and his face falls. Yes. I made a note of this.

I was like, Jim, you have no client. Why are you doing this? He was just being polite, I guess. Yeah. And we end with a, hope I answered all your questions. Yeah, I think so. And then we cut directly to Jim breaking into the Life Extension Foundation office. So clearly he has more questions. Yeah. 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 Epidaya. I am the only one out there that I know of. You can go to dig1000holes.com. That's the number a thousand. Or you can go to worlds, plural, without master, singular, dot com and find my work there. How about you, Nathan? My internet home for all things NDP is at ndpdesign.com. You can find all of the links and information for all of my various games, including the Worldwide Wrestling role-playing game, my zines, and podcast projects, of which perhaps there may be more than one. You can also find me on Instagram and Twitter at ndpayoletta.

As always, if you want more information about the podcast, go to 200aday.fireside.fm. And now back to the continuing adventures of Jimbo Rockfish. Jim easily breaks into this office with a credit card in the latch maneuver, and he looks around, and immediately we all see that there's just nothing in here there's nothing in any drawers um there's only the most minimal amount of papers but then he hears something outside and quickly ruffled rustles around and grabs some some papers and pulls the light bulb out of the desk lamp so when the maintenance guy who saw a light under the door or whatever comes in to check uh he has a quick i'm supposed to audit these books by morning but this bulb burned out how

am i supposed to do this with uh you know without my eyes falling out kind of stuff and this is this is wonderful you said this is your favorite little con of the episode it's just such quick thinking on his part like he assessed who's out there he's like i need to misdirect okay if it's a maintenance guy maybe i can have him pick something real quick and then present myself as someone who's supposed to be here and it's just i don't know it's just something about how he's able to just think on his feet so quickly yeah i just it's just a good one it's one i'll use at some point when i'm in an office's quickly complicated by this maintenance guy saying that, well, light bulbs, that's the electrician's department.

And he describes how he's going to have to go to a different closet and dig around and find it and come all the way back up. And Jim ends up giving him a $5 bribe to go ahead and just get a light bulb for him. Why don't you? There's multiple bribes in this episode. They all get a close-up on the handoff, so we see that it is exactly one $5 bill each time.

Yes. We see Jim... Oh, it was the later one where he turns his back to the guy while he's trying to figure out his money situation. It's good. On his way out, the maintenance guy says that it's one of his favorite offices. It's like there's no one in here. Ooh, it's a clue. In my notes, says that it's one of his favorite offices it's like there's no one in in here oh it's a clue uh in my notes i say it's a big store it's just a bunch of props and facades with no real stuff going on but there is one half filing cabinet of files and jim looks through them real quickly and sees that there's one with sorrel henderson's name and it's a medical file and we see that she was referred to

lee yost by some other doctor um if there were other details on the file that went by too too quickly for for me to see them it doesn't we we are told what they are later so i guess it doesn't matter too much but we see that you know she specifically was referred to this doctor from another doctor which is a little weird considering that she is his secretary. Yes. And Jim looks thoughtful. We cut from thoughtful Jim to sleepy Jim, where he's fallen asleep with a book in his glasses, which is very, very adorable.

But he's suddenly awoken by tire squeals and shouting as our pair of yahoos are yelling at him and telling him to wake up hero oh they're not shooting at least not yet but they are doing donuts around his trailer uh they're clearly drinking um and uh jim tumbles out of bed and he he runs and gets his gun out of the cookie jar while they're yelling at him to you know if you go to court against us you're dead and we have an arraignment on us or something like that. It's like, these guys seem really smart. He tells, he shouts at them that he has a gun this time.

They better scram. And they take some pot shots at him before taking off. I love this how we just go to the next morning where he's immediately just telling Rocky that he made a complaint to Dennis as soon as they left. So we see that they keep on trying to intimidate Jim and he's just like, I know how this works. Like you're just building up more reason for the cops to take you down. Basically, this this instant instance then puts the earlier one in doubt.

Right. Exactly. Yeah. So Jim's theory of the earlier one is he isn't sure if it's them or if it's Yost. And now the way they behave at this one makes it feel like the earlier one might have been Yost. Because there was no yelling, there was no driving. It was just, well, I mean, we heard some tires, but there was just the sudden shock. Shooting. Yeah. But Jim is dressing up all nice as yost has invited him to brunch and rocky is just so happy that they're getting to be good friends he just wants his boy to have

a friend yeah that's all but jim explains that uh lee is nice enough on the surface uh but there's something off that he's trying to figure out and then then I kind of like this. So this settles, I guess, the conspiracy part from earlier where he says that he thought he was getting into some someone who was like jumping into premature organ donations or something like that. But it's not possible with how strict the system is. like there's all these safeguards and checks and balances in the donation system to keep someone from doing what he thought Yost was doing, which is just like, right. I don't know, hijacking someone's body before they were dead.

Right. Essentially. So that's not what's going on, but something is going on. Everyone else who does this kind of thing is a, is a nonprofit and has like more staff and bigger offices. They're integrated with the system in a more obvious way.

And Yos is different. He specifically says he's wondering if he's the first one who tried to kill him. I think he says something about, like, I wonder why he had a file or something. And Rocky goes, I am standing here just hoping that my son did not break into that good man's office.

How do I look? Oh, you look fine. There's some really good Rocky lines in this. There's also the, you can't start off being friends by investigating them. Yeah, Jim gets all dressed up and goes to this big brunch party where we get a little bit of Jim

talking to other guests about Lee. And they kind of have the same read, which is like, no one really likes him but they do find value in being close to him he seems too smooth but something is missing and so we're getting this theme hit over and over now about like something's off with him something's missing and this gets into more of the character portrait where now it's like thinking about how he's been presented so far what are we being told versus what we've seen on the screen like you know he is very calm very chill it's interesting so i start paying attention to him more as a yeah that's a screen presence um

thorold brings jim a plate of something and so in their first encounter uh she your time is my time and my time is your time right i have a wonderful spot where we can go and talk your time is my time and my time is your time right i have a wonderful spot where we can go and talk your time is my time my time is your time huh yeah you remember the lyric no my time oh yeah yeah that's cute very specifically giving us that picture of her like not really being like present i think in conversations they only have one plate but she's eating the eggs off of his plate and effect says it always looks better on someone else's plate she accidentally quotes some other song lyrics and when jim is like oh sunny sunny and share she's like what jim is picking up on on references

she's making by accident and she doesn't get it um but she's happy that he's seeing more of lee lee needs more friends um and she has a good story for him for his magazine article she had trouble getting a job after graduating from business school she's not good at tests and she specifically says something like i'm not i'm not dumb or anything i'm just not good at tests they stress me out something like that they bum her out or yeah yeah but we liked her attitude and gave her the job anyway even though she didn't do great on the test but then two days after she started she got really sick and went to the hospital but he kept her job for her and paid for everything and she was able to just you know pick it back up when she got out he's a good man and he's always appreciated that jim askers says that she must be so busy with all the legal

stuff and paperwork she says that it's funny but lee he likes to do all this stuff he says i'll do it myself he's just like the commercial i'll do it myself i'll do it myself i assume this is a commercial that people at the time would have known. I'm not familiar with this commercial. Yeah, I think I get the point from the context. Jim excuses himself to talk to Lee, but really he's just slipping into the house to take a look around. He does find some kind of medical looking equipment in a closet that seems a little out of place. And then notices that there is a I think it looks like and then is later confirmed to be a bronze star that is leveling out a chest of drawers, which is an odd thing to do if you're a military person.

And then he runs into Lee leaving the bathroom and he has a greasy towel that he's cleaning his hands with. And he says something like, oh, there's a dead battery in a car blocking the drive, just dealing with it or something. But you better make sure you join us for dessert. It's chocolate mousse cake. We follow Jim as he gets on the road in his rental yacht

and then the camera shows us that a hose has been run from his exhaust into the cabin of the car and we get our little sequence from the preview montage of Jim getting woozy and he's swerving all over the road and fading in and out and his feet are falling off the pedals.

And he finally pushes the door open and just rolls out of the car before it goes off, off the road, over the edge, down a hillside, flips over and explodes. So a couple of things about this. Number one,

I, because of the opening montage i was expecting this scene i was expecting jim to be drugged i was watching the party closely i was noting how she was eating off his plate but he barely touched anything and in fact he did the whole deal about going up to the buffet like i'm gonna get more food he goes up to the buffet just leaves his full plate right there at the buffet and then goes and does his snooping about and then there's the whole bit about the the dessert the chocolate mousse thing i kept thinking when did he get poisoned and then we see this tube and i was like oh and then like the just moments before we saw

uh lee come in wiping his hands from grease or whatever he'd been working on a car or whatever um so i was like all of that was like moments of like when is this gonna oh or what oh you know like that um having like a little mystery in my head and then having it revealed right away and then i get done with all that and the car blows up and i think to myself well there goes all the evidence and as we'll find out no uh in a refreshing change of pace yeah we go to uh another hospital bed where jim is uh he he inhaled carbon monoxide fumes but he's okay now dennis lee and sorrel are all there and so jim is kind of telling dennis what happened and watching lee he says that his car was okay when he got to the place for brunch, but someone tampered with it.

It doesn't seem to be the style of the two, the two Yahoo's right there. They're more shooting guns, not subtly, you know, engineering poisons. And then he does finally confront Lee directly. He's like,

you were out, you know, you were outside while my car was there. I saw your hands, you know, dirty with car was there. I saw your hands dirty with grease. And Lee denies it, of course. Whatever happened to you scrambled your brains a little. Now I think this just brought

it out in the open. I've been watching you, Yost, just like you've been watching me. I thought we were friends. Playing it right to the wall. There's this great piece of physical business where Lee leaves. Sorrel is watching Jim give his kind of last little thing.

So her back's to the door and she just goes, how can you be so wrong about someone? And she turns to leave, but the door is already closed behind Lee. So she almost bounces off of it. Yes. And like opens it and storms out after him. And that's a great little moment. And we'll get back to it in a second.

Dennis thinks that Lee is going to leave him alone now, now that everything's out in the open. But Jim again, reiterates that, I don't know, this guy's different. And then he has some, some final comments about how he's had two pileups in two days,

but, but thankfully his firebird is coming back tomorrow. We've saying the whole episode going where's the firebird right apparently gone but it's coming back tomorrow and he wonders if he should have it packed in a rubber crate i really love that dennis is just on board with this particular theory that Rockford has about Yost, right? You expect Dennis to be like, he's a respectable doctor, but instead he's like, Dennis even like presents the evidence of the pipe. Yeah.

He says that they did find some like melted exhaust, like pipe that, that could have been used in the manner that Jim described. Yeah. So he's like, okay, so this guy is definitely doing this thing, but,

uh, steer clear of him or whatever. But it's, it's, it's very refreshing to have Dennis both for him and the lungs be on, uh, Rockford side. Like now that he knows that we know that he's up to something,

like we can't arrest him. We don't have any evidence to like actually prosecute him, but I believe you that he's been doing something. But now he'll stop. And Jim's like, he's not going to stop. So this little door thing, I don't think it was a accident that they just kept. I think it was a staged moment for these characters, because we're now going to get into kind of like finding out the backstory of this guy, Lee. He's we're going to get a portrait of a guy who is not well. Yes. I mean, he's basically he's a sociopath. That's the portrait that we're going to get of him going forward. Very, very, very specifically.

And this is the thing with the door is almost a moment that that kind of like nods to that. Because like so he's you know he's with someone they're going to leave together right he opens the door to leave and it would never occur to him to wait until the other person is ready you know like yeah he just leaves it does not occur to him to wait for the other person hold the door open or anything he's just out and just assumes they'll be there or they won't who cares right yeah um and then it is also emphasizing sorrel as this kind of ditz like right how can you be so wrong about a person and then right right it is immediately shown that she doesn't know anything about this person right or her faith is is not well placed yeah so it's a it's a good

it's a good use of like blocking to tell us a little bit about these two characters in their own special way uh that i don't know just stuck out to me in retrospect is like yeah that was really good it's really slick a little smooth so jim jim is now trying really on the case uh he's tracked down some relatives of yost he saw their address on a package in his office it turns out that so this is like a country road and we see some cows like this is you know farm farm country later i think he says they're up in oxnard which i always appreciate good old oxnard reference so this is lee's aunt and her husband the man says that uh you know lee was like you know your your side's people and he leaves the room for them to talk and she doesn't really have anything to say so jim's claiming to be an army buddy and he's like trying to get in

touch with with lee after all these years and uh she says something like i don't think he's going to call but you can leave your name if you want the actress is doing a wonderful job of showing a woman who is absolutely terrified of the situation it's very unsettling to watch her because normally people they either are charmed by jim or they're annoyed or angered by jim right but they're rarely in this situation where she just she's just wide eye shell shot so this scene is really where stuff gets to get or this episode really really starts to get eerie i think yeah and part of that is the setting and part of that is the information that we learn but yeah she's terrified uh the guy kind of appears at the window and like motions for jim

to come join him kind of walks with jim over the bar and he's kind of asking a question but before he can finish it he grabs jim and pulls him into the barn and holds a scythe to his neck it's amazing game's over mister i looked in your car now give me straight answers um so he knew that he couldn't have been an army friend of lee's because lee doesn't have any friends. He tipped his hand with that story. Jim tells him the truth. He got their name off a package. He's just trying to find out more about this guy's background. He's got this great line where he's like,

you could have saved your tricks, mister. Yeah. Like I hate him. I would have told you anything. But yeah. So he says that the, the,

the problem with Lee, even growing up, even as a kid, as he never, he never had any conscience. And it was a relief when the army like took him when he like, you know, the kind of like foundational story here. So Lee never liked it out there in the country. He didn't like how it smelled or whatever.

It was wanting to move. And his mom told him that they'd move in the house, burn down. Then the next day it did. His mom died in that fire. Lee was nine years old. And when he said that, it was like, you know, I don't know. I didn't write down the exact thing, but it was like, and that was when he was nine. Like, this is the beginning of his sins.

Yeah. So I think this is the scene where I was like, oh, this isn't going to be about like Jim busting some kind of like organ racket. This is about Jim's dealing with this one particular guy. So it really kind of narrowed down the focus for me in a way that I had to kind of adjust what I thought the episode was going to be for the rest of it. I think you're right. Like this is, we're, throughout the episode, we were aimed at this moment.

You know, we kept kind of moving towards this, moving towards this. Like I said before, in the beginning, it felt like a conspiracy with gaslighting and all of that. But I agree. Like, this is the moment we see this woman on this couch and how terrified she is. Then we start hearing the terrifying tales of what this guy was like. this guy was like and now we've gone from some sort of organized not organized crime the mob but organized criminal endeavor to this is this is a serial killer this is a um and this is where it really starts to slide towards the horror genre in interesting ways um yeah and if there's more stuff that is horror-y definitely shout it out i didn't think that the rusty scythe was a nice little...

No, it was good. My note for that was simply a scythe! Yeah, I mean, there's obviously horror tropes, like going out into the farm and then just the isolation that these people probably have.

But this is more like a Hannibal Lecter kind of thing. This is a person that despised where he came from um yeah it's like a psychological thriller yeah yeah it's it's more when we get towards the end when we start putting sorrel in danger and of course the just the horrifying premise right here that this is someone that uh cherry picks people to to orchestrate their deaths so that their organs can be harvested for money which i think we're almost at spoilers well our next scene is in fact at the va hospital so a detail from that was that the reason that he had a package from those relatives in his office is because they were keeping his mail for him while he's in the va off hospital after him leaving the the service um then they'd send it back to him i guess so jim goes to the va hospital and my note is jim is trying to violate hippa

which i don't think existed at the time um but yeah he's telling this doctor like you know i'm from this service and i just need to get these records and the doctor's like our patients are strictly anonymous i cannot give you those without a court order and just leaves which is like you know what good people shouldn't just be giving jim rockford random medical files i mean i like jim and all but yeah this the system the system works in this case um however he was overheard by uh a guy um who pulls him aside into a supply closet okay and wants to talk to him about yost um he's the shaver he shows jim that he has a straight razor so okay we just have him threatened with the site and then the way he gets him into a closet and then shows him the straight razor is very, that's very horror movie, right? But we know that Jim's not going to get his throat slit.

We think we know. Yeah. But yeah, he's the shaver for those who can't do it themselves. He knows Yost. He remembers the last time he saw him, which is like a specific date in 1976. And he could use some cash. So we get our second bribe where Jim turns around and tries to figure out exactly how much he's willing to part with, which is very good. And we see that he offers him another $5 bill. You kidding? Things really that tough out there? They're that tough.

Things really that tough out there? They're that tough. I mean, Jim's not getting paid, so it makes sense. So what this guy has to say is that Lee Yost was faking having a traumatic anxiety disorder. He was running an ambulance service for the army and there was a fire and some people died in that fire. This was like a cover for him while the investigation was going or something. That's kind of implied. But that's why he was at the VA hospital. But he says he knew he was faking because people with his real condition, they don't feel anxiety.

They just have to learn the symptoms. They keep changing the name. Sociopathic personality. Moral insanity. It's all the same. He has no morals and no compassion i think we would say sociopath yeah i don't know what the current terminology is or uh if it's like what they're depicting here is legit like that all of that's outside my wheelhouse yeah same but i you know you you get what he's saying. Yeah. And he does point out that he was a natural in the army.

Once he learned how to cover for, you know, his, his deal, um, he helped out with surgeries. He was a natural. And then Jim asks,

what did he do in the army? Psychological warfare. How about that? Yeah. Um, yeah. So it's kind of a little claustrophobic scene. I feel like this guy's kind of hamming it up a little bit.

Like the actors, like he's not as naturalistic as some of the other yeah roles in this particular episode um but it's you know we're getting this information and it's important for us to hear so it's it's it's weird because i'm like at this point in the episode i feel a little weird being like this was kind of funny because it's the natural amount of humor in a rockford files episode is is still, it's trended down a little bit from the beginning, but it's still here. But it feels a little weird tonally because I'm kind of on edge, like seeing where this is all going to go.

There's physical bits going on here. Like there's the hunt for the match. Oh, yeah. He's trying to smoke a cigarette. And I honestly, like I wrote down that that was happening and that I don't know the resolution. Yeah, it was like Jim. Jim looked for a match and didn't find one.

Yeah. And then he just gave up and put the cigarette back in his pocket, I think. And then there's the bit where when he leaves. I think he leaves the light on and then Jim turns it off before he leaves. But there's like a little like beat there where Jim's like, wait, I'm in this. Why am I in this closet? What's going on? So there is some sort of gag going on there.

But yeah, it definitely has these trappings of the rise in danger here. You're not dealing with somebody who's motivated the same way you're used to dealing with them. Yeah. same way you're used to dealing with them yeah yeah we have a um final scene with dennis in in his office um yeah where dennis is is having billings bring him some aspirin because he has such a headache which is always great this is another uh five years later because now dennis has an office he's not out on the the floor with everyone else and um we get the line that his two Yahoo buddies are being held somewhere on a hit-and-run charge. So thankfully they're out of the picture.

We no longer need to worry about them for the duration of this episode. Jim tells Dennis about the ambulance service. It was under some kind of investigation and all the records burned in that fire. So they're never able to prove anything. Arson was suspected, but there's no evidence of arson um so like there's all these kind of suspicious things that fit this profile but

there's no proof of anything and then jim says that he looked at the accident report on the guy that he saw yost operating on who died in a motorcycle accident he says that could have been a setup he was alone when he was hit he has a rare blood type and an unusual tissue match there's an anonymous phone call to the hospital to you know get the ambulance and there's a release form for his parents wait like ready as soon as they got there in fact his files such as they are are full of people with rare blood types and unusual tissue matches and as you know uh wealthy people are not willing to wait for anything. Yes. Jim theorizes that stories about his income

don't really cover his lifestyle. He checked it out and he was only a sergeant in the army. He wasn't a battalion commander or whatever, so it's not like he has that income like he claimed. Dennis is doing his standard dubious Dennis bit and nobody's noticed until now. Jim says, just an old guy up in Oxnard and then we go into the thing with the someone

he met at the VA hospital and we get the bit from the preview montage where doctor, resident, inmate, etc. Jim waits around at the foundation office till he can talk to Sorrel and he wants to tell her,

you know, Hey, I think this is what's going on. Uh, that Lee had her tissue typed while she was in the hospital with her illness. Uh, and she also has a rare blood type. And so he has this file on her,

like all the other files have the same attributes. So he thinks that's why he hired her to keep her around. And just in case he, you know, has an order right you're saying that he's kept me here because i'm not bright enough to notice anything wrong too trusting i don't believe you oh sorrel so she doesn't know what to think um she says she's going home and jim says you're sure she goes yeah what do you think then we cut to sorrel going to yost's house yeah oh no sorrel so here we are full-on horror movie right it's dark yeah sorrel's coming to yost uh does she doesn't know what to do after hearing these things that jim

was saying yost wants to know what else he told her and we cut back and forth between them and jim who's followed in the firebird i have have a note. Firebird's back, baby. This is neither here nor there. But did Jim follow her or was he his next stop at Lee's house? It's probably the second one because he kind of looks at her car like, hmm. Yeah, that's what I was wondering too. Yeah. Also, Lee's house is stunning.

Yeah, it's a mid-century modern stunning. Yeah. It's a, it's a mid-century modern master masterpiece. Yeah. It's as all the great, yeah. All the cantilevers and low ceilings and sunken living room. Living room. Yeah. It's beautiful.

Um, so we see Jim kind of like slipping in, uh, back and forth as we go back with their conversation. We see Lee drawing a syringe of something while sorrel's pouring drinks she's upset and confused jim comes in through the front door with his credit card trick yost is uh standing behind sorrel as she throws back her drink and as she turns he says like see what loose talk can do when he raises a

syringe and she starts screaming specifically screaming no i hate shots yes but jim is there just in time he grabs a pillow from the couch oh yes we have a brief battle where he blocks a syringe and then gives zeus a good punch across the face and they fall into the couch. Jim triumphant. Syringe versus couch cushion. Like I said, this is a scene that all of my horror movie instincts were telling me was going to go the

way it clearly wasn't going to go. And one of them is just how viscerally terrifying fighting off a syringe with a couch cushion is. Like, it makes sense. It's a thing that you can get the syringe caught in and then, you know, toss aside. It all makes sense.

But, like, in a horror movie, that syringe goes through the couch cushion. And you would play with that tension. So there's a lot of stuff happened here that just felt very much like, oh no, but it's all right. It's Jim. Jim's here. Whatever attention remains, I think, is immediately kind of deflated with some humor. Where he's telling Sorwell to call the police and ask for Becker.

What's the phone number? Just ask the operator. How do you spell the lieutenant's name? Here. I could have done that. Yeah. You could have. I was trying to get you to do it.

It's very, very apropos. She's not necessarily good secretary but we're about to learn she has other career opportunities or sorry not opportunities ambitions ambitions thank you yes we go to uh our final look at walter brook and his eyebrows yes checking jim out telling him that his knee should be okay in a few days. There's been an ongoing sub-theme of Jim's knee in this episode. It was locked in the original accident and he couldn't bend it. He's been kind of limping around as he runs. He does apologize to Jim for being so rude with him and dismissive of his concerns.

But I think he says for Jim and for us as audience, he knows for a fact that that person was dead yes he was definitely dead before yost did that surgery so he wasn't operated on while alive it was bad for other reasons but not for that particular reason yeah the initial horror that sent jim on this investigation turns out not to be true, but also true. But the horror of Yost setting him up to be hit by a car so that he could harvest his cornea that appears to have actually been what happened. Yes. Yeah.

Yeah. There's a lot of like letting people off the hook here. And also like, there's a very important bit here where, yeah, I mean, there's a bit of restoring trust in the medical profession. Yeah,

exactly. Uh, the doctor can't believe it about yost and jim says well he's a one in a million case right he never should have been let out of the va psychiatric hospital um you know how do you look out for that kind of thing right uh sorrel pops up uh she excitedly asks how did it go um rocky his faith has been shaken and he talked and he's like you know i don't know if i trust the yeah trust the doctors with my organs my liver's been doing well for me so far like my my heart beats once as beat once a second my entire life or you know he has all he has good things to say about all of his organs and then Dr. Eyebrows what's his name? Dr. Bosca is the character. Dr. Bosca says that

well, we do like to keep our donors under a certain age limit. I mean, no offense, but we'd be happy to take anything your son wants to give. Jim says that well, you can have it all. I think it's great work that you're doing here. Jim Rockford as our audience

surrogate telling us it's okay. We can're doing here so yeah jim rockford as our audience surrogate telling us it's okay we can trust real doctors with our organs we can't you can't do to organ donning what you did to uh invoking the fifth amendment the grand jury yeah yeah yeah grand jury testimony yeah yeah yeah uh but yeah they'll amend his license to say he's a donor, and they exchange hearty thank yous. And then we go to our final little scene. Jim, Rocky, and Sorrel walking down the pier. Rocky is still grumpy about them not wanting his kidneys. I ain't heard of such a thing, an age limit on kidneys.

I got me as good a liver as any liver in the country. Sorrel's out of a job, but now she can get into something she really wants. Like an astronaut. I want to look at the stars. Did she say astronaut? Because I thought she called them astronomer. Like an astronomer. Oh, maybe she did. And then she says,

I wonder if there's life in the stars. Like on Mars. And Jim says, well, that's a planet, not a star. And then, oh look, pelicans! And we have a close-up on seagulls and so we end on jim giving her an indulgent but but but friendly look as she smiles at the birds freeze frame end of episode end of season five tucked in there's another good rocky line where he's like i'd like to see that dr bosco whatever his name i like see his kidneys i bet they ain't no better than mine some things improve with age it's fun the ending was like like okay okay let's pull out of this bummer yeah yeah let's restore some normalcy here sorrel's gonna be fine yeah um yeah yeah before

we get into our our wrap-up uh uh, about the, the knee thing. Um, we, we've talked about this before, but not for a while. Um, so this is probably a good time to yet again, celebrate James Garner for doing all of his own practical stunts and everything. Um, but there's, there's a little bit of a writeup about this in, uh, 30 years of the Rockford files. Um, there's a, there's a stat somewhere about how many knee surgeries he had, because he had a

injured knee from his days playing football. And then he basically got new knee surgeries between some seasons. I don't think it was every season, but he definitely had one between seasons two and three. Garner once gave a particularly memorable litany

of his injuries when he appeared on the tonight show with johnny carson in 1986 i'm always in pain john the actor said with all the injuries i've had i'm always in pain i've got nine incisions on my knee i've broken 12 ribs at a time about 16 or 17 altogether i've broken bone on my spine i've broken my tailbone i've broken every major ligament and bone other than that hey i'm in good shape but yeah this so you know the knee thing was in the text of multiple episodes you know we see him limping around a lot and sometimes it's part of the you know there's a there's an in in episode reason uh this also was supposed to be the end of the series this was supposed to be the final season oh so this would have been the episode the final episode of the final season that would have been weird right the the the summer that

follows is where the studio shows jim their books that says that the rockford files still hasn't made any money oh yeah garner wanted to be done after five seasons and then the studio had an option to do a sixth season and they did because were like, you still haven't made why there's only half a season of the sixth season is because he got so physically you know damaged that he could not continue filming yeah yeah um so that's all a bummer but i think is some interesting context for yeah if this was the last so this wasn't the last shot episode but it was the last aired episode of the season and like what a weird way to go out if that was your last episode of the entire series. Just to make sure I got this right.

This was it's not even that like this could have been the last episode because they would have they may have canceled it. This is what they were planning to have as the last episode. I'm not in a position to know whether they were like all right we're all done and then universal was like no you have to come back or if it was like all right we're done with the season we'll see what happens with our next year you know then we came back but either way you'd think there's an element of like this could be our last episode of our last season but like i don't know who decides what order you know i guess the producers decide right to put them in um and the the episode immediately prior was um never

send a boy king to do a man's job and i kind of feel like if you had those in the can wouldn't you put that one last yeah like like that is a note to go out on i'm uh i'm looking at the season now uh trying i mean it's really i mean they're all fun seasons but like yeah uh but then also in contrast with our last episode roundabout which was the last episode of season one also with jesse wells i think as we talked about there that ended up being a really fun season ender because it had such a memorable climax, but that like foot race through Hoover dam and like, here's a big fun thing.

See you next year. And this, this episode, I mean, there's a lot about it to like, but it does feel kind of like a middling episode to me. Yeah. There's a certain realm where it's like okay uh i'm looking through the other episodes of this season um the man who saw the alligators is in this season yeah it's a strong season that would have been such an ender you know like oh we're

gonna bring back a villain that would have been a real dramatic ending yeah yeah it's um it's it's an interesting choice to end it on but it's it's also it might not even be a choice uh sure it could have been driven by other concerns like yeah i don't know how you schedule a season of tv especially in this era sorry the the second episode is Rosendahl and Gilda Stern are dead. There's a lot of real strong guest star episodes, memorable episodes. This one, I think I will remember this one because of that kind of turn to being more

of a character study thriller and less of a mystery investigation. But this probably isn't going to be on a top ten list of mine. I mean, I would agree. I really enjoyed this episode. I, it, yeah. When you think about like, okay, how many stars are we going to rate it or whatever? I, that stuff, I can't, it's either at the top or at the bottom. And then in the middle, it's like, I can't grade the eight.

Yeah. Like if I was doing a, if I was doing a ranking where it's like rank all the episodes yeah i wouldn't put it low in a vacuum but most other episodes i think of i'm like yeah i probably put it under that one yeah i probably put it under that one too yeah yeah um yeah i mean that's part of the reason why the brackets are fun i'm surprised by the result we i get by filling out my own bracket but um yeah i certainly would not have picked it to be the ending but also if i had done a show for five years and i was getting tired of doing the show uh i also might have just been like yeah that's fine that's a fine that's a okay one to end it on it's as good as any of the others when you're in it i don't know if you can tell if you have yeah an episode like uh like the man who saw the alligators yeah yeah i don't i don't know

if while you're doing it you think to yourself this is this is one that's going to this is one that the podcasts will talk about right right right yeah i mean you could definitely see how is it kind of a departure in terms of the story with it not being a big mystery and it being more about this almost horror movie-ish unveiling. Yeah. It's not a big cast episode. It's a pretty small cast episode. They do blow up a car. Yeah, they went through the trouble of blowing up a car.

Which seems a little out of scale, actually, with the rest of the episode. They left the truck as a wreck not a wreck but like they beat up the rocky's truck yep no i mean like it's also weird in that it doesn't like okay so when in season six they do the uh hawaiian one which is the last one they filmed is that i don't think it's the last one they filmed but it was they uh james garner insisted that they bring the entire crew to hawaii for it yeah um so it's kind of like a party like atmosphere that i see and understand is like like even like even if that one is as far as episodes go well you know yeah it was like it was okay but yeah it's like oh dennis becker's in hawaii too oh it had a fun it had a good vibe yeah yeah it's a victory lap right like uh this isn't a victory lap yeah no yeah thinking of all the things you could possibly do with a

final episode which isn't to say that this was you know a bad choice or anything there's nothing wrong with this episode but my overall takeaway of it is a little bit amazed just because of my current headspace but like it's a bit of a bummer and if i'm going to watch an episode of the rockford files i probably would pick a different one not that there's anything wrong with this one right right but i feel like i just there isn't anything in it to really recommend it over another given episode to me even jesse wells like i mean she's her character's super fun i don't really love the like trope right she's kind of like i'm not very smart this is my my deal. Yeah. She's a part of what's going on there is that she's a lamb and her sheep dog is a wolf. Yeah.

Yeah. She's a naive. Yeah. And that's not great. I will say I really enjoyed this episode, but I think it specifically pushed buttons that I like. Obviously, we've talked about like the sort of whether or not they're intentional nods to horror it definitely sits in that realm but also i love a story where somebody like jim uh is just incidentally involved in something yeah and they get a little drawn in

and then the resistance they get is what pulls them in further. And there's a ton of examples of that. That's a noir trope that happens all the time. And this one just feels really, really right about that. It's just in witnessing what he witnessed and being like, wait a minute, I need to know what's true. And then because somebody is like, no, no, you don't need to worry about this. He's like, hmm, that makes me worry about this. Right, right.

I almost wonder if it would have been stronger for me if it was like an out of town episode. So there's a little more like even more kind of isolation that you had to deal with. Yeah, maybe, maybe not. Like if it was a little more, more noir-y. Right. You know, I probably feel the vibe a little bit more. Yeah. This one was just on the edge of unsettling, which is not fun for me.

You've listened to our previous Plus Expenses and we talked about horror movies. Yes. There's a certain line that horror, the horror genre can cross where I'm just like, this is not fun for me. Again, this is not a horror me. Um, again, this is not a horror episode. It's not like, yeah, I think we're putting a lot of emphasis on that because I'm sitting at this side of the, uh, the podcast here. We don't need to be doing that. We don't, but yeah, if it was like a little more stylized and a little less creepy, I'd probably like it more, but it's not stylized. It's very creepy.

So it's not really doing it for me. But, you know, that's just a things are going to hit different. I mean, I would never recommend that someone not watch this episode because it's definitely watchable and like moves along. Definitely has a has some reveals that you get to kind of see them coming right as they crest which is always you know the pacing is good um all that stuff but uh yeah yeah a more interesting episode than a fun one for me how about that sounds good all right though this is the end of season five it is not in fact the end of our show no we'll go adventuring through the episodes we have remaining. We still have a lot of them. So we'll see what we turn up next.

Is this the end of season five, but specifically the start of our season six? I guess so. Okay. This will be the first episode of 2022. And we started in January of 2017. Yes. I think we technically started in December of 2016, but... No, we started recording in December. Our first

episode was December 23rd, 2016. Okay. That's when we dropped our first three episodes. Oh, I see. Yeah. Yeah, so we bridged December into January. So if we count, that is our prelude. And our season started in 2017. So 2017, 2018,

2019, 2020, 2021, 2022. Yes. So this would be the start of our sixth season if we're counting it by year. Yes. Yes. Well, okay. Well, happy sixth season. Happy sixth season.

Thanks for coming with us down this little trip to memory lane. Yeah. But yeah, as I said, we have plenty more to do still. to memory lane yeah but uh yeah as i said we have plenty more to do still so we will search out another episode and be back next time to talk about another episode of the rockford files