Two Hundred A Day - Episode 99: The Gang at Don's Drive-In

Episode Date: March 13, 2022

Nathan and Eppy meet an old friend of Jims in S4E15 The Gang at Don's Drive-In. Jack Skowron, former best-selling writer and current alcoholic, is in LA chasing down stories for a new book with Jim's help. When he gets beat up, Jim starts to suspect there's more to his agenda, and has to uncover the sordid story behind a decades-old high school party gone wrong. A fun watch overall, with a sometimes-muddled story elevated by screen chemistry and some truly all-timer Rocky and Dennis appearances! 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, I have finally finished 12 long years of psychotherapy and I'm now able to tell you just what I think of you. Would you please call me? Welcome to 200 a Day, the podcast where we talk about the 70s television detective show, The Rockford Files. I'm Nathan Palletta. And I'm Epidio Rappershaw. And before we get into our episode today, we have a blinking light on our answering

machine. Oh. So we're going to see what some of our listeners have had to say about a selection of our previous episodes. First one here is a comment from our website from Dave Otterson, who I believe is also a patron, on South by Southeast, which was our episode 92. Mm-hmm. I believe we remember it well um but we talked about jim's cat and whether whether jim jim having a cat at home was an excuse or not dave says uh hey guys jim's cat is called valentino we definitely meet the cat in one episode though i don't remember

which one jim is asking valentino how it got into the trailer possibly because of a break-in so i assume that valentino is an outside cat jim says something like you've been a good cat it's a nice little bit i don't think we've done that i don't think so i think like i was like maybe for some reason it makes me maybe think of the attractive nuisance i don't know why i don't think it's in that episode, but for some reason it makes me think of that episode. There's okay. All right. We were just talking about, you know,

single subject websites. If you go to cinema cats.com. Oh, perfect. It's Beamer's last case, which I'm pretty sure we haven't done. No. Yeah.

All right. So, so we have that to look forward to. Look at that. Oh, look at Valentino. Well, so we'll have a Valentino debut episode at some point. Yeah, that's great. I'm really kind of looking forward to that.

Thanks for the tip, Dave. Next, we're going to go to Patreon, where Brian Pereira has a comment for from the becker connection our episode 94 i think this is in relation to us wondering why there is that scene that like the car wash possibly it was a car wash question mark where becker's asking jim for help and is quote buying him lunch and it's just like candy from the vending machine yeah he doesn't want the people touching his car brian says noting that the club owner you know the our bad guy from that episode noting that the club owner does auto racing and owns a car wash which is in the dialogue

may show where becker's car picked up the planted drugs a car wash where he goes to use the vending machines for lunch a little too cozy no wonder dennis was concerned about people messing with a spare tire oh yes all right well done connecting some dots there good i i'd buy it well sleuthed well sleuthed we also have a comment from patron and friend of the show sam anderson regarding roundabout our episode 96, coming through with another good actor poll for us. The woman who slams Jim's foot in the door and extracts $100 from him was played by Virginia Gregg, an incredibly prolific TV, film, and radio actor.

She starred in works ranging from The Herculoids to Maverick to nearly every incarnation of Dragnet and was even the voice of Norma Bates in Psycho. Wow. Where I first knowingly encountered her may be of interest to 200 A Day fans, a regular on the old-time radio program Richard Diamond, Private Detective, a 1949-53 show about a private eye who charged $100 a day, had contentious friendships among the police, got knocked on the head a lot, and participated in lots of woody banter, courtesy of show creator Blake Edwards

of The Pink Panther and breakfast at tiffany's fame over 100 episodes can currently be found on archive.org for any interested in sampling the program and nice i'll i'll try to remember to drop a link in the show notes to richard diamond private detective uh i just jumped on her imDb, and she was also in an episode of Ricky Brockleman, Private Eye. Ah, Ricky Brockleman, Private Eye. Excellent. We'll need to do that extended universe when we finally run out of Rockford Files shows. Oh, she's the voice of Tara on Herculoids. So that's, if you were me and you grew up watching the herculoids uh that's good

to know i recently i think we might have talked about this in a plus expenses a few years ago but recently watched uh as an adult several of the herculoid i don't think i've ever seen their herculoids it's um hannah bobera okay it's a uh family that a family of of tarzans that live on a planet uh the dad the son and uh the mom and then they have like a something that's like a six-legged triceratops that shoots balls of power from its horns sweet uh a flying thing that shoots an electric ray like a flying dragon thing that shoots an electric ray from a flying dragon thing that shoots an electric ray from its tail and two schmooze like two blobs that that i think they're probably called schmooze like i can click on her gillies right now and find out uh oh gleeps one's called gleep uh anyways it's

for kids uh watching it as adults it's very clear it's for kids what happens is that they live on a planet and they protect the planet and like every episode something comes and tries to invade the planet and they fight it off and um it's it's fun but it's it's got some dated things like almost always virginia greg's character is almost always told to stay at home, which is great. So, yeah. Yeah, a storied career there. Finally, we've had some good Twitter interactions recently. Some folks have been sending us good screenshots and little trivia things from the show. We sometimes take a little while to catch up on Twitter, but always appreciate those over at 200pod.

But one I wanted to call out here, we got a tweet from Michelle Berezanski at Michelle Berezan1. You can find the retweet on our timeline. I was searching through YouTube and found this treasure. Knowing that you are both fellow fans of Angel, I wanted to share with you. Did you know this existed? I did not. I will now listen to the entire album this is in fact a 1980 album by stewart marglin entitled and the angel sings i will i will tell you i to my great great regret i've yet to listen to it uh but i will before our

next episode i will i will give the whole thing a listen. I remember seeing this come across, being like, oh, I should listen to that. Forgetting immediately. And then now I have it open in a tab. I didn't really have a chance to go down any rabbit holes about it. But it is on Discogs with a full track list for anyone who wants to check out the, as it says, country rock stylings of Stuart Margolin. Perfect. Wonderful. There's 15 for sale from $3.38.

So if you wanted to get it in vinyl or cassette. You know, it wasn't until you said if you want to get it in vinyl or cassette that I realized that you were talking about the price of it and not a title of a song. Oh, because because that that feels like like that would definitely be a Rockford Files title 15 for sale for whatever the price was. I wouldn't put it past Stuart to title something like that. Is there a song called Hotel of Fear? We'll have to listen to it to see because it is titled The Angel Sings. I don't think any of the titles make immediate

Rockford Files references. He does have a voice like an angel, I've often said. The title, or not the title track, but the first track is Brown-Eyed Handsome Man Slash Too Much Monkey Business. It just goes from there. Way back in history Three thousand years, like ever

Since the world began There've been a whole lot of good women There we go. Oh, well, I got to listen to this. Thank you for the recommendation. And we'll definitely have to check it out. If you'd like to leave a message on our answering machine, email us at 200pod at gmail.com. That's like remembering your own phone number. It's 200adaypodcast at gmail.com. That's like remembering your own phone number. It's 200adaypodcast at gmail.com. That's what it is, yes. You can also tweet at 200pod.

We see all of our messages from patrons at patreon.com slash 200aday. And you can leave comments on the episodes individually at our website. Every so often I go through and make sure that all the spam is deleted and trying to reply to people over there. So that can have a little bit of lag as well to show up sometimes. But we appreciate it. Mm hmm. All right. All right.

So we're back. We're ready to talk about this episode, which was your pick. It was indeed. It's been a while we we've been on uh uh about a six week vacation here at the 200 today uh we'll get through the holidays in the beginning of the year of course by the time you hear this the holidays will be what valentine's day and april fool's day this will be coming out after uh after we've picked back up uh after our january break where we like to take yeah take that month off just to give ourselves a breather and kind of reset

um for the coming year and when we were we were getting back we were kind of discussing how we want to get back like we want to come in with the bang do we want to ease ourselves and we're the the sort of catchphrase was ease into 2020. So ease into 2020. Wait, ease into 2022. Oh, my. Woof. So the catchphrase was ease into 2022. I thought maybe it might be fun to do maybe like a goofier episode or something along those lines.

But I don't know why the gang at Don's Drive-In. This is season four, episode 15. The title stuck out to me. The title just, all the titles stick. But like, like I was like, all right, let's find out what this is about. And the fact that a writer suffering from writer's block hires Jim, that premise right there was like enough to be like, yeah, this sounds, I don't remember anything about this. right there was like enough to be like yeah this sounds i don't remember anything about this uh so you know this would be kind of a nice fresh episode to go into and uh i think i mean i enjoyed it i will be honest i probably would have enjoyed any episode right it's a low bar

yeah because we're getting in we're getting back into the rockford after a break, and it's nice to come back. Some classic Rockford actors that show up in this. There's some good Rocky stuff that we'll get into. Not like a lot of it, but there's some good moments. Yeah, there's some good language, good line deliveries. A lot of fun Rockfordishness in this one. This one is actually a sneak twofer arc finisher. Oh.

Not on purpose, just I think as things turned out. So the writer for this episode is James Crocker, who we still think might be our friend Jim Cocker in disguise. This is his second and final Rockford Files script. He also wrote Requiem for a Funny Box, which we did relatively recently. And these two Rockford Files episodes were kind of the beginning, near the, if not the, beginning of his writing career. He ended up doing a lot of sci-fi shows, including writing scripts for and becoming a producer on uh star trek deep space nine he also wrote for outer limits twilight zone um some other stuff not

that that necessarily seems to have much bearing on this particular script if you told me that this was like a cannel script i would have believed you like there's something very yeah he he's in the groove like this this episode is in on track with the kinds of things that the Rockford Files is doing, which is kind of interesting. There's a nice Rockford Files moral display going on here. Yes. That also undercuts Rockford at times, which is exactly what you want. Right. Like you want him to have the moral high ground, but also be like, but don't don't act like you have the moral high ground, dude. And yeah, I really, really enjoyed that. but also be like but don't don't act like you have the moral high ground dude and yeah

I really really enjoyed that the director for this one is Harry Falk and is the I believe the second I forget which order they're in but he also directed the competitive edge which was kind of one flew the cuckoo's nest

analog and those are his only two Rockford Files episodes. So we're finishing the James Crocker and Harry Falk arcs with this one. I did look around. Does not, as far as I can tell, appear to be related to Peter Falk.

But there is a Columbo connection, which we'll get to in a few minutes i do want to say there are some kind of content notes um for some of the plot stuff that comes up a lot of the character dynamic of the writer who hires jim is that he's an alcoholic and that's a serious like issue that you know we we will that is part of the plot and then there is some it's not graphic or anything but there is like some gendered violence that comes up towards the end off screen off screen yeah something that that had occurred in the past uh yeah i the opening montage there isn't a whole lot that uh i wanted to pluck out of the opening

montage to to show except that um uh they clearly say in the opening montage that someone's going to attempt to kill rockford so we know that that's great and we see rocky in trouble we see rocky coming uh running out to the um front of the trailer and shouting at someone to call the cops, which is great. You always have my attention when Rocky's in trouble because I'm like, oh no, don't you dare touch our Rocky. There were two actors that jumped out at me from the preview montage. I so rarely recognize people that I'm like, I recognize them.

First is our main character, Jack jack that we're going to be meeting he's played by an actor named anthony zerb who's been in a ton of things and has has a face right but yeah i recognize him from one of the 90s colombo episodes he plays a magician um and in the episode colombo goes to the guillotine and is very, to me, in my personal arc of Columbo watching, that is one of those where it's like, it's not a great episode, but it's a good episode. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And so I recognize him instantly as that magician. And then we also see a recurring character actor that we've seen recently mills watson who played the guy moss in roundabout yes uh he's playing a similar similarly characterized um yeah character in

this one but like with the bald head and the mustache and everything i was like that guy yeah that guy yeah he's definitely one of those very recognizable faces and of course like he's always playing usually playing a cop on something else that that somebody gets it to work 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 Thank you. China Defined Early America. It's about fast ships, cheap drugs, and American political economy. Published by the University of Chicago Press. Find it wherever good books are sold. Chuck from WhatchaReading.com. Paul Townend, who recommends Fruit Loops, Serial Killers of Color, at FruitLoopsPod.com. Shane Liebling, check out Roll4Your.Party for

all of your online dice rolling needs.ay adan showcasing his amazing miniature painting skills at jayadan.com dave p dave otterson kip holly matthew lee and jay thompson and finally a very special thanks to our detective level patrons for their generous support michael zalisco eric antenna at antenna on Twitter, Brian Pereira at Thermaware, 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. But we start off our episode with Jim as an encyclopedia salesman.

Always a strong start. This episode does a lot of dropping us in the middle of an interaction or a conversation and just kind of trusting us to be like, we'll get filled in as we go about what this is all about. Yeah. And we start right off with that where jim is in the middle of trying to sell some encyclopedias in the name of um he's he's trying to track down uh a woman named nancy uh who is the daughter of the woman he's talking to as the

salesman but turns out that nancy died 18 years ago i think it's later they say 16 years ago i don't remember i might have been down wrong 16 years ago. I don't remember. I might have written it down wrong. 16 years ago is what I have. Yeah, so she died 16 years ago of a burst appendix. And Jim has a very like, whoops. She might have been 18 when she died 16 years ago. Before we get into that bit about the dying and whatnot, I just want to just appreciate Jim's con here here he has encyclopedias on him so first of all he has encyclopedias to sell second of all i like the idea that he's

this this is a con he has in his back pocket to use because this okay this opening feels like not something that jim is doing uh this feels like the uh those glimpses we get at the run of the mill P.I. Right. Yeah. Right. And so it feels like this is just like a routine for him. Like, oh, I've got these encyclopedias. I'll bring them.

I'll do the old encyclopedia salesman. Right. Right. And what that kind of relies upon is him not actually selling encyclopedias, which is great because like, it's just like, yeah, I'm here to sell you encyclopedias knowing that nobody is going to buy those encyclopedias. Yeah. So I just really, really appreciate it.

And also, I think we've gone over this before, but in case you're listening to us and you didn't experience the 70s or early 80s, that was a thing. Like somebody would come to your door and try and sell you an encyclopedia. This is not like some weird out of the blue kind of thing. In my house when I was a kid, we had several A's because they would give you the first book in the encyclopedia as a sampler. And if you wanted more. So we just had the A volume of like three different encyclopedias

i do not remember encyclopedia sales people that was probably before my time but we did have an encyclopedia and i did use it for research papers in middle school yes i think we had the 89 and 90 edition somewhere 89 and somewhere 90 yeah anyhow so the and and the gambit with it is like he knows that she's that this woman is not going to want to buy encyclopedias but he says our records indicate you have a daughter maybe she'd be interested in encyclopedias for like an encyclopedia gift for christmas our holiday rate starts in two weeks and i can like and i can backdate it and so this is where he learns that she's in fact deceased we uh get the credits kind of interspersed throughout this full first whole

sequence, including what I thought was just like a nice little touch, which is the credit for Mills. Watson comes up over him as we see him at a door getting ushered into like a private dining room somewhere. Very cute. Well done. He's coming into this like private club or whatever it is,

pulls someone he knows away from their poker game because they have to talk about a thing. And this is a real like, here's a bunch of stuff. We are not going to understand what this is about until much later in the episode. His character is Stan, Stan Collier. And then he's talking to Bob, Bob Aikison or Ackison, something like that. Stan wants needs more money from Bob and Bob isn't interested in giving him more money to waste.

He's his product company is in trouble. You should be concentrating on your real estate business or something like that. And they mentioned Stan being interested in running for state senate and this seems a little bit like an extortiony thing like i was like is this guy mob one of the things i like about this scene is that the character stands stan mills um is basically coming in hat in hand right like he's he's asking for more money from someone and he's come into a wealthy establishment where there's gambling going on so my first instinct is that stan is of lower status you know maybe owes this guy money or you know whatever and there is some talk of like you haven't paid me back for you know whatever but throughout it uh the way mills plays the character is so menacing in

an understated way that like even though the status says one thing the scene says another right like it says that stands in charge of what's going on here and the the other guy like is projecting authority i don't know it just felt just felt like a great way of kind of showing that like, oh, both of these guys feel like they're in charge of what's happening. They're engaged in like a constant low level power struggle. Yeah. And we're not really sure why until later. But yeah, I think we get that from this first introduction. Yeah, I think we get that from this first introduction.

They got this power struggle, but everything in the text is saying that Bob has the authority over Stan. But still, the way Stan behaves, you're like, what's going on? If you're Epi, you're like, what's going on? Yeah, like he's clearly in a space that isn't his space. Like, yeah, he had to be ushered in. He gets a phone call and like the waiter brings over like a note on a tray and it's like a call from your office. He's like, Oh,

nice touch. Like this is not the kind of environment where he like knows how things work. Um, but he does go to answer, answer the phone and it's from his real estate business, I guess. And there's been a nibble on some property. But the reason that he's getting this call is because the woman who's calling him, who talked to whoever recognized this person as Jack Scourer.

You know, the author. He wrote this bestseller. He wrote the bestseller in the 50s, Free Fall to Ecstasy. Remember? I bought it, but i never finished it all i remember is about this guy rolo who jumps off the roof in the first chapter and then like free associates all the way down by the fourth chapter i stopped reading free fall to ecstasy free fall to ecstasy and then she mentions in the first of a long-running gag throughout the episode that uh you know she never finished it he sounded like maybe he was trying to investigate what stan is up to and stan looks

worried and that's the important thing that we get from the addition to being introduced to free fall uh to ecstasy uh we see that stan is worried that jack is um hunting him down for something this ongoing gag about this book is i mean well well actually i don't remember when everything comes up but it's it it gets more bizarre and fanciful as you go on and the fact that no one has finished it right yeah that Yeah, that's the gag. Just wonderful. Everyone's heard of it, but nobody's finished it. Well, even everyone started it. Yeah, yeah.

We go to the author himself, Jack Skowron. A hell of a name. Hell of a name. Played by Anthony Zurb. And he's wearing his lucky NYU writing sweatshirt. That's all full of holes and stuff. He's talking to Jim about the things that Jim has found out. So this is one of these real,

real meaty Rockford files scenes where we're getting introduced to the plot of the episode. We're getting introduced to the character of Jack and we're getting the Jack Jim dynamic. Yes. All kind of crammed together into this uh into this one scene jack's pitch for this new book he's working on is that he was following the stories of this one particular class from uh from a high school jim is like following up on these kind of lists

of names to find out where these people are now yeah and he tells them about this you know nancy's you know she's been dead like oh another mortuary special um there's a high mortality rate from this high school uh which we'll get to a little more in a minute so they clearly have background there's old times they were in new york at some point they were like carpet layers like they worked doing carpet laying together or something for a while um and they apparently got up to all kinds of hijinks and adventures lots of uh old buddy energy including the like i don't know if no no jack is kind of drunk in this scene already right and he's and he's drinking throughout he's going over to the bar and refilling his glass and jim's kind of giving him little side, and he's drinking throughout. He's going over to the bar and refilling his glass

and Jim's kind of giving him little side eyes. And there's a lot of Jack being like, remember those good times? And Jim being like, yeah, yeah, those were good times. But here's my bill. Right, yes.

Because he has a bill for two days of work, plus, you know, sundry expenses. Jack says that he'll initial it and submit it to his publisher. It'll be a few days. It's just how the things work. But Jim is working out a pocket on this one and would appreciate a rush being put on it.

Jack asks if he finished Freefall to Ecstasy. No, actually, I'm only on page 15. Look, it's really hard to get in. Yeah, I know. i know you're busy it's just that you'd think when two guys lay carpet together for two years and then one of those guys goes out and writes a bestseller that the other guy would have read it in the 20 years it's been out jim's not immediate retort but retort to it is that it was, I told you the book was stolen from me on the beach. Okay.

Which is clearly something that he told him 20 years ago. And like, fine, you could have, you could have gotten it out of the library since then. It's been 20 years, but it like, it's,

this feels very much like an old friend argument. Like it doesn't matter that there's, you know, yeah, it's good stuff. They finish up the scene with uh jack wanting to get dropped off at the marina he has someone they want that he's going to interview that he was meeting there and he would like a ride so in the car we kind of get the extension

of the scene and get a little bit more about this book uh which is tracing the john c fremont high school class of 62 jim kind of makes a a crack about how it's a like real interesting story 200 fry cooks and hotel elevator operators but jack's saying that it's a it's an investigation of the working class that's kids coming from the most depressed area of la no none of these gilded upper middle class kids with spoons in their mouths or whatever he's talking about a class that was wiped out in vietnam 70 of the class was male and they all went to vietnam and 86 of them died there or something like that which is it is grim so okay so here's the thing about this book and like you know the thing that we keep running into with this podcast is like are we doing spoilers i mean like it's an old show uh but it is a puzzle the the subject of this book is a moving target

throughout this episode right now the subject of this book is astounding right like like what he's saying is like going and looking at a single high school class where it was decimated by the vietnam war like that would be an amazing uh the word i'm like came to my mind was expose but that's not exactly what but like like that's a very compelling subject for storytelling yes so this will change as as jim gets more and more skeptical about what's going on uh until we get to what the actual subject of the book is but what's interesting especially because we have this wonderful opportunity to re-examine the entire episode from from the fact that we've seen the end is how how closely hewed to the final thing a lot of this stuff is like our episode opens up

and he learns about somebody dying of appendicitis 16 years ago right that's going to be important and in ways that like i just completely dismissed it like i like because right here we're having this argument i think it was in this argument where he mentions like but she died of appendicitis not in vietnam right like this isn't part of this you know um and he where he mentions like, but she died of appendicitis, not in Vietnam. Right. Like this isn't part of this, you know? Um, and he's kind of like,

yeah, but it's, it's still part of the like working class story. Yeah. Yeah. There's a way I may, we'll talk about it more towards the end, but I, for me personally,

it's like the actual subject of the book actually gets less interesting as we find out what it is. Yeah, no, that's exactly it. Like it starts off with this, like kind of compelling one that jim is actually a little chagrined about his attitude towards it when um he's like well

when you explain it that way another thing that i'm i'm enjoying in this episode uh is this status play thing that's happening with jim and uh jack is that they're both from the same sort of working class background jack wrote a bestseller uh and his his language is all very i would say purple prose but purple prose implies um genre fiction and and not the the lit fic thing he like it's academic it's it's it's a literary mask that he puts on right but when you see what he's dressed as like his his clothes are dirty and he's drunk all the time so he's presenting himself as higher class than jim when clearly they're of the same they grew up together yeah yeah and then so jim is making fun of this guy's book. And then this guy is like, don't look down on the lower classes, Jim.

It's just so sweet. I love it. It's just this like back and forth here. It's good. And they have they have good chemistry, I think. Yeah, they do. Like this casting is really good. They this feels like they're two guys who spent time together, have not spent time together in a long time.

And a lot has changed. And now they're finding new a new dynamic, a level they're driving along in the car the smile on jim's face looks genuine it looks like they're just enjoying themselves and they're just yeah yeah they're just kind of shooting the breeze a little bit in the in the car and then there's other times where jim's like much more serious about it and we we definitely also get this picture of jack as like probably in worse straits more dire straits than he is letting jim know of i think like with the like hey can you give me a ride to the marina and then when they get to the marina he's like hey can you just wait around and you can you can just take me back to your house i'll get a cab from there i'll get us dinner so he's stretching out this time before he'd have to get himself a cab is really yeah yeah we get a crossfade which

is telling us that much more than 10 minutes have passed yes and jim is walking around on the pier and then he sees jack in a shoving match with a guy on a boat in like a white shirt and like a you know like a captain's hat and i think this was actually in the preview montage where jim runs up on there and separates them and yeah uh the the guy is is threatening um jack and telling him to get off his boat before he like punches his face in and stuff like that we basically cut from there to jim pouring jack out of his car yes but the the i think the shocking thing about this transition is that you're he's basically pouring him out of his car but they're both laughing like i expected this to be a very angel-like moment where he's like uh but no they're they're

back to being buds you know they're being buds jack is clearly drunk like yeah yeah very drunk and he he does apologize for for getting his credit card yes classic for dinner um and jim's like all right well let's get you up to your room you know he's just staying at a hotel but jack wants to go into the lobby to get a get get a copy of the new york times because he can't be having with this, the L.A. Is it the L.A. Herald, does he say? The Tribune. The L.A. Tribune. He doesn't like the L.A. press, which is, again, after seeing the whole thing, hits different. Yeah, yeah, for sure.

But in this moment, I think specifically Jim kind of like rags him a little bit. He's like, oh, just because they gave you a bad review for your book or something. Right, yeah. And then he has a whole diatribe about la journalism and journalists in general there's a real shift that i wasn't really able to identify like exactly where it happens where jim goes from being like okay buddy like we had fun now it's time for you to get to bed to jim being like you know what you're too much yeah whatever you're whatever you're looking to get out of this trip like i can't help you anymore there's a particularly cruel line that jack drops

on jim you haven't written a bestseller and i have for slow space between a dunn and jimbo i like i feel like that's the bit where jim's like you know what it's's not worth it. It's just not worth it. He asks if Jim is dumping him. And yeah, I guess so. Well, just call me in the morning. He's a good enough guy that he's like, I'm willing to entertain, you know, talking about this when you're sober.

But this discussion isn't getting us anywhere. And he goes back to the Firebird. this discussion isn't getting us anywhere. And he goes back to the Firebird, but then he hears a yell, and there's two goons grabbing Jack, jumping him right in front of the lobby. So we get a good, meaty tussle, as I note.

A lot of good-sounding thwacks of tossing goons around. Lots of body shots. And Jim can't resist it. Yeah, Jim jumps in. Jack manages to kind of squirt away while the two guys are distracted. But then they end up just giving Jim a couple big lumps right in the stomach.

And then they go and peel out before anyone can come to Jim's aid. The plot begins to thicken. We go to a hospital and there's a bit of a moment where i'm like who are we seeing in this hospital but jim is walking down the uh down the corridor yes and he's he's coming to visit jack as a friend uh because there's no family around the doctor tells him that the the real issue here is that he is suffering from a serious drinking problem. A serious liver damage, possible brain damage. Yikes. Yeah.

And this doctor wants to keep him in the hospital as long as possible in order to get him to quit drinking, sober him up. But this is going to be tough since he has this book that he's trying to write and it's you know it's it's what he's looking forward to is keeping him going basically so like psychologically it's going to be difficult to keep him in bed we we go back to the book yes the doctor has a line uh of something like he says that he's quite a well-respected and regarded author yeah he wrote a uh bestseller back in the 50s a thing called free fall to ecstasy that jack scott yeah well i read that book i read it in college i just didn't put the names together then you're familiar with his talent as a writer oh yes well actually i

never finished the book i never got past chapter four where the hero raleigh roland wrestles with his mother in flashback it's rollo yes rollo of course i was very busy with exams at the time this is this is when it was very clear that this is going to be a running gag like the the first two incidences you can dismiss jim not reading it because we we've we have a glimpse of jim's future and wait no does he not read beth's book or he he says he didn't but he did he says he did but he didn't i think he says he did but he like came to watch the movie or he's trying to read it right before he has to watch the movie or something like that yeah yeah anyways uh spoilers for the 90s uh movies well and we also get another glimpse at like the bizarreness of the book i don't know if this is the spot where

we talk about the sea nymphs in the new york sewers or if we already did that i don't remember the order but yeah there's like we hear about like i got to the part where you know they're the sea nymphs in the new york sewers and then one one where it's like where he's talking to his mother and his mother was a mermaid or something like that right yeah yeah there's yeah there's these little little details that are telling us that this book is it's a lot yes well jack is uh in his hospital bed appreciates that he came um i guess we learned that he called jim in the end jim wants to know who those guys were jack clearly doesn't want to tell him and has this whole thing of like you know lived in nuevo york for you know 20 years and never got mugged and then i come to the

city of plastic smiles or something like yes it's a good line but uh yeah this guy hates la yeah which again there's actually good reason yeah yeah yeah but you could see jim take it personally each time i feel like there's a there's a thing but when jim's like all right well if you don't want to tell me i guess i'll leave jack finally gives in a little bit and reveals maybe the actual direction for his book yeah which he says that some of the guys from the high school who went to Vietnam that came back, they came back with connections to like drug runners in Laos. Jim's like,

Oh, is that what the book's really about? That's putting you in danger and putting me in danger. You should have told me, you know, et cetera, et cetera. There's like a drug connection with your,

with your research here. Yeah. Now this is like a less interesting book right like again now looking at it from uh having seen the whole episode this is a uh this is a ploy this is a lie and so my question is why this one though like what what i guess he's just explaining why there's goon i think so right like yeah i i get the feeling that he doesn't really have a plan. Like he has a goal. And by he,

I mean, Jack. So he, he has a goal for this story that he wants to use to write this new book. And he feels like he needs Jim's help because he can't do all the legwork himself. Yeah. Not least because he isn't in a position to be the person to talk to some of the people he wants to write about as we saw with him almost getting

thrown off a boat um but he also doesn't want jim to know exactly what the book's about possibly because he knows that it's dangerous that's actually kind of a question like why not tell jim other than just his sense of like wanting to blow a whole thing open it's not it's not like the the worst it's not a whole so much because also the other thing is that this guy is we we just get the idea that this guy's not particularly trustworthy like yeah yeah and and that will kind of pan out a little bit more later he's also bitter about the lack of success like he had his best seller and he's really hung his entire identity on being a best-selling author but we get the sense that he hasn't actually had any success in his life since then so there's you know kind of maybe a sense of like

he wants to keep everything close to the vest because otherwise someone else might take it away from him in some way but yeah so this is now where jim thinks we're at with the this you know these guys came back from vietnam with drug connections in laos and that's what the book's about well jim says that he will keep helping him but he wants to get paid two days in advance and he needs to lay off the sauce he's been pickling his liver and booze and uh it has to stop jack has this whole thing about how all the greatest writers had drinking issues which is like not a great yeah yeah not helpful as jim you know comes back with you know he ends up talking about hemingway and then jim's like yeah and hemingway also you know ate a shotgun yeah um they look at the list of names he still has to look at and uh stan collier jumps out because jim recognizes the name as a big real estate guy um and specifically that he just kind of

appeared like he bought into a real estate agency like a year ago and just like started making all these big deals just kind of out of nowhere this is an aspect of jim's uh uh he he's he's just well aware of current events yeah not all the time but like it you know he just knows when something's happening so he knows the movers and shakers yeah um so you know jack has a has a line where he's like yeah maybe it's because of his connections back in laos or something so he's like okay yeah something to something to hang his hat on yeah we end the scene with jack trying to tell jim that he's not in such bad shape he's he's fine he can deal deal with things himself and then there's a back and forth about uh you were talking to that doctor and then you can't remember the name of the doctor.

And then Jim says, oh, you mean the doctor that told me you might have intermittent memory problems because of your alcoholism? I will point out that I do not remember the name of that doctor. Right. Yeah, that's fair. But yeah, Jim's point is made. There's a lot of like good little things in the writing. there's a lot of like good little things in the writing this this script seems to me like it had like a real like a real polishing pass done on it because there's lots of like little things and this one like jack said the doctor's name earlier in their conversation like you've been

doctored talking to doctor so-and-so and then he can't remember it at the end like you know just a tiny detail that really like you know works in there in there really well. That's good. We go back to Stan, who is I guess we're in Bob's house. It's a little unclear exactly what the setting is here, but he's looking through a desk. And then there's a woman there as well that we will learn her name is Jeannie. And we'll find out more about her later. This is another in the middle of a conversation where we don't know what they're talking about. But Bob and Jeannie are saying that they're in trouble um bob is not happy that stan is looking through his stuff so we see more of their kind of

like they clearly do not like each other but for some reason they have to be working together or yeah the same orbit um they specifically say that uh jack is the son of the guy who quote was there that night but that he'll be taken care of then we have a good rockford files line nothing too drastic i hope too drastic from this glass of milk uh that is stan referring to bob as the glass of milk and then bob calls them two highly paid pieces of trash so still don't really know what's going on there but clearly they are not friends yeah yeah at this point um i don't think i had my i don't think i had it pegged as extortion uh i think i had it pegged as uh business partners partners that would be willing to rat out on each other right yeah that kind of thing you get the sense that like yeah they're all involved with something and it's more valuable to them to stay

to be involved with whatever that is than to not but they also hate each other yes so which i guess is kind of what is actually going on it's just we very intentionally are being as audience members we're very intentionally being kept from whatever it is yeah and this episode is a real other than one or two little scenes is a real one-to-one of like jim's knowledge and audience knowledge like we have these off like you know we see you know our villains we like see our villains in their own scene and we see jack in his own scene a little later but even in those scenes we still don't really learn anything more than what jim knows yeah yeah exactly all we get is hints of the interaction and also i like i feel like this is definitely a thing that i bring up every time we see this and we see it a lot in the

files but i love when the antagonists are at each other's yeah yeah like when there's there's pressures on the antagonists so that they're motivated in certain ways and there's we don't know precisely what they are but we know the the vectors that they're coming from yeah we we can see like mills i'm sorry stan uh stan feels like i mean the loose cannon is the term right but not like loose cannon in the sort of uh quotidian way we use it like literally this guy feels like a loaded firearm you know he's going to mess everything up for everyone you can just feel him itching to do it right yeah that's good stuff so we go to the trailer where jim is the hospital to talk to Jack, but he isn't there. Just as Jim is trying to find out what happened, there's a knock on the door and sure enough, it's Jack.

Now, this is one of those beats with Jack that is very similar to a beat you would have with Angel, which I appreciate. It's a very comedic moment. He comes in, he has a little bit of swagger, but he's not full swagger. Mm-hmm. I know what you're thinking, but liquor has not passed these lips. Want to smell my breath? Absolutely not. And he says he thought it'd be better if they were closer together for, you know, while Jim is doing his investigation.

He'll stay at the motel up the road. But after a little bit of like banter, Jim kind of reluctantly offers. He's like, why don't you just stay with me? You won't like that motel. There's the beat where if Jack declined, Jim would be perfectly happy for Jack to decline. And there's a beat where he thinks he's going to decline, but then does not and jim's like okay well i offered yeah i did the polite thing and uh i'm i'm paying for it jack offers to get him dinner for real this time he has his credit card jim has to pick up rocky so he can come with him to pick up rocky and then they can

go to dinner there's there's a bunch of kind of like banter kind of setting up what the shape of the rest of the day is going to look like and then he asked jim how how things are going and he says that he thinks he tracked down one of the names so jim in fact has the yearbook from the uh from the high school and he thinks that this one of the the names on that is now a genie rosenthal who is a top actress agent in la another mover and shaker that jim just recognizes her name yeah so he says you know she she finds all these actors she discovers all these actors and jack has the most pretentious i don't watch many English language movies. The French, so much more human. But Jim has the yearbook and they look through and they like, you know, read their little bios from their senior pages or whatever.

And the one for Jeannie says like, you know, ambition or like goal or whatever. Become a beautician. Yes. And I find Stan Collier who, what was it like? Stomper? Nickper nickname the stomper um reads off you know a couple things including the line lights digging the scene at don's drive-in oh my god the title of our episode yes jim thinks that it's weird that these two big la names came from these you know this humble origin and jack has a whole thing about how it's the American system. You know,

pulling yourself up by your bootstraps and overcoming your origins and stuff like that. And Jim's like, I guess, but Jim has to leave to pick up Rocky. Jack says, you know what? Actually,

he's going to stay. He's going to call. He'll, he'll call this, you know, this woman genie and set up an interview. Jim has a, a telegraph look at the bottles of wine over his

fridge and jack says yes i promise that i won't drink well let's take a little break uh 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 Epidaia. 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 Roleplaying

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 ndpaoletta. 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.

Cut to Jack slurring and singing and throwing an empty wine bottle in the trash as there are two goons pull up outside the trailer in a big blue ford i'd laugh i mean you shouldn't laugh at like this guy's got a disease right like this is this is but also this is a classic rockford files pattern yeah yeah rockford's friend who's clearly demonstrated to rockford several times that he's not dependable and Rockford going, okay, I'll, I'll trust you this time.

And just, yeah. Yeah. So yeah, as, as we might expect, they, they,

they bust in and grab Jack. There's a good line, settle down or my friend here will put a sunroof in your skull. They see from the paperwork that he's staying with a pi like why you hire pi and jack has a thing which i you know i think is he's trying to to be cool here he's yeah he's just he's just a friend i'm not hiring him for anything he doesn't know anything that's going on and they say that they'll wait around and ask him you know ask him himself what he knows we cut to jim and rocky arriving and we get some good rocky stuff yes it starts great because like i cannot describe this i don't know if i'm the only

person in the world you like okay there's there's a classic thing where somebody asked jr a token what his favorite word was and he said it was cellar door right like the cellar door because it just sounds you know it's like the most beautiful two words yeah or something yeah for me the most beautiful sound is rocky saying oxnard well i think you're glad we're gonna miss the lodge fundraising at oxnard there's nothing in this world that is just, I can't describe it. It's just, it's my ASRM. It's just Oxnard. I agree. I wrote it down. Rocky says Oxnard. His truck is in the shop, I guess. And Jim wants to keep Jack company as well. He should, which means that they can't go to the fundraiser up in Oxnard. Yes.

And Rocky accuses Jim of, and I think you're glad we're going to miss the bagpipe band too. Glad to miss the bagpipe band. After you know how much I like music, the drones, how can you say that? It's so funny, but this is only the smallest taste of rocky because what we're about to get

oh exquisite rocky goes into the trailer first because jim's gonna bring in the groceries he gets grabbed by one of the goons it's the skinny there's a skinny goon and a big goon the skinny groom grabs him by the lapels and he just instinctively gives him a huge right hook across the face. It's so good. Rocky punch. He spins away. The big goon comes after him. Jim comes after the goon.

They tussle outside. There's a good moment where the goon has his hands on the grill to like steady himself and Jim slams the lid down on them. Yeah. And then Rocky comes back out of the door and yells for someone to call the cops uh from the preview montage and so our goons take off uh but they already had jack in their car jack is like tied up in the back seat but one of the things so rocky comes out he yells someone call the cops and we do see someone over by the restaurant like run to go call the cops which is great and and this is

the cue for the goons to leave and as one of the goons is leaving rocky takes a swing at him with his boot and it's oh it's wonderful like yeah get out of here yeah we don't see that much action from rocky but this was this is good it was good the, again, pure Rockford Files realism where Jim compliments Rocky's right hook, but then asks him if he needs some ice for his hand because Rocky's like, oh, oh, I might need to call the doctor, sonny. Oh, poor Rocky. Yeah. We then go to a very dramatic scene where our goons have Jack on a rooftop and says

that he's writing lies and their employer just wants him to stop writing lies he refuses uh it's the writer's calling to write the truth he has all this ivory tower academic flowery way of you know talking about how writers have responsibility to to to truth itself and stuff like that. He also does like, I don't remember if it's exactly this moment, but he does a lot of like name dropping of other author, great authors as if he belongs in that category, in that echelon of authors. He ends with the Pope and the Borgias together couldn't stop Dante. Yes.

You're not going to stop me. Before that, we had some back and forth. It was like, what, are you going to push me off this roof? And like the two guys look at each other. It's like, oh, you want me to recreate my novel? Like, you know, but that is clearly the implication that is that we're getting here. And then he says, and you're not going to stop me. And our skinny goon goes, oh, yes, we are.

And then we freeze frame on jack's scared face and i think it is a good dramatic moment because now there's this unresolved question over pretty much the whole rest of the episode as i'm watching it the question that i have watching this not really remembering how this episode actually goes yeah is when does jim find out that jack is dead yes right right it's it there's lots of funny banter there's a lot you know the back and forth about like uh yeah but in the end it ends with like a lot of menace and and again it's this feeling once much like stan is jack feels out of control like he's not he's gonna keep throwing himself against this horrible wall until it kills him. Whereas Stan is going to just take this to the extreme and do violence against someone.

There's something in this scene that so there's a lot of machismo in his like, you know, like the flowery language and being like above it all. He's a writer writer he's got this higher calling but also it does feel quite a bit like he's trying to convince himself oh yeah which i like like like it it's both it's insufferable so you kind of want to see him at least get knocked around a bit but also um it's also a little sad yeah yeah i i enjoy it not as much as i enjoyed this very next scene so the next scene is one of the one of the themes that i think you know you you mentioned a lot and then we come back to a lot with the show is that one of the strengths of the show is that it shows us little moments of why these people are friends even while the big strokes are almost only almost

always about the tensions between them why is jim friends with angel why is jim friends with becker here we get a scene where we see why jim is friends with becker i gotta say if we do uh a malibu madness this year who knows if we do uh i gotta remember that this scene is gonna go for rock Britishness i would say that this episode is gonna go for rock Britishness i would say that this episode is worth this scene that's that's what i'm getting at like like if you if you don't care for anything else that happens in this episode even if you don't care for rocky punching a guy and what you should care for because that's also pretty much what that worth the episode yeah this is a great scene so it's it's it's jim uh jim with dennis at the

station we're coming into the conversation after he said after he's told him that jack was kidnapped and he wants to you know report it and dennis has to do something right this is this is something that we have experienced like we're in season four now uh even if you were watching these in order which we have not you've experienced this a thousand times right like you've you've seen jim you've you've seen him come to dennis looking for help and dennis not being able to provide it right so i think so our expectations coming into this is like now we get to see dennis kind of like roll his eyes and kind of yeah like this is not how police work works right you know that yeah but he

he i think with with glee in his eye yes does a 180 and is like you're reporting a kidnapping and he goes over to like the police i don't know stenographer yeah yeah and it's like okay type up the report and he gives her all the info that clearly Jim just gave him. Taken by force by two white males of mid-30s, average height, lasting driving a blue LPD. I'll punch that into the desk so the black and whites will have it right away. Affirmative. And when you get done with that, meet me at the car. I want you with me.

Lankowski, notify the FBI. Dennisis i don't know what to say i was kind of half expecting well it's a possible kidnapping that's what i'm here for you give me something i could move on i move that's all i've ever said it's beautiful it's oh it's a joy to see a Dennis in command. Mm hmm. Mm hmm. This feels otherworldly. Like he is he is in charge. And yeah. And as you say, and then and then Billings is on the phone and he hangs up and he gets another call. There's a bank robbery in progress with armed robbers and hostages. And it's like, oh, well, then here's what we're going to do. And he yells all these orders and has

everyone go places and it's like you go you know you call the lieutenant ask him who wants to have on the team and all this stuff and everyone rushes out of the room and it's just jim and the police the police woman who's finishing up the report totally silent she's like click click click click pulls out the typewriter gives it to jim he's he looks at it he's like uh yeah this looks good and then she leaves yeah all alone in the apartment because something much more important came up and so jim's thing is just dropped immediately just utterly evaporates it is it is uh i mean it's a gag the whole thing is a gag but it's a beautiful gag and it just happens uh like they they got me i think is what like yeah like i can feel it i'm like what is happening this is

and like you're right like there's this genuine moment where not only is is it this genuine moment where um dennis says you know you give me something to move on. I move. That's all I ever asked. But also you can feel the sort of glee with the fact that Dennis knows he's he's like going against Jim's expectations. Yeah. I get to show him up. Yeah. Like it's like for once you're not like some guy punched me. I want to file, you know, something. Yeah.

You don't know who he is. You're in your line of work. This isn't even that big of a deal. Like, why are to me like this is a very clear-cut thing and he's ready he's ready and willing to help but then it just gets totally shelved because something more important comes up which is also very like this is just how the police department works like this is the most important thing uh yeah it's extremely good but also just that moment of like that's all i ever asked i don't know that's like a real yeah every so often dennis does what jim needs him to do

good stuff good scene getting that one scene for each of the main cast in there in this episode really yes really giving good juice i mean they're angels not in this one but really getting something good out of the the denn the Rocky appearances for sure. All right. So Jim still needs to follow up on stuff by himself. So he tracks down Jeannie Rosenthal, who we see is the woman that we saw earlier. You know, we hadn't gotten her name at that point, but who was with Stan and Bobby. was with stan and bobby he is led to her table and she's on the phone in a booth at a restaurant like telling some actor he's never gonna work in that town again or whatever the the phone call is

interesting because it's uh she's she's telling the actor of course that movie was bad you weren't good you're not good enough for that role i wouldn't have given you that role so if you really want to do work like so here's the thing right she much like stan shouldn't be in real estate it's very likely she shouldn't be in casting right i was trying to figure out if this is supposed this phone call is supposed to indicate that like she's just she's just awful she's not like she's just an awful person that uh you know is telling an actor that they're not good enough for the role and she would definitely get this actor roles that they're good for like you're you're playing you're aiming too high buddy you gotta go you gotta go lower um yeah maybe no i mean i think that's probably a good read on it i don't i the scene had a little

bit of like a lot of banter yes it was a fast time and i think i probably missed you know some elements she does have the line so she's with her like secretary or whoever and she has a line where she says like she's done with casting ethnic types she needs white bread yeah jim walks up and she turns and sees him he's like like that that face and jim says oh not me i'm i'm white bread but heavy on the mayo whatever i don't know what that means but it's very funny yeah yeah good stuff it's also good that she's like i need an you know i i need an actor and then looks at james gardner yeah like that that guy yeah that's a good that's a good little bit like that's very funny um so jim wants to talk to her about jack scowron who she doesn't really remember then remembers

it's a he's a writer um we know that she knows who he is but she's kind of doing the like oh since you're you know i don't really know but i remember the book she mentions that she didn't get past chapter four of free fall to ecstasy we learned somewhere in there that remember the book she mentions that she didn't get past chapter four of free fall to ecstasy we learned somewhere in there that uh the book is 10,040 pages long yes this is one of those great things where she's like i don't know what you're talking about and then starts revealing that she knows a lot about what because she talks about it's it was on the bestseller list for like a week and a half and was just really, really pumped by its publishing house. It should have lasted longer by how much the marketing.

She's revealing that she knows a lot about this. Because I wouldn't know that about any book or anything. It was riding the wave, like the Kerouac beat wave. But it just came out a little like right at the end of that she's basically like sure it's a bestseller but like not because it's a good book is kind of what she's the case that she's making so uh jim asked her if jack got in touch with her for a new thing he's working on and she says no um and then he's like okay you know he's gonna leave but he drops as he leaves.

For someone who started off to be a beautician, you've sure come a long way. Yeah. Just like throw that in, just stir the pot. Right. Yeah. So we go to Jeannie and Stan talking about this very encounter. He this guy, Jim Rockford, he must know something. And then we have a new guy come in.

I think this is the guy from the the boat maybe i didn't really recognize yeah i don't i'm not entirely sure who this guy was he's i mean it's established later who all these people are yeah that's like for the purposes of the story but his name is fred and he's a restaurant guy so he's talking about how he has a new restaurant he's opening and he's under all the stress and whatever so fred stan and genie are waiting for bob because they want to talk about this situation and now this jim rockford guy they don't know where he is stan wants to take jim out he doesn't care what bob thinks if he can't even be there for their meeting and he specifically says they all took an opportunity on that yacht and their fates were sealed forever yeah so now whatever

they have to do to protect themselves they gotta do it we have a jim heading back to the trailer uh where rocky is trying to open beers with his hand that is all bandaged up um there's no word from jack uh they're looking through his stuff and jim specifically is looking through his notebook but his notebook for his new book it's all just like doodles and scribbles like there's no notes or bullet points or interview notes or anything so i think so jim's getting more and more suspicious about what jack is actually doing yeah uh and as they look through his stuff rocky sees a cut rate plane ticket. I went back to note this cause it comes up in a later scene, just like lots of little details that all pay have payoffs in this, in this, uh, whole sequence.

And then Jim finds a news clipping about the woman, Nancy, that we were talking about way at the beginning of the episode or death from the birth appendix appendix or whatever. Uh, there's a news clipping that Jack had in his stuff, and Jim's kind of like reading through it, and it mentions the neighborhood drive-in, Don's drive-in. And Jim notes that, and we remember it because it came up in, it's both the title of the episode and also it came up in the yearbook. So Jim's just like, something weird is going on. So Jim goes to Don's drive-in yeah the weird con a weird con again we come in kind of at the end i think but

jim basically saying like well you could be liable for a lawsuit like what lawsuit so he's talking to don presumably who has been running this drive-in since that you know since 62 since before 62 because that's when these events happened but jim's this comes up through the conversation but but his his line is he was talking to nancy's mother at a party yes and she was she doesn't believe that that's why nancy actually died and there's this new you know has a technobabble name there's this new something something process littler waxman or something like that that can detect things like e.coli 20 30 years after death so they can excuse exhumer body and see if food poisoning from don's drive-in was approximate cause for her death this guy's just like what are you talking about why are you

involved in this yeah yeah you know what he gets out of this i think jim's just just throwing stuff out there he just wants to get something anything yeah he's looking for uh any path to follow at this point this scene is here to establish the narrative causality of of of our episode like yeah yeah we need this scene to be here so that jim can find out this particular piece of information which is the guy says she could have eaten any other time that day she could have eaten on that yacht and jim's like ah what yacht there's a big there's a big high school party bobby atchison had a big party that night out on his family's yacht. Like the Adjison family that owns the LA Tribune. Yes.

Uh-huh. Mm-hmm. And Jim's like, oh, were any of these other kids like part of the gang that like, you know, hung out at the drive-in? And he recognizes the name Stan Collier. He used to clog up our toilets on purpose. That's why they call him Stomper.

Yeah, that's why they call him Stomper i call him stomper and really it just feels like for no reason but i guess it's just because i don't know it's in the script and then he just like slut shames genie at the end yeah yeah it's like i recognize that one too like okay i felt unnecessary but okay i guess the point is to know, say that these are not a group of good kids. Right. Is what you're trying to what is being communicated by the by how he's describing them. The the other sort of off thing about this, because like you were saying, this is this is a narrative connective thing, right? Like it gets us from point A to point B.

I think I don't remember what Jim asks him, but he was he's like how am i supposed to remember these punk after 16 years like you just did you just revealed that you knew they're at a yacht that night and like that's a lot of information for someone who runs the drive-in to know about yeah a night 16 years ago uh but you know if it's the night somebody died maybe yeah i mean and it's possible i don't it comes up, but it's possible that he got like paid off. Also, as we all learn, a lot of people got paid off. So, yeah. Yeah, that's true. Yes.

Yeah. But yeah, it's it is a thing that it doesn't really matter. It is an element of the I don't you know, why would I know anything about that? Here's all the things I know about that. Yeah. To get us to Jim having the information he needs. Yeah. We go to the airport where Stan is picking up someone in a cowboy hat who starts off with a line.

Who's dying? Yes. This is a Rockford Files character. Yeah. Like, here's a hitman in a cowboy hat. I don't need to know anything else about him and we never really learn anything about him he's just here to add this menace at the end um so stan it looks like so stan has hired this guy hey uh this is uh address license plate number to make the car he drives

maybe uh you could make it like a suicide don't tell me my business okay yes it's a little absurd but it's also like this is a character that is going to live in my mind forever yeah he's in this episode for like three seconds yeah he's also like exactly the solution that you would expect stan to get like oh i'm gonna hire a going to hire a guy from Texas to kill or Oklahoma. You almost expect it to be Angel in a disguise. Like it's a crossover with the one where he has his hitman con and like Stan like looks him up in the newspaper or something. The things that could have been. Back at Jim's trailer, all of Jack's stuff is gone.

Either someone wanted to make it look like he never came to la or maybe jack got it himself i'm thinking like we still have not learned that jack is dead maybe he isn't and and the like the solid clue that jack may have gotten it himself is the fact that they took the dirty sweatshirt which you wouldn't if you were just like we got to go there and grab all you wouldn't know was stands the dirty sweatshirt that was like on the couch yeah yeah he so jim asked rocky hey that plane ticket you saw what airline was it i'm like oh that was a thing so i went back and made a note about where he saw the plane ticket and he doesn't remember the name but he remembers like it's the one that has this particular service and

oh this is where rocky can't open the beers uh no no or was it in both scenes it's both scenes because oh maybe i'm trying to remember because this this scene is definitely the scene where where as jim's leaving rocky's like yeah go on'll, I'll figure out how to cook dinner with my one hand. No, this is where Jim, Jim, like he's like, Oh,

I'm sorry, Rocky. And he goes over and he opens the beer for him and puts it down. And then as he's leaving, yeah. Rocky's like, I'll find out some way to cook my own dinner with one hand. Jim just rolls his eyes.

Our hatted assassin follows Jim as he leaves the trailer, which is good news because rocky's in the trailer and i'm glad that jim's taking the guy away from rocky and we cut to jack at the airport bar i guess he's alive yeah um and he's just talking to the bartender dishing out some opinions on some other writers and he ends with and his latest book has no teeth and that's when jim comes up with and you'll be just the man to read it so good so this is i feel like the slightly more rare exposition scene at the end of the episode yeah i feel like this kind of scene we often get at the beginning of the episode to like get us into the story this is a big exposition conversation that tells us

what is actually what actually happened in the past right jim is now pretty confident that nancy did not die of a birth appendix but was in fact murdered and jack is like well wasn't technically murder but she was killed okay um and that his book actually is an expose on bobby atchison you know killing a girl when he was 18 and then his family covering it all up and if jim had known that from the jump he would have rode in on his white horse to bring justice and it would have messed everything all up um jim of course is mad that he was put into all this danger without knowing why and he wants to know what atchison bought jack off with because jack's at the airport going back to new york like at this point who cares what's the point of bringing down the family that owns the tribune you know who cares jim doesn't buy it uh he's like something

he offered you something and And we have a good. I think you were mentioning at the more in our intro that there's some pushback against Jim's moral sense. And I think we kind of get it here. The L.A. Tribune is an institute and a valuable people everywhere. Yeah. Made in stream section up and over. I get off my back. you haven't lived my life so don't criticize my choices yeah so here we have a scene where jim is trying to get him

back in play i'm not entirely sure why but it feels like like mainly like because he thinks this guy should not back down on the thing that he backed down on. Right. Right. But Jim wasn't threatened on the top of this roof. Right. So there's like a there's there's a sympathetic patheticness to this character. Like earlier, Jim had this great like you did a great impression of a bowl of Jell-O. And that's true um but also why not right what does he have to gain by standing up yeah yeah yeah yeah there's just a sense that jim's like in my universe when you know that something when you know that someone is

guilty of a crime they should face justice that doesn't necessarily mean that they're always going to get like arrested or whatever but right you know j Jim lives in a world where he's like, when I see that someone has been wronged, I right the wrong. Except when he doesn't. Yes. But in this case, it seems fairly clear cut. But Jim has led a life where he rights wrongs. Right. That's his, you know, that's the investigator that we love so

much sure yes and and and is always you know scraping together what he needs and and isn't willing to take every case but at the end of the day we know he's doing what he knows is right uh while we get the sense that jack has led a life that he had a big high and it's all been downhill since then yeah and everything he's tried to do that was right just got him kicked in the teeth again here was this potential to reclaim his former glory and then he was convinced that it was not worth taking basically um he does tell jim more the details of the story which he has found out or that he did know uh which is that bobby was forcing himself himself on Nancy on this yacht during this

party. She didn't go along. And then she, she laughed at him because he was so inept and he had a gun just to scare her. And he accidentally shot her. Yikes. Yeah.

As Jack is exposing this to the audience, his stance on it is like another level of yikes he's he's saying that was an instant mistake he was just trying to force himself on her and it's just like oh oh but also jack like again jack's in this position where he's drunk again and he's trying to talk himself trying to talk himself into accepting the thing that he's already accepted. Right, yeah. This bribe that they've given him. Against the, for lack of a better word, the angel on his shoulder of Jim being like, you know this is wrong.

Yeah. So Bobby's dad, a powerful rich man, bought everyone off, giving all those kids who were there a new life. So it sounds like his patronage is what got Stan into the real estate business, is what got Jeannie into the agenting business. Yeah. Including the cops who investigated the death. Jack knows about it in the first place because his dad was an L.A. cop, which is like, this is a new thing. We didn't know that before and jim's like oh right you know yeah who was on the case and he didn't get paid off it

sounds like maybe he refused to get paid off and there's like an inherited bitterness where he's like my dad did what was right and he suffered for it and he died bitter about the whole thing what he's been offered is that he's been trying for 15 years to sell a sequel to free fall to ecstasy his publishers cut him off he doesn't have an agent no one's interested he's out there on his own dime um bobby said he'll help him publish it and it's his last chance a sequel to a novel whose premise is the character is has jumped off of it's a ridiculous sequel is what I'm saying yeah because like I think

he says like the sequel it's like the main character is on his psychiatrist's couch and he's you know recounting everything that he's experienced or something like that yeah yeah it's like great so Jim is getting increasingly angry just about how frustrating it is to deal with Jack he had this hunch

that all the stuff about truth and the writer's duty to his higher calling really meant something and he has a last ditch if it meant anything to you you would come down to the da with me and jack says that that ship has sailed that ship has sailed jimmy and they part ways and that's when our hatted assassin comes up behind jim puts a gun in the small of his back i love how blase jim is about this like yeah he's in this heightened emotional state and then this guy puts a gun in his back it's like come with me and he just rolls his eyes and says i thought the rodeo left town in june yeah it's like oh just another guy in a hat trying to kill me guides him into a bathroom tells him to go into a stall and he'll

do it nice and quiet but then jack bursts in the door he's like hey jimmy and this distracts our our hatted assassin and jim uses the bathroom door to slam the the gun out of his hand and between the two of them they take him down jack got a change of heart right at the end and maybe i'll take this one to the DA so fun little bit of action yeah it was funny because when he was telling him to go and install

Jim's reaction was like you gotta be kidding me so we are hitting kind of a sort of a Rockford wrap up here where it's like okay we do have to get through all this we've put a lot of things in play sort of a Rockford wrap up here where it's like, okay, we do have to get through all this. We've, we've put a lot of things in play and now we need to,

to tie them up. And we, we have like five minutes of episode left to do it in. So let's, let's do it. Um, which leads us to our next scene, which is the,

the, uh, exposition by newscast. Right. Right. So we go to Jack being interviewed on tv and it kind of explains some of the details about like who did what when and and jack and jim are watching on jim's couch rocky is balancing a tray on his hand with the cast and going don't you fellas disturb

yourselves i'll get these burgers to the barbecue myself. What does it feel like toppling a dynastic family as big as the Atchisons? Well, not as good as I thought. Not as bad as I feared. Thank you.

The newscaster reads off all the folks who are implicated in the cover-up and then says, we'll have a fuller story at six or whatever. And Jim says, that's all that's left is to put it down on paper. Jack is he's excited.

He has a story burning inside and it's ready to ready to get out. But then he offers to help Rocky with the burgers and they go outside to the grill. Jim takes a look at Jack's notebook, which still is just full of scribbles and duels seems to be coming along fine and he makes a face while throwing it down we have a freeze frame on jim's dubious look at jack's uh yeah notes for his for his next novel the end the end so it was a fun one i enjoyed coming back there's a thing i was gonna say about that ending bit and i can't remember what it was oh it's just throughout jack has these wonderful turns of phrase about uh like that moment in a creative endeavor when it's just flowing yeah when it's

just happening and it never ever actually applies to what's going on with him in that moment but you know he's like it just lays out so beautifully or it's really cooking a lot like it really cooks jim it really cooks yeah it's like he's remembering how that stuff feels yeah yeah and he's trying to like summon it almost by like invoking it exactly exactly and it's like there's several moments like yeah jack is the butt of a joke throughout like several jokes throughout but there's several moments like, yeah, Jack is the butt of a joke throughout, like several jokes throughout. But there's several like as they say today, there's several moments where it's just it's too real. Like Jack's struggle with the creative process.

To some extent, he's not actually literally struggling with the creative process for most of it. He's not actually doing it. He's process for most of it he's not actually doing it he's trying to solve a crime not write a book about solving the crime uh but uh the yeah i i just i guess i kind of i enjoyed that as long as he's struggling with the creative process and more that he's struggling with being an alcoholic yes exactly which he has equated with the creative process right at least once during the episode. Yeah, there's definitely a lot of sympathetic vibe, I think, to being frustrated with work that you're trying to do that isn't hitting, that isn't getting to a certain peak or a certain point. Right.

As people who both write and publish things like sometimes there's this sense of like i'm never going to get that again yeah welcome to writing advice corner on 200 a day but like i feel like there's sometimes there's a there's a fork sometimes where it's like am i going to keep trying to reclaim something that i already did or am i going to go in a different direction and like do something different even though it's kind of scary because it's not something that i've already done and those can both be legitimate choices but sometimes you bang your head against the do something the same i did but better so much that you end up not doing anything at all and you would have been better served going down that other path um and he's just a portrait of a guy stuck in that like i need to do what i did

but better and that is a that that's a vibe yes yes and it and his is like has this kind of complex thing where it was a bestseller but but kind of not on its merits yeah as we find out that it like nobody read it uh yeah not not on its merits and um it's nobody will hire him to do anything else it was like no one will hire him to do that again but they also won't hire him to do other things yeah yeah um so like he's like i said very sympathetic pathetic character he's he's uh uh despite the yeah despite the fact that he creates most of the trouble for jim in this episode the central mystery isn't too it's it is a mystery to us but it's not like a who could solve this mystery it's more of a like um it's a deliberate cover-up yeah so it's just a matter of like pulling the pieces apart and that's what they're doing literally he's just doing uh rockford leg work but doing it for a self-destructive friend

right like and that's the yeah i i i'd like that as a story yeah i feel like there's like maybe one but there might be like just slightly more like we're going to talk about something you don't know what we're talking about there's slightly more of that than i probably would prefer yeah yeah watching this episode is very passive it's very like just just watch it unfold which is fine there's nothing wrong with that um but going through it it's kind of like there's nothing really to say here because they're just talking about things that you're not going to find out why they're talking about these things in this way till the very end there's there's a moment uh about halfway through where we first hear about the yacht yeah and it's such a throwaway line and my notes are like what what yacht what's happening like what's and it's not i'm not frustrated by it but it's like okay

i guess we're gonna find out there's more to this because at that point if we're taking jack at his word they're a drug cartel right right right and uh i was like wait a minute why is there's more here and i like that's fine if that's what the story is doing is is like like oh don't get too comfortable with the current lie uh of it being about a drug because that's not true. There's something else happening here. But yeah, I agree that there's a little bit of like going back over it. All of the character interactions between the antagonists make sense and fit really well now that we have all the information. But when we watch them they're

full of mystery and i like that they do fit well because oftentimes when shows do that or i shouldn't say oftentimes a possible route to go is to make these interactions full of mystery and then if you were to go back over them the nothing seems natural because they're not behaving how they would given the information you now know they're just behaving in a mysterious way but in this case they are behaving in a mysterious way but you can now knowing the information be like oh i get why they're doing this i get this interaction with him at the club at the very beginning between stan and bob yeah yeah there's actually a bit of a connection to how that works in, um,

Requiem for a funny box. That was the writer. The writer. Yeah. He does a similar thing in Requiem for a funny box where we have the, like the comedian and the mob guy having a conversation where we're not quite sure what the, it is.

Eventually we, we learned that as the, um, the love affair like the yes gay love affair that he overheard that he overheard and again that so that with that knowledge at the end that makes that earlier vagueness work yeah so it's kind of interesting to see the same technique here like used for a different purpose obviously but it has a similar cadence where we get to see our antagonists early they have a conversation where we don't have the context but it makes sense once we do know the

whole story yeah there's a nice little there's a little writerly tick that yeah that you can see in both episodes um yeah well have we earned it i think we're we're at the end of the drive-in here from my perspective. Yeah, fun episode. A lot of rock-fritishness. Good scenes. Maybe not my favorite episode in aggregate. Right. A little mushy in how much exposition there is for me, but sometimes that's just how it is.

There's nothing wrong with that, for sure. Do you have any other thoughts on The gang at Don's drive-in? Worth it for the Rocky Hook and Dennis in charge. Absolutely. All right. Well, with that, I suppose we'll try to avoid any E. coli-laden fast food notions between now and the next time we record. But we'll be back next time to talk about another episode of The Rockford Files.