Two Hundred A Day - Episode 112: Punishment and Crime

Episode Date: February 26, 2023

Nathan and Eppy return to the 90s for the sixth Rockford Files TV Movie, 1996's Punishment and Crime. A chance encounter with a woman from Jim's past, blind psychologist Megan Dougherty, leads to a reunion! However, Megan's cousin Patrick is in some trouble with Russian heavies, and Jim is, against his better judgement, drawn in. There's violence, romance and humor woven throughout this David Chase produced, directed and written effort. It definitely feels like one of the high points of the movies so far! As chance would have it, it's also our introduction to Megan, and we're looking forwards to going backwards to her original 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) * Bill Anderson (https://twitter.com/billand88) * Brian Perrera (https://twitter.com/thermoware) * Eric Antener (https://twitter.com/antener) * Jordan Bockelman (https://twitter.com/jordanbockelman) * Michael Zalisco * Joe Greathead * Mitch Hampton's Journey of an Aesthete Podcast (https://www.jouneyofanaesthetepodcast.com) * Dael Norwood wrote a book! Trading Freedom: How Trade with China Defined Early America (https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/T/bo123378154.html) * 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) * Brian Bernsen's Facebook page of Rockford Files filming locations (https://www.facebook.com/brianrockfordfiles/) * Tom Clancy, Andre Appignani, Pumpkin Jabba Peach Pug, Dave P, Dave Otterson, Kip Holley and Dale Church! 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

Jimmy, it's Angel. It's 1215 and make it 1217. I'm going to work for your bud, Pat Daugherty. He's got some DMV issues, needs a driver, and I guess what I'm saying is I quit. Welcome to 200 a Day, the podcast where we talk about the 70s television detective show and the 90s TV movies, The Rockford Files. I'm Nathan Paletta. And I'm Epidaia Ravishaw. And as you might imagine from all the title of this episode, and also how I just phrased it,

we are doing the sixth, sixth? Sixth. The number... Weird word. Now that I say it out loud, what a strange word. This is indeed number six of the eight 90s television movies made of the Rockford Files. Yeah. And I got to say, I didn't think we were this far along. For some reason in my head, I was like, oh, we're kind of in the middle.

But when we look back at it, yeah, we've done five of these. And this is, well, the sixth. In the ongoing drama of does Eppie pull out the correct DVD from the sixth in the ongoing drama of does epi pull out the correct dvd from the sleeve in the first shot same thing i missed it uh by a long shot because i i assumed it was on disc two of the first two disc set yeah yeah no i had the same thing i uh also um imdb has a little bit of an inaccuracy here. It claims that it's two hours long. It's about an hour and a half long. Yeah, it's a two-hour TV slot.

Yeah. So it's two hours with commercials, but the runtime is, yeah, 1.32 or whatever it is. That completely tempered almost all of my notes. completely tempered almost all of my notes because i but i'm i am watching the clock as i'm doing it and thinking how are they going to get more show out of this in its runtime it's actually i think very well paced yeah yeah it's very well paced if there was an extra half hour that we needed it would be a little rough yeah but uh yeah so this one is titled Punishment and Crime and was released in September of 1996. So a good, what, 20 years after the, not the peak, not the end, but like more about 20 years after the original show is the timeline for these movies. I don't think we've done a movie in a minute.

It's been a while yeah if you have joined us since the last time we did a movie um uh the brief background on these is that uh you know the show ended with some um unpleasantness and some litigation between garner and his production studio and universal and their situation um it eventually got settled uh i think in the 80s but garner kind of harbored a grudge and didn't want to do universal slash NBC related projects for a while. Uh, but in kind of the early nineties, there was this, there was kind of a movement of kind of like bringing, I think this is just Kurt.

This is just how culture works now. Things that were popular 20 years ago, let's do them again. Yes. You know, and there were some some some concepts for doing these instead of rebooting the show doing these uh two-hour movies they ended up at cbs so these movies all aired on cbs in the 90s and there's a you know there's some like fun details about when they were time slotted and against what and whatever that's all in the ed robertson book um 30 years or the new edition 40 years of the rockford files if you're

super interested but uh my my takeaway the top line on it was kind of like so cbs uh contracted six movies the first two two to three like did fine but not great and then after that they were kind of relegated to worse time slots oh but this also coincided with the movies being more interesting movies so like the more basic straightforward campier i would say movies were probably the most seen and then as they got more as it got better they actually slid into worse time slots that's a a fairly common phenomenon it's hard to tell uh i don't know if there's there's an actual answer to this but it's often hard to tell which caused which because sometimes if you don't have that many eyes on it you're like well i could

do whatever i want now let's do this thing you know, or let's try this weird thing that we weren't. And it's a bit of a mirror of the show where like the first season was really popular. The second season, we've talked about it when we talked about the second season, but it was like some of the writing got a little shakier and also the viewership fell off. So which one caused which right. And in the third season, they kind of like corrected and kind of captured some of the original, you know, conception of the character again.

And then the show got like really good, uh, critically started getting Emmys and stuff in like the fourth season. Right. So, but it never recovered those viewership figures from the first season uh so kind of similar with the movies and so some of that slide also the way that it sounds from how it's written up in in ed robertson's book is that like cbs like had these movies but

kind of didn't care about them or didn't really know what the best thing to do with them was yeah so they started getting paced out increasingly, stretched out increasingly between when each was released. Oh, so they, like, they'd done them all in a chunk. Mm-hmm. And then, oh, okay. So, like, this movie was completed in the spring of 95, and then they didn't air it until the fall of 96. Got it.

After this movie, they picked up, I guess they had an option, they picked up two more movies, there's eight total yeah the last one uh the return of rita kapkavik uh rita moreno i think was shot in 97 it wasn't released till or shot 96 it wasn't released till 99 or something like that like oh wow yeah there's some weird time time stuff there so that all said um this particular movie was in like premiere week as well oh okay they so cbs put it in i just thought this was kind of fun i feel like this captures a moment in time this is a moment in time where i'm starting to become aware of television like right right temporarily right like i'm, like my parents have stuff on and I actually like watch it or notice it. So this movie, The Rockford Files, Punishment and Crime, is going up against the season premiere of Grace Under Fire, the season premiere of The Drew Carey Show, and in its second hour, the season premiere of Law and Order.

The season premiere, not the..., the season premiere, not the, the, not the series. I mean, I don't think so. Yeah. This is like the start of the, so television used to have seasons.

Yeah. Yeah. But that, that is definitely a tough crowd to, those are very popular shows at that time. So yeah. Yeah. So contracts with the first movie where it was put on a sunday night after um murder

she wrote right where so that was led into by you know kind of a similar demographic was the idea you would you would just leave it on right you would murder and then you would suddenly hear the rock and you're thinking i'm just gonna sit down i'm just gonna i'm just gonna just uh not even touch that dial right so this one is instead on a wednesday night against these you know network you know comedies that said it was uh it did have higher viewership than the same you know than the movie they had done last time like whatever the fifth one was uh uh friends and foul play oh that's it yeah good for them i suppose uh this uh this movie is written and directed and produced as there's a great title card written directed and produced by david chase and some elements in here that you're really are really really chaserific uh

in a good way but chasey and chaseasian chase chase we gotta we gotta come up with a good one for that one but that's kind of exciting this is much closer to you know sopranos time yeah right so uh it's kind of fun to see some of those some of that language being still being worked on yeah out here yeah yeah that's pretty much all my preamble and there's no preview montage. What's up? What are your thoughts going into the movie? Well, I have to, I have to confess my ignorance here. Uh, cause I have not read, uh, nor ingested in any form crime and punishment.

And IMDB says that, uh, Dostoevsky has an uncredited uh writing uh credit for the novel i don't know i'm wondering if that was automatically added uh just because the title is punishment and crime i would assume that if there was anything in particular other than just having a fun title and Russia, right? Yeah, yeah. This has to deal with Russian bad guys. So there's that connection. I also have not read Crime and Punishment. I might have done a CliffsNotes of it in high school at some point.

I have no idea if the plot or if there's any other references. I will say that the original title for this one was night fishing so see that all right and that fits a there's a moment in there the loneliest saddest moments of the episode you could certainly you i'm just reading the um imdb uh summary here you could certainly draw some uh there's definitely a high school paper in here, uh, against, but I shouldn't say high school. There's, there's, you could definitely do some, some good, some good academic work on this, but I don't think it's, um, I don't think that there's, I feel, I forget if we

use this term while we talked about the, our last episode, I, I, I did when I was writing it up for the Patreon, but, uh patreon but uh this one uh is a rich text yeah there's there's a lot going on on a couple different layers some of which is interesting some of which we probably don't really need to get into um there's only a a a uh a film or or television critique a bull piece here yeah and if it happens to also interrelate with literary yes exactly i am not qualified to say but i wouldn't be surprised if there's something in there and we should comment that we um or maybe we'll get into it when we get into it as we as we are want to say but this is the third, if we're considering it an episode rather than a movie, this is the third and I believe final episode with a character who we have not covered yet, despite the fact that odds are we should have covered her, given how many episodes we've done.

But yeah, we'll talk about that when that comes up. But that's going to be kind of interesting. Yeah, back to a bit core to this one. So for sure. Hey Epi, did you know that we are a 100% listener supported show?

I did not know that. Wait, I did. I did. And it is because of our patrons over at patreon.com slash 200 a day. In addition to our gratitude, patrons also receive exclusive episode previews and plus expenses. That is the podcast before the podcast. And that's where we talk about other stuff going on in our lives and games and movies and all kinds of things.

Yeah. We extend special thanks to our Gumshoe patrons supporting this episode of 200 a Day. Join Mitch Hampton to examine all matters aesthetic and what it means to be human at the Journey of an Aesthete podcast, wherever you get your podcasts. Dale Norwood wrote a book,

Find Trading Freedom, How Trade with China Defined Early America, wherever good books are sold. It's about fast ships, cheap drugs, and American political economy. Chuck from whatyou'rereading.com. Paul Townend, who also recommends the podcast Fruit Loops, Serial Killers of Color, at fruitloopspod.com. Shane Liebling, his site rollforyour.party, has all of your online dice rolling needs. Jay Adan, check out his amazing miniature painting skills over at jayadan.com. Pumpkin Jabba Peach Pug, Dave P, Dave Otterson,

Kip Hawley, and Dale Church. And finally, we can't thank our detective patrons enough for their generous support of the show. Joe Greathead, Michael Zalisco, Eric Antenor at Antenor on Twitter, Brian Pereira at Thermaware, Jordan Bockelman, not Brockleman, at Jordan Bockelman, Bill Anderson at Billand88, and of course, Richard Haddam at Richard Haddam. We follow them too at 200pod. If you're interested in helping keeping us going, you can do so for as little as a dollar an episode at patreon.com slash 200 a day thank you thanks so much as is tradition for our movies we start off with the the greatest question of all what is this 90s version of the theme going to sound like uh my first note here is such a nice soulful theme to open on uh we're we're gonna get a

melancholy tale here i think yeah uh or at least that's that's how they're bringing us in this one yeah this theme is lower key than i remember the other ones being it doesn't have quite so much explosive synth yeah going on this i feel like i probably said this about the last one as well but there's something about this these the latter half of these movies where the characters seem more similar to the 70s characters like physically like in Like in the first couple of movies, like Jim had like the little mullet and like. Yeah, yeah. Like an attempt to get 90s. There are references throughout to the 90s.

Yeah. Which is interesting because you said that like this one was only held for about a year. Yeah. But when you talked about the one that went from like 96 to 99 if it had references as topical as this one right it would be out of date by the time it got released and i mean they've all they all have been doing i think uh doing their best to fix themselves in time i mean the first movie i i just love la or i still love la is very specifically like here are all the things going in los angeles right now right it's like the riots and there's and the fire there's all kinds of stuff for some reason this one felt more chill about it like the

references seemed more like references people would actually make as opposed to we need this in the script so that viewers will know. We know we're in the nineties now. Yes. Yes. All right. That all said, we should get talking about this movie. Um,

we have our credits rolling over, uh, James Scott Rockford. Uh, he, he's on like some kind of campus and going into a, uh, kind of an academic E building.

I think there's a sign that says it's the neuropsychiatric institute. We track him as he's waiting for an elevator. The elevator opens. He sees a woman, is obviously startled. She stares right past him, walks past him. And then we kind of cut out to see that she has a seeing eye dog. So her looking past him is because she is blind of cut out to see that she has a seeing eye dog so her looking past him is because she is blind not because she's ignoring him i and i having read the summary and

remembering that this character exists i'm like oh okay so we're starting right off with this is megan doherty uh megan doherty adams in in this movie because she's married and added a name. And we will come back to her very soon. But our establishing shot gives Jim ran into this person. Yes. Yeah, exactly. That's it. I mean, it's very clear that he recognizes her. Right.

Because we haven't done the episodes with her in it. I did not. And so my notes are like, does Jim know? There's a certain portent on this that makes it feel like if you're a fan you would recognize her as well all right so this is interesting so i remember the character and i vaguely remember the episodes that she was in um before we were recording you indicated that you did not connect this person to an earlier character that we'd seen yeah that you'd seen yeah and so uh i just assumed it was uh um the further adventures that takes place between 76 is it no 78 and 96 so during those uh 18 years so yeah i guess so on the so so on a meta level i'm i'm this whole

movie i'm kind of like oh it'll be interesting to go back and see what the deal was in the show while you're watching it with kind of the fresh eyes of like right this is a character in the movie yeah everything i know i'm being told by the screen right i feel it's it's gonna hold up i don't i'm not missing any details. Yeah. And I don't really remember anything in particular where I was like, oh, that's a callback to this thing or whatever. Like, I think the movie is meant to be standalone and meant to give you everything you need to know. But yeah, that's an interesting perspective for us to bring as Rockford viewers.

Both of us being like, I don't really remember this character. For us to bring as Rockford viewers, both of us being like, I don't really remember this character. We do cut from here to one of the other highlights of our show. Angel power washing Jim's trailer right off the bat, hitting all their beats with the banter between the two of them. The deal is that Angel is working off an IOU by cleaning Jim's trailer while he's out and about. Jim is giving him all these very specific instructions about what he's supposed to do and how he's supposed to do it. And Angel is, you know, reluctantly doing what he's being told to do. And I guess the IOU came from he needed some kind of dental work. And what was he supposed to do just let the

teeth rot rot in your head or something like that yeah yeah i realized that if i tried to note all of the good banter between these two that would be my entire viewing so i had to hold off but uh it's good yeah i mean you just watch angel justify giving the money and try and get out of all the work that he's been told to do. It's also fun to see, like, just, well, first of all, it's fun to see Angel doing manual labor. But the continual improvements on the trailer, the trailer is kind of an interesting beast in this episode because uh i mean we've talked about it before in the movies it's bigger yeah i can't imagine it being ever being moved right right it's really expanded out there's like multiple rooms there's a deck like yeah yeah it's a really nice deck too like it's it's and inside it's really nice. But this particular section that Angel's working on needs work.

Yeah. Really needs work. That's also, I think that's fun, too. It's got this sort of updated, but the old is still jammed into it. Yeah. Yeah. Inside, Jim grabs a phone book. I noted his strong look in his corduroy jacket.

Yes. In this shot, for some reason he looks up a phone number makes a phone call asks for megan um and the person who answered the phone uh says you know hey mom it's for you and she answers and says it's jim rockford so he is indeed reconnecting with uh megan doherty their conversation gives us the context, you know, for their deal. So the last time they talked was 15 years ago. She and she married a man named Michael. They moved to Atlanta.

Well, now she's back, obviously, and divorced. And Jim's like, oh, me too. Again, canonically, Jim got married at some point in the 80s and they got divorced as we have learned in previous movies um he was on campus for a job that he didn't get uh but he that's why he saw her that he's calling because he saw her and i think he says like i was so stunned i couldn't say anything yes but she says it would be nice to see him again and invites him to her father's birthday party that weekend in santa barbara we have a bit of a hemming and a

hawing and then jim looks at the black and white picture of rocky yeah uh on his table and it goes oh okay yeah poor rocky or rocky well again canonically uh no, Noah Berry had died before the first movie was made, and they have a nice little tribute to him in that. Since then, Jim's connection to Rocky does come up in most of these movies. He has this picture. I don't know if it's the same picture in every movie. In this one, it's a great one of Rocky with his pipe. Yeah. And so Jim often looks through the picture of rocky for

kind of like these moments of like getting good advice or yeah deciding what he should do this is an interesting um uh thing we don't have a conversation with rocky obviously because he's not no longer with us but jim takes this moment to look at it he looks at the picture of rocky originally i thought um because she just before then says they're having a party, birthday party for her dad. And I thought that was like, oh, just like my dad's no longer here. A reminder of that. But later on, we learned that Rocky really liked her. Right.

Jim might be trying to decide at this point does he want to get re-involved in an old situation like is this a good thing to do and rocky's advice would would be almost certainly be yes yeah yeah so we could it could be read both ways and i like that to the birthday party at the the doherty it's not really an estate but it's a very fancy house in Santa Barbara. And we meet Frank Doherty, Megan's dad. So this is one of those times where I was like, I have an immediate reaction to this guy. I must know him from somewhere, but I cannot remember where. The actor is Richard Kiley. And I was like, okay.

So obviously my first go-to is he must have been in a Rockford Files. And he was not in any of them. But looking through his credits, was like oh he is a colombo villain he plays the police commissioner in the episode where he helps his buddy cover up the murder of the buddy's wife and then later uses that to blackmail him into helping the commissioner murder his own wife it's a very complex double murder situation and it has one of the best i think one of the most would hold up in court colombo reveals uh of of the whole series uh in my opinion so anyway he's really a bad guy in that episode so i you know see him in this and he has this really specific kind of manner of in how he speaks so that immediately

like because he's obviously older and everything so immediately like i was like oh this guy um i mean like he has the look of a colombo villain i have not seen that colombo episode or if i have i don't remember it but i if you were if you were to line up three people from this show and be like, which one's the Columbo villain? I mean, imagine him 20 years younger with a black goatee. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Also, he is apparently the voice of the tour guide in Jurassic Park. I you know, I was just scanning. I saw that he was the voice of the tour guide. I also saw that he was the voice of the cosmos in the Howard the Duck film. Oh, he does have a distinctive voice. Yeah, a very cosmopolitan voice here.

So next time I watch Jurassic Park, I'll be like, oh, that guy is a murderer. Yeah. And next time I watch Howard the Duck, I'll think the same thing. That's our generational divide. Right. There's a great line. He's like, Jim, you know, hasn't seen him for 15 years or whatever, right? Yeah. I bet the Reagan years were good for you, huh? Yeah.

Like all those financial crimes. Yeah. All the SNL scandals. And yeah, yeah. Which is very funny. Yeah, yeah. To me. You know, all the crimes.

You must have done great. Yeah. I would have loved to have seen a couple SNL specials. The S and L. Not Saturday Night Live, but Savings and Loan investigations that Rockford did. Because, I mean, like those were rich and powerful people stealing the money of people who really needed it, who needed the money. And so it's exactly the kind of episode that you would want to see in a Rockford Files, right? Like you want to see Jim on the tail of those.

Absolutely. So the picture we get here. So Frank, he had some kind of big deal talent agency, but he sold it off. Now he's enjoying his retirement, more or less. We do see a moment of him being a real jerk to a server who didn't bring someone enough limes. So I think we're getting a very distinctive, like, look at this guy's personality, right? Again, both a good Columbo villain. Yeah, but we are getting the class stuff that we love to see in the Rockford Files.

They come around to Megan with the official reintroduction they have a nice hug and megan introduces jim around they have various she has various sisters and other relatives etc and then enter a i say young i guess technically he's middle-aged at this point, but in context to my knowledge of him, a young Brian Cranston as cousin Patrick. I meant to look it up. This would have been his Malcolm in the Middle years, right? I think it was before then. And I only say that because Liz said, is that Brian Cranston? And I said, yes, this is 1995. And she said, oh, that's even before malcolm in the middle so that's how i know but they established later they established that his

character is like 43 or something i i don't know how old he actually is but that seems about right he's he acts younger because he's a a layabout but right yeah yeah he's a layabout. Right. Yeah, yeah. He's a cad. A rake. So, yeah. It's kind of fun. Yeah, it is. I'm not a huge Cranston head. You're not one of the Cranstonites.

I'm not a Cranstonite. Cranstonian. I still have not watched Breaking Bad. I don't have a whole lot to say about him over his career. But he's good in this in this episode yeah and i like malcolm the middle so he's good in the first second third no the first of the most recent american godzilla films i realized that it wasn't the first american godzilla film and then i realized it wasn't the second because uh-huh go on the very first godzilla film from

the 1950s. There's an American version with Raymond Byrne because you have to have like an American at the forefront in order for American audiences to enjoy it. And so that's technically the first American Godzilla film. in 1985 which was the same film as the japanese reboot in 1985 uh that they shoved raymond burr into again against some really very bad american actors which was fun then there's the the godzilla um iguana one um with uh why am i going never mind anyways the point is no i'm i'm listening because the then there's the the godzilla one that uh what is his name uh ferris bueller who's ferris bueller matthew broderick matthew broderick there's the matthew broderick godzilla film uh and then there's uh the the more recent run of godzilla films that uh brian cranston was in the first one of that and

he was quite good that's all i'm getting at that's all i'm saying is that the one in 2000 the one that had the good soundtrack well good or not 2000 2000 is the you mean the the um matthew broderick one was the one in 2000 was that the one in 2000 yeah it was it was during peak movie soundtrack where like you hear radio singles from movie soundtracks from like i forget who was on that one but like from like aerosmith or like metallica rage against the machine was on that one yeah yeah yeah their song on it was an indictment of america uh and um they specifically called out godzilla as like uh i can't remember how how they do it but like yeah they specifically are like you're you're you're being distracted by Godzilla.

The real monster is America, which is great. OK, I'm sorry. That was 98. Why did I think that was in 2000? It looks like it's from 2000. Yeah. I mean, like it's around then. Oh, my gosh.

Wow. Bryan Cranston's the one from like five years ago or or eight years ago or 20 years ago. I don't know. I don't know what time is anymore. Yeah. So the Godzilla film I'm talking about came out in 2014, nine years ago. Well, now that we've gone on that journey. Welcome to 200 Stories Tall, the Godzilla podcast.

All right. There we go. We've officially found our follow-up podcast. Patrick, Cousin Patrick. He is, again, he's immediately introduced to us. I mean, he seems already drunk um he introduces his girlfriend molly around very perfunctorily like say hi to everyone molly say bye to everyone molly um and when he is introduced to jim he refers refers to jim as megan's road less traveled yes murmur murmur murmur murmur don't worry we'll

we'll get more patrick later uh my note at this moment is like i i'm pretty sure pat is going to be the focus of the problem here whatever the problem is yeah whatever it is um we go to jim and megan uh catching up she asks about rocky and he says that he was always a major fan of yours yeah um we get introduced to uh megan's kids um she has a young teen son and slightly uh younger daughter um they do kid stuff i felt like the kids were very kid like yeah they were i think they were pretty good like um there was an a ongoing thing one of the kids was afraid of leeches the kids are part of megan's story yeah right like they kind of come in and out as i wasn't going to say i was going to say as props but that's not the right term like

yeah they're they're part of her character right so yeah you know we we get a lot of the lens of megan's life through how other people interact with her kids and how her kids interact with her and i guess just in contrast i think specifically to the last movie where i remember feeling like the younger characters were i think they were mostly college students right but like they were written like idiots yeah yeah um in my opinion uh i feel like these these kids felt very like yeah they act they're acting like Yeah, yeah. transitions into the toast portion of the afternoon, because it's still afternoon. Patrick has an open bottle of tequila just sitting in front of him at the table

and is pouring himself shots, and then gets up to make a toast to Frank, which my note is that he's irreverent at best, slightly insulting. He is obviously drunk, but then he kind of ends on like a kind of like a sweet note yeah we learned through this toast that his uh his dad died and frank was kind of you know stepped in and took care of him when no one else would and so we have that kind of

nice note at the end of the whole thing. The toast is a really good... It gives us all we're going to need to know about Patrick, right? Sorry, I keep checking what his name is because in my notes he's Brian Cranston every time. But because we know... Okay, so we know he's a bit of a jerk and the toast starts off that way. We're cringing already. But because of this tender ending right and also like he does reveal kind of the the meat of the relationship that he has with uh

well with frank and the family and everything but like um it still comes off as charming right so you get that like that tension between he's here he's's a jerk, but, you know, the family loves him. Yeah, we get that he's like charismatic. Yeah, yeah. And I really like that. I also, in my notes, I went from he's going to be the focus of the problem to he would definitely be the murder victim in a Christie novel at this point. This is the point where Agatha Christie's telling us this is the person that's going to die. So pay attention to everyone who hates him in this room. Yeah, yeah. It's the end of the the person that's going to die. So pay attention to everyone who hates him in this room.

Yeah. Yeah. It's the end of the party. Megan is walking Jim out. There's this great, I don't know if you caught this. There's this great moment where he kind of waves to someone off camera and we hear from off camera. Someone yelled,

cool firebird. I heard that. And my theory is that this is the valet, right? I'm guessing there's valet. Oh, sure. Yeah. One of them is telling the other one, get the cool firebird. Like that's the, that's the car we need to pull.

Oh, they're not. He's not like, oh, here are your keys. This is a cool firebird. Oh, that could be it. But yeah, yeah. One or the other, but it was just, I loved it. It's a great little nod. Yeah.

Yeah. Megan says that she'll call Jim tomorrow and gives him a kiss on the cheek. idea yeah uh megan says that she'll call jim tomorrow and gives him a kiss on the cheek jim gets in the firebird is ready to leave when suddenly patrick just swerves out in front of him he was like his car was just one car length in front of him in the driveway takes a sudden a sudden turn as jim is accelerating to leave and so he he ends up hitting Patrick's car. Patrick runs out. He's pissed, obviously. We have some shots of Molly in the car where she's bleeding. She had her face on a dash or something, so she's bleeding from the mouth, which is not graphic, but it's a little serious.

This whole thing feels very serious. This is not played for laughs. This is dramatic. We have some back and forth between Jim and Patrick. What the hell's the matter with you? Look what you did, Ace. You pulled right out in front of me. What are you, blind?

Well, I'm not ripped on blowing hair, I'll tell you that. Mommy. What'd you say? You were slapping up backboards when you got here today. Want to say that again? I'll say it again. I got about a hundred witnesses. Patrick!

Hey, son, don't do that. Patrick, for god's sake uh so patrick takes a swing and jim just blocks it and just gives him a huge jim rockford sucker punch right in the stomach uh uh he still got it the old guy still got it some other attendees pull patrick off and uh in the scrum we kind of zoom out and Frank is there and he goes, thank you, Patrick. Excellent choice of birthday present. Yeah, there's a little anger in the background. I can't remember exactly, but Molly, Molly starts sort of crying in Patrick's defense.

Yeah, yeah. And mentions that he's already had his license taken away. Oh, I didn't I didn't catch that. Yeah. So they're worried, worried that, uh, that they might call the cops or something, but basically,

you know, doesn't want them thrown in jail. And yeah, I will say that at first I was like, Oh, this is a guy, this is his like whatever girlfriend. And I didn't really take much,

many notes about Molly. Cause I assumed she would not be important. Um, and that I was wrong. So definitely, you know, know yeah i did not note that in that moment but maybe there's other stuff i missed as well um we go to the trailer uh it's the next morning where jim brings coffee out you know offers some to angel out on that deck out on that beautiful deck that deck is so good i i really, I was really like, wait, where are we right now?

Oh, this is the trailer. Angel's taking a break from his efforts. Don't you ever wonder what it all means? Look at me at my age. Cleaning aluminum siding on my best friend's house. So, Angel. Best friend's house. I'm just saying.

Jim says, give me a break. I spent the evening with somebody who lost her sight in a car accident at the age of 15 you should see her attitude and shrink you were bumping back in the early 80s jim sees through angels bs but to some extent angels see through jim's bs too like sometimes jim is a little self-righteous yeah and angels like nah yeah yeah i think there's a i don't think it matters and you know i guess we can do the forensics i think there's a little bit of playing with the timeline of how like old megan is in this movie versus like like how old

she was when they met versus the show how it establishes how they met like that kind of stuff yeah i'm not worried about it but i did think it was funny that he that just the phrase that shrink you were bumping in the early 80s uh yeah it's a good angel angelism jim is trying to get angel to understand you know compassion for another's plight. And Angel's like, I don't get it. He has a good, where he's like, look, Jimmy, I hear a sermon coming on. Yeah. Like, I know what you're going to, but yeah. This lecture is important for a later beat, but yeah, it's mostly more good banter. And then Patrick arrives.

He wants to thank Jim for not calling the police uh he could have done jail time and jim says that his cousin asked him not to that's the end of it and tells him to leave uh he definitely does not like patrick yes we get that very clearly we have a moment where while they're talking molly gets out of the car and goes over to angel and like tries to like yeah hang with him it seems like she's fairly social and she's like yeah yeah wants to talk to someone yeah and specifically says looks like sucky work as angel is scrubbing half-heartedly with the with his scrub brush angel's moments in this particular scene it's because like he scrambles like he's like i gotta get back to work when he realizes that patrick and jim you know that's that there's tension yeah

yeah there's tension there and he's just like i want out of this whatever this is but then when he goes and she's talking to him she gives he gives her nothing yeah which is a little weird because you would think that like uh but uh yeah i think it's just like Angel's like, there's trouble here and I don't want to be involved in any of it, whatever it is. Jim takes his fishing pole. Patrick follows him onto the beach, still talking to him. Megan thinks they should talk because Patrick needs a P.I. We learned that he's a personal manager to actors and other folk who need managers. And he has a client who is a Russian film star who's been working on getting her break in the US.

And she's been very depressed recently and she's disappeared. And so he wants Jim to try and find her. During this, Jim says that he doesn't need a personal manager. He's doing just fine. And we end with Jim saying, you're telling me that Megan asked you to ask me to find this Russian as a personal favor to her. And Patrick kind of shrugs and it's like,

well, you know, I did my best and starts walking away. And Jim gets what I call my notes. The, well, I'm going to do it. guess face as he thinks through you know his feelings about the whole situation there's uh yeah my note the same thing i was just like oh here's the look where jim's about to take the job uh yeah um

there's a hootie in the blowfish reference in this conversation at some point uh there's also uh part of this exchange uh patrick words it as she said you didn't have a job yes she was like she said what it's like yeah he's this is very this is a big sticking point for jim yeah yeah however as we see from his facial expression he does take the job It's like, yeah, he's, this is very, this is a big sticking point for Jim. Yeah. Yeah. However, as we see from his facial expression, he does take the job and we see him in the, the, the contemporary version of Rocky's truck, the big, the big red truck. Yeah. At a Russian bar theater, some kind of thing.

Yeah. Uh, and he's looking, so the woman's name is, uh, you cat arena. And so he's looking for her. She's a regular regular he's talking to this guy waxing the floor the guy says english no he pulls out a translation book for russian starts stumbling through some russian phrases the guy waxing the floor calls his buddy they start speaking in spanish jim realizes the deal and leaves his card for El Bossman, me telefono, which I still think Jim would know more functional Spanish at this point in his life. But it's a gag. It's a bit. The language barrier with this guy is fun and is maybe not entirely foreshadowing, but it gets played out again later in the episode which

is nice yeah so again you know a a david chase production by david chase um yeah most of the stuff in this is very tight like it's very like here's the thing here's the thing it will be important later the chase cubed effect yes yeah um it's very yeah it's very set them up knock them down i'm uh it's it's written right yeah it has that it's it's written and that kind of stuff makes our job a little more um entertaining because it's on the read through as we go through it again sometimes these things just dawn on me where I'm like, right, this is, you know, because when you do it linearly and you just watch the episode, it fits in subconsciously, but you might not be conscious of like, oh, this is a callback to that earlier

thing. But then when you go back through it again, it comes in. It can be satisfying on a different level. Yes. We then go to Jim over at at megan's uh she's cooking dinner uh there's a lot of good stuff in this scene uh plot wise we're learning that um her kids are going to go to atlanta to stay with their dad for the summer uh frank is also there he's hanging out with his grandkids he has a line where he says that uh i can't get that nintendo working and frank apologizes to jim again for patrick saying that every family has its

swamp thing which is a hell of a hell of a way to refer to someone i was i was so jealous of that every family has a swamp thing in my mind it's like i want to be the swamp thing of my family like you are i want well yeah maybe i probably am actually now that i think about it but yeah it was a great line there's a lot of good lines uh um there there might be something to be read into this uh as we go along because frank's language is is often the coded david chase language language of mafioso, right? A little bit, yeah. Not always, but he gets closer to it than, say, Megan. Or even Patrick, right?

The good stuff in this scene is establishing Megan's lifestyle. Yeah, how she deals with blindness. Right. Yeah. This, this movie is a great, Hmm. I'm trying to think of the right term.

It's not an introduction. It's a great showcase for accessibility because what it does is it, it over and over, it continually shows us how Megan gets around her daily life. She has all these different accessibility tools and techniques, and it's just not a thing. I mean, it's showing it. So this scene is showing us some of them

so that we know that that is her deal, that she is functionally independent, that she has all these kind of lifestyle things to assist her when she needs it. The other thing that the scene is doing is showing us that Jim keeps having this impulse to jump in and help her and she doesn't need it. There's a thing going on in the camera work where we see all of the characters observing her dealing with a thing that they would imagine would be very difficult for her.

And then the camera follows what they're watching very closely. So one of the examples in this scene, she's preparing a meal and a egg in its shell gets away from her. We see Jim, while they're holding the conversation, we see Jim sort of concentrating on the fact that that happened. We see, I think, Frank. Frank waves him off. Like, Jim kind of makes, like, a little half step. Like, he's going to get it for her or he's going to be like, let me get that for you.

And Frank gives him a little, like, don't do it. And then there's a beat. Yeah. And then she asks for one of her kids to help with the egg, and the other one, I believe, just tells her using clock directions, right? I think he says it's like 2 o'clock or something like that, and she gets it right away. So we see the whole family knows how to deal with it. We see that she has a coping mechanism, and there's no reason to get involved. There's no reason to step involved there's no reason to

step in the uh you might just get in the way right like you know you don't know and you know i apologize if the this isn't really the appropriate terminology but like it's not even that she i mean you're right that it is a coping mechanism in the sense of making up for you know whatever she challenges she's having but it's also showing us that she just lives in an accessible world part of that functionality is like her kids help and it's just a thing it's it's like asking someone to hand you the fork right you're too far away from the fork yeah yeah egg two o'clock gets it uh the son's response is is distracted even yeah he's not even really paying attention it's just part of their life yeah i guess that's what i mean about the kids feeling very real because like this whole thing feels like we're just watching a family in just a moment of no particular import yeah and then

the other thing that i the other little layer that i really like is how frank frank has this this fatherly protectiveness of her independence yeah right so he's like you know jim don't don't help her that comes off to me simultaneously as like good like he's like frank's right jim shouldn't interfere but also very paternalistic and like she can do this on her own right right and he and that's a point of pride for him and i think that's also a part of like that layer i think is also intentional yeah yeah how he views her and her you know yeah blindness and that will come up i think uh towards the end of the movie yeah i keep wanting to say episode but it's a movie all right so that all said this was all precursor to megan and j out to dinner. And this is where finally Jim expresses his miffedness

that Megan told Patrick that he wasn't working. Yes. I never said you didn't have a job. I said you were available. Oh, available. Excuse me. Well, aren't you? I do not need a personal manager.

Stop repeating yourself. You're so proud of that line. Yeah. This felt to me like a good, I mean, this is a very Rockford moment. And it's also very like a moment forged in the fires of Jim and Beth, their whole thing. Yeah, yeah. He wants to know why she's so hot to help him anyway. He seems like such a jerk.

She runs down all of his good features. He lived abroad. He lived in Africa. He lived in Russia. Two geographic locations that are roughly the same. But he lived in Russia. She says that he was one of the first capitalists there after the coup in 91. He knows Yeltsin.

Yes. And Jim says, I can tell from his driving good good topical humor is that that so i had this faint like i feel like that's that was probably yeltsin was was a drunk i didn't know if there was like a specific like driving incident that he was referencing uh i'm pretty sure that the whole thing he was an alcoholic yeah he's just notoriously notoriously an alcoholic and uh i remember that like a little bit older than you but still a teenager who shouldn't have been paying that close attention to it or i shouldn't say shouldn't but like yeah anyhow uh growing up you know they were close he was her big cousin he has a lot of positive attributes uh and and she kind of feels defensive of you know when people are are mean to

him yeah uh but she changes the subject asks about jim's marriage uh he says you first basically like we grew apart over time just usual stuff kids are great but we just weren't working you know whatever and then it's like you know don't get out of this what about your marriage and jim just has his one one line kid's a great person but the whole thing convinced me i don't want those kinds of complications in my life especially at this age yeah and megan's like same here the shots throughout the scene of the two of them get increasingly close and intimate in a way that felt really charged like yeah really like the camera work here is very does a lot of the heavy lifting to give us like there's clearly a spark here they're both interested in you know interested in whatever it might lead to right it really gives us the portrait of like two people who

are interested in spending more time together yeah without being like schmaltzy or creepy um so david chase director good job david chase director good job carrying david chase the writer no no somehow those two things just work together really nicely yep so next we have jim going to i guess it's downtown still it's a very different kind of station these days, but going to the station to see our good friend, Dennis Becker. And this is,

uh, again, a, I mean, they've had six movies. Yeah. Yeah. At no point were they not true to form with any of their character

interactions. Like I think from the first movie, we're like, wow, they're just right back at it. Yeah. But this, for whatever reason, just felt like a pure, like,

you could have transported this scene straight from an episode in, like, 76 to 90, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Where Jim just drops by Dennis's desk. I was just in the area. Oh, how's the cyst? You want to see it? I'd have nothing to compare it to so you got an

office with a window listen i i was just wondering if possibly you could do me a favor and dennis blows up this he has this whole litany about how the department is everything's in the toilet we're overloaded we have all the scrutiny our response time is a subject of public mockery. Um, and all the same negative voices come in here asking for a special treatment. And Jim says that he just thought a friend would be happy to see him working again. Why he would be bristle, a bristle at the,

the original implication. And there's also a little bit of the same angle that angel uses on jim right like i'm just a friend like let's it's his favorite kind of job the skip trace favorite kind because he because he can get dennis to do it and then make it you know and then like you know make his upcharge or whatever yeah so he's asking dennis to look see what he can if there's anything reported about this actress you're katarina yes jim gives dennis a file and dennis reads the name why katarina and they have a whole who's on first routine about the name which is both obvious and fun yeah worth watching that that's a good spot

that's a good bit uh then we have jim returning to his trailer uh it's late there's a good spot. That's a good bit. Then we have Jim returning to his trailer. It's late. There's a pile of cans inside the door. And on his answering machine, a message from Angel saying that he's quitting the job. He's going to go drive for your buddy Patrick, I think, or however he phrases it. I might put it at the beginning of the episode. Oh, yeah, yeah. This bodes well.

I think Patrick and Angel should really work together. Perfect combo. beginning of the oh yeah yeah this is this bodes well i mean i think patrick and angel should really work together perfect combo we are going to go from here into uh one of our yeah first seriously dramatic yeah yeah uh moments so jim gets in like 2 a.m or whatever we then go to seeing his clock ticking over to 6 a.m when jim hears something outside the trailer it wakes him up he looks out the window and we see two cars outside his trailer just emptying themselves of goons just yeah clearly a bunch of goons i mean my notes here i've just like a lot of heavies for a case that jim barely started right um jim gets his gun out of the cookie jar there's the knock on the door and he goes and so there's an older guy and he has jim barely started right um jim gets his gun out of the cookie jar there's the knock on the

door and he goes and so there's an older guy and he has jim's card right because jim left his card at the the bar or whatever uh and says and there's some banter about like you're looking for your katrina maybe i am who are you blah blah blah there's some banter and then there's just a explosion as the two heavy goons bust down his door, knock him down, get the gun away from him and then hold him down in his in his easy chair. The main guy asks who engaged him. And, you know, Jim is not going to give up a client or whatever. There's two. So they're all Russian, right?

They're speaking to each other in Russian. So we get, you know, some. So we get that the two heaviesies one of them is the main guy and he's the one who's always wearing like sports jerseys and stuff we i think eventually we learned his name is boris yes he pulls out a syringe and is pulling you know some kind of injection and jim immediately is like patrick doherty yeah yeah just gives them up but they inject them anyway and then uh there is a pretty brutal yeah it's brutal situation content warning this guy likes to torture people so there is some gross not graphic but brutal you know stuff that happens yeah yeah the guy who's does the speaking in english that's that is coblitz

that's coblitz yeah coblitz who's got real wrath of khan vibes yes he really does but yeah so uh yeah he does a lot of not so subtle subtle threatening um but eventually they they get jim's golf like his putter or something and uh just go to town on the soles of his feet giving us the excuse for jim's limp this set but this this movie it's true i was like oh okay i see what they're doing here but yeah it's brutal it's rough after each question the guy just winds up and just as a full driver swing into the sole of Jim's foot. And it is no good. So they ask him if he's found your Katerina, asks if he knows where Patrick is, and'm sorry. I have to leave things on such a basis. And he leaves and leaves Boris to make another swing. And we cut like from that, like noise to the next morning with a closeup of the gun and the bottle, the syringe on the carpet of the trailer.

Then we see Jim's poor busted up feet. They're all bruised and swollen. trailer then we see jim's poor busted up feet they're all bruised and swollen and we see him kind of like wake up and then physically wake up like feel yeah feel the the effects he drives still woozy from whatever this injection is to megan's house he stumbles out of the truck he's holding his gun and i'm like oh no like this probably is not gonna go well he calls for megan there's no answer and then he he passes out on a bench next to her door basically her entryway has like a little bench and he yeah yeah on her front porch or something yeah he he passes out on that and we see him drop the gun and so i'm like oh this is gonna be a thing yeah uh

fortunately it is not a thing but it is very dramatic cut to night time megan is getting dropped off by her sister after they took the kids to the airport to go to atlanta she walks past jim doesn't see him um but then as she's like getting her keys she hears him groaning who is that and he has a muttered i'll take the trash out in the morning you know some kind of like dream yeah i'm gonna sleep mutter and here's that it's jim we go to becker in megan's house with jim he's getting his jim jim's getting his feet all iced just just just plunging his feet into the bags of ice and some conversation to figure out what is going on. That whole sequence, very dramatic.

Yeah. And very like, oh, it's on. Yeah, yeah. It is on now. We have some pretty high stakes. I'm still, at this point, not entirely sure what is happening. Clearly there is something going on that none of our principals are aware of. Yeah, yeah yeah exactly the whole gym driving still doped up uh with his blinker on the whole way

you know that kind of uh poor decision making but he's concerned for megan right yeah exactly patrick is in danger i need to find megan that's his instinct and And kudos to David Chase for writing the kids out of the story at this point. Well done. Megan also has a seeing eye dog. An adorable golden retriever named Buddy. Buddy is a wonderful character.

He does a great job. There is one moment where we might be worried about Buddy. Buddy is okay. Nothing happens to Buddy. He does respond to Jim on the park bench with a little, like, apprehensiveness of, like, what's going on here. But that's it. That's all you get from him in that scene.

We are going to take a little break in the middle of our episode here so that we can stretch, maybe get a beverage or a snack, and talk about the other places that you can find, maybe get a beverage or a snack, and talk about the other places that you can find us on the internet. Epi, if our listeners want more Epi, where can they go to get maximum Epi? You can find me at my website, dig1000holes.com. That's dig1000holes.com. Or you can get my sword and sorcery fiction and games at worlds without master.com that's worlds plural master singular if you want to engage with me on the social medias

the best place to go right now is mastodon at epidia at dice.camp nathan if they want to get maximum nathan where do they have to go for that? I should have gone Maximum Nathan. Maximum Nathan can be found at my website, ndpdesign.com. That's the hub for all my stuff on the internet, including all my role-playing games, zines, and other podcasts. So if you're interested in pro wrestling detectives or zines about pro wrestling, among other things. Those are all at my website. It also has links to contact me in other ways. Currently, I'm still posting on Instagram at ndpeoleta.

That's where I'm posting pictures of my dog. You can also find me at cohost, cohost.org slash ndp. That is a fun, small-scale social media site that I'm enjoying quite a lot. And now we return to the continuing adventures of Jimbo Rockfish. Becker says that they finally got in touch with Molly. She hasn't seen Patrick, so he's basically been missing since sometime yesterday. Jim says these guys, they must have like KGB training or be like either mafia or kgb or both right no one you know neither jim or nor nor megan know who they could be she does reiterate that

patrick was in russia you know she lists off a couple of different reasons he was in russia and could know russians uh there's a gag about tivas and then a billings appearance yes uh to say that none of the neighbors saw anything and jim says not even a crazy old guy waving a gun around yeah yeah like a tall whacked out on i don't remember what he said but yeah yeah bugs was like did that happen so that's good but uh megan pack a bag we can't stay here and this is when dennis does reveal that they did get something on your katarina she's been found she is in a hospital from an overdose but is in satisfactory condition very tight here's stuff that's going on oh here's the

next lead kind of yeah yeah this is where we're going next yeah so we go to the hospital and here's where jim's walking with his cane um for the rest of the episode yes this scene has more kind of like back and forth to remind us of her background and kind of what the deal is as well as to give us some new information what we learn is that uh yeah katarina uh so yes patrick is her manager and she is like seeing or was seeing the guy koblitz but now she doesn't want them to tell him that she's in the hospital as soon as she can she's going back to moscow this whole thing in america isn't working out um she had like an argument with with cobblets uh and then after that took too many pills and that's how she ended up in the hospital she has a couple moments where she's like you can't tell him i'm here and she tries to offer jim a watch and offer

megan a fur coat to like yeah kind of as bribes almost and they're like you don't need to bribe us we're not gonna tell him yeah yeah so there's like you know some cultural barrier there and we end the scene with jim telling megan that you need to tell your father so we go to frank's house at this point in my notes i am not entirely sure that that's the right move jim but but we'll find out yeah we'll find out yeah i guess that's a question so this whole episode is very we know what jim knows this is a yeah yeah very one-to-one yeah you know knowledge situation but we do get some some foreshadowing in various ways somewhere in this scene i was kind of like okay so frank's something about this frank is touching something about this situation yeah i don't know what it is i don't know if it's in concert with or in opposition to these russian guys but like

there's something here right right right i i was like is frank crooked what's going on with frank in this uh i was well we'll find out what i was. Yeah. They tell Frank what they've learned. Um, and he says that he knows Kennedy Koblitz. Uh, he's not an idiot and he knows not to touch anyone in Frank's family. I have the kind of friends who will send him to the cold room. Yeah. And Megan says, well, he wants to kill Patrick. And Frank says, I said, my family, I'm not talking about Patrick. Yeah.

Which is pretty cold. Um, he's hotheaded, but he'll see reason. He just wants to scare, you know, scare Patrick. Maybe it'll actually get through with thick skull or something like that. But he knows him through Patrick. Gennady had come into possession of some 15th century Russian religious icons. And Frank knew a collector, So he helped with the negotiations, something like that.

And Megan is like, I can't believe you did that. Yeah. Yeah. Like what is wrong with you? And then she excuses herself to go to the bathroom. And again, here we see the specific relationship that Frank has with Megan,

where she, he turns to Jim and is like, she's really something, isn't she? Well, she's something. All right. That's the way she took me to task none of my other kids have that much spine if we weren't suspicious of frank we know now that frank we don't know like is this about something frank did right or is frank aggravating it? We don't know that. But we do

know that, like you said, Frank touches this in some way. We get the sense that he doesn't really have a strong moral compass. Is there a big difference between Patrick and Frank other than age? Right. Like, sure. Yeah. Yeah. Because they're they're both in the same business and they're both or Frank used to be in the same business as patrick right yeah he's a talent he ran a talent agency or something yeah like he goes oh yeah i know this this russian heavy i know this guy i've worked with them i guess more more revelations to come this next scene i think this is the one that starts with like the scariest image you could have in the rockford files where jim is taking groceries out of the car yeah in my notes i say uh-oh it's like oh no it's going to get worse uh listener this might be the only time in the rockford files where we've seen jim by himself at night take a

bag of groceries out of a car and not get jumped yeah this is uh um he is going inside this cabin where uh inside megan is on the phone with her kids uh i and then i have a note he makes it in okay exclamation point so they are hiding out in rocky's old studio which is this kind of woodsy cabin there's a mediocre at best painting of jim on the wall yes which is fantastic yeah um but he says it was a studio but all he ever did was bring his buddies up on the weekend they'd watch the game and grill kielbasa um jim can't unload it but he still pays taxes on it we say i wish the kids got to atlanta all right that's all they're all good um megan says let's not have the conversation about who's going to sleep on the couch and who's going to sleep in the bed and jim replies that his bad back cuts into his chivalry these days

she can sleep where she wants that's a good line there's a long pause megan asks you know ask jim why did you call me um like in the first place, right? And we have a really great sequence where Jim kind of, this is all without any more dialogue. Jim goes over to her, sits, takes her hands. And then there's a romantic music swell as she holds his hands and then feels up to his face and holds his face and then brings him in for a kiss. And we cut to buddy lying down on the floor with the, the guitar playing a very tender. Yeah. Yeah.

It's nice. It's again, it's a manage. I mean, at least for me, it manages to be charged without being like schmaltzy. Yeah, it's good. It plays well on the screen.

It's a good use of all that tension you build up by having Jim carry the groceries from the car to the cabin. Absolutely. All right. The next scene feels like it's from a different episode, but I like it. It's our only instance of jim jim running a con so the deal is that jim is pretending to be a professor who works with some other professor who's a russia expert and he is coming to see a guy named festa who happens to be at the gym and is clearly mobbed up. His guy who takes Jim's card and then brings him down the elevator is the most mobby goon you ever did see. I would be very surprised that this guy didn't

end up in other David Chase. Yeah. Yeah. Johnny Zeps is the character name. Yeah. Oh, good. His real name is Johnny Williams. Uh-huh. He was in Goodfellas as Johnny Roast Beef. A lot of his credits are Mobster or Mafioso. He's in a movie called Crybabies playing a character named Tony Two Guns. He's in a movie called Real Gangsters playing a character named Big Tony. And he's in a movie called Jersey Justice playing a character named Big Bill Romeo. So that's the kind of guy that we're talking about.

Festa, I thought I recognized him and I did not. He just looks like another actor that I know. He looks like he should be in movies. Yeah. Look, and he actually is not in that many movies. Anyway, that's neither here nor there um i don't know this is the bringing in the italian mob yeah part of of the david chase project so this guy festa continues working out the entire time that he's talking to

jim jim tracked him down through uh he saw his name in a newspaper article paired with gennady they had some kind of partnership to buy property in Atlantic City. He's working with this other professor who's interested in Gennady and blah, blah, blah. Like he has whatever his cover story is. That doesn't really matter. Pestis says that partnership did not eventuate and said that he's lower than a silverfish. You know, the Russian part of the partnership ripped them off for $18 million. Let me tell you something about the Russian mafia. They're violent,

they're sociopathic. A bath once in a while would be nice too. That's not true, Rich. What, are you going to contradict me? This is a sociocultural thing. I think it's so cold over there taking a shower is not instilled in the young. I think it's up to the individual. I mean, Koblitz with me was always well groomed it was great because he just kind of called him on his bs and was just like no i you know like some people are this way some people are you know like it was good it's good so jim asks if he knows where koblitz is uh festa says i would be willing to pay up to four figures for that information myself. And Jim goes, is that right?

Ching! We know that there is a mobbed up guy with a grudge against these Russians. This may be important later. Our next scene is back at the cabin. There's still no word from Patrick. Megan's still in bed. This is kind of like a short short scene showing us their you know the tenderness that has grown between them yeah um this is a resonant touch for me so she's on the run right

she's like not she had to like not work right she's in hiding you know she's like there's there's actually something nice about being in this cabin away from everything. No work to do. I feel like I'm getting away with something. Right. And Jim's like, that's the problem with LA. There's no snow days. So that,

that feeling of as an adult being like, Oh wait, I don't have to do anything today. Yeah. And how rare that is. She's living in a different world in this cabin. I mean, this is,

yeah, uh, this is going to become part of, uh, uh, tension that rolls out in their relationship because this at this moment they have a relationship and it's in this world this fantasy world where she doesn't have work to do or anything like that and when she returns back

to to real life that's going to be um it's going to come into question not that she uses this language but it's also like a fancy world where she doesn't she doesn't have to deal with her kids she doesn't have to deal with her dad everything doesn't have to deal with her family yeah like it's just like her and jim and buddy yeah and jim's the one doing stuff like he's going off to do things and coming back yeah it's this little fantasy world but it's very nice while you're in it right yeah and and jim agrees to the extent that he he likes the like he doesn't like being on the run or whatever but he likes the being there with her part right right later she tries her answering service again and there is indeed a message from patrick says there's

nothing to worry about he's fine he spent the night with a client um he's been on the move actually got a lot of work done but he knows cob Koblitz and it's all going to blow over. So don't worry about it. He's going to get Molly and they're going to go. He named something. I assume it's like a hotel or a resort or something like they're going to go out of town for a few days. She plays this for both of them to hear. And Jim just goes, Molly's get dressed.

Yeah. We go to the truck where we have a brief moment before our next action sequence. Yeah. Yes. Megan, what she's thinking about. And she says that she hopes her kids are having fun with their dad. Jim turns into a,

uh, into like the driveway lane and a gray car shooting out of the lane. Jim hits it and it's angel. Yeah. The speed at which this goes from a gag to something very yeah serious is uh not to make a pun but whiplash inducing because because like in the angel's car it's a gag right like you see angel he's about to capitalize on everything that just happened but um megan it doesn't know what's going on just knows that she in an accident, doesn't realize there's Angel in the other car.

Right, right. And is kind of having this panic. And as far as we know, accidents have a post-traumatic stress situation for her. And Jim is kind of leaping back and forth between the boundary between the two, which I like. It's a good scene for that kind of like. And you could also just get the kernel of the scam that Angel's about to hatch. Angel is like putting pieces together now. Jim approaches and he's like,

and Angel's like, call 9-11. Yeah. Jim's like, Angel. Angel sees this Jim. And the first thing he says is it's horrible back there. It's horrible.

Jim goes to check on Megan, who is freaking out about Buddy because, you know, the dog's in the car. Right. She doesn't. He's like, but he's fine. But he's fine. Stand here. He gets her out of the car, has her stand, goes back to Angel. And by then, Angel's like really playing up.

He's like, oh, I think he says, I'm leaking cranial fluid. Don't move me. And Jim, you know, has no time for for angel yeah uh we go up to the house and we see a very rough scene uh molly has clearly been assaulted she's on the ground patrick has like crouched over her he's basically crying uh calling her name as angel said it is uh horrible so we go from there to the hospital where we hear molly asking someone to call her mother so we get that like okay so she's alive yeah um becker jim patrick and megan are talking through what's happened um becker says that she's in rough shape she was beat up she's also sexually

assaulted possibly by both guys there's two she was attacked by two russian men not koblets she would recognize koblets but you know assumingly those two guys yeah um patrick is apologizing i'm so sorry so sorry for what happened to molly and there's an amazing line so sorry about all of this jim what they did to you you've got no reason i can remember to call me jim the timing is so good yeah that's a good good line it has so much potential energy in the beginning with that like you have no reason to apologize right like something like yeah but no no patrick is the bad guy in this situation to jim still the menace behind it is just it's it's really good it's not the overblown anger that he uses to yell at angel it's no icy cold you are lower than scum to me right that i

think we rarely see deployed and it is scathing. Yeah. Becker talks to Patrick to get more background and we kind of, you know, get more exposition through their conversation. Kennedy blames Patrick for your Katarina's career, not taking off. And then when she split, that's when Patrick hired Jim. Um,

Becker asks about his fee for his management situation, the usual 15%. And he's kind of like uh yeah well no and it's like what do you mean no so megan's the one who's like patrick i know that you're holding something back yeah i think it's also important the deal was that he asked gennady for a hundred thousand dollars cash up front and promised that your catarina would win a golden globe they're like what yeah he's like he's in litigation for a screenplay he owes forty thousand dollars for something and he's like what else was i supposed to do he apologizes again he says don't tell uncle frank about the golden globe

thing and becker's just like i've seen enough and he just leaves uh jim goes to follow him and passes angel being wheeled in on a stretcher where he's groaning about not being able to see he has a coat over his face so he takes the coat off his face and he goes jimmy i'm blind and jim's like you're not blind you have a minor concussion they're going to keep you for observation you're going to be fine specifically you've been making blind jokes and now you're scared like get over yourself and again another piece of angel this here where he wants to know he wants jim to assure him that is is mr d still going to hire me he owes me two days pay and then asks if if if molly mentioned how the food is in the hospital it it's like Angel.

It must be a joy to write for Angel. Just be like, OK, in this situation, what concerns Angel the most? Right. Whether he gets to keep his job, whether he gets his back pay. Like he's clearly fled the scene after they came upon it. Even if he didn't get into a wreck or anything like that, you fled in his car. You would you charges would be pressed against you but yeah yeah uh i do i do want to note that uh 16 years after this

aired no wait 18 years after this aired patrick does get his golden globe i just i looked that up. Good sleuthing. We then go to another heavy scene. Oh, yeah. We go outside with Megan and Jim. This is a great frame where they're going to the truck. They must be on like a rooftop parking lot or something, right? So it's like framed in the center of the screen against the L.A. skyline. Yeah. There's something about it that's like really striking you know

we don't have any other cars or anything so it's just like it really feels like they're alone the two of them yeah in this like moment even though they're probably in like a crowded hospital parking lot or whatever jim does not understand what why she's so protective of patrick she says that she doesn't need him to understand that's good because i don't understand well that's too bad they have this they continue this argument she continues defending him says he wasn't always this way he got into harvard uh he had all these accolades and stuff jim's like he says like lots of stupid people get into harvard or something like that um but he says all this stuff uh you know and he did this all without a father and jim says well he had your dad and that

hit some kind of nerve so we get to the emotional dramatic core uh character moment here she has something to tell jim she has to work herself up to it but she wants to tell him the we have a flashback sequence with her narrating over it back in the back in the 70s like their families would all get together for the holidays and they had this like cabin or whatever and all the kids would go basically just like like a party just partying yeah all the kids they're all teenagers right and they would all or maybe coming back from college for the older ones or whatever and they would all party they'd all bring their like boyfriends and girlfriends and like whatever so there's this flashback montage of this party you know there's a

couple kids who are clearly the troublemakers and they break open uh there's like a cabinet that they like break open because there's a gun in it and they're playing with the gun and there's this very uh tension-filled series of shots as kids are taking this gun and pointing it at each other and then like pushing it away and then pulling the trigger but there's it's not loaded we think um she's outside the cabin with her boyfriend and then patrick's inside the cab he's taking it away from this other kid and then he's like going to put it back then he like looks at it and he's like kind of also overcome with how cool it is or whatever yeah he fires it i guess it goes off or it goes off in his hand it's hard to tell from the shot yeah uh but there is at least one bullet in it it goes off and it shoots through

the window we come back to the present so i always just say i lost my sight in a car accident otherwise when people meet patrick or even in the way they relate to me, it's just a lot easier. This brings her and Patrick together because they both experience social isolation after this event because she has gone blind and people treat her differently. And him because he's responsible for the event and people treat him differently. And that paradoxically draws them closer together he had a suicide attempt she yeah responded that by telling him that if he left her she was gonna like she was gonna kill herself yeah uh which you know is classically not a great thing to tell to someone who's suicidal but she she does bracket that with like i was 15 i didn't

know you know like yeah she clearly was going through crisis at the same time. She says that this takes place in 71. Right. So that's three years before the first Rockford Files episode. Yeah, yeah. That's the, like, time discontinuity with the original show. That places her at 20 years old, I think. Or early 20s when she first meets Rockford.

So we'll see when we watch the other ones. Yeah, I think it's a little close, but. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, she says they're a private club of two. Yeah. Going through this again, this resonates with her kind of like having these having these isolated like i have

this experience with this person like kind of how she is with jim in the cabin yeah like i have this experience with this person like her and patrick have their what has happened between them and both of those she has to have that as well as having her whole entire other life and that's a lot um yeah it's heavy it's heavy stuff but it's a good scene yeah yeah and it's also um fairly unique in the annals of the rock profile so we don't get many flashbacks like that like that's a a pretty standard um amongst a lot of mystery shows and things like that to see like we'll go to 20 years earlier or 30 years earlier or something like that. But we don't, I actually can't think of another Rockford files.

Yeah. It does that. That does a visual flashback. Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes there's like a voiceover, but it almost always comes out in dialogue of some sort, but it's,

yeah. I mean, I think, I wonder if that's an effect of like the medium like you can't that's a lot of extra filming to do for like a week television show but for a one-off not a one-off but like for a tv movie with a long production schedule um and also just stylistically that feels more 90s yeah to me but yeah yeah that's good it was it was it was unexpected i also want to say like the filming of the flashback and the whole playing around with the gun is very well done as far as like tension building because there's also a question of where

is this going yeah yeah which is left pretty unresolved until the very end and even then i was like so like did he kill her boyfriend like that was my first thought the introduction of the story is about this guy that she's interested in that that she either meets at the party or his boy you know like or they're just it's their early relationship or something like that so you have this feeling of like we haven't heard about this guy right right what's his what happened to him and so yeah it definitely feels like he's going to end up getting shot or um even what what is it that they use there's something they use to jimmy the lock oh it's a golf club yeah yes was it i think yes yeah it'd be like the setup for the second of three introductions,

or three times we see the golf clubs. Yeah, it stands out. Yeah, that was well done. But we do go from there to the next day in the cabin. We are breaking that tension with Megan waking up and saying that she slept great and that she loves this place. Jim says Rocky would be happy to hear it, but he needs to find Koblet so they can all get on with their lives throughout this um megan's been saying like all

the things that she's hearing like all the beautiful bird songs and stuff yeah there's specifically a bird that is that is singing every 17 seconds and like yeah that's something she's really like identified with yeah so this is the second mention of this high-pitched bird singing every 17 seconds just because it was mentioned specifically again i was like i wonder if that's going to be some kind of device it's not it's just no no it's more of the material about her experience of the world yeah yeah so jim needs to find cobblets we go to back to our russian nightclubclub where we come in with some shots of a Russian kind of torch singer doing some you know, singing.

I knew the song. I didn't even write the song down. It's a Russian version of a standard. And I can't remember what it was now. Ah, curses. Dennis meets Jim outside and saying, I just got on days. But Jim had staked the place out until Koblitz, you know, showed up. And so Dennis is there to help him out.

So they go in. Dennis identifies himself as a police officer, wants to talk to Koblitz. It's like this man says that you went to his home assaulted him you know etc etc what do you have to say kennedy's like i went to his house to talk there was no assault and that's kind of his whole thing he's like yeah the story he told you is embellished like yes we talked he left his card here i wanted to see if i could help but i could not help. Like that kind of stuff.

They introduced that they know about this guy, Boris, Boris Andreevich, who's the torture guy. Did you go with him? He's like, no, I went alone. And then Koblet's mother arrives and he introduces his mother who does not speak English, but she loves L.A. And then when they ask him where he was like where were you when like molly was assaulted he's like i was with my mother and jim's like oh at disneyland and she reacts to disneyland and there's a gag about disney yeah um she loves pirates of the caribbean we gotta end the scene with dennis telling koblitz that he's uh of active interest to the department

uh my big note on that scene is that at the beginning i'm just like jim's about to get real meaty here he's very physical in this scene he really wants uh dennis to just stand by and let him roll this guy over uh the whole business with the the mom uh was kind of fun just with jim's sarcasm because there's a few other sites that they mention maybe knott's berry farm or i don't remember what all of them are but like jim knows exactly the excuses that this guy or alibis that this guy has set up for himself because they're they're obvious yeah and it's like jim is rolling his eyes at him and whatnot it It's, it's good. It's a good scene. Cause it just ramps up a little more anger between Jim.

Yeah. It's not that there needs to be any more, but yeah. Jim goes to see Megan in her office. She's acting fairly manic. And he's kind of like, Hey, what,

you know, what's up? Yeah. So she's back at work, right? She's like catching up on all the stuff she has to do and whatever she size. She just talked to her husband. It's kind of like, I'm coming back to work, right? She's like catching up on all the stuff she has to do and whatever. She sighs. She just talked to her husband. It's kind of like I'm coming back to reality, right? Yes.

Talked to my husband. We've been talking about getting back together, kind of like mostly for the children. Your situation isn't typical, you know? I said I got it. Oh, don't be like that. Like what? You're going to do what you're going to do. Don't expect me to sit here and scrunch up my hanky over your children. They've got everything. And you know what? It is none of my business.

It's just so complicated. And that's exactly what we agreed we didn't want. Oh, right. And you called me to compare notes. There's a, what I term a mature argument, in the sense that this seems like an argument that adults would have. Yes. As opposed to a TV argument, which is overblown and doesn't, doesn't seem germane to what they're actually arguing about. I don't know why I feel like I have to make that distinction, but sometimes I think it's good. Like the setup

is good too. Like the, like you were saying, she's kind of keeping herself busy as a defense to keep from having this conversation. Uh, and Jim's like, well, whatever this is, we need to have that conversation. And then when they do, yeah, it's an argument, but it's not like shouting. There's no doors being slammed. There are definitely feelings being hurt, but they're not irreparably being hurt. Right, right. They both kind of know where the other person's coming from. Yeah.

But that doesn't mean it's not painful to have this conversation. And to some extent, that sucks because you not painful to have this conversation and and to some extent that sucks because you actually want to have the door slamming angry like there's there's some great lines especially when like he says like you're the one that got sexual and she's like well i'm glad i forced the issue yeah and the sex was great by the way like just like yeah like i don't regret that yeah yeah nothing's wrong with that the the core of it uh here is that she says it's also complicated and jim says well that's what we said we didn't want you know gets back to him saying that his first marriage

ended because like it was too complicated basically yeah right he is kind of like and i thought that's where we both were and she's like well we still need to acknowledge that we have something yeah um they end uh this was saying they were going to go to a concert and he's like i don't think we should go to the concert i don't see how we could have a good time you know you should go with your sister you know send me a brave's hat sometime or something yeah because atlanta okay i just i was like why did you say that atlanta i'm there now it's a nice parting blow right like like i've reduced our relationship to this now like or you have or you know like this is yeah i like it so he is taking her back to her house to drop her off and there's music playing inside uh jim looks in through the window and patrick is there that loud

music i have to say i thought oh this is this is threatening right like this is this is an ambush if you're going to ambush a blind person in their home you would have loud music playing uh to take away whatever ability to disorient them yeah yeah well i guess threatening in a different way because it's just patrick um megan's not happy of course he's just Patrick. Um, Megan's not happy. Of course he's supposed to be laying low. He's in danger. He starts off with like,

just making some, just like terrible wisecracks. Yeah. But then shifts pretty quickly to like, I want to tell you that Molly's doing much better by the way. Um, and that he talked to Kennedy on the car phone and made some assurances and it's all going to

blow over. He's never going to harm anyone I care about ever again. It's all going to be behind us. We're all alive and life is worth celebrating. And he, cause he's wrapping presents. Like, yeah, let's have a party. He got Megan a Chieftain's CD and listing all the songs that she will like off of it. And she just has this great delivery of this, of being like, you don't mind if I don't listen to this right now, Patrick.

Like, come on. M, who is watching this with me, had this great note that there is a stark fashion divide in the 90s. And he's sitting on the early part of that one. Patrick is? Patrick is pre-grunge. He's wearing this long sleeve, not button down, but long sleeve shirt that's tucked in to stonewashed jeans. And he has an earring, right? Yeah, yeah.

The one little earring. Yeah. And it's very like pre-grunge. It's a 90s, what we would maybe call normcore. Yeah, yeah. Before that term term existed it's what a dad wears but like a cool dad yeah exactly so uh but like but at the time right so this was filmed in 95 so at the time this was already out of date yeah just barely out of date. Yeah. Just barely out of date. Yeah. Anyways, there's your little fashion topic for this episode. Well, you know how we like our fashion.

So Jim leaves. Well, he says everything's okay. And I apparently am not having a relationship with Megan. So I'm out. Yep. Yep. He goes home. He's watching baseball.

And here's where I note. All right. There's a half hour left to go in this movie yes what unpleasantness is in store i i mean like yeah i was like still on edge from when he brought the groceries into the cabin right oh jim's about to get ambushed right he's going home that's not a safe place and he is but what he's going to get ambushed by is solitude. Oh, our feelings. Yeah. And this is like a real solid, like, three-act structure with, like, exactly one-third, one-third.

Yeah, yeah. At the 60-minute mark, we are going into the third act of this story. But yeah, he's ambushed by solitude. He takes his fishing pole out to the pier. And we have some good, he's ambushed by solitude. He takes his fishing pole out to the pier and we have some good, solid Rockford files harmonica. Yeah. Oh, very sorrowful.

He makes a single cast, but his heart clearly isn't in it. And we kind of zoom out and, and kind of see him standing underneath one of the lights as waves crash under the pier. And he just looks out to sea. Hence the one of the lights as waves crash under the pier and he just looks out to sea. Hence the title of the episode, Night Fishing. Indeed.

We go from there to the next day where Jim is at a driving range and he's making a couple swings. Our two Russian heavies just walk up, grab him straight up at gunpoint and just start walking him away he's like hey what's going on those golf clubs cost me a thousand bucks you know they march him out of the place at some point he does call like hey someone call the police and just nobody nobody answers there's an interesting bit with um we get subtitles for them talking on their yeah on their radios and they're like wolfound, it's in code.

I spent a little time thinking about that because I was like, what? I feel like this is really meant for us as the audience to just submit that these guys are probably ex-KGB. Yeah, yeah, I think so. Like, they're not, like, mob. Yeah. But, like, the background of these guys

is this more military style yeah organization yeah which explains the next scene to some degree as well so they take jim to a recording studio you know i was like huh interesting so this this particular twist uh feels very cannell to me this feels like yeah like a kind of out of left field but actually totally makes sense steven cannell to me this feels like yeah like a kind of out of left field but actually totally makes sense steven cannell style uh weird memorable bit but they take him to recording studio throw him into the studio part where you know the musicians would be boris our our torture aficionado uh runs up the faders and is blasting just white noise yeah it is very loud for us watching to tell us it's very loud it is not painfully loud because it is television that we're supposed to be enjoying but you know the reaction of jim you know is that it

is uh incredibly loud in there after a minute um they toss megan in and she's totally panicked yeah as she would be right yeah very very strong um work here uh in in this moment jim runs over and like grabs her he's like you're you know you're with me we're in this whatever but she's totally disoriented kennedy makes his appearance they bring down the noise so he can talk to them from the booth. This is white noise. In six to eight hours, you cannot organize your thoughts or walk for a while. You can't do that to her. You can't even keep her balanced if you can't hear.

I know how you feel. That's why she's here. One of you will decide to help me it is time i need patrick wants to know where he is and they don't know anything but and he just says in a few hours i will know what you know and cut from there so there is something kind of weird not weird but kind of like particularly unpleasant about gennady wanting to know things and just assuming they're being kept from him when they actually do not know what he wants you know yeah i think the the way that one that one line is delivered to me it gave me the impression of him

it's not like i will know the things that you will know but it's i will know what you may or may not know sure sure if you don't know anything then i'll know for sure if you do know something i'll drag it out of you he's such like again good wrath of khan vibes like really really uh a good menacing villain and the contrast is good because he's like his affect is kind of like i have to do this it makes me sad that i have to go to these lengths while boris is gleeful yeah you know he's pumped that he gets to like do these terrible things to people koblitz gets to be the the uh what's the word i'm looking for here that reluctant hero of his own tale right like like i'm doing this for the greater good if you only you would cooperate

uh it definitely has the feeling of like i guess david chase wrote it so at some point david chase must have been in a music studio and just thought what if i had like a scene where they were torturing somebody with the you know this would be a a nice setup for that or you know whatever like yeah no it's good it's good memorable yeah definitely we cut this this tension by going to angel with a uh poorly suited seeing eye wire terrier of some kind yes wearing dark glasses outside a casino we see he has clearly decided to run this con, but he's not really chosen a good spot. Yeah. This is a total comic relief. The setup, you can see this start with way back when Angel was power washing Jim's wall when they were having coffee.

Yeah. And Jim was describing an incident in which Megan was handed. Oh, right. I think it was like a 50 bill or something like that like when she was in vegas for a conference or something yeah yeah so the story that jim was trying to say right here's a woman with pride here's a woman who uh wants to be able to take care of himself and it's humiliating that this happens and the lesson the angel takes it's like i hear you jimmy i can get angel takes, it's like, I hear you, Jimmy.

I can get $50 if I stand outside a casino as a blind man. Right, right, right. And that's so angel. He hears someone approaching and says, excuse me, am I close to the public library? And this woman just goes, this is a gambling casino and walks away. Yeah. I was like, it's not even a good con.

Um, we go back to the, uh, recording studio. Boris like fell asleep and then got up and left, you know, for whatever reason, Jim sees the,

the guy who's cleaning the Russian club is also cleaning the studio, uh, which I'm now realizing, I guess, places the studio at the club. Maybe. Yeah. Yeah.

That's what I'm guessing too. Jim's play is he flashes, he gets his attention, flashes money at him, and then writes a note to get Mr. Festa at L Jim, bring him here. And he pushes the note and the money under the door and then the guy who we

established earlier you know doesn't speak english takes the money we see him counting it in front of jim and it is left very unclear about whether he understood slash will you know follow up on jim's plan this is a hail mary pass yes it's great it's it's a uh a good callback to the language barrier they had before where they literally cannot speak to each other because of the soundproof glass there's i did my notes are i'm like have you no experience with angel like why are you giving this person all the money up front don't uh all right all right jim again it's it's yeah it's a real know, it's a real last ditch move. Yeah.

And, you know, he's been under this white noise for a bit. Yeah. He's probably not thinking straight. We go back to the casino where a couple of youths on skateboards hassle Angel. And then one of them is like, hey, you were here yesterday. And Angel has all these, like, responses. One of them says, like, that's not the kind of, like, what kind of seeing eye dog is that? They don't have that kind of leash or whatever. That kind of it's a french one yeah he's so quick with the responses that make no sense then yeah but they hassle him

and then i mean they're mean to him like they are not heroes here yeah yeah but one of them like pushes him and his glasses fall off and he kind of stumbles away and they go hey this dude's a fake and they start chasing him so angel gets his comeuppance i guess and is chased away from the casino by youths on skateboards back at the studio jim so the two goons are back jim sees them both look up startled and one of them runs out and then uh what was his name johnny zeps and then he sees johnny zeps just walk in shoot the other one and leave yes well guess that's uh guess that worked of course we've got all just the white noise going right like yeah that's the like the the score for this point is just the yeah the muted white noise when we're outside the booth or when we're in the booth.

And then the loud white noise when we're inside the room. I love this because it just has this like, OK, it looks like Jim's plan is going to work. Uh-oh, Jim's about to witness a murder. That guy just killed him in cold blood. Maybe Jim doesn't want to attract Johnny Zepp's attention. Right, right. Things are changing. We don't know if it's for the better

jim then uh grabs a mic stand and starts swinging at the glass um his first attempts go nowhere and then he just tries a different window yeah i don't know what the and that one shatters i don't know whatever yeah it works it works i guess he wouldn't have gone for it earlier because the goons were there like watching him. So he gets Megan. They get out. They hear shots being exchanged. And then they see Festa, who's like behind like a bank of like lockers or something. Turns kind of half points his gun, sees that it's Jim and goes like rolls his eyes and then like jerks his head.

Like, you know, get out of here. Yeah. Go, professor. Get out of here. here in the background we hear him yell i want my 18 million you son of a bitch yeah exit italian mob that's the last we see of festa and johnny zeps yeah so that whole thing feels very chase as opposed to it's like i don't know it's good it was good very good and as it has an appropriate amount of levity i think to kind of try and to balance out some of the very serious yeah um stuff that's been going down there's a there's like a nice justice to it all too right like i mean like it's set up uh we know that fest is looking for um koblitz but also koblitz has this whole thing like you put me in a corner so i have to do this to you like well now you just put jim in a corner

right right and now jim has to do the thing gotta do it to you yeah gotta do it yeah it's uh it's a mob justice it's good stuff we go to uh megan's house buddy is there there. Buddy is okay. I was saying earlier how there's a good accessibility showcase in this. So I think they know the who and the what but why is he so focused on Patrick? This seems much elevated over like my girlfriend doesn't have a job because of you. So they go to her computer to look up anything they can find about him in the university archives and her computer uses a text-to-speech thing for her to

use it and it's great because at first i was like oh a 90s computer it has a computer but oh of course it does yeah yeah this makes total sense why am i judging this and it's i mean like it's the um steven hawking yeah voice thing that like we were all familiar with at the time it is 100 feasible it feels like a much more a much more of the moment use of computers than the last time we saw Jim use a computer, um, like navigating through a weird nineties. This is a computer stuff. I just looked at this is,

this is, was done two years after Jurassic parks, uh, computer stuff, which was the weird nineties. This is a computer thing. Yeah. This,

I mean the interface I'm sure is made up for this, but like the way that it's navigated and stuff,'m like oh yeah that's how it would work i don't know it was just that naturalistic touch i felt was very good yeah anyway they find 11 articles they're in russian so it starts speaking the titles in russian she's able to translate it so that it's really so it shows them on the screen in english but her the program can't read them when they're translated, I guess. So Jim has to help her. Yeah, that doesn't quite work, but sure.

You know, we don't have to read the screen. We can hear Jim tell us the summary, right? Yeah. So there's a story from 1992 about the hit-and-run death of a U.S. trade representative to Russia wheready was questioned about it and it was after a party held by Patrick where Gennady had attended earlier. I think those are the salient details. Basically, their

impression from this story and what they know now is that Patrick must have some kind of smoking gun knowledge about this accident that was probably a murder. Yeah. he's trying to leverage that to get gennady to back off but that's just motivated gennady to take him out as a as a potential you know weak point in his you know whatever his deal is we go to the station to

see becker becker's being very officious he wants to see jim i want to talk to you in my office about your behavior the other night and megan tries to ask him a question and he just ignores her. Yeah. She sits down outside his office. He brings Jim inside his office, closes the door. And then we see through the window that he's showing Jim crime scene photos and it's Patrick. Yeah. He is clearly dead. Yeah. So this whole thing was to kind of insulate megan from that well he could tell jim yeah yeah it's very it's pretty quick but i thought that's a strong like i don't know it's a strong scene that's very both like it makes sense with all the characters and it kind of flows from everything we know and it's also like escalates the situation again

it does this neat trick of um making you as the viewer decipher what's going on. Because if he just said that Patrick was dead, that would certainly have an impact, right? Like that's an important point in the story. And it's an important emotional point for a number of people involved. But instead of doing that, they do it this way. And we have to like witness it as bystanders from the outside of the glass, we don't hear it. And we have to infer it from what we see. I don't know, there's like, whenever that is done, that that kind of draws the audience in,

you're not fed it. So you have to put it together. And it's not hard to put it together. It's not meant to be hard to put together but because you had to do that little bit of work you're drawn into the emotion of it a little bit more than uh you would be otherwise we used to we used to on our episodes we used to have like little lessons to learn about it that's the the one from that's a good one yeah from this one we do cut from there to just a shot of of Megan's hands running along the coffin at the funeral. Yeah. Which is also very affecting.

And then we, you know, have kind of a short follow-up. Frank invites Jim to come back to the house. Jim says that he's going to be going home. He turns to Megan and says that he's truly sorry about the death of your cousin and so in my notes i said truly sorry about the death of patrick because i'm taking notes but i remember that he specifically doesn't say his name yeah i'm sorry about the death of your cousin a person who mattered to you you know not necessarily like this specific person who i still do do not think you know deserve your your love the way that you did, you know?

Yeah. And she is understandably being fairly, is fairly withdrawn, but civil and says, you know, she just says goodbye to Jim. We have a good instance of the theme, harmonica theme, as Becker walks up the steps to Jim's deck. He's like, hey, I thought I'd come out, see if I can take you to lunch. Jim says, what's your problem? I have the afternoon free. I want to buy you lunch. There's no problem.

Inversion of the earlier bit where Jim wants a favor. Yeah. Jim hands him a beer. Becker relaxes with Jim. There's a pause. And then he starts talking about the case. Yes. Patrick had plane tickets in his pocket he and his

girlfriend were going to leave la is bigger than both our butts put together two russians from mince hints they just find a motel where patrick is hiding out and jim's like i don't know man you know i think jim very intentionally is like i can't still be invested in this yeah um asks about megan jim says it's over dennis is like yeah i thought so uh and they go to lunch yeah i love the line la is bigger than both our butts put together it's very good and i do love that like it's like you, it's the inversion of the earlier scene where Jim comes to Dennis in the earlier scene and just wants Dennis to do the work for him. And Dennis is doing the same thing, right? Like he's like, there's more work to be done here. Maybe I can't get it done because of whatever.

Like maybe it's case closed for the, you know, but it wouldn't be. There's a murder. And he's like, Jim could probably get that done for us. So it's good stuff. We go to Jim snoozing on the couch and a noise wakes him up. He gets his gun from the cookie jar. But this time it's Angel. Yeah.

Tying up the dog to Jim's grill. Jim yells at Angel. Angel runs away and Jim takes a shot into the air. Yeah, I know. That is maybe the most shocking moment of this whole episode. But yeah. Angel falls over and then starts yelling, my hands, I scraped my hands. And Jim wants to know whose dog is this.

Angel's like, I can't keep him in my apartment. You know, I can't leave him at the pound. Jim has a line. Oh, when did you start sharing oxygen with another life form? He asks Angel, what is it? The seeing eye scam? He hustles them in. He says, Angel, this is your dog. And if I ever hear you've given him away, I'm going to feed you his friskies.

Then I'm going to break your face. Inside, Jim's making Angel get the dog some water. And then he says, the one thing I wonder is what happens to this dog if you go to jail? In Jim's opinion, he's been thinking, and he says Angel looks real good for giving up Patrick, giving up his location to the Russians. And Angel, a lovely line. I didn't twist nobody's cat. He's offended you would even think of it. Yeah.

Angel is always full of, you know, flim flam. But there's this moment where he's like, this is serious stuff. And I was not involved. Yeah, yeah. He says that he hasn't even seen him since the accident. full of you know flim flam but there's this moment where he's like this is serious stuff and i i was not involved yeah yeah he says that he hasn't even seen him since the accident he didn't know where he was how could he have given him up to the russians and we see jim have a thing cut to frank yeah i think around around when like becker the scene with Becker previously, is when I was like, I think it was probably Frank. Yeah, yeah. The timing's good.

When they cut, my notes just said, Jim's on to this. Yeah. Like, this is it. He is poolside at his place. He's playing with his grandkids, Megan's kids. There's a great shot of Frank. There's like kind of stairs, Beverly Hills. There's kind of these stairs down the hillside.

There's a kind of retaining wall over them. Frank is at the top of the stairs pouring himself a drink. Over the wall, we see Jim just up here behind him. Yeah. It's a very good shot. He's there to talk to Frank, not Megan. He wants to know if she ever expressed any anger over the accident with Patrick. We cut inside to see that Megan can hear them talking.

Yeah. We go back out. Frank says not at Patrick. She was angry about all these other things, but never with him. Somehow they were soulmates. She always was able to, you know, see the best of him or whatever. Not like Frank. Frank couldn't help it. he was always hard on patrick you saw it i would set him up and then cut him down i couldn't help it he asks him straight out if he told gennady where patrick was he kind of

like makes a face like no or he says no but he kind of makes a face like what a ridiculous thing to ask of me. Yeah. I have a note here. There's some really intense facial acting here with Frank. Richard Kiley. Yeah, with Richard Kiley. Like, there's a lot of close-ups, and we see a lot of the thoughts and emotions passing across his face as Jim is confronting him. It really conveys to us the truth of what happened right as Jim is pulling it out of him, like, verbally. This girl that he loved, it hurt so badly, she couldn't give him what he had coming to him.

Patrick hated himself, Frank. And Frank does not confirm or deny, but says that Megan... She has never seen her daughter's face. Her son's. Daddy? Is he right? Mm-hmm. It's like, okay, he totally did this. So this is when she comes out, asks Frank if Jim is right.

How long could we go on? He was so unhappy. So tortured. Oh, God, Dad. Oh, my God. You were his father. The job fell to you. Why?

Oh, that's the wrong question. All you can do is keep going and carry what you have to carry. But you didn't. You didn't, Daddy. You taught all of us to do that. And in the end, you didn't. Megan. I can't let my kids be around you knowing how, you know,

I can't allow them be under your influence she specifically says was i such a disappointment such a horrible tragedy to you that you had to murder because i don't feel like that daddy i don't feel like I'm a tragedy. Yeah, it's a great line. And his other daughter rejects him in this moment, too. This is the nadir of Frank here. This is, yeah.

The scene ends with Megan just walking away from all of them. She doesn't have Buddy with her. And so she turns, she walks. She clearly knows the house. Right. It's a great physical moment where she's walking away and she's just using her hands to like you know feel along the wall and she kind of almost bounces off a little you know out yeah pushed portion and she gets around it and keeps walking away it's very much it's like she walks away without wanting or needing any of them to help her right right yeah uh i don't want to be part of this anymore and i don't need any of you i'm

off on my own and it's very it's it's poignant and strong i think so yeah yeah well frank did it frank did it frank is bad yeah i don't know it's it's uh it's a good scene it fulfills the expectations that were built and then goes even farther. There's a great moment in the scene where the kid draws his grandfather's attention and just kind of like, look at me, look at me kind of moment. And he's on a diving board over the pool and he pretends to be shot and fall in the water, which is like, you know, whatever, it's kids playing. but with this particular conversation in the context of all of this and what happened to his uncle it like everyone else is just like that heightens the tension for all of them yeah completely unconsciously you know the son like

he doesn't know he doesn't yeah i actually in the moment was like oh that's kind of a little much but as an audience member like that's kind of a little much, but as an audience member, like that's kind of like putting a hat on a hat a little bit. Like, yeah, I'm pretending to be shot. But as you described it, I think I'm realizing that the effect is for the characters.

Frank, there's just this thing where it's like, that that's with you now that you did this thing. You did this horrible thing. We do have a couple more scenes um dennis is joining jim at a motel where frank said the russians contacted him from the captain kicked jim out because it's a police matter and one and boris is indeed registered at this motel dennis won't let jim in but we kind of camera kind of follows dennis and we see jim

kind of following at a remove yeah so these cops are coming in the captain comes back to talk to to talk to dennis uh it's jack garner yes and a wonderful one of his wonderful little appearances where he says all right it's confirmed i'm gonna go give a call to the russian consulate and he leaves so it's dennis's show uh they kind of clear the area bust into there's like a bat it's like a i guess it's a motel but it's also like a bathhouse yeah yeah dennis opens the door and we see boris in a bath with a girl and they're drinking champagne dennis calls his name and he just grabs a like an automatic from under his clothes kind of oozy or something yeah and starts shooting

at the door and dennis ducks back and there's some some cameras cutting back and forth of like boris shooting and the girl screaming and running and dennis biding his time during that time he was surrounded by other cops and they swarm and yeah managed to apprehendend our villain without anyone getting hurt. For a minute, I really thought that he was just going to be like, the cops were just going to shoot him down. Yeah, yeah. But it was 96, so that was not the assumption at the time. Even the location implies it,

because you really want to just drop a bunch of red dye in that jacuzzi. Yeah, yeah. But that would be a little much for the Rockford Files, I suppose. Is it because you really want to just drop a bunch of red dye in that jacuzzi? Yeah. Yeah. But that would be a little much for the Rockford files, I suppose. They get him down. They ask where Koblitz is. He's flying to Moscow.

Dennis sends the cops to check out the area, you know, see if there's anyone else fleeing or whatever. So it's just him. And then he calls in Jim. He's like, Mr. Rockford. Yes. Jim and Dennis and Boris. Not only have you used methods of torture against several citizens, including a visually impaired woman, but just now you assaulted Mr. Rockford over a minor altercation concerning your shower sandals. What? What? What? Where's your hypodermic needle now huh

and then dennis leaves and jim gets to have his two-fisted comeuppance over this uh this guy who has literally been torturing him the entire episode an egregious abuse of power that you you you love to see like you just we see and so dennis is like standing outside the door we hear the meaty smacks from inside as rockford wreaks his revenge one of the other cops comes up and is like going to go in the door and this is like we are searching the area and like sends him off and then looks at his watch it's like he's he's giving rogford exactly some amount of time yeah exactly yeah you don't love to see it because as you say egregious abuse of power but at least jim got his own back yeah yeah we love to see that and we go to our final scene of the movie jim is putting

his feet in a bowl of ice he smiles at rocky's picture his phone rings he sighs he gets up he goes crosses the room answers the phone it hangs up he goes back to his couch puts his feet in the ice gets his newspaper gets his glasses phone rings again he sighs he stares at the phone he lets the machine get it it's megan it was her just now as well she's not going to atlanta she needs to pull herself together and she says i need to talk to somebody i need to talk to you call me if you want to and then we freeze frame on jim's smile as he hears this welcome message now that all of the unpleasantness is over and maybe he can move on to something more uplifting with this rediscovery of this person from his life.

A good old fashioned freeze frame on the smile. A good old fashioned freeze frame on the smile. That you do love to see. Yes, that you do. My notes on that very final scene are, oh, Jim, get out of there. You do. My notes on that very final scene are, oh, Jim, get out of there. Because remember, as I said at the top of the episode, I was under the impression it was going to take two hours and we still had a half hour left. So that was the most terrifying hang up ever. And then with the second one, I was like, oh, all right.

And then and then like as it was approaching the freeze frame on the smile, I thought to myself, shouldn't they just freeze frame on a smile and end this episode here? You and David Chase on the right wavelength. Exactly. End of movie. Congrats. We did it. We did it. We're six out of eight.

Yeah. So this is clearly a long enough episode, so I don't think we need to spend too much time going over anything else. But was there any other particular bits you wanted to make sure to highlight before we get out of here no i think we we nailed it all i thought it was uh it was a lot of fun i enjoyed uh i like this one a lot yeah the imdb reviews are very split on this one there's a lot of high ones and a lot of low ones and uh it really seems to be whether you like the character of megan or not uh yeah okay the ones that are high are people who i think are probably more where

like i'm at and i assume you're at where it's like she's an interesting character she feels real yeah she has good chemistry with jim and so it's like, it's an emotional story with some action bits, with some really high stakes that isn't necessarily action packed, but certainly has the character relationship stuff at the heart of it. Right. Right. And then there is another read, which is this character is someone from Jim's past that he should have, that there's no,

it doesn't make sense that he's still interested in her and she's manipulating him. She doesn't know what she wants and it's unrealistic that he would be interested in her. No, I feel like that read says more about the person than about the show. But you know, I,

I can't, I can't speak for everyone. If that's your reaction, that's everyone if that's your reaction that's right that's your reaction uh but yeah that's not what i see in this show in this in this movie um i see the well-rounded characters with a lot of the the humor and the wit that we've come to expect but also some of the melancholy from all the accumulated years of all the things i've gone on in both of their lives yeah highlighted by this tragedy that they're in right because it is a tragedy it's a tragic tale at some point we'll have to do our you know power ranking of the movies i guess we need to finish

watching them but this one definitely feels the most real i think in my memory this one feels like just like a slightly longer episode or maybe even like a two parter. If it weren't for the fact that, like you said, it was a very solid three act, you know, it's hard to take a three act thing and turn it into two parts. Right. I think if we,

we re look, you know, looked at it with that in mind, there's probably a natural place where you would break it. Yeah. Um, for, for being in two things,

but yeah, it didn't feel forced into the movie format. Yeah. It felt like a story that this was the natural fit. Yeah. And then you could do that in two 45-minute episodes or one long movie. But yeah, I guess at some point we'll have to go back and review all of our feelings about the other movies. But this was a fun one.

And now we have a good launching point for our next couple of episodes to go visit the original the og megan doherty character yeah i'm excited and see whether our read on it is you know see how well our read on it stands all right anything else i don't think that's it um we've earned our 200 for the day a thing that we still say sometimes yeah Yeah. Join us again next time where we... Oh my God. We will be back next time to go back to the 70s and talk about another episode of The Rockford Files.