Two Hundred A Day - Episode 123: Only Rock 'n Roll Will Never Die

Episode Date: August 14, 2023

Nathan and Eppy complete the Wiard World Tour with this two-parter, episodes 3 and 4 from season 6: Only Rock 'n Roll Will Never Die. Show favorite George Loros guest stars as Eddie, a prison buddy of Jim's now working for rock star Tim Ritchie. He reaches out to Rockford to find a missing member of Ritchie's entourage, but the mystery of what happened mostly backgrounds the (anti) romance of Eddie with reporter Whitney Cox. Jim navigates Eddie's neuroses, an on-going court case, the mob and the whims of a rockstar who has it all in this two-parter that we find almost too relaxed in its storytelling (even though the character stuff is Very Good). 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/) * Colleen Kelly, 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 * Freesound.org (https://www.freesound.org/) for other audio clips

We're down at Hennessy Bar, Jim, having a drink or two. You better get down here quick, Jim, or we'll come and sing up your flu. Welcome to 200 A Day, the podcast where we talk about the 70s television detective show, The Rock Profiles. I'm Nathan Palletta, and Epi is laughing at me. I'm EpiDiarrh, who's trying to get through his lunch as fast as possible. I would invite our listeners to

join us for some food this episode. It's a long one. Yeah, perhaps a taco. Yeah. Maybe a pizza. Yes, indeed, this is a long one, for we are talking about season six, two-parter episodes three and four only. Rock and roll will never die.

That's a great title. It is a good title. It is just awkward enough to make me think about it. Yeah, exactly. You know, it's going to involve rock and roll. This one, of course, is directed by William Wired and it is the final episodes, episodes. So I'll say episodes because unlike some other two-parters, this one was aired as two individual episodes. All right. As opposed to, for example, Lions, Tigers, Monkeys, and Dogs, which was a 90-minute episode that was split into two for syndication.

Yeah. Or some of the other ones so this is more like uh if i'm remembering right this is more like gear jammers where it's it was conceived of and originally produced as two discrete episodes um but yes these episodes are directed by william wired uh our final consideration in our summer of Wired, adventuring across the Wiredverse. Yes. This is his final Rockford Files as well, right? We ended...

No, no, he has one later on. Yes, he has one later on. His final contribution is, again, in airing order. I don't recall the recording order. But his final contribution would be the Hawaiian Headache. Right. Which we did and that one would have been the final recording one because that was like a big cast party kind

of situation hawaiian headache episode 69 the hawaiian headache yeah back from april 26 2020 oh what a what an innocent time. Ooh, doggies. Can't even think back that far. Wow. Yeah. Again, if I'm vaguely remembering what I think you are also vaguely remembering. So the final episode that aired in season six was Deadlock and Parma. But that season was cut short because of James Garner's injuries and having to stop doing the show so he could recover. And the Hawaiian headache was the last one shot.

And it was the like, we're all going to Hawaii for a shoot party atmosphere. But then it aired, you know, earlier in the I think it's the second to last episode, maybe somewhere there. I think it's the second to last episode, maybe. Somewhere there, yeah. Anyhow, this is our last look at the 26 episodes that William Wired directed, though that includes these two partners as two discrete episodes. So like, you know, maybe 22, including the two partners that were one episode. I don't know. Yeah, hard to count.

We stick by what IMDb says just so we have a point of reference. So that's what IMDb says. This one is written by David Chase, and i feel like it's real chasey yeah bringing in a lot of the elements that i you know associate with is you know interest in these like little interior psychodramas in context of these larger plot arcs of like what's actually happening like that kind of it's it's uh yeah feels feels chasey um yeah i don't really have a lot to say background wise on this so here's the thing i've i've i've an opening statement on this one oh okay in addition to being a two-parter, so, you know, being a lot to, you know,

twice as much as usual to watch and do notes on, there is some quality of this episode that I found a little fatiguing. Okay. There's something about, there's a lot of references. Like, there's a lot of references to actors, references to show, like pop culture references to actors references to show like pop culture references like contemporaneous ones right um and they were going by so fast i just was like i just

gave up i was like i can't look at what all these things are like i recognize very few of them we're not an archer podcast right yeah like i was just like i i can't so there's a lot of stuff that probably flew over my head because i just don't know the reference um and doing additional research on the episode i just nothing really popped out to me on the initial look look around and i just didn't have it to do any deeper look that's fine yeah so i got nothing i got nothing to say before we get into our preview montage is what i'm saying my cursory research in that i i'm just now looking at the um imdb and uh they say that the the center the story uh is based on a real life case between lee marvin and his lived-in girlfriend so the

thing about this episode is that it it's hard to get a grip on what the mystery is yeah yeah rockford is hired to find a missing bandmate of of this rock and roll star uh and why this person's missing and why rockford is hired i feel is more mercurial than it usually is yeah i remember thinking i've watched these over two days because i just didn't have the solid chunk of time to do them all in one sitting uh because that's the way they were meant to be watched right right um and i finished the first one i was like all right i can't wait to watch the next one to find out what that was about. I'm not going to say that this is a particularly bad episode or anything like that, but I vibe with your fatigue on it. Okay.

Yeah, I was curious. I didn't want to bring it up pre-discussion because I was curious about if you had a similar experience or not. Because I'm totally open to it just being me being in a weird mood i did watch it not in one sitting but i did watch it over like i watched one in the morning and took a break and then i watched the second one i wasn't like in a bad mood or anything but i think i i just was kind of like yeah felt a little bit like okay let's get through the the rest of this show i could totally see the the necessity to do it for a podcast right in this case might have might have impinged a little bit of my thing i think another part of it was that like i just had a lot of trouble with everyone like the names are all really just normal people

names and i kept on losing track of who was named what there's only like three people you need to remember but for some reason i just kept on forgetting which who is who i i'm coming into this recording our conversation a little like so maybe well maybe you can talk me out of it because there's a lot of good stuff in this in this in this episode or these two episodes i'll be the cheerleader for this episode then well like i said uh i don't really have a whole lot of extra stuff to say about it before we get into it. So we should go ahead and talk about our relatively brief preview montage for the first episode. What I got out of it, I really appreciate the reporter giving us the background. Okay, I'm already going to get into this. There is a larger story at work here.

There's a rock star who is being sued by his long-term living girlfriend right for her half of his fortune because they were as if married right and her her claim is that she was never able to successfully have her acting career because of his influence yeah and since he kept her from making her own money she is suing him for half of his money so we get this told to us in the preview montage by a reporter which and then we'll get that reporter because it is a preview montage we'll get that reporter delivering it again that same scene several times over the course of two days of episodes uh and it's kind of important because it otherwise is not important until the end it's preparing you for things you're going to need to know for the

quiz at the end sure yeah uh all right so i just wanted to make a statement about that and then we got lots of good rock and roll haircuts. A lot of good rock and roll lifestyle stuff in this episode. I'm really enjoying a hint that the mob is involved. Good. But you already said David Chase was written this. And we get Rockford like this joke in the montage cut where he's like, I'm off the case or whatever. And then there's a,

whether there's a gunshot and we see a piece of the trailer go down, right? Like he is on and get shot, which is kind of a rare, rare thing for, for that. But yeah, that's what I got out of the preview montage.

And the main thing that jumped out to me was that we see one of our longtime favorites,ony boy but not anthony boy george loros playing a different kind of uh emotionally not complex fractured emotionally fractured person in jim's life uh he's going to be a protagonist in this one as opposed to the Anthony Boy character that we saw in The Man Who Saw the Alligators. But seeing his face was very exciting. This is a fun character too.

No, he's a fun character, yeah. Great actor though. I mean, I really enjoy him. Oh, he's so fun, yeah. Yeah. 200 Today is a 100% listener-supported show thanks to our patrons in addition to our gratitude and editing access to our 200 files files spreadsheet patrons receive exclusive episode previews and plus expenses our bonus just chatting podcast about media work and life we expend

special thanks to our gumshoe patrons supporting this episode brian burnson has a facebook page where he drives his Rockford tribute car to shooting locations from the show. Check out facebook.com slash brianrockfordfiles. Join Mitch Hampton to examine all matters aesthetic at the Journey of an Aesthetic podcast. And Paul Townend recommends the podcast Fruit Loops, serial killers of color.

You can find these shows wherever you get your podcasts. Dale Norwood wrote a book. It's about fast ships, cheap drugs, and American political economy, published by the University of Chicago Press. Find Trading Freedom, How Trade with China Defined Early America, wherever good books are sold. Chuck from whatyou'rereading.com. Shane Liebling has all of your online dice rolling needs sorted at his site RollForYour.Party. And check out Jay Adan's amazing miniature painting skills at JayAdan.com. In addition, thanks to

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Brian Pereira, at Thermoware, Jordan Bockelman, not Brockleman, at Jordan Bockelman, Bill Anderson, at BillAnd88, and of course, Richard Haddam, at Richard Haddam. If you're interested in keeping us going for as little as $1 an episode, check out patreon.com slash 200 a day to see if becoming a patron is right for you starting our first episode of our two-parter uh as you say we start right off with this tv reporter but the frame for the frame is that rocky is watching the

six o'clock tv news and this report about the trial is in the middle of a block of if it bleeds it leads kind of stuff and rocky this scene shows rocky like addicted to this yeah presaging yeah it's a great commentary yeah on uh on uh a lot of things like Facebook and Fox News. Yeah, for sure. It's good. And there's the development of cable news. Yeah. It's one of those things where you kind of think of that as like, oh, this is how things are now.

But you see these things as far back as, you know, the 70s. And people clearly were already trying to make commentary about the nature of infotainment. Yeah. Not infotainment. News as entertainment. Jim certainly doesn't approve of the situation. Jim does not approve. There's a lot of disapproving in this scene.

So we learn about the lawsuit. Diane Bjornstrom is the girlfriend. And the rock star is Tim Ritchie from a band called a band called the suspects but now on his solo career rocky has this kind of confused set of um opinions opinions about this whole thing because he's saying whatever happened to people just standing up and saying i do right but then he's also saying uh he has the line this guy this rock star he's all painted and gussied up like a madam, which he also seems to not approve of. And so Jim, first of all, Jim is snacking on chips as Rocky watches the news, which is very fun. I need to make a comment about this.

These chips, more specifically the salsa. This is a three act joke for Effie. This is act one where Jim puts the chip in the salsa and then taps the chip. Like he inserts it vertically and taps it to remove the salsa from the chip and then eats it. We don't want too much salsa. Oh, but it just I was like, I mean, my notes are like, get some salsa on that chip. This will come up again. notes are like get some salsa on that chip uh this will come up again but jim says well if they were married she'd be entitled to half under california law hence giving us why there's a

whole lawsuit about it right and then rocky's saying that's his point if you said it if she'd been married now they could have been married but they weren't now she wants to be reimbursed for living like a stumper. What? You heard me. Oh, well, hey, Dad, she's not my idea of a great date, but what are you bucking for, the Cotton Mather Award? Yeah, it's good. Yeah, so I feel like this is the weird, it's not weird

out of character. It's, Rocky has this weirdly conflicted set of values where he's like, I don't approve of any of this for various different reasons. There's no reason for Rocky to have opinions about these people's lives. And he does. And I think that is very central to like this whole like Rocky's addicted to this television thing, right? Rocky mentions, well, but aren't you working for this guy? And Jim is going to

be hired by him. And he's been brought in, but it's on a missing persons thing, not a domestic case. Because as you know, Jim doesn't work domestic cases. Then it turns to a story about an apartment fire. And this is when Jim scolds Rocky. Every night you plug into this litany of misery. Nobody's telling you to watch. You're just making yourself unhappy. And then he leaves.

And then there's a beat. And then Rocky turns back to the tv the announcer is talking about the charred remains and just a smile grows over rocky's lips yeah i mean like this is absolutely a commentary this is like yeah this stuff is is is uh i don't know if rocky's age is part of the commentary or it's just you know rocky is rocky is kind of the everyman in these kinds of situations, right? Yeah, exactly. So Jim goes off to learn about this job. So we watch the Firebird pull into a literal castle.

So this I was curious about. And our source, rockfordfilesfilminglocations.blogspot.com does have something about it. You do have to scroll past a lot of commentary about how attractive all the women in this episode are, which is take that for, for what it is. But this was a castle in Malibu.

This was a private residence that was built in this early seventies, I guess, and was destroyed by a fire in 2007. So the, uh, blog spot article reproduces a news story about it that says that the castle filled with paintings and Elvis Presley memorabilia was one of several homes of socialite philanthropist,

Lily Lawrence, known as princess Lily castle. Cashin, uh, with a K was named after the village of her father reza fallah a former iranian oil minister so there's a lot going on there but yeah it was built in 19 oh so it had just been built it was built in 1978 uh by a doctor thomas hodges oh it's yeah and then it has some lines about television shows such as the rockford files were shot there and it's available to rent for weddings um etc princess lily bought it in 1998 oh okay so that would have been later yeah it is a great location though oh yeah it's

it's incredible recently we've gotten a few rock stars on the rockford files right not real but like like we just did the shock to fame country music star uh heartaches of a fool yeah yeah but this this one is is very much the disposable income situation like it yeah we have language later about how basically this guy's the the band the suspects they got famous very early and he's been a millionaire since he was like 18 or something like that yeah i mean and i guess from the suit we know that apparently he's worth 30 million dollars right because she's suing him for half of his of his net worth um okay so anyway the firebird pulls into a castle yes um and a wild george loros appears he's yelling for Jimmy,

and he's wearing a bowling shirt that says Car Town Cannonballs on the back. This is important later. It is. I actually had thoughts about it, and they explained it, so that's great. This is Eddie, and Eddie is an old prison buddy of Jim's,

so we establish that with some banter up top. Eddie works for this guy, this rock star, Richie. He's a little vague about what he does. It kind of comes out, I mean he's basically kind of a gopher. Yeah, he calls himself a personal security analyst or something like that.

He was hired a year and a half ago when Richie saw Eddie throw a guy through a plate glass window while he was bouncing at a bar that he was performing at. And now, yeah, he's a personal security analyst. But he says he's around him when he's traveling. He runs errands for him. Yeah. That kind of stuff.

There's a gag about the cars in this giant front area. There's this row of like incredible sports cars. What do you got a used's this row of, like, incredible sports cars. What, he got a used car lot here? Ah, Tim, he just loves cars. He just can't seem to find one to fill all his needs. Yeah, he likes to take her with him, huh? Nah, he hates engines and things like that. He doesn't even like to drive. Why?

Eddie trails off when we see a woman in a magenta dress walk across the parking lot totally loses his train of thought and then comes back to uh to to bring jim in to meet tim ritchie more about her later yes but it's it's very clear that he's uh there's something yeah something up here it's a bit of a uh looney tunes awuga eyes yeah kind of moment um so inside we meet tim ritchie uh he is played by christopher tabori this is the first place where i started getting kind of exhausted because a lot of write-ups or mentions of this episode mention the rock star played by christopher tabori who is the son of i mean who is an actor and a director in his own right,

but who is referred to in all these write-ups as the son of the director Don Siegel, who directed Dirty Harry, among other things, including the 56 Invasion of the Body Snatchers. So I started going down this rabbit hole of like, and I just, I'm not finding anything here that's actually that interesting to me. So I was trying to see, like, is this someone that, like, I should know who this is? And maybe I should, but I hit a wall pretty quick. He is heir to the Baskerville fortune in The Return of Sherlock Holmes, which is the Grenada Sherlock Holmes series starring Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes the definitive Sherlock Holmes I will fist fight

any human being on this planet there is one Sherlock Holmes and it's Jeremy Brett yes I know about Basil Rathbone yes I know about Eggs Benedict but Jeremy Brett is just I highly recommend the sherlock holmes

um with it with the caveat that they they came out in the 80s uh and they decided to do some episodes of the original sherlock holmes stories that were not particularly sensitive and then also were not particularly sensitive uh themselves so there's a few that are like anyways the point is this guy plays uh air to the baskerville and so the whole time i'm watching this i'm like how do i know this guy how do i know this guy and i think i mentioned to you earlier that i watched uh colombo goes to the guillotine. Right. And for some reason I confused in my head that, Oh, this is coincidentally the same actor, but a decade later, but it's not anyways.

Okay. Rabbit hole fulfilled. Yes. Tim Ritchie is the rock star. Um, he's, he's hustling out various. He clearly has various hangers on.

He's, he's, um, getting them out of the way so he can talk to Eddie and Jim. He asks if Eddie has explained their problem. And Jim says, not yet. I still don't know anything. What do you want?

Richie is worried about a business associate of his, Brian Charles, who seems to have disappeared. So he was his bandmate in The Suspects. He produced his current LP, Renegade Lotion. Such a good day uh they had a business lunch a week ago and he didn't show and richie hasn't heard from brian since this is we now get appearance of one of my favorite parts of the episode the manager ronniez. He is played by... Lenny Baker. This guy is a hell of a screen presence. He's skinny.

He's all limbs. He's all limbs. He has this really kind of raspy voice. Yeah. Really frenetic kind of eyes. Just a real weirdo kind of presence. If it's acting, he's brilliant brilliant if it's not he was well very well cast exactly yeah but he has this way of like looking at someone and you you could you

can hear the gears grinding in his head where he tries to sum up whether that person is a threat to him and what he should do about that. And it's just, I mean, it's really kind of hard to explain except to, to watch the episode and experience it. But yeah, he is one of my favorite bits of this episode too. He also has great outfits. Yeah.

I was like, Oh, what else has this guy done? I would like to see more of him. And unfortunately, I mean, he was, he did a lot of stage,

stage acting as well, but he has kind of limited TV credits. He actually died really young. He was 37 of AIDS-related cancer, which is a real shame. Yeah, I'm looking through his stuff, and

it's been a hot minute since I saw the paper chase, but that probably would be the only thing that I would have seen him in like i love to see him in more of a role like this and i bet he was just like a one-off background guy and stuff so anyway yeah he's great i'm glad we we get to see him um so the manager ronnie uh there's some stuff going on that i made notes about because i thought that it'd be important later and it wasn't so whatever but there is the beginning of a running gag

where he says that his 450 is in the shop so he needs a ride to get the there's these two twins that are rollerblading around to take the twins to chinatown to see like a place that has this new wave band or something yeah so the the idea of the 450 is one that will continue coming back um he he sees he's introduced to jim and he's like oh you're the investigator don't you wear a hat don't pis wear hats big brims maybe you're thinking ah ah bogey he always wore a hat if you'd like to take a couple of hours and go out and find me one it'll be okay

with me it's great yeah that's good um he asks tim if he's told bogey that brian's had a junk problem off and on and uh tim says well right now it's off um jim starts to turn down the job he says it's not his kind of gig he's trying to leave and richie says i don't understand we hired that pi in rome for what two grand a week for that kind

of money you should do what you advertise and jim well i can see your point i'll see if i can rearrange my schedule and squeeze in a week for you there's a phone call eddie escorts jim out to give him more background uh we get the mention of the 450 in the shop nice bicentennial phone that must just be sitting around from the bicentennial because we're now past the yeah yeah that year but. We have to just mention the accoutrements in this castle here because there's a gumball machine, there's pinball machines, there's roller skates everywhere. It's a delightful little playhouse. That's all I'm saying.

All right, so outside we get some more background. Brian and Tim Ritchie were having some trouble creative differences you would call it ritchie did the unthinkable and put a disco cut on renegade lotion a song called migraine or yours which is pretty good i love it all these titles um brian is an old school rock and roller thinks disco is a fad and a blight. There's another moment where it's like, oh, I never got you the picture. Eddie's been supposed to give Jim a picture of Brian for like three conversations now, and he keeps on forgetting.

So he goes back inside to get this picture. And then our woman in magenta returns. She is a reporter named Whitney Cox. She is played by Marsha Strassman, who, again, I feel like is mentioned in many of the IMDb reviews and summaries of this. And I'm like, I don't know who this is. And, you know, I mean, she's been in stuff I've seen. I just don't particularly recall.

She was Julie Cotter on Welcome Back, Cotter, which I think is where people would know i have never watched welcome back cotter so i don't know oh she uh she returns for one of the tv movies yes she's um the psychologist there's the one with um right chapman where jim goes back to take the class yeah he has to get her approval to do it. For your generation. Mm-hmm. She's the mom from the Honey, I Shrunk the...

Yes, series. Yeah. Yeah. She's also a voice actor on Real Monsters, which is the place I would know her from. Anyway, she's fun.

She definitely has fun chemistry with Jim. The character is actually... Yeah, the character's a lot of fun. I didn't expect the character to be fun in the way The character is actually, yeah, the character is a lot of fun. I didn't expect the character to be fun in the way the character is. But yeah. Anyway, so she's a reporter.

She's working on a story for Knickerbocker magazine, a three part special on Richie. The most sensual man of his time. That's right. She asks him if he's the P.I. and he's kind of noncommittal. Yeah. That's right. She asks him if he's the PI and he's kind of noncommittal. Yeah. Then when Eddie comes back, that's when he says that she's a reporter and Jim has this great, I would never have known you were a reporter if nobody had told me. Yeah. Eddie comes back and starts this pattern of just telling her absolutely everything.

Yeah. Despite the fact that Jim is clearly not trying to tell her absolutely everything. Yeah. Despite the fact that Jim is clearly not trying to tell her absolutely everything. Jim has this instinctive don't talk to reporters line in this, which I don't know if that's always how he acts, but in this, I mean, it's important for this plot. Yeah. I think this case is definitely a, uh, he would be on his guard about this. Yeah. Big high profile client.

Yeah. Yeah. Big high profile client. Yeah. Yeah. But yes, his her thesis for her story is that the old school macho cowboy is over. And Tim Ritchie is the sexual bellwether and prototype of the future, including that line, the most sensual man of his time. She asked Eddie if he can fix the flash on her camera. And so he's like, oh, yeah, I can do that right now. asked Eddie if he can fix the flash on her camera. And so he's like, oh yeah, I can do that right now. And

he tells Jim to go on ahead. They were going to go to Brian's place to check it out. And Eddie said, I've been there. I didn't see anything. And Jim wants to see it for himself. So he tells Jim to go on ahead of him. He'll catch up later. And he hurries off to fix

Whitney's camera flash. So we are now 14 minutes and 51 seconds into the episode. And that's when our credits begin. So coming from the first season again, this is a big, you know, we don't need to hold anyone's hand. Like you're here to watch this show. We're all we all know what we're getting ourselves into here. There's like a rock music cut. Yeah.

Under the credits. And the lyrics are kind of all about like watching someone else from across the room waiting to be seen. I couldn't find who it was. I was hoping to. I did look into it a little bit. And I guess this is kind of a TV production thing. Since there doesn't seem to be any additional music credit noted, this was probably Mike Post.

Oh, okay. Yeah. They just do record whatever they, with some like studio musicians or something. He said his name and the Night Court theme just popped into my head. He did that, didn't he? I'm sure he did. Probably. So yeah, there's this, and I think there's another,

and there's various like chunks of presumably Richie's music. like this is supposed to be tim ritchie's song yeah uh throughout the show and i think they're all like people playing it on radios and stuff and that's all um yeah post post and carpenter but i think i'm sure i could look this up i think it's kind of a huggins cannell situation where like yeah it's a huggins cannell show but huggins left and it was cannell's show i think music by post and carpenter was the original music and then i think michael post basically did the music like for the actual show but i could be wrong about that i'm sorry if i'm wrong about that but that's that that's my impression that i'm not gonna take more time to go look up right now he he's not night court oh okay so i'm wrong i'm wrong we're wrong all over the place so we have the the the credits and this music play as we watch jim checking out brian's

place and eddie poking around with the flash and the camera there's a good match cut from eddie using the screwdriver to try and do something with the flash to jim picking the lock at brian's uh house or apartment i guess house house. He's looking around. He finds all these things and like the camera shows us them so that we know they're important. There's a ticket book with a plane ticket for a flight to Geneva. I did note that it was with tax. It was a $621 ticket, which, you know, given inflation. Yeah, that's that's a lot. Flying became such a commodity over time that it's easy to forget that it was actually very expensive for some of these flights at the time. Anyway, finds a woman's nightgown, finds a broad brimmed hat, and he almost puts it on and it kind of shakes his head.

And we're like, ah, we're getting there. And then he picks up a, something that seems to stick out a bright red pack of moon cigarettes with some, uh, some characters on them. I thought there were Chinese characters because earlier they've been talking about going to Chinatown. And I was like,

Oh, this is going to be a thing. There are Japanese characters. It's about something else. One of the many things where I was like, Oh, this is going to be a thing. And then it not this is this is definitely uh pi senses there is camera work that indicates it's a clue yeah but there there's no um diegetic anything that

indicates it's a clue right right right it's just rockford going these are a weird brand of cigarettes i bet you that means something uh which is what I would do if I were playing the video game. Yeah, they have the little glowing aura around them. So you can click on them. He hears a noise. So by now, the credits have finished and the music has come down. Jim hears a noise. He goes back outside.

He trips on a piece of fence and kind of falls down into the dirt. And then this is such a weird frame and i guess it makes sense later but i just was like what is going on yeah we zoom out a little bit so that jim's at the bottom of the frame and then a rock just falls out of the corner onto the back of his head cut to commercial yeah it's not not to get too critical here but same thing with me i was watching it and i was like i knew what the intention was that jim was knocked unconscious by a rock yes uh i'm putting that together it's the the show didn't didn't hand that to me uh instead i'm like that's probably what happened and we get that when we get back yeah and there's this weird comedic sense to it

to me yeah because it would have been a brutal way to knock him unconscious right because it wasn't held by anyone so it was thrown so the framing is intentionally so that we don't see whoever threw the rock fine that is a mystery we don't know someone knocked jim out with the rock but because it looks like it just falls into the frame, which it does, as we learn later, it's a mystery that doesn't actually mean anything. It's a layer of obfuscation that I think ends up being meaningless in the end, I guess. But again, we'll get to it when we get to it. We do learn that it knocks him out because we come back from commercial.

He's putting the ice in a hand towel on his head yeah or at least it hurt him enough to to need to reduce his swelling with ice not heat exactly that's what you do uh the phone rings eddie is calling he got caught up fixing the camera he had to take it down to the photo mat one of eddie's qualities is that he gives all the details that you don't need to know right so the uh one of eddie's qualities is that he gives all the details that you don't need to know right so the uh one of the battery cells had leaked and it corroded a contact and that's why you etc etc jim says if you have the thing for whitney just come out and say it and then he replies it's that obvious uh so i like that jim yeah says what we're all thinking and we know it's going to be a part of the show he tells eddie someone hit him and ran he doesn't know who

eddie has a separate lead uh there was an engineer at a recording studio who thought he saw brian there the night before he didn't show up for this lunch that he was supposed to go to he's going to meet jim there i want to be in on this jim replies that he is not going to get his hopes up but the two of them do appear to come together as we go to both of them talking to dwight the engineer we get a little more about brian here so that specific night they didn't like talk or anything but you know he just has worked with brian on things in the past he says everything is relative to Brian. Uh, he has this whole story about, he got really into organic gardening and he kept on telling me that he was

going to bring me tomatoes, bring me tomatoes. And I, one day I said, Hey, where are the tomatoes? And then the, the garden was completely dead.

There's a, a way that he says it where the Jim and Eddie both kind of laugh. And I was like, I don't get it. Like there was some joke that he made or some reference that he made. And I rew of laugh. And I was like, I don't get it. Like there was some joke that he made or some reference that he made. And I rewound it. And I was like, do I not understand the word he's saying?

I don't get this. And so I just moved on. Um, rather than trying to figure it out. This is when Jim sees another pack of those moon cigarettes, he asks. And it turns out that they belong to Chiyoko Takai, a Japanese artist that they're cutting an album with uh she was there the same session as brian and he says we're listening

to her right now and what we're listening to is what sounds like bog standard country country music yeah so that's the joke japanese country and western jim asks how he can get in touch. He gets the name of her label and her producer, uh, who is specified to be a Japanese guy named Jerry. So we know to keep an eye out for that. They leave the studio and he asks what's up. Jim explains all the clues that he saw, uh,

says that in addition to the untouched ticket to Geneva, his bags were there and they weren't packed. So he clearly didn't go on whatever trip he was planning. Yeah. There was no car in the driveway. So he's probably somewhere in driving range. He clearly didn't fly anywhere. So these were all these just clues that were just sitting there at the house. And he's like, oh, I didn't see any of that. And so he apologizes. He says he's been so caught up with Whitney and he starts going off about how she's like a generational beauty he compares her to lauren bacall and grace kelly um and uh jim is just like humoring him like oh sure yeah no she's very pretty and then ask him what happened when you told her you know what you think right i cut

the crap ola jim don't patronize me what She could have her pick of anybody. I mean, you could see it coming. Guys were hitting on her all over the place. Important guys. And Timmy himself is interested in her, and I can tell. I'm sure when the professional part of their relationship is over, bam. Eddie, you're no Rondo Hatton. Why are you chopping yourself? Women don't like me, Eddie. They just don't respond to me. You've had some really nice women. Neurotics. I'm in a similar situation

that's it that's as far as i want to take this conversation yes i'm thinking about this now um with hindsight this whole angle is a red herring right um in one sense it is red herring to the mystery however what it does do is it puts Jim in front of the. Oh, yeah. The Bernie Selden character who we're going to meet in a minute. That's true. So it has a functional use in parallel to the red herringness for the mystery. Yeah.

Yeah. So far, we're at question. Where is this guy, Brian? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So far we're at question. Where is this guy, Brian? Yeah. Mystery that ends up not really being related to anything else. Number one, who hit Jim in the head with a rock? Right. I think that's where we're at right now. And I guess framing mystery or framing question. What does this have to do, if with the uh court case that yes his client is currently in that that right now is not real they do not seem to be related but everything everything we've been watching is telling us they will be but we've seen six seasons of the almost you know five and a half seasons of the show and we can assume that there will be related at some point also who is the president of england which is a one of the lines to the country music song i believe is i don't know the president i wasn't i i did not the country music had like

i don't know the president of england was one of the lines and it's just yeah there's probably some jokes in there for a reason that we'll learn in a second i gotta say i was doing very little background paying attention i was just trying to get the broad strokes down um so jim goes to evergreen management i as a viewer of this show see him in the establishing shot and go j Jimmy Joe Meeker. Yeah, me too. He's wearing the big hat. He's wearing the, not a broad-beam hat, but like a cowboy hat. And kind of the, I have no idea if that's seersucker,

but like a shiny suit. And like Western, like a bolo tie. This is in fact the last appearance of Jimmy Joe Meeker. Oh, that's the rap on Jimmy Joee i would have to do the legwork he was in farnsworth he was in uh never send a boy king to do a man's job have we seen another one that he was in because this is apparently his fourth and final appearance we'll we'll we'll do this research on our own. Yeah. I feel like there was another one that we talked about him in, but now we've done like 110

of these, so I'd have to go back to the archives. So he's going into Sal Blondetto's office to try to talk to, I guess that's the producer? Management? Yeah, he's at the manager's office. He wants to talk to i guess that's the producer management yeah he's at the manager's

office he wants to talk to this manager in the office that manager isn't there but the producer jerry is working on a song with the singer chiyoko takai he's coaching her through pronunciation because it turns out that she doesn't speak english she sings her songs phonetically so she learns the english words phonetically and she does the country western singing jim asked for sal and the uh producer says he took a secretary out in his new 450 don't know when he'll be back so there's our second 450 mentioned jimmy joe meeker here from meeker enterprises uh he's interested in promotion he acquired a footwear company in texas turned it into a number one supplier of western boots elton john wore a custom pair and sales went up 22 jerry says so you're

talking about chiyoko hyping your cowboy boots in japan and jimmy joe's like well yeah and i had a phone conversation with brian charles about something and she recognizes the name brian yeah jerry says you're gonna have to wait for sal he handles all the rights we don't have time to schmooze we're working on the we're trying to work through the song he wants to know well do you know where i can get in touch with brian because i also wanted to talk to him about blah blah and so we have a gag that's not really a gag i thought it was going to be more of a gag yeah he asked her and she replies in japanese and it goes on for a long time jim looks at his watch yeah looks out the window and so i thought

it was just going to be like she she says she doesn't know, period. But there is more. She doesn't know where he is now. She's been trying to reach him. Last time on Wednesday night, drove him to his place because he lost his license and he doesn't drive. So and then she left, you know, later that, you know, early in the morning or whatever. How do you know Brian? Well, they all met at Bernie Selden's house. What does all this have to do with boots?

Nothing, Mr. Ito, nothing. It has to do with politeness. Hands across the water and stopping to smell the roses. He's leaving, walks past a guy yelling at a receptionist about getting a limo for the Grammys. I'm not gonna

schlep on foot like one of the nothings. And she calls him Bernie. So Jim notices that this Bernie Selden is going to be more important. I arrive at the front door like a mensch. We get a portrait of, I don't know, a certain. Certain type. A certain type of golden age media tycoon. Yeah.

Jewish guy who worked himself up from the bottom and isn't going to let anyone think less of him because of it. Like that kind of typology. I mean, this is kind of like the studio heads in the 40s kind of guys. Yeah. It becomes important throughout, but he's really concerned with appearances. More so than with substance. Yeah, it becomes important throughout, but he's really concerned with appearances. More so than with substance. Yeah, yeah. And no spoilers, but we went later and he's mobbed up.

So there's that aspect as well. Jim goes down the elevator and then we see Whitney pop out of a hallway where she obviously saw Jim leave. And then she goes to talk to the receptionist and the camera dollies away so we can't hear what they're saying but she clearly is you know going to get some kind of information little snooping going on little snooping which is what jim was doing so fair play we cut to jim looking at a mugshot with dennis get a little bit of dennis in this episode turns out that bernie selden is a real kind of criminal scumbag. He has all these aliases, and Jim says he ran into him once

and saw him beat up a parking lot attendant for turning his car on with the air conditioning still on. Bernie Selden. So at this point, I thought he was going to have more to do in this episode than he ultimately does. But he's played by Stanley Brock, who's a that guy. But this is his last appearance in the Rockford Files. But then he ultimately does. But he's played by Stanley Brock, who's a that guy. Like, you know.

But this is his last appearance in the Rockford Files. Oh. We've seen him in There's One in Every Port, our episode 17. And Never Send a Boy King to Do a Man's Job, our episode 79. In both places, I think he's part of Jim's crew. He's like one of the crew. Right, one of the crew. He's also in Rattler's class of 63, which we

have not seen. So haven't closed the book on him yet. But I was like, OK, we're getting there. Yeah, he's that guy. Jack Garner appears. Captain McEnroe.

McEnroe. Yeah. Captain McEnroe. Reoccurring character. Captain McEnroe. Lieutenant, is there a particular reason your friend is going

through the mug books and dennis says on my authority captain it's a good bit it's a rock furnishness moment it's a very lived in world moment where he's like okay well for the record i was at lunch and then dennis tells jim that he's retiring in a month and he's so worried about his pension that he's making sure to keep a tight lid on everything. It's good. It's very funny. And it is a little bit of a, since they have two episodes, we get a little bit of room to breathe with this kind of stuff. Yeah, yeah.

It's a fun, what do they call that? You spoil the expectations. Because any time a senior officer shows up oh sure we're expecting them to dress jim down right like works and in this case it's just like okay i just didn't see it okay i don't i don't know anything about it leave me out of this yeah yeah um dennis says that bernie selden has not been seen around la last they knew of him he's in miami or something and jim says well he's here now. He's planning to go to the Grammys.

Dennis, that's the case you're working on? Jim was working on. Was. We go to a scene in the courtroom where Diane's lawyer is examining a French filmmaker about her career and about this movie that they were planning to make. I mean,

they wanted her and they'd had all these conversations. And then she said that she couldn't do it because of Richie, um, and pulled out. And there's a good line where it's like, and did the film end up being made? And the guy says, well,

we refuse to go commercial and knuckle under to a bunch of Italian dentists. So the funding never came through. OK, so this is Alain. Alain. Alain. How do you pronounce it in French? Alain. Alain.

Yeah, I was going to say Alain. So the Florio brothers, Alain and Honoré. They're these French filmmaker brothers. I honestly didn't know there were two people. Well, no, I knew there were two people. i honestly didn't think that this was going to matter like i just thought this was just like fun texture for an episode and a half so i just did not pay attention to their scenes yeah i mean that makes sense like we were just saying they've got room to breathe and the whole episode feels like they're breathing which to some extent

if you got like a um an actual whodunit mystery going on yeah you want to throw as as much up in the air for people to be distracted by to keep away and it literally worked for me as well like i was like oh this guy like he's doing a little uh sno French thing. That's just the joke. And like, I didn't even know which side of the of the suit. Well, yeah, that we were supposed to land on. So Rocky has his opinion about what's going on. Right. Right. And we know that Rocky's opinion is muddled and whatever.

And then we get Jim's opinion of the rock and roll star right which isn't very high yeah it isn't very high so i'm like maybe we're supposed to be on her side and then we get this this guy yeah nothing that this guy does in this scene but it's just he's just annoying he's yeah he's played to to be like i'm the villain yeah not the archvillain, but like, no spoilers. He's coded with underhanded vibes. Hold on. I'll tell you what he's coded with. So I was just looking at his IMDB.

He is listed as maitre d' in seven different things. That is just his character name. I was just kind of scrolling through this and I saw Rest in Peace, Mrs. Columbo. He's the maitre d' in that. Jean-Paul Vignon is the actor. And he's the maitre d' in Murder, a Self-Portrait, which came out the year before. And I thought, oh, is this the same character? And I was like, oh, no, wait, hold on. No, this is a job, not a character.

He's just a maitre d' in everything but this, apparently. In this, he's a filmmaker. We see Jim slip into the courtroom, and we see he and Whitney see each other. So all our principals are there. We see that Richie does not look happy to hear this testimony. And we go outside where he's yelling at his lawyer, saying he doesn't remember that happening. Maybe at most I said, I don't remember that happening maybe at most i said i don't think it's a good idea but i don't remember telling her she had to leave london or

like whatever the the testimony was um there's this whole scrum because there's like reporters and they're saying no comment he has all his hangers on his lawyer and his manager ronnie is there and there's this whole scrum moving down to the elevator jim keeps trying to get richie's attention and this executes a death maneuver where he just kind of switches places with ronnie and physically pushes him out of the elevator right before it closes it's great because ronnie um again like you get the feeling that he is conniving the entire time right like without getting that feeling but like so he's clearly trying to shut jim out right you're not it's not entirely sure why but that's

fine because this whole episode's about like who's responsible uh and then yeah it just feels so satisfying but jim gets in the elevator instead of him oh yeah we cut to outside the courtroom with richie going mobbed up. Jim explains that Brian was hanging out with Bernie Selden. He's mobbed up. He owns evergreen management. Richie apparently didn't know that. Um,

that's interesting. And Jim has a policy to get out when the mob, uh, shows up. Uh, Richie has a good line. So what hoods in the music business that doesn't exactly rate with Japan surrenders. Does it? Uh's in the music business? That doesn't exactly rate with Japan surrenders, does it?

Jim says that Brian has disappeared and he's not going to follow him into the flying saucer. Yeah, good line. I'm sorry. Either you call the police or I'm off the case. Wait, Jim. Don't make a snap decision. I'm sorry, Eddie. Hey, you. You. Think that was cute? You're finished. You're off this case. Yes. And Jim says, I know.

Here's a copy of my bill. $2,000 as discussed for a week or parts thereof. Which is amazing. Ronnie says, I'll write you a check. And Jim says, I'll take that in cash. And so Ronnie tells him to take it down to their production company office. He'll call ahead. Tim and I don't carry cash.

There's too much terrorism. Eddie says, thanks a lot. Eddie's like, I brought Jim into this and now Jim is making me look bad for recommending him. He leaves. He has a different car. I guess it's not that important. I noted it. I thought it was because I thought he was like, I drive Tim. And then he like is has a different car i guess it's not that important i noted it i thought it was because i thought he was like i drive tim and then he like is in a different car yeah but it's

also like his his job is very ill-defined and is kind of whatever so he probably isn't trusted enough to be in the inner circle right yeah and there's there's a bit a little bit later on where i get the feeling that ronnie is trying to it, it just feels like Ronnie's trying to drive wedges between Tim and everyone. Yeah, yeah, for sure. And that's not the central point of any of these episodes, but I can see Ronnie putting... Putting Eddie at like a distance. Yeah, yeah, just being like, you got to drive the other car or whatever. But yeah. Whitney comes up to Jim.

What's the matter? You look angry. Jim, Mr. Renegade Lotion and his Flippo Brigade. You try to do business with them. You feel like you've eaten a mushroom. Good line. Again, Renegade Lotion. Exquisite.

An exquisite album title. Whitney says that you have to understand that he lives on a different planet expecting tim ritchie to relate to what they call reality is a bit much she asked him about the brian charles case he says he's not discussing it with anyone but his client she doesn't apologize for being a journalist she's willing to take risks and burn bridges they're a lot alike our director brothers have appeared the main one uh alan sees her they know each other he comes up to talk to them she introduces jim as a pi working on a missing persons case he's like oh how mysterious he says they must have dinner together she tries he invites both of them um jim begs off says he's he's not interested. Not tonight.

So Jim leaves. I guess it's been established that Whitney knows these director brothers. So, again, just mostly a couple of gags. Yeah. But yeah. All right. We are getting towards the end of our first episode. Jim is taking out the trash at night and I immediately go, oh, yeah. But the main drama here is that the

bottom of his trash bag splits open before he can get it in the trash can and just another thing on this day. And then Eddie rolls up with his blaring radio. Yeah. How do you like my new 450, Jimmy? So the 450, I was like,

what is... So obviously it's a car. Alright right this was not in the rockford files files i broke my rule and i did look something up about cars because i was like okay they just keep talking about the 450 what's the deal it's a mercedes there's multiple different classes of the mercedes mercedes 450 that were made during the 70s trialing for what these things look like i think it's the 450 SEL, which is the coupe version, not the convertible version. And it was one of the most expensive cars that Mercedes made at the time. That's all I got. Well, that's good. I mean, that is clear

from context, but I was like, okay, what is this? They keep mentioning this car. Apparently it was the rockstar car, at least in context of the show i don't know if that's a reference that at the time would have been you know a reference to something that actually was a was a trend or something anyway how do you like my new 450 that he's clearly drunk um when i took delivery this morning i could barely make the payments but now i'm fired thanks to you uh he threatens to break jim's face Jim says, try it. He's in the mood. He got tied up in Century City traffic.

Ronnie never called, so he didn't get his money. You could bottle his adrenaline and sell it to hospitals. Eddie backs down. He doesn't know what he's doing. He can't figure it. You know, what has his life become? I don't know, Jim. 10, 15 years ago, i used to wear a bowling

shirt because i was on a bowling team i like bowling now the shirts are chic and bowling is square and i paid 150 bucks for this and i never dream of telling my friends that i used to roll a 300 game it's such a good life yeah i mean I can remember a moment in my history where I was, I wasn't in his situation, but I was sitting in a very similar, like, especially the early aughts where everything was ironic and everyone was wearing like, like I'd be going down the street and there'd be people wearing band t-shirts of bands that I like, ironically, one day, and then the next day they loved them. And it was like, what's going on?

I don't know what's happening so i could i i feel for for our uh sad sack anthony boy which is which is my nickname for eddie yes well jim brings eddie inside uh rocky is sacked out on the couch sees uh eddie's shirt oh yeah says oh you're you bowl i'm a bowler, too. I bowl in the Oceanside League. Jim's like, Eddie's not having a good night. Oh, I get it. You're coming back from the lanes and things. You didn't have a good one.

So good. So rocky. Jim tries to hint at Rocky to leave and then basically tells him to leave. Yeah. I love this is a great Rocky line. Well, just pardon me all the heck. You don't have to go putting me to bed or sending me looking for stomach medicine. I hope you feel better.

And another classic Rockford moment where one of Jim's friends goes, he's a nice guy. Yeah, he is. Not only did Eddie get fired. Also, he saw that Whitney got the, quote, royal summons up to richie's room yes and so that was the other blow he waxes on about whitney how great she is jim says that's good that he talked to her and eddie says well he's just building himself up to ask her to go for a ride in his new car when tim comes back down and he's prowling around like he does he's really bugged and then he invites Whitney upstairs to talk about a book he's reading so Jim tries to put some brakes on says Eddie the Whitney that you're talking about is an idea in your head you need to like get a grip and he just ignores that

totally tells him that he's he doesn't even know know Whitney you're just reacting to her looks and he says that it's more than that his body physically hurts because of what he's been through and thinking about her. She smells like a New England hillside in the springtime, which is a wonderful description. Oh, my gosh. She smells like allergies. That's what you're saying. She smells like your eyes itch and you want to sneeze all the time. He tries to get Eddie over to the sandcastle.

We'll have a couple, you know, before we go to bed. And Eddie's like, you know, I really want I really wanted to reconsider taking the case. You can really help me out. I'll pay you back somehow. And Jim's like, don't ask me. It's too dangerous. And so a great joke here as they leave the trailer. And Eddie says, how bad could it be aren't you

jumping to conclusions then there's this whine of what we clearly know is a ricochet yeah and he says what's that noise jim says he didn't hear anything and then more bullets someone's shooting the canopy starts coming down this is a very dramatic end of our episode. Eddie takes a, takes a hit in the arm. And as they try to run for cover behind the four 50, Jim takes a shot in the leg and quite the role. I don't know if, if,

if, uh, Jim Gardner was, well, did his stunt there or not, but like that was impressive. I'll, I'll talk about it a minute.

Cause there was something about that. Um, they shelter behind the four 50. Uh, it takes a couple of hits's something about that. They shelter behind the 450. It takes a couple hits. We see like the radiator gets shot or something. It's quiet. They're waiting to see what happens next. They hear the car peel out.

They see the car shooting away. And then we focus on Jim as he goes, why in the leg? Freeze frame. Yeah. To be continued. Good. It was an entire origin story for the limp for the second episode um so apparently i mean he was you know this is the season where he was in increasing pain

yeah you know having increasing trouble uh moving around uh to do stunts and stuff apparently what happened was doing this dive hurt his knee ah so they wrote in the leg shot for the text of why he's limping. And he also was limping around because he hurt his knee doing his own stunt. Poor Jim. Poor Jims. Both of them. Poor Jims. All right.

So we end that episode not really knowing anything more. Yeah. I mean, this is the thing, right? Like it ends on a nice, exciting note. Yeah. We know Jim's in danger. Or I guess or possibly Eddie. Yeah.

Somebody. But there's no there's very little forward momentum from the audience point of view. Right. Like we've gone down some things that all just feel a little dead-endy you know and uh it like you were saying there they had room to breathe and they did breathe and i enjoyed the what they did with that room right like there were good gags there were very good character interactions everyone was like handling the scene i loved just watching everyone interact with them like anytime ronnie entered a room with his big muppet arms and big muppet face yeah yeah and like eddie like those conversations where eddie's talking about whitney they are long he is going on yeah

diatribes right he is spinning this whole web of fantasy about this woman and it's a significant amount of screen time and like i would write a few of those things down and then i was just like i whatever eddie like i'm with you i'm jim on this now you gotta shut up yeah all of that that bit has has some fun payoff in the next episode uh but it's in the next episode right yeah there is a problem in this being a two-parter, not like a horrible, insurmountable problem. And obviously from the year 2023, when we could at our leisure, watch them back to back or whatever,

it doesn't really matter. Like this is a movie length thing, but we are at this point and it does stop and I'm going to pick up the next day to watch it. And I definitely have this moment where i'm like what what happened like what yeah there's something so clearly it's a cliffhanger ending right where it's like action jim's been shot what's going to happen next yeah and like there's nothing wrong with that um but yeah there is kind of i think like i think saying there's no feeling of momentum

is exactly right i'm tuning in next week because well i haven't watched the rest of it yet yeah exactly but yeah i'm not like i can't wait to see how they answer this question or like yeah what is going on with that it's kind of like well i guess that the mob's involved so i guess we'll find out more about that to the show's credit the second episode brings all that stuff forward i don't want to say you could just watch the second episode brings all that stuff forward. I don't want to say you could just watch the second episode, but maybe you can. I think you can just watch the second episode. I mean, you lose some of the character fun because you don't watch it unfold in real time. Yeah, I was just thinking that maybe we need to move on and talk about the second episode. But I think so.

The episodes that are one long episode that got broken up for syndication. Yeah, I think so. The episodes that are one long episode that got broken up for syndication. I wonder if I extend them a little grace because like, well, it's supposed to be one long story. Exactly. And you happen to watch it in two pieces. So, of course, there's going to be some stuff that like you have to wait to see what happens. Well, something where it's like, here's part one and then here's part two. I'm like, well, part one didn't really wasn't very satisfying. It's like, well, yeah, I have to watch part two, you know, like, like, obviously. One of the areas where this was done well, and people can go back and relisten to our episode to find out if I am if I've changed my opinion on it.

But Gear Jammers, right? Like the two episodes of Gear Jammers are very different from each other. There's still the same mystery. And like the thrust of the first one is like what is rocky doing during his day and jim chasing rocky down and then the second one is the mystery itself and that was a great cohesive narrative to break on yeah i kind of remember it that way also also uh the the trees that yeah he's the trees and tt flowers where i don't remember if that was a long one broken up or if that was two individuals on purpose.

Uh, I don't recall now, but again, there was a really satisfying action sequence at the end of the first episode where they broke him out of the hospital or whatever. And then the second episode was like salt, like resolving the situation. Yeah.

Um, that felt like a satisfying standalone episode. And then you've got to watch the rest. To be fair, we're doing a Rockford Files podcast. And unfortunately, that means that the Rockford Files has to stand up to the Rockford Files. And I wouldn't wish that on any other television show. True, true. All right.

Well, we should go ahead and talk about the second episode. 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 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 dig a thousand holes.com that's's dig1000holes.com. Or you can get my sword and sorcery fiction and games at worldswithoutmaster.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 um those are all at my website it also has links to contact me in other ways currently i'm still um posting on instagram at nd payoletta. 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. Jimmy, this is Dora. I'm going to move in with the kids, but I'll sure miss you, dear. Thank you for taking out the garbage every week. I'll send you a card for your birthday.

Should I do an opening montage? Yeah, well, as usual for two-parters, we start with another opening montage. Yeah. And this surprised me that it was, and I don't know why, I don't know what the pattern is. I should know at this point. But I was like, this is not a previous one. This is an opening montage. I think in past they sometimes just do a previously on instead of an opening montage yeah i don't

remember but uh basically i get uh eddie's getting angry whitney is putting jim's life on the line for a story we get that all kind of spelled out for us and then oh no not the firebird yeah not the firebird is my note as well uh they talk about bootleg copies of the record is the other thing that yeah i was like okay so there's some plot happening it's gonna happen we then move into the recap yeah which i'd say hits all the high points i was kind of watching it with an eye of like is there anything that's emphasized in a way to set us up i mean obviously it chops up the timeline but like i feel like it just kind of gave us the the high

points of like the story so far some of the good gags uh some understanding of relationships uh we get the flying saucer line again why in the leg we ended on which is great the thing that i want to point out um and this matters to no one but me but that we get the the chip in the salsa again what are you what are you doing with that salsa jim and i think that's the setup for the payoff that's going to come in a moment well we have uh four and a half minutes of recap which again uh feels like a long time by contemporary standards um but is you know it's fine we have our titles over jim and eddie uh getting out of a cab back at the trailer they've clearly gotten patched up eddie needs to call his auto club somehow they managed to blow the doorknob off of the trailer so they have to go in through the bedroom which i love that yeah i thought that was going to be more of a thing like they were

going to get jumped when they get i mean you and i at this point i can't imagine jim's normal day to day life at that trailer without him just like what's that what's that noise you have to remember that like watching him work is like once a month. Right. Yeah. It's always a dry spell between his jobs and stuff. But yeah, I do love that we get the bedroom door, which I think has been at least mentioned or hinted at in other episodes. He's gone out of it sometimes to like sneak around and stuff. It's always fun to see his bedroom because it's like always slightly different.

So Jim is not going to hang around waiting for the cops to get off their bureaucratic duffs he's going to put together a package on bernie selden to take to the cops jim's assumption with no real reason not to think otherwise is that oh this mobbed up guy tried to hit us yeah eddie says he mentioned in the last one he got fired and he has two weeks to find a new job or whatever. So I guess they are extending him two weeks of being fired, which is not usually how that works. But whatever, that's fine. The point is, he says, you can bunk with me at the castle. He doesn't call it the castle. I call it the castle.

But you can bunk with me for the next two weeks, at least, if you don't want to be home. I want to just mention the gag. Yeah. Look, my car is be home. I want to just mention the gag. Yeah. Look, my car is broken down. I need a tow. 29 Cove Road, Malibu. Jimmy, what's your nearest cross street? The Pacific Ocean.

I don't know. There really isn't one. It's just 29 Cove Road. 29 Cove Road. Jim is asking Eddie if he told, if Eddie told anyone that Jim was going to go to Evergreen Productions. And he says he didn't tell anyone other than Richie. What about Whitney?

And he kind of blows up. I would never discuss the case with her. And Jim says, okay, I believe you. No hard feelings. Eddie asks, why would Selden be concerned with Jim? And what we all want to know where's brian yes i think at this point we've seen mention of a murder at least in in each preview montage yeah so as an audience member i'm like he's dead right yeah right like we we could all agree that he's dead yeah and jim gets there at some point i think so where's brian yeah where is he jim doesn't know

but but richie is showing a lot of concern about a guy who sounds like it was a real pain in his neck right because we've gotten these stories about how brian didn't like what he did with the record and he was we kind of get the sense that he was fighting with richie about other things and he wasn't you know just they weren't on the same page about stuff. He put a disco track on there. Surprise disco track. Surprise disco track. And also, Richie didn't seem surprised about Selden's company being evergreen.

Something about that. Plus, there's a $2,000 account to settle. Yes. Eddie doesn't want to confront richie because so jim's kind of implying like maybe richie's in on whatever's going on like i want to get my job back and jim is willing to put eddie's job up against his own neck which is a good jim rock yeah that is good eddie oh who cares anyway job money joy says without whitney he's it's like he's in a dark room with no windows

and he might be better off dead and jim replies you coming heathcliff yes that one i understood right in reference to the cartoon cat yes the cartoon cat that's why weathering heights yeah good good job there was a brenta star ace reporter reference earlier that was referenced a couple times i'm like i'm sure this is something i did not look it up i don't know who that it's an old comic and i think it's been made into a movie a few times or whatever but it it is what you would expect it to be all right so we have the rest our main credits uh over the firebird as jim and eddie head back to the castle, we get Jim limping and a line about how he was shot in the leg. They're trying to find Richie.

He's in the room. He has a special room. He has a little garret up at the top. Yeah. Where he goes to compose his songs and be alone and do his creative thing. He's not supposed to be disturbed when he's in the room. Good. Then they'll feel like an innovator.

Eddie tries to warn jim off but jim knocks richie's incensed that someone would dare interrupt him but he tells jim you'll meet him on the patio we crossfade to jim on the patio talking to richie with uh ronnie in the background and another amazing outfit our hero ronnie jim says that someone is trying to kill him and eddie are you going to clean it up or just let what happens happen yeah uh jim has a beer we know that because he's holding a can that says beer on it in giant letters yes i love the generic beer in the show i had a beer count for this episode because it's the same i saw the generic beer and i thought oh that's actually you don't see that that often in a Rockford files. And then he continues to have beers throughout this episode.

Oh, get the screenshot. Yeah, there it is. Oh, good. The expression on his face is also. Yeah. Oh, OK. Richie comes clean. Well, I guess Ronnie gives the details, but she's like, OK, you know, here's what happened.

Renegade Lotion shipped Platinum, which that's what, a million records? Is that right? Yeah, I think so. I feel like it doesn't mean anything anymore. So Renegade Lotion shipped Platinum. So, you know, they shipped a million records. 300,000 bootleg copies hit the stands at the same time. It costs his label 1.4 million. A master disc was missing after Brian visited the pressing plant. So Ronnie's saying like Brian leaked the album and Richie is like, well, look, we don't know that. So we see that there's a dynamic there. Yeah.

Why would he do that? Ronnie says that Brian's a jealous, spiteful person. And Eddie or God, see, I got so many names. And Richie says Tim Richie. Tim Richie. The worst part of it is that he's got two first names. Yeah. So we got Jim and Tim.

We got Richie, Eddie and Ronnie. Anthony Boy, who's not in this episode. And then Selden and Brian. All right. Richie is like, well, I put the disco track on there. I think that sent him over some kind of edge. Like he just couldn't deal with it for some reason. I don't know why he would have made him do this.

He didn't know about Evergreen Productions, but the news did confirm his suspicions. So the picture they're putting together with what Jim knows is that maybe Brian leaked the record to Evergreen and this guy. Right. Bernie Seldon is the one who made the bootlegs and got them into distribution, right? To bite on their release. Apparently the mob likes this business. This is good mob business. It's easy money.

Mm-hmm. Jim, do you want to call the police or should I? Richie doesn't want to. But Ronnie says, why not? Brian sold you out. Give him the spike. Yeah. To Ronnie.

Absolute Ronnie. Richie, he's in the middle of the court case. The press will be all over this. A big high profile, you know, scandal in the middle of the case. He doesn't want to. He leaves. Ronnie's still there. There's a beat.

My, my my my wait until whitney cox gets an earful of this chit chat oh she'll have a field day just last night tim was telling me that she was bugging him about brian and evergreen management i don't even know how the hell she found out and jim slams his beer down. He looks mad. And Ronnie gives him this great look and just. Oh. I'll say, guys, did I say something wrong? Darn this silly mouth of mine.

So Ronnie. So Ronnie. Yeah, it's pretty good. And at that point, I was like, oh, okay, he knows exactly what he's doing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Eddie and Jim go back to the Firebird. Okay, fine. I did mention you were going to Evergreen.

I didn't think it was important. And then I didn't tell you because I knew you'd take it the wrong way. Jim is, you know, mad because he got lied to. And also now he's putting together why he's, you know, someone's coming after him with a gun. He's trying to build a probable cause for an attempted murder if that gets in the way of eddie's fantasy too bad we have a peak of the jim eddie conflict jim he gets the name of the hotel that whitney's staying at eddie's like you know but you be you be nice to her she's special or something like that yeah yeah no it doesn't take anything special to sleep with a dozen guys to get an angle on a story.

Yeah. As he's bending over to get into the firebird and Eddie just kicks him just right in the ass. You're talking about the woman I love and then kicks him in his wounded leg. And we get the, the, the anger, the real mad,

uh, Rockford anger, which you only see every so often. And Jim punches Eddie in his arm wound. He keels over and then Jim gets in the Firebird and peels out backwards. Out of the way, turkey. My notes are cheap shots all around. There's a lot of good fight choreography in the

rockford files and this does not disappoint this is right up there all right jim goes to dr whitney uh he kind of tries to deny what he's saying uh you know you got this info from eddie and then you're following me around trying to break your story she says well that's an untruth and jim says but not a lie yeah and then this stuck out at me just because it's like anti-rock traditionist this is where it goes all sherlock yeah where he like makes fun of people for thinking this is the kind of thing that he does yeah she has a pair of like high-heeled boots sitting on the on the ground and he picks them up and says this is the same kind of mud that was in in brian's yard you were the one outside the you know the house and you know you're the one who hit me with a rock yeah uh my theory here because he he says this is a i don't

think he says this is a unique blend or something like that but you know it kind of has that this is a particular blend yeah yeah or something my theory here is that this is him laying it on so that she admits it so like probably just notices mud on her boots and is like okay i'm gonna find out and and instead of it being rockford understanding uh you know being a top sociologist or whatever they're called uh there's got to be a word for dirt science. Dirt scientist. Dirt scientist. One of them dirt scientists.

If you're a dirt scientist, please ring us up with the appropriate way to address you, your majesty. Well, I will accept that as a more consistent read. Yeah. I was shocked to find out that she's the one who beamed him with the stone. Not only that, but I just barely remembered it happening. Well, okay. So she said that it was an accident. She was trying to throw it over him to distract him so that she could get out of there without him seeing her.

And she just dropped it on him instead. Also, he was on the ground. Like he had tripped over something at that point. Yeah. This isn't a lot. Like, I think this is what happened. Like, in the story of the episode, this is what happened at that moment. She tried to throw the rock and she just wasn't good at throwing a rock.

Yeah. It just feels, I don't know. It just feels weirdly first draft to me, I guess. It's like, really? This is a whole thing because it doesn't come up it's not like jim's been like and i need to find who hit me with that rock like it's not like it even like came up again really like you said i forgot about it until he started mentioning talking about it again exactly so it just feels weird that it's in the episode anyway unless it's

like a joke about how she like can't throw a rock which it's possible that which is not a good joke yeah i don't want to get too into it but there there's definitely a read of this episode that makes it a little little little sexist yeah yeah i think if you don't go with that read uh like for instance jim is making comments about her sleeping around later on she's gonna make comments about her sleeping around. Later on, she's going to make comments about her sleeping around. And it's not a big deal. Right, right. Yeah.

I mean, it's a little bit of a gag, but it's not a, you know, like a. In that scene, I think it's more he's saying it to get under Eddie's skin. More than anything else. Yeah. What I'm saying is that I wouldn't put it beneath, you know, this episode to be like, the joke is she can't throw a rock or you know whatever but nonetheless we've spent more time than the episode did so she finally she does admit she's been following around she just wanted to feel out um bernie see what's up with him she asked him if he knew why pi had been hired to look into the disappearance of brian

and when she did that bern Bernie kind of blew up at her. And so Jim's like, oh, so there's the connection. That's how he knows to come after me. She agrees to go down to the police with him to explain everything. And that's when Eddie arrives, all panicked and out of breath, to warn her that his friend Rockford, oh. And then he asks, tough? It's very funny. She's like, you know i you got shot he's like

it's like i'm okay my my wrist will be numb but that's how it goes yeah they tried to give me pain pills but i don't believe in that kind of stuff jim's smile during all this is is priceless but she says that jim's right she's fouled everything up we got it we should go explain on the way out jim says to eddie you rushed over here to warn her but you stopped at change clothes so we go to our uh our principals plus dennis confronting bernie selden while he's getting measured for pants for the grammys bernie says of course he was upset uh he was upset that a P.I. was misrepresenting himself in his office. He claimed to be some big Texas promotions man or something.

And Dennis gives Jim a little look. Dennis knows Dennis knows Jimmy Meeker. Yep. He tells his tailor that he's going to the Grammys, not a bris. Dennis asks, you know, very sober, you know, police questions. And we get Selden says that brian and he were social friends they had a shared business interest in some painter so they talk about that occasionally but that was all and that the night that brian uh disappeared or or the night that jim whatever one of the whatever night they're asking about he was alone

alone at home no one to give him an alibi. And Jim's like, oh, of course we're going to believe that. And he has this like, hey, you see that knob? Turn it, pull. He's full of good little short, short bits. He says to Whitney, this is what I get for being cooperative with the press. And she says, well, you were being very cooperative when you said, what is it you said? This is the kind of publicity that money can't buy.

It's like, well, you're going to get my company linked in print to some piracy scam. You think I don't know how things work in rags like the knickerbocker? Clearly, this isn't really going to go anywhere. And Dennis ushers everyone out. Yeah, good for Dennis. Good for Dennis. We go to an outside patio where Jim, Whitney, and Eddie are having some lunch and talking over the whole thing. Beer number two. I think she has a salad

while they're waiting for what turns out to be a pizza that they're getting. Eddie realizes that Whitney hasn't gotten her a glass of wine and goes that creep. I'm going to go straighten him out. The timing was great because they were they might have been talking about Selden. They were talking about someone.

Well, they say like one of them says, like, but where's Brian? And then he's like, that creep. Yeah, it's good. He leaves. And then Whitney and Jim talk about Eddie for a few minutes. Whitney says he's a nice man, just a little morose and quiet. And Jim comes to his defense. Actually, he's a nice man just a little morose and quiet and Jim comes to his defense actually he's a firecracker Eddie but yeah yeah you know he's a top man on the uh prison variety show told jokes play blues harmonica you take him to parties he goes into orbit what's wrong has there been a death in his family Jim explains since you're asking he's really

taken with you you never noticed uh no he doesn't even look at me i thought he didn't like me is this real and jim just sighs oh so good look i wouldn't usually do this but i'm taking this chance since i hate to see him so unhappy he's you know he's really into you you should know and she says that she has noticed a certain virility in his walk, a certain animal energy. I love Jim's line about like, do you think I set people up? Nine times out of 10, it's sucker bet. That's great.

Says, well, he's no Tim Ritchie. Whitney says, unfortunately, I wouldn't know. And so Jim's like, oh, I kind of assumed. And I think, you know, he is going to keep going further with that. But then Eddie returns with her wine. And I like her response here where she's like thank you kind sir yeah she's opening herself up for more positive interactions just like yeah off the bat they get back to business at cheese pizza arrives while

they talk um the only one we see eat any of it is whitney there's a gag about like her getting some sauce on her mouth yeah we'll come up come up. This will be important later. At some point, she pays Ronnie the greatest compliment. But at some point in this conversation, she says that Ronnie, our friend, the big big limbs in the yeah, our Muppety friend, Ronnie has the sexuality of a pocket calculator. And I can only assume that this is one of the greatest compliments that... Of all time. Anyways, I couldn't let that go by. Well, Jim says, okay, what the police need is a body to establish probable cause. Maybe we'll get lucky and also find Jimmy Hoffa.

Ah, a reference I got. Yeah. But Jim says, what if he never left his house? He didn't drive, as we've learned. He wasn't packed for the trip. He never used that ticket. And as Jim knows from falling down in it, the soil in his garden

was freshly turned. It wasn't all dried out like what we've been told. If he really lost interest in this thing, why would it be like fresh soil? Eddie thinks it's worth a shot whitney thinks it's a long shot selden's too savvy for that and we end the scene on jim giving her the little you got something on your mouth napkin motion i'm starting to justify the first episode now because this is where a lot of these bread crumbs are coming together right and uh now having watched it and then gone through it uh i'm like oh okay all right this is groundwork that was laid

by things that felt like red herrings or or it's never a red herring in the rockford files it's always you don't know what he's getting out of this scene yeah yeah but it'll show up later jim's right but but his assumptions are wrong yeah yeah and whitney's right but she doesn't know it yeah because i'd forgotten about this her line that someone's too savvy for this she's not wrong yeah um yeah we cut back to to evening jim and eddie are digging uh eddie says she should stand back in case jim actually finds something down there and she's like don't worry about me i've seen some things i covered a gang war in new york and etc etc and then she asked eddie for his jacket you don't want it to get ruined it looks like a ventino yeah i think he's the best wonderful material yeah i think the days

of the unconstructed jacket are numbered j Jim, we are digging for a man's body here. Whitney says that she thinks they're digging for nothing. Jim gives an uh-oh, pulls a broken pair of glasses out of the hole, and then uncovers a face. And Eddie says, that's him. That's Brian Charles. All right. Later that night, back at the castle, Jim is trying to find Tim Ritchie. He's holding a Western Union envelope addressed to him because apparently it was sitting on the door.

He's limping all around the castle. He goes through a room where the TV is on, and there's a news story about the body's discovery. Mm-hmm. Finds Ritchie in his special room. Jim's there because everyone has to pay their bills. We get the internal life of the rock star, right, in this scene. The special room, I think, is important in that it's like a monk's chambers, right? Compared to the rest of the...

So we get another tour of the castle and the decadence of the castle. Do we see the twins are just asleep? I think they're passed out in front of the tv that's playing yeah yeah everything about this screams you know uh the palace of a decadent emperor and then we get to where this emperor's is his private room and it's this cramped little thing at the top of the tower that looks that it's got like an elvis presley poster on the wall and a old phonograph it's a record player why did i call it an old victory all that no it's just like a record but like um but it is an old record

player because it's from he talks about it's brian's from when they were teenagers. Yeah. Yeah. And his personal retreat in the castle is something very sparse and very small and just has like a few significant items. But that's it. Like it's not a recording studio or anything like that. Yeah. And he says that he's not supposed to care about money. You can't be singing songs about anarchy on one hand and be checking bank statements with the other. And I think Jim asked him,

well, how do you explain those two coexisting? Like, you are very rich and you sing songs about anarchy. He says, I tried to tell myself that because I have contempt for it all, but that doesn't really hold. I don't know. A little moment of personal honesty. Like my interpretation of it, right.

Is like, well, you dance, you dance with the one that brought you. Yeah. Especially in the creative field. Like that's what ends up happening. People want to hear the hits. Anyway, he has some cash on him. He can get the rest downstairs to pay Jim the $2,000 he owes him. Jim gives him the telegram. It's from the western union telegram it's from diane it's expressing sympathy for

brian's death richie starts waxing nostalgic about diane and how she was when they first met says that brian was clean then and then he starts talking about brian and i think you know this comes up as text but it's clear from the beginning where it's like he's really shook yeah uh and he's going through his memories going through his relationship with brian maybe trying to see where it went wrong trying to see if there's anything he could have done but just being in a state of like grief he's grieving yeah yeah he says you know what's funny is brian was going deaf and so he tried to do things that weren't like rock and roll for a while he did like a bad rock opera in new york

and then he moved to london to score movies but he couldn't stay away couldn't stay away from rock and roll so the the fads come and go disco i think he says like disco reggae something else but all brian wanted to do was stay up until 4 a.m. playing Johnny B. Good until his brains popped out of his ears. He has a stack of 45s from when they were 16, and he has Brian's record player that he had over his parents' garage, dreaming of impressing their high school with their music when they finally came back at a reunion or something.

I think most people go back to their high school reunion. They're overweight, frustrated, and unmemorable. You? You've got this big house on the ocean. You're still alive. You, uh, are going to be remembered always by the people back home. So what do you want from life, huh? A putting green?

You're going to miss him a lot, aren't you? That's what it always was, wasn't it? The adverse publicity, the rationalization that you gave me. And the truth of it is, you really cared a lot about Brian. You didn't want him hurt. I blew the chance to ever tell him,

didn't I? Yeah. Yeah. You did. Those things you said, is that how you felt at your high school reunion? No.

No, I always kept kept myself pretty good shape i've got my big house on the ocean big house on big wheels besides i was in prison at the time one of my notes during this scene that apparently was a note to future me i just want to bring up it just says this two-parter has a lot of time for long character scenes yeah and i don't hate it i was thinking about that like because you know earlier we were talking the first episode ends and it's just i think this episode not necessarily really redeems it but like i liked this scene right yeah i like the scene too could we have had this scene if it was one episode? Probably, but at the expense of a lot of other things, more condensed.

Yeah. Yeah. This scene, this is the first time where I like got interested in Richie as a character. Yeah. I honestly just didn't find him very interesting the whole rest of the time,

which is kind of tough for two episodes. Like we're almost at the end here. Yeah. And like, it's, you know, you get to see the interiority of the, of the, you know the of the you know of

the artist yeah and the humanity that he still has even though he's still separated from day-to-day concerns of most people that is a valuable thing and it's a and it's well done but it's also like this is the kind of the last we see of this character yeah and i just didn't care about him until the scene and then he's gone that's not great just like brian just like brian the works on levels levels i just like how this goes back okay so jim has a dance with everyone who tries to hire him where they they don't give him all the information he needs and he knows and he tries to quit and blah blah and all that and this scene does a good job of like establishing why tim ritchie behaves towards jim why he hires him and then is very off-putting with him when it comes to all this

stuff and i like that like i like because that's that was that was a problem it's like tim ritchie hires them to do something and it puts jim in front of the crosshairs and it's not clear what's happening or why that's you know and he's he's been very uh reticent to tell jim anything and it's because he's he's got this deeply. You know, his whole reason for hiring him. Dual consciousness. Yeah. So, anyways, just wanted to bring that up. Yeah, I think, yeah, it retroactively explains a lot of the dynamic, for sure. We leave the Garrett, and Eddie and Whitney are standing there. Whitney with the obvious wires.

Right. We have a close-up on her tape recorder actively going. They say that they just wanted to tell richie they're sorry about brian uh he kind of says thanks and goes downstairs jim goes to follow but before he does he uh pointedly takes the tape out of whitney's recorder and he gives her the okay fingers and walks away with it and then uh downstairs he gets the rest of his money and then jim thinks that eddie's still behind him starts saying hey let's go out to celebrate and turns around and eddie and whitney are out on the patio talking by themselves

yeah so jim leaves cut to rocky watching gruesome news stories as jim is providing taco night. Boy, it's nice to have a meal at home after four days away. So I appreciate how he got paid $2,000 for four days of work. Yeah. That is a good Rock for Files payoff. That is a great Rock for Files payoff. So tacos, we get the big payoff. Jim sits down and just spoons salsa like several big spoonfuls of salsa into the taco finally jim eats the salsa for two whole episodes i've been frustrated by

jim's lack of salsa consumption but we're here we're good and his third beer. I'm sending you another screenshot. Oh, good. Yes. Yes. Some good Jim tacos. Well, I'm glad that the salsa mystery has finally been solved. He's just saving it for like the right. Because here's the thing with salsa, right? It's all about proportion. I myself am a low salsa liker.

I like a taste. I don't like a big chunk. So I like a thinner salsa, more of a salsa verde, not like a paste picante. Right. Oh, now, okay, hold on. I'm sorry. Am I bringing two things together that shouldn't be in conversation? I'm just saying that not every chunky salsa is a paste.

Well, I just mean that density, right? Okay, all right, all right. Sure, sure. It can be like a fire-roasted, you know, like organic store brand, which is what I would usually buy. It's usually pretty good, maybe with corn in it or something, but like the chunky one. Yeah. I prefer more of a saucy one. Okay. You do a dip, and then it's going to dribble off if you have too much.

So you tap it. So you do tap it. I wouldn't say I tap. I would scoop, but then I would bring it out vertically so that it doesn't have a pool. Okay. And then I would chomp. But if I have a taco, then I'm pouring it because there's something in it for the salsa to sit in, and you get the combination of flavors. You see?

So I'm, I mean, definitely, that is definitely the taco way. Like, absolutely. But I am, I will take two chips and put it into the salsa and hold them together and just shovel it down my throat. I have never had gazpacho, which is weird because you would think, given what I just described, that that's the meal I'm looking for. Right. See, if I want that experience, I get that from a guacamole. Yes, that's good. I use a chip as a small surface upon which I can pile the guacamole.

Yes, yes. And get as much of that into my mouth as possible. Because I just want a little bit of the crunch and a little bit of the extra salt from the chip. But I really just want a spoonful of avocado with all the good stuff in it. Yesterday I had, uh, yeah, some vegan tofu pups, right. Or, or smart dog, whatever the really cheap kind. Um, uh, if you're vegan and you're, or even if you're not vegan, if you're looking for a nice tasty hot dog, uh, field roast Frankfurters are great, but they're not what i would do

this with so i had that and then gardines uh chili with beans poured over top of that but i had it on a bed of corn chips so that as it slipped around on the outside and then and then just like a ton of onion and uh fig cheese on it anyways i'm just saying i had a chili dog yesterday nice and i loved it i recently had a what i would call a chili nacho which is where we had some uh we had some veggie chili that my dad made so i don't know exactly what all went into it but it was vegetables and it's delicious and so i constructed a uh tortilla bowl of you know a bowl with tortillas in it yeah chili some more tortillas chili oh nice i did put i actually do have some vegan cheese but i did put real cheese on it because i was just microwaving

it until it was hot and that was not going to melt the vegan cheese so that's a very very akin to a frito pie yes yes it's similar to a frito pie one of my favorite dishes i'm using big you know big triangle yeah chips and not fritos. But yeah, it's the same idea. Anyway, this is the important stuff from this episode. Alright. Thatta boy, Dennis. Dennis did it. So first there's an update

on the trial. Richie didn't show up to court today and there's speculation about why that was. Diane's lawyer is claiming premature victory. Jim eats his taco. In related news, charges of grand theft and copyright infringement were filed against bernie selden and that's when jim goes good job dennis apparently they found documents in brian's home definitively linking selden to the to the

bootlegged albums and he's going down for that. However, the police have no leads in the attempted murder of, you know, one of Richie's, you know, employees or whatever. And an associated investigator. And Rockies goes, that's you. You made the six o'clock news. It shows you how far gone Rocky is to this. Jim, we see that Jim has a thought. Yeah.

He tries to call Whitney. She's not at the hotel and she hasn't picked up her messages since yesterday afternoon. And so Jim's onto something. He says, they don't say that the police don't have leads unless they really don't have anything. Yeah. So why would Seldon murder Brian? If he's such a valuable resource, why would he stop that from happening all hell broke loose when whitney cox started dogging my footsteps she spilled everything to selden what if she did the same with the florio brothers the french directors

he's going to eddie's uh rocky goes hey don't leave me eating alone here jim leaves and we end the scene with rocky taking a big bite of his taco and returning his attention to the six o'clock news to the warm glow of the television okay yes i really completely forgot about yeah yeah this connection i mean i did have that thought of like so why did he kill brian yeah and i'm like oh they had a disagreement or you know whatever my notes are so wait this is about the divorce trial right right yeah but yeah at least this scene which at this point i because i wasn't watching the time i was like oh okay i guess we're wrapping up the case with how is it and then jim takes us further into it.

So, and not only does he take us further into it, but there's now a tension in the scene, right? Like we're worried now about Whitney and what might happen to her. Jim goes to Eddie's. There's a moment where you're like, what happened? And then Eddie does come out. He's wearing his boxers.

Whitney was there, but she left just half an hour ago. And Jim gives him an up and down on what he's wearing. Yeah, he's like, all right, cool. So Jim lays out his speculation. What if the Florio brothers killed Brian, then sent someone after Eddie and himself? Brian was scoring movies in the early 70s in london so this is all relying on remembering the scene with the testimony you know where alan was testifying that in 1973 or whatever was when they were looking to cast diane and they were talking to her when she

was in london um eddie says when they were watching the six o'clock news, presumably the same broadcast that Jim was just watching the part that was covering the trial gets to, uh, making the picture, you know, trying to cast the picture in London and that made her sit up and she left. She was standing outside Richie's room when Richie told Jim about Brian went to London and was scoring films.

Yes. And he was preoccupied, so he doesn't remember. Suppose that the Florio brothers' testimony was spurious, was bought by Diane's defense to establish cause for her to get this suit. And then maybe they're getting paid a cut of the settlement. win this to get this suit and then maybe they're getting paid a cut of the settlement brian was in london at the time so maybe he knew and brian knows diane so maybe he knew diane was never considered for this role so the florio brothers see brian as a threat to exposing their lie yeah on behalf of diane on stand right and so he thinks and now whitney probably left because maybe she saw she made those same connections and now she wants to break the story.

Okay. Yes. Now we've solved the case. We're good. For some reason, maybe it's because of the two episodes and there's like so much time in between. Maybe it's because there's other things that I've been paying attention to. I guess it's not like this is uncommon, right? These plots often have a scene where Jim explains the connections to someone so that he puts all it puts it all in front of us we've gotten here and this

is um in case you weren't paying attention or whatever right or like just or to reveal a connection that we didn't know before but he does he figures out it was originally broadcast television so you may have just been in the bathroom at the time or, you know, whatever. So this is not an unusual structure. But for some reason, I found the chain of logic to be so tenuous that I just had trouble buying it. Like, I'm like, I know he's telling it to me. This is the scene where he tells me what's going on through speculation. So as an audience member, there's no reason for me to doubt that this is the story. This is the story.

This is what's written down. This is the plot of the episode. But I'm like, I just don't buy it. It doesn't feel like it. I mean, it hangs together logically, but I just don't, it just doesn't seem that important. Am I being uncharitable with my read? No, no, I agree.

I feel like it's not like a huge thing but i do feel like the the french uh filmmakers are their motivation is underbaked like if we even had a dollar sign on a you know like a dollar amount on how much they were paid to say whatever they said their recent film was such a bomb that they're in incredible debt. Yeah. And now they're going to get a $5 million payout if she wins her seat. Right. Because they killed one person who might. Again, tenuous connection.

Like it's not clear how they might have learned that this person. But anyways, it's not that Brian and Tim Ritchie's friendship was a secret to anyone, right? Right. So why, when they hatched their plan, they didn't think, oh, wait, this guy would see right through it. Tim Ritchie's best friend who hangs out with him all the time would know. But neither that nor this, neither here nor there. The other bit is that, like, they need to be motivated well enough not only to commit one murder, but to start a series of murders. They're about to start a series of murders.

Well, they already attempted another two murders. Yeah, yeah. Because that's the thing. So that's who shot at Jim and Eddie are, I mean, presumably honorary because he seems to be the gunman. Yeah. And Eddie are, I mean, presumably honorary because he seems to be the gunman. Yeah. So if they showed him as like a typical Rockford Files thing to do would be to show this guy as like flying off the hook.

But we don't really get him at all before now. We get a couple shots of him and he does seem like the hot tempered one. Yeah. one yeah but there's another nuance to it where it's like given what we know about what was happening with brian and richie and selling out richie to the mob for money for the counterfeit scam in the diane richie brian triangle brian currently seems like he's aligned against richie right right he's doing things to undercut richie so you'd think he would be able he'd be an easy sell on just to pay him off just pay him off for or something and now now i'm just reading in you know now i'm just doing headcanon stuff where it's like maybe the intrinsic connection between like maybe diane knows that brian and richie at their core are always gonna align together and right but she's not in on the

plot to kill him she finds that out in the next scene so it's like i don't know i for it doesn't yeah i don't know why i find finding this so unsatisfying. It's like really bothering me. And I don't know why. So I think we should just move on. Cause I'm, I'm, I'm fixating on, on this when in another episode I'd be like,

yeah, it doesn't really hang together or whatever. Let's keep going. So in our next scene, Whitney is interviewing Diane and she keeps bringing it around to talk about Brian. I mean, I guess in context of,

Oh, he was just discovered, you know, we just found out that he's dead uh you must have known brian after he left the suspects after he went into exile in london how was he then um we see honoree coming into the room i think with groceries yeah he hears whitney asking about brian and diane's kind of is saying like like Diane has stood up and has her back to Whitney and is saying you know we were never really that close yeah I remember I sent him money a couple times

because he needed some help but I'm not really sure you know something Henri sneaks up behind Whitney he has a gun and he hits her in the back of the head and knocks her out then Diane turns yeah sees what he just did and goes you killed Brian that wasn't part of the deal and knocks her out then diane turns yeah sees what he just did and goes you killed brian that wasn't part of the deal so i appreciate that she puts it together immediately yeah uh but that wasn't part of the deal right she doesn't she didn't know like yeah in on it she's not in on it we go to eddie and jim in the firebird whitney must have tipped off the the brothers when she went to dinner with them the dinner dinner that Jim decided not to go to. So maybe this all could have been avoided.

I think Jim says like they must have played her like a fiddle or something like that. Eddie wants to tell Jim something. The night was incredible, but he says, maybe it all started going wrong when we got dinner from Ricky's rip ranch. See where this is going right away you got sick no it's just hard to stay turned on when somebody's got dried barbecue sauce in the corner

of their mouth and on their chin you know there's something about the color of that sauce eddie do i have to listen to this eddie goes into excruciating detail about how their night was progressing and everything was great but then she wanted to get something out of the icebox and in the light of the refrigerator bulb and there was just no sexual spark the appeal to me was strictly looks i was taken in by appearances now eddie i tried to make that clear to you This is more frank discussion about sex than like the entire run of the show Yeah, the whole rest of the show combined

And it's the most un I mean, I think this is very well done and framed and well acted It is the most unappealing You feel Jim be like, please stop talking to me about this I don't want to know it's it's great it's very funny it's very strange bright good-looking person like her with a lot to offer

if she wasn't so messed up how could you think that way she could have it all that was so could you eddie so could you you know you give power away by the shovel bolt people you don't even know yeah and it plays into this thing about whitney's character that is uh so whitney obviously has investigative skills right like she knows how to follow a lead she knows you know she has a good nose for news and whatnot uh and but she's oblivious to uh to the fact that eddie liked her right um and she was oblivious to the mess that was on her face when jim asked her early on about like you know the article she's doing and she just kind of talks about tim ritchie's being the sexual or the sensual icon of his age or whatever um it wasn't i'm trying to think of

the best way to describe it it was more manner of faculty it was more academic right right than anything else she didn't really sound like she's attracted to him yeah and like in a little while we're gonna get like her rundown of her sexual experiences here and they all kind of have this same sort of thing where it's just like um it's kind of clinical kind of yeah yeah and i love it i love it like that her character is this like. Her character is this, like, uh, there's this whole part of the world that is completely open to her that she doesn't navigate well at all. Like that's it. Well,

we have some action music as Alan rolls up to Diane's. He sees Whitney's car. Um, here's yelling from inside. And then he goes in and he's uh yelling at honore you were supposed to stay away until the trial was done he says all your life you have been betraying marks and now you do the same to me they're supposed to be like pseudo like yeah leftist intellectual i guess i feel like this is again a very of the time like gag yeah like a like a french avant-garde gag i i imagine anyway they have to do something

about whitney and that's when uh oh no okay so this whole sequence is intercut alan arrives at diane's jim and eddie arrive jim parks they They see Alan and Whitney's cars. And then, so they know that they're both there. And then we hear been betraying marks, et cetera. And then we have to do something about Whitney. And that's when Eddie runs in with a pipe and attacks the brothers.

Henri has a gun in his hand, shoots him. It looks like in the leg. And Jim comes around the other way, knocks honore with a punch and takes his gun and alan is pushed past the stricken eddie eddie tells jim i'm okay i'm okay and jim runs out in time to see our uh our french director gunning it backwards directly towards his firebird. And he says, turn left, turn left.

And then he just slams his car into the firebird. Not my car again. I will, I will say, uh, I noticed this and then I saw that it was on IMDB. So I felt, uh,

absolutely not special at all, but I did notice that the car, the firebird had already been banged up before they might have done like a couple scenes of it backing up in one of the like or they might have had a banged up firebird for when this car ran into it but like the shot of it backing up you could see that the firebird had already been hit by something so yeah well maybe that's why he says again. Yeah, it could be. All right. We have our last scene of our two-parter here at the Sandcastle. Jim and Eddie. It looks like a big plate of seafood, I think, to me.

Maybe it's a salad. It's hard to say. Yeah. Jim has a big plate of something. Indeterminate food. Yeah. It has small pieces because he holds one on his fork for half the conversation. It has small pieces because he holds one on his fork for half the conversation.

Eddie is there, but he's, as he says, yanked off at Jim because he told Whitney how Eddie felt about her. And Jim is incredulous. He has a good Jim Rockford. I can't believe this. If Jim hadn't said anything, nothing would have happened with Whitney. And he's like, that's true, but I don't want other people interfering in my love life. So the other part of the earlier conversation and now a little more now is that now that he's gotten to know her, he doesn't like her. Right. Like he's like, she's self-centered.

She has all this like baggage from childhood. You know, all she talks about is herself, like all this stuff. But he's still mad at jim for interfering right uh so you know again i think i said portrait of the fractured psyche right like eddie really has he has a lot of different things going on that he needs to work out uh they see whitney approaching across the parking lot uh jim mentions oh i left her note for rocky saying where we were and he says i'm maxed out with that lady and he sneaks off before she can see him it's it's great jim says oh you just missed eddie and when he says that's fine i'm here to talk to you jim she's going back to new york she just wanted to thank jim for what he did and she wants to get

her cassette back and jim has this great song and dance the other night the whole rockford clan got together you know we sometimes do that and my dad got out his squeeze box and oh we played uh oh the dust on mother's bible and will the circle be unbroken amazing grace you know all the old favorites and I wanted to tape it for my nephews. And, well, cluck that I am, you know, I taped right over everything you had. You are no cluck, Mr. Rockford. All right, and we are going to end our episode on,

as you said, on a deep exploration of her sexual exploits. Yes. Cause he says, well, even without that, you have enough to do a great writeup on Tim Ritchie. Plus you have the whole sexual angle.

Yeah. And she says, you know, it was funny about that. I came all the way out here to see if I could find out for myself. And it didn't happen with, with Tim Ritchie. And then she goes through.

So I hooked up with his bass player and he wasn with tim ritchie and then she goes through so i hooked up with his bass player right and he wasn't tim ritchie and then i found this roadie that i really liked but he wasn't tim ritchie and then she says that during her last interview he she was doing her last interview with with ritchie and he started playing with her hair and she was finally going to get what she wanted and he wasn't tim ritchie yeah freeze frame end of episode i feel like a call back to um jim's well i mean like this is the conversation that jim's been having with eddie the whole time where he's like right she's not a real person you've made her up yeah that that's the theme right of our of the episode we've

witnessed it from one end we've seen seen Eddie go through the entire cycle of having her as this fantasy of his and then discovering the reality just doesn't match what he had in mind and couldn't have. Right. And that's the thing. It can never match the fantasy. And then now we are discovering right now at the end that she has been on the same journey just with a different person. So two episodes uh i mean i will i will say probably fundamentally a little bit of a mixed bag um i am on a line where i could argue either way that it holds together or it doesn't like you know there's certain parts of it this arc that we just mentioned eddie whitney uh i don't want to call it a romance anti-romance whatever it is

uh it's great like i really enjoyed that and uh i like how that plays out the mystery is a little um mysterious it's just a little vague yeah yeah we kind of get from here to there but um there's not there's yeah there's not a lot of energy in it. It just doesn't, you know, aside from being shot at. But the jokes were good. Like, I really enjoyed some of the gags. Yeah, the jokes are good. Character moments were great.

The casting's good. Yeah. But also, we should talk maybe a tiny bit and then end this long episode. Wired's contribution to this. This is our final Wired, right? Yeah. Okay, so clearly I found some parts of this one a slog. I do want to praise many aspects of these two episodes.

I think the casting is really good. The jokes are really good. Even though I feel like there is a greater than usual separation between character scene and plot moving forward scene. I really enjoyed each of the character scenes. Yeah. So that stuff is all good. And yeah, I think my overall sense and we'll talk about Wired. My overall sense of this one was that was a little I don't want to say lazy because that's too pejorative.

Right. It was a little lackadaisical in the structure and the writing. Sure. uh, romance, anti-romance thing, the portrait of this, uh, rock star, how Jim goes about, um, breaking not one,

but two mysteries or solving not one, but two mysteries. Uh, you know, and I have, and here's some good gags that are in here along the way. And a little bit of meta commentary about like the pernicious influence of you know news media diet that we're fed right yeah yeah um so that stuff's all in there and

it's great and then the stuff that holds it all together is kind of like yeah like this happens and this happens and this is why this happens and uh we all know what we're doing here like it's the rock right like everyone's gonna do a good job yeah it's gonna look good it's gonna sound good uh we're gonna get some custom songs uh you know let's go have fun and then it just doesn't feel considered in the same way that some of the great episodes yeah really feel considered okay yeah so i agree i'm done being critical let's talk about uh mr wired let's talk about Mr. Wired. Let's talk about Mr. Wired. You think because I brought it up, I'd have something pithy to say. Well, I was kind of struck by how this one, unlike some of our more recent ones, was a very restrained visual palette. It was pretty straightforward.

There are some good match cut kind of things yeah um i think the music is is placed really well um some fun cinematography uh like as they're approaching the castle like i did make a note of like when um the shots were were uh like hey let's let's just enjoy yeah malibu or or what have you. There's some really good celebration of space in how he, like you said, going to the castle. Even watching Jim go around Brian's house in that first scene

and pick stuff up is kind of like a ooh, we get to watch him do detective things. Both of those are under the credits, right? Yeah. Which is interesting. I'm not sure about the castle. Well, when he goes up to the castle in the second episode, I think that's

during the credit run. Yeah. And I think that's pretty, I mean, you know, they're in a great location for appreciating, you know, the visual splendor. I think that is something that, I hesitate to say that there's any signature ward things.

Cause he's such a journeyman and like everything is like just solid. Everything's just what it needs to be for the, for the episode. I do think when he has the chance to kind of do that slightly more cinematic celebratory framing kind of stuff, he takes advantage of it for good and, and for ill sometimes as in um return of the black shadow yeah but we talked about this in um heartaches of a fool how the camera really does a

lot of work to the camera uses the landscape of la at the end to you know push the emotional resonance of that whole final sequence and yeah with the willie nelson song and everything like that kind of stuff is he he is able to take advantage of those moments yeah yeah this this episode uh you know we we decide on the horror uh we chose this one last because it was a two-parter because it was the longest one and we put it off for as long as possible yeah so we didn't make any conscious choice of of like a a good showcase episode for him yeah uh but every episode is very competently done like uh there are definitely showcase episodes for him probably not these there's two-parter um but yeah uh it's been fun to like dive into, I, you know, I, I don't often think

about who's, who's directing this episode that I'm watching. Right. Like I do now of the Rockford files, like this, this podcast has, has trained me to do that for the Rockford files. And occasionally, like if I'm watching a Columbo, I'll, I'll do it. But like, if I'm watching anything else, it just kind of goes by me unless, uh, it's a, it's a name that I really recognize. And, um, it's been fun kind of realizing, Hey, wait, here's this, here's this, uh, director who has had quite a big hand in, in the series, right? Like, um,

yeah, almost a quarter of the series basically. Yeah. Yeah. Which is pretty incredible. Yeah. I mean, you know, and of course there's going to be with that wide of a with that wide of a portfolio some are going to be more interesting than others yeah some are going to be more creative than others um and so maybe we will use this as a chance to take a slightly more holistic look at the Wirediverse. Did I say Wirediverse? Yeah, I keep doing that too. We're tired. We're tired, not Wired. So maybe we should take this opportunity since we've done all of them

to take a more holistic look at the Wirediverse and finish off our summer of Wired with a little bit of a... Yeah, here we go. This is coming completely off the dome. We haven't talked about this at all. A rewired retrospective rewinding through the Wirediverse.

Yes. You can see what that means when we come back to you next time to talk about 26 or so episodes of the Rockford Files. Wired, wired, wired, wired, wired. Wired, wired, wired. We did it. We did it.