Two Hundred A Day - Episode 15: 2 Into 5.56 Won't Go

Episode Date: August 13, 2017

Nathan and Eppy discuss S2E10 2 Into 5.56 Won't Go. Jim's old commander from the Korean war has been killed - but not before leaving a mysterious message on Jim's answering machine that leads the Colonel's daughter to Jim's door. This episode leans a little harder on some generic tropes than we generally expect, but does feature great dialogue and a lot of fodder for our second-half discussion about handling villains, dramatic irony and metaphors in your stories and games! Support the podcast by subscribing at patreon.com/twohundredaday. Big thanks to our Gumshoe patrons! Check them out: Richard Hatem Lowell Francis's Age of Ravens gaming blog Kevin Lovecraft and the Wednesday Evening Podcast Allstars And thank you to Shane Liebling and Dylan Winslow! Thanks to: zencastr.com for helping us record fireside.fm for hosting us thatericalper.com for the answering machine audio clips spoileralerts.org for the adding machine audio clip Freesound.org for the other audio clips Two Hundred a Day is a podcast by Nathan D. Paoletta and Epidiah Ravachol. We are exploring the intensely weird and interesting world of the 70s TV detective show The Rockford Files. Half celebration and half analysis, we break down episodes of the show and then analyze how and why they work as great pieces of narrative and character-building. In each episode of Two Hundred a Day, we watch an episode, recap and review it as fans of the show, and then tease out specific elements from that episode that hold lessons for writers, gamers and anyone else interested in making better narratives.

Jim, it's Maria over at the laundromat. There's a yellow dress in with your things. Is that a mistake or special handling or what? Welcome to 200 a Day, the podcast where we explore the 70s television detective show, The Rockford Files. I'm Nathan Palletta. And I'm Epidio Ravishaw. This time we have an away episode where Rockford leaves his home turf for a new adventure. Eppie, where does this episode take us and our friend Rockford? Well, it takes us into Rockford's past a little bit, actually. This is interesting. He's going to head out to a military base where he's been called to by a colonel who used to be a former commanding officer of his. And this will be a little look at the, I want to say nefarious.

Maybe the shady past. Yes, his shady military career. That's what it is. A look at Rockford's shady military career. Yep. It's a look at Rockford's shady military career. Yep. I remember way, way back when we talked about Sleight of Hand, there were a couple little callbacks to his military career there.

And since then, I don't think we've really touched on it in any of the episodes that we've talked about. Yeah. This one is Season 2, Episode 10, 2 into 556 won't go. That is the five 56. We will learn pretty late in the episode. For those of us who are not military heads refers to an ammunition size. And I will say that I have not quite figured out what the entire title means. I have a theory about that, that maybe we'll,

we'll talk about at the end. I think I figured it out at the end of this episode. Oh, okay, good. Because I chose this episode based on the title alone. I am a sucker for numbers and interesting word order, and they were both in the title here. But at the end, I was like, I mean, I knew the 556 by the end end and that was it. We'll see if my theory holds any water when we get there. This episode written by Stephen Cannell, our good friend and series co-creator

and directed by a French director who I'll try not to butcher his name but I believe it's Jeannot Swark Yeah, but that sounds good enough. He has quite a filmography this is the first of three episodes of the Rockford Files that he will direct, as well as two of the 90s Rockford

Files movies. He's all over TV, including still directing shows that are currently running, including episodes of Bones and Grey's Anatomy, Scandal, and some other pretty high-profile TV series. Also the director

of Jaws 2. Oh, interesting. Yeah, and one episode of my other favorite 70s detective show, Columbo. He directed Lovely But Lethal, which is the one with a very young Martin Sheen in like a makeup czar's web of danger and murder. So yeah, in retrospect, a little more of a heavy hitter director than some of our other episodes, but I'm not sure if this particular episode

was particularly memorable for the direction or framing or anything like that. There were a few moments where I wondered what the director wanted. Sure. There's a couple freeze frames. There are also early on some really good moments that we could talk about when we get to them. But yeah, I'm with you.

So since you picked the show on the title, how did you feel about the preview montage? Oh yeah, so I've got some things to say about this preview montage as the show goes on. And actually this is going to get a little bit into the bit in the second part that I want to kind of talk about. Whenever Rockford dresses down authority, I'm happy. And the preview montage has the civilians

outrank lieutenants and colonels line, which is great. If you're just going into this fresh and you don't know that Rockford himself has been in the military, that gains a little bit more oomph when you finally reach the line. There's a great moment between Shana. So we'll get to know her in a minute. But there's a moment that we are starting to recognize in Rockford File episodes where a female lead says something about starting to warm to him. He's going to rub them the wrong way. And then one of the many patterns is the contentious relationship between Rockford and his female client, usually. And then they saw.

Yeah. Or they come to some kind of positive understanding at some point. Yeah. The episode. The reason why I think this is worth pointing out in the preview montage is when we get to her actual entrance. It's great. I think in terms of the emotional content of the show, it's great i think in terms of the uh emotional content of the show it's pretty much all in her like she's the the emotional through line so we get to see her

right off the bat so we know we definitely know there's uh there's something going on with the army this woman will be involved and uh we get to see who's clearly a a goon of a cop or sheriff a county cop of some kind having having a confrontation with Rockford. And I also want to point out that this Sheena is played by Jesse Wells, who was the voice of Eleanor in Wizards. I was going to ask if you made that connection. You know what? Okay, this is weird and slightly embarrassing, but I spent most of the episode trying to

figure out if, as a kid, I had a crush on her. There was something about her that just kept pinging something in the back of my brain. And then finally, I looked her up on IMDB, and when I saw that, I was like, I wonder if that's what was happening. If I was just hearing that voice. Yeah, she's an interesting, kind of an interesting character in this episode. She's in two other episodes of Rockford Fford files one prior to this and one after i think in kind of similar roles but not the same character which is not the same character no she's not a recurring character she's just a recurring you know face so i was like she's kind of familiar probably because

she's been in multiple rockford episodes i I still have never seen Wizards, so... Oh, well. That's on me. That is. I assumed you had, though. Mm-hmm. 200 a Day is supported by all of our listeners, but especially our gumshoes.

For this episode, we have five of them to thank. Thank you, Kevin Lovecraft. You can find him on the Wednesday evening Podcast All-Stars actual play podcast. Visit misdirectedmark.com to find that feed, along with other gaming podcasts in the Misdirected Mark Productions Network. Thank you, Lowell Francis.

Check out his award-nominated blog full of insights and historical analysis of role-playing games at ageofravens.blogspot.com. Thank you to Shane Liebling and Dylan Winslow. And finally, a big thank you to Richard Haddam for his very generous support. Find him on Twitter at Richard Haddam. If you want to get a shout out for your podcast,

blog or anything else you do, check out patreon.com slash 200 a day and see if you want to be our newest gumshoe. We start off the episode with some pretty hot action. Oh, yeah. Car chase right off the bat, but not with Rockford uh unfortunately no uh we see a guy in a army i'm not a military minded person so if i use some wrong words to describe army things please forgive me i'll forgive you he's in a dressier uniform i don't think it's a dress uniform but he's right has a full hat and coat and everything. He's driving this open-top Jeep in hot pursuit. It's a sedan of some kind, right on his heels. He manages to smartly evade his pursuers by going off-road in the Jeep, and they get stuck and can't follow him.

He loses those in pursuit and finds a payphone, which he uses to call Jim Rockford. He leaves a very compelling mystery message with his name, Colonel Daniel Hart Bowie. He'll be waiting at a different phone. He wants Rockford to call him there. He's clearly in distress. There's something about this that, well, first of all, when he started running up to the phone booth, every ounce of my soul wanted to hear the Rockford answering machine message, right? Like that was the, this man in such dire straits, barely eluding his pursuers, flees into a phone booth to give Rockford a call. And there's two things I want to have happen.

One, I want him to be trying to reach Rockford. And two, I want Rockford not to be home and he'd have to get the answering machine. I cannot justify that desire, but I was so happy it was fulfilled. Yep. Afterwards, I was struck by the urgency in which he did that. And then he's like, I'm going to run off and be near another phone. Right. Why did he not wait until he got to the other phone to call Rockford? And I don't think the episode actually explains that. It's a wonderful conceit, but. Yeah, not to be too much of a downer, but this episode, I don't think, holds together as much as some of our more favorite episodes that we've talked about. And that is an early sign, I guess,

of that. Though, it works out in his favor, right? For whatever reason, he decided to do that. And that's good because on his way from that phone to wherever he's heading, he gets pulled over. And the sheriff that gets out of the car, we recognize from the preview montage as clearly our goon of a sheriff. Also, he is a great goon face. He's been in a lot of things. So Charles Napier, who plays authority figures all over the board. Yeah, I definitely was like, I have seen this guy in other things. He's only been in one other Rockford Files episode, but he's been all over the place as this good old boy, crooked authority figure.

And he just, as soon as he steps out of the car, you're like, oh, this is a bad guy. Can't wait to see him get his comeuppance. At first, the colonel is not aware that he's getting messed with, but our sheriff here, he handcuffs him and calls in that he's got him. And then the car that was pursuing him earlier pulls up with our other goons. He does have a good line in here after the colonel asks him, why are you working with these guys? Because he puts it together pretty quick. The sheriff responds with, life's a booger, ainoger ain't it colonel he's got this whole spiel about it's the satisfaction of a job well done or something like that when these other guys arrive i do like the universal symbol for a villain the cigar

yeah the guy just like sits sits back and lights up a cigar so there's the the guy in a suit who uh due to our rockford character visual coding is probably involved with the mob in some way yeah lighting a cigar while another heftier man in uh army like fatigues but not a uniform slaps our colonel around is clearly of lower rank and has been looking forward to this for a long time slaps him around a little bit and then they hustle him into the car and and head off to mysterious ends so that intro a little bit, and then they hustle him into the car and head off to mysterious ends. So that intro is our episode.

And then from there, we still haven't gotten anyone's name in any of that, except for the Colonel, Colonel Bowie. But we will see all these guys again pretty soon. From the end of that scene, we cut to a great shot. Jim Rockford rinsing off his catch, rinsing off some fish in the sink. Yeah. And jawing with his dad, Rocky, about how he wants the fish prepared. Rocky is upset about the polluted conditions.

Mm-hmm. And you get the impression that Rocky is making excuses for why they had such a poor catch, right? Right. There may or may not be actual pollution going on. It may just be that they just didn't get that big of a fish. Jim likes his fish filleted while Rocky likes his fried. That's established very clearly in this conversation as well. There's a slightly out of character Rocky moment here too,

where Rocky is suggesting something quasi-legal. I don't want to read too much into it. But I do think it holds some sort of thematic resonance with the things that will happen later in the episode. But he wants to set up these no dumping signs and invent ordinances. Right. Because if the sign's there, people will obey it. Right. Like this feel of authority to trick people into not messing up his catch.

During this kind of one-sided conversation that Rocky's holding, Rockford asks him to turn on his answering machine and check his messages. He hears the message. He looks concerned and calls back, you know, the number that he was given. Rocky recognizes the colonel as the one that Jim used to know or something. He makes a reference to make it clear that they all know who this guy is. Yeah. Like, ask him if he's one of his old army buddies, and Rockford responds that they're not exactly buddies. Right. There's no answer to his phone call, and then there's a knock on his trailer door,

and it's our good friend Sergeant Becker coming in with another army guy, Lieutenant Fenton, who wants to talk to Jim, wants to take him to the provost marshal's office because they're investigating a case that he may be involved with. He asked him, we know you were involved with Colonel Bowie, Jim with his backup immediately,

as it is when people just walk in and want him to do things, just plays the message for him. And he's like, that's it. That's all I know. He's staying put. He's staying right there. And then we smash cut to him in the marshal's office,

having had his arm twisted in some way, shape, or form to get him to the military authorities to talk to them about Colonel Bowie. These are some of the better cuts in the whole episode. You know, some of the better cuts in the whole episode. I've got a little more you know moment here. I did not know this offhand. Had to do a little research.

There's the line about the provost marshal. Rockford says that he's not really into marshals of any kind. Yeah. And he says, I'm not even into Matt Dillon. And I was like, I think that Matt Dillon is an actor who's come about sometime after this series. So he can't be talking about the Matt Dillon that I'm thinking of. So I went and looked it up. Marshall Dillon was the lead character in Gunsmoke.

Oh. I thought, oh, okay, that's neat. I hadn't seen a lot of Gunsmoke. So, you know, it wasn't something that was stuck and fresh in my head. But then I thought, okay, is there something deeper to this? And so I found out that there's a Maverick episode starring our friend James Garner called Gun Shy, in which they had to do this big send-up of Gunsmoke. So I haven't seen any of the episodes.

I don't know much more than that. But that was the little rabbit hole that I fell down into. And now I feel richer for knowing it. Well, thank you for that, Epi. Oh, you're quite welcome. In the provost's office, Jim is getting dressed down, as so often happens for his record. Oh, yeah. Our colonel here, Colonel Hopkins, reads like it comes out of Ripley's Believe It or Not.

So basically, Rockford yo-yoed between ranks. It seems like he would get promoted, and then he would do something and get demoted back and forth in the Korean War. Some of the highlights from this include that he traded 400 rations for a North Korean tank, in addition to setting up a network of pool halls throughout the area while he was still in Korea, among other line items so colonel hopkins is not predisposed to believe him when he says that he knows nothing about this this is this message is the only thing only contact he's had uh and that puts rockford's back up again

as you might imagine but colonel hopkins revealing himself to be a reasonable man i think uh which comes back again later changes tack and he's okay, this isn't getting us anywhere. And he reveals to Rockford and to us that Colonel Bowie is dead. He was found dead in a rolled over Jeep and that he had Rockford's phone number in his pocket and he just wants to know why. I think it's also made clear here that when Rockford was in Korea, he served under Bowie, the colonel who is now dead. Some of those misdeeds, he claims to be

at Bowie's command. And presumably then Bowie then demoted him for doing it. There's clearly a adversarial relationship between Rockford and this now deceased colonel who had contacted him. Yeah. He's kind of confused about, or not confused, but he doesn't think there's a clear reason why he would have been contacted in the first place, considering that they didn't exactly have a great relationship. And we just kind of leave that question hanging. Rockford doesn't know why the colonel called him. Colonel Hopkins doesn't have anything to keep him there for. And this is where we see the line from the preview montage about civilians outranking colonels. Yes. While it's still a army matter,

they don't really have any way to compel Rockford to do anything unless it becomes a criminal case. And now we get this line and if we haven't been watching Rockford before, we are now well aware of the fact that Rockford has this shady past with the military. So his reaction to military authority is not at all surprising. I think at this point, Hopkins knows much more of what's happening than Rockford. And so there's some things we know as audience that Rockford doesn't know yet. And there's some things that Hopkins knows that neither we nor Rockford know. What's interesting now looking back on it is you can see why Hopkins is sort of handling Rockford the way he's handling him. Yeah. And why Hopkins would definitely think Rockford would be involved. What eventually falls

out seems right. Just another step in the progression that would be Rockford's file. It makes sense. Definitely. But the way that this episode is structured, we don't really see that until the end. Yeah. We'll go over it again when we get there back to jim's trailer uh rockford is worried about this kind of stressed out he he might be accidentally frying his fish when uh rocky thought he was going to be filleting it but then we get another knock on the door a woman comes in the woman from our preview montage. Yes. And she immediately draws a giant gun and just starts demanding to know what he told you. So this is, I mean, this is what I love about the preview montage. Knowing that this is a series and that this character will go on, this character

being Rockford, we know that nothing really bad is going to actually happen here to him. So that's not really what's at question here. What's at question is how we get from walking into his trailer with a gun pulled to I'm warming to you. Yeah. We know that arc has to happen and now we're excited to see how that arc is going to happen. Yeah. In this moment, we pretty quickly get to seeing that she's not super serious with this gun as it's not even loaded. She's not super serious with this gun as it's not even loaded. Rockford manages to talk her down a little bit by deducing that this is Shana Bowie, Colonel Bowie's daughter, because she'd be about the right age.

And also she's holding a gun that he recognizes as being the colonel's chrome plated revolver. So once he kind of talks her down, she is upset, a little weepy. She thinks that it wasn't an accident.'re saying it was a jeep accident she doesn't think it was an accident she thinks he was killed and this is a theme that comes back again and again he was such a straightforward solid straight shooter kind of guy when she saw him a week ago and he was visibly upset he was drinking hard liquor he was he said he had a problem but he wouldn'tibly upset. He was drinking hard liquor. He said he had a problem, but he wouldn't tell her what it was. And that's when she started worrying.

And now he's dead. So she thinks those two things are connected. The only kind of clue, for lack of a better word, that comes out of this conversation is that he mentioned someone named Terry in this shaken up state that he was in when they had dinner. Through all this, Rockford, I think, is sympathetic, but also doesn't want to get drawn in.

We get a classic Rockford two-step, where he starts off with a very strong, I'm sorry that this happened and that you're upset, but it's an open case. The MPs are investigating it, so I can't get involved. And Rocky backs him up with, you don't want to get involved with the army. This bit is also in the preview montage.

This great line about how if you mess with the army, they'll give you a shovel and point you at hard ground. Jim is like, don't worry, Rocky. There's no way. I'm not going anywhere near this. Yeah. And then he says that it's just not available. Yeah. No, no, no.

Here are all the reasons why this is not going to happen. If we can point to anything as great directorial in this episode, it's this scene here. You have her sitting in front of the desk. He's behind his desk and Rocky's in his kitchen. So you just shift over to Rockford and Rocky talking about how it's not going to happen. He's just not going to do it. And then he shifts back and it's as if she wasn't listening to the conversation like he's treating her like i'm not available that's it as if for some reason he had

stepped out of the room right step back but he didn't she's sitting right there he's telling her like i'm sorry i can't get involved and he's turning around while they're still both in the room and saying rocky i absolutely am not getting involved. What are you, crazy? And the camera is making that division make sense. And then this wonderful pause. You watch him realize that he's not going to be able to say no. Nothing spoken is just uncomfortableness. Somebody should leave now, but nobody's going to. And then we get the cut.

To Shana and Rockford sitting next to each other in a mess hall or a dining hall talking about expenses. That may be my favorite scene of this whole episode. Just that whole... It was good. It reminded me of... There were a similar couple cuts in A Portrait of Elizabeth. Yeah. To achieve the same effect where Rockford's saying, no, absolutely no way.

And then cut. And he's doing the thing he was just said, no way. Yeah. We got that with going into colonel hopkins uh office and now we're getting it going to uh working for shana sorry jim we knew you were going to give in in the end doesn't really matter how you got there but now you're in it they're in this dining hall or cafeteria somewhere shana uh is talking about expenses this is the first of a number of conversations they have where she wants him to

help but she doesn't really want him to do what he does because she feels like he's too aggressive or he's going to take advantage of her in some way or that he doesn't respect her or he doesn't respect her father and this is something that gets returned to a lot uh and i think maybe leaned on a little much in this whole over the arc of the episode yeah let's see what you think about it but this is the first place we see it she can't really afford him anyway so she wants to make sure that he's not putting her over a barrel for expenses and he's offended by that because he's he would never do that in the first place so he just gets really sarcastic it's a great shout out to bookkeeping here she wants to hold the expense receipts so that she knows. And he goes, well,

if we're doing double entry books, then make sure you get the coffee because that was 10 cents. I enjoyed that. The upshot is that he takes the case, we can assume, because she talks about not being able to afford him, but she's hiring him anyway. She asks him, why did you take the case? And he's, I'm not sure. A little bit of a fourth wall breaking reference to what we were just talking about. Just we go from here and there and he's in it. I mean, there's also a real in-character reason to have that response,

but I felt like it was a nice little wink at the audience. Like this is what he does. I also noted that they're sniping, but it's a little flirtatious. Yeah. And we see that come up as we go also. But yeah, so now that he's on the case, they go to Colonel Bowie's quarters on this base, somewhere on the coast, somewhere outside of Los Angeles.

Shana goes down memory lane, kind of with the artifacts that are there and his medals that are framed on the wall or his whatever it's called, all the campaign ribbons and stuff. Rockford's main intent is to figure out who Terry was as the only real lead that he has. So he wants to start looking, find his address book, etc. But as they start looking around, she points out that things aren't where they should be. Like there's a picture that he always has on his desk. Through every time they've moved, it's been in the same place on his desk.

But now it's on a different table. His dress pants and dress shirt are on the same hanger which i guess a military man would never do it's his uh fatigue pants with his dress shirt so it's a mix and match i thought that was a great little little life hack don't hang your fatigue pants with your dress shirt unless you're in trouble it's a nice little sos to any private investigators that come by they theorize that someone's already tossed the place looking for something and then put it back, but they just didn't get the details right. Which, as far as it goes, is fine. I don't think that goes anywhere though, right? We never... Okay, so this plays a little bit into the flirtation stuff that you were talking about too, because I think that there's an underdeveloped attempt to kind of bring Rockford and Shana together.

If this place is tossed, well, okay, I guess there's a couple of things happening here. I think one is that it definitely makes Rockford suspicious, but we don't need to do that. Rockford is suspicious. That's how he is. I mean, it leads directly to how he acts in the next scene, which we'll get to in a second. It makes it uncomfortable for her to stay there though. And I think that that might be what they're trying to do that might be more of the intent of that yeah because plot wise it never really comes up again the colonel had something that these goons wanted or something as we said this episode has more more than usual of those rough edges uh i think so this is one of them anyway uh before they can really get into searching anything, there's a knock at the door and

our next ne'er-do-well appears. He's introduced as Harvey. We recognize him as the bad guy army guy who was roughing up the colonel earlier. I think in a good use of audience character difference of knowledge, a lot of the tension of this episode comes from us knowing who the bad guys are before rockford does so we see him and we're like oh here's the bad guy but shana knows him they're friends he's coming to to give his condolences uh of course then when shana tries to introduce jim he runs her over with a with an alias and a story to keep her from revealing

to the sergeant who he really is. So we know that he is suspicious. It's a great bit of sloppy con work, right? Like, she's like, this is Mr. Rock Sanford. Rock Sanderson. A little bit of a hangover from my fighting days or something like that. And she says like, oh, we can trust him. He's a friend.

And we were just here too. And he's like, to tell you that we're engaged. Goes way off. Though in so doing, I think shocks Shana into going along with what he's saying. Yeah. She's in a spot now where she just can't figure out what's happening and just runs with it. The sergeant seems a little weirded out, but kind of is like, all right, well, that's great and all, but you still can't stay on the base because you're not an army person. He leaves. And then Shana immediately turns and is angry that Rockford both steamrolled her, I think.

Yeah. And also told lies to someone that she considers a friend. And I think very poignantly, like, it's the army man aspect of it. Yeah. She has this great respect for the military, partly because of her dad and how decorated he was. So she says that it's because he's been with her dad for so long. And we know as audience members that this is not a good thing for her dad. But Rockford's reply to that is great.

Every podcast episode, we tell you, go watch the episode. And this is one of the moments I think it's worth watching the episode for. He doesn't know Harvey. He's not been in the military with Harvey. And he's been in the military with her dad. So Harvey managed to skip out on the Korean War. And Rockford says the thing like, no matter how much I tried, I couldn't do that. It was one of my classic failures, which is a great line and fits this rockford noble cowardice there's something about rockford it's kind of a principled cowardice yes you know he's got this

thing where he's like you know he assessed the situation and says this is not a place where i need to risk my life so i'm not going to do it just because somebody told me to and he comes out with that in response to Shana accusing him of spending the whole war trying to get out of it. Yeah. And contrasting that with her father, who was this model soldier, you know, who did all these great things, fought all these great campaigns. And he was such a such a symbol of, you know, all the great things about the military. And then, yeah, Rockford is the opposite of all of those things. For me, this is the heart of their dynamic. He says that mourning your father is fine.

Yeah. Mourn the man. That makes sense. I get it. But don't be impressed by a military record because you don't know what he did, basically. You don't know what people do to get those accolades. Yeah. He has that line about he had a gun with notches and

handles this this man has killed people and so rockford always this is part of his principledness i think is that he judges people on actions not on titles we've talked about this before and how that's a lot of the class dynamic in the show he's butting up against shana grieving and having this this relationship with her father where he was kind of this paragon of this great military man so she kicks him out if you're going to be that way i don't want you to be involved she kind of fires him before we get to i just there's he has this line here uh we're just stepping on each other's ghosts yeah it's a great line there's a call back to it later but the part of it that i think that it's great i'm thinking about this in the context of when this episode is supposed to take place and when it's supposed to you know when it

aired so this this aired in 75 in november of 75 so we've got we're still fresh with vietnam war and whatnot and just a national dialogue of both an unwanted war and also how we treat the soldiers from that war. In that line, what's great about that line is that it's really easy and right on the top level to read that line as, I don't want to ruin your memory of your father. I don't want to step on your ghosts. I don't want to ruin. But on the other part of that, he says, we're just stepping on each other's ghosts. And she's airbrushing his history.

He's got a lot of baggage tied up in all this as well. So it's not that he's just exasperated with her, I think. I think that there's more to it. That line is strong because it, I mean, it's a little, it's a little cliche, ghosts of the past, right? Right. But the way that it's phrased in the context of the conversation, it's kind of saying we both have an emotional attachment to this man that maybe we didn't realize was going to be a problem. Yeah. I didn't really think about your emotions about this and you haven't really thought about mine.

But this is still not enough to calm her down. No, no. It's not very pointed, but she's basically like, you get out of here. I don't want you in this house. Yeah. I don't need your help. And he's like, well, I'll go to like, you get out of here. I don't want you in this house. Yeah. I don't need your help. And he's like, well, I'll go to the motel if you need me. Yeah.

So he's not backing out entirely, but he is respecting her, like, give me some space kind of movement. That's a good scene. I do feel like we kind of hit it right the first time and then we kind of get the same conversation a couple more times over the course of the episode. get the same conversation a couple more times over the course of the episode. So we might gloss over those because the content doesn't really change, even though they kind of have this conversation a couple more times. But yeah, Rockford moves on to his hotel, the Seaside Motel. He comes into his room and straight away he is surprised by our crooked cop, Billy Webster, waiting for him with his gun out.

And he, in short order, cuffs Rockford and takes him away to mysterious ends. Rockford demands to be read his rights, wants to know why he's being arrested. And it becomes very clear that Officer Webster here has no intention of acting like an actual police officer should. Rockford out to some vaguely rural location. We hear the sea, like we know it's on the shore somewhere, and we kind of hear the sea throughout the background of the scene, which is nice. We actually don't get that a lot in Rockford Files.

It's night. He sits Rockford down, still handcuffed on this little wall, and then there's this very weirdly complicated dance between all the principals in this scene. Rockford's sitting on the wall. Billy Webster's kind of slapping him around and giving him a hard time. And he turns on this radio. There's another radio in another car, a black limousine that's out of the circle of light that Rockford can see. So they're listening in to what Billy's saying. In this car are our cigar smoking man, Mr. Davies, as we learn,

and the sergeant, Sergeant Slate slate harvey slate is his full name this is like a walkie-talkie that's only going one way the people in the car can hear the conversation but they can't hear what the people in the car are saying oh wait before we do that we should talk about what's in the wallet billy kind of slaps rockford around takes his wallet you know he's like what are you doing up here rockford's story of course is that he was a friend of the colonels and he's up here for the funeral, which makes total sense. Billy pulls his wallet out to look at it. And sure enough, he has an ID that says Sanderson on it.

I love this deep undercover that Rockford can accomplish. Later on, we learn it's only so deep. But he'll make the... We've talked in earlier episodes about how he makes his little fake business cards and things like that but one of the things i love about it is that in that setting at that time that's a possibility like nowadays you would need to have some hacker genius that's helping him out or something like that i particularly like this moment because it's a it's a great show don't tell moment showing us that j Jim is good at this. Yeah.

For whatever reason, he either already decided that this was his alias and that's what he used with Harvey. Or because he used it with Harvey, he made sure he had a matching ID for later. Yeah. It works both ways. And either way, it shows foresight on Rockford's part where he just knows how to give himself cover when he needs to. So, yeah. that's pretty cool. He sticks to his story that he's just there for the funeral. When Billy starts getting a little too violent, Davies in the car starts honking to call him back over there.

Just kind of a failure of this radio system, I guess. If it's set to one way, he can't just call him. Billy goes over to talk to the guys in the car. They know that there's a PI involved because someone was like spying on Shana or something like that. But they don't know who it is. They're worried about CID, which is, I guess, like the military, like internal affairs. Yeah. Some kind of investigation. And they're pretty sure this guy isn't CID.

But they don't know if he's the PI or not. Mr. Davies just doesn't want him around. But he doesn't want him like killed or roughed up. He just wants him run out of town. In this conversation, we get that they have a shipment of 556 going out, which is the important thing. They don't want anything to interrupt that. And we also see that these guys don't really hold Billy Webster in very high regard. He's kind of a bully and he's kind of dumb, and they just want to point him at things and they don't want any lip from him. Of course, our good friend Jim Rockford,

being a smart guy, manages to reach out with his foot and flip the radio switch so that he can hear their radio instead of the other way around. So he gets to overhear pretty much this whole conversation. The meat and plot movement of the scene uh kind of all occurs in that car and then we end up with jim provoking billy webster into a fist fight i i okay i love this moment for a number of reasons first of all it's got a lovely tension going into it where it's clear that jim can't switch the radio back without making it obvious that he overheard what happened. So despite how perhaps a little dumb Billy Webster is, like it's just not a thing he can do.

So as Billy Webster is approaching the radio, that's when Jim just starts talking up, looking for a fistfight with some amazing lines. He just starts insulting the guy. Yeah, you heard me, rum-dum. Calls him a tub of lard. Yeah, a sack of guts. Billy Webster comes back with, I'm going to beat you down so low you'll have to reach up to tie your shoes.

Yeah, just, oh, it's great. Lots of Rockford-style threats. Oh, it's great. Then this setup, as sort of mirrored as it is, it creates this, I think, this lovely tension moment. When Billy then undoes Rockford's hands and Rockford is like rubbing his wrists as you do. Whenever you get your handcuffs off, you immediately rub your wrists. Billy sucker punches Rockford in the kidney or something like that. And there's a fight that breaks out. And then Billy pulls a gun on Rockford.

Rockford has to die behind this rock wall. And at that point, the other car is in such a panic about what Billy's doing. Yeah. That they just keep flashing their lights and honking their horn throughout the whole thing. Like, stop, stop. I love that. Yeah. Unlike some other episodes, our bad guys here, our villains, are not criminal masterminds.

No, they're not. You get the feeling from this scene pretty much that this is a very seat-of-the-pants operation. Yeah. They don't want any more murders bringing out any more heat, basically. So they honk and yell at Billy to get him to lay off. He leaves with a final threat,

and then they drive off in their respective vehicles. And we end the scene with Rockford finding the cigar stub of... Dun-dun-dun....Mr. Davis that he'd thrown out the window. So now he has a cigar stub clue to go on. Yeah, that was a weird one because it's not really a clue. It's not. I mean, I'll talk about this when we get to the callback for it.

Sure. Because it's nice that it's there, but it's also completely unnecessary. Yeah. Rockford, I guess, walks back to the motel, it seems. Yeah. He just walks back up to where he was staying. He takes his gun out of his trunk because he thought ahead enough to put his gun that usually lives in the cookie jar in his trunk. Heads back into his room on high alert.

There's no one in there, but he is surprised by Shana running up to meet him because she was waiting. She was in the coffee shop waiting for him. And now we get the reprise of the earlier conversation yeah she's confused she wants to talk about her dad but she's mad at rockford for his she says like what are you trying to prove with your amateur psychology because he's pointing out that sounds like her issues are with her dad not with him yeah this is all just pure character stuff. Yeah. She has been thinking about what he said. She has some things to get off her chest, so she's just going to say them.

He was never really there for them. And she has a quote that kind of sums it up. All my life I've been trying to get passing marks from someone who didn't care. There's a great little bit about Rockford's gun. She sees Rockford's gun and is like, are you allowed to carry that? And he goes, I've never seen that before. And the maid must have left that there. So this scene is a little weird in how they half flirt throughout it, I think. They half flirt. And then when she's laying out the stuff about like, my dad never loved us,

he's just in the background kind of smiling and listening to her i think we're supposed to get that he's being a good listener like a compassionate friend but it's a little weird there's a little bit about where she's going to spend the night and she's thinking about getting a room in the hotel which i was like is this supposed to be an opening and nothing comes of any of this it's interesting character scene between the two, but it's also a little weird. It does, I think, have the callback to the ghost line earlier where she says, what good is it to step on your ghosts if you don't kill them? And Rockford now comes to her dad's defense a little bit.

He played by the rules. That was his life. He was an army guy. He played by the rules. That doesn't mean he didn't love you, I guess, is kind of the implication. All of this is also with that weird half flirtatious thing. And the scene ends with our line from the preview montage of, you know, for somebody I can't stand, I'm becoming awfully fond of you. Yeah. And then we cut to them eating dinner in the hotel restaurant. Kind of a weird scene, right? I felt it was weird because as I was watching it,

I kept thinking I knew where it was going. It wasn't like it was surprising me with the directions it was going. It was just never quite reached anything, if that makes any sense. It felt to me like the kind of conversation in a role-playing game where you have two characters in a scene and they're talking, but neither of them really knows what they want out of the scene yeah that's interesting yeah so again that stands out as kind of a weird place for for rockford dialogue to be because usually the dialogue has a somewhere to go and in this one it didn't really seem to go anywhere but moving on to the

restaurant they have dinner on their plates but we do not see them actually eating any of it and it's hard to see what's on rockford's plate. It's behind the glass. So food watch still inconclusive for this episode. He made a phone call to ask about Billy Webster with the actual local sheriff. Shockingly, turns out that Billy Webster is not a real cop and is impersonating a cop. And so he reported the assault and battery to the actual authorities. But he was clued into this by the fact that billy did not run his plates when he took him in the car and that's like a thing that all cops do his his cover isn't so deep that if billy had just done what a cop does he would have known that it was jim rockford not uh james sanderson or whatever

again nice detail but also a little unnecessary. Like as opposed to just calling because one of your cops beat me up. I think it gives them a moment to unclutter the end of the story. That's true. You don't have to include the local cops as well. Yeah.

It also, the sort of thematic callback to Rockford, or not Rockford, Rocky earlier, wanting to invent all these ordinances. I just saw like a little connection there. I don't think there's anything like big or momentous to, Rocky earlier, wanting to invent all these ordinances. I just saw like a little connection there. I don't think there's anything like big or momentous to read into that. But I thought it was kind of neat that here's a fake cop enforcing, you know what I mean? What Rocky wanted to do at the very beginning was come up with fake ordinances to protect what he had going. They kind of go over what they have so far, which isn't much.

Rockford asks if she knows what 556 is, and she does not. But she thinks if it has anything to do with the military, then they should go back to her dad's quarters and look around a little more. From here, we go to kind of the next act. Yeah. There's kind of a weird passage of time here.

We go to the next day. Rockford is talking through a screen door to a great, memorably scruffy, one of our great side characters. This guy, I don't think he even gets three words in before I'm like, oh, this is one of these guys. This is a character I'm going to love. So I remember having no idea why Rockford was talking to this guy the first time I watched this episode. Yeah. Why is he here? Over the course of this scene and then a later scene,

I think we pieced together that Rockford was following up this limo. Like he managed to get the license plate or something of the limo that he saw the night before. And that's what led him to this guy. But that wasn't really telegraphed to me. You had to really pay attention to get that connective tissue i i agree i was in the exact same boat i i was loving the scene and it was a little i know that this guy is going to reveal a bunch of stuff um and just his patter was just amazing yeah he's so mad about his his niece rockford is falling up on this name terry and the fact that he saw this black limo or

got the license plate number or something like that. Also not really noted in this scene, but backfilled later is that this is a mortuary on or near the army base. So he poses to be a insurance guy following up on a hit and run. He has a client whose car was hit by a black limo and he wants to know who may have been driving this limo. And it was not this guy, but it might have been one of the girls, maybe Alice or her friend Terry, driving the cemetery limo. They're not supposed to, but they might have taken it. Terry's been going around and getting drunk with that Sergeant Slate,

so she's liable to do anything. He just has this whole list of complaints about his niece and her friend. Yeah, no, he just says, them girls them girls is wild wild is wild and no good rockford walks away from that door literally saying bingo that moment is another great wink at the audience here whether or not it was i don't know but i'm taking it as such uh because this guy pretty much hands the case to rockford on a silver platter yeah you mentioned before about that previous scene with rockford and Shana being like two characters in a role-playing game who don't know what they want out of a scene.

This one is that scene in the role-playing game where the GM's like, I just need to barf this into you. Yeah. I'm going to baby bird all this information. And here's what you need to know to get on with the story. Yeah. But it's such a great character to do it through that I'm like, yeah, I'll take it. Super fun scene to watch.

Just kind of, we're not quite sure why we're here and we're not quite sure why this is the critical information, but whatever. We'll just go with it. Yeah. Rockford calls. He wants to get on the base or is pretending to want to get on the base. And the gate guards say that he can't see Shana because she left. She left the base with and the gate guards say that he can't see shana because she left she left the base with sergeant slate yeah now we've put the pieces together with sergeant slates

the bad guy that we saw in the beginning he's been going around with this girl terry who apparently was the limousine hookup and now he's gone with uh shana so that's bad mojo they do give him a piece of helpful information which is that they checked out car 2424 out of the motor pool. So Rockford is trying to track down Terry that goes to the actual mortuary. Yeah, the funeral home. Yeah. Yeah.

And we see him in his car using his business card printer, which we haven't seen since the very first episode that we recorded. Tall woman in red wagon. Yeah. I feel like something is is occurring to me just now because in that one it was also about a casket right it was yeah i wonder if he's using the same character i can't remember i don't remember the name oh it is a different company yeah because this one his his little cover story is that he works for mahogany hall you know we

call it the oak lined library of slumber chambers. But anyway, we get there in a second. As he's going into the mortuary, he passes an open garage in a very fortunate turn of events and sees a car with a sheet over it, but it's rooked up over the license plate, which is 2424. Yeah. So he goes in to check it out. Not only is that the car, also on a little workbench is one of the radios that matches

the radios that he's been seeing these people using and a half-burned cigar that's the matching cigar band of the one that he found. Three indications that this is where the bad guys are. Yeah. Do you need all three? Yeah. Any one of those would have worked. Only two of them.

At the very least least two of them yeah yeah so this is kind of getting back to like the cigar band was like a nice clue but ultimately if it wasn't here it wouldn't change the story at all yeah but yeah so he goes into uh the the mortuary uh has this cover story of slinging uh oakland library of slumber chambers, asks for, I think, Mr. Quentin, who I think is the old guy that he talked to earlier. Yeah. Knowing he wasn't there. The woman who was there is like, oh, he's not here.

Turns out that this is, in fact, Terry. As soon as he knows that it's Terry, he drops the act and just goes straight into, I know you were having an affair with Colonel Bowie. He told you he was worried about something, and you told the people who killed him. Full on, here's what you've done. Okay, let me talk to you about this one. Her reaction is clear that he nailed it and she's ready to run and he stops her. My reaction is very similar to hers. I mean, obviously I'm not Rockford. I'm not going to piece it together

like he does, but there's certain key elements to his story that i don't recall being telegraphed at all like the the affair yeah so they piece it together afterwards but that moment either he's got a working theory and he's just taking a stab at it and he hits or which i think he kind of is yeah she kind of confirms a lot of stuff for him. Or there was, there was other footage there that they cut out so that we could have cigar moments. You know, I can see the logic of now that he's seen who Terry is, because Terry could have been a man,

right? Like all we knew was the name, but now that he knows it's like this woman and he sees her and she's attractive, maybe he's like, so what's the most likely situation. And he just happened to be right. But yeah,

it is a little, it does feel a little like, Oh, so that's where you're going with this. Yeah. All right. But yeah, she, she spills the beans. Slate and Davis are smuggling stuff off the base in hearses, which is why she's involved. A couple months ago, they wanted, I guess she was, you dating slate or whatever a couple months ago they pointed her at the colonel to seduce him essentially so that she would be in a position to distract him with weekend trips whenever they needed to get these hearses with smuggling stuff off the base because

he's the one who's in charge of things such that he would know that that was improper so they would stage funerals to get these hearses on and off of the base. And that's how they're smuggling stuff. She insists that she didn't know that they were going to kill him. And that seems fair enough. I think she says that she gets him out of town because he's the kind of guy who would double check that kind of thing. Again, very by the book kind of guy.

So now that he kind of knows the parameters of what's happened, Rockford goes back to Colonel Hopkins, our provost marshal. Hopkins is still kind of mad that Rockford's in his business, but he tells him the scheme. He's like, here's what happened. And then Hopkins has a revelation. It all fits. These things that I know that you don't know are fitting in with this stuff that you've just told me. It's even smarter than that. It's not only that, it's even better. Yeah. Almost genuine admiration for the scheme. This is where Rockford finally gets the answer to what does 556 mean.

It is a measurement of ammunition for the new M16s or something like that. Hopkins makes some phone calls, finds out that there is indeed a hearse on the base, calls for a helicopter. They're going to go out and catch these guys red-handed. Rockford wants to go with. Hopkins is resistant, but Rockford, I think they have Shana as a hostage. So I want to be involved to make sure she's safe.

And also he apparently owes the colonel one. Or there's initially Rockford threatens him, physically threatens him. He says, I'll bloody you or something like that. And he says, also, they have Shane as a hostage. And then, yeah, there's that, the indication that there's something in Rockford's file where... We get the story later, but this is where Hopkins knows and Rockford knows that there's some kind of interaction that Rockford had with the colonel back in the day that makes Rockford feel positively inclined towards wanting to be involved. So we get our dramatic scene in the helicopter where they're flying around to track down

the hearse, which gives them a nice little stage to give us the rest of the exposition about what's going on. I would have loved to have been there for that meeting when they decided. And then we'll put them in a helicopter. And they'll just talk for a while. Yeah. I mean, it's great. It's fun. There's beautiful vistas and whatnot.'ll put them in a helicopter. And they'll just talk for a while. Yeah. I mean, it's great. It's fun.

There's beautiful vistas and whatnot. Well, there's vistas. Well, we do get some dramatic shots of horses galloping across the California wilderness. They're in the helicopter to follow this car that may contain people who would be wary about a helicopter following them. Right. But then we get this sort of tidy up of, of what the plot was. So,

yeah. So, uh, Hopkins was there from Washington looking into weapons disappearances on this base. Yeah. He, he,

he told everyone that they thought it was an accident so that the people that he did think murdered the Colonel wouldn't spook. What they discovered was that in order to have regular funerals, they were creating fictitious soldiers in the computer and then killing them off whenever they needed to have a funeral. So he was pursuing the weapons disappearances or what's with all these funerals. And then Rockford came in with, this is the actual method that they're doing. And those were the pieces of the puzzle. However, in a synergistic moment, Hopkins had just cracked the computer that morning to figure out the thing about the fake soldiers. So all the dominoes came falling down on the same day.

So you think this computer part was done by our cigar-smoking villain? They have a line earlier, either the first time we see them or when they're talking while Rockford's handcuffed, about, I'm in the computer, or you're in the computer right like something like that yeah our cigar smoking man was on that end i believe there was like one line earlier in the show that sets up the computer thing i'm just thinking about the structure of the villains here that they're probably closer to like a three-way partnership than they are like one person in charge of anything even though yeah one guy smokes a cigar he might not actually be the leader of the gang exactly they find the car they're gonna go go into the final showdown we get a nice little

bit about rockford's reluctance with guns he says uh i always try to avoid gunplay. It's kind of a religion. I love it. But he does accept a 45 from one of the MPs. And then we have a fairly exciting showdown in a barn. Our bad guys have pulled the hearse up and they're going to, I guess, unload the cargo or whatever. Whatever they do to actually distribute these ill-gotten ammunition boxes. The helicopter lands. There's additional military police who kind of storm the compound everyone kind of backs down once they realize that they're outgunned except for uh our good friend billy who being dumb is also very aggressive he runs out into the middle of

the yard and struggles with a rifle he like can't figure out how to cock it rockford who's hiding behind a tree or something is just like don't do that just like scolds him the exchange is don't do that what don't do that the what is the best part it's like you're embarrassing everyone right now he tells him about to do it he's still fussing with the gun he's like what don't what are you talking about you know like just having a normal conversation with the man he's about to shoot at. He does drop it. He goes for his sidearm and Rockford is quicker on the draw and shoots him in the shoulder.

A classic Rockford disabling them with a non-fatal shot. And then he shoots out one of the tires of Slate's car where he's driving away with Shana, presumably to try and escape. And they're all apprehended. Happy ending for our for our heroes there's a little line uh that the uh the colonel hopkins is like oh i saw that john wayne stuff yeah you know you're a good shot or something like that shana looks at rockford and then there's a weird awkward long freeze frame yeah and then i i don't know what's what but it seemed like the film quality completely changed for the next scene yeah i i don't know what's what but it seemed like the film quality completely changed for the next scene yeah i i noticed that too and i wondered did they decide they needed like was that supposed to be the end right they decided they needed another end and they filmed

it but like with a handheld camera because they were their shooting schedule like they couldn't get the the real camera or something because it seems like a like a home movie quality film grain in the last scene that ending that freeze frame is a i mean we've seen those freeze frames a few times in rockford episode but it also felt like an ending freeze frame where they just missed their button the line they ended on was okay it wouldn't be like a really great ending i'm probably reading way too much into what's just artifact of like how it got stored or something like that or how it got edited maybe yeah we don't have any more cigar helicopter footage so so we do have a last scene uh it's at the funeral or after the funeral yeah or outside the church or whatever uh we have colonel hopkins jim and shana coming out

and kind of making their goodbyes. Hopkins says to ask about Poussin if she wants to know why Rockford was so willing to help. He frames it as a, you don't want to hear this. This is a there I was story. That's a good way to describe that genre. There I was. But he tells a story. He was wounded while out on patrol, surprised and wounded and separated from the rest of the unit he had this leg wound so he couldn't move around and that her father who was in charge who was the commanding officer came back for him when he doesn't think a lot of people would and he

never really quite understood why and he's asked himself that a lot over the years they clearly had an antagonistic relationship but still but still he was loyal enough to his men to yeah not let him just die out there and in korea yeah he never quite understood why and that's the end of the episode yep it's interesting i love that the episode ends with unresolved bits about this everybody's feelings about colonel bowie and the military in general in this this history that bowie shared with Rockford. Like, they don't... I mean, they do end on this, like, he was a nice guy, but we don't justify all of this stuff.

It's still... Yeah, there's no, like, wrapping it up in a bow. Yeah. The emotional reality is very striking, where it's like... Yeah. He had a complicated relationship with this man that he thought was probably never going to affect him again. But then it came back into his life and he had to confront all this stuff all over again through the lens of Shana, who has her own complicated relationship with her father. There's no reason that should just be like, and now I've come to terms with how I felt

about my old commanding officer. Like there's no reason why that should end up in a neat place. Yeah. This is a reoccurring event in our adventures as podcasters here. But having the opportunity to watch episodes over again and then dig into them and talk them through again, you know, I get to like see more about what's happening in the episode. episode one of the things that the whole arc the emotional arc of rockford versus the military versus colonel bowie is that beginning all the beginning bits with his answering machine message right because he just plays it for people like the moment they show up he's just like that's what it is i don't i don't care we hear it four times maybe like because he just keeps playing it for everyone who's who's asking yeah and it's not that that's out of character for rockford because i can it definitely felt like a rockford kind of moment like oh you're gonna come at me with all that well here it is

it's that i think that that takes on a nice interesting light in that it's he keeps trying to shuffle it off he keeps trying to like uh this guy who's like an overbearing authority figure is is now doing that to me again. Right? Yeah. Everybody that shows up, he's like, no, no, this is all it is. You take it.

I don't want anything to do with it. Good stuff. So my thought about the title. Oh yes. We learned about five 56, uh, right. That's the,

um, ammunition dimension. So I think where we end with the two into five 56 won't go. I think the two is Rockford and Shana, their relationship, even though she ends up feeling fond of him or whatever they're not destined to be yeah in some episodes we get the feeling that this led to some kind of relationship this led to you know a fling or they dated a little bit afterwards or whatever um sometimes they end with a kiss uh in this case we kind of end with this kind of downbeat story.

And it's still about her dad. She doesn't really have closure, I think. And the two of them aren't going to fit into this odd shaped hole, right? The 556 is an odd number. That's my maybe reading too much into it read of what the title is referring to. I love that read. And it just now occurred to me to Google. Is that a reference to something else?

I mean, if you have another idea, I don't know if that's the best interpretation, but that's my read. I think like with every Rockford Files episode, there are more things to enjoy as you break it down. Having the foreknowledge of the reveal, I guess, of the plan

makes the first encounter with the provost marshall a little more fun yeah there are some great turns of phrase there's some great uh one liners but overall um i think this episode didn't really do it for me as much as as most of the other ones we've talked about so far yeah i would agree there's it's worth watching for the highlights. If you're like, I only have enough room for a dozen Rockford episodes between now and when I die. Yeah, this might not be in the top 12. That won't be on your list. Yeah. But yeah, I would not tell anyone to skip it if they do plan to just watch all the Rockford they can consume, which you should do.

There are great Rockford moments throughout it. I guess what I would say is become a Rockford fan and then watch this. Yeah, I wouldn't watch this as a first one for sure or to introduce someone to the series. I guess for me what it comes down to is that there were two potential interesting episodes that each got about two-thirds of the content it needed. each got about two thirds of the content it needed. The story of a budding relationship between Rockford and a client where she has some kind of hangups and he has his own hangups

and they need to resolve those in some manner is one story, or they end up resolving them in one manner is one story. And I think that's done better in other episodes. And then this kind of smuggling heist playing on Rockford's past with the military is a pretty good story that could have used more support to be an entire con artist episode. Yeah.

The smuggling was the reason for the plot to move along. But the actual content of the story was, I think, a little more focused on the Rockford-Shana relationship. That relationship wasn't pointed enough for me to really buy into it. Yeah, I think that might be why the half-flirting stuff doesn't pan out either. Because, okay, so she's there to drag Rockford into the mystery, which that's fine. But she's also there to present these rose-colored glasses view of the military for Rockford to bounce off of. Right, yeah, yeah.

And that's it. Like, I think that that's the extent of what's going on there. The other episode I would compare this dynamic to is actually Tall Woman in Red Wagon. Yeah. Where, I forget her name, but the female protagonist client has a similar role where she's the one who drags Rockford in and she's a journalist and she bounces off of Rockford. They have some confrontational kind of stuff, but she warms up to him in the end in a similar arc. But she also has something she's keeping from Rockford that gets revealed to him later that brings them closer together once that revelation is made. And I think that's kind of what I'm missing from the dynamic in this one,

that next level of Shana's agenda. That's what makes so many of the dynamics in this show compelling, is the agendas. And while she has a motive, like she has a motivation as a character, she doesn't really have an agenda. Yeah. She has propelling force, but she doesn't really have anywhere to go. Ultimately, my criticism of this episode would be that it's got plenty of fun bits.

It's slightly underbaked, really, is really what it, you know. Unlike some of the other ones, once you dig in, you start seeing more flaws. Yeah. Instead of less, I guess, instead of how they connect and whatnot. So if we were sounding a little unnecessarily harsh, I think it's just we have such a high standard for satisfaction that when we're even minimally underserved uh i think it's it's worth pointing out is all but yeah definitely definitely a fine one just to watch it's fun it just maybe doesn't stand up as well to scrutiny as some of our other favorite episodes that said of course we still have more to say about it yes so we will be back after our break with some more thoughts

on general applicability of the stuff that we did like from... Colonel. Lieutenant Colonel applicability. We'll come back

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Epi, what are you excited about right now? I'm excited about swords and sorcery. The type of swords and sorcery you find at worldswithoutmaster.com And my new project, codename Linkin Green Robin Hood roleplaying game You can find all you need to know about that at digathousandholes.com I'm excited about your stuff as well Aw, that's so nice

As always, you can check out my catalog of fiction and roleplaying games At ndpdesign.com Including the Worldwide Wrestling Role-Playing Game. If you want to see my newest stuff, check out the playtest page. That's where I have free downloads of all my fun new projects. Thanks yet again for listening. As always, we deeply appreciate your support. And with that, back to the show. Welcome back to 200 a Day. We just went over the episode 2 into five, 56 won't go. And we're now going to talk a little bit about some of the sort of narrative lessons that we've picked up. You could

use as you create your own fiction, whether it's at the table or in a book or a movie or in some sort of folk song. There are many ways. There's a lot of Rockford Files things you can use for folk songs. I agree. Murder ballads, perhaps. Oh, nice. What stood out to you, Epi? I think I was a little critical of the episode when we wrapped it up, but there's definitely some good stuff here. So what's the first thing that you wanted to talk about? There's always something to learn, whether something is a cautionary tale or... But actually actually I think there's some things that this episode did quite well. The first one that I want to get at is, I wish I had a name for this, and I'm sure there's a name for this out there. So you have Jim and he's at the Provost Marshall, Colonel Hopkins, and Colonel

Hopkins is going over Jim's military history and the bouncing back and forth of his ranks as you hear about the various deeds that he's done, right? Yeah, he says he should have put a zipper on his sergeant stripes because they came on and off so often. Yeah, such a great line. This reminded me of a moment in a Fofford and Gray Mouser story. As often, I will take a Rockford Files episode and just jam it into something sword and sorcery. But there's a Fofford and Gray Mouser story called The Adept's Gambit. It's a little bit of a weird one, but the part about it that this stood out to is that there's this moment in that story where in the course of a paragraph, an entire adventure

is told. I don't have the story in front of me. I can't read it out. Nonetheless, it basically says like, they just came back from the incident with the blah, blah, blah, where blah, blah, blah, and blah, blah, blah, and just laid it all out. And it was this amazing little chunk of background fiction. The same thing that happened here with Rockford. I wanted to watch the Rockford Files prequel where he's in the Korean War up to no good. But tucked within this episode is an entire epic saga of his military career. And it's done so well because it's done through this conceit of a litany of things that he had done. Yeah, that's a good technique for a couple things. One is filling out backstory.

Here are all the things that I've done. Or here's the reason I'm famous, right? Or here's the reason why the other characters are impressed by this character or threatened by them or whatever it also is a way to introduce um story hooks things that are gonna follow on from these things that the character did before we've caught up to them as audience this also reminds me of you're familiar with the i forget what it's called, but in HeroQuest or Hero Wars. Right.

Where you make a character by writing like a paragraph and then underlining keywords. Yeah, yeah. So there's a game that's gone through many editions and versions and whatnot. And I kind of lost track of where it's at right now with contemporary stuff. But when I was introduced to it, we were playing the hero wars version which is a little older there are many different ways to create a character from traditional kind of here's all your points and spend them on stuff and whatever to this narrative version where it's write a 50 word story about your character underline the keywords and those are your abilities your skills

and abilities and you turn those into your character sheet and that was super fun yeah it's it's kind of like a a testament to the narrative power of a bulleted list right the book life of pie which i have a conflicted relationship with but i think the greatest moment in that entire book is if you if you aren't familiar ostensibly it's about a young kid who is trapped on a lifeboat with a tiger. And one of the greatest moments in that book is just the list of survival gear that's on that lifeboat. It's literally a list that comes with the lifeboat that says what you have on it. And you could sit and just read that page over and over and just pour over it. And just a whole adventure, in this case, more of a Robinson Crusoe kind of adventure, you know, plays out in your head where you're like, how would I survive with only this?

And it's a really neat technique that can be done for various reasons. And I think that sometimes we shy away from just listing things because you feel like you have to fill in. I think we feel sometimes we need to fill in like little plot things in between where in this case, the only thing we fill in in between is the banter between Hopkins and Rockford. And that's great. It just lets us take all that in and kind of marvel at every little thing. Trading the food rations for the enemy tank you know they're well chosen examples because they're ones that are i don't remember all of them now but there's trading the rations for a tank which uh rockford clarifies is that he was asked to to

scrounge a tank yeah but hopkins comes back with yes but he probably expected you to scrounge one from your own side right yeah uh so there's that there's like setting up pool halls um and there's like essentially stealing or taking an officer's car from in front of a fancy hotel and going joy joy riding or something like that there are these audacious things but they're all audacious in different ways yeah um and they all require require some level of competence right So they're also boosting these character traits that we know of Rockford's, just putting them in a different context. It's a neat technique and one that I enjoy. It dovetails with what we've talked about in some of our previous episodes about creating world through implication and taking what the characters care about to illustrate the world.

Like in this case, it's not really illustrating the world. It's more illustrating the iceberg of Rockford, right? Like we only see the tip over the water, but he has this whole past that we get in dribs and drabs through different episodes. And this one is illuminating a little more of that. So do you have something here? Yeah.

One thing I found potentially useful is this device of showing us the bad guys at the very beginning. Yes. And then letting Rockford discover who they are more naturally through the progression of the episode. We've talked before about how different episodes use audience and on-screen character knowledge to create tension in different ways. And this is a good example of giving the audience knowledge that Rockford doesn't have. And then as we're watching, we're waiting for Rockford to discover the thing that we already know, right? And that's a different kind of tension than watching through Rockford's eyes as we discover the new things about this situation.

The dramatic irony where the audience knows stuff that the main character doesn't. And I have DI for dramatic irony posted against the notes about when Shana first comes in and when Harvey shows up at the door. Right, yeah. And this, in kind of a subtle way, I think, but in a stealable way, in a way that I think is very easy to import into a different story, this episode treats each of these villains a little differently, so that Rockford has a different kind of interaction with each of them. So even though as the audience we know that all three of these men are the bad guys, when Rockford meets Sergeant Slate, meets Harvey, it's a different part of the story uh than when he meets billy webster the the fake sheriff and then he doesn't really actually end up interacting with uh with mr davis um uh he's more of the like shadowy architect of the scheme

i guess right but rather than have them all be violent goons or have them all be people that shana already knows. So therefore Rockford needs to discover that they're actually against her by treating those two as different kinds of cases, different kinds of villains, but they're still united in the scheme. It makes it fun to watch Rockford discover each of them and react to each of them in a different way. And there's even a little bit of it when,

when Dennis shows up because Dennis is in this episode for just this tiny little bit. And he comes at the door and Rockford's like, hey, Dennis, as if that was good news. And we have the audience. We know something really suspicious has just happened. And Dennis has just showed up at his door. We don't even know that they contacted Dennis. We just know that that's bad news and that's great stuff. Yeah. Dramatic irony is one of those things where I feel like we're really afraid of it. Like, spoilers. People want to avoid spoilers. And there's plenty of reasons to do that. But the experience that we

have, you and I, as we do this podcast, where we've watched an episode and then we go and we talk about the episode again, we often come to a greater appreciation of these episodes because of what we know and then seeing how the sort of craft of how that's put together. Or in the case of this episode, when we see, when we talk about Hopkins first talking to Rockford and then realizing, now that we know the whole story, why Hopkins is suspicious of Rockford. Right. And it's not just that he has a suspicious history.

It's that Rockford's suspicious history would fit perfectly with this criminal enterprise. The strength of the series is that in most of the episodes having seen it before it doesn't make it less fun to see again and a lot of the time it allows you to appreciate certain things that were flagged or telegraphed or character decisions that were made because the second time you see it you already know why they were made and so it makes more sense i think it is a difficult thing. May not difficult, it's the wrong word, but I think it is a skill to learn for tabletop games how to apply this idea. Because you don't necessarily want to start a session by saying, okay, here's the bad guys and here's what they're up to. Now let's play a game where you find out there's bad guys and discover what they're up to. That's not tension necessarily or irony.

That's just forecasting. There are certainly games that you would not want that to happen. It depends on, I mean, obviously it depends on what you want out of the game, what everyone wants out of the game. But there are plenty of games where you know the premise of when we play this game, we're going to get to this end point. But I guess I'm thinking about a little more general idea of how do you present a solution to something that would otherwise be a mystery and then have the process of discovering that solution still be tension-filled. So if you've got a game that's primarily investigative where the players themselves aren't supposed to know the answer right off the bat, so they have to uncover the clues and whatnot. There's a thing that happens at the end of those games. I feel fairly comfortably saying universally happens at the end of those games where the GM says, okay, so now this is what really happened. And then reveals that to the players.

And then the players go through that whole thing that we just did, where they're like, oh, so that's why, oh, there's fun to be had there. It depends on how much fun you had beforehand. From my personal experience, that sometimes that fun to be had there, I've slogged through so much to get to that point that I'm not in the mood to have that fun. You're not ready to relive what you just did. You're not getting a value add out of it. Yeah, but there's definitely times where that is a thing.

Where you're like, oh my god, that's why we were thwarted every turn. It's because this guy was with us the whole time. Yeah, you want that reveal to be one of oh that makes total sense that's so cool right not yeah oh that's what we were supposed to have figured out we're dumb yeah and i and i think this episode has a little bit of a cautionary illustration there where the concerns and this this applies even beyond uh just tabletop role-playing this this also as you're writing stories you there's so much you're juggling when you're doing a narrative

you want to inform your audience uh you want to inform them in an entertaining way uh and you want to inform them just enough so that the reveal seems you know that i guess the the phrase for it is surprising but inevitable or you know whatever you want to put that. Yeah. And I think a lot of times an easy mistake to make is to fall on the side of under informing your audience. And we had a little bit of that going on in this episode where we talk about when Rockford is at Quentin's door. Or no, no. Well, there's that. I mean, that's one kind of it.

We need to wrap up in half an hour um okay so you guys are at uh you've tracked down this guy and he's going to tell you this thing right who cares about how we got here definitely but uh the thing i was thinking of was terry uh at the funeral home where that's the moment where rockford makes these sorts of guesses about where the plot's going if we sat sat down and we drew out the sort of strands of knowledge that the audience knew, the strands of knowledge that Rockford knew, and maybe some other characters that we care about, and we saw where they got tangled up,

there are these moments where it's like at the end where Rockford kind of just hands it all over to us. Yeah. So where we know stuff and Rockford doesn't, it's fun. And where we discover it as Rockford is discovering it, it's fun. And oftentimes in mysteries like this, it can also be fun to have your super genius detective reveal something. But I think most of the time, it's more fun to know stuff that the character doesn't or to have it revealed to you as it's revealed to the character. Yeah, in this case, the leap is one that doesn't seem supported by what we know about the story so far, right?

Like that's what stands out is sometimes when Rockford makes these jumps, these like analytical jumps or these deductive reasonings, he has another character he's talking to. So he's transmitting the logic with the dialogue and he's making a guess yeah or he's telegraphing about how it's a guess even even something as simple as saying like now i'm going to go ahead and guess that you were having an affair with him even something like that which he does a fair amount and it's kind of startling that that missing just that half a sentence makes it stand out as this like where did that come from right in the context of uh how these shows are usually written so i think that this episode was actually kind of a nice melange of well done dramatic irony um right down to like i said before the

preview montage having sheena warming to rockford and then when she first shows up she's got a gun on yeah which you could have done it the other way right the preview montage has her bussing in with a gun but then having that as the first scene would not have been interesting right yeah it would have to be a reversed kind of reveal yeah i i agree uh i think maybe one technique to think about for bringing dramatic irony into your game specifically would be something like this episode is a good as a good example of is that whole first scene where it's like here's a scene that's happening with none of your characters present you know here's these guys are chasing this guy they threaten him we know that

these guys are the scumbags all right let's let's start you know and then you you play your answering machine message and this is the message let's go yeah in this case it's not revealing the whole scheme it's not telling us what their agenda is but it is setting it up so that when we meet the characters again later we're already predisposed to act in a certain way towards them yeah Yeah, we're wary of them. Including having our character maybe trust them when they shouldn't because we're playing a character that needs to discover that they shouldn't trust them or whatever. Yeah, so I want to talk about the guns, right? So throughout this episode, we get the moral quandary of Rockford's life.

He leads a violent life, but he doesn't want to, but it's what he does. His arm is not being twisted too badly, so he obviously gets something out of this, but he'll moralize about guns quite a bit, despite having been in the military and himself illegally owning a gun. Or even because he was in the military right right you kind of get that that feeling as well exactly so one of the the bits that i really enjoyed in this episode is the regalia there's the scene where he's with shana at her dad's house and they're looking at the the medals and the um she talked about how she used to play with them and he has i i can't remember the lines now but he has some good lines about like how they're not as fancy as you think

they are you don't know what what he did to get those like that kind of stuff and i think one of the neat ways this episode subtly reinforces all this is that shana shows up with her dad's gun which is this chrome-plated piece of art right that she doesn't know how to use and this is a great metaphor for her experience of her father's military career right and then later on we get to see rockford's gun which is this tiny little tool that he hides away in the back in the trunk of his car where he keeps his jack you know it's it's it's a last resort thing that he's a little ashamed of and doesn't want out and i think that's great i think that's this this neat way that this episode subtly reinforced this theme of the two having different experiences uh with the same military history there's ways to do that over the top, obviously.

And that's a thing that I love doing when I write my sword and sorcery. I love describing opulence and I love describing, you know, our heroes in abject poverty and whatnot. I think you've made a nice definitional split there, maybe. So maybe surface or 101 level of that idea is that each character has a weapon that reflects their character right sure that's pretty straightforward effective well-trodden ground but in the context of this episode it's not that each character's gun represents their character it's that each character's gun has a resonance with their experience with the military right that's a different thing that's a more complicated metaphor down to billy webster not being able to use the military rifle right

like he struggles with it and he can't use it he drops it and goes for his pistol because he's a he's a cowboy right and then rockford is a better one and is able to use his pistol that he was borrowing from the military to bring down this guy who was perverting the military, right? He wasn't even a cop. He was being hired as part of the scam to pull one over on the army.

And it's not Rockford's gun that he uses. It's an MP's gun that Rockford borrowed. So maybe we're reading too much into it, but when all these things hang together in that way, I think it indicates that someone thought about this. Maybe not literally like everyone's gun has to represent their meeting with the military, but more like what's the thematic resonance

of each of these scenes? What happens when she pulls the chrome-bladed gun that doesn't have any bullets, right? Right. Et cetera, et cetera. Just in general, a thing to do is when you're working on something like that and you're like, like you said, we can make the weapon represent something intrinsic to the character, but I think the more interesting thing to do is to make something represent a relationship

between that character and something else in this case the military or military history uh or you don't always have to use weapons since it just happens to be what's happening here going back to like cars right it could be a vehicle or beast of burden or something like that or gifts that are given between characters um you know i think that the kinds of stories that we like, and one reason why we're doing this whole podcast, is the nature of the relationships of the characters. That's what really keeps us

engaged and keeps us motivated to see more. So if your metaphors and your imagery are reflecting those relationships, that's when they become very powerful. More so than the simple symbolism that they might have. Yeah.

Well said. Well, thank you. Yeah. I don't know if I have much more to add to that stuff. That all seems like the high points from this episode for me. Do you have anything else? No, I think we've earned our 200 for the day. I agree with you.

But that won't stop us from coming back next time to talk about another episode of the Rockford Files.