Season 1 Episode 16: “Counter Gambit”

One thing the show makes crystal clear is that Jim is living client to client most of the time. $200 a day plus expenses is nice, goodness knows, but only when you’re actually earning it. Which he’s not, reliably. He’s between clients a lot. He gets stiffed repeatedly. On several occasions, he’s worked for himself. He’s definitely not earning as much as that on a regular basis, and he’s got bills to pay that he can’t expense to his clients. He can’t afford to turn clients down, even when he wants to.

Moss Williams (Eddie Fontaine) is getting out of prison. He hires Jim to look up Moss’s girlfriend, Maria Heller (Mary Frann), who has disappeared. Moss says he wants to find out if she’s got a new boyfriend in advance, so he won’t kill anyone and end up back in prison. So far, so good. But Jim hates him, because Moss beat him so badly when they were in prison together that Jim was in the hospital for two months. She’s been living with Harry Crown (Burr DeBenning), who was Moss’s partner in the theft of a pearl necklace before he went to prison. She runs out on Harry, too; everyone assumes she’s got the necklace.

If Jim really were a crook, he’d be a lot better at it than his clients in today’s episode. Moss says he won’t kill Maria because everyone would know he’d done it, and he’s not wrong—his girlfriend shows up dead the day he gets out, everyone’ll know he did it. On the other hand, if Jim shows up dead, they’d know Moss had done it, too. After all, he did beat up Jim in prison. He did visit Moss in prison—Edgar Burch (M. Emmet Walsh!) is able to get that information, and the cops would know it even faster. Jim turns up dead, Moss is the first suspect, and that he doesn’t know that tells you a lot about him.

I don’t know if Jim’s safe idea would work, but it’s yet another example of how clever he’s repeatedly shown to be. We don’t know much about his educational background—probably he graduated from high school, but we have no reason to assume he’s been to college—but regardless, we also know that he’s not much for book learnin’. Where he makes up for it is raw problem-solving skills. He’s quite a driver, and he’s a pretty tough guy, and what’s even more important is that he can solve problems with the best of them.

My favourite character of the wide range of supporting cast is definitely Dennis Becker. He’s no dummy. He’s patient. He’s sympathetic. He’s a good cop. He doesn’t cast Jim’s record up against him all the time; he’s the only cop who understands the concept of “pardon,” it seems. Or at least he’s the only one who doesn’t believe Jim was probably guilty of something even if he wasn’t guilty of the specific crime he went down for. Even the criminals believe that.

Take Care of Rockford Files: His new client holds him at gunpoint.