It’s interesting that one of the goons on this show has asthma. And uses an inhaler. And still definitely comes across as a tough guy. It’s not as though I think asthmatic people necessarily need to have representation as criminals, of course, but you have to admit it’s an interesting concept. That they bothered at all to show the guy as having the condition—the first person using an inhaler on this show at all. “Asthma” has coded “nerd” for a lot of years, and that is definitely not what we have going here.
Jim’s old parole officer, Marcus Aurelius Hayes (Louis Gossett, Jr.), now going by O’Brien, shows up on his doorstep offering to buy him breakfast. Now, we’ve already seen him getting beat up, so we are naturally suspicious. He tells Jim that one of his parolees is now playing for the Lakers and is being pressured by organized crime to shave points. Jim agrees to look into who’s doing it. It turns out Marc isn’t a parole officer anymore, he’s a PI. He’s using Jim.
Marc is perfectly willing to play into people’s stereotypes. He has absolutely no problem with letting people believe what they want to about him. This is stereotypes about his race, his class, and his profession. It doesn’t bother him what people think. He’s confident enough in himself that he’ll even put on a phony accent to reinforce things. It’s a choice, definitely. I strongly suspect that the reaction from the people he’s fooled is unlikely to be “gosh, it turns out my prejudices turned out to bite me, and I should learn from this experience.”
Name an industry in LA, and it’s been corrupt. I suspect that’s just a big city thing, regardless of which city it is. It’s just that LA has an awful lot of prominent industries. In today’s episode, it’s professional sports. It could just as easily be the movies or aerospace or, well, trucking. We as a nation have learned in the last year1 just how much shipping goes through the Port of Los Angeles, after all.
Southern California for Tourists: Jim’s cheerful lie this time is that he’s detecting smog. The thug who beats him up for it tells him he doesn’t believe in smog; the air is just a little brown sometimes. A few years ago, actually at the suggestion of Politifact when Barack Obama made a comment about the air quality during his LA years—about a decade after this episode aired—I read a book about the history of smog in LA, and that was actually an argument people made. Someone from my home town actually offered, at a meeting of the LA City Council, to bring in a bottle of “imagination” to show the Altadena air quality.
Take Care of Rockford Files: Held at gunpoint. Roughed up.
- This essay was initially written in 2021. ↩︎
Lou Gossett Jr. with hair is almost as weird as Telly Savalas with hair.
The plot involves people competing for a new pro basketball team, and the dearh of the head of the league involved. The summaries on IMDb assume the league in question is the NBA. While that league was not the global juggernaut of today, there is something of a ticky tack nature to things. And that suggests, even if the American Basketball Association was on its way to merging with the NBA, the writers are thinking of that league and its attempts to keep expanding before it collapsed. Though just the idea that someone was out to murder a TV version of Larry O’Brien, NBA commissioner in the 70s and before that a JFK aide, is sort of funny.