These are all the tricks of fake psychics. The show knows them all. Cold reading. Hot reading. Lots of predictions that don’t pan out. Frankly lying. Putting together bits and pieces. There are plenty of tricks. You can obviously get quite rich using them. You can definitely con a police department. Though it’s worth noting that most police departments listen politely to self-proclaimed psychics and then ignore it. The testimony doesn’t stand up in court; psychic evidence went out with the Salem witch trials.
Jim is awakened very early in the morning by a crew digging up the beach outside his trailer. A self-proclaimed psychic, Roman Clementi (Robert Webber), has announced that Rick Richards (Not Appearing In This Episode), someone Jim was following, is, with his girlfriend, Allison Curry (Also Not Appearing), somewhere near a body of water—another one of those popular psychic dodges. Because the guy’s a major publicity hound, it makes it into all the papers and onto the news, and everyone starts to believe that Jim knows where the missing people and the missing $80,000 is.
It’s been many years since high school Spanish—and living in LA, which will give you some basic knowledge—but I was able to understand most of what Ray Ochoa (Pepe Serna) was saying. Admittedly, this is because little of what he says is all that complicated; you don’t have to be all that fluent in order to translate “como se dice.” But they hired an actual Mexican-American actor to play the character and had him speak actual Spanish, and there are plenty of shows we’ve covered that don’t bother with those two details.
Come to that, it’s nice to know that we have a forensics tech played by James Hong. He’s obviously an example of colorblind casting, too; there’s nothing about the character that makes it necessary for him to be Asian. (The character’s actually named Kumagi, making one of the few occasions where Hong played a character who wasn’t Chinese.) It’s true that most of the main characters on the show are white. But every now and again, you get a character who isn’t, and it’s for no particular reason half the time. Rocky’s friend LJ, for example, seems to be black because black people exist.
Jim’s detective work is more impressive than ESP. He puts pieces together. He says he gets lucky. He refers to longshots. But what he’s doing in his way is the same hot and cold reading that Roman Clementi does. He picks up on clues. He just uses that for good instead of lining his own pockets. He was right about Clementi’s having a snitch inside the police department, even, because that was so obvious. It’s the easiest way for Clementi to know details that hadn’t been made public.
Take Care of Rockford Files: Head is danced on. Nasty chokehold. Car chase. Attempted holding at knifepoint. Hit by car.
Four time guest Robert Webber is to The Rockford Files as Patrick McGoohan is to Columbo. And this one is the most memorable of the four, a character perfectly suited to Webber’s skills and to the testy chemistry between him and Garner.
While psychics bamboozling individuals and the wider public are nothing new and still lurking now, there is something very 70s (the Uri Geller Age) about a psychic trying to insert himself for the publicity.