Jim’s an ordinary guy. He carries a notebook because he can’t remember license plate numbers. He dodges trouble at every opportunity. His mouth gets him in trouble because he doesn’t keep a tight enough hold on it. He drives a fancy car and drives it well, but a lot of what’s going on is out of his league. Heck, today’s episode even shows him incapable of fixing a car or knowing where to start. For some reason, he ends up in a lot of high-end investigations, dealing with the wealthy and connected. I suspect it’s because, as with Columbo, it’s nice to watch them get taken down by someone lower class.
Jim is playing pool when Beth’s cousin Warren Weeks (Ron Rifkin) comes up to him. He asks for Jim’s help. It turns out Warren is wanted for the murder of his boss. He’d been fired. Then, his boss was murdered. Now, because of Jim’s involvement with Warren, the feds are leaning on him. Jim has no idea what’s going on, and Warren isn’t giving him enough information for him to figure it out. It has something to do with Bolivia, but that doesn’t really help Jim much.
Honestly, Warren codes as autistic to me. This is not intended as a diagnosis, of course. I just mean that he displays a pattern of actions and thoughts that read as autistic in the minds of Hollywood script writers. He’s extremely intelligent. He hyper focuses. He’s got unusual interests. He’s bad at reading social cues. He’s still able to create and maintain social relationships, even having an affair with a woman, but the specific way they have him act strikes me as having him be a neurodivergent character before people knew that term.
One thing I don’t like about Jim and never have is his casual sexism. He shames Warren for playing the flute—so okay, most of the people I knew growing up he played the flute were female, but only most, and some of the most famous flautists are male. For some reason, it’s acquired a reputation as a “sissy” instrument—probably because it’s higher pitched—but Jim brings it up here pretty much every time he’s annoyed at Warren.
People are never going to stop falling for Jim’s giving them a lot of information he logically shouldn’t. In this case, the person knows that someone’s killing people associated with the company Warren was fired from. He knows that Jim is looking at people within the company for it. And he still believes that every piece of information Jim gives him is accurate and in no way a setup. He never even asks why Jim is telling him all this, which is something I’d want to know right away.
Take Care of Rockford Files: Car chase. Brief fistfight with associated handgun.