For all his devil-may-care attitude, Jim does very clearly work within the law most of the time. He has to; it’s how he keeps his license. Oh, he may fudge a few details on breaking and entering, but there’s a reason he sticks to closed cases. He doesn’t want to tangle with the cops if he can avoid it. Oh, it’s one thing to banter with Dennis and get a little information from him, but he doesn’t want to lose his license and he surely doesn’t want to go to jail.
Someone Jim has never seen before comes to his trailer and is abducted after attempting to hire him. It turns out to have something to do with an organization called Fiscal Dynamics, Inc. Alec Morris (John Carter) now denies everything. A sleazy DA (Don Billett) throws the book at him for filing a false police report. However, this piques Jim’s interest. A widow (Sharon Spelman) attempts to hire him to investigate her husband’s death, which she believes also ties in to FDI. A financial analyst (Michael Lerner) assures Jim that FDI is healthy, but we start to see things that suggest this is not true.
This is not Jim’s usual beat. He is not used to the world of high finance. He’s much more used to pawn shops than stock brokers. His usual client is much more along the lines of the print shop owner (Val Bisoglio) who is a small part of what’s going on. Even Doris Parker seems on the higher end; she’s not going to have to make payment arrangements. You could fit Jim’s trailer in her living room with room to spare.
It’s hard to believe Ned Beatty was only 37 when he played Leon Fielder. This is before he made it big, if just barely, but he seems destined to play this sort of half-mad executive type. And half-mad may be an underestimate, come to that. Here, his character is a little too studied; he’s playing silly games with Jim, and Jim knows it. He actually tries to play the handshake trick a second time after Jim calls him on it, and while they’ve both acknowledged it’s childish, Fielder can’t resist.
Jim doesn’t want to get beat up. He doesn’t want to go to jail. He doesn’t want to get sued for ten million dollars. All of these are perfectly reasonable on his part. And if Doris claims to find it cowardly, well, one of the funniest moments of the episode is when both she and Jim jump at the buzzer his car has for if you accidentally try to take off with the keys in the ignition.
Take Care of Rockford Files: Gets beat up by thugs kidnapping his newest client.