In LA, there’s a lot of thunder. It’s one of the few things I miss about the weather there; certainly I was grouchy enough when I had to deal with the heat. There’s hardly any in the Pacific Northwest; I can remember a couple of summers when we had a lot of thunderstorms, but mostly, the sound we get with our rain is just the sound of falling rain. I don’t know if it’s a combination of obvious sound effects’ being obvious and LA people’s being used to the sound of thunder when there’s rain, but that’s not what rain in Seattle sounds like.
Jim’s got a friend who’s a photographer. John “Mitch” Micelli (Hector Elizondo) is an old Army buddy of Jim’s from Korea. His friend Jennifer Ryburn (Pamela Hensley) is a murder suspect; she is believed killed in an exploding car. But Mitch believes Jennifer is still alive and well and living in Seattle, and he wants Jim to go to Seattle to find her. Jim doesn’t want to, but when Mitch is killed, Jim takes it personally.
Hector Elizondo’s another actor who was making a pretty solid living at police dramas at the time. He was even caught by Columbo once in one of the weirdest episodes of that show. He’s a solid actor, and it’s nice to see him here as a good friend of Jim’s. He’s going to come back at some point, playing a very different character. That’s a nice thing about Elizondo. He’s one of those actors who’s always nice to see when he crops up.
It makes a lot of sense that Floyd Ross (Ken Swofford, whose murder was solved by Columbo once) charges less than Jim. The landscape is different in LA than Seattle. Especially in 1975, before the tech boom. Yeah, you’d get some Boeing guys—I’ve got a friend who’s a retired Boeing engineer, and he’s definitely not hurting for cash—but this was the year Microsoft was founded. The cost of living here was a lot lower relative to Los Angeles then than it is now. You could afford to charge less because you could live on less. Probably less demand, too, come to that.
Jim’s days in Korea come up now and again. It’s clear that he doesn’t miss them. It’s also clear, though, that he had some high points. We learn bits and pieces about that time—he and Mitch were good friends. It seems to be the era where Jim started being more interested in the criminal underworld than Rocky was ever going to be happy with; he told a story a while back about selling radios and earphones to guys in the Navy and having to learn to sail in order to do it. I wonder if Rocky has ever noticed the straight line from those days to Jim’s current career.
Take Care of Rockford Files: He gets shot. He then gets in a car chase immediately after, which cannot be fun as he was shot in his driving leg.