The show is, of course, full of references that people won’t get as time passes. Jim’s enormous tape-recording answering machine that, as I recall, he rents. All the pay phones and rotary dials and so forth. Catch gas prices out of the corner of your eye as you’re watching and contemplate exactly how much a full tank’s worth would buy you today. But all scenes set in airports more than twenty years ago remind us of the days when you could walk someone to their gate. You could just wander around an airport without anyone’s really noticing or caring. Remember that? Or not, because you may not be old enough.
Jim is helping his friend, Lori Jenivan (Sharon Gless), who works in reservations for an airline. She is attacked in a parking lot at the airport. Whoever has it is coming after her, and she doesn’t know why. Though we as the audience can work out is has something to do with the man she noticed had traveled a lot in the last few months. Someone breaks into her home in the middle of the night and shoots at her. She thinks it’s the man, too, a Mr. Farrell (John McMartin), but she can’t prove it. Neither can Jim. So he’s going to figure it out.
One of the things I love about Jim is that he’s a noir detective who has milk and cookies before bed. He fits a lot of the cliches, but there are a lot he also avoids. Part of it is that he’s living in Los Angeles in the ’70s, and that’s a very different place than Los Angeles in the ’30s was. Or ’40s or ’50s, come to that. He’s still got a lot of the attitudes, but they’re changed by the fact that he lives in a time when so many expectations had changed. He’s not going to spend all his time getting hammered and being a sexist pig, but he’s still a bit sexist and hard-boiled.
You know, Dennis is absolutely right to be pissed at Jim for waking him up in the middle of the night. Dennis is not the only policeman in the city of Los Angeles. I’m sure that Jim trusts Dennis a lot more than most of the other cops we see over the course of the series. He has a right to, come to that. For one thing, there are a lot of cops we’ve seen mistreat him over the course of the series. He’s also been through the criminal justice system as an innocent man, and that’s going to leave its traces.
You can tell who the smart criminals on this show are. They’re the ones who have the sense to disable Jim’s car before dealing with him. Whether it’s taking a bit out or, as here, slashing his tires, you definitely need to make sure he can’t go after you. If you’re going in a car chase, Jim’s going to beat you. So okay, you might not know that necessarily, but still. And honestly, I’m not sure it would take all that much to find out. People in the underworld would, by now, know the name of James Rockford and what all he’s capable of. It’s impressive how many people continue to underestimate him for seasons to come.
Take Care of Rockford Files: Shot at. Shot at again. Then, for variety’s sake, shot at, but by someone else.
I remember my grandparents meeting us at the gate in LA in the 70s and 80s, and even family going with us to the gate in ATL in winter 2001, but I think the NYC airports got rid of that policy sometime in the 80s. I wonder why.