Season Three Episode Thirteen: “Sticks and Stones May Break Your Bones, but Waterbury Will Bury You”

One of the weird things about watching older shows and movies is seeing some of the basic safety differences between now and then. Someone who drives like Jim should wear a seatbelt, just for starters. Sure, Rocky’s driving is safer, but still. When we first see Jim in this episode, he’s very obviously not wearing a seatbelt, and it makes me twitch a bit. Even in those days, my mom made us buckle up, because she’d worked in a hospital, but this is well before seatbelt laws and definitely before you could be pulled over for just not wearing yours.

Jim returns from vacation to discover Billy Merrihew (Cleavon Little) putting tape on his door to track if he comes home or not; his answering machine batteries died while he was gone. Billy’s a fellow PI—or was. He’s lost his license on a breaking and entering charge. He hires Jim to take on his case to find out what’s going on with the person who hired him. He then finds out that Vern St. Cloud (Simon Oakland) has also lost his license, on a B&E charge, while working the same case.

Genuinely, Jim is smarter than the others. He’s the one who is clever enough to track the woman who hired them both down, and she’s not going to get busted on the B&E. Especially not now that he knows it’s a set-up. Now, he’s able to pick up on the details a little better because he’s not personally involved, but the fact remains that he’s the only one who successfully gets the woman’s name. He’s also smart enough to get busted by the cops in order to shake a tail. He’s also smart enough to see the pattern. Though I grant you Vern St. Cloud is not difficult to outsmart.

I mean, there’s also the detail that “Odette Sorell” is a fairly distinctive name. They also end up pairing with another PI named Marvin A. Potemkin (Val Bisoglio, who would go on to be the cook on MAS*H). Billy’s probably got the least distinctive name in the group. There’s a reason Jim always chooses more boring last names when he’s lying about his identity. His first name is run-of-the-mill—I discovered when choosing a name for my son that a truly startling percentage of the US population is named James—but Rockford? Forget it.

Look, I am definitely in support of the idea that private investigators should be required to follow basic laws. Breaking and entering, definitely. Carrying a concealed weapon without a permit, ditto. But it’s a pattern, and Vern—terrible and cliche though he is—is not wrong that Dennis is deliberately ignoring that fact. Sure, private investigators can be flakes, and Jim is definitely not an exception to that. I’d still be suspicious, especially because you’d hope they would give the details of their cases. The fact that there’s overlap should raise a few eyebrows.

Take Care of Rockford Files: Conked on the back of the neck and held at gunpoint. Car chase.