User Reviews

In this season one closer, Jim is hired by Insurance company rep Edward Moss (Mills Watson, making one of his four appearances on "Rockford") to find a Nancy Wade (Jesse Welles) to deliver a insurance check worth $10,000 on the death of her mother. The trail leads Jim to his former "Maverick" guest star Virginia Gregg as Nancy's aunt Eleanor Wainwright (Gregg played Gida Jamison in the classic "Maverick" episode "Pappy"). After shaking Jim down for $100, she gives him a letter from Nancy that says she's in Las Vegas.

Jim goes to Vegas and then its the classic boy gets girl, boy loses girl (she gets kidnapped!) and the $10,000 check. So Rockford has to find her, get the check back and then turn it over to her witnessed by a notary. To his surprise Jim finds her working in a Vegas lounge. What happened with the kidnapping? Jim has to find out.

The answer involves money laundering, the mob and the recording industry. This is mostly a action episode, but the mystery of what's going on with Nancy Wade is a good one and done well. There is some comedy with Jim driving a VW bug as he's chased by goons in a powerful sedan and there's a funny moment at the Hoover Dam involving the code word "Geronimo". There's also a great (if subtle) parody of chases. This one is through the Hoover Dam. There's purposely no music used in the background and little tension as Jim chases the bad guy through tunnels, through power rooms, down stairs, on and on, all the way to the bottom of the dam, where they both collapse, exhausted. Another series would have built it up as a big action sequence. The Rockford Files portrays it as the tiring run it really would be.

The Season 1 finale goes all out with a fun location shoot in Vegas and the surrounding area as Jim tries to deliver an inheritance check to an elusive girl and, of course, winds up in over his head. The only issue I had with the tight script (and it's a minor one) is that the Mills Watson character, the insurance exec, didn't really have a good final scene that would have rounded out his interactions with Jim. Otherwise, this episode pretty much has it all - the quirky car (green Bug), a musical interlude, humor ("Geronimo!") and one of the series' best action sequences, the chase inside Hoover Dam. (There's no Dennis, no Rocky and no Angel, but they're not missed.) It also has the ever-welcome George Wyner and a nice example of casting an Asian American actor (Frank Liu) in a role seemingly not expressly needed to be Asian... something I can't imagine was common at the time.

The first thing that really jarred in this episode was the appearance of the green beetle. Rockford arrives in a cab at Nancy Wade's hotel.

After convincing her she needs to go with him to deposit the cheque, they leave the hotel to the car park and climb into a green beetle in which they drive off. There is no explanation. I thought it must be Wade's car, but it became clear it was not.

Jim was tasked with delivering the cheque, and told it must be delivered in front of a notary, presumably he needed to get a signature to that effect. He insisted they have to go to a bank to do this, and when they get to the bank she is about to open an account when the bank clerk discovers she already has an account with $300000 in it. The subsequent carry on about this is unbelievable and makes no sense. It should have actually simplified the transaction. Instead it results in everything going off the rails. It'sa ridiculous moment.

Rockford drives around in the bright green beetle. He sees Wade's name on a venue, seems surprised, and goes in to catch up with her.

He has no idea she was a lounge singer, so this development is apparently just a huge stroke of luck. Why was he driving around LV? She'd apparently been kidnapped. Did he think he'd just bump into her somewhere? Seems like a hopeless strategy and a very weak idea for the story.

He follows her and her minders/captors, in broad daylight using the bright green beetle. He climbs over a wall, and overhears a discussion which he later uses to set up the bad guys despite this conversation containing only about half the knowledge he later appears to have.

Anyway, maybe it's a great episode for nostalgic scenes of 1970s LV and a few funny lines and comebacks but overall it's just a very dumb and unsatisfying bit of comic drama that feels like minimal effort. I like Garner and I have fond memories of the Rockford files but this was a very poor example IMHO.