With all the westerns James Garner did, I find it kind of amazing to discover this was the only time he worked with veteran character actor Strother Martin.
Martin plays a cranky old friend of Rocky's named T.T. Flowers who has a 10 acre spread he calls "Freedom". Jack Mullerd (Scott Brady, who was last seen as a corrupt union boss in "Gearjammers") is a land developer who's ready to do anything to get control of Freedom and works with T.T.'s son in law Sherm (Alex Rocco) to have him drugged up and pronounced incompetent.
The entire show is told as a flashback as Rocky delivers the eulogy at T.T.'s funeral. Other than a few amusing moments as Jim tries to sneak into the sanitarium where T.T. is being held (the car horn bit is priceless)this is an episode that mostly takes itself pretty seriously.
Strother Martin shines as the cranky old T.T. but the script lets us down just a little there as it fails to give us a scene or a moment that makes us feel like he and Rocky are really friends. They're friends because the script tells us so--it fails to really show us.
Scott Brady is probably my favorite Rockford bad guy outside of Robert Webber and James Woods. He's powerful, devious and quite believable in every one of his appearances on the show (though again the script lets us down a little--he tries to kill Jim by leaving a bottle of nitrous oxide in the Firebird so Jim will crash--something that will surely show up in the wreck).
Gretchen Corbett makes an ever so brief appearance as Beth Davenport in this first half of the two parter as Jim goes to her apartment to hide out (we should all be so lucky to have such a hideout!) and "Mchale's Navy" star Bob Hastings (the weaselly Lt. Carpenter) makes another appearance, this time as a construction foreman.
All in all, a good episode thanks to good casting, but not as much comedy as in some of the best "Rockfords".
Martin plays a cranky old friend of Rocky's named T.T. Flowers who has a 10 acre spread he calls "Freedom". Jack Mullerd (Scott Brady, who was last seen as a corrupt union boss in "Gearjammers") is a land developer who's ready to do anything to get control of Freedom and works with T.T.'s son in law Sherm (Alex Rocco) to have him drugged up and pronounced incompetent.
The entire show is told as a flashback as Rocky delivers the eulogy at T.T.'s funeral. Other than a few amusing moments as Jim tries to sneak into the sanitarium where T.T. is being held (the car horn bit is priceless)this is an episode that mostly takes itself pretty seriously.
Strother Martin shines as the cranky old T.T. but the script lets us down just a little there as it fails to give us a scene or a moment that makes us feel like he and Rocky are really friends. They're friends because the script tells us so--it fails to really show us.
Scott Brady is probably my favorite Rockford bad guy outside of Robert Webber and James Woods. He's powerful, devious and quite believable in every one of his appearances on the show (though again the script lets us down a little--he tries to kill Jim by leaving a bottle of nitrous oxide in the Firebird so Jim will crash--something that will surely show up in the wreck).
Gretchen Corbett makes an ever so brief appearance as Beth Davenport in this first half of the two parter as Jim goes to her apartment to hide out (we should all be so lucky to have such a hideout!) and "Mchale's Navy" star Bob Hastings (the weaselly Lt. Carpenter) makes another appearance, this time as a construction foreman.
All in all, a good episode thanks to good casting, but not as much comedy as in some of the best "Rockfords".