Exit Prentiss Carr

Was Jim Rockford a toxic bachelor? He was never married (at least in the original series), and aside from Beth Davenport and Meghan Dougherty (Kathryn Harrold, in seasons 4 & 5), his relationships with women always seemed fairly nonchalant. He enjoyed the company of women, but never actively pursued them. If he was a toxic bachelor, however, it is hard to pinpoint the source of the contamination. His main fault as boyfriend/husband material, aside from perennial cash flow problems and a tendency to drink milk from the carton, was his desire to avoid being tied down. But he was also the kind of guy who, after a clean if somewhat rueful breakup, wanted to stay friends.

So it is not surprising that old flames are often the catalyst for TRF plots. In S1, E6, Janet Carr (Corrine Camacho, who had non-recurring roles in four TRF episodes) asks Jim to look for her husband, Prentiss. Jim finds him murdered in a motel room in the small town of Bay City, just outside of L.A. But when he goes to the police he holds back, telling them only that Mr. Carr is not answering the door of his room and that his wife is worried sick. After the police find the body, Jim returns to L.A. to break the news to Janet.



The fact that she is underwhelmed by the news reveals what will be the central tension of the episode. When Janet asks Jim why he didn't tell the police what he found, he replies: "I wanted to talk to you first." He thinks there's a chance that she was involved in the murder, and wanted to give himself the option of protecting her. Up to that point he has only told the police that she was a "good friend."  Now we are left to wonder about the depth and/or intensity of their past relationship, as Rockford is notoriously reluctant to stick his neck out for other people, especially when the police are involved.


Whatever they once were to each other, Rockford is distrustful of (and perhaps even a bit irked by) Janet's lack of emotion over her husband's death. Their encounter on her tennis court the morning after the murder leads to the following exchange:


JC:  "I didn't realize how demanding tennis is. Skip a day and your game is shot."
JR:  "Be a shame to lose your backhand, too."

She tries to seduce him twice with the variations on the "I don't want to be alone tonight" schtick. He is bemused, but also a bit put off. Later he observes: "Between your tennis lessons and your travel folders, I hate to tell you what you're doing to the whole mystique of widowhood."

The tension over her emotional state is intertwined with the fact that for most of the show, he remains open to her as the prime suspect. She eventually gets sick of his moralizing and the conflict comes to a head:


JC:  "I'll bet your grandfather was a preacher!"
JR:  "As a matter of fact, he was a horse thief."

The actual murder mystery in "Exit Prentiss Carr" mostly serves as a backdrop for the central conflict between Jim and Janet and the secondary conflict between Jim and the Bay City cops. The actual culprit was Prentiss Carr's boss at the insurance company where he worked (who actually uses the word "phlegmatic" to describe Carr -- would that word ever find its way into a 21st century drama script?). Jim eventually gets the whole story unraveled for him by a guy who looks 20 years too early to audition for Baywatch, by pretending to want in on the scheme to blackmail the boss.

JR:       "I'm taking you to the cops."
Guy:    "You said we had a deal!"
JR:      (Cheefully):  "I lied."

The show ends at a booth in the Sand Castle. The sunshine outside and the brandy snifters on the table offer an ambiguous message about the emotional tone of the encounter. She claims she is soon off to Tahiti -- plans she has alluded to throughout the show. Just as soon as she finishes a stint of volunteer work, filling in for a friend at a home for deaf children. Rockford is chidingly skeptical, as if he has figured out once and for all that she is, in fact, not a murderer or a gold-digger, but the decent, caring woman that he had once loved liked quite a bit.

http://www.hulu.com/watch/13254/the-rockford-files-exit-prentiss-carr