“Exit Prentiss Carr”

Click here for the answering machine gag.

After four episodes that left me feeling enthusiastic, I’ve finally reached one that leaves me a little cold. “Exit Prentiss Carr” combines several elements of previous episodes: the female client who may be the murderer (“The Countess”), tennis as an upper class signifier (“The Kirkoff Case”, “The Countess”), a locked room mystery (“The Dark and Bloody Ground”), and an easily tricked lunkhead (“The Pilot”, “The Kirkoff Case”). But the episode doesn’t come together as well as its predecessors, mainly because Rockford spends so much time fending off red herrings that the actual villains seem like afterthoughts.

“Exit Prentiss Carr” opens with a tantalizing brain teaser. Rockford was hired to follow an old girlfriend’s husband, the titular Mr. Carr. He finds Carr in an unlocked hotel room, dead of a gunshot wound, gun fifteen feet away under the curtains, with the room in disarray. He goes to the police, but he doesn’t tell them he’s been in the room. He merely asks them to check on Mr. Carr because Mrs. Carr is ostensibly worried. They check. They find Carr in an immaculate room with the gun in his hand and rule the killing a suicide.

Now Rockford has to resolve this conflict. Sadly, Rockford chooses to handle this by accusing the investigating officers of participating in a cover-up. This gets him thrown out of town. He returns to Mrs. Carr, who tells several conflicting stories about where she was in the hours before Prentiss died. She’s also poring over travel brochures and seems awful anxious to spend her husband’s money. Rockford has a good line about how she’s destroying the whole image of widowhood.

Rockford spends much of the episode bouncing between the angry cops and the Widow Carr, but while many of the scenes are entertaining in themselves, they aren’t, in retrospect, all that plot advancing, because none of these people had anything to do with the murder of Prentiss Carr. The actual killer doesn’t arrive until about forty minutes in, and instead of our meeting him as the result of Rockford’s following a long series of carefully laid out clues, the killers first appearance in the story is more of the “point the camera at the guy following Rockford with a look on his face about as subtle as the Goodyear Blimp flying over a Papal Mass with a message flashing along its side in letters fifty-feet high “I AM THE MURDERER” variety. The killer is so obviously sinister that I’m surprised the police aren’t constantly picking him up just because. Lucky for Rockford, he’s also kind of dumb, so there isn’t a whole lot of suspense in their chase through the Bay City streets and their battle in a lumber yard. (Rockford wins by tricking him, but because Swifty the Slayer couldn’t have beaten the tag team of a lobotomized three toed sloth and Paris Hilton at Stratego, the victory is cheapened.) The remainder of the murder motive, blackmail about an insurance scam, is wrapped up with a few lines at police headquarters, as are all of Rockford’s problems.

The episode is notable as the first significant use of Rocky’s fancy pickup truck, so that’s something. On the whole, though, “Exit Prentiss Carr” strikes me as a first-season stumble. It’s an entertaining hour in its way, but its plotting is too lazy, and its reveal of the killer is too much of a cheat. I know "The Rockford Files" can do better than this. It has, and it will again.