Salute to Worst Columbo?

I'm not a big fan of the mystery genre. I don't hate it, but if I saw a major motion picture that was a mystery advertised on tv I wouldn't be that interested. My mom happens to be a huge mystery fan, so I could read any of her books or her collection of stuff with Charlie Chan or Poirot or whoever, but I usually pass.

The one exception is Columbo, who fans know as a unique take on the mystery genre. Instead of guessing who did what, we have to guess how Columbo is going to politely get a killer to trip up with the small clues the Lt. finds. The highlight of most of these episodes is the dialogue between Columbo and the killer. I used to watch some of these on Family Channel and now I'm watching the DVD sets. It's a great show despite the fact that the seventies really date it. Sometimes I want to laugh at the styles and decorations.

My favorite episode has got to be the episode where the killer was head of the police department. It's a crazy episode, and the way Columbo catches the guy is a great come-uppance.

So today I was watching the last episode of the Season Five set, and I saw what has to be the first really bad episode of the series. It's just plain weird, and not in a good way. It's entitled, "The Last Salute to Commodore", and it tries something new, but it fails. At this poin I'd like to say

SPOILER ALERT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Ok, so there's a guy who's old, bitter, and only likes boats. His daughter is a drunk and his son-in-law is Robert Vaughn. There's some other people thrown in that may or may not be important. Anyway, after the Commodore tells everyone off and makes it clear he wants to sell out of whatever business it was that made everyone rich, he's dead. Son-in-law drags his body and dumps it into the sea.

So there's our episode, right? Robert Vaughn is our guest killer and Columbo will figure it out by the end, right? No. This episode throws a twist at us at the 30 minute mark, but there's a problem before getting there.

This episode introduces two sidekicks to help out Columbo. There's one old guy and there's a young kid named Mac. These two guys make you wonder if the writers were considering a spin-off. It's a good thing they didn't do that, because the conversations between these guys leads to a lot of repetition. It's almost like someone had bad hearing or if these three were trying to ad-libb the clues. It doesn't help that Peter Falk played Columbo differently. He's too goofy at times and his acting becomes distracting.

One of the defining scenes is when he's asking a guy on top of a boat for clues. Columbo spends an entire minute or trying to shout over a background buzzsaw or some damn thing. If it was meant to be funny or cute, it fails, although I did have fun calling out, "Fred. Fred!" for a while.

The big twist is that Robert Vaughn is killed soon after Columbo and gang confront him with damning evidence. The evidence is so damning and the confrontation is so direct that you wonder why the hell the episode isn't over already. The son-in-lawss death reveals that this is the first episode of Columbo to be a who-done-it. Now we've wasted the guest star and set up a mystery where a number of nobodies could be the killer (the wife is such an obvious suspect that she's clearly a red-herring.) I'm not a fan of the genre, but I do know that this is a poor way to set up a mystery.

There's one clue that's so obvious that I felt embarrassed watching the actors pretend they were confused by it. The commodore had stencils spelling out SAILS. There was also a stencil with a hole in it, as Peter Falk put it while trying to pretend it wasn't stupid to think that way. He and the other two investigators were rearranging the letters but not getting anything other then SAILS (At one poin, they spell ASSLI, and Columbo laughs. I'm not kidding.) I felt insulted by this scene, because we just met a character earlier named LISA, and the "hole" was clearly a period, but they really pretended that this was a huge clue to be revealed later.

There was also a scene where Columbo made a big deal about stuff that needed to be dusted, but it never played a roll later on. And of course, there was the commodore's watch, the final clue. After Columbo gathered the four suspects together, he made each suspect listen to it. While most said stuff like "So what?" and "big deal!", the murderer said, "That's not it." Columbo then reveals that the watch was altered so that it was now ticking, which reveals the killer's guilt. Not only is the murderer an idiot, but that's a mighty underwhelming final clue. It just doesn't seem plausible.


Luckily, I have the Season 6 and 7 set, and I'm sure that this was just a failed experiment instead of a sign of things to come. I hope that the series continues to be good, or at least gives me an episode so dumb that I could review at a future time.