Monday, November 20, 2017

Day 246: Columbo, Columbo Goes to the Guillotine




Show: Columbo
Episode Particulars: S8EP1, “Columbo Goes to the Guillotine”, original airdate February 6th, 1989.

 Summary: Elliot Blake (Anthony Andrews) claims to be a psychic, and has been working with a government institute to monitor ESP. Said institute is dangerously close to losing its funding, so Blake has convinced the woman in charge (Karen Austin) to fudge the results. Still unconvinced, representatives from the government bring in Max Dyson (Anthony Zerbe), a magician with a talent for ferreting out psychics. Unbeknownst to anyone, though, Dyson and Blake know each other, having spent time in an Ugandan prison together. The two of them cook up a scheme to fool the government bigwigs, but Blake, convinced that Dyson sold him out and kept him in prison for another three years, murders Dyson that night by cutting his head off with a magician’s guillotine. At which point, of course, a familiar face shows up to investigate…


Standalone Thoughts: While I’ll preface this by saying that I did enjoy the episode, I have to admit that I’m a little surprised at the tonal shift that’s on display here. I know I should have expected it, given that it was now the late 1980’s and technology, fashion, and sensibilities had changed, but the shift wasn’t a direction I had been expecting. Based on everything I’ve heard, the 1970’s weren’t a great decade, and the 80’s brought some life and energy back to society. But that’s not what happened with Columbo. 1970’s Columbo was both physically and tonally light most of the time, with only a few scenes taking place at night and everything having a very easy-going vibe, despite the subject matter (perhaps Falk’s performance had something to do with that). This episode, by contrast, has a lot of nighttime scenes, and the combination of the lighting and the synth music on the soundtrack winds up giving it a mysterious, sometimes dangerous air. Once Columbo enters the picture, things kind of revert back to the old days, but there’s a long stretch there where it feels like you’re watching a thriller or a horror movie. I kind of like the atmosphere on its own, but I’m not entirely sure it fits with the Columbo mindset.

Once you wrap your head around the change, though, the episode works pretty well. Falk is still the same Columbo we always knew, just with more grey in his hair and the need for reading glasses. And for some reason, I really liked Anthony Andrews’ performance as Blake. He gave off an air of suave confidence that could feel menacing in the right circumstances, and I enjoyed watching him every time he was onscreen. Then again, I have a weakness for British accents and tall dark gentlemen, so that may account for it too. Even so, I feel like he and Falk bounced off each other well, and that sort of rapport makes for good viewing.

This is a decent start for the new age of Columbo, and I’ll be curious to see if the other episodes, especially the 1989 ones, have the same feel. Like I said, a bit of dark atmosphere is fine, but it works best in small doses. Mixing it with Columbo could eventually lead to a tonal dissonance that doesn’t quite work for me. As a one or two-off experiment, though, I’ll happily take it.

Number of “Columbo-isms”: 3/6. There’s the car (honestly looking in much better condition than the last time we saw it), several references to Mrs. Columbo, and a “Just one more thing”. I found the “one more thing” in particular charming because the minute he says it, Blake gets a smile on his face. In-universe, he was probably just putting on the smile to give off an air of being friendly and helpful. Given that this was the first time Columbo had said those words in over a decade, though, I’d like to think that in the real world, Anthony Andrews was taking enormous pleasure in hearing them again. I know that’s how I would have felt if I’d been watching the episode in 1989.

Other: *I initially found the entire premise of this episode a little shaky. Would the CIA and the Pentagon really be interested in psychics? Then they said that they’d heard the Soviets were doing tests involving ESP, and all became clear. I get the impression both the US and the USSR did some very stupid things in the name of one-upping each other, so this felt like par for the course in that context. It still seems a little weird, but at least not entirely implausible.

*Just to make sure I haven’t been in fandom too long; we’re supposed to infer that there was a romantic relationship between Dyson and Blake, right? The dialogue and some of their interactions really make me feel like that was supposed to be present, although I definitely wouldn’t go so far as to say it was the primary motive for Blake wanting to murder Dyson. Like I said, though, I’d like a second opinion just to be sure.

*Columbo gets a dramatic reveal by lighting his cigar in a darkened car, so the light illuminates his face. I understand why, though; after being gone for so long, the crew wanted to call attention to the fact that he’d come back. It’s hard not to resist the temptation to do something like that.

*I was a little disappointed that Columbo seemed to have no memory of encountering a smaller version of the guillotine trick back in “Now You See Him…”, because as you know by now, I like little continuity nods like that. But then it occurred to me that, according to Wikipedia, Columbo was on a new network (ABC as opposed to NBC, which had run all the prior episodes), and therefore the old stuff probably couldn’t be mentioned, because it was still under the copyright of the old network. Still, I wonder if that episode didn’t partially inspire the writers of this episode…

*Earlier in the episode, we’re told that Blake changed his name after he got out of the Ugandan prison. It makes sense, because he didn’t want his criminal record following him around. But later, Columbo reads through a dossier from the institute and notices that Blake was born in Uganda, and wonders if there might be a connection between Blake and Dyson thanks to that. Blake deflects it by pointing out that he left Uganda when he was six, but all I could think was, “How stupid are to you change your name and presumably your whole life but leave a potentially incriminating detail like that in your profile?” Granted, I know nothing about how changing your name works, but clearly his old name wasn’t in the dossier, so why couldn’t he have gotten someone to fudge a birth certificate saying he was born in Wales or something? It just seems like something you should do if you want to be better safe than sorry and have a, shall we say, tilted moral compass.

Would This Hold Up in Court?: Although Columbo can claim an attempted murder charge, I think the way he obtained it would raise a few eyebrows. So I guess it depends on the defense’s case and the sympathies of the jury, but my money’s on no.


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