Day 253: Columbo, Rest in Peace, Mrs. Columbo

Show: Columbo

Episode Particulars: S9EP4, “Rest in Peace, Mrs. Columbo”, original airdate March 31^st, 1990.

 Summary: Vivian Dimitri (Helen Shaver) is a woman carrying several grudges. Ten years ago, her husband got desperate enough to embezzle money from his clients, only to be ratted out by his friend Charlton Chambers (Edward Winter), investigated by Columbo, and sent to jail for ten years, where he died of a heart attack. Now that she’s recovered from the shock of his death, Dimitri is out for revenge against both Chambers and Columbo. She handles the first by straight up shooting Chambers, who is now her boss (and aware of who she is, although he didn’t know that she knew he was the one who ratted out her husband). She handles the second by trying to get chummy with Columbo when he comes to investigate Chambers’ death, and taking a particular interest in his wife. And given the title of the episode, I think you can guess what she has in mind.

Standalone Thoughts: This episode is full of interesting ideas. Having the murderer target Columbo, having the bulk of the story be told through flashback, having the murderer be connected to one of Columbo’s previous cases…all of these hooks could carry their own episode. This episode decided to smash them all together, and I think the result is much weaker for it.

To begin with, the flashback structure isn’t very well-handled. We open with Mrs. Columbo’s funeral, apparently to prove that the title wasn’t just for shock value, and then slowly zoom in on Dimitri, listening to her thoughts before we get a dissolve and are in the flashback, watching her start to set up her plan. So far so good. After the first commercial break, we’re back at the funeral, and now we zoom in on the receptionist for the real estate office, DeDe (Teresa Ganzel), who thinks about how sorry she feels for Columbo before we flash back to when he arrived at the office to investigate Chambers’ death. This is where we start to run into problems, because the flashback quickly starts showing us things that DeDe wasn’t present for or was very unlikely to have overheard. This happens again with the third and fourth flashbacks (one of which features a character who’s barely involved in the story), and then they just drop the flashback idea entirely. There was a way they could have made this work, but the way they chose clearly wasn’t it.

Secondly, the episode tips its hand too much. Columbo figures out almost immediately that Dimitri is the killer because there are too many holes in her story, and has confided his suspicions to his assistant Sergeant Brady (Tom Isbell) before the halfway mark of the episode. Since we know he suspects her, it makes everything that follows seem increasingly contrived, especially since a lot of viewers will suspect that (potential SPOILER ALERT) it’s highly unlikely that anything’s actually happened to Mrs. Columbo, because it’s a little too dark for this show (END SPOILERS). While you know from my Poirot reviews that I’m all for episodes playing fair with us, making it less obvious that Columbo knew what was going on might have allowed for more tension. Instead, it starts to feel like the episode is unnecessarily dragging things out.

Finally, the way they handle material surrounding Dimitri’s character is a bit suspect. It’s established very early on that Dimitri isn’t mentally healthy, given that she gets a call from her doctor (Roscoe Lee Brown) because he’s concerned she didn’t check in with him. A little later, it’s all but stated that she spent some time in a sanatorium. And then much later in the episode, Columbo talks to her doctor, and the doctor, who at least tries not to violate doctor-patient confidentiality but does it anyway, basically informs Columbo that she’s got an unhealthy obsession with getting revenge on the men who wronged her. With all this evidence, it starts to feel like Admiral Plot Device was in charge, because it just seems highly unlikely that her doctor would have really allowed her to leave the sanatorium, much less take a job working for the man she wanted dead. Plus, it’s hard to tell if we’re supposed to sympathize with Dimitri or not, and combined with everything else I’ve discussed, that makes this episode really hard to parse.

While this isn’t exactly a bad episode, it’s definitely the weakest of the season, even though some editing (both of the script and of the film) might have prevented that. You can’t win them all, of course, but given that they were trying to go for something very different from the norm, this was a bad episode to slip up on. I’ll still give them points for trying, though.

Number of “Columbo-isms”: 3/6, plus a brief mention of Dog. Obviously, Mrs. Columbo comes up a lot in this episode, but we also get a few glimpses of the car and two “Just one more things”, one of which is literal. Someone also describes Columbo as “fumbling”, but I don’t think that counts for the trope. Also, Columbo does shed his normal brown suit and raincoat for a black suit, which obviously makes sense in context but is always odd to see. At least he looks pretty good in it…?

Other: *The rain that takes place during the funeral scene may be atmospheric, but it’s very clearly fake. Not only does Southern California not get a lot of rain (although perhaps it was different in 1990), but there’s a shot that just makes it look like someone deployed a rain machine during a sunny day. I know you can get rain and sun at the same time on occasion, but this was just too much of a muchness.

*Columbo mentions that he and Mrs. Columbo never had kids, which directly contradicts what he said in “Any Old Port in a Storm”. As always when it comes to Columbo and continuity about his family, though, we should always take it with a grain of salt. That is a pretty big thing to make up, though…

*Columbo whips out his glasses at one point to examine something, and he has to hold them up to his face like a monocle because one of the arms broke off. That made me smile, because that just seems so very right for Columbo, even if we never find out how they came to be broken.

*The crew put this tombstone in the shot on purpose, didn’t they…

I don’t know if that’s a prop or an actual tombstone at the location, but there’s no way that’s just a coincidence.

Would This Hold Up in Court?: No, for a wide variety of reasons. Not only did Columbo repeat several times that he had no solid evidence against Dimitri, but the way he finally caught her was unquestionably a setup, and a very time-consuming and expensive setup at that when you factor everything in. There is one piece of evidence that might result in a conviction, but the setup may cause a problem when it gets explained to the jury. I guess it’s all going to depend on who the jury’s more sympathetic to.