#im just sad columbo isnt real

[pelleas-at-castle-nox]

Watched one of the final episodes (of the original run) of columbo tonight. The killer involved was a therapist, particularly one who charges for public courses about controlling your life. His scheme is that he trains his 2 dogs to kill his friend and colleague who had slept with his wife (who it's also implied and all but confirmed that he also killed 6 months ago) by making it look as if the dogs just... Spontaneously decided to attack him.

This man also tries to kill literally every character who appears in a scene with him with the exception of one guard, including columbo. It's not a particularly clever murder considering the crazy amount of evidence he leaves, to the point in the deconstruction scene, columbo flat out calls the killer an idiot. His motive was obscenely easy to glean (evidence of his affair was in the victim's home, already bad enough but then he tries to steal them and gets caught in the act), his method for training the dogs was obvious and his only way to cover for that was to say "uh no I wasn't doing that"

It's got me thinking, both in the micro and macrocosm of the show. Throughout Columbo many of the killers are psychologists, I'd need to double back to check but I feel like there's at least 1 per season, and notably the original pilot featured a psychologists as the killer.

Between this episode and the last one I watched (whether they were one right after the other isn't completely clear) there was a heavy theme presented in that both cases involved a previous murder going unsolved. In the previous episode, a famous author's beloved niece is killed by her husband, and because the killer was never caught, the author takes matters into her own hands and kills him herself. In this episode, the fact that his murder of his wife goes unsolved leads directly into him being able to kill again. In the first episode, the author laments at the end after she's been caught "if only you'd been the one to investigate my niece's death, then we wouldn't be here." Obviously saying that she felt that if columbo had done that investigation, her own victim wouldn't have gotten away with his crime. It goes unaddressed on this episode, but I couldn't help thinking the same thing. He'd already killed once, and it wasn't caught, and as stated in another recent episode, murder begets murder, "even when you don't know it, you start to think it."

Perhaps it's a subtle sadness and recognition of the fantasy of columbo. It's easy to think that you can't commit a murder in LA in this world because if you do, Columbo will show up much like a vengeful specter and hound you til your crimes see the light of day, but these episodes are a grim reminder, he's just one man, and even a case as obvious as this one still took so much time and effort for columbo to actually be able to PROVE what was so inherently obvious.

Perhaps read uncharitably, that could be read as a nugget of copoganda at the core of columbo. "Isn't it stupid that it's so hard to convict someone who it obviously just feels guilty? It shouldn't be so hard to arrest people like that!" Which is a terrible stance to take, and I'm sure one that, intentional or not, many people in the 70s and beyond probably took as the gospel of Columbo.

Personally I don't think that was the writer's intentions, at least not from how they talk about the stories they wrote in interviews (a quote from one of them went along the of "people love to see capitalists pay for their crimes") personally I think it's just a bitter sweet element that poked through the fantastic veneer of columbo, a sad reminder that columbo ISN'T a cop in the true sense. He doesn't carry a gun, he doesn't say a thing until he's ready to say it and not a moment before. He refuses promotions and prosperity because that would hinder his work.

Maybe there are, or were a detective or two out there who was as devoted to the truth as columbo was on the screen, but even if such a man exists, columbo, the show itself, doesn't want you to forget that if he did, he'd hated by his peers.