Columbo: "A Stitch in Crime"

Kate says I LOVE Columbo. It is the ultimate relaxing television. It also substantiates my position that television without progression (just plot) can be great. Columbo is nothing if not formula, and it's so fun!

"A Stitch in Crime" is not one of my favorites, but it is a fairly good representative of the formula: bad guy feels trapped and commits murders; Columbo involves bad guy in the investigation; Columbo discovers a slip-up on the bad guy's part. Although the identity of the bad guy isn't kept from us, the slip-up usually is until the very end.

The bad guy in this case is a doctor played by Leonard Nimoy. (This episode is a kind of precursor to Murder Diagnosis which moved the entire detection process into the hospital.) Nimoy plays a cold, sneering bad guy. Watching his bad guy establishes what a fundamentally warm character Spock actually is!

And of course, Columbo is there, doing his thing. The dry dialog exchange between Nimoy and Falk is quite good and very funny. At one point, Columbo says, "Hey, is there any coffee on this floor?" and the doctor snaps, "No." It isn't the line that's funny, so much as the tone and pace of the dialog.

Falk as Columbo is, of course, pitch perfect. His car and hard-boiled egg show up in this episode as well as his trench coat and HAIR (I love his messy hair). The dog doesn't show up, unfortunately.

His squeamishness regarding blood also shows up. Columbo has several "real" idiosyncrasies; many times, it is hard to tell if Columbo is really the way he presents himself or whether he is simply trying to lull or otherwise mislead the bad guy/gal. The distaste for blood (and guns), however, shows up even when he doesn't need to mislead anyone. So it's a "real" trait, and Falk is very good at doing the squeamish act.

If you think Columbo is your style, you don't need to watch the episodes/movies in order. However, you may find the first episode interesting. I didn't suggest it for this review because Falk plays Columbo as much more restrained than he later becomes. However, it is extremely interesting and does a good job establishing the concept of Columbo. He's kind of crystallized in pop culture as the grandfather in Princess Bride (which is wonderful), but even Falk was extremely young once.

Mike says a mystery, without the mystery, is really just a game of cat and mouse. And while it is interesting, there's not a lot of suspense in knowing how everything is going to turn out.

I've never really watched Columbo, but I did enjoy the episode. Falk does a great job of making Columbo both deep and immediately easy to understand. His little quirks are funny, and I love the idea of making the bad guy twitch. Nimoy is also great in this role.

All in all, I don't really have a lot to say about Columbo: I love the character, and I think he deserves his iconic status. The episode also taught me what an Inverted Mystery is (when the evil doer is revealed in the beginning instead of the end), which I had seen before, but I had no idea it had a label.

CSI or other crime shows will sometimes change things up by inverting them, making a certain episode a cat and mouse instead of full fledged whodunnit. I think the idea works well when it's used to create diversity, but I don't know how I would feel watching the same thing again and again.... I'm sure it's relaxing, but I've often felt that the only difference between the living and the dead was the depth of their relaxation.