(no subject)
A few weeks ago, I had one of those dreams that stuck. It was some TV show that never aired, or a movie that was never released, that had characters from Star Trek TOS and TNG, and everyone looked about as old as they would in 1985. But the only thing I remembered apart from that was that it was discontinuous from the Trek universe, like someone threw the characters into another ship in another universe and nobody noticed.
I got a similar feeling when I watched some of the later Columbo episodes.
Columbo has a simple formula: someone with a lot to lose ends up committing a desperate murder, and covering it up pretty well. A homicide detective in a trenchcoat shows up, just has a few routine questions that are easily answered. As he's leaving, one more question that's not so easily answered, but he seems to buy it. He seems easy to fool; if he's not dazzled by some new technology lying around, the perp can come up with a red herring on the fly to send him elsewhere. But he keeps showing up, and the next thing you know, he has an airtight case against the murderer, and the credits roll before the cuffs are even on.
But then, in later episodes, they stray from the format. There's a kidnapping at his nephew's wedding, and he's doing legwork on that, and we don't see the perp until the second act, and his motives turn out to be just a crazy guy with an obsession with marrying and then murdering a supermodel. But the more embarrassing one was "Undercover," in which a homicide detective is somehow recruited to recover some stolen money for Ed Begley Jr, and Columbo puts on slightly different shabby clothes and bullshits his way into a deal with some guy who has another part of a picture puzzle. He gets hit on the head and goes to the hospital, and he's really whiny when he finds and confronts the guy that did that, and that's at the end of act two and I fell asleep. The tone's all wrong.
Now, there's a couple of times where they play with the format. In "Rest in Peace, Mrs. Columbo", it opens at his wife's funeral. There's one where we see one murder get executed but another one gets solved. The one guest starring Leonard Nimoy has a second victim that stayed alive because his surgical thread hasn't dissolved yet. They still have the formula, and they still have the tone.
I got a similar feeling when I watched some of the later Columbo episodes.
Columbo has a simple formula: someone with a lot to lose ends up committing a desperate murder, and covering it up pretty well. A homicide detective in a trenchcoat shows up, just has a few routine questions that are easily answered. As he's leaving, one more question that's not so easily answered, but he seems to buy it. He seems easy to fool; if he's not dazzled by some new technology lying around, the perp can come up with a red herring on the fly to send him elsewhere. But he keeps showing up, and the next thing you know, he has an airtight case against the murderer, and the credits roll before the cuffs are even on.
But then, in later episodes, they stray from the format. There's a kidnapping at his nephew's wedding, and he's doing legwork on that, and we don't see the perp until the second act, and his motives turn out to be just a crazy guy with an obsession with marrying and then murdering a supermodel. But the more embarrassing one was "Undercover," in which a homicide detective is somehow recruited to recover some stolen money for Ed Begley Jr, and Columbo puts on slightly different shabby clothes and bullshits his way into a deal with some guy who has another part of a picture puzzle. He gets hit on the head and goes to the hospital, and he's really whiny when he finds and confronts the guy that did that, and that's at the end of act two and I fell asleep. The tone's all wrong.
Now, there's a couple of times where they play with the format. In "Rest in Peace, Mrs. Columbo", it opens at his wife's funeral. There's one where we see one murder get executed but another one gets solved. The one guest starring Leonard Nimoy has a second victim that stayed alive because his surgical thread hasn't dissolved yet. They still have the formula, and they still have the tone.