Who would have thought Columbo could be obsessed with women’s underwear? He arrives at the scene of the crime and heads straight for a draw full of “panties”, delighted to discover they are the same brand as his wife’s. Later he fingers the evidence of the victim’s panties, and in the end it’s panties that crack the case for him. Will they stand up in court? Not without help from a grumpy looking mannequin.

The Motive

Wayne Jennings is a kept man, in a relationship with a rich author. He’s also a ladies’ man, stringing along so many women that he should be an expert in panties… but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. His girlfriend/author Theresa has decided to marry him, but it seems she has found out about his cheating and phones him up in a rage (or so it seems – this is a twisty bit of the story but ultimately the details have little bearing on the case other than a dramatic bit of story padding for later). That million dollar insurance policy is looking like it might get cancelled…

The Murder

Yet another gunshot murder, with what appears to be a fairly weak alibi – driving from LA to Palm Springs to commit the crime, but making a couple of phone calls before and after to pretend to be elsewhere, making sure the time of the calls is noticed. It’s all very clumsy. But the really clever bit is something we don’t get to find out about until much later in the episode: Wayne shoots Theresa in her sleep, waits half an hour, and then shoots the dead body again, making it look like he arrived with murderous intent, but somebody else had got there first. It’s fiendishly clever, and according to Columbo it’s not a crime to shoot a dead body. Maybe “intended murder” isn’t a crime across the pond? Who knows.

The Mistakes

There’s some chatter about the socks Theresa is wearing, which apparently narrows down the list of possible suspects to the two people who knew she would wear those when she was about to go on a flight and knew she was going on said flight. Those two people are Wayne, and Theresa’s sister Jess. The list of two is narrowed down to one by the panties being on back-to-front, which is, according to Columbo, only a mistake a man would make. In this weird mess of a story, that’s about it for the evidence that matters, unless you count the dismantling of the weak alibi and the forensic evidence concerning the gunshots.

Columbo

Just why is he so obsessed with underwear? They way he spots the label in the photo is a great bit of detection, but that doesn’t require the painfully obvious attempt to set up that moment in advance, by making Columbo some kind of a panties expert. The writer even tries to make a sort of a running joke out of it.

Just One More Thing

Before we get to how bad this episode is, and it’s moment of true brilliance, let’s dispense with the panties issue. Just about the most important aspect of any Columbo episode is the gotcha moment. It’s got to be earned by some great detection, it’s got to be clever, it’s got to be something that would actually convict the murderer, and it’s got to make some kind of sense. This is one of the weakest ever examples, a piece of evidence that would only be a stepping stone towards the gotcha in any other episode, rather than the key deduction that closes the case. There are plenty of reasons the panties could be on back-to-front. Getting dressed in the dark quickly while disturbed by an intruder is probably the most obvious, but also unless I’m misunderstanding this meandering story, Jess actually says she tried to get her sister drunk enough to reject Wayne earlier in the evening. Would a drunken woman be guaranteed to dress herself correctly? And apart from anything else, some people are just simply ditzy, and that probably applies double to an author whose head is full of stories.

The Verdict

One thing that’s a rarity in Columbo episodes is bad acting. It happens, but it’s usually an isolated problem with one character, and almost never a main star. This is quite an extraordinary effort, because almost everyone is a bad actor. Brenda Vaccaro as Jess has to be seen to be believed, and her sudden decision to lock lips with the man she hates and then go off on a shopping spree with him is entirely unconvincing. I’m slightly more forgiving of Andrew Stevens as Wayne, because most of his bad acting falls into the category of the murderer pretending to be upset, or just doing a really bad job of dropping his alibi into the conversations, so I think he’s actually trying to do something logical with the role, albeit with no subtlety at all.

The one saving grace of this story is the big twist in the middle. Up to that point, it has all played out like a regular Columbo episode, and then it suddenly looks like everything we thought we knew was wrong, and somebody got there before the murderer. It brings the episode to life for a while, but ultimately it all collapses into a mess of circumstantial evidence, and a script that simply misunderstands the strengths of the show. If you turn Columbo into just any old detective, ordering around a team of underlings and trying to assemble all the main characters in a room like he’s in an Agatha Christie, the whole thing swiftly loses its unique appeal. Fiddling with panties wherever he goes, Lieutenant Columbo has never been more disappointing to watch than this. His case against the murderer is far from being sewn up. It’s falling apart at the seams, inside-out, back-to-front, and the label is showing.   RP

Read next in the Junkyard… Columbo Goes to College