The Shabby Detective: Yet Another Columbo Podcast

Mike and Chris close the book on Season Seven with "The Conspirators," a 1978 episode that takes Columbo somewhere the series rarely ventured: the murky, morally weighted world of real geopolitical conflict. Clive Revill — Tony-nominated stage actor, Matilda's trainer in the boxing kangaroo film of the same name, and the original voice of Emperor Palpatine in The Empire Strikes Back — plays Joe Devlin, an Irish poet and public charmer who moonlights as a gun-runner for the IRA. 

Devlin doesn't irritate Columbo the way most killers do — he disarms him. They exchange verse, play darts, share whiskey, and trade jokes about their respective cultures, two sides of the same immigrant coin. We weigh whether all that conviviality comes at the cost of tension. An episode this pleasant can sometimes forget to be dangerous.

Directed by Leo Penn and written by Howard Berk, "The Conspirators" is not Season Seven's sharpest hour.  As the last Columbo of the 1970s, the last on NBC, and the last new case the Lieutenant would face for nearly eleven years, it leaves a lot to be desired. 

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What's the perfect alibi? Being at the doctor's office while your dogs do the dirty work. Mike White and Chris Stachiw sink their teeth into Season Seven's "How to Dial a Murder," a 1978 episode that features one of the most ingeniously gruesome murder methods in the entire Columbo canon.
 
Nicol Williamson commands the screen as Dr. Eric Mason, a behavioral psychologist with iron self-control, a house full of movie memorabilia, and two very well-trained Dobermans named Laurel and Hardy. When he discovers that his late wife had been having an affair with his best friend Dr. Charles Hunter (Joel Fabiani), Mason devises a kill that's equal parts Pavlov and Orson Welles: dial home, ask a question about Citizen Kane, and let the dogs handle the rest.  

There's also the small matter of Columbo's complicated feelings about the dogs — and whether they deserve what the legal system has in store for them.

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Hell hath no fury like a TV executive scorned. Mike and Chris train their cameras on Season Seven's "Make Me a Perfect Murder," a 1978 entry that puts Trish Van Devere center stage as Kay Freestone — a network programmer who, after being passed over for the big promotion by her boss and lover Mark McAndrews (Laurence Luckinbill), decides that a well-timed gunshot during a screening room preview is a more satisfying career move than updating her résumé.

Our hosts wrestle with the episode's real weaknesses: a runtime that overstays its welcome by a good twenty minutes, bogged down by a meandering subplot involving Lainie Kazan's has-been singer and one too many scenes of Columbo fiddling with TV equipment.

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As Mike and Chris continue to traipse through the controversial official final season of Columbo with the Shabby Detective returning to the kitchen to face off against Louis Jourdan as a snotty TV chef and food critic who uses blowfish poison to take out a victim of blackmail who was going to go public.

Is the all-star cast and steady directing from Jonathan Demme enough to save the episode?

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Mike White and Chris Stachiw kick off season seven of Columbo with a close look at “Try and Catch Me,” where literary titan Abigail Mitchell (Ruth Gordon) believes she’s engineered the perfect murder—cool, elegant, and legally, uh, airtight—only to underestimate a rumpled detective who thrives on patience and psychological pressure.

The conversation delves into Columbo's new show-runner, giving the Lieutenant's catchphrases to others, and how a skilled mystery writer can bungle a crime so badly.

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