I suspect this particular story was chosen so that Peter Falk could have fun with the undercover scenes, pretending to be different characters while he interacts with various lowlifes. One of the character traits that has nearly always defined Columbo is his refusal to carry a gun. He is hugely out of character for most of the episode, even becoming a gun-toting badass for one scene, which feels desperately wrong. He’s a cog in a wheel, rather than a shabby lone wolf. The gritty serial murder case, without a key suspect for Columbo to pester, forces the Lieutenant to change his tactics from his usual modus operandi, and he is acting as part of a team throughout. Undercover, in contrast, doesn’t really have any reason to exist at all. ![]() Instead, we had an interesting insight into how Columbo works as part of a team, and we saw his keen intelligence put to a different use, with the stakes as high as they could be: the life of a member of his family. No Time to Die was a qualified success, surprisingly, but I think that worked because it was personal to Columbo, and was just so different that there wasn’t even a murder to investigate. The choice to adapt a couple of Ed McBain’s police procedural novels was always an odd thing to do, simply because Columbo isn’t a police procedural show. This is most definitely not one of those. I’m all for a long-running series trying new things, but it has reached a point where a Columbo episode that feels anything like a Columbo episode has become a rare treat. I didn’t reckon with the 90s episodes, which have almost forced me to make the usual format the exception rather than the rule. ![]() When I originally decided on the format for these articles, it made sense to write about each episode in the order that events take place, starting with the motive, then the murder, then the mistakes the killer makes, etc.
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