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Tag: Donald Pleasance

An Evil-Smelling and Blinding Gas

Episode Card- Episode 70, Murder is a Parlor Game

Well, we’re back from our break with a Mrs. Columbo. Before you hit us, though, wait! “Murder is a Parlor Game” stars Donald Pleasance! That must mean it’s good, right? Right? Nope! Go ahead and hit away! In this episode, Pleasance plays a retired Scotland Yard detective who lives in the Wee Britain section of LA, an acclaimed true-crime author and sometime instructor in women’s self-defense. When a wrongly-accused suspect from a past case comes back to haunt him, there’s a struggle, a gunshot and one of the sorriest attempts of a crime scene coverup in recorded modern history. Will Mrs. Columbo piece it together, working the weekly penny saver beat? No, not really! She just sort of stumbles upon things while snooping around and… oh, just watch the thing or listen to us.

Back again are writers Jennifer Wright (Harper’s BazaarGet Well Soon: History’s Worst Plagues and the Heroes Who Fought Them) and Daniel Kibblesmith (Late Show with Stephen Colbert) with ideas to fix the show, a killer Owen Wilson impression, the “Mrs. Columbo is Dumb” theory, and a free name for your ska band. ALSO- Viewer Mail, with tech tips, analogues to The Wire and speculation about the future of this very podcast.

Liquid Filth!

Poor Adrian Carsini (Donald Pleasance). When we meet him in “Any Old Port In a Storm,” all he wants is to run the family winery, play the big shot with his wine nerd friends and decant the days away. When Carsini’s playboy half-brother threatens to sell the winery’s land to the Two Buck Chucks up the road, he flies into a rage, mostly killing him with a solid blow to the head, then finishing the job by suffocating him in the wine cellar while jetting off to NYC for the weekend. Columbo coincidences his way into the case when it turns from a missing person gig into a homicide. Steven Goss (Drunk Columbo) joins in to talk about a solid episode from a solid season.