Just One More Thing: The Most Crucial Game

A retrospective by Forrest Humphrey

Paul Hanlon (Robert Culp) is a premier football team manager, and he's grown tired of the team's young, immature, party animal owner, Eric Wanger. So one day he stages an alibi, heads out to the young man's home, and bashes his skull in with an ice block while Wagner is swimming. With the murder weapon safely melting in the pool and the murder looking like an accident, Hanlon escapes, and its up to our battered Lt. Columbo to figure out how Hanlon did it.

What I like about this episode is how truly stumped Columbo is for most of the runtime, seemingly unable to get around the villain's alibi. He does find his first clue pretty quickly, reinforcing how intelligent he is with the unorthodox way he gets tipped off. This leads to another great game of cat and mouse between our two leads, and as with my previous episode, it remains amusing to see the villain so aggravated by the bumbling detective.

I wont spoil the final section of course, but Columbo's final “eureka” moment is quite satisfying, and the last moments are so very gratifying for it. Peter Falks' charm continues to shine here, playing his run down beat cop character perfectly. Culp also puts in a great turn as the murderer, tossing out convincing excuses with efficiency, he keeps Columbo stumped for an impressive amount of time. Overall, another very satisfying episode.

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Cinema Basement

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