This was interesting, and it would have been better if they had not wasted time in showing us their 'technological wonders' that leave Columbo's mouth open... I mean, it was 1978, it was really so amazing to see a line on a monitor making shapes in rhythm with the music???
Anyway, I liked the protagonist here, so sorry she chose to become a murderer out of vengeance. Kay works on tv, she just finished the production of a new movie, 'the professional', and she has a love affair with her direct boss Mark. When he tells her he's promoted to go work in New York, she's all happy saying 'when do we leave?' but he goes alone. She doesn't let this throw her down, instead asks happy again that this means she will get his position once he leaves, but he tells her that he doesn't think her ready for that, because most of her success is due to intuition... which might be his expert opinion as a professional, yes, but it also makes him sound like a jerk, in a job like that isn't good intuition a good thing after all? Anyway, he says he got her a new Mercedes, as a goodbye gift I suppose, and she leaves, not before he jokes showing her his gun asking her if she wants to shoot him.
I think that's the gun she used, although I'm not so sure when did she take that.
She plans everything very carefully. She has a man work all night so that there will be someone hearing the shot and alerting everyone immediately, to testify the exact time of death. She makes a tape with her voice to remind her how much time left she has, a four minutes countdown. She tells the operator to go and pick something up, that she'll stay there to make the reel change - since she tampered with the clock on the projector, he thinks he'll have to make the change in two minutes time, but she'll do it instead. He goes and immediately she starts her plan. She has four minutes, not two, before the change, so she goes down, enters Mark's office, shoots him, hides the gun above the elevator's roof, then hurries back, only slightly slowed down by a guard that stopped to watch pictures of nude women on a magazine. She gets back just in time to make the change, but the projectionist enters right that instant so she has to throw the glove on the floor. It's one of the gloves he uses for his ship-model building hobby, after all.
Everything seems perfect. As soon as Columbo starts talking to her, as always he immediately starts suspecting her, but it takes him time to realise the motive and the way she did it.
Colombo believes in Poirot's style very much, (with the difference that Colombo does everything himself, instead of having someone else do the walking): he pays a lot of attention to people's reactions, and talks a lot with a lot of people paying attention to everything they say because while talking casually often people can say things that turn out very interesting/useful.
In this case, the projectionist - who dislikes this kind of movie - rant against 'the professional', saying there's too much blood in these movies, and that the other day (of the murder) he came back, took a look, and saw a man shooting himself in the head. He didn't like that.
Later, Colombo goes to see if a repairman was able to repair his tv - he went in with his dog in his arms, I can't understand why they can't let him walk on a leash, poor thing; Colombo said that it's the dog that watches tv in his house, and that they wanted to see Valerie's show - a dancer who should have appeared live on tv but she was a mess Kay cancelled her show for the night, ordering to air 'the professional' instead. The man was still working on the tv and yet the tv was on (....?...), and Colombo watched a minute of it, not surprisingly the bit he needed to see, all heroes need a bit of luck right?
He sees the sign that signals that the reel must be changed, and immediately after the scene when the man shoots himself, which means that Kay had just changed it when the man arrived (instead of two minutes before).
By the way, she will get fired over that. I thought it absurd too, actually, and I'm not a tv producer, but that movie was new and she burned it by showing it unexpectedly like that. Bad move.
Luck helps him again when he's at Mark's house and a guy delivers their laundry (what a coincidence) and he notices that there's a woman's jacket, not a man's, because of the way it's buttoned.
He understands that Kay had a relationship with him, and everything now makes sense.
Towards the end, Kay and Colombo are in the elevator together when she sees the gun up there, so after he gets out she goes back in and takes it, and then she will throw it off her car.
What she didn't know is that the police had found it already, and had placed another one where she could see it. They checked, it was there before she went in, it wasn't there anymore when she got out.
After being exposed, she says she's not relieved at all that it's all over, and that she will fight and she will survive, and who knows, maybe even win.
A remainder that Colombo's job may very well be done, but that doesn't mean that the culprits will be locked up.
The episode started with the police chasing after Colombo thinking he was a drunk driver , and they even hit his car. I thought this was why he needed chiropractic help and also to wear one of those white things around his neck for the first half of the episode, but then he started saying that every doctor had a different opinion on why he had neck-ache, and then that his wife was the only one right saying that he slept with the window open... I mean, what about the car-crashing thing? I go by experience when I say that that's most likely to cause neck problems....
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