The avenger by Edgar Wallace

Never to read again. Nicely written, mind you, and easy to read, a pleasant read too, but once is enough. The plot, strictly speaking, wouldn’t be too bad but he book is also full of a very unpleasant character and most importantly an absurd creature with too much space. This Bhag is described as an ape, an orang-utang with a half-human brain, who doesn’t talk but understands everything perfectly, whoh can obey any order lilke a perfect butler and be protective lilke a bodyguard, or a mother. This creature is written in only to add colour, to frighten the readers and make them wonder if it could be the murderer, maybe… and ok, it was 1926 so maybe people didn’t really know what was or was not possible. I still didn’t like it. 

I didn’t like this creature (and it got a lot of space in the book) and I didn’t like its master, this wealthy man who  was quite a despicable individual and yet nobody is said or done about it, and at the end he will only get like six months of prison for ‘concealment of his death’ after he killed a servant some time before our story, he said in self-defence, but of course he would say that. The fact that he used to raid Borneo and kidnap women as he liked doesn’t seem at all important… well at least he got one away, for sure. 

Furthermore, one thing that made no sense was that the murderer was to be found just where our hero was,  by coincidence, since he was there simply to follow a weak trail in the investigation. 

The story, in as many details as I can with my memory and without being boring:

Michael Brixan investigates the case of the head-hunter, a serial killer who leaves heads to be found. Twelve heads in seven years. The latest victim was Francis Elmer, and he was Adele Leamington’s uncle. She was the last person to see him alive, although he did not see her, and so Michael is sent to Chichester to meet her.

He falls in love with her basically at first sight.

She’s working a an extra in a film, but dreams of doing more, and she gets her chance when the spoiled leading actress Stella Mendoza argues with the director once too much and is fired. This is when Michael gets his first important clue, he finds a page written with the same typewriter that wrote all the head-hunter messages, so he sticks around to learn more. Mr Lawley Foss who receives all the manuscripts sent by people, says he knows nothing of who wrote that particular page, but later on in the book he will get killed by the head-hunter, I guess he tried to blackmail him for money.

Jack Knebworth is the director, and is maybe the nicest character all round, he and Adele. 

They shoot some of the film scenes on two location with the permission of their owners, Sir Gregory Penne and old Mr Longvale. 

Adele is totally repulsed by Sir Gregory, and with good reasons, she has a good head. He tries to befriend Michael when he thinks he’s just an extra and friend of Adele, hoping that Michael will bring her to him. He shows Michael his collection of old, very sharp swords, his servants from Borneo and his most loyal servant Bhag. He is a very unpleasant man.

One day Jack sees in his pictures that there’s a woman in that house, with a terrified face. Sir Gregory ask Longvale’s help since he has medical experience (not much, but Sir cared more about privacy than about the woman. Sir said the woman was sick, I don’t know the truth about that, only that the new stranger in town came to get her because she was his wife who Sir Gregory took away. They fight for her, and then the woman leaves with the stranger and Longvale finds them and helps them. 

Stella is quite angry at being replaced so easily, and starts creating trouble, at first by trying to scare Adele away, but she’s not stupid. Then she tries with Jack, but he’s fed up with her and he likes how Adele works, so Stella goes to Sir Gregory, who was once very infatuated with her and gave her money and help. She wants, almost demands his money to fund her own company, but he’s tired of her. She tries blackmailing him because she knows that he once killed a servant, he says it was self-defence, but he did kill him and most of all he did hide his body. At the end, she’ll go to his house one last time, thinking he changed his mind, but he didn’t. He got very drunk, he kept her driver with his servants, and locked her in a room, then took her car and went to get Adele with a ruse. Not listening to her protests, he took her home and in the room with Stella for a while. Stella gave her her own mini-gun to defend herself, unwilling to leave an innocent girl in Sir Gregory’s filthy hands. Adele managed to get away from him and run, only to be followed by Bhag. Adele shot him too and kept escaping, until she fell down into a hidden cave…

Michael and Jack are alerted when Adele’s landlady shows up to bring them something she ‘forgot when she came to see them’, only she never came to see them that night, so they learn of her abduction. Michael is afraid for her, and he can’t find either her or Sir Gregory. He finds Stella only. He runs after them, and then he goes where he thinks Sir Gregory is, and where he thinks he’ll find the head-hunter. It’s Mr Longvale. The ancestor he was so proud of, who we never got to know who it was until now, was apparently the man that used to cu heads in France, he manned the guillotine, and even took the king and queen’s heads. Now he wants to follow in his footsteps, and is perfectly convinced of his mission and purpose. He got Sir Gregory down his house, and he gets Michael too, embarassingly easy. 

He wants to cut their heads, then Adele shows up to stop him, walking through the cave to under his house, but after such an adventure the little gun is too full of dirt to function properly, so Longvale gets her too. He can’t do anything against Bhag though, who very much resents his treatment of Sir Gregory, so Longvale is the one to lose his head. Bhag put him in the guillotine.

At the end, Jack complains that she will not go fara in the film industry because she’ll get married and leave work behind…  

How to lose a guy in ten days - 2003

 Not bad, it was kinda fun to watch, but not realy romantic, just a funny comedy. She has to write a column on how to lose a guy in ten days, while he bets that he can make any woman fall in love with him in ten days, so basically she has to do all the work, trying  to get him to break up, but since he wants to win the bet he bears it all pretending to love it, since it’s just for a few days. Of course they’re made for each other, they like the same things, so he doesn’t have to work hard to make her fall in love. And he likes her when she’s herself, he just thinks she’s crazy, with multiple personalities or something, like amazing-Andie and crazy-Andie. 

He doesn’t even do anything at the end, because she’s the one to admit that she loves him (twice, first in the paper and then to him), he’s just there. Yes, he runs after her before she flies away, but she had no idea he’d come. That’s all he does, really. 

Andie doesn’t even like to write that kind of things, she’d want to be a ‘real writer’, write about ‘serious stuff’ like politics and poverty, but Composure is not that kind of magazine. That’s pretty obvious, if you think about it, how could she think of writing about those subjects in that job, it wasn’t doable, but she seems to believe that she’ll be able to do it if she just writes this one last thing… actually nobody said that, ever, her boss clearly said she has to write the kind of things she approves of, the kind of things that Composure’s readers like, and expect to find.

Anyway, she seems to believe that.

Ben is into campaigns, and he’s had success with sports products and the like, but for diamonds the boss thinks that the other team, of two women, will be better, so he pushes his way into their meeting and says that he might have a different approach, that he knows women, he loves women and he knows what they want, and he could make any woman fall in love. His competition just met Andie at the Composure office and know about the article, so they choose her.

They are both very confident they can make it easily. At first everything is perfect, they talk and go to a basketball game together, and they have fun, but then she starts doing all those things that drive men away - obiously, since she acted like a lunatic. I mean, making him go get her a coke and lose the last minute of the game is just inconsiderate and selfish, but leaving more than ten messages in his phone machine, filling his house with pink stuff, and his bathroom with women stuff (on what, the third day they’ve known each other?) and then showing him the album she made on her computer with pictures of their wedding and their two children, and calling his mother without telling him to get pictures of him, and giving him a little dog that pees everywhere, and making a scene at the vegan diner, like ‘he thinks I’m fat!’ and crying, and ruining his game night with his friends, and making him think she’ll take him to an important game and instead taking him to a Celine Dion concert, and when they went to the movies and she chose Sleepless in Seattle because she loves it and he has to say he does too, and she keeps talking and causing a big guy to punch him in the face… (btw, how come they showed an old movie? Is it just for this film or does it really happen?)

Ben on his part only has to bear it; he almost gives up after the game night, but his friends and colleagues remind him of what’s at stake so he tries again. 

Finally the ten days are over, and she accepts to go with him at the party. He has to bring ‘the girl’ to that party as the condition for the job, he has to show his boss that he did it, that she loves him. It works, and he gets the job, but they also both learn about the other’s bet.

Funny thing, they both get angry, which is rather stupid since they did the same thing… anyway, they have a big fight and break up, but he keeps the job because his boss talked with her and thought she did love him.

Andie writes her story, just a little differently. She writes that she fell in love with him, that those ten days where the best of her life, or something… and his friends make him read it, so he hurries to get her back.

Andie asked her boss to write about what she wants, and of course the boss says she can choose what to write among certain things suitable for a fashion magazine for women, so Andie finally understands and when arrives at her office he’s told that she’s going to Washington. He rides his bike through the traffic and stops her taxi on the bridge to talk to her. First, he asks her if it’s true what she wrote, then tells her that she doesn’t have to run away, that she can write whenever.

They kiss: happy ending.

ITA come farsi lasciare in dieci giorni

Parthenope - 2024

 I don’t even know what to say… it’s not bad, it’s well done, but I don’t like it. There’s a thing like too  much realism, for me, and that’s the main thing here, and I don’t approve of the character and I generally find everything just… too much… everything, just too much. Watching the crude sexual act of two youngsters basically forced to do it, or looking at Parthenope’s crying face without her using any handkerchief…

But… I’m not from Napoli, and I’ve never been there. And maybe that’s the point, why I can’t feel this film, why everything feels to me like alien, why I could never connect. This film represents the many faces or souls of Napoli, fake or real, rich or poor, honest or camorra, etc.

Parthenope is the name of this girl, and we follow her life from the moment she’s born till her retirement, but mostly we follow her youth, of course. She’s lived a spoiled life, rich and beautiful, she had everything, and got used to have everything and everyone after her. Even her brother Raimondo. How could nobody say anything when it first started, why was it let go that far… it may be good to be fond of your brother or sister, but it’s not normal to be so ‘attached’ as to act as if you’re boyfriend and girlfriend… that’s not right and the adults should have acted when they were younger, when it started to not let it go so far that Raimondo could not imagine being with another woman and could not live with the idea of Parthenope with another man. Not acceptable.

Since her birth, both her brother Raimondo and their friend Sandrino are obsessed with her, and always keep around her. She’s young, beautiful and very spoiled. 

At school we only see her in her anthropology class, with professor Marotta who nobody likes but her, they kind of respect each other, she agrees to his deal of never judging the other.

They go to Capri, where Raimondo wants to court a rich heiress, and he does, and he gets her attention and could make his move… but he can’t even kiss her because she’s not Parthenope.

Parthenope wears very sexy dresses, for 1970 (I mean that they ‘just barely’ cover what they ought to cover), and acts completely free. She refuses other men’s advances, but is interested in talking with writer John Cheever (where we have conversations in English when everything else was in Italian). It doesn’t go further than interesting conversations, because he wants her to enjoy her youth, not waste time with his old self.

Sandrino is as always after her, dancing with her and touching her… when they just dance, Raimondo joins them and they dance all three together, but then when Sandrino brings her to having actual sex with him, Raimondo can’t cope with her with another man, and kills himself.

Parthenope’s mother openly tells her that it’s her fault, she’s sure it’s all her fault and will never forgive her. The time passing doesn’t help Parthenope cope with it, so she asks Professor Marotta to do her thesis on suicide, and she cries in front of him, almost silent but messy tears, with snot on her nose that she doesn’t clean for the whole scene. He doesn’t like the theme, and tells her to do it on ‘miracles’ instead, meaning miracles in their culture.

First Parthenope tries the acting path, because she had been given a business card from some agent saying she could be an actress. She meets an old diva who covers her face in black because she’s disfigured now or something, but wants her to kiss her. She sends her to another old actress, Greta Cool, who is a guest star at some even, but she basically insults Napoli and all its inhabitants. Parthenope likes her for it.

Parthenope then meets Criscuolo, a charming man in the camorra. He takes her to see the poor area of the city, with people she had never seen before, I wonder if she even know that people like that existed, that there was another kind of life other than the golden one she had always known.

Criscuolo gives some money to the poor people than leads her to a place where he needs to be: there’s going to be a big fusion between two camorra families, meaning they want a young man of one family to haev sex with a young woman of the other family and produce an heir of both families, but there’s lots of people there, all watching, to make sure that things go according to plan, so everyone watches these two naked people, she shows herself completely to excite him so that he can perform, and everyone watches until he finishes in her. Realist and crude and tough, I’d have rather watched the reactions, I don’t appreciate actually seeing it all.

We know that Parthenope had sex with Criscuolo, who knows what goes on in her head to do that… and then I guess she aborted, but they don’t dwell on it. I wonder what’s the meaning of that at all, maybe just to have her experience as many things as possible…

When Sandrino goes to her saying he loves her, she tells him it’s just a young love that will vanish with time, and that he caused Raimondo’s death, luring her into having sex when he knew that Raimondo was a fragile soul… she says these things looking and sounding serious, and I don’t see how she’s different from her mother here, putting the blame on someone else alone. 

Parthenope finishes her study lilterally with the upmost possible grade, (lode, plauso, bacio accademico…), and professor Marotta wants her as his assistant. 

Years go by and she’s offered to write about Saint Gennaro’s blood so she meets a cardinal that feels all the burden of having the miracle occur during his mass… which does not happen, the blood doesn’t change to fluid, but a woman starts screaming that her period is back and it’s the Saint’s miracle, staying theere with all the blood showing…  :-/

Parthenope has sex with the cardinal, after wearing the Saint’s jewels… 

Professor Marotta tells her that it’s time for him to retire, and tells her to apply for a position as a teacher, she would have to spend just a few years in Trento and then she could transfer back to Napoli. He convinces her and she accepts, so the professor finlly has her meet his son, finallys ure that she would understand and not judge. His son is a giant man-child, “made of water and salt”, “like the sea”.

We see nothing more of her until her retirement day, she’s been in Trento the rest of her life, teaching but never marrying. Now, she comes back to Napoli, after so long, and looks around and sees the people celebrating their football team’s championship victory, and smiles, she’s back home, she ran away for so long but now she feels part of Napoli again.

Wednesday - season 1

Wednesday is really weird, but also not, because her desire to be herself and not be molded by her parents to be like them in everything is not so different from many other teenagers. She has a difficult relationship with her mother, feels judged by her. She will also confront her in the fifth episode, asking why was she sent to a place where she can never escape her mother’s shadow. We see that she’s not so different from all the other kids, outcasts or not: Enid, Bianca, Xavier, but also Tyler, they all have teenage problems with parents that can’t understand them or don’t have time for them or just want to use them… 

She has no remorse after she causes a boy injuries, but he was her brother’s bully. We do not actually see her hurting good guys, ever. 

Wednesday strong points is that she really has her own identity and doesn’t care to conform to the others, that she’s confident and independent…

But she also has negative points! She’s not only impulsive and impatient, as Weems says, she’s also reckless, insensitive, manipulative, but also she accuses people as soon as she’s just a small suspicions without waiting for real proof, she puts people in danger, she acts as if she was in charge of the whole investigation and everyone should do as she wants, as if they had to tell her everything, when really, think about it, she was just a 15 year-old girl who had no right to ask questions and who certainly shouldn’t be playing cop! Plus let’s face it, we like her and we love her, but she made a mess from the start, she caused more harm than good. Nobody will care because at the end she’ll win, but she caused more troubles than she has any idea of! 

I did not like their choice for Gomez, sorry but he was not right for the role. Not too keen on Morticia either, though, she’s too modern and cold. I like both actors, but this is not the Gomez I know, he was full of energy, an athlete, always moving and doing things, and a bit of a genius too.

1 - Wednesday’s child is full of woe.

It was nice, much more than a simple introduction as it often happens. We know Wednesday of course, who gets expelled (again) from a high school. It happened because after she found her brother Pugsley locked inside her locker, she went to the guys’ swimming pool where they were practicing water polo and threw piranhas in the water. A guy lost a testicle, and she was accused of attempted murder. This is what his mother was waiting for, and she’s soon brought to the Nevermore Academy, for special kids, we might say. There’s a bit of everything, they all have something different from normal humans. Her roommate Ened is very colorful and very joyful, but also sometimes sad because she’s a werewolves who can’t transform.

Wednesday does not get along with her parents, especially her mother. She feels like they want her to become like them, and she hates the very idea. Nevermore is the school where Morticia and Gomez met and fell in love, they were stars when they attended it. Wednesday is sure she’ll hate it and plans to escape as soon as possible. 

We’re told she’s allergic to colours, which explains her black and white clothes and why the school gave her a special uniform (all the others are blu and black, but hers has no blue). We also see that she has a gift, or something, sometimes when she touches people she can see things, past or future. I mean, she foreesees a man’s death, but with Pugsley she saw the faces of the kids that bullied him.

She’s told the queen of the school is a girl named Bianca, a siren, so she challenges her to a duel (well, sort of) and Bianca wins. Wednesday feels really bad about it.Rowan thanks her (although I’m not see why they think she did it to defend him, after Bianca sort of humiliated him, I think she just didn’t like Bianca’s attitude). 

The principal Larissa Weems was Morticia’s roommate and feels now in charge of making sure she does not escape.  Wednesday also has weekly visits with a therapist, court orders, and the therapist even seems like a good one. She read Wednesday’s books (who gave her her books? They’ve not been published, who has them?) and she read them and it’s really obvious that she wrote about herself, in a way, and her conflicting relationship with her mother. Still, they don’t talk a lot because Wednesday tries to escape, from the second floor window. She does get out, then she enters a cafe to order a coffee with ice… I’m not really sure why, actually, she was so set on having her order, how is that relevant to her being able to escape? She even fixed Tyler’s coffee machine (simply using a screwdriver, and a normal one at that; I might understand if it was a sonic one…), and then she beat up three thugs that didn’t want her there because they don’t like the freaks from Nevermore. Tyler promised he’d drive her out of town if she waited, but then Weems finds her and Tyler’s father the sheriff tells her that her father killed someone and therefore he’ll keep his eyes on her… Wait, what? Gomez wasn’t a murderer! It’s pretty obvious that the sheriff doesn’t like Nevermore with everything going on, even now there’s been three murders that were very gruesome, and it makes him think no normal human could do that, and no normal animal either.

Xavier saves her life when a stone gargoyle almost lends on her head, to repay her from saving his life when he was ten and playing hide and seek he thought it was a smart thing to hide inside a casket moments before it was cremated…

Towards the end, while she’s again trying to escape, again with the help of Tyler, she bumps into Rowan and sees his death, and this time she runs after him to warn him that he’s in danger, but he says it’s the other way around, she’s the one in danger because he has to kill her, because he found her image in a book: basically her mother was a seer, and she saw that that girl would destroy Nevermore, and told him he had to stop her, and now he’s obsessed about it, it was him who pushed the gargoyle on her.

Wednesday can’t really free herself from his power, but then a beast of some kind, a monster attacks him and kills him, but it just looks at her without attacking her.

At the end, her parents call her (it’s the end of the first week, I think) through their crystal ball, since Wednesday doesn’t own a phone. Thinking of everything that happened, she realises that at Nevermore things are really more interesting, and she might like it here for a little longer. 

The scene when she played the cello outside her window, it was visually beautiful. The colours, the window, the weather, it was really good. 

I really like the woman that came to welcome Wednesday to their dormitory, and brought her a black dahlia as a welcome gift, said she felt it was the right flower for her. I thought it was pretty well done, and Wednesday even said thank you.

2. Woe is the loneliest number.

Wednesday told Bianca about the attack before she fainted. Now there’s been searching all around, but Rowan’s body has not been found. She insists she saw a beast kill him, but then Rowan appears and all the school can see him. Still, he stays for a very short time, because the next day he leaves and refuses to talk to her. Wednesday has Thing follow him, which it does, but when ‘Rowan’ enters a restroom and a different-looking man exits, Thing does not follow by nose, it follows by eyes (it doesn’t have neither, but it always acts like it can see, doesn’t it? Otherwise how could it help Wednesday in anything?), and therefore loses him. We as the audience are the only one that can see that man changing into Weems. Now it’s clear. Bianca has no problem telling Wednesday thatshe did not call the ‘normal’ police first, no, she doesn’t trust normal people, she called Weems instead and had her deal with it, so we can guess that Weems took away the body to cover it up.

Wednesday overhears Bianca telling Xavier that Wednesday is not right for him, that she thinks she’s better than everyone, stuff like that. Bianca is competitive and manipulative, Xavier insists on the latter point, and is so sure she’ll win again the Poe tournament that Wednesday decides she’ll join and help Enid win just to beat her. And she does. She also has a vision of something…

In botany class, taught by adorable Ms Thornhill, Wednesday knows everything about it, much like Bianca, which irritates Bianca no end.

Later, Thornhill sees Wednesday in the library searching for something, and Wednesday does not hide what, and instead asks her about Belladonna, but the book she’s looking for is not there. Ms Thornhill tells her she has a gift of being always herself, and to never change. She feels sad that after almost two years at the academy, some teacher still don’t even say hello to her because she’s different, she’s one of the ‘normals’, which sucks because she can never fit in, too normal for the outcasts and too weird for the normals. I love her, she’s my favourite so far from the first moment I saw her.

Wednesday finds a symbol in the book page that Rowan gave her, the one where a drawing of herself depitcts her as the one who will destroy the school. It’s the symbol of an old students society called Belladonna, she starts investigating and finds a secret entrance behind Edgar Allan Poe’s statue that leads to a hidden library where she finds the book she was looking for, the one Rowan took the page from, and puts it in her bag, but she’s immediately captured.

3. Friend or woe.

The plot intensifies :lol:

Wednesday wataken by the Belladonna club, thoght closed for years, ever since a guy died (during the time Gomez and Morticia were at school I think). It is still going on, with all the elite students: Bianca, Xavier and others. Xavier proposes to let her in, Bianca doesn’t like it, but it’s Wednesday herself that doesn’t want to join their group.

When Wednesday shows Xavier the page torn from that book , he knows about it. In the book she finds the other page of the picture showing a man. Xavier knows who he is, Crackston (or something like that) the man who founded Gericho something lilke 400 years ago. 

There’s an outing, all students will go into town for a ceremony, a big statue of Crackston, and they’ll have the chance to visit Pilgrim World… At first it seemed a terrible thing to her, but now she wants to go to learn more about him. She also sees the girl from her vision, she calls her(the one that looks like her, but not in black). 

She helps Eugene against the town’s three bullies, then she keeps looking. She looks for the old place the Pilgrim used, and asks Tyler about its location. Xavier is jealous.

She finds te place, and since Thing insists, she starts touching things to see if she has a vision, and to her surprise she does. She sees her ancestor, Goodie Addams I think, being condemned as a witch by Crackston and the other virtuous townspeople. He locked her inside the building with a lot of other people,  and sets it on fire. The others are all chained to the floor, and her mother pleads for her to save herself. So she does. That was Crackston hating the outcasts and killing them off. Now Wednesday hates that new statue, and has Thing set it on fire. Of course Weems blames her.

Wednesday sends Enid where Ajax is, to spend their day in town, and she flirts all the time, but he doesn’t get it until she explains, bursting really, so he ‘asks her out’. He’s a Gorgon but she said she’s not afraid, after all it’s only temporary, but when he takes a shower, he accidentally looks at himself in the mirror and is petrified, meaning that Enid waits and waits and he never comes…

Wednesday sees the ‘monster’, and runs to follow his trail, and can see that after a while the beast footprints become human. 

 

4. Woe what a night.

There’s going to be a ball at the Nevermore school, one of those things where the girls ask the boys.

Wednesday is suspicious of Xavier and sneaks into his private studio to see that he kept painting the monster over and over. She finds him more interesting now. To hide the fact that she was spying and also to know him better since he might be the slayer, she asks him to the ball. We finally see him smile - he’s always brooding - but it’s really difficult for her to find and spit out the words :lol:

Enid asks the mayor’s son: they both want to make someone jealous, but they find they have fun together, because Enid likes kung fu movies and other ‘boy’ stuff. Some other girl ask Ajax, he did not explain to her why he didn’t meet her the other night as planned.

Wednesday meets Tyler in town andhe looks annoyed that she’s going with Xavier; she asks him why and he says that he doesn’t understand her, he thought she liked her… she doesn’t know how to react, and tells him that she has a lot going on, other priorities…

She goes back to Xavier’s study to find his dna, and she finds where he dubbed his blood after he was hurt: we know he can make his art ‘come out’ of the painting, and now he says that it hurt him. Usually he can control his power, but he says that he’s been dreaming of this thing for weeks now and can’t get it out of his head any other way. She interrogates him, he insists he is not a murderer. Now he understands why she asked him, he feels hurt and tells her to get out.

Now she has no date, and Eugene suggests going together, but she’s got a better idea. Since Eugene knows the cave that Xavier painted, she wants to go there together and explore.

Without her knowing, Thing writes a message to Tyler and brings it to him, so Tyler appears at her door the night of the ball as she’s about to go exploring with Eugene. She changes plans now and goes to the ball, ,wearing a beautiful black dress that Thing stole for her (I think). 

She tells Eugene that they’ll go together the next day, but Eugene goes anyway. He sees a man, a figure setting fire to the cave, and he runs away, but is found by the beast…

Xavier tells Wednesday that Tyler destroyed his murales, his mosaico the year before, and Tyler has no justification for this. They talk, they dance…

Wednesday even has a nice talk, a peaceful one with Bianca. She just left Xavier: the idiot asked her to use  her siren power to make him forget Wednesday, and of course Bianca got upset. Especially since he left her because he thought she was manipulated him… she also tells Wednesday that she also wasn’t sure of his feelings, if they were genuine or influenced somehow by her power. 

The mayor’s son’s plan was to ruin the night for everyone, but he was changing his mind after getting to know Enid (adorable Enid) and when his two friends arrive he tries to say that maybe they shouldn’t do it, but he doesn’t want to lose face and they go on with it, flooding the entire hall and everyone in it in what looks like blood, only it’s not thick at all; Wednesday tastes it and says it’s just colour, not blood.

Everybody runs, Weems screams, poor Thornhill was having such a nice night, the ball was a success and then it was ruined…

I don’t know how, Wednesday suddenly has a vision of Eugene in danger and she leaves right away to run looking for him. She runs and she calls, he calls back and she gets at his side, but he’s been hurt already. Thornhill appears to ask if he’s dead…

(Weems tells Thornhill that in her days, the boy she asked turned her down for another girl: Morticia)

5. You reap what you woe.

We hear that Eugene is not dead, just in a coma. When Wednesday will go see him at the hospital, she’ll meet his two moms. They say he was really happy to have her as a friend.

It’s  parents weekend, and not many kids are happy about that :lol: not that we know of at least: 

—Xavier’s dad couldn’t make it, again, he’s always too busy doing his things, being famous, to have time for his son.

—Bianca’s mother, unfortunately, came and is now here… Bianca looks terrified of seeing her there. They talk, and it appears her mom is in some kind of cult, and she uses her siren powers a lot, but now they’re weaving so she wants Bianca to use her own, powerful power. Bianca actually has another name, but she doesn’t like that, she wants to be Bianca and live her life free of her mother’s plots… her mom doesn’t really ask, though, she demands, and at the end Bianca tells her she’ll help her one last time, but only after the school year, and then she wants to have nothing more to do with then, ever again.

—Enid’s mother doesn’t seem able to accept her daughter as she is, she kept asking if she’s a full wolf now, and then she suggests lycanthropy summer camps to bring out the wolf… Enid bears it all with patience, but at the end tells her that she won’t go to any summer camp, she’ll make it on her own time.

Her father never speaks, but when he does, at least he has the right words, and tells her he’s proud of her.

—Wednesday… well: she confronts her mother for sending her to a school where she’ll never have a chance, because in her time Morticia was really popular and good in everything, and it’s a competition Wednesday can’t win.

Pugsley missed her.

The sheriff arrests Gomez: he’s been convinced of his guilt for years, and now he thinks he has proof in a note left by the coroner after he shot himself (yeah, what’s up with that? did he really kill himself? It feels really suspicious, he seemed glad that he was days from retirement and already planning trips with his wife…).

Gomez admits it, and he tells Wednesday that this Garrett guy was obsessed with Morticia, wouldn’t leave her alone, and that night he got crazy angry when he saw them together, and he attacked Gomez, who got beaten up a bit until he managed to get hold of Garrett’s sword and stab him… accidentally, then Garrett fell and Weems saw them.

Wednesday goes to her mom who says that Gomez wants to protect her, because that night Garrett looked out of his mind, inhuman, and in her desperation to stop the fight, she got hold of the sword, not Gomez…

Now Wednesday digs up the body, just enough to take a finger. It’s all blue, showing clear signs of belladonna poisoning, so Wednesday and Morticia confront the mayor. Wednesday saw it in a vision: Garrett’s father giving him a phial of poison, to kill everyone at Nevermore. He tu it in his shirt pocket, and it got smashed while they were fighting, poisoning him. The mayor knew about this, so now they force him to release Gomez. 

Wednesday then confronts Weems after seeing her picture in the school year book: she didn’t just make impressions, she turned into the other person, she’s a shapeshifter and she knows that Rowan is dead. Weems admits that Rowan’s family know it too, and they agree with her that it’s better to put a lid on the whole thing. Rowan was going crazy, he had already tried to kill Wednesday twice, this way at least he was stopped…

The sheriff told Wednesday that Garrett was not the only life lost: his mother took her own life, his father drunk himself to death or something, and the sister got sent away oversea and drowned or something… but that was far away, he can’t have seen the body, maybe this sister is still around seeking vengeance for her brother… or maybe full of hate for the outcasts like her father… although that’s not right, the beast has killed whoever, not just students at Nevermore. 

6. Quid pro woe.

Enid lures Wednesday out at Crackston’s cript, where she finds a surprise party for her birthday!! There’s a cake with Death on it, and there’s Xavier and Ajax… and who knows who else.

She finds in there the same words that were written in fire in front of the school. 

She keeps investigating, still suspecting Xavier, but also following every possible lead. After what Morticia told her, she tries to contact Goody Addams so that she may teach her how to control her powers,  but Goody tells her that sh’s a raven, she can’t be taught, or something like that. Goody shows her a place and tells her to find it. Xavier had a drawing of that same place, it’s Garrett Gates’ house. 

I’m not sure why, but the mayor is looking into Laure Gates’ files, and he goes looking at the house. Wednesday follows him and hides in his car when he goes to meet the sheriff to talk about the case. Before being mayor, he was the sheriff. But he can’t talk about anything because he’s run over by a car, under the eyes of both the sheriff and Wednesday. 

She tricks both Tyler and Enid into going with her, and they find that Laurel’s room appears to be lived in, with no dust and fresh flowers, and there’s the car that almost killed the mayor, and there’s also jars containing the pieces that were cut from the various victims. And there’s also the beast, that hurts Tyler and tries to kill Enid and Wednesday.

When they get back, Enid is very angry at her, because she used her to get out past Weems’ restrictions, not caring if she put her in danger, lying to her, generally not being a friend.

She leaves, saying she’ll be staying with a friend for a while.

We see that someone entered the hospital to kill the mayor for good.

7. If you don’t woe me by now.

The mayor is dead, they’re at the funeral. Wednesday sees a figure running and goes after him, and it’s Fester! Her uncle Fester, and for him she does smile! He’s wanted by the police, so she hides him at Eugene’s place, and forbids him to eat Eugene’s bees, since Eugene loves them.

After seeing a drawing of the beast, Fester knows it’s a Hyde. Weems already knew about the beast being a Hyde, but didn’t say anything to protect the school. Wednesday reacts as if she’s offended that an adult didn’t share all her knowledge about the murders with her fifteen year old student… (only now 16).

Sigh… really, Wednesday?

She spies on Xavier and sees him meet the therapist Kimbot, and thinks they’re doing it together, she thinks Kimbot is Laurel Gates, and that she’s using Xavier, luring out the Hyde with hipnosis or something and controlling it, or unleashing it… and she tells her this, she appears in her office when she shouldn’t, tells her she knows that she’s Laurel and guilty of the beast’s killings… and Kimbot tells her she’s really unwell and should be in an asylum or something, and even calls Weems to tell her this, when she hears noise and opening the door she’s attacked by the Hyde. She’s dead.

After hearing this, Wednesday says that she’s had enough now, and she leads the sheriff to Xavier’s study, where she finds stuff from Rowan, Eugene and Kimbot (at first I thought she planted it to put an end to it, but I think later she says that Tyler planted it) so the sheriff arrests him. 

Enid wanted to change room permanently and go stay with Yoko, and Wednesday never showed any sign that she’d like her to come back, but now she is back, with all her part of the room all colourful again, all pinks and purples, and Wednesday tells her there’s no need for any tape to separate their zones anymore. She says that they go well together after all, and that since she left the room has been ransacked and Think has been almost killed (Wednesday even cried a little, she found Thing stabbed to the wall and ran to Fester as fast as she could, and they saved it) so she’d better be back. 

Earlier on, Wednesday had accepted a date with Tyler, and he arranged for her a picnic in Crackston cript, and to scare her with a horror movie he made her watch Legally Blonde  :lol:

Then they almost kissed before the sheriff interrupted them, looking for Fester.

Now Wednesday goes to Tyler, thinking he’s the only one she can trust, and kisses him first, and while she’s kissing him she has a vision, and she sees that he’s the beast that attacked the therapist.

She runs away.

8. A murder of woes.

It starts with Wednesday meeting Tyler at the cript, he came because apparently Thing delivered a message from her. Now Wednesday tells him that she knows it’s him, that he’s the hyde, but he keeps denying it. She didn’t come alone, though. She has Bianca, Ajax, Kent, Divina? And one other girl I don’t know, as back up, and also because Bianca can use her siren power to make him obey, so she chains him inside Xavier’s studio. She’s very sure that he’s the Hyde because she saw him in that vision, but the other kids think they’ll just have to wait for him to transform… Wednesday though has other ideas, she wants to force him to transform, with ‘light torture’, she calls it: a taser (that she uses) plus a saw and a hammer, and those she’s not allowed to use, the kids are horrified and leave her alone and go to Weems who calls the sheriff. She’s not locked up on one condition: she’s explelled. 

And once again Wednesday is unbelievable, or well, maybe just acting as what she is, a kid: when Weems tells her that she should have come to her and they would have handled it together, Wednesday is resentful that Weems was never cooperative with her and didn’t always tell her the truth… 

She insists with Weems that she did it all alone, and Weems points out that for someone who says she doesn’t have friends or care for anyone, she’s quite protective of them.

We already believed Wednesday because her vision have never been wrong, that I know, but we also know that Tyler is conscious of it all now when he stops Wednesday to tell her “What does it feel like? To lose?” And we realise that if at first he didn’t remember and didn’t know, now he does, and he likes it.

After she’s told that she’s expelled, Wednesday goes to Xavier who is in chains, and tells him that she knows Tyler framed him and that he’s the hyde, because “I saw it in a vision when he kissed me”, really no tact at all this girl, as gentle as a sledgehammer… 

Now she wants his help, to know if he saw anything more about it, but it seems he’s had enough, finally, and he tells her “You ruined my life! I tried being your friend, look where that got me.” And also “every time you get involved, people get hurt. You’re toxic, all you ever do is make things worse” and then, when she shows him once again that old drawing, the one that Rowan thought meant that she’d destroy Nevermore, Xavier tells her that to stop all that she has to leave, that without her that won’t happen… and he was right, you know.

When they say goodbye, Wednesday tells Enid that she always thought having people to care about, friends, was a weakness, that she would have been disappointed sooner or later, but “turns out I’ve been the disappointment”. Enid tells her that Eugene woke up, so she asks Weems to stop at the hospital before getting on the train. Eugene tells her that the person who set fire to the cave, he’s pretty sure that they were wearing red boots. Wednesday thought it was Kimbott, but now she knows better. Kimbott never wore red boots, but Thornhill does. 

Wednesday comes back to face her, and when Tyler walks in I was totally sure that it was Weems, there was never any doubt. She shows herself only after everything is cleared, Thornhill basically confessed: at first she chained Tyler in the cave, then she taught stuff, and made him like dependent on her, and he became like a willing slave. 

I don’t like the next scene, did they really think that she’d come without a fight, that she’d yield gracefully, or something? That’s ridiculous! Was I the only one not surprised that she turned aggressive? She attacked Weems and injected her with Nightshade poison. 

I was sorry to see her die, and it was a stupid death too, she didn’t deserve such a stupid death.

Anyway, of course Thornhill kidnaps her. Eugene calls Enid to tell her everything,and then Thing comes to tell her about Weems and that Thornhill took Wednesday to Crackstone’s crypt… Eugene leaves the hospital because he says he has to help Wednesday, since she’s his only friend.

Thornhill, or Laurel Gates, shares her family’s hatred for the outcasts, but she chose a different path. She chose the supernatural approach, she found Goody’s Book of Shadows, and in it there’s a way to bring back the dead, that’s why she needed specific body parts from the people killed. For this ritual. She has six.

But Crackstone’s body is sealed with blood, and only Goody’s blood can open it… meaning Wednesday’s blood. 

So you see, without Wednesday here, nothing would have happened. Well, there would still be a hyde at her command, but not much else. Crackstone could never come back without her, but now that she’s here, Laurel cuts her palm to open the sarcophagus with her blood. Crackstone comes out, and Wednesday (who freed herself of the chains) stands to challenge him, the silly kid, but he has a staff with magical powers and she can’t move, and he stabs her to death. Goody appears to her, to tell her that Crackstone must be stabbed through his black heart, and that her necklace is a talisman, that it helps conjuring spirits, and “it will allow me to pass through you and heal you” … Goody will disappear forever, but she’ll be alive to save the school from Crackstone. (Btw, Goody is quite the corporeal spirit, she wrenches free the blade, out of Wednesday’s body, and she heals completely.

Enid and Ajax call Bianca, Davina and Kent (the ones in the Nightshade secret club…) to get all the students to safety before the school will burn…, and the three sirens will use their song to get everyone out.

When the sheriff is called to the school because of Eugene’s mom, he leaves Xavier chained in the car. Luckily for him, Thing comes to help him. 

Enid runs to the crypt thinking of her friend, and she transforms on the way for the first time. 

When Tyler intercepts Wednesday and turns into the hyde, and almost kills her, it’s the brave wolf with pink hair on her head that saves her. And Wednesday leaves her to fight alone while she runs towards the school. She almost dies, but the sheriff shoot Tyler. Not to kill, because it’s his son, but to stop him. Just one shot won’t stop him, but it helps Enid. She knocks him out and he turns back human, just like Enid. 

At school, almost everyone’s gone away. Wednesday takes the sword that Morticia used on Garrett (that’s the one, right?) but it breaks against Crackstone’s staff. Xavier tries to help her by throwing an arrow at him, but Crackstone turns it back, and Wednesday takes it for him, in her shoulder, but she just pulls it out, yells at Xavier to get everyone out and then fights him. With her sword broken, and against his powerful staff, she’s losign, but then Bianca stabs him from behind, giving her the chance to stab him through the heart, so he vanishes for good.

Laurel appears, she wants to at least kill Wednesday, but lots of bees appear and attack her, controlled by Eugene, and then Wednesday kicks her out of consciousness. I don’t know if she lives.

Outside the gates, everyone is waiting. Enid appears alone from the woods, all bloody, poor sweet thing, and the first hting she says is to ask about Wednesday, because she doesn’t see her, but then she appears, walking out with Bianca and Eugene. 

Enid runs to hug her, and for once, Wednesday finally stops deluding herself and hugs her back, they are friends.

Lurch comes to take all her stuff. She finishes her book and says her goodbyes. Classes are cancelled for the rest of the semester, and Enid invites her to San Francisco. Xavier gives her a smartphone as a gift, they are friends again because she took an arrow for him. I’m glad he didn’t apologise for what he said before, or stuff like that, because he was right, but after what she did they are friends again. He’ll be happy with a text from time to time.

While Lurch is driving her away, her phone rings with three messages from an unknown number: there’s one picture of her with Tyler at the cafè, and one with Xavier at school when he gave her the phone, and then there’s the words: “I’m watching you”. 

And then another appears, it’s like a gif of her getting stabbed through the head. 

“My very first stalker” she thinks. “Maybe this forced vacation will be more interesting than I imagined. Unlike my novel, not every thread has been tied up, nor every question answered. Secrets are still lurking in the dark corners of Jericho. Were Laurel Gates and Tyler just pawns in a bigger game? Will today’s stalker become tomorrow’s nemesis? I know the suspense is killing you.”

And that’s how it ends, with a scene in which Tyler changes into Hyde while they are taking him into custody. 

Conclusions:

Well, they killed off all the adults but the sheriff, I’m a bit sorry about that, but at least all the kids are ok. I’m not sure if Laurel is dead or alive, but Tyler is definitely alive and from the look of things he might even be free, most likely he’s already free. 

Pity, I liked both Laurel and Kimbot more than him.

Since I know they’ve done a second series, that should be out in a matter of months, I hope they’ll stop with the love triangles, but also that they’ll put a bit more students interactions. A bit more Nevermore.

Marilyn Thornhill/Laurel Gates is Christina Ricci

Wednesday is Jenna Ortega

Larissa Weems is Gwendoline Christie

Dr Kinbott is Riki Lindhome

The sheriff Galpin is Jamie McShane

Tyler is Hunter Doohan

Xavier is Percy Hynes White

Enid Sinclair is Emma Myers

Bianca is Joy Sunday

Morticia is Catherine Zeta-Jones

Gomez is Luis Guzmàn (the other accent on the a)

Poirot - The mysterious affair at Styles

 Absolutely one of the best, for how they wrote both the story and the characters, this is one of the most faithfuls. I liked it ^_^

It’s set in June 1917, lieutenant Hastings meets old friend John Cavendish and accepts his invitation home.  There he meets again John’s mother Emily and his brother Lawrence. Mary is John’s wife. Plus there’s Evie the personal maid, and Cynthia. Emily took her in and she lives there now. There’s also the old servant Dorcas and Emily’s new husband Alfred, that nobody likes. So much that Evie quarrells with Emily about him and then decides to leave the house.

Hastings tells them all that his great aspiration is to become an investigator, that he once met a funny man, a real investigator, a real dandy, and he uses the same investigative methods, only improved…

Hastings and Poirot meet in the village to both their surprises. Poirot came here with a few other Belgians thanks to Ms Emily who helped them and gave them a place to stay, He says that Belgium is no safe place to stay, with the war.

It’s easy to see then that when Emily dies, Hastings immediately thinks of him and asks John’s permission to contact him and have him look into it.

How it went: at night, they hear distressed yelling, John tries to open the door but it’s locked; Mary is in Cynthia’s room and says that the little door joining the two rooms is closed. 

John and Hastings shouldered the door open and found Emily clearly hurting, yelling and thrashing in the bed, until she dies. Lawrence comes and doesn’t say anything about seeing the door to Cynthia’s room open. Everyone is in shock and nobody knows where Alfred is.

Evie comes back of course, and immediately starts telling everyone that for sure Alfred did it, and what is everybody waiting for, just arrest him!

Poirot accepts to help, of course, and promises confidentiality. Alfred offers no alibis whatsoever, but he was seen going to buy the poison (I think it was strichnine, I’m not sure I remember right, but it’s a good guess, it was a favourite of Agatha’s :D ). He denies it, of course, but won’t say anything more. 

Hastings doesn’t know Japp yet, but Poirot does, and approaches him as soon as he sees him. Japp has total confidence in Poirot’s ability, but his boss doesn’t know him and is more inclined to go on with what they have and know. Poirot insists they should not arrest Alfred, and when it looks like they’re going to do it anyway, he reveals Alfred’s alibi, or something like that, and that he did not buy the strichnine. 

Then they try another route and arrest John… so Poirot hurries to find the missing piece to the whole thing, and he gets it through a comment made by Hastings: Poirot was making a cards castle, but he doesn’t go far this time because he’s not totally calm, and Hastings says that the only other time he saw his hands tremble was when he was arranging the things on the fireplace in Emily’s room (he likes everything in order, symmetrical, tidy…)

The solution is as it should be: Alfred did it, with Evie’s help, because they’re in love and planned it from the start to get Emily’s money. Evie bought the strichnine wearing a false beard to implicate Alfred and insisted he get arrested right away so that they could easily free him revealing he could not have bought it, and by the English law he could never be retried later for the same crime… had the police arrested him before Poirot had a chance to intervene , he would have been free forever.

Lawrence insisted Emily must have died of natural causes because he saw the door to Cynthia’s room was open, and he also remembered that the last person to see Emily alive had been Cynthia when she brought her a coffee, and he wanted to protect her, that’s why he smashed the coffee cup into dust.

John had nothing to do with the murder, and also I don’t think he cheated on his wife, he was just helping a woman in town, he gave her some money, officially as a loan, not sure if he really expected her to pay him back… but thinking about it now, I’m really not sure about the cheating part… well, let me keep on thinking he didn’t… so,the fight Dorcas had overheard had not been between Emily and her husband, it was with John, because Emily found out about the money and was angry about it, about his behaviour (not unreasonably, he was not behaving nicely). Mary was insanely jealous of him, sure that he was cheating on her, but she still lied to the police to protect him because she still loves him. That night, she had entered  Emily’s room at night searching the room for what she believed would have been the proof of John’s infidelity, but it wasn’t. When the whole trouble started, she bolted for Cynthia’s room, who kept on sleeping having taken a pill to sleep.

The definite proof is a letter. Alfred started writing it to his dear Evelyn, meaning Evie, but didn’t finish it, probably someone came into the room, so he locked it inside his writing desk. Later on, after her fight with John, Emily wrote a new will leaving all the money to Alfred, but she didn’t have any more stamps so she unlocked Alfred’s desk to search for one, and instead she found that letter… in which Alfred talked about planning to kill her. That night, Emily asked for her fireplace to be lighted: it had been a very hot day but she needed the fire to burn the new will. Later on, after her death, someone entered the room (well, it had to be Alfred because Evie didn’t know about the letter) and forced oped the little safe box that Emily used to lock away all the important documents, and took the letter… but then Poirot and John arrived and there was little time to think of what to do, and so he teared the letter into three stripes and put them over the fireplace, among the other pieces used to light it. 

Poirot realized that someone had touched those objects because he remembered having straightened them again. He had already done it the first time he entered that room, after the death, and then again when they found out that the little box had been forced open. So he went in there (this time the room was kept locked at all times) and found the pieces of paper that made up the letter, so he could read it and prove it all.

How they did it: they add something to her usual medicine, like blomuro or something, because her medicine already contained strichnine in acceptable doses, but with what they added, the strichnine remained all on the bottom, so that she finally ingested all of it all at once.

I think I covered everything.

But the funny parts: Hasitngs thinking he’s some great detective (lol, he thought that in the books too, but he could never be an investigator of any kind, he thinks all the nice ones are innocent and the unpleasant ones are guilty… well, this one actually is on circumstance where that is correct, but normally it’s not)

— when Cynthia cries that Emily forgot to take care of her in her will, so her fuure in unknown, and she’s cared and she also thinks that in that house nobody likes her… and so Hastings propooses to her! Just like that, he turns, takes her hand and asks her to become his wife, and he’s a bit offended when she tells him to not be silly, and very put out when she starts laughing at the idea, she thinks he only did it to guarantee her a safe future, and she thanks him but also warns him to be careful, that someone else might accept him next time… 

And then at the end he’s totally surprised when he learns that she got engaged to Lawrence, and he tells Poirot that he really can’t understand women… and Poirot promises that one day, he’ll teach him all about it…    :-)

Columbo - A friend in deed

 I liked this episode. I so did not like the Haplering character, but I guess that was the point, he’s not a good character, but I quite enjoyed the rest, and especially seeing Colombo in a different setting, like when he talks to a reknown thief, and suddenly Colombo seemed more at ease, on his own ground, with no need to affect anything or to feel uncomfortable. 

Details:

Mark Halpering is Columbo’s chief, and Hugh Caldwell is his neighbour and friend. Since Mark works in the police, Hugh runs to him when he ‘accidentally’ kills his wife. Well, he puts it like that, I don’t, there’s nothing accidental in strangling a person until she dies! He says he was angry because she had lovers and he did it in his rage… and Mark forms a clever plan in his mind. He doesn’t really choose this course because it’s the best for his friend, but for himself!

By doing this, he paves the way for his own wife’s murder,, sets a precedent, another woman killed by the same thief…

So Mark tells Hugh to stay at the club and call home at a specific hour, when he’ll be there to answer it, and stay there until the police finds him. 

Mark goes to Hugh’s house, changes the woman’s clothes putting a nightgown on her, one that he took from the wardrobe. He answered the phone, of course, he set the whole scene.

When he went to his own home, he talked to his wife (their problem is that she likes to ‘help people’ with the money she inherited and that is only hers, while he’d want to spend it all on gambling and women). 

Then Mark looks out the window and pretends to see a man coming out of Hugh’s house, so he calls but of course nobody answers, so he calls the police. 

To the journalists and everyone, he says that the thief who alreary robbed three houses in that area, this time got seen and so he killed the house owner that saw him… and he also says that both he and his wife saw him, and she might be able to recognize him… which obviously is not true, since there was no man at all.

Shortly after that, he goes home to his wife having a bath and drowns her in the bathtub, then puts a dress on her and asks (demands) Hugh takes her body and throws it in the pool at a specific time. To show that he’s taking it very seriously, he joins the helicopter doing patrol, and again he says he saw someone, and looking closely they can see a man throwing a woman’s body in the pool. He jumps out and pretends to try and save her, the scum.

He swirls it like the thief came to shut her up because he said that she might recognize him…

Colombo of course doesn’t believe any of it, there’s lots of little things!

Things that probably nobody else would notice, as usual, because he looks deeper. Knowing that the thief never leaves fingerprints,the cops weren’t going to check, but he insisted!

Of course Mark was wearing gloves, but that’s not the point. The maid had cleaned everything very throughly during the day, and it’s still very clean. There’s no fingerprints on the phone or on the wardrobe, and how could the woman answer the phone and open the wardrobe without leaving any? Also, she would have taken the nightgown she had under the pillow, not another one in the wardrobe, her husband knew about that. 

Colombo also asks the coroner to look into Mark’s wife’s lungs, even after he’s told that there’s no way he can find any chlorine because it gets absorbed fast or something, but once again Colombo insists that he take a look, and he’s rewarded by quite the finding: there was soap in her lungs! Of course we knew it, and now so does Colombo.

So: Colombo doesn’t believe the thief-turned-murderer theory but his boss insists, of course, so he has to play carefully. There’s only Mark’s word, but it’s not easy to speak against it. 

Colombo talks to another cop, who’s specialty is thieves, and gets the name of the most likely man to have done the first three robberies, and he goes to talk to him. This man initially goes out of his mind, thinking they’re trying to pin the murders on him (well, Mark is, but not Colombo), and then he stops and listens because Colombo knows he didn’t kill them, and he also knows who did it, but he needs proof and wants his help to get it. 

This is what I was talking about at the beginning, here Colombo has to deal with a known thief, and his attitude is different, less humble. With rich people, who are usually arrogant and demanding and entitled, he’s all apologies, ,but with the thief there’s no being sorry to bother him or stuff like that. They talk and they understand each other, and the man agrees to help Colombo because he knows that otherwise someone will succeed and he’ll be labelled a murderer. 

The thief (sorry, but I really can’t remember his name) calls Hugh saying stuff like I know you killed her, I saw you… and he wants to meet to ask for some blackmail money. Hugh tells Mark everything, and Mark looks for informations on the man among the files on Colombo’s desk, searching for the man’s address. Once he finds it, he goes there to hide under the mattress the jewels that he took from Hugh’s house, then he has the police arrest the man while he was meeting Hugh to get the money (nobody wondered why an innocent man would agree to be blackmailed? If there was nothing true about it?).

Colombo keeps telling him that he does not believe him guilty, that it’s a mistake, but Mark insists on going to the man’s house with a search warrant. Colombo quietly explains to him all that he knows about how things went on, especially on how Mark himself killed his own wife. Mark doesn’t yield and when the cops finally find the jewels, he’s all victorious, thinking that now he can pin it all on the thief, no matter what Colombo knows or suspects. 

His joy is short lived though, because Colombo out-played him here. They are not at the thief’s house, not at all, it’s Colombo’s, well, a new place that he rented recently, probably just for the occasion, and it worked. Only Mark could have put the jewels there. 

Busted, he doesn’t know what to say.

P.s. the apartment had to appear lived in, so Colombo filled it with his clothes and stuff, there were even pictures of his family, well, of a man and then of two children who were his nephews or something. 

Columbo - Double exposure

 It wasn’t bad,  but it’s not one of my favourites, for the simple reason that it’s all based on the theory of subliminal messages. Sure, they admit that it wouldn’t be enough by itself, there has to be something more, so that those messages are just the last push you needed, but I still found it rather forced. 

Still, Robert Culp was good.

Plot details. 

Kepple wrote many books on subliminal messages and stuff like that, more broadly about the way you can influence people with commercials I think, all that stuff, “motivational research”. He owns Kepple industries, and he also does a bit of blackmail on the side, I think, because we have Mr Norris quite angry at him because of it, because apparently Kepple set a girl on him with the intent of blackmailing since Norris is very much married. Norris is quite the big fish and won’t bow down easily, he intends to fight back and ruin Kepple. 

So Kepple has a plan to murder him, and this time it won’t be just because of Colombo that he fails, but also because he let himself be seen doing something that brings him to murder a second man… that of course complicated things… and since he did have Colombo on his tail, the end was inevitable. He really thought Colombo was so easy to figure out… and sure he didn’t get trapped in the little things, but the end is the same.

So: Kepple will have Norris and some other people working for Norris come to him to watch a film that had been commissioned, while Kepple will provide the commentary behind the curtains. In preparation of their arrival, Kepple put in that video some subliminal messages, meaning some pictures of a glass of iced tea. He also provided some very salty caviar knowing that Norris loves it. And he also had no air conditioning. 

Kepple used a screwdriver to turn off a surveillance monitor, and was seen by Roger, the man working the tapes. 

Kepple also called Mrs Norris, masking his voice,  to tell her about Norris and the girl, promising her proof if she met him at a specific hour somewhere. 

When the people arrive, Norris is the aggressive type, he eats a lot of caviar and then sits to watch the video, but at some point, he can’t resist and goes out to drink something, and the only thing available is water in the lobby. The other people did not dare leave their post, but they also had not eaten any salty caviar… Kepple had recorded himself reading the commentary, so he sets the recorder and he goes out unnoticed, and shoots Norris, with nobody noticing anything.

He goes back to finish the commentary in person, so that he’s there to talk to them as soon as it’s finished.  

To delete the tape, he takes the recorder and puts it on the table in the lobby, since he always records people’s comments about the videos, hitting Rec when he puts the recorder on the table.

When Colombo arrives, he’s so hungry that he eats every snack he can find, and even tastes the caviar. He seems to like it, and only stops when he’s told how much it costs… he says he’s so hungry becauses he didn’t eat before, he “missed dinner tonight, working late on  that Hayward case”… :) (meaning the episode Candidate for a crime). 

Of course, Colombo being the uncouth that he is, uses the little spoon to get the caviar straight into his mouth, and puts it right back… that little spoon is to be used by everyone, to put the caviar into some cracker or whatever, nobody should lick it…

Colombo investigates of course. Kepple suggests he questions the wife, he very much counted on her as a prime suspect, but Colombo dismisses the idea very quickly. Of course he does talk to her, he never ignores a trail, but he never suspects her. 

They can’t find the murder weapon, and there doesn’t seem to be a reson for the man to go out or a way the murderer could know he would get out right then… 

He talks to the projectionist Roger, who offers him some iced tea… and I’m not surprised Colombo asks for a refill, since the man only poured a few drops on that glass!

Colombo of course checks the weapons Kepple keeps in his office, but none of them are the right calibre.

Roger approaches Kepple saying he knows how he did it, how he murdered Norris, because he saw Kepple near the surveillance monitor that didn’t work and it was the one watching the lobby, and he also found the added messages in the film, and so he asks for some money. It’s amazing that he will look surprised and shocked that Kepple might murder him too! I mean, the man’s a murderer! Kepple shoots him at the theatre where he works using Mr Norris’ gun that he took from his house, to further involve Mrs Norris. 

Colombo learns everything about subliminal cuts put in tapes from people working there, and since he got thirsty after eating the caviar he asked for an autopsy to check if the man had any, and this leads him to the subliminal cuts suggesting he goes to have something to drink… in  this case the nearest water fountain. He had the film examined but there were no cuts, there might have been a second print with the cuts, but he won’t find it of course. 

Kepple’s alibi for Roger’s murder is Colombo himself, because they think it happened later, until Colombo notices that there was no nickle on the floor, Kepple himself changed the second reel but didn’t put the nickle in, he went away, and the murder was discovered when Roger did not change it again…

The trick  used by projectionists, to take a nickle and put it at the bottom of the film and when it falls down the projectionists hear it and know they must change the reel.

Colombo is sure that Kepple murdered both of them, but he still has no murder weapon for the first one, so he takes a photographer and has him shoot pictures of himself looking around in the man’s office, and then he puts the cuts into the film that Kepple will watch in the screening room next, and it works, while watching it Kepple goes out and runs into his office and it’s he himself that reveals how he did it, because now Colombo can see that he had a “calibration converter” hidden in there, and he used it to change his own 45 into a 22. 

Colombo would have never thought of a converter, he thought he had hidden a weapon! Once busted, Kepple smiles like he’s lost it…

Colombo says he likes western movies while talking to Roger, and it also appears he’s the one doing the grocery shopping in his household, Kepple guesses it by his body language when they meet in a supermarket and Colombo confirms it.

Columbo - Candidate for a crime

 I liked it, more than I usually would have with such a character, but I liked all the investigation bits, and also the expressions of the wife, it was a nice episode.

The male lead is Nelson Hayward, candidate for the Senate I think, saying that the judges granted him a police escort that he was forced to accept, but that nothing and nobody will stop him in his war against crime… he uses his own words, but that’s the spirit, and back then there were men who actually believed that when they said it, but then they were killed and the others got the message…

Harry Stone is the man that manages his campaign, but he’s not paid by Nelson, he’s put money in it and now he expects Nelson to do everything he says and be elected. 

Vickie is Nelson’s wife, and Linda is his lover; she’s also Vickie’s assistant.

To be sure to avoid all possible scandals, Stone wants Linda out of Nelson’s life, not just for the elections, but for good. Nelson has no intention of giving her up though, and since Stone insists he says that the other really gives him no choice, and goes ahead with the plan he made. He says he can’t break up on the phone, he has to talk to her in person to make her understand, and since they can’t have policemen or journalists follow him to Linda’s house, he has Stone take his jacket and his car and go to his beach cottage, so they’d follow him instead. But Nelson doesn’t go to Linda’s house, he goes to the cottage and shoots Stone, then changes his watch - because Stone’s own watch was of the made-to-last type, and Nelson needed a more fragile one, so that he could smash it and provide the police with a time of death, one when he would be sure to be noticed elsewhere of course.

Nelson hurries back home, where he has planned a surprise party for his wife, and has invited lots of people. Colombo will reach him there to tell him that Stone has been killed, probably by someone who thought they were killing Nelson instead… 

So, since Nelson needed the body found when he had the alibi of his wife’s party, he sneaked into a room and called the police, pretending to be some anti-Nelson-Hayward criminals and saying that they had just killed Nelson, true to their threats… and that was what Colombo knew at first, he heard on the radio about Nelson being killed while he was in the dentist’s chair (poor Colombo, he really doesn’t like it, I can empathize…) and he keeps thinking it for a while, he arrives at the crime scene thinking Nelson died, but then he learns the truth and starts investigating. Everyone assumes Nelson was the intended victim, even Colombo at first, but he doesn’t let that blind him to other possibilities…

Colombo as always investigates all the little details, not keeping anything to himself.

For example, there was no way the murderer could have called the police at that hour after having murdered the man only a few minutes before, because there’s nothing around but a garage, and that night the garage closed early. Which means the murder had to happen earlier that what the watch suggests…

The watch itself, it does not agree with the rest of Stone’ss tuff, all his clothes are of the made-to-last kind, he would never have bought such a fragile watch, which suggests someone changed it in order to smash it to provide an hour…

Colombo is there to see when Nelson is delivered his tailor-made jacket, a sort of copy of the one that got ruined when he shot Stone, meaning his jacket that he gave Stone to wear, and Colombo asked the tailor and the jacket had been ordered ten days earlier. 

…

Colombo starts asking questions that rather suggest that Stone was the intended victim after all, so Nelson makes himself some threat letters and has Linda pretend to discover that on his desk, and then since Colombo doesn’t really buy it, and Nelson knows that Colombo suspects him, he puts together another big scene. While alone in his hotel room, he shoots at the window from outside, on the balcony, so the bullet goes into the wall inside the room. With a silencer nobody heard it, and then he went out becausehe could not wait, he had to join his wife and go voting, there were journalists waiting for that. 

I think they said it was three hours later that they got back to their hotel room (I don’t remember if it’s yet known who won…) and Nelson used a firecracker to pretend someone shot at him right then, and when the cops enter the room of course he’s alone, and he makes it a big deal of how it’s pretty obvious now that someone wanted and still wants to kill him, and it should be enough even for Colombo… but it doesn’t, and Colombo still thinks and claims that Nelson murdered Stone, and now he has proof. Thing is, Colombo kept a closed eye on him, had a cop warn him if Nelson was ever alone anywhere, and so he was told when Nelson went into a room alone saying he had to make some calls, and he looked at the communicating phones, there should be a light when the phones are in use, and there never was a light… and so he wondered what was Nelson doing if he was not calling anyone, and so he entered the room while the others were all out and searched it. Of course he found the hole in the wall, he took the bullet and sent it to their lab, which confirmed it as fired from the same gun that killed Stone… but there’s no way Nelson can explain that. He was just now yelling and insisting someone ‘just’ shot at him…

About Linda, they talked much about avoiding scandals and all, and yet Nelson starts calling her for everrything. Nelson suggested Linda follow him on his campaign, so he could bring Linda and he’d have a valid excuse to see her often, and then they thought it was normal that she kept bringing him stuff or that he kept asking her to do something… only the wife looked unhappy about it, I really liked her exression when she saw them… I mean, he had his own assistant, it made no logical sense that he should ask Vickie’s assistant to fetch him things… 

Let’s not even talk of how after hearing that firecracker both women got worried and hurried at his side… that would have been clue enough for everyone, had it mattered at all, which it didn’t because at that moment Nelson got busted :p

P.s. in this episode, Colombo is stopped by the road police for a check, and even after they learn he’s a lieutenant they go through with their inspection and give him a list of things he has to take car of - like he has a burned light, stuff like that, and good man that he is, he immediately does it, leaving the car at the garage nearest the murder scene, so he can keep investigating while the man works on his car. 

Columbo - Requiem for a falling star

 A nice episode, quite interesting, I liked it.

Plot details first:

We meet famous actress Nora Chandler. Her assistant of many years, Jean Davis, is in a relationship with Jerry Parks. Nora doesn’t like that, because she thinks it’s all just pretending on Jerry’s part, because he’s a journalist, one of those that know people’s secrets and when it’s just little gossip they write it down, when it’s something more interesting they blackmail. Jean insists that they love each other, and that she’d never talk to him about Nora. As soon as she’s out of sight, Jerry blackmails Nora for something that happened years before, and that cost that company making that money two million dollars.

Now we see Nora giving her a list of things to do for her, like picking up her clothes at the dry cleaners and stuff. Jean is a little annoyed, but drives away. We see Nora following her and looking at her while she meets Jerry at the book shop, and then Nora is outside Jerry’s  house, pouring two tins of gasoline on the floor and creating a trail. As soon as the car stops there, she lights it up and the car goes up in flames, killing the driver. 

Nora is reached at a restaurant to tell her that there was an accident, and at first she thinks Jerry was the victim, then she faints when they tell her that Jean is the one who died. 

When Colombo arrives at her house, he’s really exited, he tells her he’s been in love with her all his life… and then he calls home, and since his wife is out, he has her say hello to his brother-in-law George.

Apparently Jean’s car got a flat tyre or something, so after the book shop she got Jerry to give her his, so she could do her work, and then she went to his house. It’s supposed that the murderer thought Jerry was driving and tried to kill him. Thinking this, Colombo starts talking to Jerry, trying to find out who might want to kill him. He also keeps talking to Nora and telling her stuff, as he usually does, to see their reactions.

Colombo is especially troubled by the tyre, because it had been checked recently, and it appears to be in good shape, there’s nothing wrong about it that they can find… and this will eventually convince Colombo that she was indeed the intended victim, not Jerry, because it wasn’t an accident impossible to foresee, someone sabotaged Jean’s tyre so that she’d be forced to take his car since she had work to do. This ruse was because as a blackmailer, Jerry has lots of enemies, while Jean didn’t. 

Nora herself reveals that little scandal that Jerry knew about her, she reveals to show Colombo that she had no reason to kill Jerry, but then when he tells her that Jean was the target, she pretends an attempt on his life, by almost running him over with her car, or  with a car anyway, to change Colombo’s mind. 

But looking at an old film on tv, one that George warned him was on, he sees Nora dressed with a raincoat and hat, pretending to be a man, and it suddenly hits him.

Years before, Nora’s husband disappeared, he was seen going out sailing, but he never came back and he was declared dead, but now Colombo sees how easily she could have played his part, her husband was not tall, people might have seen her instead and thought it was him… and indeed that’s what happened. Nora married him for her career but came to love him, and she had to bear his infidelity, but when he started taking girls home, their home, it hurt too much and she hit him and he died and she buried him in the garden, and then put a fountain on it, taken from the studios. A fountain with no water because of course she could not allow anyone to dig under it. 

To get his proof, Colombo tells her that when Jerry was almost run over, he had an envelope with him, with a ring inside. Jerry had alluded on other stuff he had on Nora, but they thought it was just empty words, but now Colombo tells her he had this ring, and shows it to her, and it looks like her husband’s ring, so she runs home and runs straight out towards the garden, and that’s when Colombo confronts her with the evidence that she ran straight there, to the fountain. She’d been wondered if Jerry or someone found it, dig it out. Because twelve years ago she had killed her husband, and Jean knew about it, apparently, and with Jerry in her life now…

A curiosity: Edith Head, the costume designer featured in this episode, is the real one, and those oscars on her desk are real ones that she had already won.

Nora was played by Anne Baxter, Jerry by Mel Ferrer

About Colombo’s home life, I’ say it’s for sure that he has a brother-in-law named George. Sure because he says it when he’s alone and calling home, not when he is with some suspect or others. He calls home an says “It’s me, put her on” but she’s not home so he speaks to George. She’s always out, but George is always in…

Colombo also says that he does have another car, his wife drives it.

Colombo is given a new tie, a pretty one that he’ll keep for special occasion, he still wants his own back to use for every day. 

Columbo - Any old port in a storm

 I like this, it’s nice, the characters are interesting. This is the episode of the wine experts. 

Honestly the victim as he is described by his friends doesn’t sound like the man we saw and heard. They talk of a young man full of life, who loved sports and was in perfect shape. They say the brother ruined the family company so he wanted to sell it to make money to be able to marry his fiancee… but what we saw and heard is an unpleasant guy who had no regard for his brother (or stepbrother, as is the case). He cared nothing about quality, only about money. He wanted riches, and didn’t care if he ruined/destroyed his brother by selling all the plants, and for no real reason too! They’re not at all ruined. Adrian in no billionnaire, he has to count how much he spends, but he still spent 5000$ for one very rare bottle… and this Rick, his car was a Ferrari! Not the car that your average man can drive… 

The actors were good, I mean Donald Pleasence as Adrian Carsini is fenomenal, such a wine fanatic, when he was told who Rick wanted to sell to, he went into a blind rage, he was practically foaming at the mouth :lol: I also knew Dana Elcar in this episode, he was Adrian’s Texan friend.

More comments at the end on how much it makes sense…

Anyway, details:

This Rick Carsini comes to tell Adrian that he’s getting married and he wants to sell everything to some family that produces common wine in large quantity making lots of money, while Adrian produces good wine in smaller quantities, and certain special wines he only makes in such small quantities that he keeps that for himself to open in special occasions.

Adrian is a real expert, a wine lover like only a few can understand. Rick has no intention of talking about it, or bargaining in any way, he just came to tell Adrian that he will sell, (destroying Adrian’s life, in a way) and that Adrian can do nothing about it… and Adrian is so desperately enraged that he takes the first thing at hand and hits him on the head… but he is not dead.

Funny how in “Dagger of the mind” Lillian killed the man by throwing at him a simple jar of cream, like every woman uses for makeup, and just like that Sir Roger was hit and fell down: dead. But here, an enraged man hits him hard on the head from up close, and yet he’s not dead…

Adrian has friends there, to savor some good wine together and to be told that he’s been voted Man of the Year in their circle… and then he has a trip already planned, to New York maybe, for a wine auction, so what he does is put his brother inside his wine cellar, all tied up. He stops the air conditioning system, puts the Ferrari inside his garage, then leaves for his trip. He comes back a week later, and takes his brother’s body; he puts a sub outfit on him, the one he has in his car because he did it before meeting Adrian, and then drives the Ferrari to a secluded spot… the plan is to make it look like an accident, and it kinda worked fo a while, but for Colombo…

The other cop was quite satisfied with the fact that he hit his head and died at sea, but Colombo wasn’t. For a few reasons: first, Rick’s friends say he was really healthy and used to sports, but most of all because of the car. It was left open, but the day he was supposed to have gotten there, the weather was bad… 

As always, it’s many little things, like the coroner saying that Rick had not eaten anything for two days before his death… (can they really tell a week later? ). 

Colombo tries hard to find someone who saw Rick coming and going from Adrian’s office, because he knows he got there, but not what went on afterwards… but then Ms Fielding says for sure that she saw Rick go out and drive away… which would be Adrian’s alibi, in a way. Adrian knows it’s not true, and asks her why she lied, and she starts saying that she loves him and wanted to help him, and then ends up saying that he doesn’t need to love her to marry her and make her his work partner…

Colombo ‘steals’ one of the bottle in his wine cellar, and has a restaurant secretly serve that bottle to him… but as soon as he tastes it, Adrian goes ballistic saying they ruined it, they didn’t keep it cool enough… and then Colombo, quite offhandedly tells him that the week he was away there was a huge heat wave, it went up to 43°, so Adrian understands that all the bottles in his wine cellar are ruined (well, ruined for him, everyone else would still find it delicious, like at the restaurant both Colombo and Ms Fielding liked it, but he’s a fanatic, as we said) and he goes out at night to throw his bottles at sea… until he meets Colombo and understands that the man knows everything. He doesn’t even fight it, he says he’ll confess.

A peculiar thing is that the episode is good, the actors too, one of the best episodes, and yet does it really make sense? I mean, I understand some things, but when you really look at it, does it make any sense? The wine cellar: I guess Adrian didn’t have the time for disposing of the body right away, he had a trip planned and nothing comes before his precious wine…  But why stop the air conditioning, to keep the body warm or to kill him by taking away the air? If it’s the latter, why not finish him right away? Maybe he didn’t have the guts to do it? Now that he is no more in a rage he can’t bring himself to do it? Maybe…

And the ending… it’s fun and enjoyable to watch, but really, what does that prove? He could just say that his wine got ruined because his air conditioning system broke down while he was away… there’s no proof at all that Rick was there, or that Adrian drove that car… no proof at all. Maybe that’s why Colombo hurries and asks for a deposition, he wants a confession because he knows any lawyer would be able to get him out of that… and maybe Adrian does confess simply because he was tired of it and wary of his new situation with Ms Fielding, not knowing yet how far her blackmail might go… 

Other men, rotten characters Colombo had to deal with, would have killed Ms Fielding without a second thought, but Adrian is not like that, planning a murder in cold blood is not him.

Just one more thing :) 

In this episode, Colombo says that if they can find a babysitter for the baby, his wife will join them at the restaurant, and then he says that since they couldn’t find one his wife had to stay home, he says that their usual babysitter had a concert that night, or something like that… which would point to the fact that maybe they did have a baby, Colombo might have a son (the only other reference that I can remember is in “the most crucial game”, season2)