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)
Nessun commento:
Posta un commento