It was nice, I liked it, it’s one of those episode where there’s an equal amount of Colombo and the others, and of course Colombo outsmarts them all and fully enjoys it; this time he says it clearly, that the man told him such ‘stupid lies’, and says it to his face, the great psychologist, mind-control/life-control guru, who thought he was so brilliant, he was nothing more than a petty bastard and an idiot.
The plot in details:
Eric Mason makes seminars where he tells people to take control of their lives, and stuff like that; he lost his wife six months ago. Now we see that he trained his dogs to enter the kitchen when the phone rings and then to attack if they hear the word Rosebud. He tells his, supposedly, best friend Charlie that they’ll play tennis together but he’ll have to wait till he’ll be back from doing his physical exam. He tells Charlie to take the dogs home… and it’s obvious that he’s the intended victim. The reason is obvious as well, because while talking Mason tells him that although it is hard to get over his wife’s death, their marriage was not perfect, because she was having an affair… it was pretty obvious with whom,at that point, and yet Charlie never suspected that Mason knew. So Charlie goes to Mason’s house with the dogs.
During his ECG, the doctor leaves him alone to relaxwhile attached to the ECG machine, and Mason hurries to phone his own home, so Charlie and the dogs all enter the kitchen. Charlie is used to having the dogs around, they’re always very obedient and sweet, lovely dogs, but now Mason tells him that while talking to the doctor they started remembering the Citizen Kane movie (quarto potere), and he asks Charlie to say a specific word that is recurrent in that movie, and that Charlie knows for sure because he has seen it many times, since Mason owns the sled from the movie. Charlie says Rosebud once, and the dogs start growling; he doesn’t understand why, but doesn’t worry too much. When he says it again, though, the dogs attack him and kill him.
A girl living in Mason’s guest house hears hos screams and calls the police.
When Mason got home, he was expecting to see his dogs taken away immediately, to be killed as soon as possible, but instead he sees Columbo playing with them.
Mason firmly denies phoning home that day, but Columbo is sure that someone did and that Charlie answered because of the sound of the receiver. Mason doesn’t appear at all under shock that his beloved dogs suddenly tore to pieces his best friend. He speaks like he understands that the dogs have to be put down, and he attempts to enter the kitchen without a thought of the body still within and its horrifying condition. It was not self control, it totally looked like he didn’t care at all.
Mason then enters Charlie’s house to take away the pictures he had of himself with Mason’s wife, and when he found Colombo there, he said he had no idea why Charlie was missing a jacket.
Mason then had no problem showing Colombo his collection of movies memorabilia, objects that were owned by actors or used in famous movies, stuff like Citizen Kane’s sled.
A stupid scene, and it’s not the first time something like this happens in Colombo or other stories, is that when Mason enters the isolation room where the dogs are kept, the guards questions if he might be allowed to stay or not, and to be sure he leaves the room to search for Colombo and ask him, but when he leaves he doesn’t make Mason go out as well, he leaves him in. How absurd is that? I mean, I don’t know if you can stay here, so you better stay here while I go check??????
Anyway, Colombo already talked with an expert dog trainer on what dogs think and why they might attack, and then he saw her with her dog, and she said Kiss and the dog attacked, and so he learned that you can teach a dog anything, using words as commands. So he became convinced that Mason killed Charlie using the dogs, but he had two problems: one, without the dogs he would have no proof, so he had to stop the judges from having them killed (a thing that Mason desperately wanted, of course, it was too dangerous for him if they lived), and he also didn’t know what word he may have used. He saw how the dogs reacted to the sound of a phone ringing, so he set out to find the command word by talking a lot with Mason and saying lots of words. He used a recorder that started recording every time simeone started talking. So he not only registered their words plays, but also what they said while they said their goodbyes at the gate. When Colombo started chatting about Mason’s gate and how it looked familiar, and Mason said it was the one from Citizen Kane, so they started remembering how the movie started, and Mason said the word Rosebud.
When Colombo played the recording to the dogs, they became aggressive at hearing that word, and he knew. He talked again to the dog trainer, but we don’t hear it because it’ll be the big surprise at the end.
Mason talks to the girl, now ready to live his house, though not happy about it. She says she could have made him happy if he had let her, and she reveals that she once saw his wife and Charlie together, she never said to not hurt him, but she knew. Mason is shocked, tells her she must never tell, and it looks like he might be willing to kill her, but right then, Colombo comes in. Always great timing, that man.
Colombo lays it all as it is, that he knows everything, all the stupid lies he told and everything he did to train the dogs (including using one of Charlie’s jackets). Colombo only lies about the command word, he says he doesn’t know it but it doesn’t really matter, with the dogs alive, and the dogs are right there, with him. So the man thinks the only way out is to get rid of Colombo, by having the dogs attack him, so he says the word, Rosebud, twice, pointing at Colombo, and the dogs launch at him… only to tackle him with affection. Colombo explains that, knowing the word, he had the woman dog-trainer change the dogs conditioning, so that they react differently to the word now.
That is the last proof needed, and the man is busted.
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