This is the episode with maybe the nicest character of the whole show, the victim of course, the Russian chess champion Tomlin Dudek. He’s nice, he’s kind, he’s sympathetic and helpful and understanding.
This is also one of those episodes when you kind of wonder why Colombo was there at all: when Dudek was hiding from his staff, Colombo was called because he had ‘disappeared’, then Colombo is again called when Dudek ‘slipped and fell and hurt himself, but was still alive’… are these things that need a homicide detective? Really? How does it work?
There are only two things: 1 I didn’t much understand why the letter had to be in Russian (and it clearly was, since Colombo asked to translate it), I mean, as ‘Dudek’s letter’ of course it had to be in Russian, but as the letter Clayton wanted to copy for this woman he had, was she Russian?- 2 I didn’t like how the girl changed so easily her attitude, for the first half she’s all against Clayton, speaks harshly of him, then it’s enough that he tells her that he talked to Dudek and they sympathized with each other and she’s all sweet and no more suspicious…
Well, there’s also the fact that I really don’t think Clayton’s device is actually possible, and that the
There are two chess champions, Dudek and Emmett Clayton. Clayton has the title now, but only because at that time Dudek wasn’t well and didn’t play. Now Clayton is eaten by anxiety, he can’t sleep… the night before the match they meet at a restaurant near the hotel, they eat and talk, and of course end up playing chess using whatever they find on the table. Dudek wins, they go back to the hotel and play again in Clayton’s room, because Dudek wants to escape his overprotective staff. They play and Dudek wins again, but he’s not smug about it, he says it’s clear that Clayton has something else on his mind, he suggests a girl, he seems the romantic type. It’s not true, but of course Clayton can’t tell him he’s just incapable of beating him. He can’t stand it, and he plans to kill him before the match.
Clayton calls for a taxi giving the name Dudek, and he enters Dudek’s room to pack him a small bag with his necessities, then he calls him pretending to be desperate for his help. They meet and Clayton plays it incoherently, saying he’s desperate and doesn’t know how to get out of it, that there’s a woman, that he made a mistake… basically he means he had a fling but she’s taking it seriously and wants more from him or something. He begs Dudek to write it on a letter, saying that he’ll copy it later, and so he has Dudek write things like I’m sorry, I made a mistake, I’m ashamed…
Clayton’s plan is to push Dudek into the big garbage disposal machine the hotel has in its basement, making it look like he was secretly running away but slipped and fell into it, dying.
Colombo starts questioning Dudek’s staff, who can’t believe the man would ever run away and are very baffled when Clayton shows them the ‘letter’, saying Dudek left it under his door for him. Colombo notices immediately that Clayton speaks as if Dudek were dead, and corrects his wrong assumptions. Of course it’s now obvious that if Dudek survives the surgery he will have to kill him.
BTW, why surgery? If the machine was designed to shut off when something got in while it was on, it shouldn’t have injured him at all. Of course he’d be slightly wounded by being thrown into it, but to the extent of emergency surgery?
Anyway, now Clayton manages to get a look at the list of medicines Dudek will need after he wakes up, and he doesn’t have to take it, he just has to read it once and his memory will work fine. So once again he sneaks into the room and alters them, swirching a box with another identical but tampered with (where he got that nobody knows). Voilà, Dudek dies and everyone is shocked and baffled, but Colombo knows what must have happened.
He had his suspicions from the start, of course, because he believed him dead, because he had dine with him the night before, and he showed them the letter, and he kept telling everyone that he won when they played together… but Colombo couldn’t see why he had left him alive the first time… until some people explain to him that the machine stops when something goes him while it’s on, going of course silent, and to restart it they need to pish a button…
I didn’t yet explain it, but Clayton was deaf and he used a hearing aid (imagine an ipod with one earpod, but bigger). With it, he could hear perfectly, without it he couldn’t hear a single sound. Sometimes he would take it off on purpose to cut off the excessive noise, and he could still read lips , and that night the device broke, so when he committed the murder (attempted, it turned out) he was without it, and when the machine shut off he didn’t notice the sudden silence and so didn’t turn it back on.
This is what Colombo uses to make him see he’s busted, he shows him that in this case the murderer just had to be deaf.
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