Interesting, not my favourite because this Blake gets too much screen time, much more than Colombo, but it’s a nice episode, a good one. Still, it keeps with the show’s old tradition of having no witnesses at all when he arrests this murderer, so at the trial it will simply be one’s word against the other’s, not exactly “proof”.
This is the episode where ex magician Elliott Blake pretends to be the real thing, to have powers o read thoughts if he tries hard, and they do tests upon tests to show it… (and yet these mind reading people never answer if asked What am I thinking?)
The military bring in Max Dyson to confirm it, he has a magic shop and has written a book on mind-reading and magic, and he also works as a consultant to uncover imposters.
What nobody else knows is that Elliott and Max know each other, have known each other for years, Max was actually Elliott’s mentor, who taught him everything he knew,, so now Max decides to help him and they cheat on the decisive test - the one where three drivers pointon a map using a blindfold and takea picture that he must guess.
Colombo will think hard on this, on how it was possible, but like his little friend, child magician says, if you start from the premise that it’s a trick, you just have to think about it and it’s pretty obvious. It could not have been a random place in the whole big city, it had to be a specific place that he knew about already. It had to.
Still, they are not exactly ok. Max thinks they are, until Elliott shows all his anger, because they were together in Uganda, in prison, and Max got out betraying Elliott’s escape attempt or something like that, so that while Max got out Elliott stayed there for three years.
Elliott hates him for this betrayal, and will never forgive him. He went to meet him at his lab (where Max builds magic tricks) with the idea of shooting him, but then he got another idea, seeing that Max was working on a guillotine, and so Elliott cuts his head off!
Columbo is called in before the body is even seen by anybody, because below the lab there’s a bar owned by an ex sergeant, who insists on talking to someone from homicide and noone else. Blood is dripping down from above, so they break in by cutting a hole… somewhere, not totally sure where the other entrance was, the lift was totally fine … anyway, it’s not a nice view.
The other magicians loved Max, and Colombo talks to the man working at the magic shop and they even share a drink wearing long pointy magician hats…
Elliott of course insists he never knew Max, only met him like two days before the test, even after Colombo discovers that he was born in Uganda.
When Colombo ‘asks for his help’, Elliott fakes his powers again saying he feels pain and desperation, hinting at a suicide, but Colombo is sure it couldn’t be because Max had just bought a lot of good meat to eat.So Elliott turns it to mean that the desperation might have worked unconsciously to create an accident… and here Colombo has proof that it wasn’t, because someone put the wrong screwdriver in Max’s hand, but most of all there’s blood on the wooden collar that stucks the head to the guillotine,and the collar was not near. It couldn’t be, of course, if the pretense was an accident while working on it.
So it was all for nothing, it’s Colombo who tells him it was definitely a murder.
Now, I understand the map-of-the-city trick requires a moment to figure out, but the ‘draw a shape and I’ll read in your mind what it is’ does not! Why did Colombo have to explain that? I was actually wondering if Colombo was actually tricking him back by pretending to fall for it, but it turns out he wasn’t, and later he learned ‘the trick’ and was surprised… and I’m shocked, because everyone watching the show could clearly see that he was drawing a circle and then a triangle, how can you not look at the hand doing the drawing?Of course you do, and so it’s obvious which shape it is…
Elliott tries to escape by accepting the offer from the military, a job far away with a totally new identity, but somehow Colombo learned about it and stopped him. He actually did the same test with the maps to show it was a trick, so the military is no more interested in Elliott.
Now Colombo only needs proof. He knows that Max betrayed him, which is excellent motive, he learned (reading Max’s book) how the murderer could have gotten out leaving the place locked from the inside, he knows how the guillotine works… but he still lacks definitive proof that Elliott Blake is a murderer, so he gives Elliott his chance; he accuses him and tells him he’ll never leave him alone and will find out a way to get him because he is sure he did it, and so Elliott tries on him the same guillotine trick that worked on an unsuspecting Max. Of course it doesn’t work and Colombo’s head is still very much attached; this is because he knew it would happen, he worked towards making it happen, to get his proof and be able to arrest him… and this is what I was talking about at the beginning: there’s just the two of them there, nobody sees that Elliott tried to kill Colombo, there’s no cop coming out of hiding to arrest him. It’s just the two of them!
Anyway, busted. Elliott’s face is of shock seeing him still alive, and Colombo takes out a gun with a very long barrel, because instead of a bullet the word Bang comes out :-P
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