Recap / Columbo S 08 E 02

Episode: Season 8, Episode 2
Title:"Murder, Smoke and Shadows"
Directed by: James Frawley
Written by: Richard Alan Simmons
Air Date: February 27, 1989
Previous: Columbo Goes to the Guillotine
Next: Sex and the Married Detective
Guest Starring: Fisher Stevens, Molly Hagan

"Murder, Smoke and Shadows" is the second episode of the eighth season of Columbo.

Alex Brady (Fisher Stevens) is a hotshot young Hollywood director, currently starting production on a new picture on the Universal lot. He is met by an unwelcome visitor from his hometown, one Leonard Fisher. After bailing from the Universal studio tour (he didn't ask for Babs), Leonard confronts Alex in Alex's studio bungalow. He reveals a long-hidden 16mm film reel from Alex's past as an aspiring studio filmmaker. It seems that Alex was making an amateur film with his friend Buddy Coates and Leonard's sister Jenny. Jenny attempted a stunt on a motorcycle, but had an accident and was thrown from the motorcycle. Alex and Buddy then left Jenny to die, and made it seem like Jenny died en route to the filming. An enraged Leonard, who came into possession of this incriminating footage upon Buddy's recent death from hepatitis, promises to expose Alex and destroy his career.

Alex claims that the film is faked and promises to show Leonard how it was done. In reality, he takes Leonard to the famous Universal "Brownstone Street" set and causes Leonard's death by electrocution when Leonard tries to flee and grasps an electrified gate. Alex then strips Leonard's body of ID, smashes his face to a pulp, and dumps him on the beach, hoping to leave Leonard as a John Doe vagrant.

Enter Lt. Columbo of the LAPD. It turns out that found next to the body, presumably dropping out of Leonard's sport coat, was a paperback copy of The Films of Alex Brady, that had Leonard's direct office number written on the inside cover. When interviewing Alex, Columbo notices two, not one, incompletely consumed ice cream sundaes on Alex's counter. And then there's the matter of Alex ordering a water truck to wet down the streets of the brownstone set the night before for no particular reason...

---

Tropes:

• Always a Bigger Fish: Alex uses the fact that he's a superstar director to get his way for much of the episode, but after getting on his boss's bad side, he's quickly put in his place towards the end of the episode by the boss dramatically reducing his financial support.
• "Blackmail" Is Such an Ugly Word: Alex's personal secretary invites him to lunch, where she "casually" observes that she was quite surprised that Alex left some details out concerning Leonard's visit to him. Alex quickly asks if she's interested in an all-expenses paid trip around the world, which she naturally finds appealing. Unluckily for Alex, it's a trap: at Columbo's behest, she attempted to pressure him into offering her a bribe for her silence.
• Break the Haughty: Alex's boss promising to end his career and cut his funding already takes the wind out of his sails, but then Columbo revealing he had already tricked Alex into incriminating himself, using both his secretary and his favorite actress as part of the ruse to boot, destroys him.
• Chalk Outline: On the beach!
• Dead Man Writing: How the story gets rolling. Alex and Leonard's old friend Buddy Coates, who was wielding the camera that recorded Jenny's fatal accident, apparently felt guilty, and arranged for the film to be sent to Leonard after Buddy's death.
• A God Am I: Alex effectively sees himself as God in regards to anything having to do with him, applying his directorial skills to manipulating everyone around him and going on philosophical rants about reality via light and shadow, with him as the light and everyone else as the shadow that he can make and unmake at will. Columbo solves the case by stealing Alex's position as the light and leaving him a mere shadow, breaking him into pure silence.
• Have You Told Anyone Else?: Leonard very foolishly does this to himself when he says to Alex, "I couldn't tell anyone! Not until I could face you." At least he thought ahead enough to only bring a copy of the film instead of the original with him.
• High-Voltage Death: Leonard dies after Alex manipulates him into running towards and grabbing a metal fence that has been rigged to electrocute him. For good measure, Alex ordered the grounds to be wetted down to make the voltage go through better.
• Laser-Guided Karma: All of Alex's actions come back to bite him in the end. His ungrateful rejection of a favor for his boss/mentor convinces the latter to ensure Alex's career is ruined, while his soulless manipulation of Ruth and poor treatment of his secretary Rose convinces them to join Columbo's show to get Alex to incriminate himself. Even his letting Leonard's sister Jenny die long ago, as beyond being the catalyst for Alex to murder Leonard, the tape of it ends up in Columbo's hands anyway, rendering all of Alex's efforts for naught.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: A lot of this as Alex, who is trying to butter Columbo up, talks about how he'd like to plumb Columbo's expertise for use in a movie.
  Columbo: I don't think the things I use would be very interesting to an audience.
• Lens Flare: Seen in the studio as Alex is using a spotlight to show Columbo how lighting is used to create a scene.
• Magical Realism: During the showy finale where Columbo is demonstrating how Brady was hoodwinked, he briefly appears dressed as a circus ringmaster, before reappearing again in the rumpled overcoat.
  • During Alex's "light and shadow" demonstration with the picket fence, the fence goes on MUCH longer in the spotlight than it should. Additionally, he and Columbo begin randomly appearing on either side without the other noticing or commenting.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: Brady is a very thinly veiled Steven Spielberg, wearing Spielberg's trademark glasses. This is doubly ironic as, when Spielberg was working as a TV director before he got famous, he directed the first regular Columbo episode, 1971's "Murder by the Book".
  • Molly Hagan's character is an expy for actress and Spielberg's first wife, Amy Irving.
• Personal Arcade: Alex's tricked-out bungalow on the Universal lot not only has old-timey arcade games, it has a model train set and a working ice cream soda fountain.
• Plot Hole: The episode ends in typical Columbo "gotcha" style, but Columbo never does anything to place Alex at the murder scene or at the body disposal scene. All he really proves is that Alex tried to misdirect Columbo's investigation. And although this evidence is circumstantial at best, he does have the old footage showing Alex's presence at Jenny's death, which leaves Alex on the hook for negligent manslaughter and establishes a motive for Leonard's death. Either way, Alex's career is over by this point. ^note In addition, thanks to his insulting treatment of his boss earlier in the episode, Alex was being stripped of most of his financial support anyway .
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: When Ruth confronts Alex with how he set her up with a rebound after they previously broke up, she calls him out on how he's ultimately a manipulative rascal who uses people like puppets. To this, he retorts that his manipulation doesn't change that she not only fell for his manipulation, but how everyone went home happy (he got to get her out of the way, and she got to retaliate him with a rebound).
• Shout-Out: As Alex is putting the moves on his actress/girlfriend Ruth Jernigan (Molly Hagan), he makes ice cream sundaes for the both of them. She says, "So, you ever gonna find true love, Andy Hardy?"
• Staging the Eavesdrop: Alex has two actresses sit near Columbo in the commissary and have a conversation designed to mislead his investigation. However, Columbo figures out it was staged because one was dressed as a nurse and the other as a bridesmaid, but there were no hospital or wedding scenes being filmed that day.
• Symbolism:
  • Invoked. Alex uses a spotlight and shadows from a picket fence to give the illusion that he and Columbo are on different sides of an actual picket fence. In this little mind game, it's a question as to which one is on the "free" side of the fence and which one is on the "imprisoned" side of the fence. Is Columbo Alex's prisoner, or is he Columbo's prisoner? To drive the point home, the picket fence does resemble bars of a prison cell. When Columbo tries to reason that they could just move away from the fence to be free of this "prison", Alex points out that by leaving the spotlight it would just symbolize one of them dying, or even Columbo losing his case. And to drive home his veiled threat to Columbo, Alex says he can destroy our detective with but one word: "Kill (the spotlight)!" Cue the two of them being bathed in darkness.
  • When Columbo is introducing Alex to all the members of the police force who pretended to be ordinary civilians and spied on him, for a moment, Columbo is dressed as a circus ringleader. This aptly reflects that not only was Columbo the ringleader of this whole operation, but that he also played Alex like one as well.
• Through the Eyes of Madness: Once Columbo finishes explaining just how badly Alex got played, Alex, whose entire worldview and ego is now completely demolished, briefly sees Columbo in a ringmaster's outfit as he takes his bow.
• Undercover Cop Reveal: Done by Columbo, revealing that the busboy and waitress who overheard Alex trying to bribe his secretary were in fact police officers.
• Ungrateful Bastard: Early in the episode, Alex's boss asks him if he can speed up the completion of the film from a summer to an Easter release as the board has need of one. Alex declines, suggesting he tell the board Alex is being difficult, and humiliatingly drapes a necklace of paper clips over his neck. This was apparently one step much too far, as the boss later invites Alex into his limousine and coldly informs him that henceforth he will only authorize daily payments for Alex's film, essentially crippling production. Alex himself seems to realise his mistake when he's called into the limo, but by then it's much too late.

---