Recap / Columbo S 09 E 05

Columbo annoys Dr. Corman at the racetrack

Episode: Season 9, Episode 5
Title:"Uneasy Lies the Crown"
Directed by: Alan J. Levi
Written by: Steven Bochco
Air Date: April 28, 1990
Previous: Rest in Peace, Mrs. Columbo
Next: Murder in Malibu
Guest Starring: James Read, Jo Anderson, Paul Burke, Dick Sargent

"Uneasy Lies the Crown" is the fifth episode of the ninth season of Columbo.

Dr. Wesley Corman (James Read) is a dentist who caters to Hollywood celebrities. But he's not that good of a dentist, and worse, he's a bad husband who manipulates his fragile wife Lydia (Jo Anderson) and bleeds his in-laws of hundreds of thousands of dollars to feed both his irresponsible business deals and his serious gambling habit.

Wesley's father-in-law Horace Sherwin (Paul Burke), who runs the dental practice where Wesley works, tires of this, and one day calls him into the office. Gleefully, he tells Wesley that he has persuaded Lydia to divorce him, thus cutting Wesley off from the Sherwin money spigot. Additionally, Horace, who clearly loathes Wesley, says he'll be suing for payment of the $220,000 that Wesley owes him after Horace covered his gambling, horse racing and real estate losses.

A shaken Wesley resolves on murdering...movie star Adam Evans, one of his patients. Adam is having an affair with Lydia, which is another reason that the divorce is happening. Wesley manipulates events so that Adam comes in for his appointment without anyone else being in the office, and then cunningly packs some poison into a crown that he puts on Adam's tooth. He then executes an elaborate plot to frame his own wife for the murder of her lover so that he can both head off the divorce and get his hooks into Horace for good. But like every rich guy who murders someone in Los Angeles, he doesn't count on Lt. Columbo, who wonders why Adam would pocket a matchbook from Wesley and Lydia's house when he had a lighter in his coat pocket.

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Tropes:

• As Himself: Wesley plays poker with some of his celebrity clients. Among the guests at the game are veteran TV actors Nancy Walker, Dick Sargent (aka invokedThe Other Darrin), Victor Bevine, and John Roarke, as well as Major League Baseball player Ron Cey.
• Asshole Victim: Inverted, Adam's death is played as very tragic while his murderer, Wesley is shown to be a self-entitled douche. This helps viewers cheer on Columbo as he builds his case against the him, and feel a sense of victory when he's caught at the end.
• As You Know: When Lydia's brother David fields her panicky phone call, he makes sure to call her "sis" so the audience will realize who he is.
• Bait-and-Switch: Based on their conversation at the beginning of the episode and how Horace declared he was cutting Wesley off, one would assume, at first, that Horace was going to be the Victim of the Week. Turns out that Wesley's murder target would be Adam, an innocent patient of his that his wife was having an affair with.
• Bluffing the Murderer: The gotcha comes when Columbo informs Wesley that digitalis turns porcelain (like the porcelain in Adam's crown) blue. As a triumphant Horace moves to remove the tooth from the corpse, Wesley cracks and admits his guilt. It turns out that digitalis doesn't do a thing to porcelain, and Columbo faked his little demonstration with laundry bluing agent.
• Chekhov's Gun: The laundry bluing agent that Columbo managed to stain his shirt with. He uses it at the climax as part of a Bluffing the Murderer scam to get Wesley to confess.
• Dramatic Irony: When it seems as though Wesley has protected Lydia from going to jail, Horace praises what a devoted husband he's been and how wrongly he judged his son-in-law. What he doesn't know is, this whole thing was engineered. So he's wrong on both accounts: Wesley's a terrible husband, and Horace had him pegged all along.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: For Horace and Lydia. Respectively, he's had to put up with an incompetent, leeching son-in-law, while she's lost two loves of her life and been stuck in a loveless marriage to a selfish narcissist. The instant Wesley walks out of the door, father and daughter breathe a sigh of relief, knowing they can rebuild their lives now that the man that ruined it is out of it.
• Frame-Up: A popular Columbo trope. Wesley does this by taking his wife's digitalis medication and packing it into Adam's crown, coating it with time-release coating, and making sure he is seen somewhere else at the time when the poison is released. Then he leaves Adam's car in neutral to alert the police that something is up, puts a matchbook in Adam's pocket to lead them to his house, and puts some digitalis in the cocktail blender and Adam's glass to make it look like Lydia poisoned him. It doesn’t help Wesley much that he put so much digitalis into the blender to make the whole thing impossible.
• The Gambling Addict: Apparently, at least half of the $220K that Wesley owes to his father-in-law was for paying off gambling debts. Later in the episode, Wesley is shown leaving work to go to the racetrack, showing he hasn't the slightest intention of turning his life around.
• Gaslighting: Part of Wesley's plan. As the intentionally shoddy car accident and heart attack coverups are dismantled to reveal his true frame of Lydia being the murderer, he says the right things to help convince Lydia and her family that she really did poison him, using her prior history of mental illness to justify it and present himself as someone who would defend her to the end. It very nearly works until Columbo sees through it and informs the family of his suspicions.
• Going by the Matchbook: Wesley attempts to engineer this as part of his frame-up of his wife, sticking one of their personalized Wesley-and-Lydia matchbooks into Adam's shirt pocket in order to lure the LAPD to his house. But it backfires when Columbo wonders why Adam would have pocketed a matchbook when he had a cigarette lighter in his coat pocket.
• Headbutt of Love: Wesley does this when trying to calm down a panicky Lydia in the immediate aftermath of Adam's death. It's hypocritical as he is in the process of framing her for murder.
• It's All About Me: When Lydia seethes about how cold-blooded it would've been for her "devoted" husband to let her go to jail or an insane asylum, Wesley merely quips that the divorce she and her father intended would've been somehow worse. Narcissist he is, Wesley is incapable of understanding how doubly more spiteful it was to gaslight Lydia, on top of ending an innocent life in cold blood.
• The Magic Poker Equation: At his informal celebrity poker game, Wesley gets a flush but loses to a full house.
• Murder the Hypotenuse: Wesley bumps off Adam, both as revenge for sleeping with his wife, and to put his wife's family under his thumb by framing Lydia for killing him.
• Narcissist: Wesley comes across as pathologically self-centered, bleeding his in-laws of money and resorting to murder to both get back at Lydia for seeing Adam and avert the divorce that Horace filed. Wesley would have let Lydia be framed for murder and even rubs it in at the end by claiming what they did to him was no worse.
• One-Hour Work Week: Among the many grievances that Horace has with Wesley is the fact that he's barely ever at the office.
  Horace: Wesley, let me ask you something. What do you do for a living?
  Wesley: Sir?
  Horace: Oh, I know what it says on our office door. "Wesley Corman, DDS." But I see you so seldom around this office, I don't know, I thought perhaps, you'd taken up some other profession.
  Wesley: I know. I'm sorry.
  Horace: Which may not be a bad idea. Because as a dentist, you're a total incompetent. For five years now, you've been my son-in-law as well as the junior associate in my practice, and in both of those areas you've been a crashing failure.
• Out with a Bang: Adam ends up dying while he was having sex with Lydia. As the coroner notes to Columbo "Can you think of a better way to die?".
• Pun-Based Title: The uneasy crown in question is a dental crown laced with a lethal dose of digitalis.
• Significant Reference Date: Early in the episode Lt. Columbo comments about how he's been on the force for 22 years. This episode aired 22 years after the original Columbo pilot movie, "Prescription: Murder".
• Sympathetic Adulterer: Lydia with Adam, considering that theirs is a love match, and her husband is an amoral snake who's willing to frame her for murder.
• Time-Delayed Death: Wesley kills Adam by placing a porcelain crown containing poison into his mouth. Wesley coated the poison with a time-dissolving gel that would prevent it from taking effect until hours later, which not only gave Wesley an alibi, but Adam's death also occurred when he was with Lydia.
• The Tooth Hurts: In a fortunate Contrived Coincidence Columbo gets a toothache, or at least is forced to think about it (it's clear he’d been putting it off), as he is investigating a dentist for murder. His visit to a non-murderous dentist predictably helps him crack the case, by explaining the gash on Adam's cheek (he bit it while numbed, like Columbo himself did).
• Tranquil Fury: When Lydia learns that Wesley was behind Adam's death, she approaches him and practically growls how cruel it was that he intended she either go to jail or get committed. Her tone is calm, but there's an edge to it, showing that her interaction with him is a very measured response.
• Trapped by Gambling Debts: As Wesley will be sued by Horace for his debt and soon be divorced from Lydia, Wesley resolves to murder her new lover Adam Evans with an overdose of digitalis under his crown so he can continue to take advantage of his inlaws' money.
• Vanity License Plate: Wesley has a license plate to his sports car that says "WC DDS". This helps to establish him as an egotistical douche.