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Columbo/Headscratchers: Difference between revisions
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* Don't you think that by the fifth or so time that Columbo pulled that [[Obfuscating Stupidity
** I'm not sure that's the sort of thing crooks say to each other. "Look out for a polite, slow-witted, absent-minded short guy with bad grooming and a glass eye, cause that's the guy who beat me."
*** Don't forget that most, if not all, of Columbo's cases dealt with middle- to upper-class crimes of passion or revenge. Those are not the kind of people who would get the word onto the street in the first place.
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** This troper has always been an adherent of the theory that Columbo is a latent telepath, and is thus able to find the killers so easily.
** A detective show doesn't have to be a "Whodunnit" although the exceptions to the rule are rare. In this case there's always still a certain amount of suspense typically where the specifics of the crime aren't all revealed.
** What makes the show so brilliant is exactly what bugs you so much about it: most real mysteries that real life detectives deal with are exactly of this reverse sort: it is perfectly obvious from the start who did it; the real issue is figuring out how to get them. What is the evidence leading to their arrest? How to use that evidence to catch them? How to bring them in safely? More often than not "Whodunnit?" is not the greater part of the mystery if it is even a mystery at all, ''yet almost no fictional mysteries use this fact'', to the point where figuring out who it is is enough to put them away without any hard evidence. Not so with [[
** Regardless of all that, the perp is '''not''' the only suspect Columbo ever questions. He often talks to lots of different people. The one he thinks did it is just the guy he keeps asking to "assist" him in his work, keeping them up-to-date with his progress because he knows the real killer will almost always be easily suckered into injecting themselves into the investigations, and if they know he is getting closer and closer, they are likely to mess up. But he certainly questions other people regularly; the perp is just the one who is obviously hiding something or whose story doesn't add up, is giving them the runaround, or who the evidence points to. That makes it more realistic than typical murder-mysteries where much of the problem is ''everyone'' happens to have a secret they'd lie about at the worst possible time, when a crime has been commited.
* In the episode "An Exercise in Fatality," the final, damning thing that Columbo nails the killer with is... the knot on the victims shoelace. That's... that's just really reaching. You'd never get a guy convicted on that. Heck, you couldn't even arrest a guy on it. And he didn't incriminate himself, either.
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