Title:"Last Salute to the Commodore"
Directed by: Patrick McGoohan
Written by: Jackson Gillis
Air Date: March 2, 1976
Previous: Now You See Him...
Next: Fade Into Murder
Guest Starring: Robert Vaughn, Diane Baker, Wilfrid Hyde-White, Fred Draper, Dennis Dugan, Bruce Kirby
"Last Salute to the Commodore" is the sixth and last episode of the fifth season of Columbo.
The "Commodore" is Otis Swanson (John Dehner), wealthy owner of a shipbuilding business. He is surrounded by people he despises as hangers-on, including his perpetually drunk daughter Joanna Clay (Diane Baker), her husband Charles, currently CEO of the company (Robert Vaughn), and affable nephew Swanny (Fred Draper). Otis is particularly unhappy with his son-in-law, criticizing Charles for aggressively expanding the company. Otis throws some strong hints that he is thinking about some radical changes in the business.
Cut to Otis, dead on the floor of his house. Charles Clay is frantically working to dispose of his father-in-law's body and establish his alibi, in typical Columbo style. First he smuggles the body out in a car, while making sure sure the gate guard sees him driving out and notes the time. Then he goes to the Commodore's yacht, dressed in the Commodore's clothes, and takes the yacht out in the ocean. Then, after making sure there's a bloodstain on the yacht's boom, he throws the Commodore overboard, puts on a diving suit, and swims back. The idea is to make it look like the Commodore went sailing, got whacked on the head with the boom, and fell in the ocean and drowned.
Like all Columbo episodes, however, he doesn't count on Columbo, who wonders why Charles had to ask the guard for the time when he wears an expensive watch. When an autopsy reveals that the Commodore had no water in his lungs and thus was dead when he fell into the ocean, suspicion falls on Charles...
...until Charles turns up dead himself, and the episode turns into the most famous Oddball in the Series in Columbo history.
Second of four episodes directed by Patrick McGoohan. McGoohan also played the murderer in four Columbo episodes but does not appear in this one.
Tropes:
- Absence of Evidence: Columbo determines the murder weapon to be a belaying pin in the Commodore's home, as all the other pins have dust on them except for one.
- Alliterative Name: Charles Clay.
- And Starring: Diane Baker gets "Special Guest Star" credit.
- Artistic License – Law: One of several Columbo episodes where the lieutenant, a homicide detective, is called in to investigate before it's been established that a murder has taken place.
- Batman Gambit: A rather odd gotcha. Columbo hides the Commodore's watch in his hand. He then makes four suspects listen to the ticking watch, and tells them that it's the Commodore's watch. Three of them don't care. Swanny says "It isn't." That's the gotcha—Swanny thinks it can't be the Commodore's watch because he smashed the Commodore's watch after he murdered the Commodore. Of course, this gotcha would fail if Swanny had just expressed disinterest like the other three did.
- Bludgeoned to Death: How Commodore Swanson, and eventually Charles, are both done in.
- Clock Tampering: If there's a smashed watch in a Columbo episode, it's guaranteed that the murderer planted it there. Sure enough, the Commodore's smashed watch, found at the scene, was an effort to mislead the police about the time of death. It actually winds up backfiring, as Columbo concludes that Charlie couldn't have killed the Commodore, because he would not have rigged the watch to read 12:42 if he was going to be driving out the front gate at 12:46, only four minutes later.
- Establishing Character Moment:
- When he's picked up by a motorboat to go to the party for his big customers, Otis scowls and hisses "Let's get this damn thing over with." He's established immediately as mean and cranky.
- And then there's Joanna at the party that immediately follows, drinking herself sloppy and making a spectacle of herself in front of the family.
- Frame-Up: As it turns out, Swanny was trying to frame Joanna for the murder of the Commodore by dropping clues like a tube of lipstick and her brooch. What he didn't count on was Charlie arriving at the scene first and taking quick action to protect his wife (and more importantly his money).
- Halfway Plot Switch: It plays out like a regular Columbo episode, although attentive viewers will notice that we don't actually see the Commodore get killed. But we see Charlie disposing of the body and crafting an alibi as Columbo killers do, and we see Columbo zeroing in on Charlie as he always does on his suspects. Then Charlie is found dead and it turns out that we are watching a regular old "whodunit" and not a Columbo-style Reverse Whodunit.
- Hitler Cam: Used for a ground-view shot of the cops looking down on the dead body of Charlie Clay, at the moment where Columbo has to re-evaluate his conclusions.
- Lady Drunk: Joanna is intoxicated or hung over in just about every scene, and she's a bitter, weepy drunk, the kind that gets loud and angry in bars. It's not directly stated why she can't stop drinking, but it seems to be caused by an unhappy marriage to Charlie.
- Leaning on the Fourth Wall: There are a couple of references to Columbo trying to give up smoking. At the end of the episode he lights up one of his trademark cigars. Sgt. Kramer says "Thought you were gonna quit," but Columbo replies "Not yet. No, not yet, Sergeant. Not yet." At the time there was a lot of speculation over whether Peter Falk would be quitting the show. He did in fact come back and play Columbo in eight more movies before the show finally ended in 1978.
- Match Cut: From the door swinging open as Joanna opens it to Lt. Columbo, on the front step, turning around to look at her.
- May–December Romance: Lisa the shy engineer was engaged to marry the Commodore, who was three times her age. She insists that they were marrying for love and she made him promise to not leave her anything in his will.
- Oddball in the Series
- This is one of only three Columbo episodes where we don't see the murder. The others are Season 10's "A Bird in the Hand" (see below) and Season 1 finale "Blueprint for Murder", although in that particular episode it didn't really matter.
- What really makes this episode an Oddball In The Series, however, is that it is not a Reverse Whodunit. The whole episode is set up to make the viewer think that Charlie did it, right up until Charlie gets killed. Then it turns into a standard Police Procedural in which the audience doesn't find out who the guilty party is until the end. There's even a Summation Gathering with all the suspects, which never happened in the typical Columbo format. This is the only episode of the original NBC run that was not a Reverse Whodunitnote . (1992 episode "A Bird in the Hand", made after the show was rebooted on ABC, also experimented with a semi-traditional mystery format.)
- Off-into-the-Distance Ending: The odd ending to this odd episode has Columbo hop into a rowboat and start rowing across the bay. When a nonplussed Sgt. Kramer asks where the lieutenant is going, Columbo says he's headed to the yacht club to meet his wife. On that note, the episode ends.
- Old Cop, Young Cop: Columbo is asked to mentor a young homicide cop called Mac (played by Dennis Dugan, who went on to direct a lot of Adam Sandler movies). Hilariously, at the end Mac has elected to imitate his famous mentor by carrying around a rumpled brown raincoat in sunny Los Angeles for no reason.Columbo: (points at raincoat) Are you expecting rain, Mac? (smiles)
Mac: You just can't be too careful, Lieutenant. - Red Herring: Arguably the largest in the original series. We see Charles cleaning up after the Commodore's death. We see him dispose of the body. We see Columbo honing in on him as the killer. He's played by "Troubled Waters" guest killer Robert Vaughn. Everything about it has set up Vaughn as being a repeat offender in the vein of Robert Culp. And then Charles gets murdered. For four seasons audiences were used to the format, and likely they were floored when the episode revealed that Vaughn wasn't the murderer.
- Summation Gathering: Ends with Columbo gathering all the suspects together, explaining the crime, and finally unmasking Swanny as the murderer.
- What Did I Do Last Night?: After her husband turns up dead suspicion shifts to Joanna. That's a problem for Joanna as she can't remember what she did the night of the Commodore's murder, having been discovered on a neighbor's patio at 4 a.m., after having gotten so drunk that she blacked out.
- What the Hell, Hero?: Columbo acts distant and uninterested until Charles gets killed, very unlike how he is in other episodes. He also is constantly invading Charles and Lisa's personal space to the point it's uncomfortable to watch, and doesn't make sense for the character to do.
- Wham Shot: Columbo makes his way to Charlie's house to arrest him after determining he killed The Commodore. He finds other officers in the house, leans down to look at something... Charlie's corpse.
