Line #40 Recap/ColumboS04E04


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4	Episode: Season 4, Episode 4\
5	Title:"Troubled Waters"\
6	Directed by: Creator/BenGazzara\
7	Written by: William Driskill (teleplay), Jackson Gillis and William Driskill (story)\
8	Air Date: February 9, 1975\
9	Previous: By Dawn's Early Light\
10	Next: Playback\
11	Guest Starring: Creator/RobertVaughn, Creator/DeanStockwell, Jane Greer, Creator/BernardFox, Creator/PatrickMacnee, Poupee Bocar]
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13	"Troubled Waters" is the fourth episode of the fourth season of ''Series/{{Columbo}}''.
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15	Hayden Danziger (Robert Vaughn) is a used-car dealer and frequent luxury cruise passenger. On his last trip aboard the Sea Princess he met curvaceous temptress Rosanna Wells (Poupee Bocar), the lounge singer aboard the ship. An affair followed. Unfortunately for the married Hayden, afterwards Rosanna started blackmailing him, threatening to tell Hayden's much richer wife Sylvia (Jane Greer).
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17	Hayden resolves on murder. His clever scheme involves sniffing amyl nitrite to fake the symptoms of a mild heart attack. After he's put in the ship's sickbay, seemingly establishing an airtight alibi, Hayden sneaks back to Rosanna's cabin and shoots her dead. He attempts to frame Lloyd Harrington (Dean Stockwell), the pianist in the ship's band and Rosanna's jilted lover. However, Hayden didn't anticipate the presence of Lt. Columbo of the LAPD, who won a raffle and is taking a cruise with his wife. With the ship being several days out of port, Capt. Gibbon (Patrick Macnee) asks Columbo to investigate the case.
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19	Second appearances on ''Columbo'' for Dean Stockwell (the victim in Season Two's "[[Recap/ColumboS02E03 The Most Dangerous Game]]") and Bernard Fox, who plays the ship's purser in this episode and played a Scotland Yard detective in Season Two's "[[Recap/ColumboS02E04 Dagger of the Mind]]".
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22	!!Tropes:
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24	* AttackOnTheHeart: The ship's doctor says Hayden's shot got Rosanna Wells right in her heart. It ends up screwing with his DyingClue setup, as she wouldn't have had the time to write it.
25	* BlackmailBackfire: The scheming Rosanna is demanding a payoff from Hayden, lest she reveal their affair. It's a bad idea.
26	* BluffingTheMurderer: Having discovered that a pair of ship's surgical gloves is missing, Columbo tells Hayden that all he needs to nail Lloyd is to find the gloves, with gunpowder on them. Hayden proceeds to steal a gun and some gloves, fire a bullet, and stash the gloves where they'll be found. What Hayden doesn't know is that it's easy to get fingerprints from the inside of surgical gloves, which Columbo does.
27	* BusmansHoliday: Columbo gets roped into investigating a murder while he's on a cruise.
28	* CruiseEpisode: Mr. and Mrs. Columbo take a cruise. Naturally there's a raffle.
29	* DoesntLikeGuns: Columbo gets Hayden to test-fire a gun, saying "I don't like guns."
30	* DyingClue: Hayden attempts to fake this, scrawling the letter "L" (for Lloyd Harrington) on Rosanna's vanity mirror with lipstick. Columbo isn't fooled, especially when he finds out Rosanna died the second the bullet hit her.
31	* FrameUp: Hayden tries to frame Rosanna's murder on her ex, Lloyd Harrington. Columbo, naturally, doesn't buy that bull.
32	* TheGhost: Mrs. Columbo as usual, but particularly notable in this episode as she's on the boat with him. One sequence has Columbo wandering around the boat looking for her. Another scene has the captain pointing at Mrs. Columbo offscreen, getting on a shuttle boat.
33	* GoryDiscretionShot: {{Subverted}}. Due to the fact that Rosanna Wells was shot in the back while wearing a backless dress, the body is shown with a small bullet hole and some blood dripping out of it. A bullet, even that small, should've produced a lot more blood than was shown, but it would've rattled the censors at the time.
34	* InsistentTerminology: A RunningGag in the episode, as Columbo keeps calling the cruise ship a "boat" only to be corrected to "ship" by the captain. In the end, when he calls the vessel that he'll use to get to the shore a "ship", he's corrected that it's a "boat", at which point he lets out a frustrated "to hell with it!"
35	* InstantDeathBullet: Played straight, as Rosanna slumps over in death. Plot-relevant in this case, as the ship's doctor doubts that she would have had time even to write the letter "L" after she was shot through the heart.
36	* InTheBack: How poor Rosanna gets it.
37	* MacGyvering: Since there's no forensic crew aboard the ship, Columbo uses graphite from a pencil to check whether the murder weapon has any fingerprints on it and shoots at a mattress to catch the bullet so that he can compare it to the bullet that was found in the victim.
38	* OrgyOfEvidence: Columbo just gets more suspicious when he finds the DyingClue, the pistol, and a receipt for the pistol. Part of his problem with it is that the crime took place on a cruise ship, so it should have been incredibly easy to dispose of evidence
39	* PillowSilencer: Hayden uses one to shoot Rosanna. This backfires on him since a feather from the stuffing gets caught in his clothes without him noticing and ends up next to his room in the sickbay, which is what initially makes Columbo suspicious of him.
40	* PlayingSick: Hayden creates his alibi by sniffing amyl nitrite to simulate a heart attack, then sneaking out of sickbay while he's supposedly laid up in bed.
41	* TooCleverByHalf: Hayden tries to set Rosanna's ex as the killer when he probably would have had more luck just shooting her and chucking the gun into the ocean.
42	* VacationEpisode: ''Columbo'' messes with the formula a little by having Columbo investigate a murder while he's on a cruise ship, his wife having gained the vacation for the two of them at a lottery.

Context Recap / ColumboS04E04