Title:"Swan Song"
Directed by: Nicholas Colasanto
Written by: David Rayfiel (teleplay), Stanley Ralph Ross (story)
Air Date: March 3, 1974
Previous: Mind Over Mayhem
Next: A Friend in Deed
Guest Starring: Johnny Cash, Ida Lupino
"Swan Song" is the seventh episode of the third season of Columbo.
Tommy Brown (Johnny Cash) is a very popular country gospel singer. As the episode opens he is giving a concert, with his wife Edna (Ida Lupino) singing in the backing choir. Theirs is not a happy marriage. Edna, a religious crusader, liberated Tommy from a prison work farm in Arkansas and set him off on a country music career. However, Edna basically treats Tommy as a slave, taking all the proceeds of his music career for her religious crusades, including a grand new Baptist temple that she's building. Tommy doesn't even own a car. The reason Edna feels free to do this is that she knows for a fact that Tommy once committed statutory rape by having relations with a 16-year-old girl. That girl, Maryann Cobb, is part of the backing choir along with Edna, and she is perfectly willing to go to the cops if Edna tells her to. Edna is using Maryann as blackmail to make Tommy toe the line. And Tommy can't even enjoy the sex and drugs part of Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll, because fundamentalist Edna is watching him like a hawk.
Tommy resolves to free himself by committing murder. His very risky scheme involves luring both Edna and Maryann onboard the private propeller plane that Tommy himself will fly from Bakersfield to Los Angeles, the site of their next show. He slips barbiturates in coffee to both the women. Then, after they're out cold, he takes a parachute hidden in his navigation box and leaps from the plane. All kinds of things could go wrong with this plot, including parachuting from a low altitude, but none of them do. Edna and Maryann are killed when the plane crashes. Tommy breaks his leg upon hitting the ground, which only makes his story more plausible. He hides the chute under a dead tree and manages to make it to the road, where he claims he was thrown clear of the plane upon the crash. The federal investigators buy this but the LAPD's representative, Lt. Columbo, doesn't. Edna's brother Luke insists that Tommy killed her, and Columbo starts noticing inconsistencies, like how there are no ashes from the navigation papers that should have been in the box.
Second appearance of Ida Lupino on Columbo. Directed by Nicholas Colasanto, who played Coach on Cheers.
Tropes:
- Adam Westing: Tommy Brown is not too different from Johnny Cash. He dresses all in black, he sings country/western and gospel, he's from Arkansas, he has a similar name, he was in prison (Cash never actually served time in prison but it was part of his image), and he even served in the Air Force.
- Affectionate Nickname: Tommy calls Columbo "little buddy" a few times.
- Artistic License – Law: One of many examples of Columbo investigating a case where the LAPD has no jurisdiction. Crimes committed aboard aircraft in flight are federal crimes. (And even if they weren't, the crime wasn't committed in the city of Los Angeles.)
- Asshole Victim: Edna is a vicious hypocritical shrew and Control Freak who has borderline enslaved Tommy and uses Maryann as a way to keep Tommy in line instead of helping the girl, or even helping her heal from her ordeal. But even putting the two murders he commits aside, Tommy has slept with an underage girl (and plans to do so again), so their conflict is a sort of Evil Versus Evil.
- Blackmail Backfire: Edna keeps Tommy in line by threatening to turn him in for statutory rape. However, she neglects to consider that he might decide to kill both her and the victim, Maryann.
- Bluffing the Murderer: How Columbo gets Tommy. He pretends that he's going to send out squadrons of Boy Scouts to find the incriminating thermos, which really could be anywhere around that mountain. Tommy then goes back to the spot where he landed, digs up his hidden parachute to get rid of it—and finds Columbo waiting for him.
- Call-Back: Columbo's conversation with Pangborn and his flight to Bakersfield both contain reminders that he does not like flying.
- Dramatic Irony: During the case, Edna's brother tells Columbo that Tommy didn't love Edna throughout their marriage, and was using her. While he's right on one account, he has it the other way around: Edna was using Tommy.
- Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Despite her flaws of Hiding Behind Religion and blackmailing, Edna has a brother who cares the world about her and is dead-set on avenging her when he suspects Tommy murdered her.
- Even Evil Has Standards: Tommy may be guilty of statutory rape (and later double murder), but even he is infuriated at Edna's hypocrisy at using religion as an excuse to blackmail him, all the while keeping the 16-year-old girl by her side instead of helping her. Later, Tommy admits to Columbo that although he had the nerve for murdering Edna and the girl, he didn't have the stomach for it as the guilt had been eating him alive.
- Fanservice Extra: All the hot bikini-clad ladies at Tommy's party.
- Greedy Televangelist: Edna, while frugal, only insists she and her colleagues save money to later build an excessively lavish temple using blackmail to make Tommy play for audiences and rake in the dough. She fails to consider that Tommy would arrange to murder her and Maryann in order to break free. Considering she's getting most of the funding for this tabernacle by blackmailing Tommy, it calls into question how much she really believes in the word of God...
- Hiding Behind Religion: Edna portrays herself as The Fundamentalist, but she isn't above blackmail, theft and extortion and justifies it as all being in the service of her faith.Tommy: You're a sanctimonious hypocrite of a Bible-spouting blackmailer and I've given you your last chance to be fair!
- Hypocrite: Edna is this, claiming to be a good religious woman while she blackmails Tommy over having sex with a 16-year-old and keeping the girl on as leverage, rather than help the girl out.
- I Ate WHAT?!: Columbo eats some of the chili being served at Tommy's party. He enjoys it. He's then appalled to find out it was made with squirrel meat.
- Jailbait Taboo: How Edna got leverage over Tommy: his weakness for underage girls. After he kills her, he starts creeping on another backup singer who looks like she might be just as young.
- Make It Look Like an Accident: Tommy's very risky plot, arranging a crash of his own plane that he parachutes out of. Edna and Maryann are killed, and Tommy is lucky in a sense when he breaks his leg on the landing, which adds credibility to his story of being thrown clear of the plane.
- Meaningful Echo: Tommy's song "I Saw the Light" is sung in the beginning, taking on a tinge of hypocrisy, as his tendency to sleep around with underage girls (on top of murdering the victim of the week) makes his far less saintly than his song implies. In the end, Columbo plays his song on the radio after Tommy soberly confesses to the murder, admitting he felt very guilty about the murder. This time, the song sincerely reflects Tommy and his new-found conscience.
- Musical Episode: Hey, you get Johnny Cash to play the villain, you're not gonna not have him sing.
- Pool Scene: Columbo visits Tommy Brown to question him regarding the death of his wife. He finds him holding a party in his backyard with several bikini clad young ladies lounging round the pool as he plays his guitar and sings.
- Round Hippie Shades: The record producer is marked off as being a hip record producer type of guy by wearing Lennon specs with truly gigantic frames, as big as saucers.
- Slipping a Mickey: Tommy drugs Edna and Maryann prior to bailing out of the plane.
- Stock Footage: Some very noticeable stock footage of a real Johnny Cash concert audience is spliced into the show.
- Sympathetic Murderer: Tommy, more or less. After Columbo finally nails him, Tommy even expresses relief that he's been caught, and admits that he would eventually have given himself up.
- Workplace-Acquired Abilities: Tommy knew how to make and bundle a parachute because he was a parachute rigger in the Air Force after he washed out of flight school. He only got hurt because he wasn't able to use a proper harness or make it big enough and still have it fit in the navigation box.
