Recap / Columbo S 09 E 06

Episode: Season 9, Episode 6
Title:"Murder in Malibu"
Directed by: Walter Grauman
Written by: Jackson Gillis
Air Date: May 14, 1990
Previous: Uneasy Lies the Crown
Next: Columbo Goes to College
Guest Starring: Andrew Stevens, Brenda Vaccaro, Janet Margolin

"Murder in Malibu" is the sixth episode of the ninth season of Columbo.

Wayne Jennings (Andrew Stevens) is a tennis player and aspiring actor whose real profession seems to be "gigolo". He is in a relationship with romance novelist Theresa Goren (Janet Margolin), a woman in her late forties who doesn't seem to realize that the blow-dried, blandly handsome, 20-years-younger Wayne is only interested in her considerable fortune. Theresa ignores her sister and business manager, Jess McCurdy (Brenda Vaccaro), who loathes Wayne for the gold digger that he is and begs Theresa to dump him.

Wayne makes a dubious excuse to leave Theresa's Malibu beach mansion, driving to Palm Springs to have sex with the wife of a movie producer. While there he receives an enraged phone call from Theresa (or is it?), who angrily dumps him. He races back to Malibu and shoots Theresa—or does he? The shooting isn't shown. Lt. Columbo of the LAPD shows up and starts unraveling Wayne's story, noting among other things the unaccounted-for miles on Wayne's car. But a surprising report from the coroner forces Columbo to reevaluate the case.

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Tropes:

• Accidental Pervert: Columbo gets a lot of side-eye as he spends an inordinate amount of time examining Theresa's underwear. At the end, as he's looking at the underwear mannequin he used to demonstrate his gotcha, he turns to see all the women in the restaurant looking at him suspiciously.
• The Alleged Car: Columbo's ratty old Peugeot was a Running Gag throught the series. In this episode he sees Wayne's fancy red sports car and says "You know, I've got sort of a classic car too."
• Artistic License – Law: After word comes from the coroner that the bullet Wayne fired through Theresa's heart was actually postmortem, with the fatal head shot having come a few hours earlier, the cops just let Wayne go. In Real Life you could probably take a shot at an attempted murder charge in that scenario and there are certainly other possible charges like desecration of a corpse or interfering with a police investigation or giving false statements to a law enforcement officer.
• Beach Episode: The show certainly gets a lot of mileage out of the Malibu scenery around Theresa's mansion.
• Bird-Poop Gag: Columbo gets a ride on the cherry-picker crane that the cable guys were using to fix the cable line to the houses on the beach. The cable guy tells Columbo to wear a hat but Columbo declines. A flock of Disturbed Doves—well, ok, crows—zooms over them. When the cherry-picker lowers the group back to the ground Columbo is wiping off the top of his head with a handkerchief.
• Call-Back: When Wayne is first introduced his latest sex partner is giving him back the fake wedding ring that they apparently used as a Smithical Marriage ruse to get into a hotel. Later, Wayne the weasel proposes marriage to Theresa using that same ring.
• The Casanova: Columbo cannot help but boggle at Wayne's ability to seduce women. That includes Theresa, Jess (this barely a couple of days after Wayne tried to kill Theresa, which Jess knows), Jess's maid, Theresa's secretary, the producer's wife out in Palm Springs... If anything, Wayne's womanizing tendency is practically a Running Gag unto itself.
• Chalk Outline: A tape outline marks the spot where Theresa's body fell by the fireplace.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Once it's revealed that Wayne really did kill Theresa, his actions come down to this. He murdered Theresa because she allegedly broke up with him, spontaneously claiming she hated him. So his reaction was to drive all this way to murder her in retaliation, for a break-up that never really happened.
• Driven by Envy: Columbo has Jess and her motives pegged as this. The reason she pretended to be Theresa breaking up with Wayne was out of a deep-rooted, life-long jealousy towards her sister for not only being care-free, but also prettier and more popular with men. Columbo even admits that to some degree, his older brother also made him feel the same way, and he too would pretend to be him over the phone just to glean a little attention.
• Drives Like Crazy: Another running gag throughout the history of the series. In this episode Columbo makes an aggressive left turn to exit the Pacific Coast Highway, drawing angry honks from the cars in the oncoming lanes.
• Fake Faint: Wayne seems to keel over from the shock of finding out that the bullet he fired did not kill Theresa as she was already dead. He's faking.
• Gold Digger: Wayne is a transparent phony romancing Theresa because she's rich.
• Headbutt of Love: Part of Wayne's phony affectionate boyfriend act is giving Theresa a Headbutt of Love in the jacuzzi, before he leaves for Palm Springs to have sex with another woman.
• Large Ham: Andrew Stevens' goggle-eyed overacting as Wayne is something to behold.
• Laser-Guided Karma: If being arrested isn't good enough, Wayne receives retribution from Jess for murdering her sister with a sound slap on the face and a good beating. If nothing else, this is also for the rather disgusting deceit that he was the innocent party and their relationship was meant to be.
• Not So Above It All: A rather tragic example. Theresa's sister Jess likes to think her inability to attract men gives her the advantage to see through Wayne and protect her innocent younger sister from his wiles. But ultimately, when he convinces her he's not Theresa's murderer, she gives in to his charms out of some vain hope that someone does like her. Later, after Columbo exposes that he indeed killed Theresa, Jess (after having spent her anger on Wayne) is rather sober about how she fell for the scoundrel's advances, no different than her own sister or Wayne's string of lovers.
• Oddball in the Series: One of only a few episodes that tinkered with the Reverse Whodunit formula that was canonical to Columbo. In this one it looks like we see Wayne commit the murder, but eventually it's revealed that Theresa was already dead.
• Plot Hole: One of the weaker gotchas in Columbo history has the lieutenant notice that Theresa had her underwear on backwards (the tag is on the wrong side), which means someone else must have killed her and dressed the body, and Wayne must be the murderer because Jess is the only other suspect and a woman wouldn't make that mistake. Beyond excluding the possibility that Theresa might have just put her underwear on backwards in the dark, Columbo doesn't come up with anything to show that Wayne, as opposed to any other man, was the person who shot Theresa and changed her clothes.
• Sequencing Deception: The Reveal is that Wayne did in fact shoot Theresa both times—he arrived in the pre-dawn hours and shot her in the head, but he was stuck there because the cable guys in their cherry-picker had a clear view of the road and would have spotted his distinctive sports car. So instead he had to wait there until the coast was clear, then leave, double back, and shoot a now-dead Theresa a second time in order to give himself something to confess to that wouldn't be the actual murder. We never see that first sequence of events, only the second where Wayne arrives around breakfast time and shoots Theresa through the heart.
• Sexy Discretion Shot: Amazingly, Wayne's hard-sell seduction of Jess works, and they lock in a passionate embrace. The scene cuts away to the next scene, where they're picking her clothes for a vacation.
• Smithical Marriage: Hard to imagine any hotel in Los Angeles would have cared about stuff like this by 1990, but nonetheless Wayne's sex partner returns to him the fake wedding ring they used for a tryst in a hotel.
• The Sociopath: Wayne is a textbook example with Ted Bundy vibes- superficially charming, emotionally shallow, manipulative, parasitic, utterly amoral and with no realistic life plan beyond sponging off wealthy women. His motives for killing Theresa are not properly explained, but were either an extremely juvenile reaction to being "dumped"; or, just as likely, because he planned to capitalise on her death as her grieving ex-lover before anyone learned he'd been dumped, and she's barely in the ground before he makes moves on her sister as his next target too.
• Strange Minds Think Alike: Columbo was the first to connect that Theresa's underwear label meant it was put on backwards, and therefore Wayne did kill her. The only one to come to this conclusion (if just as quickly) is Mavis.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Jess wasn't being malicious when she pretend to be Theresa and told Wayne over the phone she was breaking off their engagement. At worst, she did it out of jealousy towards Theresa's beauty, and at best, she was just trying to protect her sister from Wayne and his womanizing ways. All the same, it leads to him coming to her home and murdering her for the break-up.