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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mel O&#039;Drama" data-source="post: 283318" data-attributes="member: 23">Sex And The Married DetectivecontinuedAs Dr. Joan Allenby, Lindsay Crouse is by some margin the most compelling killer of the new series so far. She’s far less obvious than Elliot Blake or Alex Brady. In place of chewing up the scenery or arch villainy we get someone who’s fairly level. She has a great first scene with Columbo in which they take a silent ride in the lift: him carefully looking at her and noticing a store label hanging from her smart new overcoat. Her looking at this dishevelled man with disdain and discomfort. She makes a show of fanning his smoke away and he suddenly spots the no smoking sign and - after looking round unsuccessfully for somewhere to extinguish it, plops it into his coffee (I suppose Nineties Columbo will suffer less from morning fatigue now that there’s a Starbucks on every corner).She’s initially shaken-but-stoic (she does a nice little swoon when David’s body is removed, but then does the chin up, life goes on thing. For much of the episode she’s calm and level, before the archetypal Columbo journey of gradually becoming increasingly frustrated at Columbo’s doggedness. And it’s easy to see her point of view. As entertaining as they used to be, Columbo’s “just one more thing”s and multiple re-entries to the room have lost all subtlety by this point. There’s one scene in which he bursts back into Joan’s home two or even three times in rapid succession after “leaving” and rather than enjoyably frustrating and entertaining it just feels incredibly tiresome and rude. It’s sad to say, but actually most of the scenes that dragged this episode down were Columbo ones. Peter Falk’s performance continues to be broad and mannered, but it’s not all down to him. He had a lot of help in delivering a few of the episode’s low points.First, there’s the tuba/fountain scene already mentioned in this thread by [USER=33]@Angela Channing[/USER] (thanks again for the warning). It was dull and unnecessary. And it’s also so late in the day to be discovering Columbo’s hidden talents that it felt out of character. The direction with the fountains going in time with the music was just silly. The episode would have been better without it. Fortunately, it was over reasonably quickly. That’s more than I can say for the scene in which Columbo is leaving Joan’s offices when he is accosted one-by-one by three different colleagues of Joan seeking his advice. Two of them tell Columbo about their feelings for Joan. The third is the slutty receptionist who asks him if she should tell Joan about David’s feelings for her. It’s a terrible sequence with some godawful acting as the actors portraying the colleagues do their limited best to appear quirky and wacky. It’s a sledgehammer attempt at David E. Kelley type humour. Not only is it a terrible fit for Columbo, it’s also painfully unfunny and as a viewer it’s an uncomfortable feeling I’d equate to watching a bad stand-up comic dying on stage: a mixture of pity for their humiliation and anger for subjecting me to it. continued...</blockquote>

Verification: What month follows July?