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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mel O&#039;Drama" data-source="post: 285299" data-attributes="member: 23">The Specials (1990-2003) Columbo Goes To College <img src="https://i1.wp.com/columbophile.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/College-titles.jpg?w=576&ssl=1" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 539px" /><img src="https://i1.wp.com/columbophile.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/College-1-1.jpg?w=528&ssl=1" alt="" class="fr-fic fr-dii fr-draggable " style="width: 514px" /> Knowing that Robert Culp would be appearing gave me high hopes for this episode. I knew he wasn’t going to be the killer and that his role would be more secondary than his previous appearances. Nonetheless, I associate him with the best of Columbo which possibly affected how I feel about this episode overall. This one has a lot of the ingredients that make Columbo great. A clever murder with a clear motive. Some genuine detective work for Columbo himself. Nice location work. And a very satisfying Gotcha. Story-wise there’s very little to fault. A couple of Knotsy casting connections: Laura’s fake mother was Robert Culp’s wife. And I spotted Dr Ackerman’s name in the credits as the dean, even though I didn’t spot him as I watched. Culp himself is great and it’s wonderful to see these two working together again. It’s a shame he had relatively little screen-time, but I’ll take what I can.I’m on the fence with the killers. Having two killers always dilutes the energy for me. And they were young which is another strike. I like to see some gravitas in my Columbo antagonists as they go toe-to-toe with him, and I didn’t really see that here. I didn’t even find anything to like in them as I frequently do with the antagonists in this series. I was rooting for Columbo to wipe the smug grins off the faces of these two snotty, spoilt brats.And it seems very wrong to have a killer doing an impersonation of Columbo as though he’s on Saturday Night Live. It just felt too meta. However, both were well-played and the fact that they were frighteningly convincing as entitled young sociopaths added a truth too this. The funny handshake they did after carrying out their plan was quite chilling as I’m sure I remember recently reading about young killers doing something similar in a news article. I’m not sure if this is intentional, but I got a Leopold-Loeb vibe from them, which in turn reminded me of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope, where one man got to the truth, just as Columbo did here. To a lesser degree, I was again reminded of what would come in Scream; particularly with the two killers attending a big party, and utilising Nineties technology to carry out their plan. Indeed this episode feels very of its time, but up to a point I’m OK with that in a Columbo. I liked that he got au fait with how the tech works, replicating it in order to capture them, similar to what he did in Robert Culp’s previous episode some seventeen years earlier. As I said, there’s little to fault.  Thanks mainly to the lack of a one-to-one relationship between Columbo and killer it lacked a certain magic for me, and if anything Robert Culp's appearance made me even more nostalgic for that kind of dynamic. But it’s a decent enough episode, and one of the better revival episodes.</blockquote>

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