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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mel O&#039;Drama" data-source="post: 287204" data-attributes="member: 23">Butterfly In Shades Of Greycontinued... Molly Hagan’s back after playing a muse-cum-hologram in Murder,  Smoke And Shadows five years earlier. It’s nice to see her getting a beefier role here. In every role in which I see her I’m intrigued by how unchanging and ageless she seems to be. She doesn’t look any different here to her appearances in Knots Landing almost a decade earlier. I was a little surprised when she was described as twenty five in the script as she looks older (and indeed, Molly is almost a decade older). But she’s hard to pin down to any one age, which is no doubt a plus when it comes to acting. My view of this is probably also clouded by Molly playing Miss Ellie when she actually was twenty five. I tend to perpetually think of her as an old soul. As Fielding Chase, William Shatner makes a great foil for Columbo. I don’t think of him as a character actor, but it really feels as though he’s giving that his best shot here with his little pencil moustache and his accent somewhere in the mid-Atlantic as he goes for grand Englishman affectations (impressively he even uses the standard British pronunciation of “harassment” instead of the American/Frank Spencer version). At times it’s an almost comical performance, and it’s hard to tell if this is intentional. This even extends to the props department. There’s one scene where Chase stands next to a huge framed headshot of himself at the radio station, and it’s clearly a generic picture Shatner on which which someone has drawn a silly pencil moustache with a Sharpie (which makes me wonder if the character’s facial hair was a last minute decision. Or at least a surprise to the crew. But, do you know what? It all works. He’s a very watchable actor and, as in Fade In To Murder, there’s a great chemistry between Falk and the Shat. What’s more, Chase becomes wonderfully irascible towards and intolerant of Columbo as the episode progresses which for me evokes the spirit of the great Robert Culp (it struck me during the scene in Chase’s home gym that if this were a Seventies episode, Culp would have made a great Chase). As with other Nineties episodes, the killer is shown to be a complete nasty. There’s one scene in particular where he destroys a political guest on his radio show by having an accomplice call in and expose a past sin that Chase has uncovered, destroying several lives in the process. The scene has Shatner lit from below and he looks particularly sinister. It’s kind of overkill, but again it works for me in this episode where it hasn’t in others and I think it’s because the writing and performances had me invested. continued...</blockquote>

Verification: Who played JR Ewing?