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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mel O&#039;Drama" data-source="post: 287205" data-attributes="member: 23">Butterfly In Shades Of Greycontinued... In common with Shat’s earlier episode, Columbo wanders onto the set of a TV series. This time it’s a daytime soap and he’s mistaken for an extra playing a homeless person in an alley (he’s hired and fired in the space of ninety seconds before he finds his badge). It’s daft fun. Not really necessary to the episode, but a nice, lighthearted moment. As well as the smell of the greasepaint, this episode has technology in common with Shatner’s previous episode (and indeed, a number of classic Columbo episodes). Firstly, there’s Chase using a combination of telephone answering machine (at his home) and phone extension (at Gerry’s home) to pretend he’s speaking to his victim from miles away when actually… the call is coming from inside the house. Although not exactly the same premise, A running thread during the episode has Columbo marvelling at Chase’s mobile phone and questioning if he should get one, referencing a common (and quite possibly well-founded) fear that was frequently discussed at the time: that mobile phones cause brain tumours to form. Chase dismisses this out of hand, but then he also trashes the idea of climate change (there is, he tells a grandma from Texas who phones in, an entire chapter in his book devoted to this myth). Columbo is also impressed by satellite TV which we learn is necessary due to the mountainous surrounds of Chase’s home. All these things come together for the Gotcha where Columbo goes all out to show that Chase couldn’t have made an emergency phone call from anywhere within a five minute drive from his home as there’s no phone signal. Which, to Columbo, is proof that Chase wasn’t speaking to Gerry from his home. As always, he goes all out to prove his case, including around ten police officers posing as cyclists, one of whom covertly tampers with Chase’s car to strand them in the middle of nowhere. Columbo's also gone to the trouble of trialling a mobile phone himself in order to drive round by himself to prove there's no signal in the valley. All the same, the Gotcha wasn’t the strongest and despite Victoria’s keys going missing and whatnot, I felt the revelation about the phone signal could have been supported by some other evidence, which could have been something as simple as Columbo discovering that Chase’s answering machine stopped recording once the phone was answered. continued...</blockquote>

Verification: What month follows July?