Just One More Thing: Last Salute to the Commodore

Notes and screenshots for Last Salute to the Commodore: Originally broadcast on May 2, 1976, starring Robert Vaughn, Wilfrid Hyde-White, John Dehner as the titular Commodore, Diane Baker as a spectacular drunk, plus Bruce Kirby, Fred Draper, John Finnegan, directed by Patrick McGoohan, written by Jackson Gillis and, of course, Peter Falk as Columbo.

"Charlie Clay runs the ship building business of his father-in-law, Commodore Swanson, who turns up murdered; Lt. Columbo is on the case."

-IMDB Summary

"“Last Salute to the Commodore” is an odd episode of Columbo to be sure. The titular Commodore, owner of a luxury shipbuilding firm and head of a dysfunctional family, is found dead, presumably of an accident at sea. The prime suspect is conniving son-in-law Robert Vaughn. But wait! He gets killed, too? What? This episode is a whodunnit, complete with drawing room scene? Columbo seems drunk? He has a teen sidekick? He can’t stop touching Vaughn to the point of discomfort? There are shades of Groundhog Day, The Prisoner and Arrested Development? Sure! It’s all strange and actually kind of fun. Writer Christy Blanch is onboard to try and figure out how and why."

-RJ's episode summary

Listen to the original podcast episode here:

Episode 48: Ohhh, the Mizzen Boom with our guest Christy Blanch.

Last Salute to the Commodore

Season 5, Episode #6

Director: Patrick McGoohan

Writers: Jackson Gillis

It’s a weird episode, and everyone warned us about it. In fact, we warned ourselves, because both RJ and I had remembered it being awful.

And yet ... the more times we watched it, the more we came to enjoy it. Hell, I think I love this episode (despite giving it a relatively low score at the end of the podcast, which I felt I had to do for formal reasons). One of our listeners described it as a fever dream episode, and I can accept that.

We’ve discussed before this extended, weird idea of how Columbo can be considered an antibody -- if you think of television as an organism, and the networks as its organs, and the shows as cells of that organ, then a metastasizing cell puts the whole organism at risk. We’ve used episodes like “Murder of a Rock Star” and “A Friend In Need” as examples of episodes where the murderer feels like they wandered in from their own show elsewhere in the lineup, threatening the health of the organism, and are then defused by the Columbo antibody (and the show wiped out of existence for the benefit of the organism).

Well, with that idea in mind, this is a case of Columbo being used as a drastic cure. The cast of Last Salute do feel like they’re at the fraying, tail end of a long-running soap opera with the wheels falling off. It’s a late stage malignancy, and Columbo-the-antibody needs additional medical methods (by way of Mac and Sgt.Kramer, the chemotherapy of this metaphor) to destroy the dangerous cells. So, of course everything is weird, tense and chaotic about this episode, because it’s a late-stage medical crisis and the organism is in panic mode.

Add that to the Groundhog Day and Prisoner theories that were brought up on the show. If Last Salute has anything going for it, it might be that it’s weird enough to support rambling theories like these ...

Columbo makes things uncomfortable for Robert Vaughn:

Next episode: Fade in to Murder