Just One More Thing: Try and Catch Me

Notes and screenshots for Try and Catch Me: Originally broadcast on date, starring [cast] and, of course, Peter Falk as Columbo.

"An old lady who writes popular mystery novels strongly suspects that her niece's husband murdered her, so she exacts revenge by asphyxiating him in her house safe while devising a solid alibi. It's up to Columbo to unravel the subterfuge."

-IMDB Summary

"Ruth Gordon is mystery novelist and playwright Abigail Mitchell, in season seven’s “Try and Catch Me.” When Mitchell’s beloved niece dies in a boating incident, she suspects murder. When the police fail to find evidence of foul play, she does the next natural thing- killing the niece’s husband by locking him in a vault. Everyone does that, right? Myke Chilian (Uncle Grandpa, Rick and Morty, Channel 101) joins Jon and RJ to see how Columbo could find such a sweet old lady to be such a cold-blooded killer."

-RJ's episode summary

Listen to the original podcast episode here:

Episode 49: Shall We Compare Poverty Stories? with our guest Myke Chilian.

Try and Catch Me

Season 7, Episode #1

Director: James Frawley

Writers: Gene Thompson, Paul Tuckahoe

Here’s a question we never got around to answering on the podcast: Is Ruth Gordon’s killer, Abigail Mitchell, sympathetic or merely likable? Unlike other so-called sympathetic murderers on Columbo, she wasn’t in immediate danger from her victim, there was no blackmail scheme or affair or business chicanery going on. Her motive was revenge but, as we talked about at length, it’s left up in the air as to whether her nephew was really guilty of the crime she believes he committed.

It’s also a cold-blooded and horrible kind of murder, maybe the worst – despite being the least graphic – in the history of the show.

One thing we didn’t discuss and which only occurred to me this morning was a connection between this episode and the one we discussed previously, Undercover: It seemed very unlikely in the course of Undercover that Columbo should happen to think to check a burned out lightbulb for a missing piece of the photograph for which everyone was searching, but he does and manages to find the very piece for which he’s looking. Likewise, in try and Catch Me, he finds the victim’s accusation hidden in the burned-out lightbulb of the airtight vault which was his tomb. So there’s a precedent in Columbo’s world for important evidence to be discovered in burned out lightbulb. It makes the scene in Undercover much less unlikely…

One of the interesting things about this episode is the murderer’s charmed life – literally everyone connected with Abigail Mitchell (except for her stage-Irish maid, and maybe even her) knows that she’s murdered her nephew; her personal assistant just wants a payoff (in cash and life experience) and her lawyer pretty much explicitly tells her that he’ll help hide the corpse next time. It’s not surprising that she tried to charm Columbo out of his dogged investigation.

Along those lines, I don’t think we covered this sufficiently, but Abigail seems to believe she’s charming the pants off Columbo when what’s really happening is that the two are jousting; the same predication of unthreatening daffiness, the same rambling anecdotes, the same keen minds appraising the other behind a veneer of avuncular modesty. Abigail seems to believe that they’re bonding, while Columbo is clearly trying to outmaneuver her (with, at best, limited success). It’s easy to see why this episode is so beloved.

Next episode: Murder Under Glass