Fair enough. My favorite part in any episode is the cat and mouse with the murderers. That's why I love certain newer episodes, even those with lame clues like Columbo Goes To College. The interaction with the cocky kids is great. In Goes To The Guillotine he keeps backing the "psychic" into a corner without ever admitting, until the end, that he knew all along that he was really a phony psychic, i.e. a magician.

But with Double Shock there wasn't much of that interplay between the Lieutenant and the twins. The blenders, of which Dexter still had both was one example. There wasn't too much else. Also it's not a true Columbo in that we don't know who did it until the reveal.

But as you said, great acting overcomes a lot of these shortcomings. Btw, did I miss something about why they killed moonbeam girl and framed their lawyer/ally?

Not sure what you mean by "we don't know who did it until the reveal". We see one of the brothers kill him at the beginning. Columbo knows one of them did it but can't be sure which one. Once he figures out the fuse situation and Mrs Pecks TV going off and the fact it would take two people to lift the body from the bathtub he then knows it must have been both of them. It was obviously an inside job because the security system was disabled.

It does get a little convoluted at the end with the lawyer but I think the lawyer figured out they did it and blackmailed them into keeping him on with a retainer. They obviously didn't want to do that so framing him would solve that problem. I'll have to watch it again and pay more attention to that part.

The dynamic between Columbo and the killer is a little different in this episode because there are two killers who are both trying to convince Columbo the other one must have done it. So the usual adversarial interplay isn't there as much.

Glenn, We see one of the twins kill their uncle but we don't know which. And they continually blame and hate each other. We know that Dexter was there but drove off. We are left to wonder: Did Dexter sneak back in or did Norman do it? And then the reveal is that it was BOTH of them. They had been talking all along.

So there was an element of a whodunnit unlike other Columbo episodes excepting Commodore.

As for the lawyer, he wasn't blackmailing them. He was destroying their uncle's recently altered will and conspiring to make them the sole heirs. In return all he was asking was to keep his job. They would have needed an attorney anyway. So their motive was to save paying his higher fee and hiring a cheaper lawyer. They could have even killed him later when the heat was off AND the will was successfully swapped.

I must be missing something. Because once the lawyer is framed, he shows they police the real will and the twins don't inherit.

Like Glenn, you're a moron ... it's an excellent episode and Landau does a fantastic job playing twin brothers.

Why don't you two go find yourselves something productive to do with your empty lives and leave this forum out of them? We'd really appreciate it.

I'm just glad someone mentioned how the idea of "failed" Dexter doesn't make much sense. Maybe it's a local show, but how unsuccessful can you be if you have a local show in Los Angeles?
Another small plot hole is Dexter's womanizing (according to Norman), because you never actually see it. But maybe the cooking show, with its audience mainly of women, explains that. Between the bored wives and the single women, Dexter probably does pretty well for himself in that area.

I think to some people having a TV show is not a great sign of success. I've heard of several instances where children of prominent doctors, lawyers, politicians etc have children that want to go into music or acting and the parents are like "that's not a real job". Maybe his brother didn't see having a TV show as something to be proud of.

It might be saying the obvious, but I think Dexter is one of those COLUMBO characters based very loosely on real people. In his case, Graham Kerr, "The Galloping Gourmet." Including Dexter's tradition of asking an audience member to help him cook the dish.

Glenn, I wouldn't lose too much sleep over this kid Charles. I made a lot of prank phone calls when I was a kid and I always thought that the next generation of kids would get me back, lol. Of course today we have the internet so kids use that.

This is an interesting episode because Peter Falk and Martin Landau were clearly off script with the humor and bantering going back and forth. They were trying their best to hold it together.

This has always been my favorite episode. Sure it has plenty of plot holes but it has some of the most humorous scenes, especially with Mrs. Peck.

I have to agree with you 100%. I recently watched this episode and couldn't believe how bad it was. I really favor the older episodes too, a lot of the newer ones are too corny and the quality of the writing just isn't there.

But this was so bad it was hard to get through. At one point I was just praying that Columbo would throw Mrs. Peck down the stairs or strangle her. One of the most annoying characters I've ever seen on screen.

But everything was bad about this episode, writing, directing, editing etc. Dig the scene on the cooking program where Columbo rolls up his sleeves to separate the yolks, then they cut and his sleeve is down and he rolls it up again. Just a sloppy episode.

In addition to the fact that Mrs. Peck is infuriating on all levels, what I don't like about this episode is how in the end its a ridiculously easy item (phone records of calls between the brothers) that's supposed to be the other key to nabbing them. It's not much of a clue and is the kind of thing that Columbo would have learned much *earlier* in the process, much in the same way that "Lady In Waiting" is done in by the fact that the "payoff" clue is something that Columbo would have logically known about the first night much earlier in the going.