lol I hear you. The guy didn't like the fact that Columbo wore a raincoat? Talk about not getting the point. He was so hostile to Columbo that I was thinking he might be a wealthy murderer himself.

But even that podcast actually turned out not so bad. I don't know how long you stuck it out, but that guy fortunately stopped trashing the show at some point and it became pretty interesting.

Anyway with this episode they have a lot to work with, i'm looking forward to it.

I'm glad it got better. I could only take about 10 minutes or so. I got bored with it. It can't be that hard to find someone who actually likes the show to be a guest.

I don't mind nitpicking the show but I prefer it come from a perspective of love and admiration not ignorance.

I tried listening to one of the other podcast (Etude in Black) and got bored with that one too.

I think it would be better if they found a way to do it over the video like commentaries on DVD's. So you're watching the show while listening to them.

I often wonder that too maybe he wanted to test his deception tactics, see if the bartender would twig. Anyway the Bartender is best known as Artie Jessup in A Friend in Deed, great performance. I watched this a few times and never thought is was one of the best plots but the ending is a cracker.

Off subject

Also there a Ford Capri in it to just before Columbo goes to the fairground it is in traffic behind must have been a rare car in the USA at that time. I thought they were UK and European market only.

I haven't seen it in quite some time, but I remember nearly the whole plot confusing me (though not entirely in a bad way). So maybe that was SOME of the podcast host's problem (I don't know since I haven't seen the podcast).

Nearly the only thing that "makes sense" to me is Barbara Rhoades' halter top!

"I do not understand the whole Steinmetz thing at all, or why Brenner needed Lawrence Melville at all. "

Brenner was acting as a double agent to extort money from the agency for his own benefit. Brenner creates the "game" for the CIA to play by using a "missing naval code on microfilm" that's in the hands of some boogie man (Steinmetz, the other half of Brenner). Because Henderson wants his due share of money from Brenner on past deals "down in bananaland", Brenner uses his double-agent hoodwink yet again to not only rub out Henderson, but to make even more money on the fake microfilm crisis. So, Brenner sets up the deal with the broken poker chip and money changing hands (money from the CIA) to cash-in on the "crisis", then later has to take-out Melville since Columbo has his name from a witness that saw him leave Sinbads.

The cigarette machine click-click move was to alert Melville to the party he had to meet. The move was to keep all parties "in the dark" and partitioned using coded actions. This keeps the two unsuspecting players (Melville and Henderson) assuming there is truly an elaborate plot with multiple parties involved exchanging large sums of money, etc. All part of the double-agent's psy-op tools to pull one over on his boss and everyone else.