Richard: I think everyone should be watching Togetherness on Crave. I think the greatest album I've heard in forever is You and I Will Never Die by KANGA. And I think for comics, everyone should be reading Something is Killing the Children. That concludes our journey through Columbo‘s epic fourth season. Our next episode review will be Forgotten Lady, the tear-jerking Janet Leigh vehicle that Peter Falk himself rated as one of his very favourite episodes. Don’t miss it! It’s worth noting that asking someone to do this on the red carpet is totally different from doing this sort of reading in a more scripted setting, as a number of Redditors pointed out. There’s a difference between signing on to read sexualized content about yourself, and having someone ask you, out of the blue, to engage with it during a formal event. Sure, fancams and edits are fun, but they do become fetishistic at a point where they take over someone’s public persona — and invade their space in public events. Put simply, Nadia is far too emotionally fragile to be relied on at the best of times – let alone at a time of crisis. No wonder Columbo saw through her story in a heartbeat. Even a first-day rookie wouldn’t have swallowed the tosh Nadia was ladling out, so it doesn’t say much for Collier’s judgement that he would entrust her with such a weight of responsibility knowing that any wrong move could spell disaster for them both. Columbo and Co. are now investigating another death, and this one is also causing the Lieutenant some confusion. Nadia’s apartment door was bolted from the inside, so no one threw her over the balcony. She must have jumped. But why did she take off all her clothes first? And why did she place her valuables in the toe of her shoe, as if she was going swimming? And her phone receiver been found on the coffee table – had she got up in the middle of a conversation and flung herself to a grisly demise?

I also love Collier’s peanut-butter brown leather coat! (See Columbophile’s “Phwooooar!” screen capture above.) 🙂 It was TikTok that would catapult thirst for Pascal into even greater heights. Why has Pedro Pascal blown up on TikTok? Ok, suppose now the guy could really see – this would be again a reason to shut up and talk to your lawyer. In this case Collier should assume Columbo has real evidence, and anything that he says, can only discriminate him. Collier is a doctor, so supposedly – not a total idiot. Kathryn: Having just spent a lot of time talking about how much I hate most revivals, I now have to completely undercut that opinion and tell you that I felt that way very much about the first season of Perry Mason on HBO. I thought it was unnecessary and could not figure out what to do with itself. And then I watched season two and I was like, "yeah, Perry Mason! He's in L.A. It's a noir. He eats sandwiches!" I don't think I watch the show correctly. I think I'm supposed to take it very seriously, and instead I'm like, "he's cooking a pot of beans, and now he's eating the beans, and then he's going to argue." If you spent any time on the internet in the past two months, you likely encountered Pedro Pascal fancams or thirst edits — ranging from tweets calling The Last of Us star “daddy,” to TikToks using an audio clip from Shaggy’s “Hey Sexy Lady” to punctuate thirsty fan edits. Or maybe you saw the 47-year-old Chilean American actor appear in an ad for the oddball game Merge Mansion and wondered how he got there.While far-fetched, the hypnosis murder has always been one of the most memorable Columbo killings, and George Hamilton is a supremely good baddie – vital ingredients that help this episode stand out from the crowd. But under closer cross-examination, does it still cut the mustard? Well, spoiler alert, yes it does! Elamin: That's exactly the tone of it, right? This is more than just an actor having a moment. It feels like a fever dream of adoration. Every day of this week, Pedro has been the main character of the Internet. Everybody calls him "daddy," and I don't mean this like a father. I mean this in like a—well, you know what I mean.

I haven’t been able to find any strong evidence that IRL moms are more prone to Pascal’s daddy charms and, believe me, I have done extensive research at this point. (I really don’t want to think about what typing “Pedro Pascal daddy” and “Pedro Pascal slutty daddy” have done to my algorithm... but also I’m kind of excited to find out...?) Adoration of Pascal as daddy seems to be fairly universal. But, as a mom, I have to imagine that other women who, as a group, have a unique understanding of nurturing just get him on a special level, you know? Like, we’d raise your TV babies with you. Not that you need our help. You’re so capable... so capable and strong... Just watched this one on MeTV. It is a pretty good episode overall, and the gotcha was indeed fabulous. A couple of thoughts… It’s at this time Collier arrives along with Dr Borden, who is evidently the designated driver. Columbo introduces himself and notices Collier lighting a cigarette with a match. This is a fact he squirrels away for later, as the good doctor heads inside to minister to his patient. Our end-of-week Group Chat gets into all this and more, with the help of New York Magazine writer Kathryn VanArendonk, CBC Unreserved's pop culture correspondent Richard Van Camp, and musician/producer Matt Hart.

Elamin: I have to say, Matt, when I first saw that Party Down was being revived, I think I had the same reaction that Magnum P.I. was being rebooted — I was like, "who needs this? I don't know who this is for." But the show has this interesting history because it was on in 2009, 2010, and then it went off the air. But it truly developed this weird cult following. What drew you to the show? The men then grabbed some jewellery, ran out of the door and drove away. Nadia heard the car drive away, but – as Columbo is immediately puzzled by – she didn’t hear the car arrive. Things aren’t adding up from the get-go, so Columbo sits down to have a think after Nadia is led away to rest by her doctor. Columbo has read up on Collier’s books about hypnosis. He has found drugs in Nadia’s bloodstream known to be able to break a subject’s will, and the way she removed and folded her clothes, and hid valuables in the toe of her shoe all point to someone who believed they were going swimming. It’s a natural step, then, to deduce that Collier had been able to plant just such a suggestion in her mind. Meanwhile, this same week, fellow mid-40-year-old famous man Tom Brady announced his retirement from football. To commemorate it, he posted a picture of himself on a bed, shirtless and wearing underwear, hand covering his bulge, with the caption, “Did I do this right?” The caption is meant to evoke innocence or unknowingness, but the sequence of events — loss, retirement, underwear selfie — gives off the vibe of a man continuing to fumble his divorce. Collier’s decisions exacerbate a bad situation. If he and Nadia had come clean about the killing of Karl, it’s likely that they could have avoided jail time. Collier’s book deal would be gone, though, and being romantically linked to his patient would jeopardise his professional future. I can see why he’d want to protect that, but boy he made a mess of the cover-up plan.

The fantasy of daddy now exists primarily as a one-way pursuit. Daddies are the object of affection, and if a daddy is actively pursuing anyone, let alone a recent high school graduate, they are no longer daddy. In the corridor he meets his subordinate, Dr Anita Borden. She has noticed that some hypnosis-inducing drugs have gone missing from the lab, and hints broadly that she believes Collier is using them on Nadia to deepen her hypnotic state so he can write another book about the secrets of the mind. Collier furiously denies the claim and sends Dr Borden scurrying away to do more testing on lab rats as part of his research project.Kathryn: Look, the existence of Party Down suggests that it is possible to do this well. But the existence of Party Down also suggests that it almost never happens, and that when it does happen, it feels like a special gift that you are surprised by. This is the exception that proves the rule. The other thing is, I talk to a lot of people who make television. I talk to a lot of people who are trying to develop shows. There is no dearth of new ideas. There is a dearth of money for new ideas, and we are in a moment where as Hollywood has been contracting, particularly over the last year, we are coming down from the peak of peak TV and there is a lot less willingness to risk money on new IP. What I'm seeing over and over are conservative plays, and the conservative safe choice is like, "well, everyone already knows what Night Court is so we're doing it again." Like all “Columbo” episodes there’s still something to enjoy. As a rule, any time when Columbo is around is generally fun. And Columbo’s crusty old Peugeot actually saves the day for once because it gives him the clue about the tires! The cut from Columbo struggling to follow the colour-coded lines on the floor to the rats navigating the maze is a cute touch. One of Collier’s party guests is played by Danny Wells, best-known to children of the 1980s like me as live-action Luigi from “The Super Mario Bros. Super Show!” (1989). Columbo has good reason to believe Collier was in on it with Nadia, because a police doctor has suggested that the killing of Karl could have happened much earlier that the 7pm time-slot suggested by Nadia – and in that case Collier’s alibi is decidedly dodgy.

But is A Deadly State of Mind actually any good, or does it round out Season 4 like a wet lettuce? Or to put it another way, is it as steely-minded as Dr Mark Collier, or a helpless flounderer like Nadia Donner? Let’s take a look… Dramatis personae That’s why A Deadly State of Mind remains an episode to be treasured as an indication of the series’ refusal to lower its standards, while remaining as fresh as ever – more than 7 years after Falk first pulled on the fabled raincoat. Did you know? Once his car-related snooping is done, Columbo attempts to navigate the bowels of the university to find Collier – at one point even eliciting a ‘comedy female scream’ sound effect after inadvertently entering a wrong door. He eventually finds Dr Borden, who confirms she was with Collier the night before during the time he was informed of the Donner death. I know L.A. is warm year-round but this takes place in the dead of winter (established in the beginning of the episode as the reason for Collier and Nadia for selecting the beach property which is largely abandoned that time of the year for their ill-fated tryst) and maybe it had been emptied. The pool is never seen before her fatal dive nor much after, and I know for a fact that these episodes have been re-edited and a lot of filler removed, at least on COZI TV. If the pool had been full she might have landed in it and survived as it seemed to be directly below her balcony (as I pointed out) and the splash would likely have immediately brought her out of her trance.The TikTok has since been referred to as the primary Pascal fancam edit — with one commenter saying outright, “I love how the entire fandom has just collectively agreed that this is the official Pedro Pascal edit.” The song “Hey Sexy Lady” by Shaggy, combined with those particular lines of dialogue from Kingsman: The Golden Circle, has become the audio file used for numerous other thirst edits of Pascal. More than 24,000 TikToks use that particular audio. An obvious pleasure of the show is having these elaborate and ingenious murders delicately unravelled by equally ingenious observations. The first death denies that pleasure and while the second murder is far more fulfilling (despite its implausibility) it leaves no time to savour Columbo’s efforts. Instead he immediately spots the (clever) inconsistencies and divines the wild truth in time to confront people with it in the next scene. Elamin: I was just saying, the words "no one is asking for this" were also my reaction to the Super Mario movie. But you know what? Here we are, and that is fine. Recco's for the road Daddy worship had gotten so bad at that point that it spurred a viral “ stop appropriating Daddy” diatribe. “Don’t have deep psychosexual Freudian and Oedipal trauma/dysfunction? Good for you. Stop appropriating ‘Daddy,’” the screed read. Daddy was too mainstream, this internet user argued, that its edges, all of its subversiveness and thrill, had been sanded off and turned into mainstream fluff.