Dumbest way a TV detective has solved a crime [open spoilers]

Cafe Society
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<There’s a 22 year old thread on this, I thought better to make a new thread than ping all those people again>

In this thread, @solost gave the example of Columbo managing to incriminate the perp with a “swap the poison” style trick, where Columbo not being decapitated proved the perp’s intent to kill.

My example is going to be in the Jonathan Creek* episode Daemon’s Roost.
The killer is impersonating a security guard working on the grounds of a manor. The patriarch of said manor has had a stroke and cannot move his body, only his eyes. The patriarch is ultimately poisoned, and, as he’s dying, he sort of waggles his eyes.
Creek later figures out that he was actually darting his eyes between a phone and the letter Y, which, from his perspective, was the only letter he could see of a book’s spine.
Get it? He was spelling out the word “phoney” as a clue about the security guard! I mean, just staring at the guy would have been a better clue, but nah bro let’s shoot for the moon.
(I might have some minor details wrong, I can’t find a detailed synopsis)

* Jonathan Creek at its best was a series that managed to be both scary and irreverant, and with genuinely clever “impossible murders”. It dropped significantly in quality in later series though, of which this episode is an example.

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The show that comes to my mind is the Korean series Extraordinary Attorney Woo where, in each trial, the title character repeatedly stands up and interrupts witness testimony in order to spout various incorrect theories until one of them turns out to be correct. Maybe that’s how the legal system actually works in Korea, but I’m a tad skeptical.

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Going back to Columbo (not to beat up on the show, because I do love it), I did a ‘Columbo rewatch’ thread a few years ago in which I posted what I thought was one of the weakest Columbo ‘gotcha’ moments (though not as outright dumb as the ‘guillotine’ gotcha), involving whether a potential witness was blind or not (if you click on the ‘replies’ at the bottom of that post you can also see a clip of the scene posted):

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THere would be several good Columbo examples - but to talk about the ‘switching the poison’ would be the episode where Columbo’s wife is ‘killed’.

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I guess Inspector Clouseau does not count?

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This one is sort of OK, because, similar to the exploding cigar, it relies on Columbo doing something perfectly normal, and the murderer reacting inappropriately.

Much worse, to me, was the one with the Commodore’s Watch. If I remember it right, it depended on letting the family hear the ticking watch, one by one, while commenting that it was the Commodore’s watch. One of them said it wasn’t, and they were the killer because only the killer knew that the watch was broken.

In what world does it seem normal to go from person to person, putting a watch up to their ear and telling them it’s a certain watch? If that’s not a “Hey everyone, let’s find out who the murder is!” choice, I don’t know what is.

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I have to vote (though this may not be the DUMBEST, it sure is close) was the Columbo-esque Rehearsal For Murder (written by Levinson and Link, so… yeah).

Short version, a Broadway producer’s wife was murdered, and he brings “the usual suspects” together, along with a policeman, to recreate the night of her murder, so he can trick the actual killer to reveal him or her self.

Turns out the cop is an actor, because said producer couldn’t get the real police interested.

Anyway, truth is, the actor/cop was the killer, and all the “suspects” were in on it, and the entire trip was that the killer would open a drawer in the set and find a flashlight at a critical point. In true Levinson/Link/Columbo style, it was assumed that this guy, who was in the victim’s house one time, would not only know where she kept her flashlight, but remember a year later, assume the fake set actually included everything that was in the kitchen drawers, and while under stress. (I can’t even remember where my own flashlights are!) And, if he hadn’t, then what? There was nothing else planned!

Plus, really, if the husband of the oman you actually murdered, comes to you all sweet and innocent, and asks you to participate in an event intended to trick the “real killer” into revealing themselves, would you even go??

I really hate that movie! I think one of the Columbo pilot movies used the same plot.

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I’m a big fan of Monk. Some of the mysteries are a bit unbelievable.

Monk Goes Back to School, Season 2
A teacher is killed. The suspect was in a classroom giving students a test when she dies. She had jumped from a clock tower.

How’d he do it?

Well, Monk says he killed her in the clock tower. Put her body on the minute hand at 8:15. (the hand would be level). Rushes back to his classrom.

She slides off the hand around 8:20 and hits a parked car. Setting off the alarm. The noise sets her time of death.

Is that possible?

I know those clocks are big. But balancing a limp, 130 lb. body on a minute hand?

I like the episode. It’s sentimental because Monk’s deceased wife graduated there.

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Well, it held Buster Keaton’s weight :wink:

Kidding of course, but yeah, also nobody happened to check the time on the very publicly visible clock tower in that 5 minutes and maybe notice a dead woman hanging from the minute hand?

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It’s a movie rather than a TV show, but my first thought was John Candy’s titular character in the movie Who’s Harry Crumb?.

John Candy plays a private detective hired by a wealthy older man to solve the kidnapping for ransom of his daughter. His character is a good natured but bumbling detective who stumbles into solving the kidnapping because a second crime is also being plotted, the murder of the wealthy man by his second wife and her lover so that she can inherit his money. Crumb eventually confronts the wife and her lover, thinking that they are the kidnappers. In reality the kidnapper turns out to be his boss at the detective agency, who assigned Crumb to the case because he is a buffoon and figured Crumb would never solve it. The kidnapper ends up tied up and gagged in a maintenance closet at LAX, courtesy of the other criminal couple that had already been caught. Crumb starts bragging to his boss about how he thought that Crumb would never solve the case, and now that he has (or at least that he thinks he has), he proceeds to showboat. The boss, annoyed by Crumb’s antics, confesses as soon as the tape on his mouth is removed due to his annoyance with Crumb.

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While you’re 100% correct in your assessment of Who’s Harry Crumb? I’d like to state for the record that the entire movie is filled with gags like that, and it’s one of those movies that both need a lot of work, and are so much fun that it’s perfect as it is.

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Borrowing my response from a different thread:

One I especially hate is the Monk episode with a significant amount of missing gold where the solution was that the guy melted the gold, blended the molten gold with ink, then used the resulting still liquid still ink to write gibberish in diaries for decades. What?

(It was from the episode “Mr. Monk Gets Married”.)

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The Last Salute to the Commodore was the first one I thought of, but more of a dumb murderer. Columbo goes around the room with the watch and everyone makes a comment like “okay” and “so what”. Then when he gets to the murderer he says that it isn’t (t’aint?). If I were the murderer I would respond like everyone else.

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That’s why the script had him go first. :slight_smile:

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I’m currently watching all episodes of Columbo and several other 60s-70s-80s shows. I saw that episode just last night.

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How about the various CSIs where the tech grabs the reflection from someone’s eyeball or glasses and enlarges it to show where the person was. I don’t have a problem that they cut corners on timing (like DNA) because you have only 44 or so minutes to tell your story, but that’s a little extreme. And there was another one where they raised a voice from a piece of pottery that was recorded while it was spinning on the potter’s wheel.

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A: How did you get busted?
B: Feds put a tracker on the package, DEA had us surrounded. You?
A: Some genius detective made me listen to a ticking watch. I mean, I could have just shrugged, but I’m a real stickler when it comes to horology, you feel me?

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Isn’t that Harold Lloyd?

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Yeah, d’oh, you’re right. I even googled “buster keaton clock tower” and Google clearly knew what I really meant because it loaded a bunch of pics of the Harold Lloyd stunt.

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That reminds me of another episode of Columbo, a very early example of “zoom and enhance”. Columbo proves a murder by zooming in on a desk visible in a videotape to see and read a party invitation.

That episode also has an early description of a digital watch: “a super watch that
printed the time in red letters.”.