In that episode, the killer was already in prison, but he wouldn’t reveal where the bodies were. He taunted the cops who came to question him that his attorney saw the bodies and even closed the door to the place where they were hidden. That’s what McCoy based everything on, that by closing the door, the attorney actively hid evidence.
Despite that blatant tapestry of justice, that is still one of my favorite episodes. Not just for the outcome, but that it spawned a sequel.
Plus, it makes Larry Miller a three time “repeat offender”: twice as the killer Dobson, and once as himself.
He’s still obnoxious all three times. 
Whoever told him he was funny?
Criminal Intent, season 6 episode “Bombshell” (inspired by Anna Nicole Smith) has two murders, committed by two people. One a psycho nutjob woman, the other the father of pseudo-ANS’s baby. Detective Logan watches as the nutjob woman holds the baby over the ledge of a tall building (on her own accord, did I mention she’s a psycho nutjob?) and his idea of “talking her down” is to urge (coerce) the father to confess to the other murder.
No way that confession holds up. “Your honor, Detective Logan merely watched as psycho nutjob threatened to murder my client’s child. For all we know, he put her up to it. He had no choice but to lie to save the child!” Not one of my favorite episodes!
If Goren has a formula fault, it was coercing guilty suspects to confess to hide a deeper (to them) sin. (such as a priest who fathered a child with a parishioner, and if the secret came out, it could bring harm to them.*) He did that enough that I thought he should be reined in. Or find better writers.
*ada Carver: You do that again, detective, and I’ll have your badge.
Goren’s whole thing was that he was mentally and emotionally troubled, seen as a borderline nutjob by his fellow cops. But because of that, he got results because he didn’t play by the rules, man.
There was a several episode plot arc to start off one of the seasons where he had been kicked off the force, was hanging out in bars getting drunk, and got involved in something illegal.
Turned out he was undercover the whole time, but it was very believable that he might have been spiraling, since the writers had painted him as so troubled.
To be fair, that came later.
His original thing was he was a genius in the style of Sherlock (but not as far out there. He couldn’t identify tobacco by the ash. ) But he did know a lot of different facts and skills, such as speaking Chinese and knowing about fire detection in a library in Alexandria, that were useful in making connections and solving cases.
Goren became “emotionally troubled” because D’Onofrio became emotionally troubled and hard to work with. Those arc episodes are some of the worst. Which is why we got Logan’s “rage-a-holic cop” and…whatever spectrum Jeff Goldblum’s character was at the end of filling in.
PS the Chief of D’s should have made a public apology for the “nutjob” comment, because Goren solved not on the murder of the cop, but correctly identified the killer in a case where another man was wrongly convicted.
Well, the two are far from mutually exclusive-- the ‘genius detective with mental issues’ trope goes back to, well, Sherlock Holmes, at least. And I think Conan Doyle based Holmes on another character from some earlier literature (a Poe character?).
But you’re right, Goren’s character, and the show itself, did change over the first few seasons. One thing I noticed, separate from the Goren character, was that the show started out with a setup similar to Columbo, where the audience saw who the bad guys were and what they were doing from the start, and the plot became ‘how would the detectives figure out what the audience already knows?’. It later shifted to more of a mix between that setup and more typical ‘whodunit’ episodes.
Really? Interesting, I hadn’t heard that. I just thought D’Onofrio was having fun chewing the scenery, doing his best ‘DeNiro Jr.’ impression 
Too late for edit window-- I had meant ‘Pacino Jr.’.
I did that once when I was still living in Minnesota. It was really, really cold that night! 
Not always:
I did that for a few years - while pregnant and breastfeeding.
The only times I’ve seen it in movies/TV are when there’s a sex scene, or post-sex-scene, where one would normally be naked, but the actress presumably refused.
I’m just astonished that Hamilton Burger kept his job as long as he did, given how often he prosecutes innocent people. Surely some of them go to other lawyers and end up with life in prison.
When fans would ask William Talman about that he had two stock answers,
- As a prosecuting attorney I’m after the truth, even if it winds up embarrassing me.
- You’re only seeing the cases I have on Thursdays. I’m right in the rest of them.
My wife and I have lived in three places. Two of them had the couch in the middle of the room. Both were townhouses, one rented, one owned. In the first one, we had a long enough couch that we created a hallway coming from the kitchen into the living room with the couch. It kept it feeling open.
In our current townhome, the living room and dining room are attached. When we first moved in, we had it so five or six could comfortably sit and watch TV but that put the couch in the middle of the room, defining living room and dining room. We might have tried not to have that happen once but we couldn’t make it work. Really, the floor plan isn’t great. There is a fireplace in the middle of a wall but the mantle wasn’t made for the TV, in terms of plug ins and cable coax. We can’t put the focus on the fireplace easily, so something gets put in front of the fireplace, so the rest of the chairs can face the entertainment center.
Really, this has me thinking if we shouldn’t redo it.
Thanks for the discussion!
Or the Australian version of dealing with police questions:
[Moderating]
With 26 posts on the Columbo episode with the cigar box, it probably warrants its own thread. I’ve moved those posts.
My parents couldn’t agree, so every 2 months we moved the couch. Not making that up.
My mother used to redecorate the living room every time the seasons changed, and this usually meant rearranging the furniture, and moving the couch. In addition to the seasonal changes, there was also the Christmas decorations. So we moved the couch three to five times a year.
The furniture in our living room revolves around it, on the approximate orbital period of Mars. After each change, it is apparently a better arrangement than the last one - even if it is the same as it was 6 orbits ago.
In the next 30 seconds we are all going to die/the planet will explode/all life in the universe will get snuffed out. But first let’s spend 5 minutes talking about our feelings. It’s especially egregious in Star Trek: Discovery but it happens in a lot of other things.
Yep, that is really fucking stupid.
I’ve seen in some movies/series where the good guy (victim, kidnappee) is invited/hustled into the limousine; the divider goes up, poison or knockout gas is dumped into the compartment rendering our subject inert. The doors are locked (with the requisite thunk) and cannot be opened from the inside - forget about the windows.
I don’t think this happens in real life a bunch - the cleaning bill would be substantial after a few episodes.
I seem to remember a couple of times where the victim is “contained”; the driver bails; and the vehicle plunges over the cliff with the resultant explosion. In real life, the driver takes the family or him/herself solo over the cliff.