How about the serial murderer/author Jessica Fletcher vs Lieutenant Columbo? Would Columbo be fooled by Fletcher or not?
Are we talking early TV series Wedneday (where she’s younger than Pugsley), or the movie / Wednesday-series / Broadway play Wednesday?
Very, very different Wednesdays. Early-tv-series, she’d be of no use.
All the others, and Eddie had better watch out.
Unless we’re talking about a dance challenge:
Modern Family (Pritchetts and Dunphys) vs. Arrested Development
It wouldn’t even be a fair fight. No matter how nasty Lucille is, Gloria happens to be a crack shot. And Jay can still beat up any member of the Bluth family, let alone what Cam could do when sufficiently angered. You’d have to get to Maebey vs. with Alex or Haley to get to a near-even match. Maeby is crafty, but Haley is an evil genius while Alex is an actual genius.
Y’know, they eventually did pit Columbo against an Agatha Christie stand-in who’d decided to graduate from writing murder mysteries by committing one and making it look like an accident and arranging an alibi for herself thousands of miles away, and — spoilers? — off the top of my head, it’s maybe the only time he wound up in an Ellery Queen scenario: he couldn’t talk her into giving herself away, but, for a change, he instead needed to get into the mindset of the dead guy.
If that’s the one I’m thinking of, isn’t it an example of Lt C breaking the law? As in, perverting the course of justice (as it’s called in the UK anyway). He has got solid evidence that she did it, but he lets her get away with it?
No, this is the one where Abigail “The Best In Murder” Mitchell is rich enough — having authored dozens of mystery novels, to say nothing of a hit play — to have a small walk-in vault, of ‘bank’ quality if not size, in her home. And so she asks a guy to (a) showily leave her home, in front of folks who know she’s about to leave for the airport, and also asks that guy to (b) secretly slip back in and meet with her at said vault; she dangles the prospect of easy money as he walks into said vault, at which point she locks him in there before catching a flight to the coast. So when the vault is opened, it looks exactly like an unscrupulous jerk tried to play burglar while she was out, and maybe thought he heard a maid and panicked and hid by closing the vault door, accidentally locking himself in there and dying.
And so Columbo tries his usual schtick — which often gets a suspect to slip up and say something only the killer would know — but she just keeps saying stuff an eccentric innocent could after some larcenous idiot botches a heist on her property. And so Columbo asks himself: what if the guy in the vault, with nothing else to do, had wanted to leave a message that names his murderer? But how to manage that, given that she might be the one to open the vault and ‘discover’ the body? So, take the killer’s psychology out of the equation; all Columbo needs to do is figure out what the victim would’ve done, for to find the solid evidence that’s a Like-Unto-Deathbed-Testimony note. And, when he finds it, she asks him to let her get away with it; he, uh, doesn’t.
Hop Sing would eke out a narrow win over Mr. French, if only because of basic frontier toughness.
However, even if they teamed up, the two of them would lose decisively to Hazel.
Mr. French just needs to sit on Hop and he’d sing “uncle!”
Alice could take them both. She dates a serial killer butcher.
There are rare instances of Columbo not arresting someone because, e.g., she would be dead of a terminal disease before trial, or the one where he destroys evidence and lets an accessory to murder go because she was victimized, but it was not that one.
Igor (Lab Assistant to the movie version of Doctor Frankenstein) vs Torgo (minion of the Master, from Manos the Hand of Fate).
Torgo gets to keep both hands.
Who would prevail in a mob war between Jabba the Hutt and his henchmen versus Tony Soprano and his crew? Assume for some hand wavey reason they are on the same planet at the same time, and they both have access to the same weapons and tech.
Igor would bring Torgo to his knees.
I must’ve remembered it wrong because that’s the episode I was thinking of. I thought he let her get away with it because
Summary
The victim had killed her daughter
If it is close combat, the Supranos would win. Hutts are slow moving and big targets.
Are any of Jabba’s henchmen Hutts?
More importantly are any of them interior decorators?
Could ANYBODY take on Green Hornets driver, Kato?
Cliff Booth