#24.6.24

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der einen spur im

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sand folgen als wäre sie mehr

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als die fußnote

Hey two episodes in two days, that's pretty good. This second Columbo episode was pretty solid, although particularly following Murder by the Book it did feel a little boring at times. Our main strength is in the vastly different context of murder this episode compared to the previous ones I've watched. Our murder is entirely accidental - not premeditated in any way. And through the course of the episode we watch the murderer - one Mr Brimmer - get increasingly desperate to protect himself and to get Columbo anywhere else but on this case. And it's a fun dynamic, because Brimmer is a private investigator, and so that similar line of work he shares with Columbo gives them something resembling a chemistry. His inviting of Columbo to join his own company I would call the highlight scene of the episode, in fact. Since Brimmer also kills a man's wife, that man starts the episode as somewhat of a suspect, aware of the show that he's in, which is a nice twist. He's very sympathetic honestly, and the fact that he otherwise shares a good relationship with Brimmer makes the murder hurt quite a bit.

Do think this episode has a couple weaknesses holding it back a bit compared to some others though. There's sort of an ending twist involving some contact lens fuckery that I don't think quite made sense, more of a twist for the sake of a twist. One of Brimmer's men - Leo - is also established as a character that exists and given some attention but doesn't really amount to anything such that it feels like a bit of a side tangent in this murder. Lastly I think it maybe has more characters than necessary in general - such that Columbo's attention is divided between a lot of people and he doesn't get to have quite the tense rapport with any single one of them that he has in prior episodes. Although that's not exclusively a bad thing since the majority of the characters in this story are very well utilised.

I'll also quickly say I've been reading the Columbophile blog reviews for each episode (after I write these posts just to ensure that my opinions actually are my own) and one of the details they hammer in is the Columbo character's increasing softness and kindness throughout the show. First episode Columbo who yelled at young actress lady isn't the same Columbo we'd have down the line, you know? And to that end I wanna call attention to a particular scene in this episode wherein potential murder subject Archer, terrified of his own fate because he has no alibi and had an illicit relationship with the murder victim, is assured of his own innocence by Columbo. That's a feelgood scene, just straight up. Guy doesn't have much screentime but despite what he's doing he's sympathetic and it's nice seeing Columbo have his back here.

Yeahhhhhhh I don't think train managed to win me over in the end. Gone over this before, but from all the marketing I expected it to be something else entirely, which it wasn't, and that surprise put me off. I gave the show some time though, it grew on me, I was okay with it being this utterly bizarre thing, but then it just did a bunch of crap episodes in a row. And for me it just never really recovered, I guess. The episodes nearer the end were better than the ones leading up to them, but I was ready for the show to end quite a while ago. I feel like taken as a whole, Train feels like it kinda struggles to be much of anything really, like I would say the thematic conclusion the show comes to is embracing change, even if you're afraid of it - Shizuru is apologising to Yoka because she was too afraid of change and hurt her for it, and then there's change in a very literal sense of what 7G did to the world, but it's hard to get the impression that the entire show is about that. Lots of its runtime is just kind of random deviations. I don't think every single thing happening in a narrative has to be in service of some grander idea, like I said random deviations but it's not like it's filler or anything, but trying to piece together a cohesive whole from Train just leaves me feeling like it was a bit aimless as a series, like a jellyfish drifting through the... wait a minute.