An Under-talked About Part Of Columbo Is The Way It Presents Non-murderers. Most Episodes Have At Least

An under-talked about part of Columbo is the way it presents non-murderers. Most episodes have at least a few scenes where Columbo talks to people involved in the case who, you know, aren't the ones who killed the victim, and in those scenes to see a multitude of ways people handle grief (or, if not grief exactly, the simple shock of someone you know no longer being around). I'm watching one of my favorite episodes right now, the one with Leonard Nimoy as the killer, and Columbo is interviewing one of the victim's co-workers, a nurse, and she just keeps going on an on about how much better the victim was morally than her - how the victim really cared about healing people as opposed to herself, who only wants to advance her career. And in this brief, minute-long interaction you get both the comic relief of Columbo quickly realizing this woman will provide almost no useful information but being unable to get her to stop talking without being rude, and a very clear illustration of how the victim was inspiring to others and how this co-worker in particular not only admired her, but feels inadequate for not living up to her. It's a very short interaction, easy to ignore in the scope of the episode (Leonard Nimoy gives SUCH a good performance as a villain it'd be hard to talk about anything else), but it all adds a humanity to the episode that would be sorely missing without it. If you didn't care about the murder before, you sure as hell do now, and you know Columbo is a better person than the killer because he actually cares about the effect these murders have on people enough not to coldly shut down a grieving friend of the victim when she's rambling on about her feelings.

Anyway, I know this is a hot take for Tumblr, but Columbo is really great.

Robot disabilities. Robot who charges slowly and loses power incredibly fast and is always tired. Robot with malfunctioning lenses and can’t process visual information properly. Robot that can’t process anything too large and at a fast rate or else they’ll shut down. Robot with limbs screwed on too loose/just can’t attach correctly, so if they’re not careful they fall out. Robot disabilities,,,

Hot take: Actual literary analysis requires at least as much skill as writing itself, with less obvious measures of whether or not you’re shit at it, and nobody is allowed to do any more god damn litcrit until they learn what the terms “show, don’t tell” and “pacing” mean.

it's interesting to me that torture just works to us, as a literary device. It's everywhere in movies and stories and whatnot, from big-budget dramas to little grindhouse short stories. It fits neatly into the requirements of plot: character doesn't want to offer information, Gets Tortured, has to offer information.

the issue with this is that it isn't how it works.

torture is a display of power. It fouls interrogation, this is known; a person being tortured will tell you whatever you want to hear to make it stop, which is more often than not a lie, made up on the spot, or if the truth an incomplete and useless version of it. It isn't generally done for information's sake anyway, but as a form of what the ancient Greeks called hybris, the violent exhibition of your power over another person.

This is, every once in a great while, done right in fiction, but it's a challenge to write vs. the idea that it's a shortcut to one character revealing plot-critical information to another. Pretty much every form of torture works this way, even the ones that are legally permissible. Psychological torment or physical discomfort also produce an animalistic desire to escape harm and foul interrogation. The forms of torture the cops can do? The cops do it not to gain information (or if they think it will, they're lying to themselves) but because it makes them feel powerful.

There's probably a master's thesis in it for somebody studying the rise of torture as a plot device since the beginning of the war on terror and the contemporaneous development of the Broken Windows theory of policing. I'm not really aware of any similar level of disconnect between what Works in fiction and what happens in real life!

cruelty is so easy. youre not special for choosing it