Reviews

This episode is unusual in that it is one of the newer episodes that is somewhat good. I find many of the newer episodes to be not as good as the older ones, since they don't follow the formula of the 1970's episodes and stray too far, sometimes, into typical crime-show territory. The episode "No Time to Die", from 1992, is one that strays very far from the formula and that many regard as one of the worst.

One issue in my mind with this episode is that Columbo is hounding a person who is not mentally all-there. Usually, we root for Columbo because he's catching an evil calculating person who usually deserves to be locked up, although there are certainly episodes where the "murder" we see is accidental, in my opinion, or not as evil as other murders.

In this episode we have a woman who murders the man who helped put her husband into prison, and then plans to get rid of Columbo's wife and Columbo himself. As we see throughout the episode, she has an obsession with her husband's death, irrationally blames people other than her husband for his conviction, and (metaphorically, maybe) plays recordings of actual or imagined conversations in her head regarding the case of her husband. Those "recordings" may represent auditory hallucinations.

To me, she is suffering some psychosis and, as the reviewer "stubbers from Essex" says, Columbo knows "full well that she is insane." Dr. Steadman, Vivian Dimitri's psychiatrist, says she has an "obsession" and Columbo says that he read a book with a case history of a person exhibiting "psychotic behavior" to learn about Vivian Dimitri's mind. Dr. Steadman tells Columbo that the case history he read does match Vivian Dimitri's behavior.

I think the reviewer "Harry Smart from United States" gets it wrong by saying, "there are psychopaths like that in the real world." Untrained people constantly throw around words like "psychopath" and "schizophrenic" without any idea of what they mean. Vivian Dimitri is, to me, psychotic and definitely NOT psychopathic. A better example of a psychopath would be former President Bill Clinton, as a number of psychiatrists pointed out while he was in office. A significant number of presidents and CEOs are psychopaths and it plays an essential part in them achieving their successes. Have you spoken to more than a few police officers in your lifetime? Then you've more than likely met a psychopath. Police is one of the top ten professions that employ psychopaths. Vivian Dimitri is certainly not an example of a psychopath.

My guess is that a defense attorney would seek to have her found unfit for trial.

I didn't give this a 10 since I feel sorry for Vivian Dimitri. She is not as clearly evil and cold as Robert Culp or Jack Cassidy were in their 6 episodes as murderers.