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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mel O&#039;Drama" data-source="post: 288320" data-attributes="member: 23">Columbo Likes The Nightlife continuedThe Gotcha was effective enough. The reveal of the body under the fish tanks in the club floor felt like a bit of a cheat since I don’t think we knew where the body was. It’s the kind of concealment I’d usually feel very frustrated by, but this was mitigated by the fact that Tony’s death was almost the secondary one compared with Price’s murder of the journalist, and the audience was entirely in on what had happened there. What I did like about the Gotcha was the shrewd detective work that led Columbo there. All through the episode we’d seen him linking up the connections between characters and crimes by doing legwork, looking through files, spotting things that struck him as odd and listening to his gut instincts.The observation about the koi was a particularly good one, and I enjoyed his lengthy exposition (as other characters waited for him to get to the point) about how much water each fish needs, which led him to suspect one of the floor tanks was shallower than the others. My one gripe with this is that I don’t think it's something the audience could have worked out based on the information we were given. But I can forgive that because it all helped make the Gotcha more effective, and I enjoyed watching it sink in with Price and Vanessa as they slowly realised they were about to be found out. The whole radar technology used to observe the body was a very twenty first century kind of thing and almost felt too much and malapropos. But I found it acceptable firstly because even back in the Seventies this series hasn’t shied away from using technology against killers; and secondly because the killer’s fates were sealed before we saw the infrared image of the body thanks to Columbo’s detective work. All in all, it’s a watchable episode that would no doubt be a forgotten episode other than by virtue of being the last ever episode (and even then, I’d guess very few viewers could name or describe this episode). It’s by no means a great episode and certainly not a fitting note on which to end the series compared with the previous two episodes. But it could have been a lot worse. At least Ed McBain never got the last word. </blockquote>

Verification: Who played JR Ewing?