I guess Robert M. Young, the writer, had been reading Tom Wolfe or he wouldn't have come up with the extravagant title of this nice little story. Theodore Bikel belongs to a club for people whose IQs register in the upper two percent of the population's. There are half a dozen or so other members who meet regularly in a comfy, two-story place to discuss weighty matters. Another member is Sorrell Booke, Bikel's partner in the business they run. Booke has discovered that Bikel has been cooking the books to satisfy the materialistic desires of his wife, Samantha Eggar. So Bikel cooks Booke upstairs and arranges an alibi for the time of the shooting by using an elaborate Rube Goldberg chain of events that involve squib charges, an umbrella, a record player, a dictionary, and a Magic Marker.
Enter Columbo, from whose rumpled clothing and shambling demeanor we can gather that his IQ registers somewhere in the neighborhood of that of a particularly mature gopher tortoise. Actually, he's pretty smart, and it only takes him a day or two to figure out Bikel's routine. In this effort, he's helped enormously by his magical powers of intuition. He muses aloud, "Why would somebody play only da last four minutes of a record?" Well, Lieutenant, MAYBE THEY LIKED THE TRACK! There is also the usual problem of Columbo not having nearly enough evidence against the murderer to bring to court, and the murderer breaks down anyway and blabs about the crime. "When did you begin to suspect?"
No matter, really, because Columbo's Magical Tangerine Flake Streamlined Intuition is part of every episode and usually slips under the viewer's radar or, if the blip shows up, it can be happily ignored. The same with the criminal's abject admission at the end. So it doesn't make sense. So what?
This organization of intellectuals that Bikel belongs to -- the members include Kenneth Mars and Basil Hoffman among the recognizable faces -- is obviously modeled after MENSA. I'm not so sure it's a good thing to be all that smart. There's increasing evidence that genius and insanity aren't strangers to one another. And anyway, there's a mutual fund managed solely by MENSA members and it always loses money because they get hung up on a specific theory and stick with it regardless of returns. It's as if they were not managing a fund but testing an hypothesis. Further, I've had some encounters with genius classes in college and, I'll tell you the truth, they all looked a little neurotic to me.
The plot doesn't really do much with all those high IQs. There's an over-sized dictionary in one of the rooms, but nobody discusses weighty things. Nobody is into mathematics or elaborate puzzles or symbolic logic or games of strategy as far as we can tell. In real life I'd imagine every other sentence would have "string theory" or "fuzzy logic" or "fractals" embedded in it somewhere. And the set-up that Bikel uses to conceal his culpability isn't really that much different from those we find in other episodes, although the script makes a lot of how much brain power must have been behind it.
That all sounds kind of negative, but it's small stuff compared to seeing mainstream Columbo. I always enjoy this episode. Bikel makes a nice sweaty villain, though not a snotty one, and the script has an exchange between Columbo and a brilliant fourteen-year-old girl. He tells her she's not only smart but pretty. And she gushes: "That's the first time anyone complimented me for my body and not my mind." There's a cameo by Jamie Lee Curtis.
And Bikel gives Columbo a neat little mental puzzle to solve. Imagine that you have some bags of gold, as many as you like, and the gold pieces weight as much as you like. Then imagine there are bags of phony gold, again as many as you like, and each piece of fake gold weighs whatever you want. You can put any number of bags, or any number of pieces within them, on a scale and weigh them -- but only once. Now, separate the phony bags from the real gold.
Columbo comes up with an ingenious solution. It's simple but elegant. However, it would be even simpler to imagine just two bags -- one filled with fake gold and one with real gold, each containing one piece. If the real gold weighs one pound and the fake gold weighs one pound and one ounce, all you have to do is weigh one of the bags to find out if it's real or fake. Now, according to Occam's razor, entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem, and mine is the simpler solution and therefore the better one.
And -- oh, another thing. That Latin phrase above? It means "entities shouldn't be multiplied more than necessary." William of Occam wrote it in Latin but that wasn't his native language. He was a Franciscan monk who lived in England and spoke Middle English. God knows how many years he had to spend, learning Latin. And you know where I got that quote from? Wikipedia. It took two minutes. Well, if my solution to the writing of that Latin phrase isn't simpler than William of Occam's, I'll eat my hat. Therefore, to be fair, I get bonus points for additional simplicity.
I've been thinking of applying to MENSA for membership but I'm afraid they might accept me.
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