Columbo: Season 02 (1972)

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Rumpled, raincoat-wearing, cigar-chomping Lt. Columbo (Peter Falk) continues to play clever mind games with criminals who mistakenly believe they've committed the proverbial "perfect murder" as Columbo enters its second season. This year the series, one of several rotating programs of the detective anthology NBC Mystery Movie, offers eight episodes of varying lengths (90 to 120 minutes) for the entertainment of Columbo's ever-growing list of fans and devotees. John Cassavetes and Blythe Danner guest star in the opener, "Etude in Black," wherein Columbo matches wits with a symphony conductor who has murdered his mistress; this episode was written by no less than Steven Bochco. "The Greenhouse Jungle" stars Ray Millandand Bradford Dillman as a larcenous uncle and nephew who plan to raise a huge amount of money with an elaborate kidnap scam which inevitably segues into murder. Robert Culp, "special guest killer" in the first-season episode "Death Lends a Hand," returns to play a different but equally homicidal miscreant in "The Most Crucial Game." Columbo heads to London in "Dagger of the Mind," a tale of backstage intrigue and suspicious-looking suicides, with Richard Basehart heading the guest-star list. Movie star Anne Baxteraccidentally kills her press agent while attempting to do in her husband in "Requiem for a Falling Star." Leonard Nimoy plays a doctor who uses his medical knowhow to cover up two murders in "Stitch in Crime." A deaf chessmaster Laurence Harvey hatches a murder scheme that points the finger of guilt to a non-deaf person in "The Most Dangerous Match." And in the season-two finale "Double Shock," Martin Landau plays a dual role as a pair of greedy twins, one of whom committed murder -- and, of course, it's up to Columbo to ID the guilty party without "seeing double." ~ Rovi