On February 10th, 1990, Patrick McGoohan returned to Columbo in a big way: starring as legal shark Oscar Finch and directing the episode himself. Agenda for Murder is the point where the revived ABC run starts to feel less like a pleasant reunion tour and more like the real thing again.
McGoohan plays Oscar Finch, a brilliant defense attorney and political operative with a very neat office, very polished manners, and a very large problem named Frank Staplin. Staplin knows too much about an old bit of legal-political skulduggery involving Finch and Congressman Paul Mackey, who is now on the brink of being chosen as Governor Montgomery’s vice-presidential running mate. Finch wants a place in the next administration. Staplin wants protection. Columbo, naturally, wants to know why the gun is lying on top of the blood.
Meet Oscar
We open with Oscar Finch and Congressman Mackey on their way to meet the governor. This sets up the foundational undercurrent of the entire episode.Return of McGoohan
This is Patrick McGoohan’s third on-screen turn as a Columbo murderer, after Colonel Lyle C. Rumford in By Dawn’s Early Light and Nelson Brenner in Identity Crisis. It is also his first Columbo appearance since the 1970s. That matters. The revival era had already given us some enjoyable pieces, but McGoohan brings instant old-school credibility. He knows the rhythm of the show, he knows Falk, and he knows exactly how to make a suspect seem both amused by Columbo and genuinely threatened by him.
Oscar Finch is not as austere as Rumford and not as weird as Brenner. He sits comfortably in the middle: urbane, fussy, theatrical, politically connected, and always chewing on something. That last part turns out to be important.
The food thing
Finch nibbles constantly. It is one of those character details that could have been annoying if overplayed, but McGoohan makes it useful. The audience registers it as an eccentric habit long before it becomes evidence.Governor Montgomery
Arthur Hill does a nice job as Governor Montgomery. Unfortunately he doesn't have much to do in this episode, he's basically limited to that opening scene where he invites Paul Mackey to be his running mate.
Frank Staplin has a problem
Frank Staplin, played by Louis Zorich, is exactly the wrong kind of old acquaintance. He is cheerful, needy, compromised, and dangerous. Years earlier, Finch helped him beat a case, but the price of that help was apparently a little favor from Mackey when Mackey was still an assistant district attorney. Now Staplin is in trouble again and wants Finch to make the problem go away.
Fax me a murder
Staplin is also in the middle of using a fax machine, which gives the episode a terrific little time capsule feeling. In 1990 that machine says modern convenience. In 2026 some of the audience will barely remember that fax machines existed. Columbo is always good for that sort of accidental historical texture: answering services, Dictaphones, car phones, pagers, fax machines, and all the little devices that were once cutting edge and now look like props from a world that vanished.Rebecca...is a little low energy
Annie Stewart has a brief appearance as Frank's secretary, Rebecca. It's her only acting credit. I guess she's just playing the character is in grieving shock, but the performance felt noticeably flat to me.
Could be a coincidence, but I'm reminded of another episode McGoohan directed where a supporting actress gave a rather emotionless performance.
The murder plan
Finch’s plan is a pretty good one. He walks to Staplin’s house in the rain, kills him with a gunshot to the temple, and stages the scene as a suicide. He prepares gunpowder residue, arranges the weapon, and counts on his knowledge of criminal procedure to carry him through.This is one of the better revived-era setups because Finch is not relying on a magic trick. He is relying on competence. He knows what police expect to see. He knows what a suicide ought to look like. He knows how lawyers pick apart evidence. The problem is that Columbo is not looking at what the scene is supposed to look like. He is looking at what it actually looks like.
Flashback to an earlier episode?
Once again we get to see McGoohan meticulously preparing his crime. In fact, the long scene of him in his office preparing the gun, and the gunpowder, and the newspaper clipping reminded me a lot of the opening scene of By Dawn's Early Light where we see him carefully putting the C4 into the cannon shell.
But a little TOO prepared?
I've worked with attorneys my entire career. As far as I know none of them kept a burner gun in a safe in their office on the off-chance they'd some day have to stage a fake suicide.
And why does Oscar already have a carefully prepared, and obviously recent, newspaper clipping about Staplin's legal troubles?
The gun and the blood
The first thing that bothers Columbo is wonderfully simple: if Staplin shot himself, why is the gun on top of the blood? It is not the final clue, but it is classic Columbo. Nothing elaborate. Nothing scientific yet. Just a little thing sitting in the wrong order.That is one reason Agenda for Murder feels closer to the 1970s formula than some of the other comeback episodes. The plot does make use of forensic ideas, especially bite-mark evidence, but the first crack in the case is still Columbo noticing something off while everybody else is ready to accept the obvious story.
Columbo and Kramer, together again
One of the quiet pleasures here is the return of Bruce Kirby as Sergeant Kramer. Kramer gives the episode an extra thread back to classic Columbo, and Kirby always had a nice way of playing the slightly more normal cop next to Falk’s shambling genius.
Kramer is not flashy, but that is the point. He belongs in the room. He can hand Columbo a report, push the plot forward, and still feel like a real police officer rather than just “the guy who explains the next clue.”
The cringy cheese
Columbo's fascination with the reggiano is weird and cringy. The idea of him eating evidence at a crime scene (and then telling the lab guys to pack it up for him) is just strange and kind of off-putting.
The courthouse laugh
This episode isn’t long on memorable scenes, so much of it is just dialog between Columbo and Finch in mostly uninteresting places. But one scene that stands out is Finch laughing at Columbo’s joke outside the courthouse.
McGoohan lets the moment hang for an absurd length of time. Finch stares. He processes. Then the laugh explodes out of him, and it keeps going just long enough to become strange. Close to 20 seconds by my estimation. It’s maybe a little too much.
There are a lot of Columbo suspects who try to charm the Lieutenant. Finch is one of the few who seems to enjoy him in spite of himself. He knows Columbo is trouble, but he also finds him entertaining. That makes their scenes livelier than the usual cat-and-mouse routine.
“Unsubstantiated, circumstantial poppycock”
Oscar Finch has one of the great revived-era suspect vocabularies. He does not merely deny things. He dismisses them. He classifies them. He swats them away like a legal brief written by an idiot.The best line, obviously, is “unsubstantiated, circumstantial poppycock.” It is the kind of phrase that only McGoohan could make sound both ridiculous and intimidating. Most actors would either underline the joke or flatten the legal arrogance. McGoohan makes it a full personality.
Columbo gets tougher
One of the nice surprises in Agenda for Murder is how hard-edged Columbo becomes when he deals with Mackey. At first he does the usual routine: polite, impressed, rumpled, asking for a favor. Later, the mask drops. He warns Mackey not to lie for Finch, and for a moment there is no “just one more thing” softness at all.
A little Candidate for Crime energy
There is a faint echo of Candidate for Crime here: politics, image-making, campaign events, and a murderer who thinks public success will shield private guilt. Nelson Hayward wanted elected office. Oscar Finch wants to ride a national ticket into power through Mackey and Montgomery. In both episodes, Columbo is the sand in the gears of a political machine.The difference is that Hayward was a candidate performing sincerity for voters, while Finch is a lawyer performing superiority for everyone. Hayward smiles for cameras. Finch smiles because he has already decided he is the smartest person in the room.
Neutral
And just like Candidate for Crime, the show carefully avoids mentioning any political parties. It's not clear which party any of these candidates belongs to, which is smart considering you don't want to alienate half your audience.
The dry cleaning detour
The dry cleaning angle turns out to be sort of a dead end. Columbo rightfully chases it down, but in a last-second twist the evidence gets destroyed. Still, it brings us a couple of nice moments.
"My wife is convinced I'm smarter than I look"
The first is Columbo's brief exchange with the delivery driver, played by Michael Goldfinger.
It's kind of a charming scene and Goldfinger plays it fine.
"Anything I can do for the police would be my personal pleasure"
The second is the nice scene with Mr. Rainier, the dry cleaner. Even though the scene ends with defeat snatched from the jaws of victory, I thought it was nicely played.
The gotcha: one bite of cheese
The decisive evidence is the bite mark on the cheese Finch handled at Staplin’s house. As Columbo gotchas go, it is neat, memorable, and very 1990. The idea that a bite could place Finch at the scene gives the finale a clean theatrical snap: the murderer’s own habit betrays him.
Seen today, bite-mark evidence carries more baggage than it did then. Modern viewers may be more skeptical of it than a 1990 audience would have been. But as television storytelling, the clue still works because the episode plays fair. Finch’s nibbling is built into the performance from the beginning, and the cheese is not some random object Columbo pulls out of nowhere at the end.
Finch should have just finished that bite of cheese.
A better ending than Finch deserves
Finch’s downfall at the victory party is satisfying because it happens in the middle of the world he wants to conquer. He is surrounded by donors, campaign staff, reporters, and political celebration. Then Columbo arrives with the one piece of paper that matters more than any campaign talking point: an arrest warrant.There is something very Columbo about puncturing a room full of status with a small man in a raincoat. The powerful people keep talking, shaking hands, and managing appearances. Columbo keeps walking toward the truth.
There's a nice moment in the final scene where Finch pours himself some coffee and Columbo just quietly gets him a napkin. Nobody says anything about it, though McGoohan momentarily holds the napkin up as if to acknowledge the gesture.
But why double-clutch it?
One thing that struck me as odd in the Gotcha was that Columbo takes Finch into the side room to lay out why he thinks he did it. Then they leave...and moments later Columbo waves a warrant in front of Finch and they go into another side room for the final reveal.
Why the two scenes? Felt disjointed and unnecessary.
And a soon-to-be familiar plot hole
Oscar places the newspaper clipping under Frank's dead hand and presses his fingers down on it for prints. But only on the front side. In Murder Can Be Hazardous to Your Health there's a very similar set-up and Columbo rightly points out that the victim couldn't have grabbed the paper only by one side. His fingerprints should have been on the back too.
Just a couple more things...
• Oscar Finch’s house is one of the more accessible Columbo locations. David Koenig identifies it as 272 Conway Ave. in Los Angeles and rates it highly as a sightseer’s dream: no obstructions, plenty of parking, a sidewalk out front, and a look that still matches the episode.• Patrick McGoohan won the 1990 Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series for playing Oscar Finch. Peter Falk also won the 1990 Emmy for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama Series with Agenda for Murder as his submitted episode.
• Anne Haney is a welcome presence as Louise, Finch’s secretary. She does not dominate the episode, but she gives Finch’s professional world a little texture.
And she played the role of a legal assistant perfectly. I've met hundreds in my career and so many of them were exactly like Miss Louise.
• For a rich guy with a fancy car his BMW's paint job is a little dodgy. There are huge faded spots on top of the vehicle. Seems like a guy like Finch would have had it repainted, or bought a new car.
Final thoughts
Agenda for Murder is not quite top-tier 1970s Columbo, but it is one of the first revival episodes that can stand proudly next to them. The plot is sturdy, the political setting is useful without taking over, and Falk seems energized by having McGoohan back across the table from him.This is one of those episodes where the revived series benefits from behaving like Columbo again: a strong guest killer, a tidy murder plan, a clue hiding in character behavior, and a finale that does not need a dream sequence or circus ringmaster.
Most of all, Oscar Finch is a terrific murderer. He is smart enough to be dangerous, vain enough to make mistakes, and entertaining enough that you almost hate to see him go. Almost.
Most of all, Oscar Finch is a terrific murderer. He is smart enough to be dangerous, vain enough to make mistakes, and entertaining enough that you almost hate to see him go. Almost.
For a comeback-era episode, that is more than enough. Columbo gets his man. McGoohan gets the cheese. And we get one of the most enjoyable battles of wits from the later run.
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