- A behavioral psychologist whose wife died under suspicious circumstances trains his dogs to kill on command using a telephone.
- The episode opens with a scene in the kitchen of a Spanish-style mansion, where two Doberman Pinschers enter to the sound of a ringing telephone, and then attack a sparring dummy on hearing the command word "Rosebud" from a small loudspeaker in the dummy.
Recently widowed Dr Eric Mason (Nicol Williamson) teaches a seminar about life control to an auditorium full of people of all ages. He is a kind of life coach, and shows people how not to be afraid of words like "death" and "pain". When he finishes his lesson, he talks with his colleague and friend, Dr Charles Hunter (Joel Fabiani). Mason is ready for a break from the work grind. Seeing Mason looking at a picture of his late wife, Hunter asks if he misses her, and Mason says flatly that she's dead, but that it hadn't been that good a marriage anyway; she'd been seeing somebody else. Hunter makes a face that indicates that he was the lover, but Mason isn't supposed to know that. Mason and Hunter agree to play tennis at Mason's later that day. Mason tells Hunter to let himself in and make himself at home.
Dr Hunter arrives at Mason's mansion, the same mansion we saw in the opening scene. Mason is running late, because he is at the doctor's having an annual checkup. After the stress-test portion of Mason's cardiogram, the doctor (Frank Aletter) leaves the room for five minutes during the resting trace part of the test. During that interval, Mason phones home. His Doberman Pinschers, Laurel and Hardy, trained to respond to the ringing phone, enter the house through the doggy door and wait, staring at the phone. Hunter looks at the dogs and decides to answer the phone. Mason tells him that he's going to be a bit late for the tennis match, and then asks him to settle a bet about the name of the sled in the movie Citizen Kane. Hunter says "Rosebud", twice, unaware that it is the dogs' attack command. The dogs attack him and maul him to death.
It is Joanne Nicholls (Kim Cattrall), a young ex-student staying at Mason's guesthouse, who discovers the body after swimming. The scene is bloody and disgusting, but not actually shown. The dogs are taken to quarantine kennels, probably to be euthanized soon. Columbo finds the dogs to be affectionate and playful, and thinks that the dogs wouldn't have attacked unless somebody had somehow given them an order.
When Mason suggests that Hunter must have provoked the dogs, Columbo disagrees and explains why. When the police arrived on the scene, they discovered a phone near the body that was off the hook, with a fast busy signal sounding through the phone's earpiece. This indicates to Columbo that Hunter had been on the phone during an incoming call when the dogs attacked him. If the phone had just been knocked off the hook during the attack or if Hunter had made the call himself, the sound through the earpiece would have been a steady dial tone instead of a busy signal.
Columbo asks Joanne whether she heard a phone ringing, but she says she didn't as she was swimming in the pool.
After Columbo leaves, Mason goes to see Joanne. When she hugs him, seeking comfort after her terrible experience finding Hunter's body, he shuts her down, though not unkindly. He encourages her to get out of this place and go home, and when she says she doesn't want to go, he tells her that actually, she's wanted to go ever since she realized that the two of them weren't going to be lovers. Though hurt and angry, she doesn't dispute what he says.
Columbo talks with dog trainer Miss Cochran (Tricia O'Neill) about how to train dogs. She tells him that dogs can be trained to do different things when they hear different words, and that any word can be the one that gets a particular reaction from the dogs; for example "kiss" to start an aggressive reaction and "kill" to get an affectionate reaction.
Columbo and an animal control officer (Ed Begley Jr.) try to figure out the dogs' attack word, but nothing works. However, whenever the phone rings, the dogs come to attention, as if waiting for an order.
Mason insists on talking to his dogs. He quietly tells them he is not sorry that they are going to be put to sleep. He's about to give the dogs some chocolates, but Columbo forbids it. Mason offers some chocolate to Columbo, then eats some himself, demonstrating that it's not poisoned.
Columbo asks Mason about some straw that had been found on the floor where the attack occurred. Mason responds that it must have been from a case of wine he ordered the previous week.
Later, Columbo proposes a theory to Mason that would explain the deaths of both Mason's wife and Hunter. Mason's wife was killed when her car went off a cliff, and the investigators have never figured out the cause of the accident. Perhaps the dog attack that killed Hunter was really meant for Mason. Was there someone who hated the Masons enough to want to see them dead? Mason calls the idea incredible nonsense, and asks if Columbo really believes it. Columbo half smiles and says that he can't say that he does, but they have to consider every angle. Mason says that Columbo does that very well: he passes himself off as a puppy in a raincoat, happily running around the yard digging holes all over the garden, only he's laying a minefield and wagging his tail. Mason says they should discuss Columbo's personality some time. Columbo gives him a level stare and says he would enjoy that.
Mason lets himself into Hunter's apartment and rifles through his desk, finding a collection of snapshots of Hunter and Mason's wife together, clearly romantically involved. He pockets the photos just before Columbo enters from a back bedroom. Mason explains his presence by saying he was looking for some reports that Hunter had been working on. Columbo wonders why one of Hunter's suits is missing its jacket, then asks if there had been any special women in Hunter's life just before he was killed. Mason says that there had been no one special. Columbo notes that Hunter had been quite a ladies' man according to the staff.
Mason visits Joanne in the guesthouse and sees that she's packing to leave. She says that she could have made him happy, and when Mason demurs, mentioning his late wife, Joanne tells him that his late wife and Hunter had been lovers. Unaware until now that Joanne knew about his wife's affair, he tells her that she must never talk of this, ever, that no one can ever know. He moves his hands from her cheek to around her neck, as if to strangle her... until Columbo enters the guesthouse right at that moment, looking for Mason. He's ready for the promised personality assessment.
Sitting across from each other in comfortable armchairs, sipping excellent wine as a fire blazes in the fireplace in the background, Mason proposes a word-association game. He gives Columbo a sequence of words and Columbo replies with the first thing he thinks of for each word. Then they reverse roles and it's Columbo who throws words at Mason. They discuss Columbo's theory that the dogs' attack on Hunter was triggered by a special code word. Unknown to Mason, Columbo records the session using a concealed tape recorder that automatically starts recording when it detects the sound of a voice. Mason then walks Columbo to his car, pausing at the outside gate, over which is a replica of the metal archway with the letter "K" that capped the gateway to Charles Foster Kane's mansion in Citizen Kane. Columbo admires the gate and they discuss the movie's first few minutes, Mason noting Kane's last word, "Rosebud".
Later, at the kennels, Columbo plays the recording to the dogs. They don't react at all to Mason's voice. The phone rings, and the dogs jump to attention, as usual. It's the judge who had signed an order to destroy the dogs, returning Columbo's call. As Columbo explains why he wants to keep the dogs alive, the animal control officer bursts in. The recording had continued to play while Columbo took the phone call, and now the dogs are extremely agitated and aggressive, the first time Columbo has seen them in this state.
Next, we see several shots of Columbo at the dog trainer's again, talking with Miss Cochran and even sleeping in his car there.
Then one night, Mason enters his home as the phone rings. He stops abruptly in the kitchen; a dummy is hanging in the same spot where the dogs had attacked the dummy in the show's opening scene. The two Dobermans enter the house through the doggy door as the phone continues to ring. As Mason stares at the dummy, Columbo comes in and lays out his real theory of what happened: the dogs had been trained to enter the house when the phone rang, and trained to attack the hanging dummy (which was filled with the same kind of straw that had been found in the kitchen earlier) when they heard the attack word. The attack word was given to them from a loudspeaker in the dummy. The dummy had been dressed in Hunter's jacket, to help them get the scent and to reinforce the kill command. Then Columbo shows Mason a snapshot of his late wife and Hunter, their arms around each other. He observes that Mason had retrieved the other photos the day they met at Hunter's apartment, but Columbo had taken that snapshot from the desk before Mason arrived. And he asserts that Mason was the one who called Hunter, from his doctor's office. He shows Mason his cardiogram, drawing his attention to the section corresponding to when he was resting after the stress test. Most of the section shows a calm, easy heartbeat, but there's one part that shows lots of sudden stress and excitement, right when the dogs attacked.
Mason tells Columbo that he should get the whole picture, everything to make his case complete, then calls the dogs over. He points at Columbo and says "Rosebud!" and the dogs jump on Columbo, bowling him over. But instead of attacking, they lick his face. He gets up as the dogs retreat, and the astonished Mason says "You knew the command!" Columbo replies, "The point is, sir, *you* knew the command." He goes on to explain about the tape recorder, how they discovered the attack word from the recording, and how the dog trainer had deprogrammed the dogs, training them to respond to the code word with displays of affection instead of attacking.
Critique by tallardyce: The traditional Columbo 'sparring' accentuates this episode that sees a new take on the means through which the murder occurs. The highly implausible aspect of discovering that the dogs could actually be programmed as weapons seemed a bit far fetched even for the dog loving Columbo. The heinous nature of the crime leads Lieutenant Columbo to believe that only a person of extreme intelligence could conceive such an insidious attack. Dr. Mason and Columbo are on an immediate collision course-as Columbo leaves little breathing room between him and the suspect throughout the entire show. The intellectual sparring is sometime too formal and contrived; but overall, it does make for some unique drama.
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