SPLAININ TO DO - TOOBWORLD NEEDS A NEW PAIR OF SHOES

‘COLUMBO’
“THE MOST DEADLY MATCH”

‘Columbo’ is one of the greatest TV shows ever made; it ranks at #5 on my list of personal favorites.  But it is not perfect.  Every episode has errors in it, but it does feel as though “The Most Deadly Match” has more than its fair share; a cameraman or some other techie seen in a mirror; people sitting in an empty hotel room (which I covered in the past); and Emmett Clayton's footwear. 

With this post, we’re taking a look at one of them and hopefully providing a Toobworthy splainin for it.  But we’ll have to go to another TV series for that answer. 

This is Helen Cutter.  She was the wife of Professor Nick Cutter and they were studying the phenomena of the anomalies which opened gateways into the ‘Primeval’ past.  (Hence, the series name.)  But she was lost in the past and presumed dead.  When she was found, Helen Cutter was radicalized by the experience and wanted to use terrorist actions to change the course of the Present before Mankind faced extinction like the creatures from the distant Past.  Eventually she decided Mankind didn’t deserve to be saved once she saw what was going to happen in the Future no matter what she did.

To achieve that end, Helen Cutter went back into one of the primeval periods of Time and whatever she did back then, it changed the timeline radically.  Two of the differences were that the funding for the Anomaly Research Center was accelerated by at least a decade’s worth.  And Claudia Brown was now Jenny Lewis with no memory of working with ARC. 

But not all of the changes were that radical, however, and here we have an example.  Lt. Frank Columbo had already zeroed in on Chess Master Emmett Clayton as his prime suspect in the murder of Clayton’s chess rival from behind the Iron Curtain.  (Based on the language spoken, we know it wasn’t Russian; probably the invented language that was native to some fictional Soviet country.)  As was the case with other suspects in the past, Clayton finally had enough of Columbo’s incessant questions and stormed off.

As we can see in that first picture, Clayton is waiting to take the elevator upstairs and he is wearing tan shoes.  But when he gets off the elevator, he is now wearing black shoes.

So we’re using ‘Primeval’ as the splainin; this is why I consider the sci-fi series to be one of the Toobworld essentials.

Up until Clayton was about to enter the elevator, the action was taking place in the original timeline of Toobworld.  But the perspective of the Trueniverse audience was yanked away before the elevator finished its trip to now view Toobworld in its altered timeline.

But why did the new timeline cause Clayton to choose a different pair of shoes that day than what he wore in the original timeline?

It could be that on his trip to California, Clayton only brought along one pair of shoes, the pair he was wearing.  So then the temporal alteration had to have happened when he was packing for the trip.  Or maybe the deviation occurred when he bought the shoes, after which he looked upon them as his favorite pair, perhaps the lucky ones he needed to wear when playing chess.  (They certainly weren’t lucky for him in committing murder, however.)

Let’s take the pivotal point in Time back to that purchase. 

As for which shoe store, I don’t think there is any purveyor of footwear more famous in Toobworld than “Gary's Shoes & Accessories for Today's Woman” in Chicago as seen in ‘Married… With Children’.  So O’Bviously that won’t be possible as a candidate.

‘THE DICK VAN DYKE SHOW’
“YOUNG MAN WITH A SHOEHORN”

My second favorite TV character of all time, Maurice “Buddy” Sorrell, had an uncle named Lou Sorrell who had a bargain shoe store near the subway.  Perhaps Emmett Clayton, back when he was first trying to make a name for himself in the world of chess, bought a pair of shoes in Lou’s store the same day he had his first chess match which could garner him a national standing.  And whatever pair he bought that day he would then consider his “lucky” pair of shoes once he won that night.

In the original timeline, Clayton bought his shoes from Lou’s best salesman, Sid Feldman.  Sid convinced Emmett Clayton to buy the tan shoes.  (Sid was rude and brusque to the customers and he probably just wanted to get the purchase over with as soon as possible.  And since they were probably overstocked in the tan shoes, that’s why Sid pushed them.) 

But in the new timeline, by the time he reached the shoe store, Sid had “quit” and Rob Petrie and Buddy Sorrell were stuck trying to run the store since Uncle Lou was out to lunch.  Although we didn’t see him in the store, he may have been one of the customers during the jump cut after the man who came in for brown Oxfords, but before those three women were served to varying degrees of success.  (One of them was the mother of Agent 99 from ‘Get Smart’, played by Jane Dulo.)

With Rob and Buddy helping him, Clayton had a bit more time in choosing his shoes and so he went with the black shoes.  (Getting the chance to play chess on a level that would give him a lot of publicity, he probably figured he couldn’t go wrong with black dress shoes.)

I think the alteration of the timeline comes in with the reason why he was late.  That shoe store was near the subway; perhaps Clayton had taken the subway to reach the place.  In the original timeline, there were no problems in the subway ride.  But in the altered timeline, some unknown TV character maybe fell, jumped, or was pushed in front of a train, delaying the train that Emmett was riding.

And if that’s what happened, in the original timeline the shoes he bought from Sid were what he was wearing during the chess match that night, and so he considered them as his lucky shoes and wore them everywhere.  But in the new timeline, the shoes he bought from Rob and Buddy became the lucky shoes.

BCnU!