Substitute Pieces

For anyone who plays chess, "The Most Dangerous Match", the 1973 episode of Columbo, holds plenty of points of interest. The writers clearly had more than casual knowledge of chess and the competitive chess world, drawing together a plot about rival grandmasters that feels credible, as far as their personalities, and satisfying, in terms of the murder motive.

Laurence Harvey, father of the bounty hunter Domino, plays grandmaster Emmett Clayton who happens to have a personal connexion to his opponent, Tomlin Dudek (Jack Kruschen), having once been in a relationship with Dudek's assistant (Heidi Bruhl).

She takes delight in the idea of Dudek beating Clayton in the only thing he cares about. The two grandmasters end up having dinner together along with an impromptu game using food and cutlery. When Clayton loses, the buildup makes it very clear just how badly it cuts his pride and sense of identity. His desire to not only murder Dudek but to make the death as humiliating as possible for him makes perfect sense to any serious player who's had a losing streak.

But in that kind of chess, no grandmaster can compare with Columbo (Peter Falk). Falk's great, of course, putting the screws into Harvey and Harvey, who died that same year, is pretty good, never playing it as an over the top maniac, just as a terribly sensitive man.

Columbo is available on Amazon Prime with commercials.

A Game for Young and Old and Very Old

After being sidelined for a couple episodes, Edward takes a central role in the fourteenth episode of Cowboy Bebop. It's the first of several episodes where some specific element from the distant past exerts strange and surprising influence on the present; in this case, chess.

Session Fourteen: Bohemian Rhapsody

Obviously the title for this episode comes from the famous song by Queen. Certainly the lyrics would apply to several characters, particularly Edward (Aoi Tada), who does seem content to go "any way the wind blows." On the other hand, the song is filled with anxiety and sorrow, two emotional states seemingly alien to Edward, though this episode is one of the few where we see her become genuinely upset. Only misfortune in a chess game seems to hit Edward where it hurts.

Spike (Koichi Yamadera), Jet (Unsho Ishizuka), and Faye (Megumi Hayashibara) have reluctantly decided to pool their resources and split the bounty (after Faye had initially suggested they all work alone) on the elusive mastermind behind the bombings of the hyperspace gates ships depend on to get around the solar system. All the legwork for the crimes has been carried out by petty criminals who don't know who hired them or for what ultimate purpose. The only clues the three bounty hunters have are white chess kings that somehow ended up in the possession of the crooks.

Edward immediately recognises these as data storage devices designed for an online chess game and she immediately starts playing a game with Chessmaster Hex (Takeshi Watabe). We'll eventually learn the lonely and senile old man lives alone in a floating junk yard with a variety of transients--along with a parrot and a whole lot of marijuana.

In some ways, this is a lot like Edward's first episode where she bonded with an old, lonely computer on a satellite. The two main differences here are that the elder entity is a human being and he and Edward bond over a shared passion, chess. And chess presents a significant difference from "Jamming with Edward" in that it is the real and familiar game that's been around for centuries; it's an actual game that has endured and seems likely to continue to endure. It's not Three Dimensional Chess or some other futuristic variation, and Edward and Hex are clearly playing using the real rules, not random made up rules like in Code Geass.

You can see here when Edward first says she's about to checkmate Hex that by taking his pawn on g7 she really will be giving check though not technically mate since Hex can take Edward's knight with his queen on g5. But instead of this move, Edward says she'll let him live and "carelessly" takes his rook on D6 (the English subtitles on my copy take the liberty of translating Edward as saying she'll "fork the king and rook" which is not what she's doing) which is actually the better move.

Edward, who as I said before is like an anthropomorphisation of the future depicted in Cowboy Bebop, where the past has been replaced by chaotic new configurations, is revealed on some level to be similar to the very old man whose senility has made him like a child but at the same time has made him even older. Now all he cares about is this ancient game, he's forgotten all about the hyperspace gate and even the crimes he set in motion fifty years ago.

The episode also has some nice moments of the other characters doing detective work. I particularly liked Jet planting a bug in the offices of the corporation who controls the hyperspace gates.

...

This entry is part of a series of entries I’m writing on Cowboy Bebop for its 20th anniversary. I’m reviewing each episode individually. My previous episode reviews can be found here:

Session One
Session Two
Session Three
Session Four
Session Five
Session Six
Session Seven
Session Eight
Session Nine
Session Ten
Session Eleven
Sessions Twelve and Thirteen

All the Suns

The Sun Makers was one of my least favourite Fourth Doctor serials the first time I watched through the series and I still don't like it very much. The best parts are improvisations between Tom Baker and Louise Jameson--the Fourth Doctor being my favourite Doctor and Leela being one of my favourite companions. But the main story, which Robert Holmes wrote apparently inspired by his recent troubles with tax authorities, has the trappings of a political satire but never connects because the premise doesn't make any sense. With some especially badly coordinated action sequences, the episode spends most of its time treading water in a capture and rescue routine.

The TARDIS materialises on Pluto where, in the future, suns have been manufactured to give the planet constant, global sunlight. Workers are enslaved by an all powerful Company and forced to pay enormous taxes. We meet poor workers who are breathing air polluted with drugs designed to give them anxiety and a cartoonish elite led by a Gatherer (Richard Leech) and Collector (Henry Woolf).

But a satire about taxation really only works if the people being taxed have some economic autonomy. What is the Collector taxing, exactly? Currency? What use is the currency the Collector and his Company presumably produce when they literally control everything--world, resources, and even the suns? All of the workers seem to be devoted to mining and industrial operations. They certainly don't seem to be selling anything to any competitors. Maybe some people are subsistence mining?

But the Doctor and Leela are so charming together. There's a moment early on where Baker obviously seems to improvise a line that causes Jameson to break. Leela speculates, "Perhaps everyone runs from the taxman," after which there's a pause and their new worker friend nods. Baker needlessly says, "He says you're right," and Jameson's face instantly turns into what seems like suppressed laughter. It's not especially funny but the feeling of authenticity to the moment is a charming diversion.

This is the second serial to feature K9 (John Leeson), following The Invisible Enemy, a serial I like even less. The Sun Makers is book-ended by a chess game between the Doctor and K9.

Here's the board at the start and it's the Doctor's move. Looks like he has both a bishop and a queen vulnerable to K9's queen. A sensible move would probably be to move his queen to a point where the queen and bishop protect each other--I'd probably move queen to queen's two. Instead, though, the Doctor takes the pawn on queen's knight four, inexplicably deciding to leave his bishop, queen, and now a pawn open to attack. K9 ignores all this so maybe there's a trap I don't see and gives check by moving his "bishop to queen six." Fortunately for the armless K9, Leela seems to learned chess notation.

I assume it was Baker's improvisation to move his king all the way across the board after this--when K9 says, "Wrong square" it's an understatement. K9 claims to see mate in six moves but that depends on how the Doctor moves. He doesn't have many options. But by going king to king's three he can at least protect his queen and then take K9's queen if K9 decides to do a discovered check by moving his bishop. But if K9 decides to take the Doctor's bishop the Doctor can't get compensation. It's hard for me to believe he didn't see all this trouble coming from his pawn move, though. I think he was letting K9 win.