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Butterfly in Shades of Grey
Russian title: Бабочка в серых тонах · Russian version
A publisher murders his stepdaughter's fiancé to keep her from leaving him, and William Shatner plays possessiveness rather than vanity. His second Columbo murder, seventeen years after the first.
Editor’s rating — 7 out of 10.
- Number
- 63 of 69
- Aired
- January 10, 1994
- Running time
- 88 min
- Director
- Dennis Dugan
- Writer
- Peter S. Fischer
The case
- The killer
- William Shatner as Fielding Chase
- The victim
- Jack Laufer as Gerry Winters
- Guest cast
- William Shatner, Molly Hagan, Jack Laufer, Richard Kline, Yorgo Constantine, Mark Lonow
Columbo is an inverted mystery: the murder opens the film and the killer is known from the first minutes. What you are watching for is how he proves it — see how the character works.
The murder
Fielding Chase is a syndicated radio host and publisher whose entire emotional life is organised around his stepdaughter Victoria. When she plans to leave for a job elsewhere, with a man he despises, he decides the man is the problem.
He shoots him at the office and stages a burglary, using the building's own security arrangements to control who is seen coming and going.
The motive is the interesting part. Chase is not protecting money or reputation; he is protecting a relationship that everyone around him can see is unhealthy, and the film is unusually direct about it.
Chase's radio show is built on moral certainty, and the film is careful to let us hear it: a man lecturing an audience about family values in the same voice he uses to control the young woman living in his house.
The murder itself is unremarkable. He shoots Gerry Winters in an office at night and disturbs enough of the room to suggest a robbery. What matters is not the plan but the reason — Victoria's fiancé is not a rival for money, he is a rival for possession.
How Columbo gets him
Shatner plays Chase as a man permanently on air — even in private he speaks in the cadences of broadcast — and Columbo lets him talk, which is always the correct move against a performer.
The security system gives the case its shape: doors, cards, logs. Chase has controlled the record of who entered the building, which means the record is the thing to examine rather than trust.
The lieutenant also works the stepdaughter, gently, and the film's best scenes are the ones where she starts to understand what her stepfather has done and why.
Columbo works the security arrangements first, because a building with electronic access has a memory. Cards, doors and logs are checked against a story that requires Chase to have been at home, and the machine disagrees with the man.
The other line is Victoria herself. The lieutenant handles her carefully — she has lost a fiancé and is being comforted by the person who killed him — and the film gives her the slow, awful realisation rather than a revelation scene.
Worth knowing
- Shatner's first Columbo murder was Fade in to Murder in 1976; this is one of only a handful of repeat killer performances.
- The episode is notable for how explicitly it treats the stepfather's possessiveness, which the script never softens into affection.
- Directed by Dennis Dugan, later a comedy director.
- Shatner recorded the radio monologues live on set rather than in post-production, which is why they sound like broadcast rather than dubbing.
- The episode was the last Columbo of the 1993–94 season and one of Shatner's two appearances as a murderer.
- Molly Hagan plays Victoria; the script gives her more agency in the final act than the premise suggests.
Verdict
Better than most of the mid-period ABC films, largely because the motive is genuinely uncomfortable rather than merely criminal.
Shatner is restrained here in a way he rarely is, and the film is stronger for it.
It sits with A Bird in the Hand and It's All in the Game as one of the later films genuinely interested in a domestic relationship rather than a professional grievance — and of those three it is the least sentimental about what it finds.
What the people who made it said
Shatner played a Columbo killer twice, eighteen years apart. Rewatching the second of them, he found he could not follow his own performance.
“I went back to review some of the footage and I have to tell you, I lost track of the dialogue so quickly because I became simply riveted by the terrible, pencil-thin prosthetic mustache they put me in. How the makeup folks — and I, for that matter — could have allowed that to happen, I will never know.”
Quotes are in the speaker’s own words — from a transcript of the recording, or from the printed source. Players open at the right minute. Everything is shortened; the full version is in the source.
Familiar faces
Actors who turn up in the series more than once — sometimes in very different parts.
- Molly Hagan as Victoria Chase 2 episodes also in Murder, Smoke and Shadows
- William Shatner as Fielding Chase 2 episodes also in Fade in to Murder
Cast data from TMDB, including uncredited bit parts. All the familiar faces →