Uncle Marin, The Billionaire (1979)

Mike spends the cold open dodging one simple question: why, exactly, are he and Chris watching a 1979 Romanian comedy called Nea Mărin miliardar? He won't say. The answer arrives thirty minutes and seventeen seconds in, when a stranger billed as Detective Columbo shuffles into frame and asks for one more thing.

Director Sergiu Nicolaescu's mistaken-identity farce casts Amza Pellea in a double role as a bumpkin uncle and the American billionaire he's confused with, with Puiu Călinescu doing his best Peter Falk impression as the country's most inexplicable cameo cop. Two sets of gangsters, a kidnapped heiress, a doubled briefcase, and a laundry chute all get involved. Mike and Chris trace the Columbo Connected Universe to Ceaușescu's Romania, debate whether Falk owns the character even secondhand, and confirm that Columbo was universal.

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