He said it himself: “ I am your cool slutty daddy,” Pascal announced last month at the red carpet premiere for The Last Of Us. Those words, in that combination, coming from Pascal’s pillowy lips, set his fans ablaze. The killer’s emotional descent from mild irritation and complete self-satisfaction through to panic and despair is wonderfully portrayed by Hamilton, and it’s a scene that just leaves the viewer wanting to jump to their feet and roar their approval. It’s one of the top 5 Columbo gotchas, ergo one of the greatest TV scenes ever recorded! My take on A Deadly State of Mind Pedro Pascal has played so many iconic roles, but his best part of all is being the internet’s daddy. No, he doesn’t have kids, nor do his rabid fans look to him as a father figure. As Pascal himself put it, “ Daddy is a state of mind.” And it’s a state of mind pretty much everyone finds themselves in whenever they see Pascal. The actor’s daddy status is nothing new; to see how a random actor ascended to undisputed daddydom, here are Pedro Pascal’s daddiest moments that continue to send the internet into a frenzy.

If you spent any time on the internet in the past two months, you likely encountered Pedro Pascal fancams or thirst edits — ranging from tweets calling The Last of Us star “daddy,” to TikToks using an audio clip from Shaggy’s “Hey Sexy Lady” to punctuate thirsty fan edits. Or maybe you saw the 47-year-old Chilean American actor appear in an ad for the oddball game Merge Mansion and wondered how he got there. At a signal from Columbo, Mr Morris, the eyewitness, is summoned from the hallway beyond. Morris, wearing sunglasses indoors, treads carefully down some steps, sits on the coach and offers Columbo some matches to light a cigar. Columbo asks him if he’s ever seen anyone in the room before, and Morris answers in the affirmative. He saw a driver screech out of the Donner driveway at 5.30pm on the day of the killing – and the man behind the wheel was Dr Collier. Columbo doesn’t have to wait long for that elusive proof, however. Sergeant Kramer is in touch to inform him that there’s a witness who can attest that a car left the Donner place in a hurry at 5.30pm. The witness can’t ID the car and driver, though, because he’s BLIND, but the wily Lieutenant finds a way to make it count nonetheless.

Our end-of-week Group Chat gets into all this and more, with the help of New York Magazine writer Kathryn VanArendonk, CBC Unreserved's pop culture correspondent Richard Van Camp, and musician/producer Matt Hart. He evidently suffers from another Columbo killer foible – pride in his own reputation. Collier has a book he wants to publish, but it’s not going well. He cares about how he is perceived in the field of psychiatric research and this ruthlessly ambitious streak is what ultimately leads him to making the bad decisions that will bring about his downfall. We’ve seen it before (Barry Mayfield) and we’ll see it again (Kay Freestone). Won’t these arrogant killers ever learn?

A dozen or more officers have tramped through the place, so for Columbo to first see the nub and then deduce it must be pivotal to the case is a bit of a stretch. As was the case in Troubled Waters this clue’s a bit too convenient for my liking, but at least the script doesn’t make the mistake of making more of this find than is necessary and having it as the single most damning piece of evidence that puts Columbo on to his man. The TikTok has since been referred to as the primary Pascal fancam edit — with one commenter saying outright, “I love how the entire fandom has just collectively agreed that this is the official Pedro Pascal edit.” The song “Hey Sexy Lady” by Shaggy, combined with those particular lines of dialogue from Kingsman: The Golden Circle, has become the audio file used for numerous other thirst edits of Pascal. More than 24,000 TikToks use that particular audio. Kathryn: Look, Matthew Rhys? One of our world's foremost eaters. But I love that show, and I keep needing to watch new screeners, and instead I'm like, "maybe I'll watch Perry Mason again?" Dr. Collier didn’t really have a choice to use Nadia in his cover-up, uh, she was there! The only alternative, and he wasn’t thinking fast enough for it to occur to him, would be to hustle her out of there and have her claim Carl went to the beach house alone, dealt with the intruders alone, was killed alone… Elamin: Richard, you're not up on Party Down, but reboots are a dime a dozen these days. There's a new Night Court, for God's sake. You're a storyteller by trade. As someone who's trying to engage audiences with a bunch of new ideas, how do you feel about all these reboots taking up the space?

Crosson described Pascal's character Joel as a "zaddy", and when Pascal inquired why, the host explained that it meant "older daddy". The term "older" had seemingly perturbed the actor and Ramsey, noticing his uneasiness, attempted to steer Crosson to redemption by suggesting she say "sexy and older" instead. Kathryn: Look, the existence of Party Down suggests that it is possible to do this well. But the existence of Party Down also suggests that it almost never happens, and that when it does happen, it feels like a special gift that you are surprised by. This is the exception that proves the rule. The other thing is, I talk to a lot of people who make television. I talk to a lot of people who are trying to develop shows. There is no dearth of new ideas. There is a dearth of money for new ideas, and we are in a moment where as Hollywood has been contracting, particularly over the last year, we are coming down from the peak of peak TV and there is a lot less willingness to risk money on new IP. What I'm seeing over and over are conservative plays, and the conservative safe choice is like, "well, everyone already knows what Night Court is so we're doing it again."