Castle--The Comparison Game

The show starts off with a jogger going through a bunch of fog on a dark night. My thought was, why is he jogging late at night in the fog? He sees someone bent over a body and instead of running in the opposite direction to call the police, he jogs over to confront them.  Um, yeah, not the smartest guy on the block.  The gunman raises her gun to his face and we cut to the loft.

Beckett is in bed reading about a fellow academy student who is being made a captain.  She's feeling like she should probably be in a leadership position by now and Castle is trying to reassure her as they get the call about the murder.  As they walk to the murder scene Kate is thinking that maybe she should have stayed in DC with the AG's office, but Castle reminds her she didn't want to play their games.  The boys walk up and give her the rundown on the murdered man.  His name is Henry Graham and the killer took his keys and cell phone, but left his wallet.  And they have a witness. The jogger is still alive! He IDs the killer as an Asian woman.

Caskett go to interview Henry's boss and find out that Henry was a repo driver and was constantly threatened.  His boss also mentions that Henry was acting weird and came back from lunch the day before really upset, but no one knows where he went for lunch.

Meanwhile, Ryan and Espo go to Henry's apartment, and show the manager the sketch of the Asian woman.  She says the woman was there ten minutes ago, so the boy run up to Henry's apartment. The door is ajar so they creep in, guns drawn.  As Ryan comes around a corner, he is relieved of his gun and the Asian woman tells him to drop it. Before he can, Espo is there with his gun, but the woman quickly takes that away from him, too. Super fast and really awesome.  So she's got a gun on both men.  Espo tells her she's making a mistake, they're cops and she points to her badge and says I am, too.

They take her back to the station for questioning (and Castle keeps bringing up how she got both their guns, haha) and find out that her name is Jong, and she's the head of a Chinese/American task force based out of San Francisco. She's got a lot of commendations and is the youngest woman to be made a Chief Inspector.  She tells them that Henry was her friend and that he'd called her to meet, but then changed his mind. She was worried so she flew out and found him dead. She was investigating his murder.  She found a restaurant receipt in his pocket, so, after deciding to work together, Caskett and Jong head to the Chinese restaurant, where Jong immediately takes over the interview.  Kate is showing Castle Jong's family picture--she's married to an action movie hero, has two cute kids. Castle can see where she's going with this and comparing herself to Jong, so he says he's seen cuter, haha. Jong, however, is across the room, finding out from the waitress that Henry had an argument with an average white guy in his 40s.  They track him through the restaurant's free wifi.

The guy that fought with Henry is an FBI agent named Glassman and they bring him in but he lies and stonewalls.  (The FBI gets a bad rap in a lot of these eps, haha). Ryan mentions that they found formaldehyde on the bottom of Henry's shoes, but no one knows what that means.  Jong and Kate go to a shooting range for a girls' night, (which Castle doesn't think is a good idea, but the boys urge him to give Kate some space) but it ends up just being Kate comparing herself to Jong. (Just as Castle predicted.) Jong works at the Hague, Jong can shoot some amazingly accurate patterns.  When Kate is telling Castle about it, she just sounds so insecure, it shocked me a little bit. I mean, she's Kate Beckett! She's pretty amazing. And yet most women I know play the comparison game. It never ends well and Castle does try to point out to Kate that she's comparing herself to a Jong that doesn't really exist. I mean, they hardly know the woman. Which is something every woman should remember. Don't compare yourself to what you think another person is like because you don't know their struggles and no one is as perfect as they may seem. What's that saying? Don't compare your behind the scenes self with someone else's highlight reel. Words to live by.

Anyway, back to the case.  Jong finds some surveillance footage of Henry's apartment that show him being shoved in a black SUV. The SUV belongs to Billy Hicks, (wasn't that the name of a character from Elmo's Fire? Rob Lowe's character? But I digress) and Billy is a drug runner and Henry was his former enforcer.  Before they can confront him, though, Captain Gates informs them the FBI wants them to back off and not to mess up the case they're building against Hicks.  Jong is mad and disappears from the precinct to show up at the gym that Hicks runs.  She takes down six men on her own, and by the time Beckett gets there, she's holding a broken bottle to Hicks' throat.

Hicks admits that he was helping Henry by supplying him with half a kilo of cocaine and dropping him off at a parking garage.  The boys head over there and find the X5 car that Henry had asked for codes for at work.  Its owner, Jeffrey Waldow, (where's Waldo? haha) had been nabbed with half a kilo of cocaine in his car and was at Central Booking. Beckett goes to talk to him and he is so relieved that someone else believes that he was framed.  As the team looks into his life, they realize that he's won a lot of real estate bids recently and beat out the owner of the Chinese restaurant that Henry went to before he died.

When they question the Chinese restaurant owner, it alllll comes out. Henry was in love with the waitress, but she owed a lot of money to the restaurant owner for bringing her over from China. Henry wanted to pay off his girlfriend's "debt" so he was going to plant the drugs on the restaurant owner's nemesis for her because once Waldow was out of the way, she could buy up all that real estate. The girlfriend was supposed to meet Henry in the park that night, but she got a message that he'd cancelled.  Poor Henry just wanted a life with love in it.

But then comes the twist. The restaurant owner didn't kill him! Henry's girlfriend, Sue Ying, had a best friend, Mae Woo, and Caskett call Mae Woo in for questioning.  She gave Sue Ying a false message and went to the park to kill Henry herself.  Sue Ying was all she had in the world and she wasn't going to let Henry take her away.  Sad.

Well, with the case closed Jong says goodbye to Kate.  She'd let it slip that she's separated from her husband, that she isn't the mother she should be, and is always busy. But she's trying to find balance. Kate takes this to heart and goes home with Castle to make a list of new goals, and new mountains to climb.  She also says she doesn't want to compromise her priorities or leave behind what matters most and Castle says, "you can't leave behind what is always at your side."  Awww. I love them.

Did you watch? What did you think?