Castle: Pitbull vs. Hammer

There were so many awesome things about this episode of Castle.  Aww moments, funny moments, and light-up shoes for a start.

The show begins with some guy running down an alley and a car chasing him. He gets cornered and even though he tells the guy who gets out of the driver's seat that they can work it out, they really can't. Dun, dun, dun.

Cut to the loft where Kate is testing Alexis on definitions for an exam.  Alexis rushes out and Kate tells Castle that Alexis has a really great brain and will be a good lawyer. He says he loses enough arguments to her and then asks if Kate regrets not getting her law degree. Kate says she likes taking the bad guys down instead of getting them through the system. Then the call comes in about the murder.

When they get down there Castle is trying to get some details on Ryan and Espo's number for a policeman's event that they've won for the last two years. The boys aren't budging, though, and Castle is reduced to saying that if he had been allowed to participate, he would have killed it.  Lainey is there and giving them details about the victim when Castle recognizes him as Richie "The Pitbull" Falco, an ambulance chaser type lawyer.  Caskett go down to his office where there are a lot of people in the waiting room and talk to the secretary.  She said he'd been acting weird the last few days, but he cared about his clients. Apparently he was in that particular area of town the night before because there's a hospital up there where he trolls for customers.

Back at the morgue Lainey tries to get details out of the boys about their number, but she also has no luck.  She finally just tells them that their victim had been in the country because he had some pollen on his pant leg.  He'd also been tasered before he died, as in tortured. Ew.

Captain Gates interrupts the team going over the clues in the bullpen and says that Kimmel had to drop out of the police event so they need a celebrity for a draw and asks Castle to do it. He says on one condition---he can compete for the trophy. She agrees and there is so much smack talk going on between Espo and Castle it is FUNNY.  Castle volunteers Kate to do a number with him and WIN against the boys, (it is so ON!) but she's not thrilled at all that he didn't ask her.  Not to mention they don't have a number and the boys have been practicing for months.

Ryan gets some footage of Pitbull being pushed into a car and the license plate is registered to a NFL has-been. They pull him in for questioning, but it's a dead end and the guy just affirms that Pitbull was acting weird. The smack talk is ramping up about the competition between the team and the betting begins. If the boys win they want Castle's next book dedication to say they're smarter and more handsome than him. If Caskett wins, the boys will call him King for a month. Haha At first Caskett doesn't want to bet, but Espo calls Kate a chicken and makes chicken noises so it is accepted.

The next person they interview is the victim's ex-wife that Pitbull called before he died. She has no new info, just that Pitbull had a Harvard law degree, self-destructed with drinking, and they divorced. She hadn't heard from him in years.  The team gets called back to Pitbull's office that has been trashed and his files stolen. Ryan is at the diner where the NFL guy dropped Pitbull off and says the waitress remembered Pitbull having an argument there with his nemesis, Archie Bronstein, the Savannah Hammer. The Hammer says yeah he got into it with Pitbull over client poaching, especially an easy win of a girl who had three bits of metal shoot into her chest when she was hit by a truck.

Back at the law office they find a hidden panel with chloroform, alarm schematics, night vision goggles, and glow sticks that were recently used.  The goggles have a name of a PI on it so they question him and he says Pitbull asked him a bunch of questions and borrowed his goggles, but he didn't know much else. Oh, except he did ask about the best way to hide a body.  Which leads Tori to ping Pitbull's last phone call to see where he was and it was a forest outside of the city. Caskett go there and find the flowers the pollen on Pitbull's pants came from. And there's fresh dirt. They start digging and talk about how they snuck in to observe the interrogation room where the boys were practicing their number. It was good. Kate is worried about being a disaster in front of everyone and not being taken seriously.  Then they find the body bag. They pull it out and someone pulls a gun on them from behind. They're tied up and the body stolen. Castle says he saw on Youtube how to get out of zip ties by slamming your wrists into your behind. It takes a few tries, (and is funny to watch!) but it works. Haha.

Martha helps Rick and Kate work on a number, but when Castle goes to raise the stakes with Espo, Kate confides in Martha that she has terrible stage fright but doesn't want to let Castle down. Aww. Before it goes too far, though, Kimmel is back on the schedule as the celebrity and they are let off the hook. Kate is relieved.

A wildlife camera catches the body thief on camera and it was the PI. They catch him with the body bag in the trunk of his car, but when they unzip it, it's just a crash dummy. I was not expecting that. The missing law office files are in the PIs apartment, too. Weird.  He's not talking, though, so they ask Lainey to look over the dummy. She sees the three holes in the chest area and Castle says where have we seen that before? The potential client in the ER that Pitbull was poaching. They go talk to her and she tells them about another lady that came to see her the day before. They start tying all the pieces together.  The victim was driving a Modesto sedan. Pitbull used to work on the Modesto car company account. He'd realized the airbags are defective and cause projectiles to enter the chest and the dummy proved that the company knew it, but covered it up. Pitbull was trying to make things right, but of course the car company would be out millions and wants to keep that secret.  The insurance lady that came to visit the victim was really the ex-wife, the current lawyer for the car company. But she didn't kill Pitbull because she wouldn't hire someone like that PI. But hey, the PI was talking to "the Hammer" outside the hospital.

And that's the final piece of the puzzle.  Caskett talks to the Hammer and he says that Pitbull didn't realize that dummy was worth millions to the car company to get it back, but all Pitbull wanted was justice. They have blood evidence from the guy's car and handcuff him.

Back at the precinct, the boys have got themselves another trophy (with light up shoes and weird hats!) and Castle says their number would totally have won, so Espo challenges him to dance-off right there.  Castle declines and takes the good-natured ribbing. Kate realizes that Castle heard her confession and since he's friends with Kimmel got him to come through for the police event.  The final scene is them singing (in shadow) in the shower. Cute!

I thought it was a fun episode with a twisty case. Did you watch? What did you think?