Castle Returns! Yay! Sort of

Well, we finally got a new episode of Castle! Only Kate wasn't in it at all. And Slaughter was back. (You might remember him from a previous episode where he was a rogue cop and nearly got Castle killed a few times.)

We start off with Martha coming into Castle's office to give him some unsolicited advice (and she's writing a book about that and using Castle's agent! Haha. That sounded fun, actually.)  Before they get too far, Detective Slaughter comes by. Alexis runs into the office telling her father it's DEFCon One with Slaughter there, but Castle takes the case anyway, even though he knows it's not a good idea after last time. (Slaughter lures him with a promise of a mob hit story idea.)

So here's the thing: Slaughter wants Castle to help him figure out a case. Booth Tower, a high tech security building has been broken into and a microchip stolen. Castle is all in and they go to visit Slaughter's informant, only he's dead and the rest of the team is there investigating that murder. Slaughter deliberately keeps information from Ryan and Espo and takes Castle to the guy's girlfriend. Of course the dead guy told her that he was coming into some money and that he had a big meeting that night. That never ends well.

Ryan calls Castle to let him know that Slaughter's fingerprints were found on the murder weapon. Slaughter denies killing the guy and Castle believes him and covers for him with the guys. (I was a little surprised that Castle so easily lied to Ryan and Espo, actually, but hey, whatevs with any relationship courtesy this season I guess.) Hayley helps them and finds out that the dead guy was a mentor to a genius kid named Louis. They track down the mentoring program director who doesn't know where Louis is, but Hayley tracks down the kid's ISP. Castle and Slaughter go to the apartment and the kid is being beat up, but takes off when they get the guy off him.  The boys show up to arrest Slaughter, but Castle steals their car and their prisoner right out from under them. Ouch.

Ryan and Espo have also found out that Slaughter was kicked out of the gang unit for allegedly taking money from a dealer and is in danger of losing his pension, so he could have been in on this microchip heist. Once again, Slaughter denies it to Castle and Castle believes him. (They do have some really cute scenes together with Castle trying to get Slaughter to be nice and less violent when questioning a suspect and when Slaughter says they're like Butch and Sundance, Castle is all, um, you know they die in the end, right? LOL They have a great partner chem overall and it was funny when Slaughter called him Sherlock. Okay, it was funny the first ten times at least.)

They go to Slaughter's ex-wife's house (she's out of the country) and Castle gets out of Slaughter that his ex-wife is a famous opera singer and they met in college because they were both musical theatre majors. (I had a hard time visualizing Slaughter in musical theater, haha. Jazz hands!) Slaughter cooks him some food, the genius kid tracks them down and tells them he's in trouble. They go to the warehouse where he's hiding and get ambushed by a lot of angry men with guns.

Castle does a West Side story move and breaks into song complete with snapping and jazz hands to distract the gunmen while him and Slaughter gear up to attack and beat everyone up. (Um, yeah. I don't know what to say about that. It was odd and more than a bit over the top, but we went with it.) Ryan and Espo and the team show up right after Castle and Slaughter have already taken care of it. (That gang was pretty wimpy, really. Maybe they were an apprentice gang or something. Whatever they were, they failed at the gang thing.)

Back to the case.  The gang people and Louis all have alibis, so could Slaughter have really done it? Nope. The kid remembers a door being wedged open during the robbery and when they came down it was shut. Someone piggy-backed off them! But who else knew what was going down? Yep, it was the mentoring program director. He used to be Mr. Booth's accountant and got fired for making advances on his boss's wife. He was getting revenge and stealing millions while Louis stole the microchip.

Slaughter ends by offering to be a mentor to Louis in a really cute scene. But then they had to go and ruin in by having Slaughter give Castle advice about his marriage.  "I lost my wife because I wasn't man enough to put her needs before mine." Yeah, I hated that. We've seen Castle put Beckett's needs before his own over and over and over. I don't see much of that from Beckett. It's not fun to see how how much he's moping over a woman that doesn't even seem to give him much thought lately. Sigh.

I still really hate what they've done to Caskett and keep hoping it's going to get better, but the previews for next week show someone saying the "D" word. (Divorce).  I'm still trying to find the silver lining in this season and the new showrunners seem determined to kill it. I hope they don't even step down that "D" road. Or look in that road's direction.

Did you watch? What did you think?