Castle Review: Back To The Academy

Well, I thought I had the murderer figured out but the show got me last night. It was nice and twisty!

We start out with Castle making coffee for Beckett and trying to get up the guts to tell her he knew about the ridiculous LokSat and had his memory wiped so it's allllll his fault the FBI team died. Um, yeah. I still don't get why he's feeling responsible. They were FBI agents. Trained. What could he have done to save them? But, okay.  He doesn't get the chance because Martha comes home to show Castle an ARC of her new book and the dedication that because of his problems, she had advice to give. Kate hides and slips away.

She's called down to a murder scene where the killer dug his bullet out of the victim's body. The dead man's fingerprint reveals that he was a police academy recruit named Bardot. One of their own. The team goes down to the academy and the boys remark on all of Beckett's still unbroken records in a trophy case. She is modest about it and tells the boys to search the victim's dorm room while she goes in to talk to Commissioner Malone and Sergeant Ortiz. She has a lot of great memories of Sergeant Ortiz's tough love and he remembers her fondly as well.

Lainey finds a bullet fragment during the autopsy and it reveals that the gun was issued to the academy, so one of the recruits was probably the killer. Beckett comes in as a guest instructor and tries to psychologically break them with interrogation techniques class and a shooting range demonstration. They find a threatening note in Bardot's shooting range locker and track it all back to a fighting ring where steroids are being peddled.  One of the recruits makes a run for it, but claims he didn't kill anyone.  Bardot needed money, fast, so he said he would keep quiet about the steroids the guy bought if he got $5000 out of the deal. Why would Bardot need $5000?

Of course the one girl whose been acting weird the entire time, Decker, is outted as Bardot's secret girlfriend. She says Bardot was coming back late at night smelling like fish. He lied and said he stepped in garbage, but the team tracks him to a mob boss's territory. Bardot bought illegal black market technology with his $5000 and met with Irish mob boss Flanagan.

With that information, the team theorizes that Bardot hacked into police files and was a mole for Flanagan. Beckett goes to rattle Flanagan's cage, but the (creepy) guy has been dealing with the cops for twenty years and isn't scared. Well, until the boys dig into his financials and realize he funded a scholarship so Decker could go to the police academy. Uh oh. Decker finally comes clean that she is Flanagan's secret love child and Bardot was probably trying to make a deal to get her free from her father. Flanagan wanted her to be the mole, but Bardot probably offered himself in her place. They put a wire on her and send her in to talk to her dad, but she goes over the edge and pulls a gun on the guy. The team bursts in and talks her down, but Flanagan does spill that he made a deal with Bardot, but didn't kill him. After he left, a black sedan followed Bardot and that's the last he ever saw of the guy.

The guys track the black sedan and realize it was checked out to Sergeant Ortiz. Of course Beckett is meeting with Ortiz at the shooting range at the time when they tell her. She pulls a gun on him and he seems genuinely surprised and before she can take him in, he's shot. By Commissioner Malone! I really thought it was Ortiz.

Malone has been skimming funds and Bardot found out so he had to kill him. He also kills the lights and begins hunting Beckett in the shooting range. Cutouts are popping up everywhere and Beckett puts her coat on one to lure him in. He falls for it and she takes him down. Thankfully, Ortiz just has a flesh wound and will be okay.

Back to the Caskett issues. Hayley counsels Castle to come clean with Beckett, but he's afraid she won't forgive him. Which is seriously outrageous because if anyone should be begging forgiveness it should be Beckett for how she's treated Castle, but I digress. He tells Beckett everything and she says she needs to process and comes over to get drunk with him. I hate how they've written these two now. All character growth seems to have been forgotten. By the end of the episode, though, Beckett says they can work together on finding LokSat. Won't that be fun? .

But overall, this episode had a nice twisty case and a glimpse into Beckett when she was driven and knew what she wanted.

What did you think? Did you watch?