Castle is at home preparing breakfast when Beckett comes in and invites him back to the bedroom. Before he can accept, his mother barges in and asks Castle to help her get Oprah's celebrity endorsement of her new book. He agrees to try and she leaves, but Beckett gets a call about the murder and Castle heads out.
Castle is grossed out by the headless body, gagging and telling the boys they should have given him a heads up. (Get it? Heads up?) Lainey brings it in and says the murder weapon was a scimitar. There's a lot of Middle Eastern books and pictures in the apartment and Castle gives the team some Cliff's Notes on the story of 1001 Arabian Nights. No one looks impressed. He gets a call from Oprah's assistant and steps in the hall to take it when a blonde woman appears and tells him about the victim, Lars, and the fact that he had an argument with his boyfriend the night before. Then she disappears. And Oprah's assistant hangs up on him. Poor Castle.
The team tracks down Lars' boyfriend and he tells them how he gave Lars $20,000 for school, but then the guy up and left him and went to Turkey. When he got back into the country, Lars was driving around an expensive car and the boyfriend called him on it. Apparently Lars promised to get him the money he was owed. The boyfriend alibi's out and they're back to square one. Oh, except for the fact that the boyfriend kept Lars' laptop as collateral. Once the team gets a look at it they realize that Lars was smuggling artifacts into the country. (He had $400,000 cash in a safe deposit box to prove it.)
The guy was at Solomon's tomb and took a picture of himself with a lamp. Castle saw the exact same insignia in the pictures as there was on a book at the victim's apartment, written by a professor at Hudson, so he goes to talk to her. She fills him in on some of her research, but seems surprised that Castle believes in genies. (As are the rest of us. I don't mind Castle being kid-like, but I hate it when they make him childish and bumbling. Sigh. I tried really hard to overlook it this episode but they hammered it home, especially when Alexis had to ask if he needed ice cream and treated him like a toddler. Oy. But I digress.)
The blonde shows up at Castle's PI office and he can tell she rifled through his desk. She claims she's a reporter and is only trying to help. She says that Lars had a partner who went by the alias Al Adin. Like Aladdin. Get it? The team track Al Adin to a sketchy looking motel and bring him in after he tried to run. He says that the genie is a demon who's out to get him. He gives them the story of how he met Lars in Turkey and they teamed up to find Solomon's tomb. They were supposed to ship the antiquities back, but there was a double-cross by the shipper people who were supposed to smuggle them into the country and Lars had to come up with $400,000 for them which he did somehow. Of course he died before that exchange could be made. But now the team wants to talk to this shipper.
Castle and Beckett are home talking about the case, when Castle shows Beckett that the blonde lied to him again and she's not really a reporter. He is starting to believe she's the genie and wants him to be her new master. Beckett wants him to stop talking about a skeezy blonde he thinks is a genie and kiss her, so he does. Cut to the precinct the next day and the boys have tracked down the shipper. His name is Yurick and Beckett makes them promise to include Castle and let him have the first rub on any lamps. They agree.
At Yurick's rug shop they find him rolled up in a rug already dead. Castle is flipping rugs up in the air, trying to find a magic one. (I have no comment on that. Oy.) He goes outside to update Beckett and call for backup when he sees a warehouse with Yurick's store emblem on it. Of course he goes over alone to investigate and falls in a window. There's a crate with a genie lamp on top of it and he goes over to look at it and gets caught. Before the female gunman can shoot him, the "genie" blonde woman whacks her over the head with a 2x4 and a puff of "smoke" and her and Castle run away. They don't get beyond the gate, however, before the blonde has disappeared again.
Castle and Ryan are discussing Castle's statement about what happened because by the time the police got there the warehouse was cleaned out. Luckily, Alexis who is so much smarter than her dad and the police has figured out who the blonde is. Her name is Genevieve Sutton and she's a securities contractor. The team tracks her down and brings her in where she explains that Mr. X hired Lars to find Solomon's Tomb and protect it so terrorists couldn't loot it and use the money for their activities.
So, she's not a genie, she just targeted Castle as her "in" with the cops to see how much they knew.
She gives the police the license plate of the truck at the warehouse and they track it to a rest stop. Castle and Beckett listen in as the contents of the truck are recovered. (That was kind of a let-down. Why have the team investigating only to listen to someone else make the arrest? Oh well.) All the crates are recovered except one--the one with the lamp. But Castle figured out who the murderer is and they bring her in. Yep, it's the professor. Lars had taken her class, used her research and notes to find the tomb and she was jealous so she killed him. (But it doesn't really explain why she tortured Yurick and killed him, too, or how she got the drop on that guy. Or what she made Lars write before she killed him. Hmmm... a few plot holes.)
Oh well. Some Jordanian prince comes to collect Genevieve and while he doesn't admit to being the mysterious benefactor called Mr. X, he does say he's glad the artifacts will be tied up in the American justice system, stored in the basement of the Smithsonian for years to come. Everyone smiles knowingly and the prince tells "Genie" meaning Genevieve, to come along. Castle has a funny look on his face and she turns around to give him a "genie-like" smile.
Anyway, the case is wrapped up just as Ryan's wife goes into labor. Things aren't smooth, however, and the team rushes down there. Jenny has an amniotic embolism, and Beckett asks Castle to use his last two wishes for Jenny and the baby. About thirty seconds later all is well and Ryan comes out to announce the birth of Nicholas Javier. Hugs all around! (I really wish that would have been a bigger storyline instead of some of the campy genie stuff, but that's just me. I like seeing the team come together for one of their own. At least we got a few minutes of it.)
So, we got it all in this episode with some cute stuff, some fun scenes, some emotional moments, and some eye-rolling at the way Castle is being written, all rolled up into a genie episode. What did you think? Did you watch?
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