The Should-Have-Been-A-Halloween-Episode of Castle

Well, I don't really know what to say about this episode of Castle. They did the spooky music opening, they had an axe-wielding man break into Castle's PI office during a blackout while Alexis and Hayley are there in cocktail dresses.(What was that all about? Weird.) Anyway, it was totally a Halloween episode. In May.

Alexis presses a panic button so Caskett knows to head down there. The entire city is in a blackout and so there's not a lot of lights, phones, etc. The team beats them there and they explain to Castle that a guy named Gabriel escaped from a hospital for the criminally insane. Apparently, Gabriel tried to kill an entire family twenty years ago and was hospitalized. But after his escape, he was stabbed, by a claw, and there was sulfur in the wound, so Castle concludes a demon killed him.

The boys head over to the mental hospital where they find out the head guy knew Gabriel had escaped and sent some orderlies to find him. Gabriel had stolen one of the orderlies key card and oddly, that orderly never came back. Castle finds a Bible with a lot of demons drawn in its pages in a really gross, rodent-infested vent in the room. Ew.

Before they can chastise the head guy further for not calling the police in sooner, Lanie tells them she found some weird stuff on the body. She gets them down there and shows them scriptures and symbols drawn on Gabriel's body. Weird. They also get footage of the one visitor that Gabriel had, but it's kind of blurry.

The team tracks down the missing orderly who admits that he saw Gabriel coming out of a church, but since Gabriel knew the orderly was selling the patients' meds, he let the guy go. A dead end there, but they do find out that the PI who had been investigating the family that Gabriel tried to kill twenty years ago had an office right where Castle's is now. And the safe inside isn't Castle's, so it was probably his! Dun, dun, dun. They break in and it's a satanic lair, with all the darkness you can imagine. Um, how did real estate agents, inspectors, and/or insurance people miss that a giant room was in this building?And it's a fire hazard to boot.

Thinking that Gabriel thought the end of days was coming in two days, they contact the family of the PI who used to have Castle's office. His wife and son don't know anything, they claim. In the lair, there's a bunch of pictures and information on the only son of the family Gabriel tried to kill named Victor, so they go visit him. He's a philanthropist, helping people get clean water around the world and doesn't seem sad Gabriel is dead since his parents died soon after the murder attempt. Castle believes Gabriel thought Victor could be the anti-christ.

Lanie figures out exactly what the markings were made of on Gabriel's body and it matches a recipe found in the lair. That leads them all to a guy named Carl. They go to his apartment and find Carl's son there who admits he painted all the stuff on Gabriel. He'll sell anything to people looking for "blessed" or religious items. Nothing to see here.

The surveillance footage they get on Gabriel's stabbing is flickering because of the blackout, so it looks like Gabriel is actually stabbed by a demon, fueling Castle's obsession with it. Castle also believes he's been marked for death since he sees a flare in every picture and video of himself now. He's searching around on the internet for how to kill the anti-christ and finds an article that says you have to have the angel dagger, which he saw in the lair. He goes there alone, leaving his trained and competent wife at home in the dark. Literally. (Has he learned nothing?) He's talking to her on the phone, explaining his actions, when shockingly someone has followed him there. Castle goes toward the person (again, doesn't he know by now not to do that?) and gets knocked out for his trouble.

A gray SUV is found on surveillance tapes and they trace that back to the PI's wife who admits to stabbing Gabriel with her garden claw, but nothing else. The blurry mental hospital visitor pic is cleaned up and it's Carl's son. They track him to Victor's office, knowing he's going to finish the job Gabriel started in killing the "anti-christ" of Victor. Of course all the security and police go off in the wrong direction and Castle finds Victor tied to a table about to be killed. Castle saves the day and Carl's son is killed when he backs into a load of pipes that fall on him. Victor thanks Castle and says he owes him and Castle thinks he might have made a deal with the devil.

Back home at the loft Beckett is enjoying scaring Castle and playing some pranks on him. (She did tell him he wasn't marked for death, the flare was a zipper on his coat.) The whole episode felt a bit off with Beckett barely on and I'm sad there's only one more episode left with Stana Katic.

So, a spooky episode, Beckett-lite, and heavy on the supernatural ramblings of Castle as he solves the case. (I really, really miss when it was more of a team effort, but those days are definitely over.)

Did you watch? What did you think?