Last night's Castle was so intense. I loved it, especially since it gave Esposito a chance to shine. Jon Huertas is a great actor from the emotional to the kick butt.
We start out with a murder in the park. Just a guy, sitting on a park bench drinking his coffee, when he's shot in the head. The team starts digging around about the victim and find out he's a GAO investigator, so he investigates fraud with government contracts. Ryan finds a mysterious phone call made from a pay phone to the victim right before he died and the police tech gets some footage of the man who made the call. Jared Stone. The boys go to pay him a visit, but see him on the street while they're in traffic. (And they were talking about marriage and kids while they were driving there. Will Espo propose to Laney? Or is she truly happy with how things are? When Espo says his biological clock is ticking, I had to laugh.) Esposito follows Jared into the subway, keeping Ryan on the phone, but all that does is give Ryan a front row listen to Esposito and the rest of the people in the subway car being taken hostage.
Back at the station the captain is yapping about giving her all the info so she can give it to HRT. (They do show an awesome looking HRT team, though.) The tech girl (I can't remember her name!) finds a feed that Jared doesn't know about, so they can all see that the hostages are okay for now. And no one really seems too freaked out until the hostage taker reveals he has a bomb strapped to his chest with a kill switch. Uh oh.
Beckett has Ryan leave the hostage situation scene to go to Jared's apartment (he's feeling so horribly guilty poor guy) but he goes. They find a shredder and go back to the precinct to put it all together. (Which would be a nightmare of a job.) The bomber asks for a girl named Erin Wilson to be released from prison. Everyone looks into her background and find that the fellow hacker is his girlfriend. Then the bomber says he wants her flown to the Maldives, a non-extradition country. Right around then, Ryan assembles some of the shredded docs and find out that the bomber had a playbook for this little terrorist activity. And he was headed to some wealth conference and hadn't planned on the subway thing.
It's not adding up for Castle who is wondering how a hacker gets involved in becoming a bomber. Erin claims she doesn't know anything about this, so the team starts searching for the mastermind. Meanwhile, the HRT team gets a message to Espo through a pizza box, (so clever!) and it's go time. They're going to breach the subway car on the second flicker of lights. Only the bomber hears them on top of the subway car. Oops. Espo is noticing how much sicker the bomber is getting and that he's sucking on his inhaler like a lollipop. Espo tells the transit cop next to him (who was young and pretty and former Army!) that on his count, they were going to take the bomber down. Which they do. Everyone is breathing a sigh of relief until Espo gets the news that the bomber was infected with a twisted strain of H1 N1 and they were probably all infected. (Thanks to Laney's observations of his illness on the secret feed they were watching.) Dun, dun, dun.
That helps the team put it all together. Their murder victim was investigating a company that made vaccines. When they examined the company's records, there was an order for ten million vaccines made for this particular strain of flu. And guess who invested a whole lot of money in that company? Our murder victim's boss. If they could use Jared to start an epidemic, she would be rich, but our little nosy investigator found out about it so he had to be killed. Poor Jared was just a patsy. Caskett go visit him in the hospital and pretty much just tell him he was used. It was sort of odd, actually.
Thankfully, Espo and the others are all treated and even though there was a cute scene with Espo and the transit cop in the hospital room, she pushes him into Laney's arms. And Laney looked pretty happy that Espo wasn't dead or had a terrible disease. The team decides to celebrate and go to the old haunt for drinks. So sweet. This episode had lots of emotion, tenseness, and lots of Espo. A really great episode!
Did you watch? What did you think?
Why I'm Not Reviewing Hawaii Five-O Right Now
This is me watching Hawaii Five-O lately
Now, for a little aside to explain why I haven't been reviewing Hawaii Five-O for the last couple of episodes. I'm so disappointed in the direction the show is taking that each review ended up being more of a rant than anything else and I thought I should probably take a step back. Now that Wo Fat is dead (which is a huge mistake in my book. Why take out the main nemesis on the show?) And add to that that there was no great reveal for WHY Wo Fat hated Steve or wanted to destroy his family.
He says two things, that Doris killed his mother when he was a baby so she took care of him until he was four, and that he thinks his father might still be alive. I was all, what the what? THAT'S why you hate Steve? Really? Cuz, dude, that's lame. That's why Steve has been hunted, tortured, nearly killed, his father's death ordered, his life made miserable, because his mommy took care of Wo Fat for four years? Wo Fat wouldn't even remember much of what happened at that young age! *shakes head*
Not to mention the torturing of Steve at Wo Fat's hand was gruesome, but another retread. (Alex O'Loughlin played the emotion and anger so well, though. He has a great range of acting skills). But Wo Fat tortured Steve before in North Korea when everyone wanted to know what Shelburne was, so it felt like, hey, I've seen this before and I don't want to see it again. (And yeah, Shelburne was a lame reveal, too.) Anyway, there's so much retread of former storylines and scenes that I'm truly starting to wonder if the writers realize they've done this stuff before. (Like Chin having the illegal money issue again.) *deep breath* I'm getting rant-y again so I'll stop there.
The other reveal was that Catherine has left Steve and instructed him not to wait for her so she can stay in Afghanistan and teach. Are you kidding me right now? They tell each other they love each other after all those years, after everything they've been through and Catherine just shrugs her shoulders at the end and is all, yeah, whatevs. I'll just stay here in Afghanistan instead of be with the man I love. SO. DUMB and a slap in the face for McRoll fans.
Yeah, yeah, Aunt Deb was on and all, but these two lame reveals have just stuck in my throat. It's like the writers are trying to reboot the reboot by adding Jerry, dumping Catherine, and killing Wo Fat. It's not working for me and it's even killing the enjoyment I got of the Hawaiian scenery. Sigh.
So, I'm taking a little break from reviewing Hawaii Five-O so I can not be so rant-y when I talk about it. It's all for you, my gentle readers, honest. Maybe after the break, you will get a happier reviewer and there will be some better episodes to talk about!
