My Last Castle Recap & Thoughts On The Series Finale

I have so many things running through my head after watching that series finale. So. Many. Things.

The episode begins with that guy from Galaxy Quest who played Teb singing along to the Brady Bunch's big hit Sunshine Day. He gets out and starts dousing the car with gasoline, then opens the trunk and asks the person in the trunk, "Don't you just love this song?" Then he lights up the car and burns that person alive. Ew.

Cut back to the silly LokSat case where it's time to go to the place where LokSat will call the phone Caleb Brown gave Beckett. They have Vikram in a truck nearby ready to trace the call. Beckett and Castle have a little moment by the tree where they are making bets as to who LokSat is. The yogi in the park? The lady who looks like Castle's ex-wife? It was cute.The call comes in and it's too short for Vikram to trace, but the voice gives instructions for Caleb to meet LokSat's accountant. Since they didn't get the trace they wanted, Caskett decides to go to the drop and meet the accountant. I have a bad feeling about this.

They enlist Hayley's help as a sniper, and Vikram as their eyes. Caleb is late, and when someone finally does come in, Espo inconveniently calls Beckett to tell her the burned guy in the trunk had the DNA of Caleb Brown on the briefcase that survived the inferno. Well, if Caleb is dead in the trunk, who is that at the drop? It's a trap.

Before Beckett can blink, an army of bad guys descends and starts shooting at Caskett. Hayley takes out some of them, but it's not looking good. Suddenly, a taco truck races in and rescues them. It's Mason from the Detective's club in California. Yeah. Weird. He says he owed Rita, Castle's stepmother, a favor so he's babysitting them. He gives Caskett access to more guns and sends them on their way. My thought was, why aren't they more concerned that they left Hayley to fend for herself?

They decide that they all have targets on their backs now, so Castle is going to go get Martha and Alexis to the safe room at the PI agency and Beckett is going to go get Vikram? (It struck me so weird that she was putting herself out there for Vikram when he's a grown man and a phone call away, but okay.)  Her dad is away on business, so he's all good. Castle isn't happy that they aren't sticking together and Beckett tries to reassure him. They say a sweet goodbye and I love you. (One of the best scenes of the whole episode. *sniffle*)

Castle goes to his office and two armed guards are there. They aren't going to kidnap him, Hayley hired them to protect Martha and Alexis. He goes to the safe room and explains everything, just as Beckett is explaining things to Espo and Ryan since Vikram let the cat out of the bag. Castle calls Kate, wondering where she is and she tells him she's staying at the precinct. He wants to come down there then, but they both decide they're safer right where they are. Kate promises not to leave the precinct and Castle promises to stay in the safe room. Yeah, that won't last long.

The team gets a clue on where creepy Galaxy Quest guy went and Ryan and Espo head out, leaving Kate behind. Surprisingly, she stays in the precinct per her promise to watch it remotely. The guys go in, but the house is empty. They were tricked. But where is creepy Galaxy Quest guy?

Castle has decided he needs to be with Kate no matter what so he takes a taxi to the precinct. Because, you know, when there's a target on your back, a taxi in New York is totally fine. But guess who is driving and playing that Brady Bunch song? Yep. We found creepy Galaxy Quest guy. Castle is kidnapped. Again. He comes to and he's strapped to a funky looking metal table torture thing that can be upright or lie down. Creepy Galaxy Quest guy questions him about his love for Kate,whether she's a weakness, etc. Castle declares his love for her, that she's unlike anyone he's ever known. She challenges him, makes him laugh. *le sigh* It was so sweet!

Creepy Galaxy Quest guy isn't impressed and hooks Castle up to truth serum and says that within the hour everyone who knows about LokSat will be dead. Which is pretty much the entire cast at this point and everyone Castle loves. When LokSat finally comes in to finish the questioning, we are not surprised to see it's Mason. It was so obvious he was the bad guy, not only from Beckett's instincts, but there was no other reason for him to be in the episode. But, whatever. He uses the truth serum to force Castle to tell him everyone who knows about LokSat. Beckett. Martha. Alexis. Ryan. Esposito. (Although it didn't make sense that Castle knew Ryan and Esposito had been told since Beckett had told them on her own at the precinct, but okay.) Castle has tears running down his face as he knows they will all be killed now. It is a powerful scene, great acting by Nathan Fillion.

Of course Kate knows nothing about this and when she gets a call from Mason who says he knows a guy who can help her identify LokSat, she insists on coming with him. He picks her up and starts talking to her about Castle. "You have quite a bond," Mason says. "He's the love of my life," she tells him. Awww.

Even though Ryan and Esposito don't know where Beckett is, they keep working the case. Vikram cross-references cell phone calls from creepy Galaxy Quest guy and narrows it down to an address. It's a CIA blacksite, but Ryan and Espo storm it anyway and take it by force. Espo gets the guard to tell him where the creepy guy is and they save Castle just as he's about to be poisoned. But, they are under siege again, with all kinds of guns shooting at them from their only way out. There's no way to find out where Mason has taken Beckett. Or is there?

Castle turns the table on creepy guy (literally) and gets him on the torture table to stick the truth serum in his arm. He finds out there's an incinerator in the basement and that's where they're headed with Beckett. But how can he get there? Castle breaks through a flimsy wall with a fire extinguisher and heads to the basement.

Beckett totally has Mason's number, though, and when he walks her into the room, she pulls her gun on him. When she orders him to put his gun on the ground, however, he activates a magnet that pulls Beckett's metal gun to the ceiling. He's got the upper hand and tells Beckett that Castle is dead and in the incinerator. She doesn't believe him and Castle shows up with a gun in hand to prove him wrong. Unfortunately, it's also magnetized to the ceiling. That distraction is just enough, though, so Beckett can beat Mason unconscious. (It doesn't take much, really, and LokSat turned out to be a lightweight sissy. Why was everyone afraid of him?)

Caskett embraces and they head back to the precinct. The guys are going to go out for a drink and celebrate and invite Vikram and Laney. Laney gives Beckett a hug before she goes and Kate looks over at Castle embracing Martha and Alexis. It was a cute scene, but if *I* were writing this episode, I would have had Laney confirming a pregnancy test for Beckett, then her looking happily over at Castle and Martha and Beckett. Wouldn't that have been awesome? Sigh.

Martha and Alexis oddly disappear and our next scene is back at the loft. Beckett feels like she could sleep for a week and Castle goes to make her breakfast. She says she loves it when he makes her breakfast and he starts the burner. He stares at it and says, "why did they burn Caleb in a car when they had an incinerator," but before he can really finish the thought, Caleb comes out of nowhere saying, "I told Mason you'd figure it out," and shoots Castle in the chest. Beckett comes out of the bedroom and shoots Caleb, but not before he fires a round into her abdomen. Castle and Beckett, all bloody, crawl to each other on the kitchen floor and hold hands.

But this is not the end! They pan through an empty loft with the voice-overs from the end of the pilot episode where Castle asks her out on a date and she turns him down, then we see SEVEN YEARS LATER across the screen. Beckett is trying to wrangle their three kids to the table, laughing and having fun as Castle is smiling at them all. So, we get our happy ending after all as Castle's voice comes on, "Every writer needs inspiration. And I've found mine. Always."  Let's just enjoy that whole scene for just a second before we start to actually think it through, shall we? (It's all over Youtube if you haven't seen it.)

Look at them. They're so happy!

But when you start to look at the ridiculous LokSat mess with that ending, for me, it didn't make a lot of sense. Why have Caleb come back at all? Was he Loksat? Or the right hand man? If he wasn't LokSat when did he turn back to the dark side? If he was, how would someone like him have the kind of connections LokSat supposedly did in the CIA that went around killing a lot of people? Why would Castle want to forget LokSat from his missing time? How did any of this convoluted disaster trace back to Kate's mom and Sen. Bracken? There are no answers, of course, and so many plot holes that just don't add up to any kind of satisfactory conclusion. Oh well, I guess.

There were some solid Caskett moments that made me happy. Their chemistry is what brought me back every week, and I'm glad we got to see the whole team one more time as they went off to celebrate, and of course, the final moments of the happy Castle family. Maybe that's why the shooting was so jarring in the middle of all of that. It was unnecessary from my standpoint, but I heard online that actually was going to be Kate's death scene, so even though the happy ending seemed tacked on and rushed, I'm glad Kate is not dead.

SO . ..  if it were me editing this series finale, I would have cut the entire shooting and just had Beckett saying she loves how he makes her breakfast, then the voice-overs of their first meeting, then the flashforward to them with their kids. It would have been so much sweeter for someone like me who has watched from day one to have their love story end like that. Oh well. Maybe I'll just pretend that last season's finale of them all around the table while Castle gave that awesome speech was the series finale with that last thirty seconds of the Castle family at the breakfast table tacked on.

Overall, it was a series finale that should have been at least a two hour show, but it had its high points amid the bizarre. I really am sad to see this show go, but at least it ended happily. Rushed, and a limping a little, but happy.

Did you watch? What did you think?

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?

To Be Or Not To Be Castle Recap

We open the show with a guy on an empty stage practicing Hamlet--and he stinks at Shakespeare. Someone is watching him and he eventually hears a noise and goes to investigate and is stabbed.

Cut to the loft where Castle is talking about how it's Beckett's turn to think of a date for them. She's supposed to top the Founding Fathers date he did for her which was pretty elaborate. Beckett lets him think she's got something planned. (I'm really really going to miss Caskett moments. It's so sad to watch them now!)

Castle goes to the murder scene where a stalkerazzi already has a picture of Zane the murder victim's body on the stage. They actually show that on the news and say that Castle is the face of the investigation. Beckett does not seem amused.

The director of the play is an old theater friend of Zane's (and also someone that Ryan is totally stoked to meet) and she says that he was in a "showmance" with the leading lady named Naomi. Apparently they had a fiery breakup and she took a baseball bat to his car.  She's also a method actor and really gets into her role. When Espo and Castle go to question her, she's speaking Shakespearean English and pretending not to know what a car is, but Espo isn't having any of it and forces her out of her "role." She says she didn't kill him, but he'd been sneaking off a lot lately and got mad when she questioned him about it.

Ryan tracks down a discreet hotel room that Zane had rented and when they go there to catch his mistress, it's none other than Castle's mother, Martha. She'd been giving the guy acting lessons, not sleeping with him. Another dead end.

The show-stealer tonight was totally Ryan. He's decided to make his preschool daughter's play into something quite elaborate and he's having trouble helping everyone associated with the preschool dance see his vision. He dances for them and tells them all about it, but they don't seem too impressed. But the cutest moment of the whole show was when his wife and kids come in and Ryan sings the song with his little girl who is dressed as a flower. Adorable!

Anyway, back to the murder of the week. The team finds a connection with Zane and his step-brother who just got out of prison. The step-brother took the fall for a B&E and Zane never came to visit him. He apologized, though, and was going to make amends to his brother right after he took care of his money problems. He was going to be broke in a few months because of the taxes he owed, but he had a plan. Now to find out what that plan was exactly.

Ryan and Espo are outside getting some food and chatting when they notice the stalkerazzi guy filming them. They convince him to show them his footage of Zane since he'd been following the guy around for a month and find some film of Zane exchanging money and a burner phone with a scary looking guy. Espo recognizes him as a guy from a drug-running group. The boys pull him in and with some conversation about moving little brother to a prison closer to home, they get him to talk. He gave Zane a burner phone to connect to El Oso, a wanted drug cartel leader. And Zane's phone call didn't go that great, he says. Since El Oso kills a lot of people, they team is thinking maybe they have their guy.

Since Beckett is going to be late working the case, they postpone the date and Castle realizes she didn't really have anything planned. He thinks the competition between them is fun, she doesn't look so sure. He decides to take Martha out to dinner while she's working, but while he's in a parking garage, he's kidnapped. Again.

He seems pretty calm about it, though, when his hood is taken off and he's standing in front of El Oso. Considering how many times Castle has been kidnapped, it's probably old hat now. He gets his hands untied and they sit down like old friends. El Oso says Zane wanted the rights to his biopic and he wanted Zane to prove he was a serious actor, so that's why he was doing Hamlet. Now he's dead, though. El Oso thinks Castle can do it. Just sit down and typey typey typey. Haha. Now that made me laugh.

Beckett and the team track him down with the chip in his YOLO card that was in his wallet. Castle sees El Oso about to get away and trips him, so now he's worried that El Oso will have him killed. But if El Oso didn't kill Zane who did? Castle is talking about rivalries with Beckett and figures out that Zane must have been playing on an El Oso rivalry--and he was! El Oso has a brother who is double-crossing him and sleeping with his wife. He offered Zane money to lead him to his brother like a Trojan horse which would hopefully lead the authorities to him and then he'd be able to take over. Just like a Shakespeare plot! Only the brother didn't kill Zane either. He just said Zane could star and direct the movie about El Oso. Who would be mad about that?

His old theater director friend. She admits to the killing after Zane told her he'd be directing the movie instead of her. I totally called that one as soon as they showed her.

Back at the loft, Beckett has planned a night in for their date. They're enjoying themselves when there's a knock at the door and a box is delivered. El Oso has given Castle everything he needs to write his biopic. The look on Castle's face was priceless and he throws over their date to start on the project and TYPEY TYPEY TYPEY! LOL

We're down to the last two episodes of Castle. I'm really going to miss the show and most of all, Caskett. It's hard to imagine what my Monday nights will look like next season!

Did you watch the show last night? What did you think?

Win My Book! And A Mini-Castle Recap

I got a great review of The Captive from Kindle and Me! Here's part of what they said:

"I feel like I just got off the longest rollercoaster ever! There were so many turns and twists and my stomach rolled a few times. It was exhilarating! I want to go on it again! I’m glad this is a start to a series!"

They are offering a chance to win your own ecopy of The Captive and you can enter the contest as well as see what else they said about my novel here

I watched Castle last night, but after finding out that Stana Katic and Tamala Jones won't be coming back next season, it just took the shine off for me. I hate that the show is ending on a very sad note when it didn't have to be that way.

It started off with a guy named Alan on hold waiting for his cable company to pick up. While he's waiting he takes some pills and gets poisoned by the water.  Cut to the loft where Castle is creepily watching Beckett sleep and tells her he takes pictures of her while she's sleeping. Um. Not cute at all. They talk about leaving it all behind, but Beckett's phone rings and she reminds him they have responsibilities.

They head to the crime scene where Lanie is giving them the run down on the victim, when suddenly he's behind them asking why everyone is in his apartment. They take him to the hospital and Lanie is flabbergasted that she declared someone dead and was going to stick a thermometer in his liver when he was still alive. Castle is in the guy's room telling him he has super powers and should take advantage of his second lease on life.The team starts digging into who hates Alan because he's a safety inspector. They investigate his partner who was taking bribes, but he had an alibi.

Alan is accompanied back to his apartment by Castle and an officer. Castle is hounding the man about living life to the fullest and the guy just wants Castle to stop. As soon as he closes the door, though, Alan lays down on his bed and is electrocuted. Lanie says he's really dead this time, but Alan pops back up again! Castle really thinks he's a superhero and they are thinking of names for him, (Captain Cool?) but nothing good comes to mind. They think of a company that could have a grudge against Alan because they had a spill and begged Alan not to fine them, but he did anyway. The president of that company also has an alibi, but Alan is infatuated with Gwen from marketing and Castle finds out she thinks he's funny. The president guy says that he saw someone waiting for Alan in the parking lot and security footage help them track him down. It's the guy who played Bud in JAG! I miss that show. He tells them about a mob front who probably wanted to get rid of Alan.

Castle takes Alan back to his loft and is still beating the dead horse that Alan is a superhero. He convinces him to call Gwen and he gets a date with her in thirty minutes. The date goes awkwardly with Alan yammering on to Gwen that he's a superhero. The boys call Castle to tell him not to leave the loft because of the mob guy after Alan. They send a picture and lo and behold the mob guy comes to sit down next to Alan. Castle rushes over to the table. (He does get called Alan's sidekick and looked so affronted it was funny.) The mob guy doesn't want to kill him, he wants to offer Alan protection in exchange for looking the other way on inspections. Alan says no and Gwen has had enough and leaves.

Castle remembers the little case that the mob guy had at the table full of ginkgo tablets and Castle and Alan go in undercover as safety inspectors to the little Chinese herb store (also a Triad front) that sells them. The team confiscates a couple of suitcases full of synthetic heroin and realize that the company with the lab spill is the one trying to kill Alan. (One of the ingredients of synthetic heroin were being produced at that lab.) Alan goes there alone to save Gwen, but she's the mastermind and shoots him in the head. The team rushes in and they think he's really dead this time, but he pops up again. Like daisies! (Name that movie) Lanie and Alan actually bond over his not so near-death experiences. Maybe Alan really is a superhero. It certainly takes a lot to kill the guy!

They also had some forward movement in the LokSat storyline. Vikram finally gets evidence that Caleb Brown is involved with LokSat. They start investigating his alias and he comes to the precinct to tell Beckett to back off and threatens her. She tells him she knows he used to fight for what was right and was a good guy. She gives him a deadline to come to her by tomorrow night with all his LokSat info. He ends up doing that and giving her a phone with his LokSat instructions. Beckett is that much closer to figuring out the LokSat mess. She also mentions to Castle that maybe they should just get away. Too bad we all know that won't happen now.

It just makes me a little sad to watch it now. I don't want them to kill Beckett off, or give her some other ridiculous excuse for leaving Castle. Sigh. It's not looking good, though.

Did you watch? What did you think?

There Is No Castle Without Beckett

Yesterday's news that Stana Katic (Beckett) and Tamala Jones (Laney) won't be asked back for Castle's Season 9 was puzzling.  What could the network be thinking to let two amazing actresses that have been there from the beginning (not to mention one of the leads) go for budget cuts? Was this a joke?

Sadly, it was confirmed. No more Beckett. No more Caskett. Unbelievable.

The reason I started watching Castle was because I'm a writer. I loved the idea of a writer shadowing a cop, but it became so much more than that. The chemistry between this sassy, kick-butt detective and a writer looking for a muse was undeniable. The witty dialogue, the twisty cases, made for appointment television for me. There were so many funny quotes between them. "Do I look like a murderer to you? Yes, you kill my patience," is still probably my favorite. I loved that Espo and Ryan, along with Laney made up the little precinct family with all their spats and laughter. It was riveting to watch. Of course, watching Castle and Beckett fall in love was the highlight of every episode.

If you've followed my Castle reviews, you could see that this season has been awful for the most part. A silly storyline of LokSat to keep them apart fell flat, the focus on Castle's PI business just didn't have the team feel of the precinct, and the new characters of Hayley and Vikram weren't compelling at all. I've hung on for old time's sake, but yesterday made me question my loyalty. Do the powers that be not value the female lead? The show may be named Castle, but Beckett and Castle together are the heart of the show. How can they believe the show can go on without her? It doesn't make any sense at all.

Looking back, last season should have been it's last. The finale with all of them around that table, after Castle's speech, fit perfectly. I think I'll make that my own personal series finale, actually. This season has been painful to watch and without Beckett, there really is no Castle. She is the muse, the inspiration. Without that, we have a writer trying to be a PI and not doing a very good job of it. They need each other to make it work and the network can't seem to see it.

I'm sad that it's ending this way. I'm sad for the actresses who put their heart and souls into something and were let go due to "budget cuts." From the things I'm seeing on twitter, cast members Jon Huertas and Seamus Dever found out from social media which only underscores how badly this has been handled. As for me, I'm not sure I can even finish out watching the show this season. The joy is sucked out of it, that's for sure.  Maybe the best thing to do is watch my favorite reruns and remember how much I loved the show in past seasons and how fun it used to be.

I've missed that. I will miss that.

Always.  

Castle Recap Where He's Dreaming of a Genie

After last night's Castle, I can't stop thinking of this theme song. Last night's episode was a bit like that old TV show--campy and fun, although not the beginning. We start off with a man duct-taped to a chair, writing a letter while he sobs. He gives a piece of paper to a person dressed in black behind him, who promptly decapitates the guy. Ew.

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?

Castle Recap: Esposito's Past Comes Back

Wow. This episode of Castle was definitely an on-the-edge of your seat kind of thing. So many Esposito revelations!

We start out with two security guards talking while they work. Just as they turn around to get another load out of the truck, they see a masked guy on a wire, headed for the ceiling! Before they can really react, the masked gunman kills one of the guards.

Cut to the loft where Caskett is celebrating the fact that Kate has moved back in. Kate wants to get Castle a cup of coffee, but Lucy the household AI robot already makes it for him. The little triangular robot is acting jealous of Kate and was the running joke throughout the episode. *shrugs* It was weird.

They get called down to the crime scene and Castle finds a strange gel on the ground that smells like Chanel No. 5. Esposito recognizes the M.O. from a case back in the day where the crew used a combination of gel and perfume to disable certain security systems. Only one member of the crew that boosted a boatload of gold coins was caught. Her name was Sonia and she's already served nine years of her sentence. Beckett goes out to the prison to talk with her and doesn't really get anywhere until she says that if Sonia doesn't cooperate, Beckett will go to her parole hearing in three months and mention that she could have helped find the security guard's killer, but didn't. Sonia starts talking and says she can help because she still has some connections and can find the partner in her old crew nicknamed Hammerhead. Of course they'd have to give her a furlough to do that and Beckett agrees.

Esposito is acting weird about the case and Sonia, so he finally confesses to the team that he used to be engaged to Sonia. When he found out she was a criminal, though, he was the one to arrest her. But, you know, he's over her, it's all in the past. Yeah, Uh huh. She walks in and Espo's mouth is hanging open (until Castle closes it for him.)  She has on the same clothes from her arrest and it takes Espo back to that day. He watches while they fit her with a new ankle bracelet that has all kinds of features on it. Of course, Ryan is going to go undercover with her, but she says no, he wouldn't fit in and suggests Esposito.

Esposito thinks he can handle it, but from the moment they get in the car together, sparks are flying. They're rehashing history and how his family felt about what happened, why he turned her in. It's intense. Castle and Ryan are following behind them in a car, unashamedly listening in. They head to a bar in Spanish Harlem, and try to chat up the bartender. He's not having any of it and Espo ends up playing five-fingered fillet (that knifing game where he goes back and forth between the fingers with a knife and gets faster and faster. It's scary! I saw it on Alias once, too.) Anyway, the bartender tells them Hammerhead's real name was Joey and his grandma has an apartment nearby. Sonia and Espo head there, and the door is open. Of course Sonia goes in first, (weird!) and they separate, looking through the rooms. A guy with a shotgun comes at them and Sonia runs away, leaving Espo to his own devices.

Are Castle and Ryan any help? Nope. They lost the signal, but finally do see Sonia running away. Espo takes care of the gunman and cuffs him to a radiator. They catch Sonia who says it was just instinct to run away from a gun. Uh huh.

They bring Joey in for questioning, but he's a legitimate chicken businessman now and has an alibi for the night of the murder. Even so, they don't need Sonia anymore and Espo asks if he can take her back to the prison. Beckett agrees. This isn't going to end well. Sonia's talking about how she didn't even get a decent meal or a hot shower for her trouble and so Esposito takes her to his mother's house where they're having a family dinner. Turns out he didn't tell anyone what happened, just that he lost her. His family is big and loud and sweet and his grandma slaps him upside the head and says don't let her get away again. They eat and have a great time. When dinner's over, Sonia talks about her tough childhood and wishing she would have made different choices. She talks about how lucky Espo is to have a great family. (I loved his family, too, and finding out more about him.) She asks if she can have that hot shower and he agrees. Of course, Ryan calls just after she goes in the bathroom and says that the burner phone the inside guy was using leads back to Sonia. She was in on it! When he rushes into the bathroom, she's gone out the window. Called it!

Ryan tries to help Esposito track her down before they have to tell Beckett, but Esposito gets a lead that the mastermind of the whole thing was actually Sonia's dad. He heads over to an address he gets for him, alone. Ryan is not happy and he stops everyone in the bullpen to help him figure out where Espo has gone. Of course Espo goes in, tells everyone that he figured out that Sonia's dad was holding her share of the gold coin heist and when she found out he'd had a stroke, she had to escape so she could get the location of the hidden gold before he died.  Once he tells everyone, he gets whacked over the head and dragged away to a warehouse.

Beckett and Castle are up to speed and they go to the address where Espo was. All they see now though, is a bloodstain on the carpet and a gold coin under the bed. Now they're frantically looking for any clue as to where they would take Espo and finally figure out the one place the dad would go once every three months was an out of the way warehouse. They all head over there.

Espo is there with the bartender he did the five-fingered fillet with. That guy has a gun on Espo and as soon as they get the gold coins, he's going to kill him. Espo knocks out the bartender and keeps talking to Sonia about what really happened the day he found out she was a criminal. He was going to give everything up and run away. But he couldn't, because he's a cop. She still has a gun on him, but she's listening. She wants to go away with him now, but he says if he was strong enough to stay true to who he was, she's strong enough to face what's to come. And that's about two more years added on to her sentence. The guys rush in, Espo's okay, Sonia's in cuffs. Sonia and Espo get one more elevator scene, though, where he promises to visit her this time. I don't know. Do we really want Espo with a criminal? I liked him with Lanie. They were smart and sassy and fun together. I guess we'll see.

We end with Kate changing Lucy the AI robot to Linus which takes Castle by surprise. Linus does not like to be touched and zaps Castle for his trouble. Three's a crowd, my friends. Even with AI.

What did you think? Did you watch?

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?

Castle Recap and Review: The Missing Time

Well, we are back to Castle's "missing time" and I, for one, wish I could erase my memory of this storyline and anything to do with LokSat. But let's talk about last night's show.

We start out with a murder in a cemetery. The guy's throat was cut and he's holding his own heart. Ew. Why do people go to cemeteries at night? Especially people who should know better.

Cut to Castle with Hayley and Alexis in a swank hotel. They're in L.A. to see if Castle can remember anything else about when he was there during his "missing time." While he's deciding what to do first, he gets a card from the GDS or Greatest Detectives Society that there's been a murder and they need his help.  Of course Castle and Hayley head down to the murder scene and Hayley sweet talks the detective into letting them have a look-see. The detective tells them the victim had just flown in from New York, so Castle offers Espo and Ryan's services in New York for interviewing the next of kin.

Ryan claims Castle, calls him "good people" and they agree to interview the victim's sister. She says her brother was on the hunt for a serial killer that he called the Phantom and had a break in the case. (Which is exactly why the guy shouldn't have gone to a CEMETERY at NIGHT! It's just asking for the serial killer to well, kill you.)  The team figures out the victim was right and they are looking at a bi-coastal serial killer. They start looking at the victims who all have distinctive knife wounds. Lainey also asks Ryan to do a background check on her new boyfriend and not to tell Espo. Of course Ryan is a terrible liar and can't keep the secret, so Espo and Ryan think it would be funny to mess with Lainey and tell her the guy has a fetish with clowns and is a bedwetter. She confronts the new boyfriend and ends up breaking up with him, but turns the fire extinguisher on Ryan and Espo for being jerks about it. Meh. I felt sorry for Lainey that she couldn't trust Ryan to do that for her and be a grown up about it, but that's just me.

Castle does go to the restaurant he saw in his memory flash from last week and the owner recognizes him. Says Castle couldn't pay for his meal so he traded a watch and the guy still has it! Castle buys it back and as they're leaving, a strange man appears out of nowhere with another card from the GDS. Castle is being summoned to their lair. Which is actually a dark old house with some expensive furniture. And Gerald McRaney. (Who I really wish would have had a bigger role in the episode somehow!) They tell Castle that the victim was part of their society and his death creates an opening. But he'll have to compete for it with some blonde chick named Kendall. He is totally up for the challenge. (And I didn't know who Summer Glau was, but a lot of people were excited for her to be in this ep.)

The boys tell him that the victim was working undercover at Zenith Films, the same company that tanked the Nikki Heat films. Castle meets with Trevor the executive that provided "notes" on the script and he tells them the victim was investigating this film director named Austin. Hayley and Castle go over to his set, but Kendall is already there. Hayley distracts her and wrangles an invitation to Austin's home that evening with Kendall. The plan is for Castle to use the time to sneak in and search Austin's house. (He's terrible at sneaking. This isn't going to turn out well.) Kendall says she has the plans to the guy's house and there's a secret room which she points out to Castle. She's lying and takes the first chance she has to find the real secret room herself. Castle catches her and he finds the knife used as the murder weapon, right before Austin catches them all and kicks them out. Apparently that knife is one of five from a horror movie show. Back to square one.

While Hayley and her father are out investigating, Alexis is gleaning a lead from the watch and the tracker that was in it. She traces it to a Special Forces guy, but Hayley tells her to just forget about it. Alexis can't do that, though, and heads to the guy's mother's house in Pasadena. The lady is showing her pictures of her son and she comes across a picture of the guy with Hayley. Uh oh. Alexis leaves and Hayley is sitting creepily in the back seat and I really thought she was going to do something to Alexis. But no, she's genuine in her friendship for Castle and Alexis and finally comes clean. (Too bad. That would have been awesome if she worked for LokSat and was evil. Oh well.) Hayley has worked with Castle's father and a year and half ago got a message from him to keep an eye on Castle. She used the tracker, but he still got away from her and when she caught up, Castle had been shot and wanted his memory erased. Castle believes her and initially decides to let his "missing time" go. For the love can we all let it go! (Are you singing that song now? I am.)

Meanwhile, Lainey has figured out that two victims were killed at the same time on different coasts so they're really dealing with two killers. Now they just have to figure out where the last two prop knives went. The GDS aren't happy with how things are going after the Austin incident, and, in order to win, Castle throws Kendall off the scent with a fake address of who he thinks has the knife. She takes the bait hook, line, and sinker and is out of his hair while he brings in the killer.  The boys track down Jordan the screenwriter and he flips out saying they'll never catch his partner. He takes a hostage and the boys are forced to kill him. Now to find the partner. Hayley tracks down Jordan's screenplay called Gemini Killers and it has notes on it that remind Castle of the guy who left notes on his Nikki Heat script. It's the executive guy, Trevor. Castle and Hayley go to him and he is babbling the whole time about finding someone who could pull this bi-coastal killing thing off. He admits everything and is taken into custody. I totally called that one.

Castle is offered the spot in GDS but he gives it to Kendall since he already works with the greatest detective. Who sadly, did not make an appearance in this episode. It's just not Castle without Beckett. Sigh. But as they're packing, Castle tells Hayley he can't let the missing time go and so she shows him a video he made before he erased his memory. Apparently, after his Thai adventure and being lost at sea, etc. etc., Castle also had time to track Bracken's partner and get involved in the LokSat mess deeply enough to get shot for his trouble. Of course, if he didn't erase his memory then Beckett would find out and be killed. Castle is stunned and takes the blame for the FBI team that was killed. Seriously? How would it be his fault that highly trained government agents were killed? Okay. But that's the end of the ep this week.

So, the murder mystery was good with lots of twists and turns, but missing a crucial element with no Beckett and no signature Caskett banter. It's just not as good when they're not together.  Castle's missing time and being involved in the LokSat mess isn't making a lot of sense and I think the episodes that feature this storyline just go too far down the rabbit hole. For me, it would have been so interesting to have Hayley be a LokSat operative watching Castle than just a spy for Castle's dad, but I guess it does give her more of a connection to the show to be a friend to Castle's dad. I don't know. It wasn't my favorite episode, but it wasn't horrible either.

Best line of the night was when Castle said he already works with the best detective. Awww. Love how he loves Beckett.  Best moment was Lainey turning the fire extinguisher on the boys. Go Lainey!

Did you watch last night? What did you think?

Castle and the Immigration Ep Recap and Review

Last night's Castle had some good moments, but also was more than a little confusing!

It starts out with a guy feeding reptiles *shiver* when one of them gets out. He puts the lizard back in and gets bludgeoned to death by a shadowy figure. The killer then puts the body IN THE SNAKE cage. (Do they call it a cage? A pit? I'm not sure, but I wouldn't want my body in one whatever it's called!)

Cut to Castle yelling at Mr. Cursor. Oh man, I laughed at that because, as a writer, Mr. Cursor has mocked me many times. Very realistic and funny. Beckett gets called to a murder, but says she can't take Castle because, you know, LokSat might be watching. But if he was watching, wouldn't he see her in the loft, pretty much back with Castle anyway? Well, we'll just hope no LokSat people were looking.

The team figures out that the guy in the snake pit (cage?) is Eddie and he's a former El Salvadoran cop. He also went to an ESL class, but when Espo and Ryan go to question the class, no one will talk to them. Well, guess who they call in to go undercover? Yep, you guessed it! Castle. Um, why would you call in a famous author who has been on the news and talk shows to go undercover? And is LokSat just not watching anymore while they work together and live together? What's the point of pretending anymore?

Anyway, the students in the ESL class open up a bit to Castle and his French Canadian chef persona and the team is able to figure out that Eddie was protecting and helping them. He helped the lady from Senegal get the money back that had been extorted from her. (And he beat up the extortionists and trashed their place, too.) He was helping Achmed track down a missing neighbor named Anita when things got dicey, though. Ryan and Espo start to investigate Anita's disappearance as well and fingerprints lead them to a guy named Marco. He shoots at them, but our fearless duo bring him in! He has a key on him and when Ryan and Espo find the locker it goes to, they are thrown on the floor and cuffed by the FBI. Of course the FBI team leader is a jerk (quel surprise! No stereotypes here) and won't cooperate with Beckett. She tries to reach out to her FBI contacts but gets nothing. My question, sometimes Beckett acts like a captain and sometimes she's still a detective. I wish they would figure it out and make her one or the other because it seems odd when Beckett is fulfilling dual roles. I miss Montgomery.

Of course our other new person has to have a cameo somewhere, so Vikram pops up to save the day when he tracks Anita to a detention center in Texas. Surprisingly, all leads are pointing to a Judge Caldwell. He signs the deportation orders and gets paid for every bed he fills in the Texas detention center. Marco is his helper in finding the undocumented immigrants, making them pay until there's no more money, and then getting them to the deportation center.

Castle and his ESL friends distract the judge as he's heading to work and it was cute, but when the final confrontation comes to a head, the judge figures out it's a setup and doesn't confess, merely gives a clue. And this is where it gets confusing.  The judge flew in Eddie's old enemy from El Salvador. Apparently Eddie had a hand in the guy's brother's murder. But the guy's brother wasn't really murdered and Eddie was protecting him. So, the guy went to the zoo, but didn't kill Eddie. Um, why did he come then? Just to chat? It made no sense to me except to have the red herring.

The team starts to wonder how the judge knew about Eddie being enemies with the guy, though, and of course Castle figures it all out and finally gets to say "j'accuse." (His French accent for his undercover gig wasn't bad, really! Nathan Fillion is amazing as always.) They go back to the ESL class and arrest the teacher. I totally called that one. The teacher helps figure out who is undocumented in the class and of course a lot of his students have ended up in the Texas detention center once he give their info to the judge and his cronies. Sad, really.

Castle throws a party for the ESL class and Martha waxes poetic about the country being founded on immigrants. Alexis stands up to say she will finish teaching their ESL class.

So, all's well that end's well. The show is still trying to find a spot for Hayley and had her come in to help with questioning a suspect who was a Geordie so the guys couldn't understand a word he said. She's also helping to run Castle's PI business. But really, there's not a lot for her to do.

This episode also had Castle remembering some things from his "missing time" and he figured out he was in Korea Town in L.A. Of course he's going to go there and investigate. Part of me was hoping they'd let that missing time thing go because it hasn't made a lot of sense from the get-go, but hey, when the missing time storyline is better than the LokSat mess, well, we'll just go with it.

Best part of the episode was Ryan saying they'd had an exciting day and he hoped they didn't have anything else happen that shift and right after they were thrown to the ground and handcuffed. Second best part was Castle's French accent and attempt to waylay the judge with his new ESL friends. Third best was Perlmutter trying to set up Beckett with his twin brother. Ha!

So, a cute episode with an immigration message and a case that was so twisty that sometimes it didn't make sense with the plot holes. Did you watch? What did you think?  

Castle Recap and Review--A Room With No View

This week's Castle takes us back to what it does best---Caskett working out a twisty turny mystery that has the audience glued to its seat.

We start out with a woman in her apartment. She goes into the closet and when she comes back out, someone has drawn a weird symbol on her mirror and she's shot and killed.

Cut to Castle interrupting Martha and Alexis at lunch. He spills that Stephen King has reached out and wants to collaborate with him on a book. They're surprised since Castle has a "feud" with Mr. King over their love of differing baseball teams. But Castle is too excited to think anything but that it's all water under the bridge now and he goes to the address he's given. It's a rat-infested run down building. Even going in, the lights start to go out and he thinks it's just Mr. King trying to scare him, but yeah, it's not and he's abducted.

The team is investigating the murder and they don't have much to go on. The co-workers tell them that there was a guy at work who was passed over for a promotion because the murder victim lied about him. And he owns a white van that was seen at the victim's apartment. But he does give them the clue that the victim was digitizing some VHS tapes.

When Castle comes to, he's in an elementary school classroom with three other men. He tries to find out if they have any connection and they don't. They were all lured there and have no idea why. They know they're being taped, though. One guy panics and breaks the glass to get the hatchet out in case of fire. That lets out a bee who stings the one guy allergic to bees. Castle finds a puzzle with the supposed epi-pen inside, but it's really poison and he has to solve more clues to get the antidote. Honestly without Castle there, the guys just would have watched the poor allergic man die. I guess Castle must be used to being kidnapped by this point, I mean, Alexis says later in the episode that her dad is kidnapped twice a year, but it feels like more than that. Anyway, Castle is able to keep his head under kidnapping pressure.

Castle finds another clue behind the clock that leads to a key in the door. When they insert it, the insert in the door opens to reveal a gun with three bullets and a message that the last one standing will be freed. One guy is all, give me the gun and Castle just gives him that are you kidding me look? He talks them out of it, but I would definitely be freaked out if I were stuck in a room with a gun and someone who doesn't mind killing me.

Back at the precinct, the guys have been looking at the video and it's just two kids doing puzzles, wearing necklaces with the symbol that was on the murder victim's mirror. They figure out that the kids in the videos were twins from the Northcliff family and when they bring in someone who worked for the family, she tells them the female twin recently committed suicide and her parents did psychological experiments on the twins relating to separation anxiety. As soon as she said that, I knew who the murderer was, too.

Where is Beckett you might ask? She was also lured to the building and is in a room with the wife and girlfriend of two of the men Castle is stuck with. Every now and then each room gets shown what the other room is doing and it's messing with their psyche. Both Beckett and Castle are working to get them out, but not getting a lot of help from their fellow prisoners. When the ladies open the door to get the gun, one woman takes it and decides she has no problem with it. Of course the men are shown this on the TV feed and her husband is all, welp if my wife is going to murder someone, I will too! When he shoots, though, it backfires and kills him. Meanwhile, Beckett has taken the bullets out of the gun for the women and so her crazy person can't kill anyone. She ties crazy woman's hands behind her back.

By this time Alexis has realized her father is missing and the team is looking for him. They go to the Northcliff's house where they are tied up. The are sitting in front of the feed showing both rooms with Castle and Beckett and their fellow prisoners. But they won't be prisoners for long! Beckett goes all MacGyver and blasts her way out of the room. Castle uses a crowbar to pry it open. Before they can get outside, though, they are trapped in a room once again where the door will only open if three people push down levers. The ones who have been branded with the weird symbol from the mirror are supposed to stay, but Castle and Beckett break the rules and they both stay. The maniac behind it all is exposed as one of the crazies in the room with them. (I called it!) Brandon the other twin is mad his parents were allowed to do the experiments so he gathered people that should have helped him---Beckett from the twelfth (policeman), teachers, some school psychiatrist, you get the picture. He wants them to choose which loved one will die, but Castle refuses. (This whole scene points out how dumb the LokSat storyline is. Some crazed guy can figure out that Castle and Beckett love each other and would do anything for each other, but hey, maybe LokSat is dumber than a box of rocks and will think they're not together. Yeah. Ridiculous.) Anyways, Brandon has lost it, but now he's stuck with Caskett and he has a rifle. Castle and Beckett get him monologuing about his sad life while Castle surreptitiously unscrews a pipe from the lever and goes after the guy with it. Beckett disarms him, just as the team bursts in.

It ends with Hailey coming to take a brooding Alexis out for fun and Caskett getting drinks and being cozy at home.  Awww.

So, a fun psychological episode with a lot of tense moments! If you put LokSat out of your mind, this is how the season should have been from the beginning with Castle and Beckett figuring out a mystery and ending the episode with a smile.

Did you watch?

Double Eps of Castle--Oh Yeah!

We had back to back episodes of Castle this week and that makes me really happy. And I was even more happy to see Caskett working together.

Sunday's episode starts out with Castle at a party and he needs to use the restroom, only the one on the main floor is occupied. He goes upstairs and sees a woman in a wait staff uniform with a fireplace poker stabbing another woman. He shouts and she immediately runs away.

Fast forward five months and Castle is about to testify in the woman's trial (her name is Nina). It should be a slam dunk case until the new defense attorney comes in--Caleb Brown who, as you might recall, Beckett and Vikram are looking into because of Caleb's connection to Loksat. Caleb absolutely destroys Castle's testimony on the stand, telling the jury about Castle's memory loss, falsely accusing someone, and of course being framed by 3XK for something he didn't do. Castle crumbles under the pressure and says maybe Nina didn't kill Sadie after all.  (My thoughts when I was watching this was, why didn't the prosecutor object to anything? Badgering the witness, leading the witness, and he didn't even redirect after Castle was humiliated. It was a glaring mistake and made Marcus the prosecutor look incompetent.)

Castle and Beckett and the boys start looking more closely into the murder to find more evidence on Nina. They find footage outside a bar of the night before the murder and Nina was there with the murder victim---kissing. They also looked like they were arguing which gave Nina a great motive to kill. But then, when Castle and Ryan are at the murder scene, they notice the basketball standard was moved (Nina used it to escape from the second story window the night of the murder.) That went to premeditation, but Castle isn't so sure. My question, why didn't they try to get some fingerprints off that basketball standard?

Castle decides he needs to question Nina, but the defense won't let him anywhere near her, so he goes to the judge's chambers and insults her alma mater. The judge is tolerant for a while, but after a phone call that her home has been broken into and Castle's claim he can find out who did it if she'll just give him a list of anyone who went to the same university as the judge in the area, and the judge throws him in holding for contempt. (It was pretty funny. Castle always delivers on the comedy side.)

Nina is also in holding and tells Castle her side of the story. She found Sadie like that, she loved her, she would never hurt her. Sadie had asked Nina to get the champagne glass of Mr. Masters, the host. So, once the boys bail him out, he goes to talk to Mr. Masters. If Sadie wanted DNA maybe she'd had an affair and needed to check paternity on her daughter? But Mr. Masters is infertile, so, no go on that. But he does have a secret safe that you need a fingerprint to open and his wife forces him to open it after Castle offers to name a villain in his book after her. (I named a villain after my neighbor once. She also thought it was cool!)

Apparently, Sadie and Mr. Masters had come across five million dollars in CIA money when they were reporting in Iraq. Sadie took it and Mr. Masters was blackmailing her for more money to be thrown his way. He had a tape as evidence and she wanted it. But he didn't kill her.

Castle remembers that the person in the occupied bathroom downstairs was Sadie's husband and it all comes unraveled from there. Sadie had been known for her affairs. Her husband saw her go upstairs and used the basketball standard to peek in and see what she was doing. One thing led to another and he killed her. Nina is free and mouths a grateful "thank you" to Castle. Awww.

I loved that the team was back together. It didn't even seem as if last week happened with their ridiculous claims of seeing other people and not working together and slaps etc. This episode showcased what made me love Castle. *le sigh*

Then we got another episode last night! This one also hit all the right notes. It starts out with a guy in an abandoned building at night, looking for something. The door slams shut and when he opens it again, he gets his throat cut. Ewww!

Cut to Castle coming into the office with a lot of shopping bags, needing Martha and Alexis's opinion on the perfect baby gift. He had baby Kevlar! Oh man. Baby light sabers, scary lullabies. So funny. But Alexis already has the perfect gift and he takes that. Martha does notice he doesn't seem too upset about Beckett these days.

At the crime scene Espo tries using howdy instead of yo, but it doesn't go over well. Beckett notices some ink on the victim and Lainey estimates his time of death. Apparently some homeless guy heard a car peel out of there so they're going to talk to him some more. Meanwhile, the victim's father is a Russian diplomat so Beckett goes to question him. The dad tells Beckett his son was distraught over his mother's death and hung out with diplobrats who do outrageous things because they have diplomatic immunity. Of course the Russians would like Beckett to work with one of their security men, Vasily, and she agrees.

Vasily is a character. He loves Castle's books and he also loves hugs. He can't believe Castle and Beckett aren't together and makes a call to the higher-ups who ask them to work together on the case. Now that part didn't make any sense since Beckett is trying to "protect" Castle, and is sneaking around to be with him, but he's at the precinct all the time anyway and apparently they can be ordered to work together. But I won't let this ridiculousness ruin it for me.

The guys figure out the peeling out car belonged to one of the diplobrats. They bring him in for questioning, but he mocks them, knowing they can't touch him because of his diplomatic immunity. Beckett is doing all she can to keep Vasily away from the case and Castle takes the guy out to lunch to hear his story ideas. The diplobrat also happens to be there and Vasily and Castle go over to question him. Vasily threatens to cut his feet off and the diplobrat admits he dropped the victim off and left. It was actually a really funny scene. Vasily plays a hitman/funny man so well!

With the ink on the victim's body turning out to be his mother's accident case file number, the team knows he was looking into that. They retrace his steps, find out the mom was actually having an affair with a sleeper agent and was a Russian sleeper agent herself! Vasily actually finds and kidnaps the sleeper agent and is going to torture him but Castle says no way, let me show you that you don't have to do that. Vasily gives him one minute and Castle does figure out that there's going to be an assassination attempt. The team goes to the Russian consulate and Beckett saves one guy's life, but the murder victim's father is shot. It's a through and through, though, and he'll live.

Castle also meets his stepmother when Kate calls her in to consult. She does admit that she's been working with his stepmother and Castle gets upset. I wish he'd get mad and lay it on the table. Kate's dumb Locksat secret has cost them a lot of trust in their marriage (not to mention character development, but I digress). Castle does get a nice convo with his stepmother, though, about his dad, and she tells Castle his dad is proud of him, which Castle needed to hear, so that was good.

Anyway, they look at the sniper weapon being so old, figure out it's from an old Russian cache and get footage of the woman who hauled it off. It was the murder victim's mother! She's not dead. They bring her in and she tells them her husband has been passing Russian secrets and is the leak in the consulate. He killed her son (he wasn't the guy's real dad) but she couldn't do anything against him because he's too powerful. Beckett and Castle go to see him at the consulate and he is heading back to Russia. They are disappointed justice won't be served until Vasily tells them the guy is going to the coldest outpost in Russia. Russian justice is complicated.

Caskett share a sweet moment together in the Russian consulate and it ends on a happy note. All is right as I bask in the Castle loveliness. I hope the rest of the season is just like this!

Did you watch the double feature? What did you think?

Castle Is Back!

After what seemed like an eternity, Castle is finally back! Yay!

The episode opens with Martha rehearsing, singing on a stage with three ladies to back her up. The stage hand is supposed to have fake snow flutter down on them, but when he tugs on the rope, a lot of blood comes down mixed with the snow. Ick.

Martha calls Castle who is reconnecting with Beckett on the sly. He rushes down to the crime scene where the team has assembled. Poor Martha is shaken up and Alexis offers to take her home. The team uncovers that the victim's name is Robin and she's an ex-con. Her boss said he heard her arguing with someone she called Mama, but he didn't stick around. The boys track down Mama who is a drug-runner, and she tells them that Robin had hooked up with a new family. The team also interviews two lawyers who helped Robin and other ex-cons with their foundation, but they seem to have no idea about anything.  Castle gets a lead on that with a set of emojis off the victim's phone and Alexis decodes it to mean Shepherd Torres Mall in Spanish Harlem.

Castle and Alexis head to the abandoned mall and it's tense when they go in alone. I hate when he does that! It looks like a dark and dirty empty warehouse, but they're being watched. Castle sends out a 911 to Espo and Ryan, but then find out it's only an underground a capella get together. Castle and Alexis find some girls that have the same bracelet as Robin and then the police break up the party. Once they question Robin's friends, however, they find a whole new angle to Robin's life. She was going to be competing in a national a capella show with her ex-con friends. They'd recently kicked Agnes out of their group, however, and she was very upset about it.

The boys track down Agnes at her ex-boyfriend's apartment, but before they go in, they accuse Castle of cheating on Beckett since she randomly slapped Castle across the face at the precinct earlier. Surprisingly, he goes along with it and says his new girlfriend's name is Svetlana. It was so out of character and I know the writers were going for laughs, but Espo and Ryan have been front and center for the Caskett love story and this seems so ridiculous that they would believe something like that. Sigh. They're mean to him for the rest of the show over it.

Anyway, they go into the apartment and Castle is once again our NYPD bumbling helper. It was a fairly funny scene however. They take her in and Agnes says Robin asked her to come to the theater to be a bodyguard, but didn't say why.

The team turns to the a capella competition itself and question some of the contestants. Corbin Bleu is guest-starring and he has a singing showdown with Espo. Who knew Espo was so awesome at singing? That was great until Castle ruins the moment by trying to beat box and spitting on everyone. Corbin runs, however, when they question his whereabouts. Beckett takes him down and he admits that he was trying to bribe the head guy over the contest to make sure Robin's team didn't win. The head guy says he didn't kill Robin because as soon as she saw her pre-performance video package she took off.  The team tracks her movements the day of her murder to the rich guy's house who claims to have saved Robin's life the day she stole a car and got arrested. He admits to Beckett that he didn't really save her, that she was already safe with a scarf wrapped around her injury.

After some awesome detective work, the team figures out the scarf is missing from evidence, and they track down the detective who handled the case and he admits that he was paid $50,000 to make it disappear. Alexis cracks the picture account of the girl who had the party and the scarf's owner is finally revealed--it was the woman lawyer who was running a foundation to help girls like Robin. She admits it was really her that stole and crashed the car and she let Robin take the fall and go to prison. She didn't kill her, though, she was out of town. Yep, it was the husband. He's arrested for Robin's murder.

Cut to Martha inspiring the rest of the girls on Robin's a capella team and Beckett and Castle keeping up the lie that they are seeing other people while meeting each other secretly.

I thought the mystery was really great this week with lots of funny moments and twists and turns. The Caskett thing is still unrealistic and out of character, but at least they're back together I guess. All in all, I'm glad the show is back on and we get two episodes next week, one on Sunday and one on Monday! Yay!

Did you watch? What did you think?  

Castle And My Death (Or I'm Sick And Feel Like Death)

Well, I just got the news yesterday that Castle will not actually be coming back Feb. 1st, it's coming back Feb. 8th.

Ugh.

It's been a really long hiatus already. But the worst part is the head people were teasing a whole lot of stuff for it's return and none of it sounded that interesting to me. Do they even hear the fans, see the ratings, or know how terrible this season has been so far? Are they trying to get Castle cancelled? *deep sigh*

Why do new show-runners have to kill everything good about a show and make it a shell of what it used to be?

And just to compound that terrible news, I'm sick.  This is my life right now.

So, I think I am going to have a pity party. With ice cream. Because sickness and someone putting a whole bunch of terrible storylines on your favorite TV show deserves really good ice cream and lots of it.  Care to join me?

Where Castle Doesn't Get To Be Mad

So last night's fall finale of Castle was hugely disappointing for me on the Caskett front. We start the episode with a murder victim in the water and she's traced back to a cruise line. Oh and she had heroin in her stomach. Beckett and Castle go onto the ship to try to find the crime scene and are under a time crunch when the captain sets sail. They talk to fellow dancers (Castle pretends to be a rich guy who knows how to dance) and Beckett talks to some old ladies and is able to find the murder victim's video camera that has footage on it of heroin being stashed in a barrel. Beckett finds and chases the guy down that packed it and they trace him back to a cartel that has connections to the silly new obsession of Vulcan and the CIA mole. Laura the murder victim was only mixed up in it because she was an environmentalist documenting the trash being thrown off of ships and saw the heroin being loaded. She was caught and killed for that, but luckily her murderer is apprehended pretty quickly and also provides a "lead" on the Vulcan Simmons thing. Supposedly.

Vikram also finds a new office for their little clandestine operation. It's in a strip club that's been closed down. Ugh. He also tells Kate that he just sent her that text to ruin her anniversary dinner with Castle. He's becoming such a jerk with not a lot of purpose other than exposition and blocking Caskett. Double ugh. Hayley almost breaks through their firewalls to hack in for Castle and find out what that text from their anniversary meant and who sent it to Beckett. By this time Beckett realizes he's onto her and they block him at the last second, but it's also a sign that they need to talk. Which Castle wants to do. He corners her at the precinct and is so hurt and stunned that she shut him out. Again. He calls her out and it was awesome.  For just a second I see fear in Kate's eyes that she might lose this great guy that has stood by her for so long. But then she comes to his house, says sorry, and all is forgiven without her having to do more than crook her finger. Sigh.

Don't get me wrong, I'm so glad Castle knows about Kate's secret and her silly new obsession and he called her on it. That part was great. The problem was the follow up, when she finally says, okay I'm going to let you in and I'm sorry I didn't think of it before, Castle pretty much just shrugs and says okay.  All is well.

Um, seriously? He doesn't even get to be a little bit more upset than that? She shut him out, stomped on his heart, and that's it? He deserved more. Why doesn't she ever have to work for the relationship and be accountable for her actions in the marriage?

Yet, this is why it has seemed so disingenuous and unrealistic from the beginning of this bizarre separation of Caskett. None of it makes any sense and as good as Nathan Fillion and Stana Katic are, I wish the writers would have trusted them to have it out. Let them dig deep into what a big obstacle in their marriage looks like and how they deal with it in a way that's true to the characters and what they've been through. Don't make it something akin to leaving the toilet seat up with shrugs and sorry and all is well. There are so many ways this could have been a forward impetus to their relationship and how they deal with things like this as a married couple, but instead it just seemed like a plot point with no real value.

So, to sum up, the case was okay. The boys were hardly on. Other than that, I'm hoping for better when the show returns in February.

*crosses fingers*

Castle Review: The Last Seduction

It was Castle and Beckett's first anniversary and well, it wasn't a great one. *sigh* But, the boys definitely stole the show tonight and made it worth watching.

We start out with a darkened apartment and a guy realizing that a knife is missing out of his knife block. He goes toward a closed door with a baseball bat and throws open the door, but the killer is behind him and he gets stabbed. A lot. (Lesson learned: turn on some lights! Don't turn your back on open doorways when you're trying to find a killer in your apartment!)

Cut to Ryan and Espo in counseling and it's not going well. The therapist says they need a buffer and when Castle shows up to the murder scene to ask them to distract Beckett so he can prepare an anniversary surprise, they take him on as their buffer. Which also means he goes to the murder scene with them and helps to solve the murder. (And once again makes the "time out" with Beckett nonsensical.) But, anyway, they get a hit on some fingerprints at the crime scene and bring the guy in. He tells them that he was friends with the murder victim, Scott, and they ran a scam to get women. One would get aggressive, the other would "save" the lady.  He was Scott's wingman. Vikram finds out that Scott was getting $5000 each time he seduced someone and they find blackmail photos at Scott's secret apartment. One of the photos shows a tattoo on a woman's lower back and the team thinks they can find her. (They also have sketches of the possible women from Scott's wingman.) At a spa. Hailey and Beckett go into the steam room with four of the prime suspects and the women recognize Beckett so they won't show their tattoos, but a woman gets scared and runs away so a chase ensues. Of course she's the woman in the blackmail picture and is caught and questioned. She tells them she was with Scott, but she didn't kill him and in fact, he was apologetic to her and seemed to be having a crisis of conscience. Her alibi is confirmed and the team is back to square one.

They do find a common connection, though, in that the same divorce lawyer, Lindsey Trent, seems to be the one setting up Scott's liaisons. The boys ask Castle to go in undercover to get a look at the lawyer log so they can see what Scott's last job was, which he reluctantly does, while they watch live stream.  Beckett catches them, though, and takes it to her office to watch. The divorce lawyer asks Castle if there's any hope for his marriage and he hesitates (I would, too!) and Beckett seems oddly surprised. (What did she expect? She's shutting him out with no explanation and no reason. But I digress. ) The lawyer does catch Castle before he can look at her lawyer log and he's escorted out by security, only Alexis gets in the office and takes pics of the lawyer log. They get a name and bring in a billionaire playboy for questioning. His lawyer, Lindsey, saves him, and he's let go. (But he's so slimy!) The team is going to investigate him further, though, because it's obvious he's hiding something.

Castle has been trying to set up a dinner for his first anniversary with Beckett. He has a surprise for her in her office that is adorable (confetti and everything) and she agrees to go out with him on a time out from their time out. He's so earnest and I hate that he's trying so hard and she's not really that sad about it from all appearances.  Before they can go out, though, the boys start fighting again and they separate to go and help them---Beckett to Espo and Castle to Ryan. Their sacrifice doesn't seem to do much good, though, since they both ask for new partners. Sad!

In a weird twist, the team finds out that Scott was hired to seduce the billionaire's mom to destroy her reputation because he wanted to take over the company and outsource its employees and the mom wanted to keep it in the country and employ people who were like family. Ryan and Espo go to Lindsey's office to bring her in for questioning, but she pulls a gun. Just as she's about to shoot Espo, Ryan lunges and takes the bullet for him. His notepad saves his life, though, but not before Espo is terrified that Ryan has been seriously wounded. It's a really good scene and definitely the highlight of the show. They catch Lindsey and then hug out their issues. *sniff* So so sweet.

Beckett goes over to Castle's house and they're intimate. It feels shallow, though, since it doesn't solve anything and Beckett is pretty much just leaving right after. She does get a text from Vikram saying he's found something and to contact him ASAP and Castle reads it. It makes Castle wonder, but when he asks Beckett if everything is okay, she says yep and leaves it at that. Secrets are never good and their relationship falls further and further down this really bizarre rabbit hole. 

So, lots of mixed feelings on this episode.  Ryan and Espo made me laugh and played the emotions so well through the entire episode of therapy, anger, and then concern and love. If I'm going to end on a positive note, I'll end with that!

Did you watch? What did you think?

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?

The Nose Knows--Castle

Last night's Castle had some really funny moments! Of course, there's still the gut-punch of the Caskett mess, but at least we had some laughs, too.

We start out with a woman driving through a parking garage. She sees a weird guy standing there with a silver briefcase, but she drives by and parks. Just as she's pressing the elevator button, she hears two gunshots and quickly gets inside. Only the shooter in a ski mask does, too.

The team gets called to the scene and find it odd that the murdered man has a bulletproof car with a hidden compartment in it. It makes sense that he would be in security of some sort. Ryan and Esposito are waiting to hear the results of their sergeant's exam. Castle has bought some celebratory champagne and goes down to give it to them, but has to quickly pawn off one bottle on another officer when Ryan finds out he didn't pass, but Espo did. So sad for Ryan. Why they gotta mess with the bromance?

Kate interviews the murdered man's brother who has nothing useful to add except that his brother helped pay for all of his expenses.  They find out who the anonymous caller was that called in the shooting and Ryan and Espo head to her house. She won't let them in, however, and is quite eccentric. They take her down to the station, but it doesn't go well. Ryan asks Beckett to interview her since she said he smelled like dirty diapers and Espo's cologne smelled like Satan's sweat. Haha! She has hyperosmia, which is a heightened sense of smell. Beckett doesn't really get a lot out of her either, except a generic description of the killer. As she's leaving Castle talks to Beckett for a minute and she tells him she needs to come over later to get the rest of her stuff. Yeah, gut punch. The look on Castle's face! Ugh. He follows Mia to the elevator and she tells him Beckett's pheremones were off the charts when she was talking to Castle. He proposes using her to get Beckett back, just having her tell him when he's being charming for Beckett and when he's being annoying. She declines, but he gets more information out of her about the killer, so he calls Beckett with it.

No one seems inclined to believe her really, until she tells him she smelled an oil painting in the briefcase. That jives with what Hayley the bounty hunter told them---that the murdered guy was transporting a multi-million dollar Van Gogh. She wants it back for the insurance company and tells the team what they want to know if they'll let her in on the investigation.  Esposito gets some ATM footage of a possible suspect named Starks and they bring him in for a "smell" ID. It's so funny to see Mia sniffing these guys. But he's not the killer. The killer smelled like nail polish remover.

Kate tells their suspect, Starks, that he had been ID'd and he confesses that he was at the parking garage, but when he got there, the guy was already dead. The interesting thing is he was hired by the same guy who supposedly hired the dead guy to transport the painting. The boys go to talk to him. The boss says that the dead guy, Justin, jumped the job and took it from Liam because it was a six figure payout. So Espo and Ryan go to talk to Liam, but he runs. They chase him into a building and separate to catch him, but Ryan ends up accidentally shooting Espo. In the butt. (He's fine, it's just a flesh wound, but he does become the "butt" of a lot of jokes throughout the rest of the episode.)

They put an APB out on the Rolls Royce Liam was driving and Castle goes to a car place with Mia that just happens to have the wanted Rolls Royce. Liam catches Castle opening the trunk, (Mia is in the driver's seat) and pulls a gun. Mia expertly backs up the car and knocks Liam in the trunk. She's so happy to have helped! It is really cute how Castle gets her back to the land of the living, and looking at her hyperosmia as a talent and not a curse. (He does resort to a juvenile fart joke to get Mia out of her apartment, but my teens found that funny.)

All the evidence is pointing to Liam, but Mia tells them the painting in that briefcase is a forgery. They check into that while Castle takes Mia to his loft for a bland dinner cooked by Martha. Mia loves Martha and saw her in a play years ago. It was a great scene with the two of them. I love Martha. But a gunman breaks up the party, a guy from the original family that owned the Van Gogh. He's desperate to get it back, but Castle disarms him and accidentally breaks Mia's nose. Beckett arrives at the scene to hug him and ask if he's okay, but she pauses outside the loft and that sort of ruined it for me. I wish she would have just rushed in.

Well, the desperate guy didn't kill Justin either, but he does give them the clue they need. He was Justin's partner and they were going to switch the real Van Gogh with the forgery and then split the money from selling it. Castle and Beckett go back to the parking garage to reenact the crime and search for clues. They find a hair on the air conditioning unit (which standing near it would make the killer smell like nail polish remover). They do a DNA test and it matches to Justin's brother. Apparently he had a gambling problem and didn't mean to kill his brother, he just needed the money. Oy.

The boys are trying to get through the angst of Espo passing and Ryan not. They hug it out, but Ryan knocks out Espo's cane and things are not resolved. Beckett suggests counseling might be an option. That could be funny if handled right.

Castle brings Mia paper flowers to apologize for breaking her nose and she thanks him for helping her live again. She also does a nice voiceover of how she helps perfume industries bottle love and passion and hope, but Beckett and Castle have the real thing. (I wish Kate's actions showed that a little more, but whatever). They do show Castle and Beckett sniffing each other's shirts and smiling. Because, the nose knows.

Did you watch? What did you think?