Anybody Watch Castle?

CASTLE - SERIES WRAP-UP

Castle

So my second-favourite currently airing (kind of) TV show Castle concluded last night with the season 8 finale, and its 173rd episode. Here, I attempt to explain my thoughts on the final episode and season as a whole, rate the seasons in order of preference and highlight just a few of my top episodes.

Quick Person of Interest side note

I found out the reason 5x04 "6,741" aired a day early was because it was shown in Canada a day early and thus uploaded to streaming sites - yep - a day early. No such luck today though. I'll have to wait for 5x05 like the rest of us. Dammit!

Castle Season 8

I don't want to be too harsh on this show given I've just watched the finale and was absolutely appalled, because overall it was an incredible show. But this section is on season 8 alone - and season 8 alone was subpar. The show's creator, Andrew Marlowe, and his wife, Terri Miller, departed at the end of s7, handing the reigns to Alexi Hawley and Terence Winter, both longstanding writers and contributors to the show - who systematically tore apart everything it stood for.

In fairness to them, it wasn't completely their fault. Reports of Castle's titular star Nathan Fillion's arrogance leading to a clause in his contract stating he should work with his co-lead Stana Katic only two days a week throughout s8's filming put a big dent in any plans the writers may have had - and muddies the waters of hatred I had for Hawley and Winter when, at the start of the season (not knowing about this clause) they were taking the blame for the dynamic storyline written to freshen the series.

That dynamic storyline? Breaking up Castle and Beckett.

Seven years of well-written character building destroyed by the arrogance of its lead, whose supposed diva attitude led not only to breakdowns with his co-lead, but reportedly saw 4 writers quit because they couldn't deal with him and a clause in his contract where he doesn't have to work with someone more than 2 days a week.

Excuse me?

I can't do that where I work! I don't work the hours they do or for as many days as they do, but I can't demand a contract saying "this person must not be anywhere within my precious vicinity for at least 5 days of the week, else I'm fucking off". What does ABC's acceptance of this demand say about them - and what message does it send to Nathan Fillion - that he's irreplaceable whereas Stana isn't?

Anyway, that's the rumour, and no one from ABC is confirming this as truth: we have only rumour and Stana's agent's word.

But it makes sense looking back and reflects in the writing this season.

So at the start of s8, Beckett splits up with Castle to protect him after she discovered somebody in the CIA (codenamed "LokSat") was linked to the drugs dealt by Vulcan Simmons, the pawn of William Bracken, who was an ex-Senator and Presidential candidate who killed Beckett's mum years ago and was at the end of s6 finally incarcerated. Bracken returns in the opening 2 episodes to tease Beckett about her new discovery, only to be promptly killed by the "LokSat" conspirator, and this becomes an arc throughout s8 - Beckett's investigation into LokSat, which she undertakes independent of Castle, and with the help of Vikram Singh (Sunkrish Bala), an analyst at the Attorney-General's office who tried to prevent Beckett's old team (she worked there briefly in s6) from being murdered. Side jibe - Vikram is also a character who absolutely nobody gave two dumps about. Ever. Since he was so anti-Caskett.

Now, the weekly episodes themselves weren't terrible (in fact perhaps the best episode of them all was episode 3, the first episode following the Caskett break-up where Castle instigates his plan to get Beckett to fall for him again by solving murders, not knowing her real reason for splitting up with him), but for the most part they were bang average and completely off-script given the premise of the show.

The show tried to do some innovative stuff - an episode set on a boat that was only set on a boat half the time; an episode where instead of solving a murder Castle has to give testimony in court (and is torn a new one, as ever in court scenes across TV); and an episode where Beckett and Castle were being held separately with other prisoners in what I like to think was a "budget Saw homage" - but it never really worked.

This finally improved around about episode 14, where Castle, Alexis and Hayley travelled to LA to find info about when Castle went missing (don't ask). And from there, the show did improve. It made references to the premise in Castle's writing, Castle's crazy murder theories each episode finally made a return and even Martha (Susan Sullivan) got a subplot in promoting her own book "Martha Rodgers' Unsolicited Advice". It was just a shame that, once Caskett reunited, it was more evident to fans that, while the characters were back together, there was most definitely a rift between Nathan and Stana affecting the characters we've come to know and love.

Season 8 finale

The season concluded with Castle (now looped into the conspiracy) and Beckett taking down LokSat in what was the worst and most predictable reveal since the Ice Truck Killer in s1 of Dexter. The head of the most secret PI agency in the world, Mason Wood (Gerald McRaney), returns just in time to save Castle and Beckett from an ambush, gives a lame excuse as to why he's there and then later, when Castle has been kidnapped by the creepy "right hand man", shows up to promise he will kill Beckett. Mason goes to collect Beckett while Espo and Ryan save Castle just in time from being murdered by his right hand man (yawn), and brings her to that very building. While the police are under siege, Castle climbs down pipes behind some kind of fake wall and tries to make a valiant attempt at rescuing Beckett. Mason's secret weapon - a plastic gun held upon Beckett which is not attracted to electromagnet in the ceiling overhead which had stolen Beckett's gun and rendered her defenceless - stopped Castle's rush to save her, too, but the distraction gave Beckett time to disarm and knock Mason out.

LokSat taken down.

Or not? Because then, as Caskett settle down to have dinner the defence attorney from previous episodes, who had been their unwilling link to LokSat (and was proven to be dead at the start of the finale), Caleb Brown (Kristoffer Polaha), somehow (and without explanation) returned to shoot them both. This was supposed to be the cliffhanger ending to lead over into a season 9, where Castle lived but Beckett died, except despite contract renewals ABC decided to cancel the show anyway, causing the the writers to inexplicably jump from the two characters dying to seven years later and they have three kids.

...

Riiiiiiiiiight. OK.

That's quite a big oversight there, ABC, but then it's just one of many. I won't go into gripes about the conclusion fully other than to moan that the side characters in Alexis (Molly C. Quinn), Martha, Espo and Ryan did not get satisfying conclusions, but the following are just some of the problems with season 8 as a whole.

• More investigative scenes were penned involving Castle, Esposito (Jon Huertas) and Ryan (Seamus Dever), and less with Castle and Beckett. (This could have been accepted given, as newly-promoted Captain, Beckett would on occasion need to be elsewhere. But this was not "on occasion".)
• Espo and Ryan got their own subplot early on as they both went for the Sergeant's exam and a strapped-for-cash Ryan betrayed Espo to get the final spot - and still failed. (This was a good subplot for these characters, however. I enjoyed it immensely - and its culmination in Ryan shooting Espo in the butt and later accidentally referring to him in front of a suspect as "Detective Ass-posito" was inspired.)
• Espo and Ryan also began to take more control of interrogation scenes, where Beckett and Castle once would have carried out 90% of them.
• A British ex-MI6 spy turned freelance fixer in Hayley Shipton (Toks Olagundoye) was introduced, and eventually sucked attention from Beckett and Castle by acting as a mentor to Alexis in her takeover of Castle's PI side job, which is where Castle began spending a lot of his time after the PI thing being nothing more than a hilarious three-episode arc in s7.
• Alexis and Martha were lost for large amounts of time this season, suddenly unimportant and unnecessary to the plots where before they acted as foils and parallels for Castle's concerns.
• We lost the recurring tech expert Tori Ellis (Maya Stojan), who vanished into thin air, and even Sidney Perlmutter (Arye Gross), whose entire (perfect) character was built around one or two appearances per season to provide scathing remarks about Castle's inadequacies at crime scenes, was used improperly (ie in scenes without Castle).
• And I never thought I'd miss Gates (Penny Jerald Johnson), the old 12th Precinct Captain, who Beckett replaced.

(Props to s8, however, for the return of Ethan Slaughter (Adam Baldwin) and Firefly reunions in Summer Glau and Jewel Staite. Further props for Jewel Staite's character being the killer.)

Castle overall

This has been a stunning ABC show for 8 years. I picked it up when s7 was midway through, and talked it up so much that next time my mate came round he demanded to watch the pilot and was hooked from there.

I can't say much about the seasons for fear of this blog being waaaaaaay too long, but I can rate them all in my order of preference:

• 1: Season 5
• 2: Season 4
• 3: Season 7
• 4: Season 1
• 5: Season 2
• 6: Season 3
• 7; Season 6
• 8: Season 8

I won't explain the overall themes of each season, because I want to talk about a few of the best episodes the show did.

Top 5 Castle episodes

My top 5 Castle episodes were not even hard to pick out, and nor was the order. Perhaps I ought to have tested myself and gone for ten ...

5 - 2x02 - The Double Down

Castle and Beckett pick up one murder case - a couple's therapist; Espo and Ryan pick up another - a dead man shot in the park. Castle secretly bets with the boys who can solve their case first, but eventually they realise both murders are connected. In the end, the killers are exposed as having travelled to work together on a water taxi, where they got to chatting about their miserable lives and somehow began planning to murder the other person's intended victim, in a "budget Strangers on a Train". This was remarkably well-written, hinging on the tiniest of details (the location of a body of water) and clever and, having never read Strangers on a Train nor seen the film, had a reveal I never saw coming. Number 5 easily.

4 - 4x19 - 47 Seconds

An explosion at a "Takeover Wall Street" protest must be investigated, and, because they are able to originally locate where the bomb was 47 seconds before the explosion, the NYPD must investigate that tiny timeframe to find the murderer. A perfect murder story given every detail had to be squeezed into less than a minute, but the punchline was Beckett revealing to a suspect that when she was shot (in the s3 finale, when Castle admitted he loved her and Beckett then pretended not to remember) she remembered everything. Castle, in the observation room, heard everything and, heartbroken, a chain of events was set into motion that was either going to lead to them getting together or falling apart forever. (Spoiler alert, they got together.)

3 - 5x15 - Target

The first of a two-part story, a college student is kidnapped and the NYPD investigate - leading to them realising Castle's daughter Alexis was also kidnapped. Castle goes full desperate-dad, leading him to acts such as torture. Nathan Fillion pulled this intense episode off without any difficulty, and the priceless reveal that Alexis's captors had taken her out of America capped off a wonderful episode.

Unfortunately, the conclusion of this two-part story wasn't as good, but that does not mar how perfect this episode really was.

2 - 3x23 - Always

Beckett's mother. They know at this point that she was murdered in an alleyway where, years before, a group of three cops - who used to kidnap mobsters for ransom - had accidentally killed an FBI agent. They know who 2 of those cops were. One is dead, and one is killed at the start of this episode by a hitman. So they have to find out who the third cop is and protect Beckett simultaneously. The biggest reveal of all - Captain Roy Montgomery, Beckett's mentor and the man who first gave her a job as a Homicide Detective, was that third cop. He makes his last stand protecting Beckett and murdering the hitman Lockwood, but in the end, at his funeral, Beckett is shot and the episode - and entire third season - finishes on a thrilling cliffhanger.

1 - 5x19 - The Lives of Others

It's Castle's birthday and he's wheelchair-bound, which means he can't investigate anything at the NYPD. No matter, because Alexis's birthday present - binoculars - helps him spy on his neighbours across the road, where he witnesses a murder taking place. Beckett does not believe him, and even when she humours him she cannot find evidence to suggest a murder actually took place, prompting Castle to go rogue. The reveal? Everyone involved in the "murder" was an actor from Martha's acting school and the entire set-up was Beckett's birthday present to Castle, keeping him from going stir-crazy from boredom. Definitely didn't see that coming.

Final words

So there you have it. Castle. I may go over this in more detail in the future, perhaps give an overview of previous seasons and my thoughts, but that is for another time. To close this, I'd like to first give a big fuck you to Alexi Hawley, Terence Winter, Nathan Fillion and the submissive ABC executives for that atrocious final season. The LokSat arc was created simply to cater to Nathan Fillion's bulbous ego, in a desperate attempt to keep a profitable show on air a little longer. But Nathan's reported demands ruined the ending (and tainted the rest) of a show which for seven seasons was incredible. No one person should be able to dictate the terms on which a show continues, especially not one hellbent on excluding the woman who helped make his character so beloved. If the rumours are true, then the entire onus of obliterating a season of this amazing show should be placed solely upon Nathan Fillion's shoulders, and any respect for him as a person should be lost.

But elsewhere, I'd like to thank all the actors for their amazing work and the crew for everything they did to make this show what it was. And finally I'd like to say goodbye to one of the very best shows I've watched and thank ABC for its long tenure.

May you do the same with Conviction, starting this year.

Thanks for reading,

Sam!