I thought this was an above-average episode of Castle. One of these days I’m going to have to start paying attention to who the writers are and see if there is a correlation between how I would rate the episodes and who wrote them.
This week started with Beckett over at Castle’s apartment, playing poker with the other detectives and his family until Beckett gets a body-just-got-found call.
It turns out to be a suburban housewife who was drowned in a bathtub of motor oil in a sleazy hotel. The crime was obviously something that had been planned, and was also meant to send a message of some kind. Why not simply drowning her in water, otherwise? The only question is…what did oil have to do with this average woman?
The case seems to be a dead end–the husband was truly shocked and grief-stricken, she had no friends and no suspected illicit lover in the city, etc. Beckett takes Castle to task for his story-spinning; “Wow, why have I been wasting my time looking for evidence when I can just make up a story?” she asks. But his speculation about a secret boyfriend who got violent seems likelier than any explanation until the detectives discover a mysterious email confirming a meeting time for the day the woman was murdered. The email address belongs to a true-crime writer who was about to hit the big-time by ghost-writing this housewife’s memoir. Because the housewife was also a domestic terrorist who, 20 years earlier, had been involved in bombing an oil tanker that resulted in the death of one of her cohorts and the permanent disabling of the ship’s captain.
The long and convoluted trail leads Beckett and Castle to suspect the captain and his family, the ghost writer herself, the third member of the conspiracy who had served his 15 years in prison, and finally a mysterious woman who might just be the terrorist who supposedly died in the explosion all those years ago.
The other question, of course, is what part did the ghost writer play in the events? Because every person from the woman’s past that the writer spoke with somehow seemed to find out where she was living…almost as if the writer wanted something like this to happen. Apparently the feel-good memoir her client was feeding her wasn’t likely to sell as many copies as a true crime book would, and the publisher was about to pull out. So this “tragic” murder by a woman who rose from the dead made a much better ending. None of what she did was illegal, of course, but Castle got the last word: “I feel it’s only fair to tell you that I’m planning to use this in a book. Soon.”
Game, set, and match. That dig won probably the least reserved smile from me so far this season.
I wish more episodes were like this. If it can’t be interesting as a crime show, then it should be interesting as a show about a writer. That might work better for it. At least it would for me.
PS–I’m starting to wonder if Nathan Fillion is being considered for the next season of Dancing with the Stars since he keeps showing up in the audience. Anyone else noticing this?
