Castle – A Death in the Family

This week was the season finale–possibly series finale, as I don’t think official word has come down about renewal yet–of Castle.

The murder victim was a plastic surgeon with no known enemies and a Boy Scout profile.  He was found inside his car when the city towed it for having been delinquent in its parking for almost a week.  His head was wrapped in plastic that had been duct-taped shut.  My first thought:  if Lucky Number Slevin didn’t just pull everything out of its ass, this was a mob hit, because this is exactly the way the gangsters in that movie killed their victims.

Turns out I was right.  After hitting a dead end with suspects (rather, a lack thereof) and leads from the victim himself, the detectives find one telling clue:  on a day when the surgeon had allegedly attended a conference, he actually performed a surgery on an unidentified male patient with a team of nurses and assistants who had been brought in from outside the hospital and were not part of his usual team.  The paper trail through the billing office led to the U.S. Attorney General’s office:  this was a Witness Protection re-assignment surgery.

Beckett gets nothing from the AG’s office.  She and Castle postulate that it was someone who turned evidence in a mafia case (who was right?!), because what else is going to be that important in NYC, plus of course the mode of death is so very pointed and signature-like.  Castle meets up with an old contact from his Derek Storm days who is in with one of the families, and that guy gives him a name of someone from a rival family who had disappeared a few months back and allegedly turned state’s evidence on his erstwhile “family.”

Armed with that kind of detail, Beckett calls up her ex in the FBI, and asks him to pull some strings for her so she can maybe catch the guy who murdered the doctor.  All she needs to ask the witness, she explains, is who killed that way so the detectives know who to go after.

The FBI pulls through a meeting, and Beckett and Castle get their time with the witness.  But he tells them that the M.O. of the murder was his signature, and that it was clearly a message to him:  if they could find the surgeon, they could find him.  He basically backs out of testifying against anyone, and gives Beckett and Castle nothing useful to work from.

Things take a turn for the even worse when a hit squad opens fire on the witness’s transport car on its way home from the meeting.  But this turns out to be good news for Beckett’s team; they know now that someone involved with the investigation–someone in the surgeon’s life, by process of elimination–was a mafia plant, because no one else could have found out about the meeting.  The team must work quicker than ever if they want to save the witness…and their own reputations.

On the ongoing story arc side of things, Castle has a forensics expert look over the file about Beckett’s mother.  Castle’s own mom overhears the conversation and advises him to tell Beckett that he’s digging into her past.  When he brings it up with her, asking if she had thought of looking it over, she tells him that if he looks their partnership is over.  That she had spent her first three years on the force obsessing over it, and had to let it go completely in order to let it go at all.

Castle’s friend tells him that the medical examiner had not caught the subtleties of the stabbing in his report; that the first blow had not been lucky but rather an intentionally incapacitating and fatal strike, with others added for show to disguise the expertness of the attack.  It got worse, he said, because there were several other stabbings the M.E. had written off as random that were in the same style.

At the end of the episode Castle indicates to Beckett that he needs to have a serious discussion with her.  About her mother.  And then the screen goes black.  So we are left unsure of what the pattern of deaths was, or why her mother was important, or how Beckett reacted to the news–or to Castle’s digging.  It was actually a really clever way to end a season that might also be the end of the show:  it brought things to enough of a conclusion that there is a kind of closure, since if there is no more show we can assume Beckett followed through with her threat and never saw Castle again.  But considering that he might have cracked the case and given someone an opening to catch whoever did it, she could be reasonably supposed to forgive him if they come back for a second season.

ABC–please bring them back.  We all know the show isn’t breaking any new ground in crime dramas or wit, but it’s not like anything else out there right now is that great, either.  So at least bring back characters and an actor I like instead of trying another new show in the same vein of predictability.  Please?  Please?