Castle – “When the Bough Breaks” review

This week’s episode of Castle was an important episode.  It was the mid-season will-they/won’t-they uncertainty, presumably filmed with two endings to accommodate either more episodes to come, or the end of the series.  Since the show got picked up for another 9 episodes to make a full second season, we saw the they-will ending.  Unfortunately for this being such a “game-changing” episode, it was a downgrade in quality from where the last 3 episodes had been.

The body this week is a Jane Doe found down a manhole.  She turns out to have been an immigrant who may or may not have been having an affair with a man in the building she worked in, whose wife may or may not have known about the affair.  Despite the usual rigmarole of dead ends, reexamining suspects, and switcharoos, this episode wasn’t really focused on the mystery.  It was focused on the characters.

On the side of the victims is the poignant and horrifying story of switched-at-birth children.  The doctor husband (played by Reed Diamond, who I’ve most recently seen in Dollhouse) did not reveal to his wife (Elaine Hendrix, who I know as Roxie in The Middleman) that their son’s amnio results showed a wasting disease and instead traded him for the healthy son of the immigrant couple.  The victim had some instinct that something had happened after her son died, because she apparently spent two years tracking down boys born on the same day at the same hospital, and was about to uncover the truth via a DNA test.  The idea of switching children is powerful–it’s a motive that is easy to understand, which is what makes it so frightening. I thought Hendrix, especially, had a great turn in this appearance.  She came off as an overly fussy bitch and managed to transform that to being kindhearted and generous by the end of the episode, when she introduced her son to his biological father.  The sentimental ploys in that scene were a bit clichéd, and I was a bit surprised at how long that scene lasted.  It was nice to see a little closure on this particular case, though, so that was okay.

In the background, coloring the entire episode, was Castle’s receiving an offer for a three-book deal in “a certain British spy series” that he doesn’t want named for fear of jinxing the deal (read:  for fear of ABC having to pay royalties for the reference).  The flip side of this offer, however, is that he would not be writing another Nicki Heat book…and would therefore no longer be working with Beckett.

I thought it was interesting how Beckett flipped her reaction from anger that Castle might not be done tagging along with her to annoyance that he was moving on to another project.  That was a more typically “female” reaction than Beckett often has; inconsistency or intentionally trying to show us the woman beneath the cool detective?  I’m not sure. 

Castle was hilarious in his puppy-ish eagerness to prove how useful he is to Beckett, presumably in an attempt to get her to ask him to stay.  I liked having Beckett one-up him at every turn, because she is the professional detective and she does know how to do her job.  When he realized that she really could go back to doing her job just as well as she had done it before he came along, if he leaves, he was totally crestfallen.  The interplay at his book party, with his agent (breezy virago Debi Mazar) making digs about him returning Beckett’s calls because she was “important to him,” was another building block in the will-they/won’t-they-get-romantically-involved story.  And his dedication to her, and his ready admission that he does think she’s extraordinary, also added a layer of emotionality to Castle’s indecision to turn his back on Nicki Heat and Kate Beckett.

For me, where this tension really broke down—and really disappointing that it did—was when Castle and Beckett had their argument about him moving on.  That played flat to me.  There wasn’t enough real wit or real anger, despite a few cutting remarks from Beckett, in that scene.  It seemed…like a TV argument.  The places where the tension was at its best were the quiet scenes, when they were wrapping up the investigation and both of them thinking it would be the last one.  Even Castle’s jocular irony comments were strained and awkward, and came across as very real.

And what a cheap way to keep them together at the end with Castle getting offered a deal for three more Nicki Heat books!  Instead of him having to make the tough decision between making a lot of money/writing stories in the world that made him want to be a writer, and sticking with his new favorite character/spending more time with Beckett, he gets everything he wants without having to figure out for himself what it is that he wants.  I thought that was a cop-out on a couple different levels.  First, it didn’t require Castle to make a difficult choice, and second, it didn’t require either Castle or Beckett to be honest with each other.  It might have been a really good way to change the dynamic between them naturally, if either of them had been forced to say “I want to stick with Nicki Heat.” 

But even if I’m not thrilled with how it came about, I am still pretty damn pleased that we get to stick with Nicki Heat for a while longer, too.