Castle – “Kill the Messenger” – review

When a bike messenger is run down and robbed of his package the same morning its sender’s nephew is fatally knifed in jail, a large and multi-layered conspiracy is immediately apparent.  The inmate who was killed had been convicted of a murder he confessed to but may not actually have committed.  Beckett’s team finds that all their leads go back to one prominent New York political family, the Wellesley clan, who repeatedly try to stone-wall their investigation.  The team goes back to the original murder case from 10 years before to see who else might have had a reason to kill the young woman.  They  discover that the family’s secrets are much dirtier than suspected, while the family’s layers of lies go even deeper than they guessed….

What a well-crafted mystery.  I mean this in the sense that the “smoking gun on the mantle in act 1” didn’t simply go off by act 5 but actually turned out to be the catalyst for the whole tragic string of events.  The reason the messenger was run down was because the inmate’s calls were monitored and he told his aunt to send it.  The reason he told her to send it was because the payments had stopped going to his wife and son in exchange for his taking the blame for the murder.  The reason the payments stopped was because Madame Wellesley was no longer in control of the money.  The reason she wasn’t in control of the money was because she had gone senile—which we see in the very first scene with her, when she keeps flipping between lucidity and the fancies of her own hazy mind.

I don’t know enough about New York socialites or politics to know if this was aimed at one particular family, or if it was a general political corruption story.  It was also in the end a little bit mob-like; I mean, this family’s motto might as well have been “never tell anyone outside the family what you’re thinking again.”  It all came down to the grandmother, but everyone else certainly got on board with it.  I actually loved the old lady, who kept harping on her missing ring (which in another loose-thread-knotting had been stolen by her “problem-solver” to finance the hits) and then talking with utter disdain about the tramp who had seduced her good son and what a worthless pansy her gay son was.  “Anything to butch up his image,” she snarked at one point.  What made it funny was that it was delivered from this sweet little old lady who seemed pampered and privileged and, you know, not the sort of person who says that kind of thing. 

I also really liked getting to know more about Beckett’s supervisor, Captain Montgomery.  First in the simple sense of him having a larger part than just being the one to tell Beckett she has to be nice to Castle, and second in getting to see him butt heads with the current power of the Wellesley family (Mark Moses as Blake Wellesley)—and win.  Then he was the one who took on the dirty prison guard and got him to talk, which even though we didn’t see this was impressive maneuvering on his part.  The exchange near the end between him and Castle about Beckett was nice.  “How does she do that?” Castle asks, presumably rhetorically wondering how she breaks the news of tragedy with such apparent ease and compassion.  But instead of answering the rhetoric, Montgomery says, “Better than anyone,” which was another oblique reference to Beckett being one of the best detectives in his department.

I also enjoyed the larger part Castle’s mom got.  For the most part I actually find her a bit annoying (mostly because she walks a fine line with being a caricature of an aging actress, too close to the line for me most of the time), but she was cute this time around, letting Alexis set her up with a social networking page then complaining about how much time it wasted then getting into a dither about her high school flame looking her up.  And the ending scene was just funny, as she’s talking about being a GILF (if not in so many words). 

One moment that I was surprised they didn’t play up more was Castle’s look of utter perplexity when Captain Montgomery, Beckett, and the Two Stooges all get on their phones at once to start hunting down leads and permissions the second they realize what the situation is.  Castle, on the other hand, has nothing to do but stand there and feel the truth of his status—writer, not detective—keenly.  I thought it was kind of funny to watch him stand there lost and wanting to help but not having anything to contribute at that moment.  Apparently Jonathan Frakes directed  (old Number One’s been showing up in the director’s chair a lot lately!), so maybe this was a moment he got to add in with Fillion even though there wasn’t anything in the script about it.

I thought overall this was one of the more interesting mysteries they’ve had to solve, and the episode itself was on par with most of the episodes this season.  I’m seriously happy that whatever groove the show finally clicked into near the end of last season/over the break has stuck around, because I’m enjoying every episode these days.