Castle – “Wrapped Up in Death” – review

This was a really lighthearted episode of Castle, which perhaps was warranted after the intensity of the two previous episodes.  The murder mystery was surrounded by circumstances verging on the absurd—a Mayan mummy that may or may not carry a curse, a museum curator who was crushed by a gargoyle, a black-market antiquities dealer, and a museum publicist who was only too happy to have bad press about the exhibit because it meant people would come.  The cast was alive to the absurdities, and the writers did an excellent job of tying in homage moments to the two obvious referents:  Indiana Jones and Scooby Doo. 

I loved seeing Castle in the Indie hat, and then poking around where he shouldn’t, like he always does, and accidentally seeing the face of the mummy that, according to legend, will curse anyone who gazes on it.  Castle brushes it off, “Of course I don’t believe in curses,” but then weird mishaps keep happening, from a chair collapsing under him to the coffee maker exploding grounds all over him.  I absolutely loved that Beckett and the Ambiguously Gay Duo were playing jokes on him.  One, it was just funny.  Two, it shows he is truly part of their team.  Three, did I mention it was just funny?

I also really liked that he started to wonder.  I think that most people consider themselves “not superstitious,” but yet I also think most of us reflexively wince when a black cat runs in front of us (and God forbid it run in front of the car—no way do we want to end up in U-Turn!!!).  I know that if I had that many “coincidences” piling up around me after I saw a cursed mummy, I’d get a bit scared, too.  Especially since there were a couple things I don’t think Beckett had planned, you know, the dog who chased him out of a criminal’s warehouse and the elevator stopping in mid-lift.  (How great was it that he actually stopped to think what to do if the elevator fell?  “Jump up?  No!  Lie on the floor!”  Because, of course, all jumping up does is put your head higher for the ceiling to come down on top of at 9.8 meters per second squared….)  So that plotline was both relatable and really poignant; it prompted Castle to write out a will, and to make sure his mother would take over Alexis…and to ask Beckett to look out for her.  Then, because he seems to have a pathological avoidance of emotional intimacy, he ruined the moment by asking her to also get rid of his porn collection “before Alexis finds it.”  He did the same thing earlier with Beckett, when he was reminiscing about taking Alexis to the museum as a kid, only to remark that it was also a good place to pick up women.  It makes me wonder what has to happen for him actually engage in an unguardedly intimate (in an emotional sense) moment with someone—and what happened that made him so afraid of those moments of connectedness.

And then on the Scooby Doo thing—I found it hilarious that Beckett either identifies herself with Velma or assumes Castle would.  But of course he was all, “No, you’re Daphne,” because he has the hots for Beckett.  I’m actually not so sure the list of qualities he rattled off were ones that actually applied to Daphne, but Kate has them in spades, so, take a compliment where a girl can get one, eh?

As far as the actual mystery, the best twist was the fact that the mummy of “slave girl number 6” had been replaced with a newer body.  The actual unraveling of it all wasn’t that surprising.  But this episode was so funny in all the other ways that the predictability factor didn’t ruin anything.  In all, an episode that was exactly what it needed to be for its placement in the season—light, whimsical, and entirely self-contained.