Castle – “Food to Die For” – review

As the episode title suggests, the pop culture skewering this week was of reality cooking competitions, specifically Top Chef, when the winner of such a show is found murdered in the kitchen of his new restaurant.  Also a little bit of American Psycho, as the restaurant Q3 was reminiscent of Dorsia’s—Castle says, “Even I can’t get a reservation here.”  It was not referencing Mythbusters, though, since the victim’s hand shattered after being dipped in liquid nitrogen, and Adam and Jamie have previously busted that myth. 

The murder followed the usual round of suspects, from the sous-chef to his biggest competition on the show to the restaurant owner, who was a high school friend of Beckett’s, to a bookie the chef may or may not have owed to the unknown woman to whom the chef had been planning to propose.  As far as the mystery went, it was fairly pedestrian; the whole point was to create a parallel between Castle and Beckett.

See, the chef would go every day to get coffee across the street from where mystery girl worked and watch her through the window, which prompted Ryan and Esposito to trade stories of what “they” had done to impress a woman (or should I have put the quotes around “woman”?) .  After they one-up each other, one of them beats both of their stories with “like Demming does every morning with Beckett,” since Demming has been coming up to the homicide’s break room for his morning coffee.  That brought Castle’s laughter to a screeching halt…especially after he had made a point to be there early in hopes of beating Demming to delivering Beckett’s morning java.

During the course of the show Beckett and Castle each have a date with someone else that is requested in front of the other; they both ask “unless that’s a problem” and say no, it wasn’t, but react otherwise.  Then their conversation with the chef’s girl becomes a subtext for why Beckett is hesitating to get involved with Castle (aside from his whole lack of actual words to her)—“You have no idea how hard it is to love someone, knowing they’re going to break your heart.”  Castle and Beckett discuss it later, Beckett saying she understood the girl’s point about staying with a man who is safe instead of that wild card, while Castle insists that “the heart wants what the heart wants.” 

Nothing is resolved, of course, but Beckett got cozier with Demming all episode even while she was obviously feeling torn over Castle going on a date with her old friend.  I actually thought there was a hilarious contrast between Castle and Madison’s fancy schmancy dinner at Rocco d’Espirito’s (including a cameo from himself!) and the existential but unpretentious perfection what Demming offered Beckett:  the best Chinese food in town over the office desk.  It was a pretty sharp difference, superficial versus real, and I know who I’d wanna roll with.  Demming, if that wasn’t clear, and I can much more easily see Beckett having a relationship with him than with Castle.  They seem much more on the same level, in the same lifestyle.

Although one of the many awkward Beckett tidbits her old friend dropped was that she had dated a French guy who might have been royalty (quite a feat, all things considered), so perhaps that was meant to be a set-up for Beckett fitting right into Castle’s high rolling New York society lifestyle.  I actually thought the old friend storyline was a weakness.  For one thing, it showed that Stana Katic doesn’t interact really well with other women—maybe that’s the point, since Beckett works with almost exclusively men, in which case it was intentional and so well done?  But it was hard to watch or find believable.  Although I did like Beckett’s confidence in Madison’s discretion—“whatever she knows about me, I know worse about her.”  Yes, that is the law of being a female.  Anytime you stop being friends with someone, you enter a mutual silence agreement for exactly that reason.

It was an okay episode but not great, and obviously it was meant to be setting up whatever emotional showdown is coming between Castle and Beckett (getting romantically involved or letting the possibility go).  I still don’t know what I want to see happen, but I maintain my position from last week that, based on their behavior, Demming deserves her and Castle doesn’t.  Given the god-awful preview focused on nothing but Beckett having “two persons of interest; but only one can come out on top,” I expect we’ll see more of this tension next week.