“Ahhhhhh…” That’s the contented sigh of millions of Caskett shippers. Castle is back and all is right with the world… or is it? When we last left our intrepid duo, Beckett was in a wedding dress on the side of the road and Castle’s car was a flaming wreck in a ditch, after being run off the road by an Escalade. While this sort of a cliffhanger really isn’t one (absolutely no one thought he was in that burning wreck), we knew it was going to mess up the wedding, and that alone was enough to cause us a few months of agita.
Well, yeah. The wedding was most certainly ruined and what’s more, any hope that we might have held that Castle would be found lying bruised, but okay on the side of the road was immediately erased. CSI discovers drag tacks leading away from the crash site and we’re off to the races!
Initially our faithful squad tracks Castle’s cell to a junkyard, where they’re just in time to see an Escalade being compacted. Cue the terror because, well, Ryan, Espo, and Beckett don’t have the benefit of knowing that Castle’s not in there and while I do dearly love this show, this episode is full of “why would/how did they do that?” moments. For example:
When witnessing a suspect compacting a car that you believe may contain your friend/partner/beloved, do you:
A) All chase after the subject, leaving the compactor to finish crushing the car, or
B) Have one of the team head to the compactor controls in the hopes of saving the compactee? Guess which one the gang chose? Good thing Castle wasn’t in that Escalade, eh?
Back at the precinct, Castle’s questioning the compactor operator, a lowlife named Gary Duffin, in a rather… violent manner. Leaving aside the ethics of the situation for a moment (not a fan of the torture), any detective worth a damn knows that beating on a suspect doesn’t work and considering the state Beckett is in, the odds of her being allowed within 20 feet of this guy are astronomical. Guess what? He doesn’t talk.
Kidnapping means FBI and we all know how much Beckett loves them, right? Well, no matter, since they don’t really do a lot, here., except suggest that Beckett go through their old cases to see who might have a grudge against Caskett. Well, after 6 seasons, it’s a mighty long list, starting with Senator Bracken, 3XK, Mickey Barbosa…you get the picture.
Ryan runs Duffin’s cell records and finds a connection to Vincent Cardano, a mobster from back in Season Five (“Murder, He Wrote”). Vinnie is in the business of disposing evidence, so a client needed an Escalade crushed, it got crushed. Unfortunately, the deal was made anonymously. However… the money was exchanged using a dead drop on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Cardano gives them the location of the dumpster and NYPD computer tech Tory hacks into some video surveillance to try and catch whoever picked up the dough. Guess who? None other than Richard Castle! Shocked looks, cut to commercial!
Here’s where the episode goes a bit off the rails, for me and another example of a disturbing trend of writers being untrue to the their characters. When Ryan asks Tory to re-run the take, suggesting that maybe they missed something, Esposito immediately turns on Castle, saying: “Yeah we missed something! Castle’s in on this. He planned the whole thing!”
I’m sorry, but there’s NO WAY that Javi turns on Castle on the basis of one surveillance video. They’ve been friends and colleagues for years and anyone’s first reaction would be “Maybe he’s being coerced.” Not “He planned it all!” It was a terribly jarring false note. Beckett also goes through a similar brief period, wondering if Castle could have faked the abduction, but after talking to Martha and Alexis, immediately goes back to the kidnapping theory. The FBI, on the other hand, is now convinced that Castle is the “guilty” party.
The thing is, they seem to have some pretty compelling evidence, including the fact that the money that Castle dropped for Cardano was the same cash he’d withdrawn a few days earlier, presumably for their honeymoon. While they agree to follow existing leads, once those dry up, they’re going to scale back.
We now enter the montage section of the show, with various scenes of Beckett following leads and posting newspaper clippings on the murder board, including one that mentions that six weeks and then two months have passed!
At the half-hour mark, Castle is finally found, adrift off the coast of Delaware in a dinghy with bullet holes in it, and the Coast Guard estimates that he was in the boat for 4-5 days. He’s airlifted to a NYC hospital, stable but unconscious. The team starts to work the case, tracking the dinghy to a dock in Gloucester, Mass, near a mobile home on property owned by a man named Henry Jenkins (Scandal’s Matt Letscher).
While Beckett, Javi, and Ryan head up to Mass to look in on Jenkins, Lanie’s been doing some investigating on her own, trying to find out where Castle’s been. Turns out there’s a key sewn into the lining of his pants and, even stranger, his blood work shows antibodies to Dengue fever, meaning Castle was exposed to the virus, most likely in Latin America, Africa or Asia. Not only that, he had a healed bullet would from long before he was set adrift in the dinghy.
Jenkins denies knowing Castle, or why Castle ended up in his boat, but mentions that a man matching Castle’s description was camping on the beach a few days prior. Esposito and Beckett investigate the campsite and find Castle’s shoes and watch, as well as newspaper clippings reporting on Castle’s disappearance and, in a particularly jarring moment, a bag containing his wedding tux.
Beckett gets a text that Castle is awake, so the team heads back to Manhattan to find out the truth!
When Beckett starts to talk to Castle, it becomes clear that he has no idea where he’s been or for how long. He apparently has no memory of the intervening two months. The hospital psychiatrist doesn’t have a definite answer and leaves open the chance that Castle is feigning amnesia.
After CSU analyzes the contents of the tent finding loads of physical evidence, Ryan is finally convinced that Castle faked his own kidnapping, agreeing with Esposito that the evidence clearly points to Castle’s guilt. Meanwhile, Castle and Beckett travel back to Massachusetts, in the hope that it might jog Castle’s memory. It doesn’t and now even Beckett starts to unravel, doubting everything that comes out of Castle’s mouth.
Even after he points out that he would never camp that close to the water (irrational fear of tsunamis, apparently), Beckett is disbelieving, pointing out that there was a witness. “What witness?” Cut to the mobile home and a stranger answering the door, claiming to be Henry Jenkins. Dun Dun DUNNNNNN!
Turns out the first Henry Jenkins was a fake and the tent was staged, revealing the beginnings of what seems to be a vast conspiracy, albeit one with far more questions than answers. An intriguing end to a rather uneven episode.
Some things I came away from this episode with:
• This was not the best episode of Castle. In fact, I almost wish they’d managed to use the first half as the last half of last season’s finale. I mean, we all knew Castle wasn’t inside the burning car, so there wasn’t a cliffhanger, but imagine if last season had ended on the freeze frame of Castle making the money drop. Right?
• The writers don’t seem to have much respect for Javier. I just found his super-quick rush to judgment extremely distasteful. If they had Captain Gates start treating Castle as a suspect, maybe, but even then… With all the insane stuff they’ve experienced, I don’t believe they’d turn on him.
• The writers also don’t seem to understand time, distance, or medicine. Without the benefit of a private jet, it’s pretty difficult to make two round trips from New York to Gloucester, Mass in two days. Not to mention Castle’s instant recovery from exposure and being unconscious for days to being able to hoof it up to Massachusetts the next day.
• Beckett reveals that she almost shot the night janitor when he tried to move Castle’s chair, while he was missing. Awww!
Mark Rabinowitz is a Nashville-based freelance writer, film producer, and regular contributor to Paste. He is the co-founder of Indiewire.com and really likes cheese. You can follow him on Twitter.