Castle: A Death In The Family [season finale]
By fred | May 12, 2009
(S01E10) How much you love a show might also depend on what you expect from it. For instance, I’m not sure that what I love/look for in this show is exactly what it wants to be, I might be a little off, which might explain why I wouldn’t call this one the best episode of the series so far. What I really look forward to is Beckett and Castle and how they interact with one another, poke fun at each other, all of that.
I love the show when it is light and fun, I don’t want another procedural when I have to care about the investigation, I just want to have fun spending an hour where I can forget about serious stuff and relax, and laugh. And sometimes I feel like this show tries to be a bit too dark or serious than I’d like it to be, like with this episode and a serious investigation not leaving a lot of place for the fun.
Or, not as much as we’ve had before. But in all fairness, this episode was still a very good one, and even though Beckett and Castle might not have poked fun at one another as much as they did in the past, they still had their moments, and we had some pretty good reasons to laughs this week – see Castle’s Christopher Walken for instance, or yet another zing at the CSI’s and the likes when Castle commented on the FBI’s SUVs.
Another thing they did a real good job at this week, was integrating all of the secondary characters and giving them something to do, even if little. Even better, we might have had the first scene in which I didn’t hate the mother – her helping her son, and telling him that he had to tell Beckett what he found, was actually a good thing.
And while I enjoy the show best when it’s light, doesn’t mean they can’t do dark/serious moments very well either. For instance, both when Castle first asked Beckett about her mother’s investigation and she explained how deep she used to looked into and obsessed over it, and at the end when Castle had to talk to her, were really well done by both of them. I also really liked him telling her why she was different, and extraordinary. Maybe it’s because he’s a writer, and he’s used to get his characters to do it, but Castle isn’t afraid to talk and when he’s got something to say or that he feels should be said/heard, he just goes for it.
It’s also a great way to write a cliffhanger, unlike the usual “will [inset name] have died in the gigantic explosion that just happened?” or “did the murderer kill him/her, or will he/she survive?” they went for a much simpler approach: Castle found something, and he will tell her what it is. And now, we’re dying to find out what the Hell it is that he found, and how she will react to the news of course.
It’s simple, but it’s all the show is about and all we care for : Castle, Beckett, and how they interact together. The real cliffhanger isn’t so much in what he found out, as much as it is in how she will react to the news, and the fact that he did look into it. Of course, if what Castle found out is, as it seemed to be the case (or at least that’s how I understood it), something new about her mother and who she was / what she did, then that might also be of consequences.
(About that discovery though, the thing about the one wound that killed her that was different, precise, and maybe not random at all… wouldn’t anyone who’s job it is to look for those things, like Beckett’s friend, who would have looked into this carefully, have been able to see that as well? That discovery didn’t seem to be coming from the lots of resources Castle could put into this, as much as it was just looking into it with fresh eyes and seriousness.)
If the its finale it might have been less light/fun/funny as it has been in the past, this was a very good episode with lots of great moments, between Castle and Beckett, Castle and his daughter, maybe even with his mother, and there were many reasons to laughs — the woman who had too man plastic surgeries and Castle trying to mimic the way her lips looked comes to mind.
We definitely need more of it, it’s a great show, a lot of fun, and the two leads are terrific and have great chemistry. Rumor is that it should be back for a second season, so we have reasons to be hopeful.
What did everybody else think?
