Castle: Flowers For Your Grave [series premiere]
By fred | March 10, 2009
(S01E01) This is a new series starring the great Nathan Fillion (alongside Stana Katic) which looks like nothing new, really. It is indeed yet another cop-show, and one of those that networks might try to come up with now that the biggest (and only?) hit this new season, The Mentalist, is just that. A cop show that goes more into comedy than drama, one that doesn’t take itself too seriously and counts on the charm on his lead to win the audience.
Either you like it or not, it’s all about taste. If you do, I don’t see no reason that should make you not like this one : it has all the element to make it work, and while it certainly isn’t anything new or that you haven’t seen before, it’s light, funny, charming, Fillion is his great self as he can be so well, and he’s got a nice chemistry with co-star Katic.
So sure, it’s very predictable all along and somewhat cliché, but here’s the thing : the pilot of The Mentalist was dozen times worse! Seriously, go have a look back in case you forgot how bad it was. That episode pretty much sucked in that area, clichés everywhere, couldn’t have been more predictable, and yet the show grew out of it. It kept getting better and better week after week, the secondary characters got fleshed out more, and it’s not a pretty fun show I enjoy every week it’s on (which for some reason, isn’t happening much lately… does CBS knows it’s the sweeps right now?).
And the thing is, as predictable as this episode might have been, it also showed a lot of potential, and that’s all that really matters here. Of course it wouldn’t help if things got better fast, because the first suspect couldn’t have been the killer, and it should have been obvious to everyone, from Castle to Beckett, from the start. As they eventually noted later : it didn’t make sense.
After that, the first suspect they got was obviously the real killer, and they didn’t even try to hide it and throw misdirections at us. But that wasn’t the point, the point was all in getting the characters to know each other, to start working together, and clearly to play the sexual tension card a lot — Castle having stated how he’d like to spend more time with her, while she was seen a few times having to restrain herself from falling for his charms.
Castle is indeed like a nine years old on sugar rush, he’s rich and friends with the Mayor and he wants to have fun, always curious about the story and looking for a good story. So I can only hope that, in the future, writers will also try to come up with better/good stories to put him through. Not only was this one extremely predictable all along and going as expected every single time, it also featured some not too bright characters – from our heroes not seeing how their suspect couldn’t possibly be the murderer right away, to the actual murderer not having destroyed the evidence that could bring him down, or panicking and rushing to do so right after the police questioned him.
But again, this was a pilot and its main purpose was to introduce the characters to us and to each other, and set what will lead to (hopefully) a lot more of stories to uncover for Castle. It did a nice job at that, the two leads are both charming and working well together, and Castle also has a family, even though so far I have mixed feelings about them. While I like his daughter and his relationship with her (which – though that might totally be me trying to see some of that in there – I thought had a little something of Gilmore Girls at times…) I couldn’t care less for the mother, which I found totally useless.
All in all this wasn’t anything new or great, but it wasn’t bad either. It was a good pilot with potential to hopefully grow into something better, something fun I’d love to tune in to each week.
What did everybody else think?
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