Castle S8 Ep8 – Mr. & Mrs. Castle

This episode was both satisfying and immensely frustrating, in ways I’ll get into at the end.

I mean, you put Richard Castle on a “Titanic”-ish boat. What do you expect will happen?

The case of the week is a murdered cruise line performer named Laurel, who washes ashore with a bullet in her head and a little bag of uncut heroin in her throat. The crime scene is a cruise ship that’s still in harbor for the moment, so Beckett goes to check it out before her crime scene departs – only for the cruise ship company to decide they can’t afford the bad publicity, so they’re taking the ship out to international waters ASAP. Once they arrive there, Beckett will be kicked off. Naturally, Castle has wriggled his way onboard as well, so they’re stuck together. Thankfully, Beckett decides to make the most of it and work with Castle to solve the murder in the next thirty minutes.

And it turns out the murdered girl witnessed a massive heroin smuggling operation, and the smuggler killed her to keep her quiet. The heroin she found is an exact match to the kind LOCKSAT has been smuggling. Finally, a clue bringing the case of the week and the Plotline of Stupid together! Hooray?

It’s just in time, too, because Castle’s been closing in on his wife’s secret. At Rick’s behest, Hayley (yay, she gets more than two minutes of screentime!) digs around and discovers the text that took Kate away from their anniversary evening was from Vikram, among other useful discoveries. From there, it’s not long before they put the pieces together. Like I knew they would, because both of them are extremely intelligent. Despite Vikram’s insistence that Beckett should keep Castle out of it (really starting to hate that guy, just like Castle does now), everything ends up coming to a head.

When the two finally have “the talk”, it goes largely like I expected: Castle is angry and deeply hurt. Beckett is apologetic but still thinks she was doing the right thing, trying to protect him. That is, until Castle makes the EXTREMELY REASONABLE point that they could have pretended to break up to keep LOCKSAT off their backs, while still working together in secret to bring the bad guys to justice. That’s right, Castle! You tell ’em! You just destroyed all of Beckett’s ‘rationale’ in under five minutes. And what does that say about said rationale? Oh, right, that it was forced, lazy writing, and stupid? Have I mentioned that? It didn’t show how “broken” Beckett was, writers. It just made her irritating, which is a crying shame.

This scene was plenty ridiculous. Sure it was fun to be in, though.

But of course when Beckett goes to the loft later to apologize for real, Castle does forgive her. Which is very in-character. And from now on our duo will be working together (and living together!) again, I assume. If Vikram doesn’t like that, he can sit on a tack.

Right, the last important part: the public defender that was called for the smuggler guy on the ship, played by Kris Polaha, is actually some kind of mastermind in LOCKSAT. Not too surprising, considering Big Name Guest Star Syndrome.

So that was it for this show until February 1, guys. What did you think?