Castle S8 Ep9 – Tone Death

We’re back, after a break that seems like it lasted forever. But was it worth the wait? Surprisingly, I’d have to say yes.

As I believe Richard Castle once said, “Best meeting ever.”

This week’s case is the murder of a 20-year-old named Robin, a talented parolee who’s trying to make it big in an a cappella competition. She was a janitor at the place where Martha is rehearsing for her latest show, and her body is discovered during a rehearsal. Naturally, Martha is horrified and shaken, and demands Rick find the killer. Ryan & Espo easily let Castle help with the investigation – at first. But then, after Rick & Kate feel they have to play up their marital discord by fighting at the precinct, the boys demand to know what Castle did to make their captain so mad. And so he feels pressured into coming up with something. And so he invents an affair with a Russian model named Svetlana. Oddly enough, this infuriates Ryan & Espo. (It also leads to an amusing scene where Beckett criticizes her husband’s name choice, and he admits “Svetlana” was weak. Hee!)

Castle and Alexis don’t take long to discover that Robin was the founding member of a group of young women ex-cons who are trying to make it big in the national a cappella competition. They’re all working with the support of a non-profit founded by a shiny, squeaky-clean looking lawyer couple whom I immediately peg as being involved in Robin’s death in some way (either one or both of them). And what do you know: it turns out the woman was actually the driver of the car that a very high Robin was in a few years ago. The lawyer crashed it after a party they were both at, then fled the scene, which led to Robin’s arrest for grand theft auto. She didn’t kill Robin, though. That was her husband, accidentally, while trying to get Robin not to go public with what she learned about his wife’s guilt.

On the Caskett front, Rick & Kate have been secretly getting together during lunch, for “meetings”. She’s still not involving him directly in anything LOCKSAT-related, apparently, but she’s promised that she’ll never keep him in the dark about what she’s doing again – and when the time comes, they’ll take LOCKSAT down together. I guess that’s a nice promise? And when she learns about Castle’s fake girlfriend Svetlana, she makes up a fake doctor boyfriend for herself, named Livingstone. If you didn’t guess that she’d ask him, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” at some point during the ep, after you heard that name, then you haven’t been watching this show very long.

This is what it looks like when you make our boys mad.

So overall, a fun, lighthearted, cute episode that matches up well with this show during its best years. I don’t like that Ryan & Espo are being lied to, even though their reactions to Caskett’s fake extramarital lovers are amusing. I’m sure that will get old very quickly. But otherwise, I’d give it a positive rating. Is it too little too late for the show? Only time will tell. We’d be happy to hear your opinions in the comments, too.