FRESHNESS RATING: Apocalyptic, soul-withering SPOILERS for Castle — DO NOT READ if you care about the series and have not yet seen the third-season finale
This is primarily a blog about movies, but I hope that readers will forgive the occasional digression into television and books. Or, as with ABC's Castle, the occasional digression into both. Castle stars Nathan Fillion as Rick Castle, a mystery novelist who spends a whole lot of time shadowing New York City homicide detective Kate Beckett (Stana Katic). I'd shadow her, too — Beckett is apparently assigned to solve every outlandish homicide in the entire Big Apple. If a mugger shoots somebody in Central Park, bah, any old person could handle that crime. On the other hand, if a former supermodel from Queens who is also the interim ambassador to Lichtenstein is murdered while impersonating a mermaid in a performance art exhibition at the Guggenheim, and the suspected killer is a lapsed Catholic priest who used to be a coffee grower in Ghana and now trains bears for the circus, then all other New York cops must BACK. OFF. Only Beckett gets those cases.
Oh, and if the killing is tied up in some hitherto unexplored backwater of New York City culture and/or history, so much the better. (Oh, come on, Castle writers. I kid because I care.) That sort of thing accounts for about 90 percent of the show, which just completed its third season on ABC. Episodes that occur in the sector of the Castle universe where the characters actually lead lives — presumably where Castle has deadlines, or gets hounded by his publisher; or where Beckett meets hunky guys who never have any dialogue, because then they couldn't be paid as extras — only pop up two or three times a year, usually just before the show's summer hiatus. (By the way, can you imagine if they attempted that sort of shenanigan in Hollywood? So long, people, that's all of the new movies there are right now. Everybody hang out for a few months and we'll have something new in September. Unless we think that you really, really like our stuff, in which case, see you in February.)
At any rate, the 10 percent of the show that's not just doing what my wife calls "freak of the week" is all tied up in the years-ago unsolved murder of Beckett's mother, a mystery that has grown so complex that it now involves more theories and vaster conspiracies than the Kennedy assassination. The show wrapped up Season 3 last week, so of course we got another Beckett's Dead Mom episode. Only, the whole thing has gotten so elaborate that the showrunners apparently decided viewers would not be satisfied with simply getting another break in the case. Instead, they pulled a Sixth Sense-level switcheroo by pretending that Beckett's loved and admired police captain, Roy Montgomery, has been — holy. cow. people. — part of the conspiracy all along! Oh, ol' Monty didn't pull the trigger or anything. He's just one of the corrupt cops whose bad behavior set the whole thing off. (Wait, wait, a police drama pinned everything on the supposedly incorruptible squad captain? It's like nothing that's ever been done before!)
Seriously! The chief SO was not concealing that secret forever from Beckett. Buh Lo Ney. And yet, strangely I loved the season finale anyway.
ReplyDeleteHOW DARE YOU?! Murder He Wrote is the best show on television and could potentially make Lord Fillion rich enough to purchase the rights to Firefly so that he can make eleventy billion episodes. I hereby grant the Castle writers blanket permission to retroactively corrupt any and all core characters. I will not criticize them for killing Becket in the last three seconds of 2 out of three seasons. They could do it for a fourth and fifth seasons for all I care. I swear by my pretty floral bonnet, I will end anyone who opposes the return of Captain Mal. That said... the fact that Castle was able to remove a fighting Becket from the hangar was kinda ridiculous and the fact that a squad of trained hit men didn't think to maybe have a peek out back for their true quarry bothered me... a little. But I swear…
ReplyDeleteHeh. I have a blog, ergo I dare anything I wish. Oh, I bow before Lord Fillion, too. But only when he's in Firefly. The Ricktator shall get no such pass from me until he spills his guts to Beckett when she can actually hear and process what he's saying. Castle is fun stuff, but I think St. Nathan more or less had it right when he made his first off-the-cuff statement about buying the rights to Firefly. It would take the might of Powerball, not a weekly show on ABC, to get him enough cabbage for a realistic foray into TV production.
ReplyDeleteI second (third...? fourth...?) the calling out of this episode as ridiculous. You can't have a character that for three seasons is a Good Guy with two capital G's, and then suddenly reveal that he was actually complicit in a major crime cover up... with no foreshadowing of any kind. It's cheap, it ruins a good character, and it's sloppy writing. If you'd spent those three seasons setting it up with little things like, you know, a small clue here, a line there, some evidence missing, a shadowy call, a stranger showing up unexpectedly, etc. But to pull that one with absolutely no set up, it has no impact other than the cheap shot kind.
ReplyDeleteAlso, does anyone remember the episode earlier in season 3 where Montgomery gets high and mighty on guest star Bruce Davidson (a high profile DA) for wanting to brush a case under the carpet and cover up the true criminal? Pot calling the kettle black? Mmmmm?
Also, stuff like that is a perfect opportunity to plant some seeds of the foreshadowing variety. Maybe Bruce says something like 'Remember when I helped you...' or 'When did you become so perfect...' or 'Hey, aren't you a part of the conspiracy that brough down Beckett's mom?' Ok, maybe the last one is a little much. But you get the idea.
However, they didn't do it. You know why? Because nobody knew they were going to sell out Montgomery until the final episode of season 3. It was an unplanned, unmotivated cheap shot.
That's the long version. Here's the short one: LAME!
You all need to read *The man in the high castle* by Philip Kindred Dick. That might alleviate the low Castle you are grieving. Obviously the screenwriters used I Ching to determine the end of season 3, and this is what the hexagram led them to. Too much reliance on causality might lead one to believe in free agency.
ReplyDeleteShirley Eugest