Castle

Castle

Episode 12: Death Gone Crazy

Mini-Review

By: Carlos Uribe

Castle is a show about a mystery writer who helps his lover solve crimes.

Spoilers Ahoy!

This week’s case is basically dull and forgettable. There’s a producer for some adult entertainment who is killed. The killer was his cameraman because the victim had decided to close down his business to go into family entertainment. Why? The victim discovered a girl he slept with was pregnant with his child and he wanted to be a good father. He felt like he had finally found his purpose in life and no longer needed the adult entertainment company to try and fill that void. The writers did their best to make this case entertaining but they went for all the predictable jokes and made Esposito a bigger pervert than normal. What is the show trying to do? Making me root against him? First there’s his tendency to ignore the law when he sees fit and now he becomes a sleazebag. I’ve liked the character in the past but the previous two episodes have inadvertently been painting him in a negative light. When the case fails this bad, you could at least hope for some good Castle and Beckett moments. There are some but they’re too far and between. My favorite and the only one that really landed was where Beckett was basically caught checking out a guy. Castle also gets to deal with a self-manufactured crisis when he finds out that his daughter has a video blog. He freaks out for no real reason and it feels like the show is trying to make a comment about how open my generation is without actually succeeding.

Death Gone Crazy does lend itself to some entertaining jokes but it’s hard to stay interested at such a dull case and a forced Castle-Alexis conflict. The episode doesn’t take itself too seriously but the jokes are juvenile and rarely land. It’s not as bad as last week’s atrocious episode but it is one I doubt I’ll be thinking about beyond this review. The show is going off the air for the next two weeks and it’s a pity that instead of an episode to the level of “Significant Others”. we get one that simply fails to really go anywhere.

Other Notes:

If Castle hadn’t brought up that the victim was seen in the frozen head case, I would have never remembered.  

The scene with the conservative activist really stood out from the rest of the episode that it’s a pity they didn’t pursue that angle further.