Under the Gun

by Courtney Hilden

"Under the Gun" found Becket, Castle, Ryan and Esposito sleuthing around a man's death, which leads to a treasure map that no one but Castle believes is a treasure map.

Although there was a lot of delightful things about this episode, like most episodes of Castle, there was a lot about this episode that did not feel right. Using the radio devices, something the show never does, meant of course that it was going to reveal a clue. Even though the clue was important, the totally contrived way of finding it ruined it. It would be far more likely that Detective Ryan would knock the calculator off the desk, breaking the phone and revealing the bug in the process. In another totally expected moment, the old man suspect was faking his poor walking.
And in the most expected moment of the night, Royce, Becket's old friend, turned out to be apart of the plot, who removed Random and made sure he was never delivered to Central Booking.
And since I already mentioned there were good things about this episode, it is important to mention them. The bounty hunter calling Becket out on her ridiculous shoe choices (heels, natch) was a nice touch.
All the actors involved gave adequete perfromances. Brian Krause as a minister gave his typical subtle but strong performance. His character's story sounded totally suspicious and he managed to perfectly balance believeable and unbelievable as a suspect.

And in the nicest touch of all in this episode, when Royce called Becket and attempted to upset her and throw her off, she turned the tables on him and did the same. On another show, Royce calling Becket would have consisted of Royce psyching Becket out and screwing up the investigation. Instead, Becket psyched him out, telling him exactly what would upset him most and keeping him on the line longer to get a location. Too bad she cried at the end of the scene. It would have been nice to see some nerves of steel from this woman.
And finally "I can't based my entire case on your spidey sense" was a great line, but it was evocative of a certain line from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, a show our beloved Nathan Fillion was once on. Castle and Becket are quickly becoming a Mulder and Scully pair, with Castle espousing fantastic ideas and Becket staying closer to reality. Unlike in The X-Files, however, Becket is usually closer to being right. And if that was not nerdy enough for you, the geek references continued, naming one of the suspects Random, also a character from Hitchhiker's Guide.

The Mastodon in the Room

by Courtney Hilden
Spoiler Alert!: Some of the early details of this episode are totally spoiled in this review. The crime itself, however, is not.

In this episode, where they "get the band back together," as it were, opened up on vacation clips of what various characters were doing. It was about as boring as actually vacation clips of characters doing things. It was sort of a lost opportunity, since the episode could have shown various characters doing legitimately interesting things in their various locales. Having a few episodes that focused on characters that were finding themselves deeply embedded in mysteries where ever they were and realizing they missed the work and their teammates would have been great. They would have given the actors, especially the lesser characters, a chance to have an episode all to themselves. Instead, they were just suppose to give us a taste of what they were doing, which was apparently exactly what you expected: Daisy still be annoying in Indonesia with Brennan stoically carrying on, Booth saving the day in Afghanistan, and Cam about to douse her career into flames.
Why was Cam's apparently impending career fail the genesis for bringing these characters back together? Somehow, this felt totally false. The case felt like a reject case from lots of other police procedural shows. Another case, a much bigger case, should have brought the characters together, or even better, a character's death should have been the case that called all the characters back to D.C. (Maybe they could have killed off one of those annoying interns. I'd still vote for Daisy, who is still so annoying and socially clueless that it's a shock Sweets has not diagnosed her on the autism spectrum.)
The episode was unrealistic in a lot of other ways. Daisy was beyond stupid to bring her engagement ring to Indonesia. She was dressed totally inappropriately with her skimpy underwear and cute clothes. (And was the camera's focus on her butt in an early scene necessary? No, it wasn't.) The only good thing about these Indonesian scenes is that Brennan was at least capable of wearing clothing that was practical for the environment and that did not do her any favors.
The costume choices continued to be strange throughout the episode. Sweets looked terrible doing the jazz look, but this was hard to notice, giving his terrible facial hair. His new look makes him look like an extra from Shakespeare in Love, and not in a good way.
On a feminism note, Brennan's comment to Booth that she had to beat people up because he "wasn't there to save her" was totally out of character, considering the pilot episode showed her perfectly capable of beating people up herself and not needing the least bit of help from Booth. What happened to that Brennan? Is she still lost out in the jungle?
Cam's anger at Brennan for pursuing the career she clearly loves was uncalled for. It smacked of all that "women need to sacrifice everything for everyone else" rhetoric. If Brennan had been a man, no one would have blinked at the decision to go do research in Indonesia. It also just reeked of trying to create drama for drama's sake. And it was another example of how unrealistic this episode was. If a program was that important to both the Jeffersonian and the FBI, someone would have stepped in to keep it going. And, given the reputation that Brennan apparently has, forensic anthropologists would have probably fought over it.
This doesn't mean everything in the episode was bad. For example, most of the interns are now out of the picture, leaving the least irritating one, Wendell. (Too bad about Nigel Murray. He had real potential.)