TV Recap: Castle 6-9 - Disciple

Last night left us with some tantalizing possibilities.  No, it wasn’t another time travel episode but one of the few recurring villains stirred things up a little.  I’m definitely on Castle’s side when it comes to the subject.  No dead body means someone is still alive in fiction.  It’s one of the main rules.

But I’m getting ahead of myself as usual.

The episode opens with a security guard finding the body of a woman hanging down on the docks.  The surprise is that the woman looks like Lanie’s doppelganger.  She was definitely strangled by fishing line, and a quick database search of that MO finds two murders down in Florida.

The victim is a former prostitute who got her life straightened around a couple of months back.  She wouldn’t talk about her new benefactor, but she was living in a great apartment.  However, all of her expenses were being paid for by an off shore shell company and there’s no way to track who really owns it.

Meanwhile, Lanie freaks when she finds the woman has the same tattoo that Lanie just got in the last three months in the same location.  Then Lanie remembers a night she went out to drink with some co-workers and woke up the next morning with no recollection of how she got home.  Since she didn’t go over her two drink rule, someone must have drugged her.

She had cheek implants to look more like Lanie, and through those they track down the surgeon who worked on the victim, but she seems to be a dead end.

The victim has a picture of herself with a boat taken on the day she died.  When they go to the boat, they find a second victim, and this one could be Esposito’s doppelganger.

This second victim is a similar story, a male stripper who had recently taken a new job paying him lots of money.  He was getting coaching in how to sound more like Esposito.

And he has a connection to the doctor.  He was sleeping with her and he recommended the first victim to the doctor to get her implants.

However, when the doctor alibis out, the zero in on a new suspect.  The second victim was seen getting into a car owned by the security guard who found the first victim.  And this security guard has since disappeared.

That’s when Castle starts thinking this feels all too familiar.  The elaborate set up and the killer being one step ahead of them?  It’s got to be 3XK.  Beckett, of course, argues that no one could have survived the fall from the bridge, but Castle points out that his body was never found.  This being fiction, that of course means that 3XK is still alive.

Beckett and Castle go down to review the files on 3XK only to find them completely gone.  Esposito had checked them out.  Only he denies it.  Likewise, “Lanie” had checked out the files on 3XK at the medical examiner’s office.  So now we know why those two people were practicing looking like our characters and why there were killed.

The security guard is located at the hotel where 3XK was held, and he’s in the same room.  While the others go into the room, Castle spots him trying to sneak away and tackles him.  Given enough pressure, the security guard actually does confess to these murders, the similar ones in Florida, and countless others.  Frankly, he’s creepy.

When the files in New York were discovered missing, Beckett had the files from the prison where he was held sent over.  Ryan looks over those and discovers that the doctor was on staff at the prison the entire time 3XK was locked up.  They rush over to her office, but it’s empty.  There’s just a pen and a note promising to see them again.

And the pen?  Castle is playing with it that night and discovers it’s also a thumb drive.  He plugs it into his computer, and a song starts playing again with the sentiments of “I’ll see you again.”  As Castle and Beckett stare at each other horrified, we fade to black.

As I say, I’ve known all along that 3XK would come back into the picture at some point.  No body means the killer is still alive.  I think more than anything, it’s just a matter of getting the guest star back.

But in the meantime, this was a chilling episode, and I enjoyed it.  Yes, there were some great one liners, but on the whole I felt the suspense more than the humor.  Not that I’m complaining.  And I hope they bring Annie back.  She was appropriately evil as the doctor.  You knew something was up even when it looked like she was innocent.

Thoughts on the episode?  Hit me up in the comments and we can discuss.