TV Recap: Castle 7-12 - Private Eye Caramba!

With as much as I enjoy mysteries (just look at my books read post on any given month and you’ll see how much), I also know the realities of life vs. fiction.  For example, most cops don’t get shot at in the line of duty, but it happens to cops in every book.  Of course, my favorite sub-genre, cozies, features normal civilians who not only keep finding dead bodies but also solve the cases faster than the police do.  Then there are PI’s, who spend little of their time on exciting cases like we read about and more time following cheating spouses than anything else. 

Why do I bring all this up?  I was wondering how Castle would handle that with this new PI business that Castle has started.  I mean, the reality of PI work isn’t really that exciting, so it would make for boring TV, so I figured they couldn’t really go there.  They acknowledged the reality of the profession when we learn that so far, Castle’s clients have been nutcases and people who are calling with theories on his disappearance.  Heck, even his first potential cheating spouse case goes up in smoke.  But it allows him to be available to take on a client that Beckett sends his way.

The client comes from the case that Beckett is investigating.  The victim is a telenovela star who is killed just outside her apartment building.  She’d called a neighbor asking to be let in because she’d lost her purse.  She almost makes it in before someone grabs her and kills her.

Esposito is clearly star struck, especially when they show up on the set.  They do the typical interview of the co-workers, and everyone seems upset but doesn’t really have any ideas to help them.  However, one of the victim’s fellow actresses becomes obsessed with the victim’s purse.  It was a $500K purse that the co-worker had borrowed and then loaned to the victim.  She has to return it or pay for it, so she needs it back.

And that’s how Castle becomes involved.  This co-worker becomes his very first client as he is hired to track down the purse.

Which means, he covers much of the same ground as Beckett and the other detectives do.  We backtrack the victim’s last night and where she went.  We learn she went to an opera and met with someone in the women’s room and got a flash drive from this woman.  This flash drive is still in the missing purse.  She then got in a limo and was driven away only to get out a few blocks later and run for home.

The limo driver becomes a person of interest when his finger prints show up on the victim’s body.  Castle finds him first, tracking down a VIN number he got from a photo of the victim on the internet.  He then calls in that VIN number pretending to be Ryan and gets the location.  Even though he searches the limo, it isn’t there.  And that’s when the driver shows up and kidnaps Castle.

Fortunately, the others are already looking for that car, and they swoop in and rescue Castle, who by this point was tied to a chair.  However, the driver isn’t the killer.  He has an alibi.  His print got on the victim when he was checking for a pulse after he found her body.

Another former suspect is the victim’s assistant on the TV show.  The two had had a public fight and he had attacked her several days ago.  Turns out that was staged, and she paid him for it.  She was promising him a better job later, but she needed a few days off first.  Again, he also has an alibi.

About this time, Castle finds the purse.  The victim had left it in a planter outside the opera.  He takes it back to his office and opens it up.  The flash drive is still inside.  Now, he just needs to plug it in and find out what it has on it.

Only, just as he realizes the diamonds on the purse are fake making it worse far less than he’d been told, his client shows up with a gun, demanding the flash drive.  Castle manages to disarm her (and it was a prop gun anyway, we find out later).  Looks like we’ve got the killer, right?

Wrong.  This was just the lead in to the last commercial break.  There’s still plenty of time for another twist.  See, Castle’s client was actually going to go into business with the victim, setting up a female driven Latina network.  That flash drive contains the information they need for the finances to set it up, and they are on a deadline to do so.  Fortunately, with her cleared, she is given the flash drive and is able to set things up.

The victim and her business partner discussed things in the partner’s trailer.  Searching the trailer, Beckett discovers that it was bugged.  Which leads us to the real killer – the director/producer/creator of the telenovela.  I was a little unclear about his exact position, but when we’d met him earlier, he said he discovered the victim and brought her to fame on the set of this show.  He was livid that she and her business partner were going to leave him for bigger and better things, really hurting the telenovela.

Once again, plenty of fun to be had along the way.  I love that Castle and Beckett still flirt with each other.  Ryan is so bad at spouting off wacky Castle theories, but he’s so funny doing it.  (It’s something they’ve done before on the show, and I love seeing it back again.)  And Esposito trying to hide his fan boy nature was wonderful as well.  Really, a fun episode.

So, what did you think?  Did you have as much fun with it as I did?

Looks like next week is a rerun, so I'll see you back here in two weeks for a fresh recap of a fresh episode.