Castle: Last Action Hero (7x09)

Not a fan, to be honest. There was nothing technically wrong with this episode, but it was just... I don't know how to describe it. It was missing something, though.

The plot is pretty basic. An action hero from the '80s is murdered. Castle, a big fan of the man's movies, immediately comes up with all sorts of crazy theories as to how it happened. Along the way, Castle gets to meet the other stars of one of his favorite movies. The main suspect turns out to be the man who played the victim's arch nemesis. The other actors basically abduct Castle and take him along on an illegal operation to get a video recording that might prove this man's guilt. It turns out that the son of one of the actors was actually the biological son of the victim. This adds a whole other layer of complication to things, and in the end it turns out to be this son's mother who actually killed the victim.

There's a very brief subplot about Beckett saying goodbye to her apartment. She is ready to move in and start her life properly with Castle, but she still feels an attachment to the apartment, and is sad to be letting it go. She commiserates with Lanie, but eventually says a wistful goodbye to the apartment.

That's one of the briefest plot summaries I've ever given, but I find I'm not all that interested in the further details of this episode. This season has been pretty strong thus far, what with Castle's dramatic disappearance, a really fun wild west themed episode, an Esposito-centric episode, etc. This one just felt... phoned in, I guess.

First of all, I feel like we've seen several plots like this already. Castle is a fan of someone who died/is related in some way to a murder case, and he gets all swept up in giddy excitement while Beckett tries to be more reasonable and logical. There are twists and turns, and in the end the killer was not who we thought it would be. Maybe this is just a symptom of watching too many procedural shows. I get a little sick of them sometimes.

The subplot with Beckett's apartment was also pretty weak. It seemed to come out of nowhere. I guess Lanie's explanation works - Beckett is sad about the apartment because this is where she lived when she fell in love, and where she lived when she solved her mother's murder. This is a place were a lot of changes happened for her. I get that, I guess, but it didn't work without buildup. If we had seen Beckett and Castle actually spend time in that apartment recently, then maybe this would have made some sort of sense. I don't know... I'm just not impressed.

But none of this is to say there was anything wrong with the episode, exactly.

I loved the whole sequence towards the end where Castle got to be part of his own action movie, in a sense. He got to team up with some of his favorite cinematic heroes and solve a mystery. Castle's enthusiasm for life is one of the most endearing things about his character, and indeed about the show in general. Even if this premise wasn't the most creative, I still like seeing him get invested like this.

There were a number of funny jokes about Castle's age, in that the stars of this '80s adventure film are constantly being approached by middle-aged men who are trying to hold on to the glory days. Castle seems like a realistic representation of a man of his age. He is middle-aged. He's still super interesting and has a vitality and youthful energy to him, but he's also a total dork, and he spent his early adulthood in the '80s.

I guess that's really all I have to say about this one. I feel bad about being unable to be more positive, but there just wasn't a lot here.

6/10