Castle: Dead Again (8x19)

Every time the word "LokSat" is said in this damn show, I have a visceral reaction. I freakin' hate the A-plot of this season so much. What a way for Kate Beckett to go out. Yeesh. Let's dive in to a rather confusingly executed episode. I didn't hate it, actually. That being said...

Cons:

The main plot of the week was interesting, creative, and funny. It involved a guy who kept "dying" and then waking up, and the guest actor was great, Castle was great, lots of fun material here. Juxtaposed to that was some forward motion on the A-plot, something that we haven't seen in a long while. Caleb Brown shows up and tells Beckett she's going to end up dead if she doesn't stop poking around in LokSat's business. Caleb ends the episode by giving Beckett a phone that LokSat has been using to contact him for jobs. He hopes Beckett will be able to bring him down once and for all.

My main complaint is not necessarily with either of the two plots, but with the bewildering way in which they fit together. That is to say... they don't fit together at all. The tonal inconsistencies in this episode were off the wall. Alan, the guest character who kept surviving attempts on his life, took a sort of dry optimistic look at his life, and each time he didn't die, there was a lot of comedy through Lanie's exasperation, Alan's bland acceptance, Castle's excited belief that Alan is a superhero, and more. And yet in between these scenes, we've got Caleb making dark threats and Beckett contemplating the possible end of her life. These two things do not gel together. At all. And it showed.

Also, while I actually didn't hate the stuff with Caleb, I did hate the stuff with Vikram. Has there ever been a more pointless, underdeveloped, and annoying character on this show? On pretty much any of the shows I watch? I don't think so. He pops in to help with the case of the week, but also to tell Beckett that he's got a lead - pictures of a guy using an alias who is definitely connected to LokSat in some way. Once Caleb shows up, Vikram's involvement ceases immediately, and I'm left wondering once again what he's even doing here.

There was also this weak little thread about Castle and Beckett's relationship. They speculate about what they'll do once LokSat has been taken care of, and Castle suggests that they get away from it all and move to Paris, or somewhere far away. That's... fine, I guess, but a conversation about uprooting their entire lives and careers should maybe be handled with a bit more gravitas. This is literally the first I'm hearing about big plans to leave New York behind. It felt like the motorcycle thing all over again, except even bigger. Would Castle really leave Alexis behind? What about the PI business? This feels like a clumsy way of setting up Stana Katic's departure at the end of the season, although I'm still not sure how they're planning on pulling that one off.

Pros:

The only thing that saved this episode from being totally bland and annoying was the humor. Like I said, tonal inconsistencies made a lot of this hard to swallow, but when we spent time with Alan and Castle, as Alan tries to go back to his normal life and Castle insists on learning more about his superpowers, we got a lot of fun material. I won't go over all of the funny moments, since there were too many to count, but I will mention a few. I loved it when Alan finds out that Gwen, his love interest, was actually the bad guy the whole time. She had tried to kill him twice already, once via poison and once via electrocution. This time, she fires a gun at him, point blank, and the guy still survives. Alan's reaction to learning that Gwen is the bad guy, and that she's dating another one of the baddies he met earlier, is a slightly perturbed disappointment that they won't be going on a second date. Ha! On a more general humor note, I loved Alan's rather mellow acceptance of what was happening to him. Every time he was asked to come up with a list of people who might want to harm him, he was so genial when relaying the death threats he'd received and the serious enemies he'd managed to make through his job as a safety inspector. That sort of optimism can be dangerous, I guess, but hey. He made it out alive! Actually, there were no deaths in this whole episode, which I found rather refreshing!

Then there's the Alan and Lanie romance, which was subtly woven into this episode. I love the idea of Lanie being with somebody like Alan, who is very different from Esposito. He's a genuinely good guy with a positive attitude and a lot of integrity, and I want Lanie to be happy! The best moment with them was when they did the finishing each other's sentences and talking at the same time bit. Castle and Beckett looked aghast. "Oh my God, is that what we sound like?" Castle declared that it was cute, but, like, too cute.

This review is rather short, but that's all I've got to say here. A successful case of the week plot with a lot of humor and no deaths... but the whole thing is marred by LokSat, and some vague meandering stuff about Castle and Beckett's future. I just don't get how they're going to wrap this up in a way that feels satisfying. There's only three weeks left!

7/10