Nanny McDead. With a bleach bottle. In the Laundry. Who can say no to that case? Not Detective Beckett and certainly not Richard Castle, who is signing paperwork which delays his entrance into the case, but not for long. This episode, unlike the previous episode helps us see Beckett and Castle as more of a dynamic duo. The mystery seemed ridiculously easy. To my surprise, the mystery is well and happily complicated. If you’re a mystery buff, maybe you did as I did and suspected the husband. He was pretty sketchy in that first scene after finding the body. Meeting the boyfriend and finding out the wife lied – you start going through the suspects one by one, just like in a mystery novel, letting their true stories cancel them out one by one. By the time you realize who the killer is (and at what point did you figure the best friend, Chloe, was the killer?), you’re right with the detectives, which is not where you want to be when it comes to mysteries. You don’t want it to be at the end, in the laundry room where the murder happened, watching the crazy girl cutting her leg, unknowingly, with a knife when you know who the murderer is. You want it to be in the the park watching the cops talking to the girl, knowing that something is off and she is probably the killer. If the remainder of the mysteries in the series goes as well as this one does, all of you murder/mystery readers will want to be watching this show.
I have to say that I like Castle a lot more this episode. He does a great job, don’t get me wrong, in the first episode. It is in this episode where we see how his mind as a writer works. He comes up with good ideas. He knows what words to weave that will cast a spell on those who read his works or listen to him. He knows that he can do this and that gives him the cocky self assurance that he needs to do this sort of writing over and over again. With that kind of self assurance, it’s easy to forget that he doesn’t know a damn thing about police work or police procedure. He doesn’t know the first thing about being in that situation where you’re trying to make sure everybody gets out alive, even the bad guy. Because the bad guy in real life is not the same as the bad guy in the books.
When Castle comes home and his daughter tells him he’s starting to act like a cop, his sheer delight at feeling comparable to the group is hilarious. Fillion has convinced us that his character sees himself as sort of a cop. He knows many cop like things from his research, but this episode, putting them into practice proves more than he realized. From questioning suspects to making the right call in the case, he finds himself a little out of his depth. It is especially telling in the final scene with Chloe in the laundry room, with his exhale, that he has gone deeper than he expected. If you watch Fillion in the scene where Chloe says, “But she didn’t get it!” and raises the knife, Fillion’s Castle makes a move as if he wants to do something. He holds his breath waiting for the knife to drop. When it does, his visible relief is real. It’s scenes like this as well as the comedic scenes, that makes me feel like this show will work. In the next scene, a more subdued Castle jokes about his inability to follow orders, but his ability to come out virtually unscathed. Here is a character that is growing.
Each episode adds a layer of depth for the characters. When we find out that Castle took care of his own child, we learn that his mother did no such thing for him and that whatever makes the daughter so darned good, Castle has a hand in that. We also learn that, outside of losing someone she loved that brought her to police work (from last week’s episode), we find that she’s gotten her heart broken before, and it was bad enough to colour how she sees men, in particular men like the guy sleeping with two nannies, taking all they had to give and promising lies in return.
This is just episode number two, but I like Castle and I hope it stays around.
