ABC’s ‘Castle’ season 8, episode 9 video: Ryan and Esposito look for answers on Castle, Beckett

Monday night’s new episode of “Castle” entitled “Tone Death” is a mere matter of days away, and if the sneak peek below is to be seen as a microcosm for the episode, there is one word that we’d use to describe it: Fun.

Since the fall finale, things have changed significantly for Castle and Beckett. While they may be keeping up appearances of some sort of epic fight, behind the scenes they’ll be blissfully in love. He’s now accepted that she needs to handle LokSat for now, at least until she can clue him in down the road. Maybe he’ll prove to be impatient eventually, but for now he appears to be handling it just fine.

Anyway, we don’t want to spend too much time talking about the Castle / Beckett relationship here, since the sneak peek is more about how Ryan and Esposito are perceiving it. They seem to think for whatever reason that Rick may be cheating, and they press him to reveal his other woman. For whatever reason, the word “Svetlana” comes out of his mouth, and that is about as hilarious of a fake mistress name as one can possibly imagine.

The clip concludes with Castle working with Ryan and Esposito to press a potential suspect, only for Castle to be the ultimate bull in a china shop before realizing that a slightly less aggressive touch would have worked just fine. The clip’s really funny, and it also gives us a fun viewpoint knowing something about Castle and Beckett that not everyone in the cast does. If this had been the twist from the very beginning as opposed to an actual separation, we probably would’ve been much happier with the first part of the season.

If you missed it, we recently sat down with Seamus Dever for a lengthy chat about playing Ryan and what’s to come this season. Check that out here! Also, sign up right now to score some other TV news on everything we cover via our CarterMatt Newsletter. (Photo: ABC.)