ABC’s ‘Castle’ season 8, episode 12 review: ‘The Blame Game’ and all its trappings
We’re a little bit later than usual when it comes to posting a review for this past episode of “Castle,” but better late than never, right? We did want to get a few thoughts out there when it comes to “The Blame Game,” mostly because this was as much of an example of the good and bad of season 8 has there’s ever been.
Let’s start with the positive: There were some fun moments that came out of seeing Castle and Beckett each have to solve some separate mind-puzzles to figure out one of their most demented cases they’ve been a part of, and the “Saw” comparisons were certainly real. Martha and Alexis had some fun lines this week, with the latter reminding us of just how many times Rick has a tendency to get abducted.
Now, let’s turn to what is the principal problem with this season: The lack of Castle / Beckett scenes. That photo above had us hopeful that we were going to get a lot of the two working together, but that really didn’t happen. The thing here is, we’d be fine with more of the twists in their relationship if it didn’t change too much about their professional dynamic. It just has. We still think the fake-breakup is going on, but the reactions by some of the guest characters to them were a little confusing.
As a matter of fact, we found that this episode had a number of little story issues where everything did not exactly line up. What if Castle didn’t figure out the bee sting antidote? Todd put a lot of stock in Rick’s abilities, and this episode was reliant on a certain chain of events. It was funny and at times suspenseful, but we’d probably prefer more of a standard case-of-the-week episode to it. Grade: B-.
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georgee
February 29, 2016 @ 6:52 pm
Your rating of a B- is about right. They are both great at figuring things out, it has always been there strong point especially when they are working together. And that is why the BS separation of the two never made any sense, and why it is still going on makes even less sense. The only reason why is that is that one of the show runners does not want to have them working and living together. I feel that is Hawley, I do not think he really likes Stana. We really have so little time left. If they want to do a spin off of Castle (that is all we hear about) they might want to look into a older show call King and Maxwell, it was really good and would be a good fit. As long as both Kate and Rick are in the spin. I would have given this episode a A if the separation was gone.