ABC’s ‘Castle’ season 5, episode 5 review: Did Nathan Fillion play a killer?

After a week off the air thanks to a Presidential debate, Monday night’s new episode of “Castle” came back with a bang thanks to a story with a very key twist: rather than investigating someone else for a murder, they were instead looking at Nathan Fillion’s title character as a suspect.

Did Richard Castle really commit a murder, though? There was certainly a mountain of evidence against him, and to an extent, you can even argue that the evidence was too much. It was carefully constructed not just to look like Castle made the kill, but that he took a few steps in an effort to implicate someone else for it instead. This was a perfect enough crime to get him behind bars, and to even get the District Attorney involved to transer him to a proper cell.

With all of this, there was still a twist: this is “Castle,” so you knew that our leading man could not be the one responsible for pulling the trigger here on a woman he didn’t even know. Instead, Beckett’s belief that her boyfriend was innocent led to a different sort of investigation, especially after he said that he was visited by the 3XK killer, who was still so confident that nothing would happen to him that he didn’t bother with trying to keep his involvement a secret. Then again, this is why villains never win: they get cocky. Thanks in part to this one move, Beckett was able to put enough of a trail together to have this guy eventually revealed as the guilty party, though he was not arrested. In a pretty cool moment for Castle, he ended up playing the hero to Beckett and shot 3XK off a bridge … even though it is possible that he is still alive.

What did you think about the episode, and did you like the way that the twist unfolded?