ABC’s ‘Castle’ season 5 spoilers: ‘Firefly’ references and more

Just in case you somehow needed more of a reason to watch Monday night’s new “Castle” season 5 episode, we now have it for you: there will be more references to science fiction than you can count.

Some of what we are talking about here is already pretty well-documented: we already know that Castle and Beckett are going to be taking off to a science fiction convention that bears many similarities to Comic-Con, and they will also be investigating the murder of a fan of the fictional series “Nebula-9.” Even though we did know that there would be plenty of stellar references to great science fiction work of yore, what we did not know is just to what extent that we would see everything from “Star Trek” to even Nathan Fillion’s old show in “Firely.”

With that, we turn to the latest comments from the episode’s director Jonathan Frakes to Zap2It:

“There’s a Browncoat in the show … Nathan does a Shatner impersonation that is absolutely killer. Armin Shimerman, who was a Ferengi from our show, plays a mad scientist, and [Ed Quinn] from ‘Eureka’ — the cast is filled with sci-fi actors. 

“And there are moments in the writing that are winks to ‘Next Gen,’ ‘Firefly,’ ‘Star Wars’ — all kinds of double entendres. Fans that enjoy the genre will be highly entertained.”

With this in mind, this episode seems to be a welcome dose of something that many longtime “Castle” fans have been looking forward to seeing more of this season: the fun. There has been some solid drama, but the reason for this show’s massive popularity is seeing the moments of levity mixed in with the serious scenes.

What do you think about some of the references we are poised to see so far?