ABC’s ‘Castle’ season 5, episode 7 review: Rocking the boat

When you have at least 22 episodes in a season, you have to get a little bit creative from time to time; with that in mind, Monday night’s new episode of “Castle” season 5 brought us a rather experimental episode that played out in a format that we have not really seen on the show before: a rock music documentary. Think of it as “The Office,” but longer and without as many pranks.

As a standalone hour, this was at least entertaining from the standpoint of seeing how some of the characters chose to act completely full of themselves whenever the cameras was on them. Gates was suddenly nice, Lanie was angling for as much camera time as possible, and we got to see a really goofy side to Beckett as she went from being overly uptight in front of the cameras to completely loose … mostly out of disdain for them being there.

But did anything really happen in this hour to actually impact the long-term future of the show? Not unless you count getting to hear Esposito sing for the first time. The precinct was investigating the death of a rock star, and the crew was there in order to capture it as some sort of fitting tribute for a project that they were otherwise planning to make before the victim’s death. Should it be a surprise that the actual killer was a fellow musician motivated by rage? Not at all, though were were some crazy tie-ins to cults and other bizarre characters.

Really, how much you enjoyed “Swan Song” is going to depend on how much you enjoy a straightforward procedural. There was nothing that was bad about the episode, and it was a nice way to escape for an hour. On the flip side, we’re sure that some people were probably hoping to learn more about some of the characters, or at least what could be coming up for them down the road.

What did you think about the format of this episode, and did you like the way in which it was filmed?