ABC’s ‘Castle’ season 5, episode 12 review: Going crazy, or going sane?
If you are someone who wants to see “Castle” turned into some long-form serial, Monday night’s episode “Death Gone Crazy” likely felt like a disappointment. There was no movement forward in the Castle / Beckett storyline, and there was also no introduction of a person who will play a role in the larger story.
On the flip side, the mystery behind the episode was actually rather entertaining. We had a story about a lewd party-video maker (think Joe Francis) who was actually making a spur-of-the-moment decision to quit his job in order to be a better person for his unborn daughter. In addition to that, we also had a female bodyguard (Kelly Hu) who Esposito immediately became interested in, even though she became a suspect on so many occasion in which that it is hard to really see this continuing beyond what we saw here.
The twists and turns were nice in the case, and we even enjoyed how the mystery all worked its way back to someone who should have been a suspect from the beginning: the victim’s right-hand man, who was desperate to keep the company going in order to add to his massive fortune. Was this story in some ways realistic? Sure, since it is really not every day that you see a man give up an empire worth millions for a more moral option. Nonetheless, it was nice, and a rare example of a breath of optimism on a show about people killing each other.
Finding out that there was a daughter involved here worked nicely into the other major story for the episode, as we saw Castle become paranoid over her daughter posting video blogs online. It was an understandable fear for him to have, just as it was understandable that Alexis would want to assert her freedom. It was nothing that was necessarily new to either character, but it at least gave Molly Quinn something to do for the hour.
We’ll leave you with this as a way to prepare for what lies ahead: we will be seeing the return of Senator Bracken soon to the show, and the moment that happens, you have to assume that the show will indeed become more serializes as Beckett starts to go unhinged.
Photo: ABC