Castle - Fool Me Once..., S02E04

Everyone loves a good con movie, or when a cop show gets a good con plot. This one started out a little horrific. A class full of grade 1 students is watching a live video of an arctic explorer, who is telling them about his trip (which they helped fund). Suddenly we see the shadow of a person with a gun, and then the man is shot while the class looks on in horror.

And it turns out that Stephen Fletcher was not actually in the arctic, but in an apartment building. Also, he's not actually Stephen Fletcher. He's a con man, with multiple identities and no prints in the system. And what con man doesn't have quite a few victims who would like to see him dead.

It turns out that he was really really good at what he did. He managed to convince a woman who had diagnosed paranoia issues to give him her life savings - she apparently meditated about his death regularly, but did not commit the crime. He also had a very wealthy fiancee whom he was to marry in about a week. Naturally, Castle (Nathan Fillion) and Beckett (Stana Katic) believe this to be a con as well. They ask her father, after all, what wealthy man does not have potential-future-sons-in-law followed by private investigators? And he did, and discovered the truth. When he confronted Stephen about it, Stephen promise that that life was behind him and that he loved Elise, and agreed to sign whatever prenuptial the father wanted.

It also turned out that the grade 1 teacher (played by David Ramsey* from Dexter) was in on the scam and getting money for it. He didn't kill Stephen either, but he reveals that Elise knew about his meeting with the dead man. And the clues keep leading to new places, and yet never to the solution. Oh complicated cons!

Beckett and Castle finally unravel the information, with help as Stephen makes contact with Elise. Is he still alive? After all, the video did not actually show him being shot and the body they recovered had no face and could not be identified. But, since they've determined that the love between he and Elise was real, they go to follow her. She has already gone to meet him.

At her house, Castle and Beckett find the programs for the wedding - they were printed by Elise's friend Sue and are exactly like the brochures for the arctic expedition.

So they con Sue - she gets money from Elise, supposedly for Stephen, but when she gets to her car and opens the case, all she finds are newspapers.

Meanwhile, Beckett spends the entire episode denying or implying that she has been reading Castle's book and conning him. It was pretty entertaining.

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