Castle - One Man's Treasure, S02E10

The quality of the crime investigation plot lines of Castle (as opposed to the personal relationship plot lines) is based on misdirection. There are very few episodes of any crime show where the murderer is not introduced at some point before the truth is discovered, sometimes as a suspect, and sometimes as a minor witness, almost forgotten.

In One Man's Treasure, the misdirection was not about laying the blame at the feet of one suspect so that another would go unnoticed, as was the case in episode 9 of this season, but to direct the focus of the crime towards the personal relationships of the victim rather than his work.

When a man is murdered, both his wife and his fiancée show up to identify the body. Naturally, the suspicion is that someone discovered his deception and murdered him out of vengeance. Abigail Spencer, whom you may know as the obsessive school teacher on Mad Men, played the wounded fiancée with an equally obsessive fervor. She masked her role of preventing the victim from performing corporate espionage by being the distraught wronged woman in love with a man who lied about being married.

The poor wife, who could not believe what her husband had done, suffered the persisting interference of a woman who did not actually care but was trying to recover corporate secrets. In the end, she learnt that her husband loved her and died protecting the environment, but the roller coaster of her emotions, which were elegantly portrayed, makes the fake fiancée quite the bitch.

In the end, Castle (Nathan Fillion) and Beckett (Stana Katic) sifted through all the information and worked out who was doing what to whom, and with all the misdirection, I was not able to work out the motive or the murderer any faster than they were. Kudos for that, and also for making an episode that, while punny as always, focused more on the crime and the victims than it did on the ongoing character development of Beckett and her police force and Castle and his family.