Thursday, January 21, 2010

Castle - Sucker Punch, S02E13

Not long ago, I mentioned how many an awesome episode of a great crime show is based on misdirection. Sucker Punch delivered one heck of a fantastic sucker punch that made me ecstatically happy.

A man working in organized crime turns up dead. He's been stabbed multiple times, and things soon begin to point to him being an informant for the FBI. Unfortunately, he had not committed to the informing, and thus no one knows who he was planning on ratting on. Still, it starts out as a fairly straight-forward case, with some amusement on the side as Ryan (Seamus Dever) is fascinated by the possibility of making lots of money through a real estate scheme.

Things got a little more interesting when Johnny Vong (Eddie Shin), an brilliant marketer playing a poor immigrant to sell his scheme, becomes involved as a sort of mule for heroin trafficking - he bundles the drugs into his real estate videos. And he is absolutely terrified of talking, preferring 10 years in jail.

Still, nothing seems out of the ordinary, a regular episode of Castle, which would not be unexpected so closely on the heels of the Alyssa Milano guest spot. The thing is, this episode was not ordinary.

When Lanie (Tamala Jones), the coroner, had the body in her lab, she seemed unhappy about something, but it wasn't until she showed up with Dr. Clark Murray (Robert Picardo, whom I know best from the Stargate franchise) that I figured out what was actually going on.

The stab pattern of the victim was identical to that of Beckett (Stana Katic)'s mother 10 years previous. That's right, it wasn't until the episode was half over that we got the big reveal - this episode was about Kate's MOM!!

And things just escalated from there. Beckett unable to keep things together and Castle (Nathan Fillion) being nothing but supportive of her. When things got really ugly, Castle backed Kate as best as he could, but in the end she had to chose to kill her mother's killer to save Castle, rather than allowing him to live so that she could discover who had hired him to murder her mother and why!

And so, while one little piece of the puzzle was answered, and we know that Mamma Beckett's murderer is dead, we still have no idea as to why she died and what she was involved with. If anything, I am even more interested, because until now, her murder might simply (and I use the term generously) have been the work of a serial killer as opposed to a career criminal.

And so, with all that excitement, I will leave you with this question: Ninja Assassin, isn't that redundant?

No comments:

Post a Comment