Tuesday, November 11, 2014

Castle - The Time of Our Lives


The longer it stays on the air the more Castle becomes Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman (including a over-complicated failed wedding and spur-of-the-moment private second attempt in front of some very suspect green screen). In the style of It's a Wonderful Life, insomnia, fear over whether or not he's good enough for Beckett (Stana Katic), and a concussion lead Castle (Nathan Fillion) to awake in a parallel dimension where the two have never met. To get home a disoriented Castle will have to find a mystical Inca artifact which he believes is responsible for bringing him to his new reality.

Despite the staid set-up, "The Time of Our Lives" does offer the opportunity to play on Beckett's old consternation with Castle insinuating himself into the middle of a case without her consent. While Esposito (Jon Huertas) and Ryan's (Seamus Dever) lives (other than the state of their failed love lives) are mostly unchanged, Castle discovers how not meeting Beckett and writing Nikki Heat not only effects him but also Alexis (Molly C. Quinn) and Martha (Susan Sullivan).

With as long as it's been on the air I guess we should expect Castle to dig into a well-mined story like It's a Wonderful Life. And to be fair, the alternate reality offers several fun moments, and the wedding back home to close out the episode is sweet (if unnecessarily rushed and not quite good enough to justify throwing such a big wrench into the pair's relationship with last season's cliffhanger).

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