TV Talk, or, I overanalyze a show at 1 am
Okay, so, I've been watching Castle from the first season to the current, and I finally got to season 3, episodes 16 and 17. AKA the ones with the terrorist plots ad dirty bombs and stuff. And, as nobleplatypus calls it, the infamous freezer scene.
So I actually watch this show as a fun thing. It's not usually very thought-provoking. It's silly, fun to solve mysteries, with some really likeable characters and actors. You know, a crime show. Fluff, but very good fluff.
But I kind of want to get all analysis-y on this little arc, so I shall.
First off, let's just get it out of the way: The freezer scene was pretty cliched and unrealistic. I mean, come on, a cop fires her gun in an enclosed metal area? Even I know not to do that. And I kept thinking, why do neither of them have frostbite? They have hypothermia but they go back to work the next day, no problem. Wouldn't they have serious circulation problems, maybe even slight necrosis in their hands and feet? Granted, I'm not an expert, but the fact that this immediately set me off means that at the very least, the writers should've stuck in a line about frostbite and why it is or isn't occuring.
And then there's the bit where Castle and Beckett are leaning up against the wall, freezing to death, and he apologizes for getting her into this mess and she almost says how much she cares about him but loses conciousness and he's like, stay with me, and I'm like, I've totally seen this before. It was actually pretty disappointing. One of the things I like most about this show is that they twist a lot of common mystery/procedural tropes, and talk a lot about the difference between real life policing and fiction. So the bar for writing (and cliches) is set a lot higher. I think if this scene happened in any other crime show, I wouldn't even notice. But I was seriously expecting something a little bit more...I dunno, unexpected.
And that was actually going to be the end of my post, but then I was about halfway through episode 17 and they had one of the most interesting and unexpected bits of character development that I've seen in a really long time.
See, there's this Homeland Security guy named Fallon who comes in during episode 16, and he's kind of a stock character -- you know, the government guy who's all-american, dedicated, wants to get the terrorists at any cost, kind of an asshole, tough as nails and has a hint of racism. Like, a Tommy Lee Jones type of character. Which, again, is not great, but acceptable, especially because the show is not playing it up as much as it could.
But then there's this great moment where Castle says, "I wonder what it's like to be him?" And then he talks for just a minute about how hard it is to deal with this kind of situation, how you do what you know is right but it makes you feel like a monster, and that this is Fallon's everyday job. Meaning, Fallon probably knows that he's doing awful things, and he probably doesn't excuse himself by saying "I have to protect America at any cost, fuck other countries" or whatever, but just does these things because he has to, and then probably goes home and has to live with the fact that he threatened an innocent woman's baby like he did earlier in the episode. And maybe I'm just thick, but I've literally never thought about that. Usually when the government spook character gets any development, it's all about how they do everything out of duty, and they don't feel bad about the little things they do every day in a crisis. But then all of a sudden we get this great, obvious thought that, of course these characters are human, and of course they're under all of this awful stress most of the time, and so of course they're terrible to people, and they feel like monsters all the time. It took this stock character that's so instantly hateable, and made him not only sympathetic, but almost tragic.
And we get all of that, literally in less than a minute of dialogue. Love it, love it, love it.
Of course then later in the episode they give him a sort of more obvious personal reason for being such an ass, but I still love that moment earlier..
That's not to say that some of the philosiphising/moral stuff in these episodes wasn't...a bit heavy-handed, shall we say. Most of the stuff about soldiers being used up "like tissue paper" (a nice turn of phrase, I'll admit) was pretty obvious and not exactly ground breaking. And I do tend to agree with the whole disposable soldier thing being basically awful, but just because I agree doesn't mean that I need to have it stated so obviously several times an episode. At least they handled the racial aspect somewhat gracefully.
What I'm a little bit torn on is the romance aspect. It's important stuff for the characters, but it felt weirdly shoehorned in. There's so much going on in these episodes -- Castle and Beckett's lives are threatened twice, they get kicked off the case and then reinstated, there's a dirty bomb, possible terrorists and a massive red herring, a government guy who takes over the case, and the actual central mystery itself. That's a lot of stuff, even for a two-part story, and the romance is the least interesting of all of this. I get the reasoning behind it -- high stakes mystery lends itself to upping the stakes in their romantic tension -- but yeah. So many things going on in this episode, and I honestly don't care about Beckett's perfect doctor boyfriend with the awful long hair. I liked Tom Demming from season 2 so much better, because he was actually developed, a sympathetic character (and it doesn't hurt that he's played by ultimate nice-guy actor Michael Trucco, aka Anders from Battlestar Galactica). I actually liked the guy and so I was invested somewhat in their relationship, rather than this doctor dude who I just want to go back to Grey's Anatomy.
The last thing I wanted to talk about was the cinematography in episode 16. They started the episode with Castle being dragged by two dudes down a hallway, no one knows what's going on, he's shoved into a large white radiation tent, and he looks up. Then there's a long shot of Beckett standing in this white blank area looking at him, and then they do a few crash zooms in on her very worried/scared face, while rather Inception-y music plays in the background (that note, you know...whaaaaaaaa. Whaaaaaaa.) And then at the end of the episode, they do the same thing, shot for shot, except this time it's Castle standing in the wide shot, and the large white space is of course the freezer. He's got almost the same expression on his face as she did in the first bit. Which...well, I can see where it'd be a really nice touch, but it was a bit overdramatic and seemed a bit forced. A little too on-the-nose. I think it was the music that put it over the top for me. I don't know when this episode was aired, but I really do hope it was before Inception came out because otherwise, damn that is some obvious musical lifting. And, like I said, if they'd used more subtle music I would've actually probably liked the symmetry.
I guess in conclusion, this arc was really interesting. It was a lot more cerebral than the average Castle episode*, and it had some really high highs and some low-ass lows. It was fun to analyze.
And, because now I've written over a page on this and I need something that's not massively TL:DR, here's the most bizarre/awesome ending to an episode thus far. I was watching it on sunday night and laughed so hard I cried.
Click to view*Looking back over this, it kind of sounds like I think Castle is a stupid show. I actually don't, I really like it (or else why would I be watching all 3 seasons) but I do think that it's not usually intended to make an audience think really hard about social issues or anything. Which is fine, because it's a great version of a certain formula, and that's really all I'm asking for.