SUMMARY
Castle & Beckett race to find the “Linchpin” in order to stop the first domino in a chain of events which will plunge the United States into war. (from IMDB.com)

PLOT
Okay, I’m eating my words of distaste from last week. I did the smart thing before watching this episode. I watched Pandora right before. Watching these episodes back to back made the story a bit better. Though I still didn’t feel like this was their best two-part episode (my personal favorite being “Tick,Tick, Tick…” and “Boom”), it was a decent episode.

I found the opening scene of them drowning to be a little uninspiring to the series. When series put their two main characters in danger like that, it’s kind of a yawn for the audience. We all know that they can’t kill the main characters, but I guess they can throw them into as many life and death situations as possible. The rest of the episode was pretty good, just when I thought I’d called the killer, I was proved wrong. I like when a show surprises me. Especially this show.

GUEST STARS AND PERFORMANCES
I’m going to focus on two performances. Jessica Beals and Josh Stamberg.

When Sophia (Beals) said that Danberg (Stamberg) was behind Gage’s murder I patted myself on the back thinking that I had caught that before she had. Truth be told, I think the main reason I blamed Danberg, is because in most everything I’ve seen the actor in, he plays the bad guy. I was used to it. Then, I find out that I’m VERY wrong, and that Sophia was behind it all along. Twists like that make for good television. Using actors that are commonly known for playing menacing roles and turning them to the good guy reminds the audience that these actors can do more than just be evil.

These two did very well playing at odds. Giving equal credit to the actors and to the writers for performing a twist I didn’t see coming. I had believed that Sophia was good all along, it was nice to have the tables turned.

QUOTES

Esposito: I was Special Forces. I used to eat classified for breakfast and writer boy can know??

Poor, Epso. He just wants to be in the loop.

—

Beckett: So you slept with her?
Castle: Yea, yeah I slept with her.
Beckett: Have there been others? Muses?
Castle: No.
Beckett: Just wanted to see how big the club was.

Jealous!Kate is always entertaining.

COMING UP

LINKS
If you need to catch up on the episode go to abc.com.
Tune in with John and Heidi weekly on Castlecast, a Castle Podcast.