“The Fast and the Furriest” is the latest in Castle‘s occasional series of supernatural- or monster-themed episodes, in which Castle (and sometimes Ryan) tend to eagerly suspect that the crime they’re investigating was committed by ghosts or zombies or vampires, while Beckett (and Esposito) remain skeptics. This week: Bigfoot.
Our victim of the week, Anne Cardinal, is a Ph.D. student in evolutionary biology who is theoretically studying primates but actually, it turns out, looking for Bigfoot. This plunges Castle and Beckett into the colorful world of cryptozoology, but while the show clearly has a lot of fun with the various hunters and their hijinks – at one point, Castle winds up stuck in a trap being menaced by a person dressed as Bigfoot – it turns out that the murder did not actually have anything to do with Anne’s Bigfoot interest at all.
Instead, Anne’s murder is related to the murder of her roommate Justine Bolton a year earlier. Justine’s ex-boyfriend Kurt was suspected of her murder, and he (not Bigfoot) hid out in the woods, convinced Anne of his innocence, and worked with her to find the real murderer. It turned out that Justine was being stalked and harassed by a professor, who killed her when he realized she was going to turn him in. He took the pendant Justine always wore – the pendant that was found in Anne’s stomach, signaling that she had found and been killed by Justine’s murderer. Once Kurt convinces the cops of his innocence, he helps them identify the professor who is the actual murderer, and the physical evidence combined with the professor’s history of stalking at other colleges allows them to arrest him.
Honestly, though this episode was fun, these monster episodes are starting to feel a bit repetitive. But this one at least had the added benefit of not only letting Beckett tease Castle about his willingness to believe anything, but turning it into a sweet, genuine relationship moment. After Beckett asks Castle whether there’s anything he doesn’t believe in, he asks what she does believe in. “I believe in the everyday magic of life,” Beckett says, but Castle explains that he thinks the modern world has lost too much of its mystery and that we need to reach for the unknown to make us grow. Beckett: “There’s one inexplicable, mysterious phenomenon that I do believe in still – us.” Aww.
There’s a mystery going on at the Castle residence, too: Castle has noticed food going missing, but all three women in his life deny involvement. He sets a paint trap that reveals the perpetrator to be Alexis, who confesses that she’s sneaking food from the house because she has no money: She invested her allowance in a friend’s crowdsourced project to plant bamboo on rooftops in order to clean the air. She kept it a secret because she didn’t want a lecture from her father on not letting friends take advantage of their wealth, but Castle ends up being pleased and impressed by her idealism and decides to help as well.
A note: Because of the bombing in Boston, Monday’s bomb-themed episode has been swapped with the following episode. It shouldn’t cause huge issues, but if you notice any continuity errors, that’s why.
(Image courtesy of ABC.)