Quick Thoughts: CASTLE, "The Limey"

This f'ing show! It looks like my rant about last week's "47 Seconds" was just a prologue because it's going to take a lot for me not to go completely off on this episode.

First off, I get what Andrew Marlowe's trying to do by dragging out the sexual tension between Rick and Kate. Television Writing 101 teaches every writer to milk this kind of story to the very end no matter how frustrating it can be for the audience because they want to think that's what the viewers want. I agree to a point, but there's a limit, and the one thing that showrunners like Marlowe, Hart Hanson and Steve Franks don't grasp is the fact that this limit exists and that they need to avoid hitting it. Hanson failed, Franks almost failed, and it looks like Marlowe can't figure it out either. He thinks that it's the dance that matters, but if you keep twirling around in circles, all you get is dizzy. So far, Castle's got me so turned around that I don't even care anymore, and I really couldn't muster any positive emotions after watching "The Limey."

My biggest issue with "Limey" was how lazy it was. The sheer fact that Lanie was pushing Kate so hard at the start was the first sign that nothing was going to get resolved by episode's end because that's what the writers wanted you to think. They figured if they had the audience surrogate tell Kate to just come clean with Rick over and over again, that she would eventually do it, but this is television so of course all we got was more unneccssarry roadblocks like flight attendants and British cops who sounded like he was from Australia (because he was). It smacked of "Chuck vs. the Beefcake" all over again, and I was over it as soon as Spartacus' Brett Tucker showed up in a towel. The boring case-of-the-week didn't help either.

In the end, it didn't matter who was killed or who the murderer was because all this episode wanted to do was add to the angst that is Caskett. We spent way too much time on Kate going back and forth about telling Rick how she felt (which of course was interrupted by the most asinine of stalls), and way too much of the old douchey playboy version of Castle. Classic audience manipulation. Honestly, why should we care anymore if the writers are going to treat us like idiots? I'm sure there are still some fans out there who love the tension (like I used to), and I don't claim to represent anyone buy myself, but I can't be the only one who's tired of it all.

After the episode ended, I tweeted that I'm done with this show, but that's my go to move whenever I'm annoyed by a show. I know that I'll be back for the next new episode (partially because that's when we're getting the Firefly reunion), but Castle's on thin ice with me. If Season 4 ends, and we're still forced to watch Rick and Kate pine over each other without any forward movement, then I might really be done with it once and for all.