Castle -- Swan Song (5.07) Review

Right, so it’s well known that I’m not a big fan of documentary/found footage episodes so instead please accept this picture of my dog.

KIDDING! Sorry, I just wanted to get that out of the way. Most of tonight's episode was listened to rather than watched. Shaky cameras have always made me lose interest in a show if the effect is used for more than a few seconds. Add that to the trap a lot of these shows fall into, having characters we’ve loved for years introduce themselves and others as if we were new to the show again but in a less organic way than the original, and you’ve got an episode that I would typically sleep thru on the DVD. Except, and here’s the difference between most of them, this episode isn’t really that different of an episode of the show. Sure we lacked Martha and Alexis, but we’ve missed them in the past and it didn’t suck. You see there was still the ever looming threat Capt. Gates could find out about their relationship and Ryan and Espo still had their carguments (to borrow a phrase from the Hawaii 5-O lexicon). Take out the cameras and this episode could have been any other episode; I mean that in a good way. So while this episode is not my favorite, it played well. Well played Castle team, well played.

That doesn’t mean I want more of these episodes so TV execs if you read this take note NO MORE DOCUMENTARY/FOUND FOOTAGE EPISODES!!! But this one didn’t suck and was actually a pleasant surprise.

And as one last note, I loved that the film team hid the footage of Beckett and Castle together from Gates and that Beckett locked one of the cameramen in a janitor's closet.