Castle 5x20: The Fast and The Furriest

A car speeds up to the patient drop-off at an ER, dumps a woman on the ground, and speeds away. She's still alive, but badly injured and she dies soon afterwards. Perlmutter doesn't have an immediate cause of death, but her face is covered in what look like claw marks. A little research determines that she was getting a PhD in evolutionary biology, and she worked at a sanctuary for primates who retired from the movie business.

Beckett and Castle head over to the sanctuary and have a talk with the director. He says that the dead girl had very little direct contact with the animals, and that even if she did, the animals are very gentle. He also mentions that she had an angry confrontation with someone in the parking garage a few days earlier. While he describes the guy to a sketch artist, Castle is accosted by a man in a gorilla suit who threatens to kill him.

It doesn't quite look real.

A witness points the team to a small-time thug, but when Beckett brings him in, he claims that he found the girl lying in an alley and didn't stick around at the ER because he didn't want to take the blame. He gives her directions to the crime scene, where Castle and Beckett find a blood stain and some giant footprints. Castle knows just who the killer was.

Bigfoot.

Beckett's a little incredulous, but Castle wonders just exactly why someone would try to frame Bigfoot for murder. Back at the precinct, battle lines are drawn once more: Castle and Ryan think their killer could be the legendary sasquatch, while Beckett and Esposito think it was just hoaxers trying to get money out of some crappy reality show that's offering $1 million for proof Bigfoot exists.

However, as it turns out, the dead girl's very last phone call was to world-renowned Bigfoot researcher, Dr. Darrell Meeks. The doc tells Castle and Beckett that since the girl was a member of the First Nations, to her tribe, the sasquatch was a benevolent protector. She told him that she actually saw one as a child, and that's why she devoted her life to studying primate evolution. Meeks figures that she may have been followed by someone who thought she might lead them to a Bigfoot so they could claim the million bucks. He also identifies the other primate researchers saw her arguing with.

International big-game hunter, Chase Diggins.

It just so happens that Diggins has a hook for a hand (his left hand having been gnawed off by a sasquatch), which could have been used to make the wounds on the girl's face. Ryan and Esposito track him to a very creepy warehouse, and bring him in. Under interrogation, he admits to being in the alley where the girl was killed, but he was there the night before she died, watching her stamp fake sasquatch footprints into the dirt.

With Bigfoot seeming like a less likely suspect, the team focuses their attention on a pendant that was inexplicably found in the dead girl's stomach. Her friends indicate that it didn't belong to her, but rather to her roommate, who was murdered a year earlier. Esposito also manages to link a piece of glass found embedded in her skull to a wi-fi enabled camera, which leads to some video she uploaded to the cloud. It seems to capture her murder, but unfortunately it's very dark, so it's not particularly helpful in identifying her killer.

It's a street light.

The police tech department manages to narrow down the murder's location to a two square mile section of woods, so Beckett and Castle trudge out to the forest to investigate. They don't find the crime scene or Bigfoot, but they do find a Bigfoot trap, which they promptly fall into. Castle manges to boost Beckett out, but he has to wait in the pit while she goes back to the car to get some rope. During his imprisonment, he tries to dig himself out with a spork, and he's accosted by yet another dude in a suit.

This time it's actually supposed to be a dude.

Beckett returns to find a sasquatch staring into the hole, and wisely draws her gun. The surprise of seeing someone wave a gun in his face causes him to stumble backwards into the bit, where he removes his mask and reveals that he's actually Dr. Meeks and not Bigfoot. Meeks has been out stalking sasquatches all day, and he's even found what he thinks is a club that Bigfoot used to kill his prey.

Back at the precinct, Esposito and Ryan have rounded up the dead roommate's ex-boyfriend, who was the prime suspect in the roommate's murder. He says he's been living out in the woods for the past year and that the dead girl has been helping him by bringing him food and supplies because she didn't believe he killed her roommate. He also tells them that the roommate's pendant was stolen when she was killed, so the fact that it turned up in the dead girl's stomach meant that she had found the real killer. A quick investigation points to the director at the primate retirement home, who had been accused of harassing various female students over the years. Castle and Beckett confront him, and the look on his face makes it pretty clear that he's guilty.

Case closed.

Meanwhile, on the home front, someone or something is stealing Castle's leftovers. Martha and Alexis swear it wasn't them, and the housekeeper hasn't been there in three days, so it's a mystery, and there's nothing Castle loves more than a good mystery. In order to catch the 'giant super rats' that are swiping his chateaubriand, he sets a trap, which goes off just as he and Beckett are about to get busy. But, when they run out to catch the perpetrators, instead of a squad of giant rats, they find one relatively large daughter.

Getting caught made her a little blue.

Alexis bolts when confronted with her tennis racket wielding father, but few days later, she returns to the scene of the crime to talk about what happened. Despite the fact that he gives her a generous allowance, she's out of money because she invested it all in her friend's idea to plant rooftop bamboo gardens. She didn't ask her dad for the cash because she's tired of hearing the speech about how people might try to take advantage of people like them who have the kind of money they do. Castle's not too upset because giving all their money to causes they believe in is kind of a family trait, but she stills owes him a chateaubriand, so he gets her to call her friend, and the three of them go out for dinner to discuss how bamboo's going to save the world.

What I Liked
-Castle has to hold Ryan back when Esposito talks smack about leprechauns. You shouldn't insult a dude's cultural heritage.
-The killer broke a camera over the girl's head when he killed her, which explains why there are so few photos of Bigfoot. That actually makes a lot of sense.
-Alexis flips out and just runs away when she gets caught stealing. That's a fairly reasonable response when you get hit in the face with a dye pack.
Castle's voice breaks a little when he gets Beckett to promise to come back for him. Nathan Fillion's voice work is almost as good as his face work.
-Beckett has giant, sasquatch-sized handcuffs. You never know when they'll come in handy.

What I Hated
-The bad gorilla suit. It was a step up from the one in Congo, but it was still quite obvious that it was fake.

Final Thoughts
The brought back Jonathan Frakes for another directing gig. He didn't make a cameo this time, though, which is a shame. He would've made a pretty good sasquatch. They've given him a couple fun episodes this season.

And this episode was indeed fun, which is what I think Castle should be. They can get really dark or dramatic sometimes, but for the vast majority of episodes, they really ought to be solving murders with the help of Castle's goofiness. There are very few other shows out there that would have a character who seriously considered the idea that someone may have been murdered by Bigfoot; Castle has two.

That being said, I didn't enjoy this episode quite as much as The Final Frontier. It was really good, but it didn't have as many fun bits as that one did. However, it did have a dude in a sasquatch outfit, and Alexis getting a face full of blue dye, so I'd have to say it's my second-favourite episode of Castle this season.