Castle 5x23: The Human Factor

A man with a bad haircut climbs into his car, which promptly explodes. At home, Castle is playing with a remote controlled tank, complete with wireless camera and a main gun that really fires when they get the call. There's nothing particularly routine about a car bomb, but when Beckett and Castle get to the scene, the car's being hauled off by homeland security, there are shadowy men in black suits hanging around, and Tony Almeida's milling about.

Technically it's just another government dude played by Carlos Bernard, but I'm gonna call him Tony.

They don't have access to much of the evidence, but Esposito manages to scrounge up the dead guy's wallet before the DHS can get their hands on it. The guy's wife and son say he was a Julian Assange type whose been being followed and harassed by various government agencies for almost a decade.

With the various three-letter agencies stonewalling them, the team doesn't have much to go on. But they do know that the bomb was planted well before it blew up, and his neighbours saw an unfamiliar motorcycle race out of the parking garage the night before he died. A traffic camera gets them a plate number, and it leads to a security contractor for a corporation the guy blew the whistle on a while ago.

A very smug security contractor.

She says that her job was to get close to the guy to find out who was leaking him damaging information. To that end, she was pretending to date him, and tells the team that his wife had just found out and threatened to kill him. Under questioning, the wife admits to the threats, but she didn't have the capacity to place a bomb in her husband's car, nor the finances to hire someone else to do it. So the team has no idea who or what was behind the bombing until the tech guys report back on the little bit of evidence they were able to collect before the feds got there: The guy wasn't killed by a bomb, he was killed by a missile. A drone missile.

A cheaply-animated drone missile.

Beckett secures a meeting with the head of the drone program at Ft. Drummond, but when she and Castle get there, Tony's standing around looking all shadowy, and the only answer they can get to any of their questions is "That's classified." On the drive home they get a call from Espo, who tells them that the feds just showed up and seized all their evidence; they agreed to the meeting so they could see what the cops knew and find out what they needed to take from them.

With no evidence left, the team starts looking into the dead guy's associates. They talk to his son, who manages to arrange a meeting with his dad's business partner, Omar. When Beckett goes to meet him, he's freaked out because people have been following him around. Fortunately, Tony's not terribly discreet, so Beckett manages to get the drop on him and takes him into custody.

Omar's a little surprised by that development.

Back at the precinct, Beckett grills Tony in the interrogation room, but he's not interested in talking because he knows his freedom is imminent. After less than three minutes of questioning, Beckett gets a phone call from the Attorney General asking her to release Tony. She does a little bargaining first, though, and gets the AG to get his man to help her with the investigation. His real name is Gerald Stack and he's a special investigator for the Attorney General's office (I'm going to keep calling him Tony, though). The dead guy was under scrutiny by so many government agencies that they needed an objective observer to look into his death. He was indeed killed by a drone, and a few minutes later, Tony gets a video feed from one of his colleagues that shows that someone hacked into the drone's software. The homeland suddenly seems considerably less secure.

Castle suspects Skynet, but Tony tells them the signal came a human being in the southern half of New York State and drops the name Warburg before taking off. A quick internet search tells the team that Simon Warburg was the chief designer of military drone software before deciding to sabotage it and go off grid. They find a video of him warning of the coming drone-based police state, and Beckett thinks he took control of the drone in order to frame the government and prove that the future is now!

Conspiracy theorists always need better lighting.

Using the video and Castle's encyclopedic knowledge of books, they manage to trace Warburg to a farm near Woodstock. When they get there, a black drone flies out of nowhere and opens fire on them. The first pass misses them, but they don't have time to find cover, so when it comes back around, they try to shoot it down. While there's some disagreement over who exactly fired the kill shot, the end result is the same, and the drone crash lands in the bushes behind them. As Castle is revelling in their victory, Beckett notices that the bullet casings on the ground were for blanks. Warburg comes out of hiding and tells them it was only meant to scare away trespassers and he's mighty pissed off that they shot down his favourite drone.

He takes them inside and tells them a story of how two years ago a drone pilot was ordered to fire upon a car that was thought to be carrying militants, but when he got a good look at it, he saw that it was covered with roses because there were no militants inside, but rather a young couple who had just gotten married. After that, Warburg couldn't bring himself to work on the drone program anymore because the next generation we'll be AI controlled and won't be able to make the decision to abort when something seems off. In fact, he wanted to shut down the entire drone program, so he wrote software that would let him hack into and remotely control any drone in the country, and then released it to the guy who got blown up. Except exploded guy didn't want to leak the software to the world because he didn't want any nutjob on the planet able to take control of a drone. But when he returned the software, Warburg noticed that someone had made a copy. Castle and Beckett suspect Omar, so Tony uses fancy facial-recognition software to track him down.

There he is!

Omar hopped on a plane to Lebanon, but thanks to the awesome power of the Office of the Attorney General, Tony gets the plane to turn right back around. Beckett puts the screws to him, but he says he ran because he was freaked out because people were following him and his boss exploded, and he has no idea what's going on. He does, however, know one other person who might have had access to the drone software. Castle and Beckett pay a visit to the dead guy's son. He was pissed off that his father's work was ruining his life and that he left his mom for another woman. People have been blown up for far less. The kid goes down, and Tony is so impressed with Beckett's work that he offers her a chance to interview with his organization. She doesn't tell Castle.

What I Liked
-Castle's official battlefield nickname is Field Marshal Pervert. That seems about right.
-Tony tells Castle that he's wearing a Mission Impossible style mask. Most shadowy agent types don't have much of a sense of humour.
-Beckett attacks Castle in the middle of the night with his remote controlled toy army. Where's tiny Arnold Schwarzenegger when you need him?

What I Hated
-Beckett didn't take any backup to her meeting with Omar. How convenient that the one time she does anything alone is the time when it would've been really useful to have an extra body around.

Final Thoughts
Does Carlos Bernard ever not play some kind of federal agent? He played one on two episodes of Hawaii Five-0 earlier this season. I guess he has one of those federal agent faces.

It's not often that Castle gets topical. Drones are big news in the US these days, but they haven't actually been used to blow people up on American soil yet. If and when that does happen, I somehow doubt that the local police force will be allowed to do nearly as much actual investigating as the TV cops did in this episode.

Honestly, I wasn't feeling this one. The stuff with Castle goofing around playing with toys was fun, but a lot of the rest was equally nonsensical while trying to be serious. Even though there was a lot of intrigue and some spy stuff, the killer was a kid who was pissed off at his dad. That's not novel or even all that interesting, really, so it really felt like a wasted opportunity to me. Plus, no Alexis or Martha this week. The killer was a family member and Castle's family wasn't even in the episode. That just seems wrong.