Castle 6x06: Get A Clue

There's a whole Da Vinci Code/National Treasure thing going on, and the secret is through this mouth.

Also, Alexis is pissed at her dad, and refuses to forget her troubles with a big bowl of strawberry ice cream.

What I Liked
-"What colour is it?" "Free" Ha!
-Castle screams when he sticks his hand in the mouth and Beckett falls for it. They always fall for it.
-The anagrams for Theodore Rose. Deer Shot Oreo was my favourite.

What I Hated
-Pi hasn't yet been spun off into a show where he lives in an apartment with two sexy ladies.
-Beckett makes a Felonius Monk pun. Boooooo.
-There are sounds of a sword fight going on and it still takes Beckett two minutes to get back to Castle. No wonder the AG fired her; she's awful.
-They never explained how the hell the guy got his dead cousin out of the church without anyone seeing. Sure, it was late, but it's not like the place was abandoned, and he would've had to drag her corpse a pretty fair distance, plus get her in the trunk of a car somehow. All without being seen and leaving no blood trail. Seems implausible, which is probably why the writers didn't even try to think of an explanation.

Final Thoughts
The whole 'secret treasure' thing was dumb for a number of reasons. Not the least of which is that finding a big sack of extremely rare coins isn't all that great since the relative scarcity is part of what makes them valuable. Anyway, the really stupid part boils down to two things: The handle to open the secret door was hidden inside a widely visible and easily accessible mouth, and the secret treasure room had multiple windows that led to the outside. The second one isn't that much of a big deal, since I suppose it's possible that the church hadn't had its windows cleaned in 220 years. But the first issue just completely overwhelms my ability to suspend disbelief. That mouth hole would've been filled with two centuries worth of gum wrappers and cigarette butts, and every jerk-ass teenager who visited the place on a field trip would've stuck his hand in it. The treasure would've been found about two minutes after it was hidden.

That's part of the reason why I didn't like this episode very much. They spent half of it running around the city trying to solve a series of riddles, only to end up back exactly where they started with the most obvious of clues staring them right in the face. While Castle showed off relative brilliance by figuring out that the symbols fit together...

Look! They make one big symbol!

...he still had no idea what it mean, and he and Beckett look like morons for not immediately sticking their hands in the mouth the moment they first saw it. Maybe I've seen too many movies, but even though it was sort of in the background, I could tell that it looked out of place. Either it was going to be important to the story, or the set designer did a crappy job. I chose to believe the former. But that just means Castle and Beckett are idiots. As is the guy who murdered his cousin.

It was fun to see Castle all giddy over the chance to hunt for treasure, but small bursts of giddiness from Nathan Fillion aren't enough to carry the show. There needs to be more than that, and they need to get rid of Pi already. I don't know anyone else who really watches the show, but I can't believe anyone out there -including the writers- could possibly think that Pi is an interesting or compelling, or even likeable character. He's terrible, and his very existence makes the show worse. It's all right to have a character who people hate if he's an antagonist, but Pi's just there Poochie-ing it up. Everything about him is bad, and only his horrible, horrible death could possibly redeem him.