Castle 5x12: Death Gone Crazy

The founder and CEO of College Girls Gone Crazy holds a party to find Manhattan's craziest college girls, he seems a little down. And when he turns up dead in the bathroom, it looks like the party's over. Where's David Caruso when you need him?

Beau Randolph was strangled with a high-end bra, so the team thinks he was killed by a random hookup. Ryan and Esposito question his sexy lady bodyguard, and she points her finger at his ex-girlfriend, Tiffany.

The company's head producer introduces Castle and Beckett to the COO and he takes them to the office to show them the big file of all the death threats Beau has received over the years. But, when they get there, they find that someone used Beau's key card to access his safe ten minutes after he died. The security video shows that it was the sexy finger-pointing bodyguard.

Kevin Costner would not approve.

Under questioning, she says that she was stealing a sex tape that Beau had made with one of her friends. She then continues her finger-pointing ways by suggesting the killer might be a guy who accosted them in the street a few days earlier.

Meanwhile, research into the death threats brings up one major suspect, an ultra-conservative activist who was trying to get College Girls Gone Crazy shut down. Beckett interviews him, and he's an uptight, evil dude, but he doesn't seem like a murderer.

Since the sexy bodyguard busted the guy's nose in the incident, a search of local hospital records leads them to Seth Parrino and his import-export warehouse. Castle's thinking mafia hit, but the truth is far more disturbing.

College Guys Gone Nuts.

Parrino's been trying to do for dudes what College Girls Gone Crazy had done for women. Beau was on board for a while, but then he backed out and said he was going to invest in children's programming. He IDs a woman who he saw arguing with Beau at the party who turns out to be Tiffany. They bring her in for questioning, and she admits that the murder bra was hers, but claims she lost it while bathroom banging a dude. She's not the killer, but she does have some interesting evidence: A photo of the sexy bodyguard pulling a bag of cash out of a garbage can.

When you point one finger, four more point right back at you.

It's fairly easy to track her down again, since she's on a date with Esposito. He's about to get lucky when Beckett shows up to cop-block him. The bodyguard says she got the money from a children's entertainment company who paid her to dig up dirt on Beau.

Castle and Beckett question the CEO and he confirms it. Beau was looking to make a hostile takeover of his organization and the CEO just wanted some leverage to get him to back off. It turns out that leverage actually was a sex tape. But it's not the existence that Beau wanted to keep secret, it was who was on it. The girl was the daughter of the crazy right-wing activist guy. If it got out, it would ruin her life as well as her father's.

Beckett brings her in for questioning, but she lawyers up. Her father barges in soon after and wonders if his zeal led his daughter to do something terrible.

Esposito and Ryan search the girl's apartment and they find an email to her from Beau detailing a $5 million trust, and an ultrasound photo; she's pregnant with his child, and he was trying to clean up his act so his child could be proud of him. Right before he died, he told the girl that he was shutting down College Girls Gone Crazy, and that he was going to be a better man.

Apparently, that didn't sit well with his producer. He killed his boss so the party wouldn't have to stop.

It's a fairly reasonable motive for murder if you ask me.

On the home front, Castle Googles himself and stumbles across Alexis' vlog: Confessions of a Columbia Freshman.

Fortunately for him they're not *sexy* confessions.

Richard thinks she's being unsafe by telling the world what she's up to, even though Martha reminds him that he was far worse at her age. He has her drop by the police station to talk about the dangers of posting personal information on the internet, but she's not having it and barges out.

Later, she comes by the Castle loft to concoct a giant sundae and convince her dad that she's smart enough not to put anything too stupid on the internet. He's the master of doing stupid things, and doesn't wan his daughter to make the same mistakes he did, but he trusts her, so he's going to let her live her life while still occasionally butting in and telling her she's wrong.

It's called 'parenting'

What I Liked
-Esposito tries to talk about how $250 shoes are more practical than a similarly-priced bra, but Castle tells him to eject. Never argue with women about how much they spend on clothes. You can't win.
-Parrino's dance moves while his guys are going nuts. Dude knows how to boogie.
-Ryan had to do bra research to determine who might have owned the murder weapon. I didn't know it before I saw this episode, but that's my dream job.

What I Hated
-Castle gets all after-school special on Alexis. It was almost Degrassi-esque in its heavy-handedness. I really hope they don't go down any weird melodramatic avenues with her.

Final Thoughts
This entire episode was really depressing. When a wealthy porn producer is sad and melancholy, the world cries. The guy has millions of dollars and hot, naked chicks throwing themselves at him. If he's sad, what right do I have to be happy? Plus he died before he ever got to see his daughter, and Esposito didn't get to nail the sexy bodyguard. There was sadness all around.

Beyond that, the show seems to be falling into the trap of making the killer a random person who had 30 seconds of screen time and wasn't even a suspect before being outed as the murderer. That's fine every once in a while, but when it happens every time it makes the show seem far too random.