Castle 5x19: The Lives of Others

Thanks to a little ill-advised hot-dogging on the slopes, Castle is sidelined with a broken kneecap. Meanwhile, there's a case to be solved. It's tax season in the US and someone just took a bat to the head of an IRS agent outside her office building. The security cameras caught it, but unfortunately whoever did the swinging was wearing a high-intensity IR light on his head and his face was completely invisible.

Looks like ARod doesn't like paying his taxes.

The victim's husband claims that someone came up to them in a restaurant, screaming about how she had ruined his life. But, since threat reports generate a lot of extra paperwork, it was an unwritten rule at the IRS that no one should actually file one, which means that Ryan and Esposito have to comb through her audit records by hand, looking for someone who matches the husband's description.

At home, Castle's suffering from a little dose of cabin fever, which is strange, seeing as how he has an awesome cable package and internet access. Fortunately, Alexis gave him binoculars as a little gag gift, so he could pretend he was Jimmy Stewart in Rear Window. He's able to resist for a while, but the temptation of being able to watch his neighbours doin' it is far too difficult to overcome. In the windows across the street he sees a couple writers arguing, a maid stealing from her employer, and a sexy young couple about to get it on. Apparently, he's not a pervert, because he actually looks away just as it's about to get good. However, as he pans left, he sees that the woman's boyfriend is home early, and she has to hide her lover in the closet and quickly get redressed.

Busted!

She manages to get the guy out of the apartment with his pants on, but he's left his stupid hat behind, and the woman has a little explaining to do. Later, as he watches them cook dinner, he prepares to witness the inevitable breakup fight. Instead, he sees the guy pick up a large knife and follow his girlfriend into the bedroom, where the shades are conveniently drawn. Castle quickly calls in the fuzz, but when they arrive they find no signs of the girl, or of a murder having taken place. The boyfriend even calls her and hands the phone to Esposito so he can confirm that she's still alive.

Although he insists that he's not crazy, Beckett gets Castle to admit that he may just be playing out a Rear Window scenario in his head, and the odds of something like that actually happening are astronomical. That sinister-looking kid is not coming to kill him. Nevertheless, he gets up in the middle of the night and continues to spy with his binoculars, even falling asleep in his wheelchair.

The next day, the team continues the investigation and finds out that the guy who accosted the dead IRS agent probably wasn't the killer and that she had asked him to help her set up a new identity in exchange for making some of his tax problems go away. Of course, the titular character is not involved, and calls Beckett back to the apartment after he sees the ex-boyfriend washing some red stuff off his hands.

He was probably just making pasta sauce with his bare hands, like they do in the old country.

Beckett refuses to believe him, but Alexis has grown up with his insanity, and is far more credulous. When he calls his daughter over after seeing the guy drag a rolled-up carpet out of his apartment at 3am, she joins him with her own set of binoculars, through which she sees the guys trip down to his underwear and slap on a gas mask and rubber gloves. Something very strange is going on over there. Without a saner voice to keep him from doing something stupid, Castle convinces Alexis to keep a lookout with her binoculars while he breaks into the guy's apartment to grab some evidence. He gets inside with relative ease, but then deviates from the plan and does a more thorough search than Alexis agreed to. Inside the closet, he finds bleach, paint, and what he thinks are blood stains, but before he has time to take a sample, the guy comes home. Hindered by his injured leg, Castle can't escape, but he manages to hide under the bed and slip out while the guy's in the bathroom.

At the same time, the detectives discover that something very strange was going on with the dead IRS agent. She had over half a million dollars hidden in a secret account that not even her husband knew about, and all of it came from crime boss Tommy "The Shark" Valentino. The Shark's not the killer, though. He wanted to make sure that the feds couldn't take him down Al Capone style, so he hired the agent as a tax consultant to ensure all his paperwork was in order. Instead, he implicates the woman's husband who just recently took out a million-dollar life insurance policy on her. Beckett brings him in, but when she starts asking the tough questions, he lawyers up.

After work, Beckett returns to the Castle home where Alexis and Richard are entirely too proud of what they've done. While Kate tries to offer a reasonable explanation for what's going on, Alexis sees the ex-girlfriend's lover stop by the apartment. To help him get over it, Beckett runs down to the street to catch the guy to see if he knows what might have happened to the girl. He hasn't heard from her in days, and her parents don't know where she is, either. That's odd enough that Kate relents and lets Richard drag her over to the guy's storage unit so he can break in and show her the body. He cuts off the lock, but all they find inside is an empty rug and some garbage bags full of clothes.

And a wig for some reason.

Before they can leave, the storage facility's security guard catches them. The Cap'n's all too happy to chew them out and threatens to arrest Castle personally if he ever bothers his neighbour again. The couple goes home in defeat, and Castle apologizes to Beckett for letting his imagination run away with him and get her into trouble. She accepts, and they prepare to head out to celebrate his birthday.

They're going to celebrate even more when they get back.

Sadly, just before the car arrives to take them to dinner, Castle notices that his neighbour was taking soda out of the cupboard, rather than the fridge. He rescinds his apology and goes back to staring out the window. Despite the fact that the Cap'n spoke to the woman on the phone, Castle still thinks she's dead and the guy has her body in the refrigerator. He plants himself firmly in front of the window and says that he's not going to move until he sees what's inside. His girlfriend, however, has no time for such shenanigans. She got all dolled up and put on a nice dress, and damn it, they're going to dinner. Beckett struts across the street to bang on the guy's door and get him to open his fridge. She makes it into the apartment easily enough, but when she tries to open the refrigerator, the guy grabs her, pulls a knife, and kills the lights. Castle is understandably distressed, so he calls the guys and together they race over to the apartment and kick the door down, where they find a rather grisly scene.

Surprise parties are so terrible.

The whole scene was just a setup. Beckett knew that Castle was going crazy without any cases to solve, and when she saw that the apartment was up for rent, she decided to give him something awesome for his birthday. Everyone was in on it: The girlfriend, her lover, and the murderous boyfriend were Martha's acting students, Alexis gave him the binoculars specifically so he'd spy on the things that were happening across the street, and even The Cap'n joined in so she'd have a chance to yell at Castle.

Thinking about the ruse she had to construct to pull it all off gives Beckett an epiphany, and the next day she solves the real murder. The video they saw was a fake. The woman's husband killed her earlier in the night, and then one of the security guards at the building switched over to a different video feed while he dumped the body in the alley. She was having an affair with the husband and he wanted to avoid a messy divorce. It was really dumb.

What I Liked
-This was the 100th episode of the show, and they stuck a little note to that in the title sequence. I enjoy this show, and I'm glad that the people involved in its production are going to start seeing some of that sweet, sweet syndication money. It also means that there will be something other than a million episodes of CSI:Miami to watch on Sunday afternoons, which is nice.
-Castle lays a guilt trip on Martha because she's going to be out of town on his birthday. Women aren't the only ones who can do that. Equality!
-Alexis and Castle get some good father-daughter bonding time.

The family that spies together stays together... or something.

-The Cap'n couldn't make it to the party, which makes Castle very happy. You never want to party with your boss.

What I Hated
-When Castle first starts staring out his window with his binoculars, he sees a couple arguing over their laptops, and then says something. I had to listen to it like ten times before I figured out that it was "Must be writers." Enunciate, Fillion. Enunciate! "Oh, that better be for a sick child" was fairly easy to understand, though.
-They did the whole 'Oh, at first it looks like he hates the big surprise, but he really loves it' thing. That's been done to death.
-Beckett solved the murder thanks to a tiny bit of graffiti that conveniently showed up between the time the fake video was shot and the real murder. How conveeeeeeeeeeeeeenient.

Final Thoughts
The pre-title segment on the show went on for more than ten minutes. That's basically unheard of in this day and age. If this were a sitcom, they would've shown half the episode before a single commercial break. It happens with some frequency on Castle, and I'm honestly not sure how they get away with it.

They used that 'IR light blinds the camera' thing on Hawaii Five-0 a little while back. I wonder if that's where the security guard got the idea.

The Rear Window portion of the episode was actually fairly entertaining and even made sense when it turned out that all of Castle's friends were putting on a show for his benefit. The other part of the episode was poorly developed and stupid, though. The killer was barely on screen, and his accomplice was seen for thirty seconds at the beginning of the episode, then only popped up again at the end. I hate when they do that, and I question the necessity of even including a real murder plot. They wanted to have that little moment at the end where Castle and Beckett talk about how they've solved 100 murder cases together, but it's not like he actually helped with this one, so I think it would've been better to merely allude to it, rather than showing a horribly undeveloped plot.