Castle: Season 3 (Nathan Fillion, Stana Katic) - Discussion & Spoilers

Discussion in 'TV & Media' started by Aragorn, Sep 20, 2010.

  1. AJBryant

    AJBryant Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

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    Re: Castle: Season 3 (Nathan Fillion, Stana Katic) - Discussion & Spoi


    And never call a black woman "fair" -- unless you're talking about her personality. ;)
     
  2. Christopher

    Christopher Writer Admiral

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    Re: Castle: Season 3 (Nathan Fillion, Stana Katic) - Discussion & Spoi

    "Sorry, neither."
     
  3. Aragorn

    Aragorn Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    Re: Castle: Season 3 (Nathan Fillion, Stana Katic) - Discussion & Spoi

    [​IMG]

    An "Officer Down" call turns out to be a male stripper dressed like a cop. Castle and Beckett explore the world of male strip clubs and struggling actors, all people in pursuit of fame. They need to determine if the murder was because of the victim's dreams of stardom or something more sinister.
     
  4. IcecreamLtDan

    IcecreamLtDan Captain Captain

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    Re: Castle: Season 3 (Nathan Fillion, Stana Katic) - Discussion & Spoi

    Looking forward to it, but I won't be able to see it 'til tomorrow, it comes on too late for me to stay up and watch it. Have fun everyone!
     
  5. Christopher

    Christopher Writer Admiral

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    Re: Castle: Season 3 (Nathan Fillion, Stana Katic) - Discussion & Spoi

    An okay episode, but I didn't like the way the climactic scene was set up by something Ryan & Esposito found out off-camera. Sure, the person their evidence pointed to wasn't the actual killer, but we were supposed to think it was, so setting up the scene in such a weak way, just a piece of information out of the blue rather than a clever moment of deduction by our protagonists, was a major structural flaw. It gave away to me that the suspect it pointed to couldn't be the actual killer, because the reveal of the killer would never be so lame and offhand. So I deduced who the real killer was based simply on my understanding of the technique of story construction, rather than on anything from within the story. And that's disappointing.

    Another story-construction clue: as soon as they showed that video of the victim playing a wanted biker in that America's Most Wanted pastiche, I knew the biker would turn out to be a suspect. Basic Chekhov's Gun there. They wouldn't have shown it if it weren't going to figure in the story. Though it turned out to be just another red herring.

    Darn, Alexis is back to the straight-bangs look. Bring back Alexis's forehead! At least the bangs kinda worked with her Grease costume.
     
  6. Aragorn

    Aragorn Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    Re: Castle: Season 3 (Nathan Fillion, Stana Katic) - Discussion & Spoi

    [​IMG]

    Castle and Beckett investigate the murder of an NYC subway worker found shot in Central Park. But, while investigating the murder they uncover the abduction of a young boy as well. The team must determine the motives behind the high stakes kidnapping in order to save the young boy's life.
     
  7. ancientone51

    ancientone51 Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    Re: Castle: Season 3 (Nathan Fillion, Stana Katic) - Discussion & Spoi

    Castle, "Ever have a pet?"

    Beckett, "You."

    beautiful!
     
  8. Christopher

    Christopher Writer Admiral

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    Re: Castle: Season 3 (Nathan Fillion, Stana Katic) - Discussion & Spoi

    ^Actually Castle's question was "What's the weirdest pet you ever had?" Which works even better.


    This was a bit predictable. Thanks to the feather and the episode title (actually "Murder Most Fowl"), I figured out pretty quickly that the surveillance gear was for birdwatching.

    Nice twist, though, that the murder was solved a third of the way through and the story became about finding the kidnap victim. Though why was that still being handled by the homicide detectives?

    At least the "home life" subplot wasn't as predictable as I thought. As soon as Alexis said she was taking care of her boyfriend's precious pet rat, I expected the rat to be dead by the next scene in the subplot. Instead it just escaped and she was searching for it. So not what I predicted, which is good, but as usual this season, far too blatant a parallel with the detective plot, which is bad.

    And what's with Castle saying the kid is only a little younger than Alexis? He's 12. She's at least 17 by now. I know, parents tend to see their kids as babies forever, yada yada, but it felt like a reach. And Alexis deserves better.

    I did like the acknowledgment that "zoom and enhance" doesn't magically bring out detail that wasn't in the original image. Although I have the impression this show has already used that gimmick in some past episode, and it did work there.
     
  9. Aragorn

    Aragorn Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    Re: Castle: Season 3 (Nathan Fillion, Stana Katic) - Discussion & Spoi

    I think this is the first time I've seen a show zoom in on a photo to see a reflection and get... nothing. :)
     
  10. Christopher

    Christopher Writer Admiral

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    Re: Castle: Season 3 (Nathan Fillion, Stana Katic) - Discussion & Spoi

    ^I've seen the trope deconstructed now and then, but not often enough. Futurama made a joke about it in one episode. FlashForward did a pretty good job of rationalizing it: They were able to enhance a blurry image, but only by sending it to the top specialists, who spent weeks extracting data from multiple video frames and combining them into a composite, and even then, the final result wasn't very clear.

    As always, TV Tropes is a motherlode of examples, both of the trope and its occasional deconstructions:

    http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/EnhanceButton
     
  11. Buck Bokai

    Buck Bokai Lieutenant Red Shirt

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    Re: Castle: Season 3 (Nathan Fillion, Stana Katic) - Discussion & Spoi

    It was enjoyable to see a little different type of show out of them this week. It's probably the first one has no speaking lines! Nice to get a slightly different type of mystery every once in a while.
     
  12. Christopher

    Christopher Writer Admiral

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    Re: Castle: Season 3 (Nathan Fillion, Stana Katic) - Discussion & Spoi

    "Has no speaking lines?" What do you mean by that?
     
  13. Buck Bokai

    Buck Bokai Lieutenant Red Shirt

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    Re: Castle: Season 3 (Nathan Fillion, Stana Katic) - Discussion & Spoi

    Sorry, I guess I should have included the minor phrase "the murderer" in there. Could have made a bit of a difference. ;)
     
  14. Aragorn

    Aragorn Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    Re: Castle: Season 3 (Nathan Fillion, Stana Katic) - Discussion & Spoi

    [​IMG]

    Castle's latest theory is alien abduction after an astrophysicist's death is found to be from explosive decompression. A well known alien abduction expert gets involved in the case. To complicate things more, a government agent wants to shut down their investigation.
     
  15. Christopher

    Christopher Writer Admiral

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    Re: Castle: Season 3 (Nathan Fillion, Stana Katic) - Discussion & Spoi

    Oh, no. Not another "Castle buys into fringe beliefs" episode. I don't believe a mystery writer would be as gullible about these things as Castle's been portrayed to be this season. For one thing, mystery writers are masters of misdirection and thus should be able to see through hoaxes and deceptions more easily. For another, falling back on the inexplicable would be cheating in a mystery story; there'd be no satifactory solution that could be deduced. So I don't see that appealing to Castle's mind, since as we've seen in earlier seasons, he reflexively casts every situation as a potential mystery plot. Solving mysteries is about critical, analytical thinking and refusing to take things at face value. A credulous mindset, a willingness to buy into psychics and UFOs and the like purely on faith, just doesn't seem consistent with that.
     
  16. ancientone51

    ancientone51 Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    Re: Castle: Season 3 (Nathan Fillion, Stana Katic) - Discussion & Spoi

    Nice reference to "Firefly" tonight. Lyle Lovett was so good as a menace because he is so stiff and strange. What was the confidencial info??? Had to have been about Castle.
     
  17. Christopher

    Christopher Writer Admiral

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    Re: Castle: Season 3 (Nathan Fillion, Stana Katic) - Discussion & Spoi

    Yep, pretty much as I predicted. Castle was fairly useless for most of this episode because he was so distracted by fantasy that he missed the obvious: that the decompression was caused by a vacuum chamber, that the signal was from a spy satellite, etc. The whole thing was rather predictable.

    That Lyle Lovett guy certainly has a distinctive look, but he's not much of an actor. I found him boring. They had Lance Henricksen in the episode, for Pete's sake -- they should've made him the MIB and put Lovett in the smaller role of the Whitley Streiber analogue.

    It took me a moment to parse the joke, but I liked the bit where Castle said he knew Chinese because of a TV show he used to love. Firefly reference!
     
  18. Aragorn

    Aragorn Fleet Admiral Admiral

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    Re: Castle: Season 3 (Nathan Fillion, Stana Katic) - Discussion & Spoi

    Was the line directly from Firefly or just a reference to said show?
     
  19. Christopher

    Christopher Writer Admiral

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    Re: Castle: Season 3 (Nathan Fillion, Stana Katic) - Discussion & Spoi

    It doesn't appear in the Pinyinary site of translations from the show, movie, and comics. The reference is simply to the fact that Nathan Fillion used to star in a show where Mandarin was frequently spoken.
     
  20. Forbin

    Forbin Admiral Admiral

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    Re: Castle: Season 3 (Nathan Fillion, Stana Katic) - Discussion & Spoi

    Yeah, I love the show, but that was a pretty sophomoric and stupid episode.