Of course, real ninjas didn't dress in black. That's a theatrical convention. By tradition in Japanese theater, stagehands or puppeteers dressed in black and were treated as invisible/nonexistent by the audience and other actors even while openly sharing the stage with them. Then some director had the inspiration to have one of those "invisible" stagehands suddenly reveal himself to be a ninja and assassinate one of the characters, making for a shocking (and kind of fourth-wall-breaking) reveal. The trope caught on, and black stagehand attire came to be thought of as ninja attire -- but only in fiction. Real ninjas just "hid" by looking nondescript. So given that the episode admitted that neither of the martial-artist combatants was genuinely a ninja, I wish they'd explained why they dressed in black. Anyway, Ryan wasn't very observant for a detective. It was clear that the heroic "ninja" had a feminine build, but Ryan called her "he." I also wish they'd given the victim a less cliched Asian-female name than "Jade." I'm not sure any real Japanese people would give that name to their daughter; it's not a word that renders very well in Japanese phonetics (the closest would be jedo or jeido). Unless her real name was Hisui and she translated it when she moved to the US. Still, it's quite a cliche. Speaking of names, I'm impressed by how accurate Stana Katic's pronunciation of "Michio Saito" was, which makes it puzzling that she used the same awful mispronunciation of "Yakuza" as everyone else in the episode. Come to think of it, I think I've noticed that about Katic before, that she usually makes an effort to give ethnic names accurate pronunciations instead of Anglicizing them. I noted the same thing here when she introduced Esposito. Maybe it's because she's sick of people mangling her surname. But apparently it's only with personal names, not group names.
Also, for some reason, I associate the name Jade more with a Chinese person than a Japanese person. Maybe it's all those WWII movies. Hm! Wiki says the origin of the word is actually Spanish!
I wouldn't be surprised if that was the case. I have a fairly uncommon last name which most people don't know how to pronounce so I am fairly sensitive on how to pronounce names. I will usually ask someone how to pronounce their name if I'm not sure how to. That was something of a challenge when I lived in Romania for three years.
That's what I like about Japanese -- the phonetics are so straightforward. The same syllable is almost always pronounced the same way, albeit with a few variations depending on placement within a word. Of course, native speakers tend to talk fast and slur the syllables somewhat, so it can be hard to recognize names and words in Japanese shows or films without the help of subtitles. (I was surprised when I heard how the name of a character named Kobayashi was pronounced in a Godzilla movie. It's extremely different from how they said it in The Wrath of Khan.)
The seventies episode was stupid as hell, but kind of fun. The scenario was totally contrived and a ton about it didn't make sense, like, why didn't the guy notice all the 2010s stuff in the world outside when they drove him to the morgue? And the bit about the "documentary" about the Starsky & Hutch knockoff cops was painfully shoehorned in -- as soon as I saw it, I knew they were going to have Ryan and Esposito dress up as those guys later on. Plus it annoys me when people assume the actual '70s were just like the way it was depicted on TV. But then, this show has long since thrown any pretense of realism out the window. I think at this point they've basically embraced being a full-on sitcom, except when they play at being a spy thriller. I didn't believe it for a second, but at least I found it amusing. Maybe because for once they weren't deriving the humor from a Scooby-Doo fake-supernatural scenario with Castle as Shaggy.
I'm also of two minds on it. On the one hand I was lamenting how far the show has fallen in terms of of just being outright ridiculous (it was always a silly premise and often comedic in nature, but it did at least try and keep things somewhat within the realm of normality at one point), but on the other hand I laughed my ass off and the actors seemed to have a lot of fun with it. I'm just going to assume this whole episode was a fever dream Castle had after binge-watching both versions of Life on Mars.
LOL! It did have some fun elements to it, but the mystery itself made no sense, and turning the precinct into the 70's was just stupid. Next week's skateboard-themed episode looks pretty bad too.
Also, why was Jon Polito's character dancing around with the cops at the end of the episode instead of, ohh, under arrest for the attempted murder of the club owner, or at least the assault on his bodyguard? It's like the writers of this episode were aggressively trying to avoid making sense. You know what would've made this episode even more fun, though? Guest stars from actual '70s crime shows. James Garner, David Soul, Erik Estrada, people like that. It's what Murder, She Wrote or Diagnosis: Murder would've done.
They showed the guy ducking down below the windows on the way to the morgue so that's probably why he didn't see anything odd on the way too/from the precinct. I enjoyed the episode as a fun romp but it kind of felt like Martha and Alexis were just shoehorned in, despite Martha's role in converting the police station. There don't seem to be any story threads going for those two this year - or have I missed something?
Well Alexis had the whole "Pi" storyline, which was more annoying than anything else; but Martha hasn't really had much to do this year.
I thought that was in the later part when they were driving him to the station -- at which point he'd come to his senses and was only pretending. Sure, I guess he could've done the same on the morgue trip, but still, it's a little hard to believe that nothing "futuristic" would've been in his line of sight between the car and the morgue room.
Hell, just walking to the car from his front door, he should have seen modern cars drive by and neighbors in modern clothes. I can't imagine his entire neighborhood was forced to join in on the gag. I liked his Betamax, though. And Stana looked awesome in the peasant blouse and Jeans. My wife used to dress just like that back then.
I HAD THAT BETAMAX. Good clean fun in the Castle vein. If I wanted serious crime drama I wouldn't be watching this show! Mark
But was that Betamax around in the '70s? It looked more like an '80s model to me, though I didn't get a good look at it. And the problem isn't that the story wasn't serious, the problem was that it didn't make a damn bit of sense. The fact that it was fun was the only thing that redeemed it for being utterly stupid.
Top-load Betas were around in, say, 1977-78, IIRC. Can't say for that exact model. I started work at a videocassette duplicating company in April 1978 and they had racks full of Betas for recording when I started there. A friend had one in his home (I'm recalling the model # SL-8200) at that time. EDIT - AH! http://www.betamaxcollectors.com/sonybetamaxmodelsl-8200.html
I guess I didn't get a good enough look at his VCR. I thought it was a more conventional '80s-style front-loading model.