After the emotional roller coaster that was last week’s episode, I kind of thought this week’s Castle would be a lighthearted finale in which our central couple would finally tie the knot. Instead, they’re forced to deal with hitmen, abductions, uncooperative strippers and possible fiery death. Really, it was foolish to expect anything else.
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He’s a Keeper
After a season of only sporadic wedding planning, “For Better or Worse” shows Castle and family seemingly planning the wedding all at once. It’s clear that Castle named Alexis his best man less because he loves her and more because he desperately needed her organizational skills. Everything is going great until Castle and Beckett apply for a wedding license and find out that Beckett is already married. During her freshman year of college, she’d drunkenly gone through a drive-thru wedding chapel in Vegas with her then-boyfriend, Rogan O’Leary. Oh, the wacky shenanigans kids get up to!
Luckily, this is network television and not reality, so a quickie divorce is available. All they have to do is find Rogan and get him to sign the divorce papers. Ryan and Esposito find out that he’s got a lengthy criminal record and is conveniently living in New York State. Beckett heads up to find him while Castle stays behind to take care of the wedding details they should have taken care of months ago.
Beckett’s alluded a few times to having a wild past. Rogan, who has not changed at all since she knew him, is Exhibit A that this is true. Every single woman she encounters in Willow Creek warns her to stay away from Rogan, and it’s easy to see why; when Beckett finds him, he’s being punched out in a dive bar by his livid girlfriend. He thinks Beckett is doing some kind of rom-com trip into her past, and claims to not remember getting married. When he finds out that Beckett desperately wants a divorce, he uses this to his advantage and makes her work for it. He tells her he’ll only sign the papers if she steals a garage door opener from his girlfriend’s truck, because he needs to steal something from the garage. Beckett does this with typical ease, but when she gets back to Rogan’s he’s being abducted. Of course.
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Even God Needs PR
Things aren’t going so great back home, either. Castle finds out that he’s lost the wedding venue on account of it burning down. There is a brief moment of panic, but Alexis quickly realizes that they can just move the ceremony to their house in the Hamptons. While she and Martha take care of this, Castle goes up to Willow Creek to help Beckett find her kidnapped husband. And with that, he has found the plot of his next book.
Castle and Beckett interview Rogan’s girlfriend, Tildy. She says that Rogan had taken money from her for a get-rich-quick scheme and lost it all, and had recently been trying to get her laptop. She also mentions that Rogan had told her his wife was in a 15-year coma, a convenient way to avoid commitment. As if that didn’t already prove that Rogan is more trouble than he’s worth, Castle and Beckett return to Rogan’s apartment to find a fully armed biker gang. They say that Rogan had promised them $5,000 to steal a stripper’s phone. If Castle doesn’t get an entire bestselling series out of this adventure, he has no business being a writer.
The stripper, Sapphire, clearly knows something but refuses to cooperate. Luckily, Rogan had copied the pictures on her phone to Tildy’s laptop, and they reveal a man getting an R-rated dance. They recognize the man in the picture from a bench advertisement as the local pastor. What kind of pastor takes out bench ad space? In there a competitive pastor market in Willow Creek? Is he trying to monopolize the Lord? I have so many questions.
Moral of the Story: Don’t Trust People Named Sapphire
Speaking of the Lord, He makes himself known in this episode. Having heard my fervent prayers, He burst a pipe and slew the demon that was Beckett’s wedding dress. Beckett is upset about this for some reason. She has a minor breakdown, which is justified given the sheer number of catastrophes leading up to this wedding. Castle comforts her with some fairytale metaphors and they continue on, now sans one hideous monstrosity.
The pastor confesses his sins, though he seems much sorrier that he got caught than he does for the actual transgression. He says he was being blackmailed, first by Sapphire and then by Rogan. Castle and Beckett assume that he had Rogan kidnapped in order to stop the blackmail, but the pastor brings out a bag full of money to show that he was planning on paying up.
Since they now know that Rogan was taking over Sapphire’s blackmail, she becomes their prime suspect. They head out to a farm belonging to her boyfriend, Jimmy Lutz, and find a barn surrounded by armed guards. They break into the barn and find Rogan. Rather than being grateful about the rescue, he remains as much of a jerk as ever. Beckett refuses to fully untie Rogan until he signs the divorce papers, but even then he’s uncooperative and annoying. I can see why so many people were suspects in his disappearance.
Everyone stops fooling around, though, when Rogan reveals that he’d heard Jimmy Lutz referred to by his real name, Barbosa. Castle and Beckett immediately recognize the name as belonging to a fugitive mob hitman, and the pictures on Sapphire’s phone prove that it’s the same man. They quickly try to escape, because they know that Barbosa and his people will definitely kill them, but they’re already surrounded.
Barbosa wants to know where the pictures of him from Sapphire’s phone are, because they can potentially lead law enforcement to his location. He threatens Beckett to get the info, so Castle tells him that everything is back at Rogan’s apartment. Also back at Rogan’s apartment? The fully armed biker gang. They lead Barbosa and crew into this trap, and tell the bikers that there’s a $100,000 reward for Barbosa’s capture. The bikers elect to focus on Barbosa after that, Rogan finally signs the divorce papers and he even manages to woo back Tildy.
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It’s the wedding day at last! Everything has come together miraculously. Beckett wears her mother’s wedding dress, which is quite beautiful in its own right and infinitely better than her original choice. Martha gives her some sentimental earrings, Lanie and Esposito have a moment and the divorce is officially legal. Truly, this is the light at the end of a very strange and eventful tunnel.
But there only two minutes left in the episode and Castle still hasn’t arrived at the house. We see him being tailed by a mysterious black car, and an hour later he’s still unaccounted for. Just as everyone is starting to get worried, Beckett gets a call. The next thing we see is her arriving at the scene of an accident, with Castle’s car driven off the road and engulfed in flames. Presumably, he’s not in the car, because this show has been renewed and he’s the title character, but Beckett doesn’t know that. She stands looking at the wreck, in her wedding dress, clearly thinking that her groom has died on their wedding day. And on that happy note, season 6 is over.
What did you guys think? Did you enjoy the finale? What about the season in general? I hope you’ve enjoyed my recaps as much as I’ve enjoyed writing them. Thanks for checking in every week and I hope you’ll be back in the fall!
(Image courtesy of ABC)
Contributing Writer, BuddyTV
