Castle Recap/Review: "A Murder is Forever"

Maya Zach ’17/ Emertainment Monthly Staff
In the latest episode of Castle, “A Murder is Forever”, relationship guru Alice Clark is found dead in her car. She was in trouble and was well aware of this. She chartered a private jet and booked a hotel room off the books. Her house was tossed, but what they were looking for was hidden inside the hotel room’s safe. Inside is an enormous diamond valued at $60 million. However, no diamond specialist in the area has ever seen this diamond and no one has reported it stolen. But it is clear that someone knows of its existence and is looking for it when Ryan (Seamus Dever) and Esposito’s (Jon Huertas) car gets smashed and the diamond is stolen.
Almost immediately after finding Alice’s body, the team connects her with Barrett Hawke (Antonio Ruivivar), a notorious fixer that always gets off scot-free. When Beckett (Stana Katic) agrees to go off-the-record, Hawke admits Clark’s clients, the Warners (Jason Antoon and Tina Morasco), hired him to find their missing diamond. He swears that he had nothing to do with Alice’s murder; she was already dead when he searched her house and car.

The Warners told people that the diamond necklace that Janet wore was just a costume piece made out of crystal. Alice was one of the few people who knew the truth, so they immediately suspected her when Janet was mugged two days earlier. However, their mugger was a man. The team manages to pull prints from a car that hit the mugger and they match it to Alice’s boyfriend, Leo Wyngaard (David S. Lee). The two conspired to steal the diamond when they discovered that it was synthetically created.
Steve Warner developed technology that allows him to create flawless synthetic diamonds. Alice tried to convince him to go public with this technique so they could negate the need to mine real diamonds and stop the horrific diamond trade. However, Warner sold the technology when he was young and thought it was useless. Since he no longer owns the rights to use this technique, he can only sell the diamonds on the black market.
Janet did not want Alice to go public with the knowledge of the synthetic diamonds, so she threatened her. When that did not work, she killed her to keep her quiet.

In this episode, there is very little character interaction, which is far from Castle’s norm. There are a few jokes between Ryan and Esposito, but nothing worth remembering. And Rick (Nathan Fillion) and Kate have a small fight that ends sweetly, but the episode does not focus on them. Castle’s presence does not even seem necessary to the case, or to the episode really.
The only things that Castle really offers up are his one-liners. And they are incredibly weak in this episode. They are usually clever and well though out, but this week, they are incredibly cheesy and cringe-worthy. They are reminiscent of Horatio Caine’s one-liners in CSI: Miami, which are notoriously tacky. I expect more from Richard Castle and the show’s writers.
Hopefully Castle will return to its witty, character-involved style of storytelling next week.