‘Castle’ Review/Recap: “Montreal”

Devika Syal ‘18 / Emertainment Monthly Staff Writer

Episode two of Castle’s seventh season featured two storylines being acted out side by side. Richard Castle (Nathan Fillion) continues in his search to find out what happened to him while he was missing for two months while detectives Kate Beckett (Stana Katic), Kevin Ryan (Seamus Dever), and Javier Esposito (Jon Huertas) remain at the precinct trying to solve another run-of-the-mill murder. Every episode of Castle since the pilot has featured a different murder case, and this episode continued to honor that–even though that storyline came second to Castle’s.
The episode opens with Castle on television interviewing for his new novels. He offers a hefty monetary reward to the public if anyone can provide information to aid him in his search, which immediately brings in a flurry of fans that pretend to have information just to get the opportunity to meet their favorite author. Castle thinks he’s caught a break when a mysterious man calls him up saying he has information because he was with Castle the entire time yet managed to escape what was happening. This man, however, turns out to be talking about an alien abduction, so Castle quickly forgets about him.
Meanwhile, Detectives Beckett, Ryan, and Esposito are solving the case of man who turned up dead, with severe scrub marks on his face and his hands. It is revealed through a meeting with a makeup artist that the victim was Wallace ‘Wally’ Willinger, a successful toymaker who had been going undercover in his own warehouse disguised as an elderly janitor. The scrub marks were the killer’s attempt to remove the makeup on Wally’s face and hands. An interview with Wally’s wife, Amanda (Lilli Birdsell) reveals that before his death Wally had been acting strange, overly shook up about the death of their dog. Beckett, Ryan, and Esposito take this information but have no idea what to do with it.

While the detectives are trying to solve Wally’s murder, Castle gets a lead on his own problem when a young couple contacts him claiming that he is in the background of one of their vacation photos, in front of a bank in Montreal. (The episode features a joke making fun of Canada, which is funnier when the audience remembers that both Fillion and Katic are Canadian). With the help of his quick-thinking daughter Alexis (Molly Quinn), Castle realizes that the key found sewn into his pants when he was rescued could be a key to a safety deposit box in that bank. So the father-daughter duo heads to Montreal and manage to get the safety deposit box open. Inside are three envelopes addressed to Beckett, Alexis, and Castle’s mother Martha (Susan Sullivan) each containing one memory card. The memory cards contained similar webcam videos of Castle while he was missing telling the three women that no matter what happens to him, he loves them.
From the video, Tory Ellis (Maya Stojan) another worker at the precinct is able to capture a shot of the skyline outside the window over Castle’s shoulder. She matches this to an address in Montreal, where Castle goes without telling anybody, and is confronted by the man who claimed to be Henry Jenkins (Matt Letscher) in the previous episode. Castle is told to give us his search because apparently he had asked to forget about whatever happened over the past few months.
Meanwhile in New York, the detectives solve the crime of Wally’s murder when they realize that his assistant Matt Monroe (Brian Tichnell) was secretly smuggling heroin into the country by stuffing it into the company’s dolls. It turns out Wally had given his dog one of those dolls to chew on and the heroin killed it. Therefore Wally went undercover as a janitor to figure out exactly what had happened.

Everything ends on a sweet note, showing Beckett and Castle lying in bed about to go to sleep. Castle asks Beckett if she’d be willing to marry him tomorrow so that they could just carry on with their lives and move on. She compromises by saying that while his head is too jumbled right now, they could get married in a month. Knowing Castle and Beckett’s luck, will this actually happen? Or are the writers finally ready to let Castle an Beckett happily get married?
The episode featured some of the aspects of Castle that longtime fans know and love. Kate and Lanie’s (Tamala Jones) relationship continues to grow, with the two of them going to each other for advice and becoming closer each episode. Ryan and Esposito’s hi-jinks while solving the case are obviously included, with a scene showing Ryan playing around on a giant floor piano while Esposito yells at him to actually help on the case.
While the first episode was a good introduction to the season and resolved the cliffhanger of the previous season, “Montreal” brought viewers back the Castle they know and love and promised for another great season.