Castle season 4 finale SPOILER POST

[avevale_intelligencer]

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Is that enough warning for everyone? I certainly hope so.

I'm wondering, having watched the finale of the latest season of Castle, whether there will be a firestorm of feminist rage about it. I think there should be, if there should be about anything. Consider.

To me it's a given that human beings in general lie quite a lot of the time, and that love is often the reason, but at the same time we loudly insist that honesty is the ultimate prerequisite for a loving relationship and a lie discovered is often the breaking point for such a relationship. It's just one of those crazy human things. Now here we have Kate Beckett, a woman who makes absolutely no secret of the fact that finding her mother's killer is more important to her than her own life, and Rick Castle, a guy who claims to love her. When Beckett gets shot, Castle makes a deal with the Forces of Evil (who are obviously the government, from the hints that keep getting dropped and the succession of corrupt cops that keep turning up) to prevent her pursuing the goal of her life in exchange for her safety, and of course does this without her knowledge because he knows she would repudiate such a deal. In the episode we just watched, when she gets a further lead and her life is endangered again, he is eventually driven to revealing this deal to her, and responds to her entirely justified anger by abandoning her and walking away to spare his own feelings. (Does love do that?) One of Beckett's two remaining male myrmidons refuses to help her, with the result that when she comes up against the latest pawn of evil*, he beats her seven ways to a Sunday and leaves her dangling over a precipice. Then, the missing myrmidon shows up to save her life, having first ratted her out to her boss who hates her. Angry words, suspension, and Beckett does the only logical thing an honest cop working for a thoroughly corrupt police force can do; she resigns.

Beckett is now, entirely thanks to men who thought they knew better than her how to run her life, bereft of everything that gives her life meaning; her calling, her supposed true love, her life's purpose, her friends and her source of income. This being television, and the show being called Castle and not Beckett, she goes back to Castle and apologises for being mad at him, and love triumphs, which is nice; but given the things people do get heated about on the net, I would think there would be some flak coming the writers' way for that.

Or maybe I'm wrong?

*Who appears to have superpowers, or at any rate to be tougher than she is, which takes some doing.

Comments

[billroper]

There hasn't, to the best of my knowledge, been a feminist firestorm in the U.S. over it, where we wrapped up the season back in May.

I'm not yet sure of who the Forces of Evil are, but I suspect that we may wrap this all up fairly early next season, as the last bit of film suggests that Beckett won't survive much longer if we don't. My strong suspicion is that the soon-to-be-deceased Mr. X who has been holding Montgomery's evidence for the last year has an "in case of my death" drop arranged to go to Castle.

And I believe that -- if that happens -- this time, Castle will hand everything over to Beckett, because part of what happened in the season finale is that Castle needed to learn (and did learn) that he shouldn't protect Beckett in the way that he was trying to.

It's not clear to me whether all the beans about Montgomery got spilled to the new captain, but she's certainly mad enough for that to be the case. I never thought that the new captain hated Beckett -- it always seemed to me that Castle was the one that she would happily do without.

It seems to me that the ending of the episode does leave Beckett bereft, but it's entirely of her own doing. She violated orders, she kept vital information secret from her boss, and she nearly got killed as her reward for doing so, being saved only because Ryan "ratted her out" and showed up to pull her up from the ledge.

Beckett comes to Castle at the end of the episode, because she recognizes that what he did, hiding information from her, may have been wrong, but what he told her to do, leave the case alone and follow orders, was right.

And, of course, Beckett is no saint in this regard, because she spent most of the season lying to Castle as well, letting him believe that she hadn't heard him say "I love you" when she was lying on the ground after being shot. Castle was no happier when he found this out than Beckett was when she found out what Castle had been hiding.

So we come to the end of season four and after a tremendous amount of time spent with Beckett and Castle being dishonest with (or failing to communicate with) each other, they've learned something -- or so I hope! -- and are actually prepared to have an honest relationship.

I'm looking forward to see what happens next.

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

I will admit that after the nineteenth or twentieth reiteration of "you can't even imagine how high this goes/who you're dealing with/et cetera" and other such bafflegab I tend to want to scream. I (as a viewer) can imagine it being the president, the Pope, any Bill Gates-lookalike the writers can conceive, the Secretary General of the UN or the Akond of Swat, for any number of possible reasons. Once you've imagined that, there's nowhere to go to but down, and I do look forward to this thread being wrapped up and the eventual minor civil servant or gangster responsible being dealt with.

Whether it actually makes it better, that the men who tell her how to run her life are actually right to do so, I'm not sure. But you make some good points.

[pbristow.livejournal.com]

As indeed do you. [SALUTE]