TV Review: CASTLE – Season 4 – “Pandora”

By ANNE LOUISE BANNON / Contributing Writer

Posted: February 15th, 2012 / 04:05 PM

Stars: Nathan Fillion, Stana Katic, Susan Sullivan, Molly Quinn, Tamala Jones, Seamus Deaver, Jon Huertas, Penny Johnson Jerald
Writer: David Amann
Director: Bryan Spicer
Network: ABC, Monday nights, 10 p.m.
Original Telecast: February 13, 2012

The interesting thing about “Pandora,” the first of a two-part CASTLE, is that it’s not about whodunit. We see that in the first scene, as a man comes crashing through an upper story window onto a car, then we see the killer looking through the window. Huh?

Well, there’s lots of that floating around. Author Richard Castle (Nathan Fillion) is the last to find out that his daughter Alexis (Molly Quinn) is interning with medical examiner Lanie Parish (Tamala Jones). And Detective Kate Beckett (Stana Katic) finds out that she wasn’t the first woman that Castle has based a major character on.

Beckett and crew bring in the bad guy, Thomas Gage (David Chisum) pretty quickly, but he not only disappears, it turns out that he’s used the police station database to look up somebody’s drivers license information. This is after the corpse has disappeared, which upsets Alexis because she was on duty at the time. Beckett and Castle head out to talk to the woman Gage looked up and she’s dead, and Castle and Beckett get kidnapped.

Well, not quite. The CIA needs them to find Gage, who has turned rogue and is about to release a complete disaster on the United States and the world, a plot called Pandora. Well, it’s not just the CIA. It’s Sophia Conrad (Jennifer Beals) who just happens to be the model for the CIA agent in Castle’s first Derek Storm novel. Which gets under Beckett’s skin, since she didn’t know about Sophia, although she had no reason to. Also, it sure feels like Sophia is trying to re-connect with Castle, which just isn’t the right way of it.

Anyway, it turns out that the professor who created the Pandora project, an expert in Lynch Pin Theory, the idea that if you make one small change, you can topple governments (kind of like the assassination of Duke Ferdinand started World War I). The professor was supposed to be dead, but guess what? He’s not and Tracy, the woman who was murdered, was his connection to the rest of the world.

And that’s where we’ll leave you hanging, but that’s not far from where the writers left us hanging. The real fun of this episode is the continuing development of Castle and Beckett’s relationship. You can see Beckett trying not to be jealous, but she’s feeling miffed and left out, which isn’t surprising since Sophia constantly addresses Castle and all but ignores her. It’s interesting how Castle reassures her at the same time when his lame explanations just aren’t enough.

But, yeah. We’re left hanging. We know Beckett and Castle get out of the situation next week on CASTLE because they’re in the tease for next week (as if there would be a show if they didn’t). This is annoying. A small annoyance, given the greater issues that make up our lives, but in this day of instant gratification, an annoyance nonetheless.

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