TV Review: CASTLE – Season 4 – “The Blue Butterfly”

By ANNE LOUISE BANNON / Contributing Writer

Posted: February 7th, 2012 / 10:34 AM

Stana Katic and Nathan Fillion in CASTLE - "The Blue Butterfly" | ©2012 ABC/Karen Neal

Stars: Nathan Fillion, Stana Katic, Susan Sullivan, Molly Quinn, Tamala Jones, Seamus Deaver, Jon Huertas, Penny Johnson Jerald
Writer: Rob Hanning
Director: Thomas J. Wright
Network: ABC, Monday nights, 10 p.m.
Original Telecast: February 7, 2012

In “The Blue Butterfly,” the CASTLE team pays tribute to the great detective films of yore with a case that harkens back to June 1947, and let’s be real here, the result is little more than an excuse to get the cast all duded up in great 1940s fashions and hairstyles. But it’s a really good excuse!

The 1940s scenes happen as Castle (Nathan Fillion) reads the 1947 diary of a private detective who has met the love of his life in a nightclub. The catch is that not only is she the local gang boss’s girlfriend, she’s packing some serious ice in the form of a necklace with a big butterfly pendant in blue diamonds. And as Castle reads, in his mind’s eye, he sees himself as the detective Joe Flynn and Det. Kate Beckett (Stana Katic) as the moll Vera McQueen and so forth and so on.

The case actually starts, however, with a young man found shot to death in the wreck of a former famous nightclub. Beckett, et. al., find an old diary in the victim’s personal effects, and Castle gets Beckett to let him take the diary home for the night. It’s in the diary that Castle finds the motive for the modern day killing – The Blue Butterfly necklace, which is still missing. Then the gun that was used to kill the young man turns out to have been used in a killing in June 1947 – the murder of Joe Flynn and Vera McQueen.

That’s about as noir as the episode gets, which, admittedly is more of a light early dawn gray kind of noir, but it’s a really fun episode, with Tamala Jones (who normally gets to just recite facts of death as medical examiner Lanie Parish) getting to strut her stuff as a singer at the club in the 1940s. Yes, when you think about it later, you have to cringe a little at the way the writers stretch reality in terms of the police work. And, as noted above, it’s ultimately an excuse for doing some 1940s-style scenes, but as noted above, it’s still a really good excuse.

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