Castle – Room 147

• Title: Castle – Room 147
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“This is now officially outstanding.”

Beckett (Stana Katic) is surprised with the ease she gets a confession of the murder of an actor, by a confused sober alcoholic (Alexie Gilmore) with impossibly-detailed knowledge of the crime scene who was seen arguing publicly with victim days before his death, but when Esposito (Jon Huertas) confirms the woman couldn’t have committed the crime things get interesting. Much to everyone’s confusion, even Castle, the mystery will lead to one of the show’s more complicated storylines.

When two more suspects (Drew Powell, Bradford Anderson) walk into the station to confess, with the same knowledge of the crime and no obvious connection to each other or the first suspect (who still adamantly argues her guilt) things even get more bizarre. Searching the suspect’s apartment, Esposito and Ryan (Seamus Dever) discover someone has gone to a lot of trouble to obscure the last two weeks of her life. And, just like the first suspect, the other would-be killers have also foggy memories of the past fortnight.

The investigation eventually leads back to the leader (John Getz) of a cult who drugged and hypnotized all three suspects, but not to convince them they had done the murder (as Beckett initially suspects) but to make them forget a similar staged murder two-weeks earlier in another hotel room of the same chain (and even the same hotel room) starring the now deceased actor. Weaving through the maze of twists and turns, and eventually putting all the complicated pieces in place, with the help of their would-be killers who are actually witnesses to the worst self-help video ever, Beckett and Castle finally nab their killer.

Even for a show that enjoys its share of twists, “Room 147” pushes the limits. However, the odd nature of the entire case, starting with the almost perfect confessions which can’t be real and the discovery of the staged video and linking it back to the cult, all through the shared confusion of Beckett and Castle, is very entertaining. In the episode’s B-story Beckett talks Alexis (Molly C. Quinn) out of punishing herself for her her failed relationship and convinces Castle’s daughter to move back in (leading to a happy father and the possibility of quite a few uncomfortable situations in the weeks to come).