April 22, 2015
I survived my surgery and am scarred up a little, but on the mend. I look not too different, and am seeing better than I have in a decade, which is a great comfort.
And, if anyone is interested, I am still running a raffle until the end of the month, to celebrate the release of my last book, scroll down the page a bit, to the brass ring entry or go to the home page for a chance to enter.
And now, for any of you who need it
A lesson on how NOT to write.
Am I the only person left on the planet who is still watching Castle? Sometimes I wonder. Because maybe that hour on Monday was just some sort of delayed drug reaction, since it had kind of the same vibe as that day in the hospital two weeks ago, when I was watching the Errol Flynn Robin Hood.
Actually not. Even drugged to the gills, I was asking my husband if that deer on Errol’s shoulders didn’t look a whole lot more fake when viewed in HD. I can come up with no excuse for what I was seeing as I watched Castle.
For anyone who cares: Beyond here lie spoilers!
Although, really, you shouldn’t care. You’re better off if I just ruin this, and we all pretend it never happened, and maybe just imagine a better end to the season arc.
To catch everyone up: At the end of last season, Castle and Beckett were about to be married, when he got waylaid on the way to the ceremony, leaving his poor bride-to-be with nothing but a wrecked car in a ditch. The beginning of the season picks up with him being found, lost at sea with no memory of the past weeks, a sunburn, a bullet wound, and apparently exposure to Dengue fever.
I missed the first ep, and am glad. Because I didn’t know about the Dengue fever until this week, and am glad. That alone would have been enough to make me laugh. WTF? Did he spend the summer on that Island from Lost?
Anyway. By the middle of the season, he has investigated his own disappearance and discovered that he was the one who requested that his memory be wiped because, apparently, there is something so horrible in his recent past that it needs to be removed without a trace.
Oh kaaaaay.
I am mildly intrigued. Obviously, there will be a wonderful, dark secret revealed at some point in the future. Even though I found the whole ‘kidnapped on the way to the wedding’ thing to be too stupid for words and an obvious ploy for ratings, and an embarrassing contrivance to stretch out that engagement for a few more episodes.
It’s like, if anyone was watching Bones a year or two ago, right before they FINALLY decided to get married, only to have an obsessive, serial killer/stalker show up to tell Booth that he had to break it off without explanation and break Bones’ heart in the cruelest possible way. Because the killer had tapped their phones, bugged their house, gotten to their friends, and accessed every element of their lives and would KNOW if he told her even a little bit of the truth. And then would kill innocent people at random, and it would be all Booth’s fault
And, even with months to brood on this, Booth couldn’t figure out a way to communicate with the most important person in his life that would end that stupid plot device. Because, apparently, a trained FBI agent can’t navigate his way out of the plotting equivalent of a wet paper bag.
I am also thinking back to the mess that X Files became, in the last season or so, when Scully got pregnant and Mulder was the father but it was by artificial insemination, or a miracle or something, instead of, God forbid, the logical result of seasons upon seasons of sexual tension.
Maybe she was infertile and needed medical help. But when you create a scenario where pregnancy by alien abduction makes more sense than two people not having sex? Just give up and get the two of them together.
Why do we want the X Files to come back, again? Because there was a two-headed dog in the last movie they made. Because when you think, “How do I improve this dog?” the answer is “A second head.”
It’s one thing to be a mad scientist. It’s another thing to be a stupid scientist.
But I was hoping for better from Castle.
Castle started the season down the dangerous path to relationship crazy town, then kind of pulled it together by letting the characters get married, and have a functional relationship. Sure, he became a detective for a while. But he stopped. Let’s just pretend that it never happened, kind of like we’re ignoring the amnesia and Dengue fever.
And then, suddenly, last Monday, he started to regain his memories. With a couple of dreams and a little bit of hypnosis, he accurately remembered license plate numbers, tattoos, and faces of friends from prep school (that he had not actually seen as adults). There were a couple of murders, and everyone telling him not to be so obsessed.
And it all led to a showdown in an alley in the last ten minutes of the episode, where a waiter turns out to be an old school friend who grew up, joined Al-Qaeda, changed his mind and demanded that Castle be brought in as his CIA contact, (since apparently, he knew no one was going to shoot the star of the show). Castle stopped a major terrorist plot and saved thousands of lives, and then decided to forget about the whole thing (???). So the CIA implanted false memories (???) which were also forgotten, but then remembered. And now he’s not supposed to tell anyone.
Of course, he immediately tells his mother, his daughter and Beckett. The end.
And all the action/adventure scenes they showed us were just dream flashbacks, because they saved the real story for a conversation in an alley.
A lot of people think romances are implausible. But if you ever set up the HEA for 300 pages, then postpone the wedding because of a asteroid strike or coconut crab attack, give up on romance novels. You belong in television.
I just watched that episode yesterday–also under the weather. In spite of my impaired state, it made no damn sense at all. But I did enjoy getting to see Michael Dorn again.