Castle, "Watershed": Sharks in dem waters

And so I finally summon the will to discuss "Watershed." It's difficult to find a place to start, so I guess I'll just start with a quibble before getting to anything meaningful.

This chick.

I know that terrible actors are a hazard of the business. Hell, for Once Upon a Time, it's pretty much par for the course (though I digress), and while I recognize that Castle has, in the past, employed bad actors, something about this woman rubs me the wrong way. She's been in other episodes this past season, and I'm starting to get concerned that she might, dare I say it, became more of a cast regular. I really, really hope this is not the case, because when she delivers her lines, it's almost always rhythmic, as if she had to memorize them to a melody. Her performance is completely wooden, and it takes all the charm away from Esposito's little crush on her. I don't want to trash her too badly, because I recognize that she's a real human being, but usually we only have to put up with extras for one or two episodes at most before they disappear into the ether, and my patience with her has run thin. Please, Kendra Castleberry, who IMDB tells me is responsible for casting and who, incidentally, has an excellent name, don't bring this chick back. If there has to be a recurring tech chick, hire a better one. That is my plea to you and the writers.

Though in light of the rest of the episode, tech chick is at the bottom of my list of issues, which I will now attempt to tackle.

To be honest, I walked away from this episode mostly happy with it, but within a half an hour of viewing, things that were wrong with it began surfacing rapidly: Why are Beckett and Castle so concerned about the stability of a relationship that's been going pretty strong for five years, and why is that that they consistently seek counsel with everyone but themselves? How has Castle not grown beyond his inner petulant child in all this time? Why is it that Beckett's only concern about the DC job seems to be Castle rather than everything else in her life? And then...the proposal, the cliffhanger, and the unanswered questions.

I guess I'll start with the Caskett.

I know that Beckett's had concerns over the direction of her relationship with Castle for a good while now. As far as I can remember, this has been clear since "Squab," and the fact that she's not simply taken the time to sit down and talk to Castle about these concerns has been a source of irritation for me since they've come up. I recognize that she's a commitophobe -- hell, she's recognized it, and her father has recognized it -- but that doesn't excuse her behavior. And while I can't remember Castle expressing similar concerns in other episodes (this season), he voices them in "Watershed," and the fact that he doesn't bother to have a frank conversation with Beckett either made it all the worse. This an outgrowth of one of my largest gripes with Caskett and, indeed, the whole of the series: that the Caskett is written like a teenage angst fest, despite it being written by adults, acted by adults, and more than likely aimed at the 18-45 demographic. It was one thing when it was just Castle acting like a lovesick teenager, but when Beckett started doing it (thinking of "The Limey" opening as the most glaring example) it started to get a bit ridiculous.

At first, I was overjoyed to learn Beckett was hiding her trip to DC and the job offer from Castle, but this is because, as stated previously and often, more than anything I just want Beckett to be Jordan, and flying in and out of the city to do something while telling no one is something Jordan would definitely do. The similarity to Jordan temporarily blinded me from the reality of how immature this behavior is, which isn't a quality I generally associate with Beckett (or Jordan). It's not to say that this is anything new -- as brave as Beckett is in her professional life, she seems to be fairly cowardly personally, sabotaging relationships and leading (it would seem) a fairly solitary life outside the precinct. I feel there's an argument to be made that after her mother died, she devoted most of her energy to cultivating her work life over her personal one, which more or less stagnated personal growth. Moreover, I can understand that she was scared, that she was half-hoping to be turned down so that she wouldn't have to deal with upending her life, and she was hoping to keep the offer buried in case things didn't pan out, but once the jig was up and the cat had left the bag, her inability to have a real conversation with Castle about it was stunning in its patheticness. This is real stuff that she really has to deal with, and her response is to see her father (and I'll address my problems with that scene further down). Really, Beckett?

Beckett is not, however, the largest source of the gripe. Castle owns most of the territory in that department, as he has since the late-s4 arc.

Note the height difference.

We'll start with the most obvious: the initial fight scene. I just...this scene. First off, right off the bat, I absolutely hate how it was filmed. Beckett is made to look the subordinate in this relationship through both her body language and her positioning, and this really bothers me, because Beckett and Castle's relationship has always been characterized as one between equals, and this scene clearly does not reflect this.

Pay attention to their heights and the amount of space each is taking up in both these POV shots. On the left, Beckett has negative space all around her, and Castle looms above her (his head is cut off at the top of the frame). On the right, Castle's head hits the top of the frame, while Beckett's is well clear, and he has no negative space. This gives the impression that Castle is in control (given he is not lost in space, and given how much height he has over her), and that Beckett is subordinate to him.
Compare with:

There are literally hundreds of examples I could pull in which the height difference between SK and NF is not accentuated, and this is just three from this episode (if you want a fourth, scroll up). One could argue that part of the reason Beckett is so short in that fight is because she's not wearing heels because she's in her apartment, but that's ridiculous on two fronts: one) we've seen her in heels in her apartment before, so one can't make a character argument, and two) her feet are not in frame in this scene, so what's on them is largely irrelevant to the viewer (e.g. she could be on a Scully box and we'd never know)
This tells us that the height difference is a completely conscious choice

I've never felt that Beckett has been disempowered (as a woman, or otherwise). Despite the name of the series, she's arguably the lead character (with Castle her foil), and I can't think of a single scene in which she was shown to be subordinate or weak. One of my highest praises of the show has been the equality between Beckett and Castle, which is something I can't say of other shows that come from a vaguely Sherlockian place. I generally compare Castle to The Mentalist in this regard (possibly because I started watching both shows around the same time): Lisbon has never been on equal footing with Jane, and she always "solves" cases by essentially clinging to his coattails. In their team, she contributes almost nothing except exposition and firearm skills, acting more or less as Jane's bodyguard as he Sherlocks his way through crime scenes. This is not at all the dynamic of Beckett/Castle. Their shtick is figuring things out together (often, blurting things out together, concurrently), of contributing equally to the process. Their sexual/personal relationship is also played this way, as the coming together of two equals. Yet, this scene utterly violates that by casting Beckett as a woman scared to tell her boyfriend about her job offer because she knows he'll get "upset," by shooting her as clearly subordinate to and smaller than (and thus dominated by) Castle. It's so different from the tone of the rest of the show, from Beckett's characterization (since when is she scared and weak?), from Castle's (since when is he domineering, especially over Beckett?), it's honestly almost shocking.

Further, Castle does nothing to re-empower or reassure her. He instead acts as a self-righteous ass ("You're damn right I'm upset"), storming from her apartment and leaving her alone with half-finished dinner prep and the continued, roiling fear that she's going to lose both the job she's put a decade of her life into and him on top of it. He seems surprised when she points out that this isn't about him, then proceeds to make it about him -- "I'm sorry, tell me how this isn't about us?" It's not to say I couldn't be sympathetic, given he's just found out Beckett's been lying blatantly to his face (ergo, is there anything else she's hiding?) and given this job offer does spell the end of their relationship in its current state (and in order to maintain it, will more than likely require a major change in his lifestyle as well as her own), but it's clear from Beckett's body language that she's terrified of how this job will impact her life, and within a few hours of the blow-out, he should have called her to apologize, recognizing that the world does not, in fact, revolve around him and that they are both wronged parties and that they need to talk. But because he does not, I can't not be angry with him for the childishness with which he takes her news, and his inability to recognize how much this job offer must mean to her.

His behavior reminds me a lot of his actions in late-s4, where his response to learning that Beckett remembers every moment of her shooting isn't horror at the fact that she has to live with those images but indignant, self-righteous anger because she hasn't mentioned the "I love you." It doesn't even seem to occur to him that maybe remembering the fall from the podium and the bullet burning through her chest is a traumatic memory for her, that in light of it his "I love you" wouldn't be something she would want to spend much time considering, especially given it was prompted by his fear he would never have another chance to tell her that while she was alive to hear it (this idea is handled infinitely better by Crossing Jordan, which I will probably one day devote a post to). I mean, seriously, Castle, you told her that because you thought she was dying. For the love of god, why would she want to bring that up?

He has this tendency to make everything about him, and it's infinitely infuriating to me. The fact that his solution to the problem of their relationship is to propose to her is even more infuriating.

Really, Castle? She's in the middle of a life crisis, and you spring this on her?

Again, I think I know where he's coming from. He doesn't know what direction they're going and, by extension, she must not know the direction they're going, so he decides that the best way to give them both a firm direction is by giving her a ring. In doing so, he's stating "I'm committed to you and this relationship, regardless of what you do with your life or where you decide to go." I get the impression that he made this decision impulsively, probably on his way to meet her. And this is all well and good, but let's back up a moment.

First of all, Castle's been married like a million times, so I think it's safe to say that he doesn't imbue the institution itself with much sacredness. This gesture would be a lot more romantic if it didn't come from someone with his backstory/baggage. I don't know the circumstances of the other marriages, but it wouldn't surprise me if they were born out of exactly this sort of impulsiveness. And think about it for a moment: they're concerned about them now, after they've been through so much together already, and his proposed solution is not to hash out their concerns, but to stick on a ring on her finger and tell her he's committed? This solves precisely nothing. More to the point, he puts her in an extremely awkward (if downright appalling) position through this sudden proposal. If she were to say no, what would that say about them in his eyes and her own? He would inevitably read it as her rejecting him, and she would know that and be afraid of that, given we know she's afraid of losing him (she's afraid to even tell him about the job because she's afraid he'll "hate her"), so she pretty much has to say yes in order for them to continue to work. In this sense, his proposal is more a form of emotional blackmail than anything, forcing her to commit to him presumably for the rest of her life right while she's attempting to figure out how she's going to deal with the rest of her life as a (wo)man in black.

And I'm going to be honest here, her fears aren't completely unfounded either. What amazes me in this episode is that Esposito noticed something is wrong with Beckett without her having to say a word to him about it, while Castle only figures it out when he finds the plane stub (and it wasn't that hard to read; she was very subdued in a lot of the precinct scenes, and I can't imagine she was much cheerier at home). I feel like Castle is so wrapped up in himself he's incapable of even noticing the subtleties of Beckett, which isn't really acceptable given how much he claims to love her. And now he wants to marry her, when he clearly doesn't entirely trust her (see: "Squab"), when he feels he has to "scratch and claw for every inch," on top of his inability to read her body language?

I'm sorry, but that is just ridiculous.

And while I'm on the subject of Esposito and the precinct, I don't understand why Beckett's only expressed concern about her taking this DC job will be Castle, arguably the easiest of her problems to deal with (I mean, come on, he's a writer; he's mobile; on top of that, he's rich as sin, so even if he didn't move, flying up to and staying in DC for extended periods of time wouldn't be hard for him to do). Why doesn't she seem to care about the fact that she's going to lose her found family, that she's going to lose her relationship with Esposito and Ryan as it is in its current state? The closeness between Beckett and Esposito has been a minor theme since the beginning, with him acting as big brother to her and Ryan as little brother. Hell, Esposito helps her deal with her PTSD, not Castle. And in "Watershed," again, it's Esposito, not Castle, who notices immediately when something is up with her, which speaks to their closeness, or, at least, his perception of their closeness. Yet we don't see Beckett angsting about losing him, or Ryan, or Lanie, or the precinct, just Castle. This is another one of those bizarre fish eyes, where the sum of her life seems only to be Castle, rather than the greater weight of the friendships and achievements she's forged through her career, not to mention her relationship with the city she's spent most of her life within (because there's a certain New York pride that its denizens are imbued with, which is not something I can say for DC). This is the kind of two-dimensionality that drives me up a wall.

Along those lines, we have the treatment of Martha Rodgers and Jim Beckett, which was as flat as if they'd been steam-rolled.

The reason I say this is clear to anyone who watched it, so I'm not going to spend a lot of time here, but suffice to say that both of them acted in these scenes as nothing more significant than one of those shoulder consciences in a Looney Toons cartoon. Jim's was especially annoying, given it wasn't entirely dissimilar to Royce's voice from beyond in regards to Castle ("To Live and Die in L.A."). I could go on, but there's honestly not even a need; it's painfully obvious just on casual observation how flat their roles were.

And that brings me to my final point: the flatness of the episode as a whole. Beckett and Castle's concerns are completely one-sided, hers especially, given they're fish-eyed to involve Castle and Castle only. Both of them act childishly toward each other, making it difficult to take them seriously as adults, let alone as the serious characters they've proven to be in other episodes (Beckett especially is almost always written as a serious character, and Castle many times dropped the sillyness to act the grown-up). Their parents, brought in in cliched "consult the older and wiser" scenes, were flat and devoid of any charm that could distinguish them from the obvious plot devices they were. Beckett's final interrogation, for her "final case," is written in a completely cheesy way, to the point where it's almost hard to watch.

Another factor contributing to this flatness that I haven't mentioned is the transparency in how its written. There are two questions driving the plot of this episode: will Beckett take the job, and what direction is the Caskett going? By the conclusion, neither of these questions is answered, and only one of them is addressed with any certainty (the proposal). I would hazard to guess that the reason this episode is written the way it is is because the writers are themselves uncertain of the direction they're taking Beckett with this DC thing, and by ending the way they did, they bought themselves the summer to figure it out (because although it's implied she's taking the job through the whole "last case" thing, it's never truly confirmed). The cliffhanger felt easy and obvious, and thus was completely uninteresting.

It's not to say the episode is terrible (that designation is still pretty much reserved for "The Limey" and "Headhunters"; sorry, Adam Baldwin, I love you, but you couldn't save that trainwreck), but for a finale that is going to greatly impact the greater arc of the show, it certainly suffered from heavy underperformance, and I was extremely disappointed with it. Further, it's starting to make me question my investment to characters who are written with such flatness with such consistency.

At this point, I can only hope that s6 opens much more strongly than s5 ended, and that they go a more interesting route than simply having Beckett say yes.

Alternatively, Beckett, you could choose, as your parting gift for Manhattan, to shoot Bracken in the face.
Then I would literally forgive everything.