'Smells Like Teen Spirit' -- Castle 6x15

Warning: Spoiler Alert

Yeah, let's name an episode after an overrated song by an overrated band. That's right, I said it: "Smells Like Teen Spirit" and Nirvana are both completely overrated. I never understood the fascination with that band, and I'm exactly the right age where I should have loved them ... but I never did. But then, I always thought that their music was pedestrian at best, so there's that.

While I kind of liked the episode where there was the dude that was possibly from the future (or possibly, he just was good at hiding at just the right times), I didn't like this episode at all. The ambiguity of the ending should have been something that was right up my alley, cuz when done correctly, the ambiguity would get my brainpan working up a storm (at trying to figure out what the hell was actually going on). But this episode didn't do it for me. It looked like there might have been a bit of a Paranormal Activity thing going on with it, which may have had something to do with why it didn't speak to me (since I don't like horror movies, and that one in particular struck me as being lame). And I would have accepted finding out that what had been presented as a Carrieesk version of TK was really some kid using wires and magnets to freak a bunch of people out. But then, turning around and having Beckett say at the end that there were no wires or magnets found in the house where they had seen the girl using TK ... it felt a little too tacked on at the end; tacked on in an effort to try to seem intelligent and mindblowing (cuz we aren't supposed to know for sure which it actually was). If that last bit had been left out of the episode, I think that I might have not hated it nearly as much as I did. With it on there, I thought that the episode went from being marginally passable to being dumb.

The thing of it is that I don't understand why the writers are trying to shoehorn these type of episodes into the show. That isn't what this show is about. It's essentially a cop/detective show with a healthy helping of comedy. It is not a mindfuck. And I'm sure that there are writers out there who can do the murder mysteries as well as doing the mindfucks, but from what I have seen on this show, I don't think that the writers here are able to do that (at least, not the ones that have done it so far).

The sad thing is that the writing seemed to be the best in season two, and it hasn't been as good since. There have been times when it has almost felt like it might have started to get back to what it was before, but then, it veers off to somewhere else.

And I think that part of my problem with this episode might have also come from the fact that the stuff with the wedding feels like it is what the writers actually want to focus on, but they realize that they have a cop show on their hands, and they are trying to force themselves to keep doing the detective work. If they could somehow get Steven DeKnight to be the new head writer, and he could give the show some its old focus, I think that I might be a bit happier about the whole thing, and might consider sticking around (instead of thinking that I might not stay past the end of the season).