CASTLE “XY” Review: Where in the World is Captain Beckett?

And…ACTION!

Ryan and Esposito  get straight to the task of tracing some credit cards found on one of the guys at their scene, an obviously bloody shootout, at which they, and Castle, assume Beckett was a victim, and is on the run. This leads to an apartment where we find our first new character: Hayley Shipton.

Hayley, it turns out has a bad girl past. And, she was tossed out of Scotland Yard for not playing by the rules and quite possibly threatening to toss a drug dealer out a window. She’s tracing fake IDs and doesn’t have a lot of time for the cops. She doesn’t know about the murders, but when Castle begs her for help finding Beckett, at any cost, she seems to feel pretty bad that she can’t help. But there’s a lead from some uniforms on a stolen van with blood inside at the site of a break in at a dry cleaners and Beckett was there. That’ll work, too.

Except when they get to the crime scene they learn that a bloodied up Beckett was there with a sickly man – but she was in charge of the break in, and identified herself as a cop. Then stitched herself up from the shootout with a needle and thread and ditched her bloody clothes. When Castle gets called back to the PI office, Hayley is there with some Intel on the the stolen ID’s – a group of 5, sold to very bad guys. 3 of them are dead men from the scene, which means two are still in play – a man and woman. And Haley has just discovered one was used to rent a storage unit. So she and Castle are off to check that out. With a side of breaking and entering.

But what has caught Alexis’s attention is the sick man her dad mentioned Beckett was with. She thinks he sounds like a suffering diabetic, and Hayley told her not to wait for her dad, but to run it down. So she does, checking in with the ambulance that responded to the dry cleaners. Posing as “Clara Striker” she discovers Beckett and the man broke in to the ambulance and stole some insulin. She’ll keep that a secret for the driver’s sake (and Kate’s) – and besides what she’s really interested in is the taxi Kate fled in. Which took them to a prison, to see William Bracken. Whoa.

Hayley’s pretty hacked off when Castle texts Ryan and Espo about the massive stash of guns they find at the storage unit. Not as hacked off as she is when the female assassin attacks her while they split up. But the killer left something on Hayley’s clothes in the attack, which she pockets.

Castle follows up on Bracken because he loves his wife like a house on fire. Bracken isn’t interested in telling Castle what they talked about, just trashing his nemesis as a crazy obsessive that tilts at windmills. Basically, his worst fear. While the boys process the weapons, Castle gets nabbed by the two killers and tortured with spiders. They want Kate. Naturally. But, Alexis goes to the twelfth when Castle’s phone goes dark. She was tracking her dad in case he ever went missing again. The boys pick up Hayley, who coughs up a clue after an impassioned plea from Alexis.

The thing left on Hayley is a railroad tie, but it’s too clean. Ryan and Espo find out where the ties are stored before use, and get there in time to find Castle. But not before Beckett shows up and gets into a shootout with the killers, helping to free a drugged Castle. But she told him she loved him, kissed him, then split before the boys arrived. She’s gone. But they have the female assassin.

It turns out the guy that Beckett was with is an analyst with the team she worked with in the DC. He’s new, so Beckett wouldn’t know him, but the catch is? Beckett’s ex partner McCord and her whole team are dead, very recently. The last man on the team was our stabbing victim. The captured assassin is giving nothing up, except that there might be more than one team of killers at play.

Cut to the last man on the five man team getting two carloads of backup. Then it’s back to the 12th where their suspect is getting sent to the Feds in DC. But she’s not going quietly. She grabs a cop’s gun and sets off a shootout in the bullpen. LT is hit, but the shooter is killed. She knew she was done when she got caught, and now she’s dead and the team and the audience are in the dark on Beckett.

Beckett and the analyst, our second new character, Vikram Singh, are in a warehouse. Beckett looks miserable. And that’s before she knows they’re about to get raided by two carloads of killers.

NEXT … TO BE CONTINUED