Castle: Heartbreaker – A Good Cop/Bad Cop Review
Our thief/killer repelled… ~ Lanie.
One good thing about last night’s episode of Castle? Kate has finally moved back into the loft and all is well on the home front. Yay. One bad thing? The writing. Lord have mercy. Many of the scenes seemed forced, and a couple of them actually made my teeth hurt. I felt bad for the cast, because they were trying so hard to make something out of nothing. Thus the forced scenes.
I enjoyed the first part of the show, until the writers went off the rails and had Kate agree to let Espo take Sonia, his former fiancee and a convicted thief, back to prison alone. Really? So unrealistic, I groaned in disbelief. Then they had him stop off at his mother’s house so the woman could have a home-cooked meal. Holy cow! Why don’t the idiot writers go to the Writers’ Police Academy so they can get this stuff right? Aarrggh.
Of course, they needed the woman to escape and make Espo look like even more of an idiot, and that was exactly what happened. By that time, I wanted to turn off the TV—and probably would have if I hadn’t had to write this blog. Then we got those weird scenes between Kate and Lucy, then Rick and Linus. Not. Funny. At least not to me.
The new showrunners have totally ruined this show.
I can’t go on, except to comment on Kate giving Espo a week’s suspension without pay for letting the woman escape. A week’s suspension. That’s all, when he should probably have lost his job. Like I said, the episode was so unrealistic I wanted to scream. I’m sure Lee will tear it to shreds, so I’ll let him have at it. I just can’t write anymore.
Lanie certainly summed up this episode in a single word—repel—when she used it to describe how the killer du jour gained easy entry into a super-secure area. The correct word, however, for using a rope to descend a vertical surface, is rappel, not repel which, by the way, means repulsive or distasteful.
Lanie’s accidental intentional use of repel in this instance may have been the actor’s discreet warning to us about what we’d see if we continued watching. So thanks for the warning, Lanie. I just wished I’d listened to you because this episode was so, so horrible and dumb in many ways.
First of all, a detective should never be allowed to work solo with an ex-con/former fiancee. The reasons, and there are a few, are obvious. But the scenario did allow us to see Espo execute a sort of decent long gun disarming tactic when the first bad guy got a little too close him. Yep, it happened twice in single episode. I guess Espo has never heard the old saying, Fool me once, shame on me. Fool me twice doing the exact same thing and I deserve whatever’s coming my way.
Here a good rule of thumb, writers. Your heroes can take a gun away from someone when it’s within an arm’s length. Any further away and it’s time to come up with another plan, such as having the protagonist retreat as fast as his or her feet will carry them, if possible.
Ryan and Espo set out on their own to recapture an escaped convict (Sonia). Nope. In the real world everyone under the sun would have been alerted to the escape. Sure, a stupid officer may have tried for a little while to find the fleeing felon, but the reality of that situation—possibly being charged with aiding the escapee—would soon take over.
Sonia communicated, by phone, with a robber/thief/killer while in prison using a prison telephone. No way. Those calls are monitored. Sure, sometimes calls are monitored randomly, but the chances of intercepting Sonia’s conversations would be likely. Besides, the plan Espo and Ryan “discovered,” where Sonia plotted the entire thing as a ruse to have them let her out of prison to help them find a killer—total BS. The chance of that happening are about as good as me coming out with a hit rap song and video (In case you’re wondering, I despise rap music, can’t rap, don’t want to rap, wouldn’t rap if I could).
Beckett suspended Espo for one week without pay. Actually, an officer would more than likely be suspended until a hearing where he’d probably lose his job or, at the very least, be demoted back to walking a beat in wino country (not to be confused with walking a beat in wine country, which would not be a bad gig).
Anyway, I agree with Lanie. The actor who played the role of the killer was probably “repelled” the moment he learned he was to drop into this episode.
Okay, now for a quick lesson on weapon disarming. This are two of the basic tactics I taught to academy recruits. I’m confident they’re also used by Jack Reacher…hourly.
