I really thought that the episode was going to be all about that big betrayal at the end. It turns out, though, that everyone got a little taste of it along the way. For those that have never experienced it, betrayal tastes like a combination of salt and stale cigarettes, and it feels something like a large animal sitting on your chest - you're still getting air, but you know it's not enough.
Poor Beckett takes the brunt of the betrayals and the slightly less paralyzing disappointments for this episode. I'm sure she was relieved to get to spend the last couple minutes of the show lying on her back, ignoring everyone. Let's see...
- Beckett's Dad, who doesn't even really know Castle, goes behind her back to him to try to get her off her Mom's murder case. (Sure, it's the old 'just want to keep you safe' gambit - still sneaky and hurtful...)
- The friendly guard that was buddying up to Beckett turned out to be dirty - taking a bribe to help set up a prison murder. (She only saw him once a week, although he was supposedly going to ask her out...)
- Castle goes behind Beckett's back to Captain Montgomery, to try to get her taken off her Mom's case. (Because, even though he's been working with her forever and is deeply in love with her, he doesn't realize how important this is to her, or how much that betrayal would hurt her.) Montgomery says no, and tells Castle she wouldn't listen anyway. He indicates that Castle's the only one Beckett might listen to, so...
- Being incredibly dumb... I mean because he's so afraid she'll get hurt, Castle goes to see Beckett at home to talk her into letting this one go. This is the man that has helped her with the case every step of the way up to this point so, while I understand that he's afraid she'll get killed, it really bugs me that he's suddenly okay with just walking away when they're so close to the murderer. Apparently Beckett watched the same episodes that I did, as she tells him to go away and never come back, ever.
- Now Ryan and Esposito get their chance to make prune-faces of disbelief and distaste, as they are the ones who discover that 'boss of the year' Captain Montgomery is 'the third man'. They get a nice little scene where they don't agree on this and it looks like they might beat the shit out of each other.
- Beckett, of course, is the one that gets to confront Oh-Captain-My-Captain face to face, and this is where I came in the first time around. Still sleepy and confused, and having missed all that came before, I have to admit that the Captain's motives made very little sense to me. While I found it much clearer in the light of day with all brain cells firing, I still don't think it was done as well as it could have been. The writers obviously wanted us to be uncertain as to whether or not Montgomery was going to hand over Beckett, and they obviously wanted Montgomery to redeem himself. He did, to an extent, but I have to wonder - if he really wanted redemption, why didn't he give up the name of the big bad? How did a standoff with a bunch of armed guys - alone - seem like a good idea? The odds were against him and, if he hadn't succeeded, then Beckett would still have been a target. He also implied that he'd taken care of her - that she wasn't going to be in any future danger. Talk about an epic fail, huh? So the intentions were good, the method sucked, the execution was acceptable - he got what he wanted - bad guys dead and no jail for him, and the aftermath was not planned for at all. Logically, if Montgomery was a good guy who'd made a terrible mistake a long time ago and been working to make up for it through his entire career, and he planned to end the night dead rather than going to jail, wouldn't he have given Beckett the name she was looking for? We'll call that one last big betrayal...
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