Let's discuss Monday's episode Linchpin (Part 2 of 2) here. Enjoy!
from ABC.go.com: Beckett and Castle must stop a series of events that could result in a war.
Check out the promo over at ABC.com Shell-Shocked! What were you thinking?
Monday 10:00 PM on ABC
I swear if Castle's father turns out to be the one responsible for Becket's mother's death this show will haveofficially jumped the shark.
They also need to stop hiring well know actors. It was easy to see the twists coming. Though over all still a pretty good episode.
Otherwise a nice two parter of a story, but the massive amount of plot holes made it tiresome to watch. For example:
What made Traci McGrath suddenly so scared that she had to call Dr. Nelson Blakely?
If Sophia Conrad was paid by someone (maybe the people who hired Blakely to create the Pandora model) to make Pandora happen, why didn't she have sufficient information and resources to complete this mission? Why did she have to keep Castle and Beckett in the loop claiming that the CIA doesn't do "domestic intelligence"? If she had wanted, she could have easily found out what the bank account numbers were that Blakely left behind. She could have easily dealt with going through with Pandora too, without involving Castle and Beckett and having them interfere with the project. If she already knew about Pandora being on its way yo being realized, why did she go through the whole complicated investigation to reveal information about the project?
One can assume that the people who hired Conrad wanted Pandora to be fulfilled, but didn't know what the linchpin was. In that case the hunt for Blakely was understandable. But why did she arrange for Blakely to be killed then? And why kill Castle and Beckett if Blakely had revealed to them what the linchpin was? And if Conrad's bosses didn't know what the linchpin was, then how could Gage have "heard chatter" about Pandora happening the very next day even before the identity of the Chinese school girl was revealed? Where did this chatter come from, if all the information around Pandora was otherwise so hard to come by? What are the odds that the girl would arrive to the US the very next day after her identity was discovered? Of course, if the people wanting to fulfil Pandora already knew what the linchpin was, they could have killed the girl ages ago. And if they knew the identity of the linchpin, why make Conrad go through with the whole investigation into the girls identity? If they wanted the investigation to serve as a way to set up Gage, Conrad could have easily done it without Castle and Beckett. At the end it was conveniently revealed that Conrad kept Castle in the loop because she wanted to "protect the op", and that she killed Blakely and McGrath for the same reason. so apparently she and her bosses knew the identity of the Chinese girl from the beginning. If that is the case, killing Blakely and McGrath is understandable. But it still doesn't make sense to have Castle around to "protect the op". She could have easily had the girl killed without ever getting Castle involved. The death of the agent that Gage killed in the beginning would have remained unsolved, and Gage would have disappeared and/or branded a traitor.
If Thomas Gage wasn't behind the execution of Pandora in the first place, how did he become aware of the project? How did he become aware of Blakely (if this man had been "dead" for years) and McGrath? Maybe he had found out about these if the "bad guys" in the CIA tried to set him up. But if this is the case, why go rogue instead of alerting people in the FBI or CIA?
I agree with the points made by CrazyAsian especially the first one
and I go on to add the best part of this episode for me was that for once in the history of television, a show based on a paramilitary organization actually respected the word classified, though Esposito constantly asking did annoy me, you can't win them all
Yeah, the possible twist I mentioned in the Pandora thread turned out to be mostly true. Gage wasn't the bad guy and Sophia was, but not the whole CIA section.
Liked that conversation between Castle and Alexis after Sophia left.
It looked like Beckett's conversation with Sophia was making her wonder about Castle, but then she says everything Sophia was saying was lies, so now I wonder what her state of mind is on Castle.
So that murder board that Sophia found in Castle's home is part of what Castle is currently hiding from Beckett.
