This is the moment I've been waiting for all semester...A Recap of Castle's "Cuffed" (4x10)

(I am apologizing in advance for the length of this. I had oh so very much to say, and everything seemed important. :D I just had to pick the episode laden with symbolism.)

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Every fangirl in the Castle universe was screaming with delight and/or fainting when episode 4x10 "Cuffed" opened. The camera panned over the face of Kate Beckett, waking up with a smile next to her ruggedly handsome partner, Richard Castle. But her smile soon turned to a look of confusion as she realized that she was not "basking in the afterglow" in her partner's bed, but rather handcuffed to him in a dirty, dingy, dark basement. She rouses her partner and the two quickly realize that they've been drugged "and not the good kind," and kidnapped. Poring through their hazy memories, they recall that they had been investigating a dead body at a seedy motel.

Here, the episode flashes back to that investigation, which opens on a bickering match between ex-lovers, Medical Examiner Lanie Parish, and Detective Javier Esposito. Beckett interrupts, and the group goes over the basic information. A man, who paid for the room in cash under the name "Jack Sparrow" as been found dead in the bed, his fingerprints burned off, with signs of suffocation and a needle mark in his arm. Throughout the discussion of possible COD and the victim's identity, there is an obvious tension between Lanie and Esposito, and everyone in the room picks up on it. Espo tells the group that the camera in the lobby "is a dummy." Lanie quips under her breath: "It's not the only one." Can I just mention that Tamela and Jon have perfect facial expressions and comedic timing in this scene? Brilliant. The scene closes as Lanie agrees to try to recover the prints from the victim's fingers, and Espo heads off to help Detective Ryan run the victim's face through missing persons.

Cut back to Beckett and Castle discussing the case in the half-lit basement. While trying to figure out how they got from the case to this basement, it's obvious that the two haven't figured out their groove. Handcuffed together, they each struggle to go their own way--two opposite forces trying desperately to figure out the balance in the relationship. At this point, it's obvious that they need each other in order to function and figure a way out of this. But so far, it's not going so well. "Are you always like this in the morning?' But the bickering leads them to remember their next step: they went to the morgue to see a man about a horse...erm...to see Lanie about a dead man.

Flash back to the morgue. Castle is pestering Lanie about what she and Espo were fighting about, to which she and Beckett both respond "none of your business." Changing the subject, Lanie tells the pair that there are signs that their victim showed signs of manual labor, and that while the outer skin of his fingers was too damaged to get a print, she could try to get one from the underside. She’s also found a scrap of paper in the victim's pocket: 147 W. 97th St, 4pm. Ooh, a clue. It turns out to be the address of a cafe, and Beckett sends Ryan and Espo to check it out, and see if anyone saw their victim there. Meanwhile, Castle discovers that the address was written on the back of a scrap of envelope, and the two use the postal bar code fragment to trace the address it was sent to--a house in Queens.

On the way to check out this lead, the two have an interesting conversation about Lanie and Esposito.

Beckett: "They both want to be together, but neither of them wants to admit to it."
Castle: "Why do people do that to themselves?"
Beckett: "Maybe they just don't see it."
Castle: "How can they not? It's so obvious."

Hmm...this sounds like someone else we know. A certain detective and her ruggedly handsome partner, perhaps?

Anyway, the two enter this house in Queens to find...an empty house. Except for the crazy creepy old woman in a cage. As Beckett tries to free the woman from the cage, the creepy lady smiles, and everything goes black. It cuts back to our dynamic duo in the basement, who are realizing that this is the last thing they remember. Castle says the one line that sums my thoughts up quite nicely: "What the hell is going on?" Cue title card. Good Lord, all of this in the first 10 minutes.

Ryan and Espo are in the break room at the 12th Precinct, discussing Ryan and his fiancée Jenny's holiday plans. Ryan mentions how Jenny suggested a road trip to Florida, for quality time together. Espo scoffs at that and says it's a relationship test. "Just watch out if she wants to take you canoeing," he says.

Esposito: "It’s all about power, direction. Like a marriage. If the canoe goes straight, it shows her that you can compromise, work together, find a rhythm, move forward in the same direction. But, if it’s going around in circles? So is your relationship."

Cut back to Castle and Beckett, handcuffed together and walking around in circles, bickering. Clever. It's just another reflection of the power struggle the two are having. Each wants to take control--Beckett, because she's the cop; it's her job to go in first because she's the one with the gun. And Castle, because he is the man, and it is his job as a man to protect the woman from harm. We see this all throughout the fourth season, as he works to protect Beckett from the man who is behind her mother's murder and her subsequent sniper shooting. It's such an interesting dynamic, watching a fiercely independent female in a role versus a slightly more submissive man who wants to take the lead sometimes. In a funny display, Beckett allows Castle to lead. "Thank you...where did you want to go?" The two find a light switch and discover a giant freezer in the corner, locked with a combination lock, and a giant hatch in the ceiling.

Meanwhile, the boys are back at the precinct, and now know that their victim had been sedated with animal tranquilizers. They also have a sketch of a bearded man that a waitress saw meeting with the victim. But the two have become concerned over the whereabouts of the other half of their team, so they hit up dispatch to trace Beckett's car.

Back in the basement, Castle and Beckett attempt to move the freezer so they can climb on it and escape through the hatch, but the find it too heavy to move. So Castle, who "studied with one of the best safe crackers in the biz" while writing one of his Derrick Storm novels, decides to crack the combo lock so they can empty the freezer.

The boys discover that Beckett's car was ditched, and it wasn't by Beckett or Castle, but by a man who was then picked up in a black F-150. Captain Gates is not amused by this, and in her no-nonsense sort of way, she says to "Do whatever it takes to get an ID on that victim. And find out what in the hell he was into. If Beckett and Castle are still out there, then they’re running out of time." Dun dun dun.

Our lock breaker is having no luck opening the freezer's lock, and Beckett is getting frustrated. She asks Castle if he's got a story to explain all of this, like he always has, but he doesn't have one that ends well. He tries to cheer her up by telling her that by now, someone is looking for them, and appreciating his efforts, she smiles and gives him back her hand so he can keep trying to open the lock. Awww.

In the morgue, Espo is pressuring Lanie into getting an ID on their victim, and Lanie is frustrated by his insistence. She’s worried about Castle and Beckett too, but she doesn’t have an answer on the ID. Things get heated, and Ryan steps in to cool down the situation, and asks Lanie if there is any way she could try and get the print from the victim now, even though it hasn’t been long enough to get a good one without much damage. Lanie agrees to try.

We cut back to the basement, where Castle has finally had some success in his lock breaking—it finally opened! The two stand, and hesitate only slightly before opening the lid. “We’ve seen dead bodies before, right?” What’s inside is much worse than a dead body: it’s a freezer full of bloody knives and chains.

Beckett: “Yeah, looks like your crazed, sadistic, psycho killer theory might not be far off, Castle.”
Castle: “I don’t know whether to be smug or horrified.”
Beckett: “I vote for motivated.”
Castle: “Right there with you. Let’s get the hell out of here.”

Back in the morgue, Lanie is attempting to retrieve a print, but Espo is breathing down her neck.

Lanie: “Javi, I can feel your impatience all over my backside. And rushing me is never a good idea.”
Esposito: “You’re talking about that print, right?”

Ooh, I smell some subtext here. Maybe this is why they broke up: Espo was ready to take that next step…or at least talk about it. But Lanie wasn’t quite ready for things to be too serious. In a way, this can also reflect the relationship between Castle and Beckett: Beckett isn't ready for a real relationship with anyone, let alone Castle. But unlike Espo, who has seemingly been impatient and pressuring Lanie for that more serious step, he has been patiently waiting, biding his time until she's ready to let him in.

The tension is high in the morgue, and in a split second, Lanie accidentally tears the print. But they manage to put together enough “print pieces” to match them to Hank Spooner, a truck driver who was bringing a delivery from Del Rio, Texas to Queens. They go to notify Gates, and put out an APB on his truck, and they are interrupted by the bearded man from the sketch. He is Chuck Martinez, a DEA agent investigating Spooner because he suspects he is trafficking drugs from Mexico, and wants to catch the people Spooner is working for. He was meeting with Spooner because he wanted out of whatever it was he was doing, and so Martinez had promised him safety in exchange for information. The group is then notified that his truck was found by troopers at a truck stop north of the city. They leave to investigate, and find the trailer of Spooner’s truck empty, save for a large crate with what looks like air holes in it, some hair, and a pool of blood. They are trying to figure out just what in the world Spooner was carrying in his truck, and they find weigh bills indicating that he delivered to a lower Manhattan furniture store two days prior.

Back in the basement, Castle and Beckett have moved the freezer and positioned it beneath the hatch, but it’s still too high to reach and escape through. So Beckett decides to climb onto Castle’s shoulders…while still handcuffed together. Probably not the brightest plan, but hey, they are desperate. She gets Castle to pull off her boots, so she can stand on his shoulders, and he makes a joke about how “in normal circumstances, [he’d] like where this is heading.” Beckett smirks. “Shut up and pull.” They get her boots off, and she tries to climb onto Castle’s shoulders in a humorous sequence of contorting and grunting that results in Castle suggesting that when they get out of there, they should join the circus. But she manages to get onto his shoulders, and after a quip from Castle about “getting kind of tired of [her] walking all over [him],” just manages to push the hatch open a crack. She decides to try and pull herself up, but before she can, a creepy looking dude appears and the two fall down off the freezer and onto the gross old mattress. They lay there, yelling at him to let them out, but Creepy Dude just grins evilly and slams the hatch shut again. What is with all the creepy smiling people in this episode? And seriously, what the hell is going on?

Back at the 12^th, the team has discovered that Spooner has been making legitimate deliveries in order to cover up whatever his real cargo is. The man at the furniture store said that when Spooner made the delivery to him, he could have sworn he heard breathing coming from behind some empties that Spooner claimed he had put in to fill some space. Knowing this, Gates still can’t figure out where Castle and Beckett could have gone to, seeing as how the only evidence they had at the time was the scrap of paper with the address on it. That’s when Ryan notices the postal barcode, and they realize what Castle and Beckett were on to. So they trace the address as well, and take off to find their missing partners. Ryan and Espo, along with a SWAT team, pull up to that house in Queens, but find it empty…for real, this time. But they also discover a hatch in the floor, and open it to find…nothing but a broken chair. What the…?

And we’re back to Caskett in the basement. Castle is trying to break the handcuffs apart with one of the creepy tools from the freezer (creepy is really a theme of this episode), and Beckett shakes her head, reminding him that these are police cuffs, made from hard-cased steel. Nothing but a key is going to open these. Castle suggests that there is another way: “we don’t go through the cuffs.” Of course, when he suggests cutting off a hand, he means hers, not his, because he’s a writer after all. That was a LOL moment for me. I almost would have taken this seriously, had I not found it so absurd, but maybe in desperation it’s possible they could have gone through with it. -shudders- Then, they hear voices coming from outside the basement. Two men are talking about whatever is in the next room, saying that “She’s beautiful…just like you asked.” The duo concludes that they are working in human trafficking, and are holding a girl hostage in another room. That’s when Beckett hears breathing coming from the other side of a wall made of stucco tile.

Quickly, the two begin to break through the wall, hoping that this will lead them—and whoever else is on the other side—to safety. This is a great use of symbolism in regards to Detective Beckett’s character, and probably my favorite scene of the episode. She has declared in the past that she has a wall built up inside of her, which comes from her mother being murdered and her quest for justice in the case. She said that she won't be able to let anyone in or have the kind of relationship she wants until that wall comes down. This scene is a great reflection of the effort that both she and Castle are going through in order to bring this wall down and allow the two of them to pursue what they want: a relationship with each other. However, like that metaphoric wall, this physical wall is holding a big secret. When the pair manages to break through to the other side, they find themselves in deeper trouble—it is not a victim of human trafficking, but a very hungry-looking tiger waiting on the other side. This could symbolize the danger of bringing down Beckett’s wall too soon, before the secrets both Castle and Beckett are keeping from each other are resolved.

We revisit Ryan and Espo, who uncover that the house in Queens was owned by National Bank, and whoever was behind this mess had been using properties owned by this bank to conduct their business. They manage to narrow down the properties, and head off to rescue their teammates.

Well, Castle and Beckett have discovered that it’s not human trafficking ring they’ve stumbled into, but a tiger trafficking ring. Oh so very illegal. But they have a much bigger problem on their hands. This tiger is going to break through this wall and eat them..and they have nowhere to run. Somehow, they manage to stand the freezer on end beneath the hatch, and climb up on it. But this won’t stall the tiger for long—tigers are known for jumping higher than a freezer.

But outside, Ryan and Espo have shown up, and hear the cries for help coming from a hatch in the floor of the garage they are in. Swinging the hatch open, they find Castle and Beckett, standing handcuffed together on top of a freezer, while a tiger circles them hungrily. But before they can rescue their partners, the boys are confronted by the creepy cage woman brandishing a shotgun, and her two dopey, creepy counterparts--also with guns. The hatch slams closed again, and Castle and Beckett are left calling for help, while the boys figure their way out of this mess.

Creepy Cage Lady (whose name is Ruth): “You New Yorkers ain’t nearly as scary as a Texas lawman. That being said, I’m betting more of you gonna be here soon. Let me tell you what’s going to happen. Me and my boys are gonna back on outta here. You either get yourselves killed trying to stop us or you can forget all about us and you can go save your friends. That’s your choice.”

Obviously, the boys let Creepy Cage Lady and her cohorts go, but when they open the hatch…Castle and Beckett are gone. Detective Ryan looks stricken.“Oh God. It ate ‘em.” Seamus Dever’s delivery here was flawless. So funny. I just want to squeeze the stuffing out of him. But don’t worry, our dynamic duo is just fine…they're just simply hanging around. Literally. They’re hanging from a pole running along the basement’s ceiling. Ryan and Espo haul them out off-screen, and the fab four are reunited once again.

Meanwhile, Creepy Cage Lady and her bros are in a pickup truck, pulling out to escape—only they come face to face with a whole team of NYPD officers ready to take them down. Reluctantly, they surrender. Score for the cavalry.

Cut back to our hostages and their rescuers. Espo is unlocking the cuffs, and freeing Castle and Beckett from their bond, and the four have an interesting conversation:

Ryan: “Handcuffed together that long? I’m surprised you two didn’t kill each other.”
Beckett: “Yeah well, there were a couple of moments.”
Castle: “Until we found our rhythm.”
Ryan: “…I think we’ll fly to Florida.”

And it all comes full-circle.
The episode ends back at the 12^th, with a sum-up of Creepy Cage Lady’s operation. Turns out, her cohorts were actually her sons, and they were tiger suppliers to clients all over the world. Tiger trafficking is illegal…practically everywhere but Texas, so Ruth and her sons paid Spooner to smuggle the tigers out of Texas and into New York. But when they found out he was talking to the DEA and wanted out, they killed him to cover up the secret. That’s why when Castle and Beckett showed up, she played the victim to get the drop on them, so that they couldn’t uncover the truth. Martinez says that while he’s turning over the trafficking case to the FBI, he’ll leave the murder charge to the NYPD. Satisfied, the team calls it a day. In the final exchange of the episode, Castle makes a Freudian slip:

Beckett: “That has got to be the strangest brush with death that I’ve ever had.”
Castle: “Me too. But I’ll tell ya. After that experience, if I ever have to be hitched to someone, it would be you.”
Beckett: “Hitched?”

Oops.

Castle: “Hitched? No, I didn’t say hitched. I said cuffed. Handcuffed, not hitched, the colloquial or any connotation or meaning.”
Beckett: “It’s okay, Castle. I understood what you meant. And for what it’s worth, if I have to spend another night handcuffed to someone again, I wouldn’t mind if it was you, either.”
Castle: “Really?”
Beckett: “But next time, let’s do it without the tiger.”
Castle: “Next time?”

Thus giving all the fangirls out there hope that someday…possibly soon…the Caskett ship will finally sail. ^.~

This entire episode was symbolic of what it takes to make a partnership—or relationship—work. Really, it was meant to move along the Castle/Beckett relationship subplot in a fun, subtextual way. Everything about this plot screamed subtext. From the mirroring of the Lanie/Espo relationship and the Ryan/Jenny relationship against the Castle/Beckett relationship, right down to the way that Castle and Beckett were handcuffed together: left hand to left hand—could it be foreshadowing of wedding rings in the future? One can only hope. Big props to Andrew W. Marlowe and Terri Edda Miller, the real-life husband and wife team who brought this episode to life. I don’t know how you do it.


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I don't tend to read a lot of Castle recaps done on professional websites, because I prefer to read the liveblogging and recaps done by people I interact with daily in the Castle fandom. The official recaps on the ABC site are kind of...stale, so when I do want to read a professional recap, I usually turn to the ones that Matt Webb Mitovich does on TVLine. (This link is to his recap of the season 5 premiere, "After the Storm") I love TVLine. anything that Michael Ausiello is involved with is fantastic, and TVLine is his site. (Michael, if you're reading this, I'd love a job working for you!). Matt's aren't usually as in-depth as the ones that we saw on TelevisionWithoutPity for Mad Men, but he usually hits the key points pretty well. Another recap I found that I really liked was this one on EW's PopWatch by Sandra Gonzalez (she is reviewing Season 4's finale, "Always"). I really liked hers because it had a real conversational flare to it, like I was just chatting with one of my fandom friends. Hers went a little more in-depth than Matt's, but still not as detailed as TWP. Honestly...the ones that my friends do in the fandom are more detailed and in-depth than the professional ones I've found. (Of course, I can't find a link to any of those when I'm looking--it isn't Castle Recovery Tuesday, after all. That's when they all come out haha.)

One thing is for sure: I have SO MUCH more respect for recappers who do this every week for their shows. I didn't expect this to take as long as it did, and it was so much harder than I expected it to be. I don't know how they do it, but to all the recappers out there: I salute you.


I think I'll stick to liveblogging.