Correct.
JSexton, you seem to interpret all of these events through the filter of “Maybe Montgomery was lying when he said that!” The thing is, there is simply no good reason to believe that he was. Is it possible? Maybe… but the writers certainly made no attempt to imply that he did.
Did he say that someone else fired it? I didn’t remember that, but I could have missed it.
I don’t like the bullet-proof vest theory, because then Castle would either have to have known about it or not. If he knew about it, then why the whispered confession of love? Did he just freak out at the sight of what he knew was fake blood? If he didn’t know about it, there was a chance he would have taken the bullet for Beckett. He looked almost about to jump, but was just a beat slow.
The blood doesn’t disprove the bulletproof vest. She could have been wearing a dye pack too. cf. “James Bond: The Living Daylights”. I’m leaning towards really shot, but will recover. After all, it’s a TV bullet. You can take a few dozen of those before you really have to worry.
The question I have is, why didn’t they kill Beckett in the court room? She was unarmed and only protected by a wooden table.
Metal detectors at the doors?
They came in with guns and shot up the place. They were dressed as cops remember?
Then how did they get the guns and the flashbang grenades in? They certainly were carrying guns (although I suppose they might not have been real).
There is that.
Right, Beckett was unarmed because I’m pretty sure even cops aren’t allowed to bring weapons into the courthouse. The extraction team clearly did have guns though. Montgomery even says that them not killing Beckett was proof that they weren’t targeting her. Maybe he convinced them not to kill her, but in the following week or so, they changed their minds?
I don’t think they needed to kill her until she started digging even further. Montgomery’s job was to keep her on a short leash. When she slipped said leash (after the extraction), she became the target de jour.
Rewatching it just now, Beckett wasn’t unarmed in the courtroom. She had her issue piece with her, because she sure as hell didn’t stop to retrieve it before barging out the door and shooting the helicopter. She didn’t fire in the courtroom because she was stunned by the flashbang.
That’s a good point. She would have needed a gun to shoot the helicopter. :smack:
Maybe the courthouse was on a no weapons “honor system” that day. It’s a good money-saver, but does have its occasional down sides.
They were cops - I believe cops are allowed to have guns.
The extraction team were fake cops to be sure, but they had the uniforms and creds to get past security.
It didn’t seem completely unreasonable to me that law enforcement personnel would be permitted to keep their personal weapons in a courthouse. I’m sure the bailiffs are armed, but allowing the regular cops to carry their weapons seems like it would in general have more upside than downside in an emergency situation. They’re not expecting fake cops to show up in the courtroom.
I guess it’s not the most implausible part of that particular show. I’m betting the law really is:
In literally minutes of googling, I can’t find evidence either to support or disprove my theories though, and that’s all the time I’m willing to dedicate to the project.
The most implausible thing is that Kate was shot from behind a tombstone. Out in the open like that, where the shooter could be spotted by, oh, I don’t know…everybody! The guy leading the horse on the hill could see him. The lawnmowing crew could see him. Unless he’s planning on shooting himself there at the cemetery, that guy is going to get made. The funeral is bound to have photographers there from the local media. They will all get the shooting on tape. Just what is the extraction plan?
For maximum angst, if the show runs another 5 years: Kate and Rick get together, marry and she discovers that the bullet messed up her plumbing so badly that she can’t have a daughter of her own. This is discovered in the Season 8 finale and the show is cancelled over the summer, leaving us all hanging. Fillion hunts down Joss Whedon and punches him in the nose, just on general principles.
When I started watching Castle, I never would have thought it would lead to something this deep. Well, quite deep anyway. I loved the scene with Montgomery putting files in envelopes and bullets in his gun; not cheesy in the slightest.
The music in this episode was done very well too, particularly in that scene.
I don’t think it was entirely against her will. Castle had spent the episode trying to persuade her that her mother’s death wouldn’t be made better by her dying too, and Montgomery had just done the same; Montgomery was giving up his life to save her. His sacrifice would have been worthless if she’d died too.
But I did think that maybe he’d set a bomb in the place, on a trigger switch. That would have been better in some ways, but this way we got to see that the assassin dude really was dead.
Ooh, I hadn’t thought about that. I can’t see Kate as Captain; she wouldn’t be sent out on jobs, so we wouldn’t have the story-of-the-week formula, and it’d be difficult for her to keep Castle around.
I think it probably will be new Captain who’s against Beckett (and Esposito and Ryan). Castle is an extremely formulaic show, hence me being so certain before (as posted in this thread, hah!) that Montgomery would be the one to die because he’d just announced his retirement. They just handle the formula very well; the characters are believable and likeable and the dialogue often zings.
I loved that both partnerships, Castle/Beckett and Ryan/Esposito came close to breaking point in this episode and they dealt with it in ways that suit their own interactions.
Same here. He had no reason to lie and his past actions were more consistent with him protecting Beckett than stringing her along.
It’s pretty easy to conceal your face and I doubt that they had cameras on a distant tombstone anyway. The extraction plan is ‘run away while everyone’s distracted.’
Any predictions for the Big Bad? I’m pretty certain it’ll be
The Mayor. He has the money and the influence and it would be strange if the Big Bad were a completely new character. We’ve met the Mayor at least once before and he’s been mentioned several times, including in this episode. He’s also a friend of Castle’s, adding complications.
And Beckett’s obviously going to live. She might be unconscious for the first episode of the next season though.
Right - I’m off to find the episode discussion thread even though I’ll probably say pretty much the same things again. 
Well, I would if I could find it. I thought I saw one - was I mistaken?
As far as I know, this is the only Castle thread, even though I didn’t start it with the intent of it being an ongoing thread. But no problem.
To answer your earlier question:
I’d say that any day a cop dies on duty is by definition his last day on the job.
I thought I’d seen a thread dedicated to the last episode of Castle. Given that I couldn’t read it at the time, I was probably mistaken and it was actually this thread.
I think you know what I meant by an older cop dying on his last day of the job - announcing you’re about to retire is like putting a red shirt on. Do not take my victorious prediction away from me. :mad:
Okay, you can have the points. But you don’t get the bonus points because nobody stood over the body yelling “MENDOZA!”
Okay, so I just finished (literally–ha!) reading Naked Heat. And I read Heat Wave back in December.
Heat Wave was fun, but Naked Heat had a more interesting murder mystery and seemed to make better use of the secondary characters. I enjoyed it quite a bit. What’s really fun about it is you’re reading a novel about Nikki Heat and Jamieson Rook, and this novel is supposedly written by Richard Castle and is based on his “real” life adventures with Detective Kate Beckett and her colleagues (Ryan, Esposito, the Captain, and Lanie all have nearly identical counterparts in the novel), and then there are little clever references here and there to the *real *real life actors. Like a couple of cops–who are only mentioned once–whose last names are Malcom and Reynolds. And a Croatian character named Peta Matic has to be some sort of nod to the half-Croatian Stana Katic.
I’ll be checking out the new one, Heat Rises, hopefully soon.