When Jenna McBoyd, a young up-and-coming model is found stabbed with a strange object in a fountain, Castle and Beckett are forced to explore the cut-throat world of fashion modeling. Meanwhile, Alexis reconnects with her old babysitter, and Ryan and Esposito discover an amusing secret about Beckett.
Tropes that appear in this episode:
- Babysitter Friendship: Alexis remembers Rina fondly and, when Castle sets it up, the two girls have a great girls night watching movies.
- Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Jenna's "best friend" was jealous of her rising fame and dosed her with amphetamines to make her aggressive and paranoid.
- Irony: Tragically, Beckett gave the killer (who wanted his wife back) the recording of his wife yelling to go back to her husband. He didn't take it well.
- Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Teddy Farrow initially seems more concerned with his clothes than Jenna's murder. But once he finds out how her fellow model and her photographer were tormenting her, he is disgusted enough to fire and ruin them.
- Laser-Guided Karma: The two people who tried to tear down the victim in life have been blackballed from their respective careers.
- Marry the Nanny: Inverted when Castle learns that the model "Rina" is "Katrina", his daughter's former babysitter, and who is therefore absolutely forever off-limits to him and to every man he knows. Especially when he learns what a nightmare it is to be a professional model and the best thing he can do for Rina is give her a night to be a normal girl watching movies with his daughter.
- Mistaken for Cheating: Jenna's husband thought she was cheating on him with the douchebag photographer and killed her in a fit of rage. Needless to say, he's devastated when he learns the truth.
- Not So Above It All: Castle mentions various films where one woman murders another for a career, ending with Show Girls.Beckett: No one dies in Show Girls. ...Or So I Heard.
- Oh, Crap!: It's easy to miss, but when Jenna's husband says that her photographer made her look bad and asked her back for another shoot, Beckett's eyes go wide. Having worked a brief stint as a model before her mother died, Beckett knows what that photographer was doing.
- Papa Wolf: When Castle learns that "Rina" is "Katrina", Alexis's former babysitter, he stops being The Casanova and starts being incredibly protective.
- Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: It's accepted as routine that models have to maintain friendly relations with photographers to get good shots or else their careers will tank. Jenna's photographer tried to use this as incentive to coerce her into sleeping with him, and it's even implied she's not his first victim.
- Retcon: in "Nanny McDead", Alexis said that she didn't have a babysitter when she was a child. Of course, given that both her parents work in fields where late-night events are mandatory, it’s possible she was referring to not having a full-time caregiver, rather than never being left home while her parents went out for the evening.
- Shout-Out:
- The victim is missing her shoes. Castle guesses, "Still at the ball with Prince Charming. Should we look for a pumpkin and some mice?".
- Alexis says that Katrina did a The Ugly Duckling thing, ditching the bad hair and teeth and turning into a supermodel.
- White-Dwarf Starlet: Averted with Martha. The producers want her not for the lead, but for the crazy grandma. Who dies in act one. Offscreen. Martha says she does not do that. So they revamp the role and make it much more significant to make it worth of a woman worthy of both her age and her talent.
