Recap / Castle S 2 E 6 Vampire Weekend

As Halloween approaches, Castle and Beckett are assigned to investigate the death of a young man found stabbed in the heart with a wooden stake in a graveyard. To Castle's delight, the two must delve into the world of vampires and werewolves to find the killer.

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• Actor Allusion:
  • Castle's first Halloween costume is a recreation of Fillion's outfit as Malcolm Reynolds.
    Alexis: Okay, first, there are no cows in space. Second, didn't you wear that five years ago?
  • The cops (bar Katic) wear costumes reflecting prior roles. Huertas as an army sergeant and Dever as a doctor.
• Artistic License – Medicine: Morlock suffers from porphyria which can cause light sensitivity. It does not make your skin sizzle and smoke when exposed to sunlight.
• Crazy Homeless People: Morlock, the muse for Matthew and Jonas's comic, is a babbling man whose been living in seclusion in a warehouse for a long time and is hyper-sensitive to light.
• The Cuckoolander Was Right: Morlock may be a homeless man with a few screws loose, but his rambling about "spots" turns out to be his testimony about how he witnessed Janice (who was wearing a spotted fur coat at the time) murder her stepson Matthew. Sure enough, when Castle directs Janice past Morlock's cell, the man instantly recognizes her in a single glance and starts ranting about how "Spots murdered the Crow".
• Dead All Along: Matthew's werewolf-cosplaying friend Jonas is presented as a suspect but was in fact killed before Matthew was.
• Disproportionate Retribution: After her parents ground her for drinking spiked punch at a party, Paige takes it out on Feggin by "accidentally" breaking him.
• Egg Sitting: Alexis and her friend are assigned to take care of an egg as though it were their own baby.
• Foreshadowing:
  • The victim's sister is wearing merchandise for the singer who gets murdered in the next episode.
  • The fake story Castle tells Beckett about his childhood trauma and the jokes she makes about Castle's childhood trauma and the fake story he tells about it become less funny after the events of "Hollander's Woods" reveal the real trauma.
• Good Cannot Comprehend Evil: Happens twice in the episode.
  • Matthew's father Alan is distraught as to why Janice would kill Matthew when she had raised him all those years. Beckett can only soberly explain that Janice possibly saw Matthew as a living reminder of her murder rather than a son.
  • Parallel to that, Alexis is conflicted as to how Paige could "murder" Feggin out of revenge when she had previously loved the egg as though it were a real baby. Again, Castle can only console his daughter that stuff like this does happen, and he writes about them to question it.
• Irony: Matthew's father believed the people he hated had killed his son, when the real murderer was someone much closer to home, his second wife Janice.
• Jump Scare: In-Universe, this is Beckett's costume.
• Kinky Role-Playing: Ryan tells how he once dated a girl who was into vampire LARPing but they broke up.
  Esposito: What happened, did the relationship suck? [grins at Castle]
  Ryan: Deal-breaker for me, she wanted to have sex in a coffin. I'm... open-minded. I'm not that open-minded.
• Lying to Protect Your Feelings: Deconstructed. As Castle points out, Alan lying to Matthew and Rosie that Janice is their biological mother is not only wrong, but goes against how fathers are supposed to be honest to their children. Even if it's to protect their feelings, it doesn't make it any more right.
• Marry the Nanny: A dark example; the nanny killed the wife in order to marry the father.
• Murder the Hypotenuse: Matthew's nanny, Janice, murdered his mother to marry his father.
• Not Helping Your Case: Alan becomes a suspect when it's revealed Matthew and Jonas were murdered for digging into Elizabeth's disappearance and death, since him keeping quiet about the truth, even after Matthew began drawing his mother from his repressed memories and Elizabeth's body was found, comes off as him covering up his own involvement in what happened.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Castle and Beckett call out Matthew's father for not telling his son that the mother he's known for years is not his biological mother, who disappeared years ago. Alan tries to justify it was to protect Matthew, but Castle retorts that if he were in his shoes, he'd tell his own daughter the truth.
• Revenge Before Reason: Paige resents Alexis for being indirectly at fault for the former's parents grounding her. In retaliation, she "accidentally" broke Feggin, the egg they were supposed to care for as part of a class project. She may have spited Alexis, but at the same time, she's also done herself a great disservice by simultaneously failing her assignment.
• Revenge by Proxy: When her parents grounded her for drinking spiked punch, Paige retaliated against Alexis the only way she knew how, by "accidentally" breaking Feggin. In doing so, it makes Alexis down-trodden at her ex-friend's cruelty towards the very "baby" they were devoted to "raise".
• Riddle for the Ages: It's never directly stated whether Matthew's sister Rosie is the daughter of Elizabeth or Janice. Based on her age, she would have just been a few months old at most when Elizabeth vanished, but she's also older than how long Janice and Alan could have been married for given the time that it would have taken to have Elizabeth declared dead (although she also might have been conceived before they were legally married). The dialogue about how Alan married Janice after losing his first wife is also vague when he mentions Rosie. However, she's not mentioned among Elizabeth's family in a missing persons poster, implying she's Janice's daughter.
• Sham Supernatural: Beckett and Castle must solve the murder of a young man found in a graveyard with fangs, stabbed through the heart. The fangs are quickly revealed to be veneers, but the episode centers around a subculture of people who take on vampiric and werewolf identities and lifestyles. This is treated with a mix of skepticism and open-mindedness, while the killer turns out to have framed the vampire community for the victim's death.
• Shout-Out:
  • Castle's "space cowboy" costume is a reference to Nathan Fillion's role as Malcolm Reynolds in Firefly.
  • The title is a reference to the band.
  • On seeing the victim has a stake through the heart, Castle quips that "Buffy hit the Big Apple", then posits that the victim was killed by Lycans, since they've "been at war with the vampires since Lucian was murdered".
• Spanner in the Works: Paige accidentally drinking spiked punch and drunkenly muttering to Castle not to call her parents is a small incident, but it's what gives him his "Eureka!" Moment that Morlock's mad ramblings are actually code for how Matthew was killed by Janice, just like how Paige's incoherent mutterings meant something as well.
• Subculture of the Week: A pretty nuanced example; the team are a little taken aback by the victim's vampire lifestyle but not judgemental and while speculations are made about whether mental trauma led him to that lifestyle ultimately he seems to have been enjoying a reasonably active social life. His murder was due to an unrelated matter and the trappings around it were intended to frame the members of the vampire subculture.
• Ungrateful Bitch: Alexis took Paige home from a party whilst she was under the influence of spiked punch. One would think she would be grateful Alexis didn't leave her at the party. Instead, she's mad at Alexis because her parents grounded her afterward.
• Wicked Stepmother: Mrs. Freeman killed her husband's first wife in order to get him and is also willing to kill her stepson when he finds out the truth.