Castle ‘The Fast and the Furriest’ recap: Big Foot tours Manhattan

Over the course of five seasons, there have been very few farfetched theories left for Castle to pursue. This week’s episode, “The Fast and the Furriest”, added yet another notch to Castle’s Amazingly Unbelievable theory list. Want to know just how farfetched? Read on.

The case was one of the most convoluted of the season. Anne Cardinal, a 27 year old  Evolutionary Biology student who worked at a retirement home for primates was thrown half-dead and with a disfigured face out of a moving car and right in front of a hospital, where she died some time later from a blunt force trauma to the head. The list of suspects begins with the man who dropped her there, a convicted murderer who’s only been out of prison for three months. But alas, it turns out he was just trying to help her without implicating himself. We then move on to suspect, wait for it, Big Foot. Oh, yes. We don’t actually believe Anne was killed by a giant gorilla, but, in Castle’s words, “someone framed Big Foot.” Indeed, there were huge footprints in the alley where Eddie Maslon found the victim, next to a pool of her blood.

The team thus splits up into its two usual stances: Team Believers, starring Castle and Ryan, and Team Skeptical, featuring Beckett and Esposito. To Castle and Ryan’s credit, there’ve been several Big Foot sightings in New York during the past couple of months, making their theory of choice quite plausible. Only, it really doesn’t. A website offered a million dollars if somebody could point them towards Big Foot, thus the outpour of sightings. During the course of the following investigation, the list of suspects grows to include a renowned Big Foot expert who was in touch with the victim and a Big Foot hunter who stalked her in the hopes of finding him. It. Well, I don’t know the appropriate pronouns to use when dealing with myths. Anyway, the list is finally narrowed down to Kurt Wilson, main suspect of the murder of the murder of Anne’s roommate the year before. Wilson fled when the police investigation pointed to him, but reappeared long enough to convince Anne of his innocence and ask her to investigate Justine’s murder. Anne’s investigation leads her to find Justine’s real killer: her former professor, and Anne’s own boss, Professor Devlin. Apparently, he couldn’t stand to have his reputation tainted with (truthful) sexual assault accusations.

Character-wise, this was an episode with some really good moments for all Castle, Beckett and Alexis. After bantering over the possible existence of Big Foot or, alternately, Castle’s fondness for believing everything and anything, the couple talks about what they believe in – for Beckett, it’s about seeing magic in the everyday life, whereas for Castle it’s about the beauty of believing in the unknown. This beautiful moment ended with Beckett answering Castle’s question about what she believes in with this gem: “Well, you know, there is one inexplicable, mysterious phenomenon that I do still believe in: us.” Cue to the thousands of dead Caskett shippers all over the world.

Meanwhile, the mystery subplot of the episode is the question of who is stealing Castle’s leftovers from his fridge. He sets up a trap, only to have the thief turn out to be Alexis. It turns out that she spent her entire allowance on funding a friend’s cause. This leads to a discussion with her father about believing in all sorts of things – for him, Big Foot, ghosts and monsters. For her, people. It was not as touching a moment as I believe it could have been, but it was still a sweet little interaction between TV’s favorite father/daughter duo.