It is also just about the only show where I love the characters family, Alexis. I loved her job at the police dept this year.

I haven’t really had any problem with the slow buildup/restarts of the Beckett/Castle stuff, because I enjoy that aspect of will they or won’t they. I guess that comes from seeing how once a show loses that it can struggle a bit. The most obvious example is Moonlighting of course. Yet I thought Chuck struggled with that as well after he and Sarah got together, at least for one season.(final season, up to a point it was great)

I guess we’ll see if Castle and Beckett have that same issue this upcoming season.

Oh, snap! I’ve been rewatching S3 too, and these are my thoughts *exactly*. It’s not that I don’t enjoy longer story-arcs – I remember watching one of the first series to employ them, Stephen Cannell’s 1989 Wiseguy, and the almost shock of realising that what had happened in one episode would be recalled in, and influence, what happened in the next. But the creative team behind Wiseguy had the sense to keep them relatively short (the one that *every* fan remembers, the Steelgrave arc, lasted a scant nine episodes) with a beginning, a middle, and an end – the latter usually packing a lethal emotional punch. The more recent approach tends to build up the ongoing mystery until the payoff can’t help but be a let-down. Also, while the early parts of such a storyline are often tightly plotted, later – and especially in popular shows which will be spun out until they implode – it becomes inconsistent or plain incoherent, a weight dragging down the show rather than enhancing it. (White Collar has suffered badly from this, and so in a different register has Supernatural). The real story of Castle is that Rick Castle is finally growing up, and that Kate Beckett has allowed herself to feel *all* the pain her mother’s death caused and assimilate it into her own emotional coming of age. Which is, as you say, often illustrated best in the stand-alone episodes.

(As for Beckett’s hair and clothes, well. That is one aspect of the show I wish the creators would revisit, because as Beckett’s grown her gamine crop into long film-premiere curls and taken to posing on five-inch heels, her persona has also been “feminised” i.e., in TV terms, become far less effective. A lot of the humour in the first season grew out of the contrast between sensible, grown-up, professional Beckett and immature, playful, self-indulgent Castle. As a cop, she took the lead in investigations and interrogations – not to mention saving Castle’s ass on numerous occasions – while he definitely remained the tag-along civilian. Now he’s routinely consulted even by the female chief of police who – understandably – mistrusts him, sits in on interrogations as of right and rescues a noticeably less competent Beckett from danger. This has been especially marked throughout S4, and the show’s once fresh and refreshing approach is in danger of lapsing into the tiredest Hollywood cliche as a result. Hopefully S5 *will* reboot this).