So Why Do I Still Long For You? Why Is My Love So Strong For You? Why Did I Write This Song For You? Well, I Guess It's Just A Mystery

--"Mystery", Hugh Laurie

I watched the premiere of Castle yesterday. While I don't count it a completely successful first episode I do have high hopes that it catches on with the general public. Nathan Filion does play a complete man-child as the critics have pointed out and, so far, the chemistry between the two leads seems to still be getting its legs underneath them. And, yes, the initial mystery did seem to be a softball tossed their way in comparison to the tangled knots the big boys at CSI and Law and Order process week after week.

But I'm just going to say it. From this first episode I can already tell this show channels the spirit of two of my all-time favorite mystery/thriller shows on television, Moonlighting and Remington Steele. The Moonlighting pedigree is easily discernible. A mismatched couple who solve mysteries while ratcheting up the sexual tension by continually playing a verbal tennis match loaded with double entendre and disdain? Nope, I've never seen that before. The Remington Steele comparison is a little bit harder to spot. However, when you think that in this case the cop/detective is the female lead and the pretender to the title of gumshoe is the male lead than the analogy becomes clear. It helps that Nathan Filion makes for a likable scoundrel, but kudos also have to be paid to Stana Katic for making strait-laced seem like a naughty thing and not an exhausting character description. It is a classic oddball pairing--free spirit with a by-the-book authoritarian--but in this case it manages to work. I can't wait to see if they can distinguish themselves from the two shows they so clearly channel.

I'd also be remiss if I didn't point out the relationship that was believable and intriguing right from the start. The fact that the self-confessed "bad boy" author Richard Castle still lives and takes care of his fifteen-year-old daughter Alexis (played by the lovely newcomer Molly Quinn)is one mystery. When you couple that with the fact that her mom (his ex-wife)seems more responsible and is just as successful, being Richard's publicist and all, it makes for an intriguing bit of suspense how and why the living arrangements were arranged as they were. Did the rapscallion Richard actually have to lay his cards on the table and fight for his daughter? Or was it Alexis who made the decision that she wanted to be with her father more than her mom? At any rate, the three or four scenes between father and daughter where you're not sure who's exactly watching after whom were possibly the best scenes in the entire premiere. They were light, funny, and, most of all, completely believable. The two actors possessed a breeziness that the rest of the premiere seemed to lack. Every other scene you could see the determination, the grit, the will to make this the best show they could possibly make it. You could see how strenuous everyone was working to make the episode good. Yet the scenes between Richard and Alexis weren't attempting to be good; they were just good.

Also, the pilot seems to have set up a situation where Alexis might be assisting in a few of her father's cases. I'm just waiting for the moment where she actually solves a case for him and makes him think he did it all on his own. It would be so Inspector Gadget and Penny.

I'd love to see that.


I'd be foolish to ignore the possibility
that if we'd ever actually met, you might have hated me

----

I don't know--I guess I want this show to excel because I've always been a huge fan of mysteries in general. More specifically, I'm a big fan of mysteries whose central characters are couples set apart from the start. Perhaps it's the twist on the romantic comedy convention, but I'm a sucker for stories which involve two silly kids who are destined for one another who manage to fight through their differences and not only solve the puzzle at hand, but also the mystery of the human heart.

The first mystery series I remember reading and absolutely falling in love with was the Thomas Pitt series by Anne Perry. At the time I picked up Cater Street Hangman, the first book in the series, I was unaware that Anne Perry was born Juliet Marion Hulme and was one of the two girls whose story about killing one of their mothers was featured in the movie Heavenly Creatures. I don't know if the knowledge she was an actual murderer from a movie I respected a lot, but it certainly figured into why I kept reading the series. Think about it--what other mystery series can claim the distinction of actually being written by someone who has killed someone in cold blood before? At any rate what drew me to the series wasn't the backstory. What drew me to the series was the fact it was set in Victorian England and the fact it had two such distinct protagonists/investigators, Thomas and Charlotte Pitt (neé Ellison). At the time Victorian anything was enough to interest me in a project, that being the time of Avonlea and all.

Yet it was the two characters that interested me the most. Thomas Pitt was a lowborn police inspector at the beginning of the first novel and Charlotte Ellision was part of the upper crust of English society. The fact that they were of two different classes should have been enough to keep them apart, but Anne Perry also had to throw in the additional twist of making them completely oblivious to how best approach each other made me, as the reader, think that their coupling wouldn't happen till much later in the series. Honestly, it was like watching a Merchant Ivory film--their courtship was all subtext and subtle clues that made me doubt they even knew each other's existence as a viable single, let alone liked each other. Thomas especially seemed all police work and procedure. If it weren't for the author's descriptions of his lingering whenever Charlotte entered or was in the same room as him, I would have thought he entirely mistrusted Charlotte. As for her, since she was the narrator for the first book, it was easier to decipher what she was actually feeling, but not by much.

It was that dichotomy; the fact that these two people of any two people should hate each other. He was disrupting her perfectly constructed world of parties and gossiping. She was disdainful over his job and how he seemed to like the seedy underbelly of polite society. Yet, like you knew it would, it would take both of them to charge through the solving the mystery. As would become par for the course, Thomas would use his Columbo-like gift for asking the right questions and connecting the dots precisely and Charlotte would use her connections with people of influences to get Thomas answers he wasn't able to get on his own. You knew that between the both of them they had all the angles to finger the right person.

Yet the genius of Anne Perry was the scene where the two of them make the connections between what they knew separately is also the scene where the two of them make the connection with one another. It was inevitable that they would solve the murder; that's the nature of the Mystery genre beast. What wasn't inevitable was the fact that Thomas and Charlotte would fall that completely for one another in the span of one book. This would lead to them getting married, having two kids, and about four or five different homes together--not to mention twenty-five books.

And all of them with the same set-up and delivery. Thomas investigates the crime, gets stonewalled, and it would be up to Charlotte to worm her way into the big houses to get that crucial information he would need to put the right suspect in jail. Yes, it's predictable, but that's not why people continue to read her books. It's the fact that the married couple act like a devoted couple through and through that keeps people coming back. It doesn't matter how far apart they started out; the fact that they ended up as close as they did is the important fact to take back with you.

They were other series, The Beekeeper's Apprentice series by Laurie R. King involving a much-older Sherlock Holmes and his assistant/protegé (and eventual wife) Mary Russell immediately jumps to mind, which employed the odd pairing of man and woman to good effect. But it was Anne Perry's series which brought forth to mind that notion that love and murder are often linked. Their both mysteries that seem impossible to decipher at the outset, but with a little diligence and more than a little stumbling along the way, eventually a discovery is made which places everything that came before it in context.

That's why the star-crossed lovers is such a natural fit for the mystery genre. What fun would it be if the hero (or heroes) figured out the whole business of love as easily as one of their cases? In an episodic series or in a series of novels it's imperative that the central mystery of the story be solved before its end. But love? That's one mystery that can keep on mystifying until well after the last page is written or the last shot is ever filmed.

Yours Swimmingly,
mojo shivers