Tuesday 8 October 2013

Castle: A debate about Andrew Marlowe

The Lovely Lady from Writing on the Castle Walls has written a lengthy answer to a very good question HERE.

I would like to explore the issues here as Fans in Castledom are split over Andrew Marlowe. The Lovely Lady is most definitely a fan and I am no longer.

So here goes.
Just before that however my feelings on    castle-is-it-about-to-jump-sharkcastle-beckett-watershed-dc-job-and-rest and castle-questions-and-some-advice-for-Andrew Marlowe.

Okay now whose show is it?
Once the show hits the TV screens it is the fans show. It is a bit like football. The team I support in MY team.
As such the fans always deserve their questions to be answered. At this stage the major questions from the final arc of series 5 have not been answered.They can't all be answered on the screen because of time constraints but surely the Paley panel is the ideal time to do that. But all questions and anger of the final arc of series 5 were totally ignored.
This merely intensifies feelings that they didn't realise the extent of the mistakes they made in the  episodes.
The best example of this is the suddenness of Beckett being an idealistic homicide detective and then hey presto she is an ambitious career driven woman. Why did this occur, how did this occur, when did this occur? We still do not know yet it is intrinsic to the final arc.

Before we examine the job in DC let us decide on what is bad writing.
 I think the best description of bad writing involves the writers writing something that is completely inconsistent and contradictory to the 'canon' of the series. It would also involve being lazy in research.

Now the job in DC was seen by most fans as fictional. Afterall you can't have it being an Agency then a Task force and then the Deputy Director of the FBI ringing up Gates if it wasn't!
However Castle fans are used to a reasonable amount of authenticity.
Here are just some of the problems emanating from the job.
  • A job which is involved in national security would not have people being invited to an interview. They would have to apply.
  •  A person who ONLY had experience in homicide would be rejected.
  • Any applicant would have a large dossier on them.
  • In Beckett's case there would be a HUGE red light on why she was suspended. When they learn't she went rogue she would be rejected.
  • All applicants would be screened for psychological tests and as well as being examined on their record. It would not take long for Beckett to be screened out because of her emotional and psychological empathy for the victims of murder. we actually see this in episode 3 of series 6.
  • They would know she had no partners before Castle and examine carefully why Castle was the only partner she ever accepted.
Hence even if you take poetic licence to its most extreme and imagine Beckett would be interviewed for the DC job no competent interviewer would offer her the job.

The fact she accepts the job offer means she has absolutely no self awareness at all.
The fact she was offered the job shows that the interviewer was totally incompetent.

The fact that Beckett accepts a marriage proposal and then in the next second tells Castle she has accepted a job offer which is incompatible with that acceptance shows Beckett to be quite selfish and self-centered however her background of both getting her Father off the demon drink and her sense of justice for victims shows her to be very altruistic!

The fact that Series 6 shows Beckett only realising the problems of the job in terms of the Caskett relationship, of having a different partner, of homicide being totally different to issues of national security means she put no forethought at all into what the job would mean to her and to her relationship with Castle.. In other words Marlowe and co have shown Beckett to be quite stupid and fickle.

This puts people such as the lovely Lady who are Marlowe lovers in a quandary.
Either Marlowe and co are good writers and Beckett is both selfish and stupid or she isn't and the writers have been poor writers since the final arc. They cannot have it both ways.

As ALWAYS ( Castle pun intended)


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