On this week’s episode of CASTLE our favorite detective duo was thrust right into a Stephan King novel. After being lured to an abandoned warehouse and drugged, Castle wakes up to find himself and three other men locked up in an elementary school classroom. Weird, but it gets weirder. Immediately after trying to break free a bee is released into the room, stinging a man and causing him to go into anaphylactic shock. Castle is forced to think quickly and solve a series of puzzles before he is able to find the antidote. Another clue is discovered and the directions, the person who kills the other’s gets to leave, come with a gun.
Just as Castle insists that they not play whatever messed up game the unknown subject is setting up for them, a screen drops down to reveal Beckett and two other women in a separate room identical to the first. Beckett and the woman went through the same abduction and by being a bit more cautious than the boys were able to identify and avoid cigarettes that would have caused an anaphylactic shock in one of the women. When Beckett’s room discovers the gun, one of the women actually pulls the trigger, but Beckett has very smartly taken out the bullets by that time.
On the other side of the glass, the husband of the gun-slinger from Beckett’s side has the same idea; but when he pulls the trigger it turns out the gun is rigged to shoot backward and he is killed. Now the teams from both sides try and devise a way out of the locked room without anyone else dying.
Back at the precinct, Esposito and Ryan are working on a case where a reporter is killed after digging up some old VHS tapes of what appears to be a science experiment from 20 years ago. After interrogating an old acquaintance of the girl, it is revealed that the two children in the video (who were seen doing puzzles for hours, and crying out in distress and fear throughout the experiment) were twins whom the reporter was friends with in childhood. The witness reveals that the girl in the video killed herself last week, and after tracking down the parents to the same compound Beckett and Castle are locked inside; they discover a chilling secret. The boy in the video is behind this, and he is in the room with Castle.
Back inside the locked room, both parties have been able to break out, and they traverse the hallways until they reach an opening to the outside woods. The only hitch is there are three levers and one member from every couple must stay and hold the lever for the other to escape. The mastermind (unbeknownst to the rest of the group) offers to stay, Castle and Beckett do the same while the rest run to safety. It is only at this point that Beckett and Castle reveal that they figured out through some telltale behaviors that he is the one running this little psychotic game, and when the criminal pulls a shotgun from behind the wall, Castle knocks him out and the team storms in, everyone returning home safely.
It looks like all ended well on this episode of CASTLE, but be sure to catch an all-new episode on February 29 at 10:00 p.m. ET/PT on ABC.
