'Castle' Series Finale Recap: Who Dies?

Risky business! You know how it seems like pretty much everyone associated with LokSat ends up dead? Well, in the series finale of Castle, your two favorite people, Kate Beckett (Stana Katic) and Richard Castle (Nathan Fillion), learn to what degree that holds true. This episode was an emotional one, as Caskett (as they’re known together, of course) faced some unforeseen challenges in bringing down the big drug and money-laundering ring with the CIA ties, so don’t tell Us we didn’t warn you …

A Bait and Switch for Kate and Rich

The show opened, strangely, to “It’s a Sunshine Day” by the Brady Bunch. A man drove a car into an empty parking lot, dancing to the music. Then he got out of his car, doused it in gasoline, popped the trunk to say goodbye to the hostage he had tied up in there and lit the whole thing on fire. The finale was off to an explosive start, quite literally.

If you’ll recall, Caskett had just gotten the phone that would lead them straight to LokSat. It was given to them by Caleb Brown (Kris Polaha) after he switched sides. The phone came with some very specific instructions on when and how to use it, so when they followed those, Kate and Rick heard a prerecorded message that had been meant for Caleb. It told them the location of an abandoned warehouse where they would meet LokSat’s accountant. They emailed Caleb and told him to show up there, planning to be hiding out in order to get photos of whoever showed up to meet him.

Back at the site where the jolly killer had incinerated his car, Lanie Parish (Tamela Jones), Javier Esposito (Jon Huertas) and Kevin Ryan (Seamus Dever) were poking around for clues. All they found was a briefcase.

Vikram Singh (Sunkrish Bala), Kate and Rick were stationed around the drop point with cameras. Hayley Shipton (Toks Olagundoye) was stationed above as the sniper. As a car pulled into the lot, Kate rejected a call from Espo. He called again, so she picked up just in time to hear him say that the briefcase at the crime scene matched Caleb’s DNA. He was dead because he had switched sides. LokSat had sent in a decoy to play Caleb at the scene. It occurred to them that they had been set up.

A Good-Luck Truck

The guy who had been sent in as Caleb’s body double yelled, “Open fire!” Haley did her best to shoot the men who poured into the parking lot, but they were quickly outrunning her shots.

Out of nowhere, a Korean BBQ truck peeled into the lot. Kate and Rick jumped in, and Rick identified the driver as Mason Wood (Gerald McRaney), the director of the Greatest Detective Society. He instantly relaxed, but Kate didn’t. How had Mason known where they were?

He said he had been sent by Rick’s stepmother, Rita, and gave some vague details about owing her a favor. He told them he wanted nothing to do with their fight, gave them some untraceable weapons and goods, then sped off. (Are you keeping up here? We know, we know — it is really hard!) Then Caskett went their separate ways to round up their friends and family before anyone could get hurt, as they figured they were definitely LokSat targets now. They swore they’d meet up later, but splitting up didn’t strike Us as the best idea …

Back at the precinct, Kate was tasked with explaining the whole situation to Espo and Kevin, just as Rick was busy explaining it to his daughter, Alexis (Molly Quinn), and his mother, Martha (Susan Sullivan).

There wasn’t much time for questions when Kate finished her explainer because the team had analyzed scratch marks from inside the trunk. Caleb ID’d his killer as LokSat’s “right-hand man.” They pulled up security footage from the place Caleb’s credit card said he had eaten the night before and saw the “right-hand man” stuffing Caleb in the trunk but could only see his profile.

A New Kind of Trap House

Kate, realizing they could catch LokSat by apprehending the right-hand man, stayed in the precinct. Rick was not having it, calling her and begging her to come to him. She told him she wanted to stay apart and both stay safe. By going to each other, they risked being followed or hurt.

Then her team ran in, reporting that they had used traffic cams to follow the suspect’s driving all the way to his house. She hung up on Rick, ready to leave for the house, only to be reminded that she had just promised her husband she wouldn’t leave the precinct. Helplessly, she watched as Espo and Kevin grabbed a team and headed out.

Meanwhile, Rick was reneging on his promise, too, but unlike Kate, he went through with it and left his hiding spot, determined to get to her at the precinct. When Hayley tried to follow him, he told her to stay with his family. He walked out alone.

Kate watched from a screen as her team stormed the house they’d traced the right-hand man to. Nothing was there whatsoever. They had been tricked again. Only later did they realize that he was CIA-trained, so of course he knew to lead them elsewhere and disable the traffic cameras on the street behind the decoy house. He had simply walked out the back door.

While Kate was staring at the screen on which she’d seen her team fail to catch Caleb’s killer, Rick hopped into a cab. “It’s a Sunshine Day” was playing, just as it had been when the car had gone up in flames during the opening scene.

Time to Spill the Tea

Rick woke up in a very antiseptic-looking room, strapped to a medical chair. The man there — the right-hand man! — revealed himself to be Mr. Flynn and told the novelist that he would be administering a chemical that would force him to reveal the names of everyone who knew about LokSat.

“Within the hour, you will tell me everything I want to know,” he said. “Then you will die.”

Back in the interrogation room, Rick was talking to Mr. Flynn. The LokSat agent was asking him all about his love of Kate. Affected by the truth serum, Rick got extremely sappy, which no doubt was written, in part, just to give fans some extra cheesy closure.

Mr. Flynn wasn’t feeling that lovey-dovey vibe, though; he told Rick that Kate would be dead by the end of the night anyway. Elsewhere, Kate got a call from Mason, who told her to meet him in an hour so they could follow a lead together.

When Mr. Flynn walked out of the interrogation room, he told Rick that LokSat himself would be in momentarily to do the interrogating. Do you know who walked in then? Mason, of course!

“Who knows about me? Beckett, obviously, and Vikram. What about Hayley Shipman?” asked Mason, who was LokSat all along.

Against his will, Rick said, “Yes.”

He continued to say “yes” as Mason asked about his mother, his daughter and Kate’s colleagues. Mason left to go kill everyone Rick had just implicated, telling him that his first stop was meeting with Kate herself.

Mr. Flynn reappeared then, telling Rick that if he was finding it hard to live with himself, relief was on its way, since he was about to die. Then the right-hand man got to work preparing the lethal IV.

Just as he was about to hit the switch that would kill Rick, the NYPD busted in and saved him. Once he was free of his restraints, Rick wrangled Mr. Flynn into the medical chair and started a drip of the truth serum. It was time to find out where Mason was meeting up with Kate before he had a chance to kill her.

You Have No Idea

Mr. Flynn told Rick that there was no way out of the room they were in because the LokSat operatives were ready to kill them the moment they walked out. Kate was being taken to that very building by Mason, and Rick couldn’t leave the room to go to her.

Naturally, being Rick Castle, he busted through the wall with a fire extinguisher and jumped through the hole, determined to find Kate.

Mason was just telling Kate that he had killed her husband when in walked, well, her husband. He distracted Mason long enough for Kate to disarm him.

It ended happily with them safe at home.

Just kidding. Caleb was hiding in their apartment because he was never really dead. He shot them both before they shot him, and they crawled toward one another, lying in their own blood on the kitchen floor. It seemed as if the rumors that at least Kate would die — following Stana Katic’s announcement she was leaving the show — were coming true.

Then the series ended with a voiceover of the unforgettable dialogue from the end of the pilot episode, as Rick asked Kate on a date, got rejected and lamented that they could have had a good time together if only she had said yes. The infamous audio of her whispering, “You have no idea …” played as the series fast-forwarded seven years to show Caskett and a brood of kids hanging out in the apartment, very obviously not dead.

To close out perhaps the most stressful three minutes of television ever, another famous line of dialogue played. This time, it was from the second season. It was Rick saying, “Every writer needs inspiration. And I’ve found mine. Always.”

Tell Us: What did you think of Castle’s final episode?

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