Castle: The Complete Fourth Season starts off with Kate recovering from the bullet wound while acting like she doesn't remember Castle (Nathan Fillion) professing his love to her while trying to keep her alive. Meanwhile, Montgomery has been replaced by a new Captain, Victoria Gates (Penny Johnson), who feels that the past months that Ryan (Seamus Dever) and Esposito (Jon Huertas) have been spending on Kate's shooting have been more than enough effort for a case that wasn't actually a homicide.
Now that Kate is back, she finds herself butting heads with Gates quite a lot. Worse yet, it seems the new captain doesn't quite approve of having Castle hanging around playing cop. A lot of Season Four focuses on Kate convincing everyone around her that she is the same cop she was, not to mention convincing herself that she is fine. There is also a good bit of Castle trying to prove himself to Gates, and while the new captain reluctantly lets him back in the bullpen, she has a tendency to discount most of his theories and ideas.
While most of the season ignores the long-running story involving Kate's mother's death (if anything they touch more on her shooting than the murder), there are still quite a few interesting cases. One of these homicides involves what appears to be a vigilante running around New York City. Not only does the vigilante wear a superhero costume, but it appears to be one based on an underground online-comic. The problem is, while he used to terrorize the bad guys, he seems to have crossed the line and killed someone.
Another episode brings up a sore spot for Kate, Castle, Esposito and Ryan (more so for Ryan, really). The 3XK killer seems to have shown back up, or at least that's what it looks like when the gun the man took from Ryan last season is used in a shooting. This is one episode where Castle works extra hard to prove his worth to Gates.
This season's two-part episode has Castle meeting up with a former muse, a CIA agent that seems to make Kate question just how close he has gotten to his other muses over the year. This particular case gets the pair thrown into the middle of an international conspiracy involving a rogue secret agent that seems bent on starting World War III.
Interestingly enough, Castle pulls away from homicides on a couple of occasions. Well, there are homicides in these cases, but the primary focus is another type of crime. In one case, Castle and Kate team up with an art insurance investigator when a valuable piece of artwork is stolen out of a museum. In another episode, Castle and his mother, Martha (Susan Sullivan), are caught in a bank robbery. Another deals with what appears to be human trafficking, and Castle ends up cuffed to Kate in a small dark room. All that being said though, one of my favorite non-homicide-centric episodes involved Castle deciding to ride along with a street-wise gang cop played by Adam Baldwin (Firefly, Chuck).
Castle: The Complete Fourth Season's special features include a featurette about one of the season's most involved stunts. In this stunt, Kate and Castle are trapped in a car as it is sent into the Hudson Bay. Another featurette called, "Bowman, Bowman & Castle," talks about executive producer Rob Bowman, his father Warren Bowman, and how the older man's career in the industry led the younger one to his current position.
Besides the normal selection of deleted scenes and bloopers, this season also has a few special features that focus on a podcast done in the style of an old-time radio show done on stage in front of an audience. One of these featurettes talks about how the show is made, another is the filming of one of Fillion's various guest roles, while the third shows the episode that Molly C. Quinn (who plays Alexis, Castle's daughter) was in.
While I don't think Castle: The Complete Fourth Season is one of the better seasons this show has had, it does have enough interesting episodes that any fan of the show should want to check out. The season is light on the overall story arc, but as a result, there are more one-off episodes to enjoy. It is definitely worth watching, but unless you've already invested in the past seasons, it might not be worth the purchase.
