Castle season 08: Rising to its earlier pedestal

Nathan Fillion and Stana Katic 

Castle is a television series that is being aired on ABC since 2010. It stars Nathan Fillion and Stana Katic among others. The main plot of the show is about the day to day interactions between a bored fiction writer Richard Castle (Nathan Fillion) and  a successful female cop Kate Becket (Stana Katic). The story line is mix of action, comedy, drama and action with one or two episodes of sci-fi. The first season had only 10 episodes and after witnessing a great response from the audience, the successive seasons had either 23 or 24 episodes.

The show's rating grew day by day as the seasons progressed. The plot was getting thicker and so did the loyalty of the viewers. Despite having a unique theme the story-line of the episodes became rather stereotypical (or predictable) in the sense that, the first two episodes of a season showed the main plot and the other 19 or so episodes were rather fillers (but interesting nonetheless) and finally, the plot either continued or ended in the last two-three episodes of the season. This was the case for most of the seasons.

Now coming back to the topic in hand, season six of "Castle" ends with Castle going missing on the day of his wedding with Kate. As a result, there was a lot of anticipation as to how the story was going to progress and the number of viewers grew by the million. In accordance with everyone's expectations the next season (season 7) started with the man hunt for Castle and a major plot in the twist. And as usual the main plot was buffed after the first two episodes and was carried forward to the last two episodes of the season. Almost all the viewers including myself, patiently waited for the season finale. But to everyone's disappointment the story-line was ended in a rather bland manner much before the finale and the final episodes were just mere fillers (much like the rest of the episodes in that season) to end the season. This caused a large downfall in the number of viewers, but not that large a downfall to cancel the show. Personally, even I didn't watch the last two episodes of season 7 until about seven episodes of season 8 had aired.

After a few months from the airing of the finale of season 7, the trailer for the next season was released on YouTube and apart from the hardcore "Castle" fans, the others were quite skeptical. To say the truth, despite being a hardcore fan myself, even I was a bit skeptical about it! Then on September 21, 2015 the first episode of "Castle" season 8 aired on ABC and I have to say that it was pretty good when compared to the season finale of season 7. The plot is solid, the story line is pacy and gripping and on the whole, I would say that "Castle" is gaining back its popularity and it is definitely rising to its earlier pedestal.

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Apru