After last week’s Halloween extravaganza, this week Castle took a turn for the musical with “Famous Last Words.” What it lacked in flashback costuming shenanigans, it made up for with a very clever plot that let the Castle family take the lead in the crime solving. Castle has always been helpful to Beckett and her team (mostly), but this is the first time that the team got it completely wrong. And with an assist from Alexis, Castle saved the day. Read the rest of this entry »

A combination of baseball and pre-sweeps repeats made for a bit of an odd week. Repeats don’t mean there aren’t numbers of note however. We had Jay Leno’s first shot against CSI: Miami and NY repeats, and a look at what running repeats on Friday does for FOX. That is, nothing good for Dollhouse season 3. Also interesting this week — The Mentalist finally topped CSI in viewers and the demo, and even a repeat Gibbs appearance is worth 16 million viewers. Read the rest of this entry »

… a catalyzer!

“Wait, a what?” For anyone who’s up on their Firefly lore, a catalyzer is that critical piece of equipment that a Firefly-class ship needs in order to function … pretty much at all. You probably would remember this piece best from the awesome Firefly episode “Out of Gas“, being the piece that Mal needs to replace in order to get Serenity working again and able to call back his crew.

For those of you who don’t know what the heck I’m talking about, read on.

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Halloween really lends itself well to the Castle style, and the writers really pulled out all the stops when given the chance to run with it. The big surprise of Nathan Fillion in his Mal costume from Firefly was given away long ago, but it was still great to see. As a bonus, it wasn’t just Castle wearing the costume. That was a full on Mal entrance he made … before being shot down by Alexis. She even got the line of the night when she asked, “Didn’t you wear that like five years ago?” Read the rest of this entry »

We do often get caught up in the big numbers from the big networks. It is, after all, hard to overlook the fact that NCIS is still growing its audience in the 7th season. There are still some very interesting stories happening on the little network, CW. When it was announced that Vampire Diaries would be paired with Supernatural, while Smallville was shuffled off to Friday, many people expected that was the end.

The show wouldn’t be able to come back from a year grinding away on Friday nights. After a few weeks looking at the numbers though, that’s not the case at all. Clark and the gang can celebrate good times, despite taking a hit from the move. In fact, this week Smallville topped new episodes of One Tree Hill, Gossip Girl, 90210, and Melrose Place. It’s far from done. Elsewhere, we had our first sizable crop of repeats this week, which brought some interesting results. Read the rest of this entry »

We lead off this week’s post with that line from the book party, because that really was the best bit of the episode. Not the book party in and of itself, mind you, but Castle and Beckett and their back and forth over whether or not there would be a Nikki Heat sequel. It’s actually a very good sign for the show. Despite the fact that “When The Bough Breaks” was far from the show’s most interesting case, the Castle/Beckett dynamic still made for a very good episode. Read the rest of this entry »

FlashForward is one of the more interesting shows of the new season where ratings are concerned. On the one hand, so far it has been a huge upgrade for the 8-9 spot on ABC. And while it has been surpassed by Survivor, it does continue to hold off Bones in the demo. On the other hand, the ratings don’t seem to be settled yet, which makes each week a new adventure. This week, the yo-yo headed back up. What will next week bring? One can only guess. I continue to think that it will eventually be passed up by the fiercely loyal Bones audience at some point, finding its place as the number 3 show in the hour. Elsewhere this week, there was good news for Dancing With The Stars, NCIS, Law & Order, So You Think You Can Dance, and Smallville. The news wasn’t so good for Hank, Parks & Recreation, Three Rivers, or Melrose Place.

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