Who killed Beckett's mother? Recapping what we know so far.

I was watching The Big Bang Theory this evening, and CTV was busy promoting the heck out of Castle. There's a new episode tomorrow, in which [spoiler] happens. And, according to the trailer...

... it's going to be an 'arc' episode. The one big overarching mystery in the series is: who killed Beckett's mother.

The last time we visited this storyline, I believe, was in the episode "Sucker Punch", which was season 2, episode 13, making it exactly a season ago. Since it has been quite a while, I thought it might be nice to recap what we learned the last time around.

The plot of the last episode went something like this:

Dick Coonan is using his school-building charity in Afghanistan as a cover for financing his drug cartel. Dick is packaging the drugs in inspirational speaker Johnny Vong’s videos to get them into the States, at which point he used the Latin Kings, a gang, to sell them.

This was fine until Dick expanded his empire, trying to sell his drugs in the Westies’ (a rival gang) territory. The Westies have a zero tolerance policy when it comes to drug dealing in their territory. Finn Rourke, leader of the Westies, asked his man Jack Coonan to kill the drug dealer.

Jack tracked the dealer down and found out it was his brother, Dick, and couldn’t go through with it. So he decided to rat him to the feds instead. But the feds didn’t take him up on it, they didn’t trust him.

And then Jack is killed and Beckett catches the case. She and Castle eventually figure out that Dick was the killer, and it turns out he was also the hired gun who killed Beckett's mother (and several other people). Dick takes Castle hostage at the end, and Beckett shoots him dead before she can get the information about who hired him to kill her mother.

There were some lovely scenes in that episode and some lovely character moments (always the best part of this show).

When the police department can't afford the $100,000 to front the sting operation intended to catch Beckett's mother's killer, Castle steps up and forks it over without hesitation.

And when Beckett shoots Dick, she immediately drops to her knees and starts CPR, trying to save his life, desperate to get the information about who ordered her mother's death.

And then there's the scene where Castle, Dr. Murray and Lanie explain to Beckett that the murderer-of-the-week was the same one who killed her mother. They lay the information out for her, and they’re all watching her as she puts it together. Watching her, hurting for her. There’s this feeling that all three of them are holding out a net for her, wanting to break her fall, knowing all the while she’ll twist mid-air and hit the concrete instead, just because she feels she has to. I loved how much they cared for her, how they were trying to protect her.

I also liked the way they handled the Castle and Beckett relationship in this episode. I  assumed there would be tears and hugging, but Castle clearly knows her far better than I do.

Castle: Do you know why I chose you as my inspiration for Nikki Heat?
Beckett: No. Why?
Castle: Because you’re tall. Now go in there and do your job.

He knew what she needed, and the writers didn’t give in to gushiness. I appreciate that.

And, though they didn’t make too huge a deal of it, there was some important stuff that happened between them in this episode. Beckett realised that Castle’s life means more to her than finding her mother’s killer, and Castle realised that Beckett’s peace of mind means more to him than shadowing her.

Those are essentially the highlights. It was a good episode, on the whole. And I'm curious to see which aspects of it they pick up on to draw into this week's new episode.