Dysfunctional Relationships in Crime Shows: Disguise in Castle

All murder mysteries include romantic relationships gone wrong. In some shows, the dysfunctional relationship is based in the classic problem--cheating; in some, it is based on power imbalances, including unequal divisions of money; in some, it is based on unrealistic expectations.

In Castle, the dysfunctional relationships often come down to the problem of disguises. That is, one member of the couple has been hiding not just A truth (a dirty secret) but an entire alternate reality: a legal identity, a complicated past, another self.

While romance shows and novels often see disguise as an opportunity for forgiveness and reconciliation (the Duke in Twelfth Night is happy, not disturbed, by Viola's revelation), murder mysteries correctly pinpoint how the revelation of a "new" self could devastate a lover. 

As I comment in my post on Jessica Fletcher:

"[Jessica] is completely devastated [when she thinks her husband may have cheated]. It isn't so much the straying that bothers her. It is that she thought she knew [him]. Not only would her husband have strayed and kept that secret to himself, he would have kept a life-changing occurrence (his child) from her. And he simply isn't the kind of man to abandon his own child. Did she even know him?"

Do I even know you? is a question that crops up again and again in Castle. "Vampire Weekend" pits a son against the woman who raised him as well as a husband against the wife who entirely betrayed his trust. In the "The Mistress Always Spanks Twice," the victim doubled as a grad student and a dominatrix. Several Castle murderers are camouflaged as upstanding citizens while in "The Fifth Bullet," an amnesiac character accepts that he could be a murderer. In the meantime, the "3XK" killer deliberately and cruelly uses the investigators' identities against them in one of the show's darkest episodes. 

Of course, Castle also supplies a great deal of humor. There's the pizza episode with shop owners vying over who is the true "authentic terrific Nick's." In the episode "That 70's Show," the entire station house pretends to belong to an earlier era, all to help a man who hid his true feelings from other gangsters several decades earlier. 

However, my favorite example of how disguise or double identities can entirely disturb a person's mental health occurs in Season 3's "Nikki Heat" when the actress shadowing Beckett begins to adopt her clothes, hair, and mannerisms. Castle assures Beckett that he didn't sleep with the actress: "It would have been way too meta."

Ryan: We really should have a code word

so we know...