I was pretty leery of the finale of season 5 of Castle because I thought we were going to see a hackneyed "woman sacrifices her career dreams for love" thing, because I knew they weren't going to actually transform the basic structure of the program, but I'll give the show credit where credit is due: it actually does a good job of justifying why Kate Beckett ultimately stays as an NYPD detective rather than becoming an agent of the US Attorney's office.
Once that's out of the way, the focuses of this season are basically on delivering the usual wacky case of the week antics, and on the ongoing subplot of Castle and Beckett's impending nuptials. The quality of the wacky cases is generally pretty good, though there are a couple of weak entries ("Time Will Tell" is stupid, for instance, and not the good kind of stupid). The marriage subplot is not as interesting or as funny as the writers seem to believe, but the two characters are a fun on-screen couple (despite the fact that off-screen, they apparently didn't get on so well), so it is mostly tolerable.
This season also marks the end of a major ongoing plot thread that's been around since season one. While I do think the resolution to this was all a bit sudden and involved a lot of cheap narrative trickery to get there, it was nice to see real progress on that front. In fact, if it weren't for this season's cliffhanger ending, I'd say it would make a pretty satisfying point at which to stop watching the show.
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