graycardinal | For Relative Values of Pi...

As you might expect, I'm not talking about the mathematical constant. No, I'm increasingly puzzled by developments on Castle, specifically with respect to Alexis' newfound Significant Other.

As far as I can tell, absolutely no one in the viewing audience actually admits to liking "Pi". At best. there's a camp that contends that yes, Alexis might reasonably fall for someone like Pi -- laid-back, over-the-top countercultural, and all too (supposedly) similar in emotional terms to Castle himself as he might have been at that age. And over the half dozen episodes of the new season thus far, we've been told repeatedly that Alexis is suddenly much more in tune with Pi than she is with her father.

And that's the trouble -- we've been told this, not shown it, and what we've been shown is greatly at odds with what we've been told.

If we're to believe what Alexis has told her father, she met Pi during her college-sponsored Costa Rica trip, and the two immediately bonded -- to the extent that she brought him back to the Castle loft with her, and has now moved into an apartment with him. She hasn't said so in so many words, but both Castle and the audience are clearly meant to assume that the two are sleeping together. And yet onscreen, Alexis and Pi have demonstrated absolutely no romantic chemistry, nor even much in the way of ordinary interaction. Instead, Pi spends most of every scene in which he appears interacting with Castle, rather than with Alexis -- and driving him up the wall, often with considerable justification.

This is, in a word, weird. The same writers who've spent the last five-plus seasons making us believe in the Castle/Beckett relationship seem to be going out of their way to make us disbelieve the Alexis/Pi relationship. It makes no sense whatever -- and I'm not sure at this point how they can write themselves out of the situation. There's no drama in breaking up a relationship that we weren't invested in to start with, and it's much too late to retcon chemistry that should have been there from Pi's first appearance.

I have to think that the writers have something in mind for this arc; for all that the Castle creative team has its blind spots, writing romantic relationships hasn't been one of them. But I can't for the life of me see where they're going with this.