Castle

After much anticipation, Season 4, Episode 14: “The Blue Butterfly” all begins in a dark, sultry club in the 1940s, with medical examiner Lanie Parish crooning away. Except this isn’t Lanie Parish, and it isn’t actually the 1940s.

Oh no, friends. Tonight’s episode is full of flashbacks — all concocted by one Rick Castle in the present-day.

There’s No Time Like the Past

At the Penny Baker club (in Castle’s imagination), a dapper Castle (aka Detective Joe) asks the bartender if he knows a lady, flashing him a photo. The camera turns to a glammed up Beckett (aka Vera) — in white fur and red hot lips — who catches Castle’s eye.

“Where have you been all my life?” he asks.

Cut to: present day at the Penny Baker Club, where the team is hovering over the dead body of one Stan Banks, holding a shamrock green pipe. Turns out, his body was searched before he was killed. But for what? The only potential witness is a homeless man who’s shacked up in the place, but is nowhere to be found.

Beckett meets with Stan’s estranged wife, who says she hasn’t spoken to him in over two months. She said he had found a doubloon, an old Spanish coin, and “got the bug” afterward — quitting his job as an accountant to search for hidden treasure. Last she knew, he thought he was about to hit it big by finding the notorious “blue butterfly” necklace. Stan’s wife also said a man had called her telling her Stan owed them $10,000 and he better pay up — or else.

Stan’s personal files include heaps of Manhattan '40s mobsters books and a detective’s diary that becomes of particular interest to Castle, as he starts to seductively read to Beckett. “Cute,” she says.

Cute, yes, but there’s still a real-life case to be solved! Ryan says there was a white Mustang parked out of the club for a few days, and Beckett discovers the threatening call Stan’s wife received came from a laundromat.

Castle excitedly asks Beckett if he can take the diary home, but before she can even answer, he’s halfway gone.

Star-Crossed Lovers

And with that, we’re off into Castle’s imagination. As he pours over the hard-boiled detective’s musings, Castle begins to imagine himself as the narrator in question and we’re transported back to the Golden Age …

He imagines Martha as his secretary and daughter Alexis — er, Sally — as a potential client. Sally asks Castle if he can help her find her sister, Vera (aka Beckett), who ran off to the big city to become a showgirl. With that, the detective decides to search the city’s clubs for Ms. Vera, and the Penny Baker Club is his final stop, where we relive the bartender scene from earlier.

But let’s pause for just a second and admire how hot Beckett looks in all-white fur. Good lawd!

Anyway, Beckett/Vera is Tom Dempsey’s girl, a famous NYC mobster. Castle/Joe can’t stop staring and gets himself in some trouble. Dempsey sends over his sidekicks, Ryan and Esposito, who grab Castle and throw him into a back room, where they, well, beat his ass (to the tune of some cutesy, '40s tunes, of course), all before throwing him outside with the trash.

And then, it all starts to make sense: Beckett/Vera emerges and she’s wearing a massive blue butterfly necklace — a million dollar, diamond necklace. Or so we think!

A Million Suspects

Back in the present day, Castle does his research (obvi) and discovers the necklace was supposedly hidden in the Penny Baker Club in the '40s. Motive for murder? You betcha! Somebody had to have known Stan was searching for the BB.

Castle also reveals Dempsey’s office in the lower half of the Penny Baker was painted green. Stan must have been down there, hence the green pipe in his hand at time of death.

Castle and Beckett head to the club again, and this time, Castle starts to narrate the diary to Beckett. As he’s narrating a sexy moment between the detective and the gangster’s mol, he accidentally uses her name “Kate” in place of “Vera.” Oops! Beckett calls him on it, but Castle insists he said “fate.” Right.

He continues to tell the story. The detective and the lovely dame are about to steal a kiss — so, so close! — when the two gangster sidekicks catch them. But before they have time to attack him for macking on Dempsey’s girl (again), Lanie/the singer emerges from behind a glittering curtain and plants one on Castle. “There’s my man,” she croons, getting the goons off their case.

“Is this yum yum really worth it?” Lanie asks Beckett/Vera. “He’s the cream in my coffee,” she replies, and with that, Lanie saunters off.

Vera tells the detective they should run away together because the necklace is expensive enough to keep them afloat for years. She’s about to tell him where the secret safe is that Dempsey keeps the necklace in when she’s not wearing it, but it turns out, the journal ends right before she names the spot.

“What do you mean?” present-day Beckett yells, before realizing she’s staring right at the secret safe. Ka-ching!

At the precinct, Espo questions Ray Horton, the laundromat owner who made the threatening phone call. Horton admits to making the call, but only because Stan was his business partner and owed him cash. Horton lent Stan the money to buy the P.I.’s journal in hopes of tracking down the blue butterfly.

Then, Ryan finds out the gun that killed Stan was also used in a double unsolved homicide in 1947 — of Joe and Vera!

Castle and Ryan head out to dig up some more old case files, and Espso checks in with Beckett, telling her that a treasure hunter named Clyde Bellasco — the man who inspired Stan to look for the blue butterfly, and who had looked himself for 15 years — just flew into NYC a few days prior. In questioning, Ballasco said Stan had approached him before his death.

Flashback to 1947, via a statement Castle finds: The detective tells Vera they’re not going to crack the secret safe, and she’s just going to have to walk out with the blue butterfly on her neck — and we find out that Sally wasn’t Vera’s sister. Sadly, that’s where the statement ends, but Castle and Ryan are uber-excited to find out what Sally was up to.

Dempsey Doppelgangers

And that’s when the future and the past really collide: Beckett gets word a man who drives a white Mustang just broke into Stan’s house, so she and Espo bust down the door there –— only to find a man staring at them who looks just like 1940s Tom Dempsey.

“You’re Tom Dempsey,” Beckett says bewildered. “Yeah, that’s me,” he replies. Tom Dempsey the III, that is. Dempsey gave Stan access to all his old files because he said he would write a book about his family with a positive spin. Turns out, that wasn’t the case. At all. Dempsey broke into Stan’s place after he heard he was dead just to see if he had found the butterfly — but he didn’t kill him. So who did?

Maybe Jerry Maddox, the old (and perhaps only alive) bartender at the Penny Baker Club, can help? It sounds promising, but when they start to question him about Stan, it becomes apparent Mr. Maddox’s memory is a little faulty. But he does have info on Sally: Turns out, she was the daughter of Dempsey’s previous girlfriend Priscilla, who Dempsey dumped for Vera.

“It’s a revenge story,” Castle muses. By golly, it is!

Back at the precinct, the sidekicks question the Penny Baker homeless man, Westside Wally, who says he was bought out by Ballasco a few days earlier and wasn’t there when Stan was killed. So, did Ballasco do it?

A Not-So-Real Love Story

From there, the story starts to unravel, quickly. Turns out, Joe and Vera are still alive — posing as the former bartenders, the Maddoxes.

It’s a man named Frankie, Joe and Vera’s worker, who killed Stan after he realized that he knew more about the blue butterfly and was going to find it first. Castle and Beckett find the blue butterfly in Frankie’s apartment and it turns out it’s fake. Like, costume jewelry fake.

Still curious as to what happened in 1940, Caskett return to Joe and Vera’s apartment and demand the real story from the star-crossed lovers. They recount the whole thing: When the twosome slipped out of the nightclub to run away together, Sally found them in the alley and wanted to kill them. But instead, she accidentally shot her husband, and then Vera/Sally wrestle with the gun, she accidentally shoots herself!

Not knowing what to do with the bodies, they threw them in the trunk and set the car ablaze. Present-day Vera asks if Castle and Beckett are going to arrest them, and they say no. “We’re looking for a Vera, not a Viola,” she says. Beckett decides not to tell Joe and Vera the blue butterfly was fake, but rather to let the adorable, elderly couple live in their fantasy.

Then, the kiss! It’s not until the absolute final scene when we see Joe and Vera — aka. Castle and Beckett  – lock lips. As the car is burning in the background, Vera asks: “Do you love me, Joe?” “Always,” he replies, kissing her. And scene.

Was it worth it? Oh, you betcha.