Remember a year or so back when I was so amused that the writers of the TV series Castle had inserted a metajoke about Firefly, the series that Castle lead Nathan Fillion had previously starred in? Well, they’ve done it again.
Some quick background for those who aren’t familiar with Firefly (which, considering that the show didn’t even make a full season would probably be almost everyone): it was set in a future society that seemed to have been influenced equally by Western and Eastern culture… meaning that the English dialog was peppered with Chinese, or at least Chinese-sounding, phrases. This lent a certain exotic air to the environment, and also gave the writers a convenient way to let the characters swear without running afoul of the network censors.
Anyhow, this week’s episode of Castle took the titular character and his crime-solving partner Detective Beckett to New York City’s Chinatown, where Beckett confronted a pair of Chinese workers with her gun drawn and told them, essentially, to get lost before they ran into the bad guy. The two didn’t speak English and there was a moment of everyone looking at each other with confusion before Castle stepped up and rattled off some Chinese that sent the innocent bystanders scrambling away to safety. Beckett glances at Castle, impressed with his newly revealed ability, and asks, “Semester abroad?”
He replies with a perfectly deadpan expression, “No, I learned it from a show I used to love.”
As the kids say nowadays, I LOL’d at that one. I love that this show is confident enough, and cognizant enough of its (and Nathan Fillion’s) core fanbase to do stuff like that. It’s a friendly little wink-and-nod to the Firefly fans (a.k.a. “browncoats”), but not so blatant that Castle viewers who don’t know the other show are going to feel confused or alienated. And it really isn’t breaking the fourth wall, either, since Castle has been depicted as something of a pop-culture junkie and it’s possible (if extremely unlikely) that he could have picked up some Chinese from watching something…
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As long as I’m talking about Castle, I’d like to mention something nice the show’s producers did a few weeks ago following the sad, cancer-related death of producer/writer Stephen J. Cannell. Cannell was the legendary creator of so many iconic TV shows: The Rockford Files, Baa Baa Black Sheep, The A-Team, The Greatest American Hero, Riptide, Hunter, Wiseguy, Renegade, and 21 Jump Street. As Christopher Mills noted on his Atomic Pulp blog, “I don’t think you could have grown up as an American male in the 70s and 80s and not be influenced by Cannell. His shows were action-packed, fun, generally smart – and everywhere.”
In more recent years, he’d found new success as a novelist with over a dozen titles to his name.
Cannell’s connection to Castle — besides the obvious influence his work had on the show — came with a couple of appearances in which he played himself, along with fellow mystery novelists James Patterson and Michael Connelly, all of whom were depicted as poker-playing buddies of the show’s protagonist. These were memorable little scenes that provided a lot of verisimilitude for the fictional Rick Castle (who is also supposedly a mystery/crime novelist), so when I heard about Cannell’s death, I wondered what the show would do to acknowledge it. What Castle‘s producers came up with was classy indeed, a poignant adaptation of the well-known coda that closed out all the shows Cannell produced:
I’m not exaggerating when I tell you that I actually choked up a little the first time I saw this…
