Jesus, Castle, Come On

Okay, this week's episode of Castle was just awful. Some good father-daughter stuff, enough to even overlook yet another plug for Dancing with the Stars, but what the hell was going on with the story proper?

I'm really sick of this cat lady will-they-or-won't-they bullshit. And I think it was inappropriate to use as a backdrop a terrorist bombing of an Occupy protest (given, in Castle's fictional reality, the not-at-all-inflammatory-name of the "Takeover Wall Street" movement). The episode took the premise so seriously, giving us the weight and depth of how the death toll would shake up the people who witnessed and investigated it, and then decides to basically use this serious story as simply character motivation for Castle and Beckett to re-examine their secret feelings for each other. It's as if all of these people died or were injured just to put Castle in the position to discover that Beckett remembers him declaring his feelings after all, and even that just to drive yet another wedge between them, because Castle's angry at Beckett for not being honest about her feelings even though he's been doing the same goddamn thing himself. So now we'll get him acting like a pouty child for a while.

So they're not only undoing character development just so everyone can be petulant, but they also decided to use serious subject matter--that they presented as very grave indeed--just to do it.

I just found the whole episode really distasteful. Where is this thing going?