Castle: is anyone kind of tired of the will they or won't they?

The Ryan and Esposito actors were hilarious. Beckett's reaction to them even more so.

This.

OMG, the flashbacks on tonight's NCIS are really horrific. I miss Angelus.

And this. Tony's hair was never that dark, so the shoe polish look didn't make any sense. Still, it was a very interesting episode.

OMG, the flashbacks on tonight's NCIS are really horrific.

I think Michael Weatherly did some interesting physical stuff to distinguish his character's age and experience. In the flashbacks Tony was much looser, bouncier. He seemed more tired and closed in in the current day shots.

Castle: is anyone kind of tired of the will they or won't they?

While that stuff usually drives me batshit, for some reason it's not bugging me on Castle (as opposed to, say, Bones or Chuck). I'm not sure why.

I liked the reappearance of Paatchi, and his comment about how someday the job was going to kill him. That, and Baltimore-Tony's comment about the plague. Nice tying in previous episodes!

And what Calli said about MW's acting choices.

Overall, I thought it was one of the better eps this season, regardless of the bad hair don'ts.

I liked that it showcased just how good an investigator Tony is. He gets played for laughs so frequently, and with the way Ziva and McGee diss on him, it's easy to overlook that Tony really does know what the heck he's doing.

Tomorrow, the BBC is going to start showing The Shadow Line" with Christopher Eccleston and Chiwetel Ejiofor. Damnit, BBCA had better be showing it, and soon!!!

Oops, I think I tripped and hit the download button. Shame how that happened.

While that stuff usually drives me batshit, for some reason it's not bugging me on Castle (as opposed to, say, Bones or Chuck). I'm not sure why.

Me too. I think it's that I've taken it as a given that they will, and the only question is how they're gonna get there. I was unaccountably pleased that almost dying in each others' arms - like, twice - was *not* the catalyst for a sudden outpouring of true feelings and a meaningful shag. I'd almost rather it happened after just, a little shared smile and them leaving the station together, off-screen even, and maybe it takes even the audience a couple episodes to figure that they really finally did.

Someone over at TWOP had linked to this story in TV Guide that answers why Tony had his hair so dark in the flashbacks.

"The flashback hair was a lot of fun. They wanted it to be a little darker, which I at first was a fan of, then I wasn't a fan of, but then I got into it. What I conceived of was this idea that Tony had been undercover recently, and that he had some kind of assignment where he had to be on the streets with dark hair. But there's another part of me that thought actually maybe Tony dyed his hair dark when he was a Baltimore homicide cop because he was insecure about his honey-colored hair. He thought, 'My name's Anthony DiNozzo, and nobody's gonna [expletive] take me seriously unless I have dark hair that matches the name.' So maybe that's the real answer — style over substance."

As for the cut of the hair, if not the shade... well, believe it or not, that's "R.J. hair." Irony alert! Effort was made in this episode to go back to something approximating the cut Weatherly had when NCIS (or Navy NCIS, as it was known then) started in 2003. And at the time, the young actor had just come off a TV movie where he played Robert Wagner... who, of course, would go on to play DiNozzo's dad in two highly regarded episodes of this series.