CASTLE: Andrew Marlowe Teases What’s to Come

There’s a brand new episode of CASTLE tonight! (It’s nice to be in the middle of a solid, repeat-free run, huh?)

To get a little tease of what will be coming up in the foreseeable future, I spoke with CASTLE creator Andrew Marlowe about weddings, births, babies, the show’s future, and more…

What can you tease about what’s coming up?
Andrew Marlowe: Really fun and interesting stuff.

Well, that’s vague. To get a bit more in depth, what can you share about the cases we’ll be seeing soon?
AM: They’re fun and interesting cases!

When we come up in the spring, we’ll have more opportunities to deal with the Castle/Beckett relationship and moving towards a wedding and what that looks like as they wrestle with those questions.

[But] we end our run in the fall with a great and charming episode where a guy walks into a church and he struggles up the aisle and he’s been shot, and he’s holding a little bundle. And it turns out the bundle is a baby, and the baby isn’t his, and we don’t know whose baby it is, and that’s part of the investigation: how did this guy get shot, what’s going on? But it means we have a baby in the 12th Precinct between Castle and Beckett as they become nannies as they go forward in the case.

It certainly brings up issues with Ryan, because his wife is pregnant and his baby is like a month away — and clearly that’s going to be something we’re dealing with in spring: Ryan having his baby in an episode that is going to be very emotional and dramatic.  I’ll tease that.

We’re hoping as we come to spring, to see a couple of familiar faces come back and join us. But that’s all in the works, so I won’t advertise more than that.

I understand why you might be hesitant to spoil if Castle and Beckett get married this season, but do you see Castle and Beckett having a wedding in the run of the series?
AM: If I answer that question in any way other than “no comment,” I’ll send our fans into a tizzy one way or the other. Let me just say the question is very much on Castle and Beckett’s mind. And they have to deal with it.

Another question, in theory, on their minds could be the potential kids they may have — especially given what was foretold to them in the time traveler case. When will that be more fully fleshed out on-screen?
AM: At this point, if I’m a fan, I don’t know how Castle feels about more kids. I don’t know about how Beckett feels about kids. So we are going to talk about that a little bit when we get to the end of the fall and we have our Thanksgiving episode with the baby. So we’re going to start to [explore] those issues. That’s what couples talk about when they’re in relationships.

Is there an arc you feel you’re working on this season for these characters?
AM: I think the arc of the season is really about Castle and Beckett settling into a new kind of relationship and [what] the consequences are of that to themselves and the people around them. And how do they go about putting their lives together and what does that mean for them?

You do have a pilot in the mix, and this show could, potentially, be heading to an end point. Are you looking at a potential ending for CASTLE at this point, or are you open to continuing on for the foreseeable future?
AM: I’m not looking at an endpoint. When you sell a pilot to somebody, it’s such a long-shot for any pilot to get off the ground. The script has to be great, and then you have to get the right person in it, and then the audience has to respond to the pilot, but it’s important to take those chances. But I don’t think it at all affects how I see CASTLE and where we’re going.

I think the characters will tell us when the best part of the storytelling is over. I think the characters will ask us to wrap up in a way that is satisfying. If you look at other shows like this, I think there can be significant legs to the show if everyone wants to continue having the fun we have been for the past several years.

So we’re not looking towards that now, but if things change or the climate changes or the characters get to that point, it’s something we’ll talk about. But just because we’ve gone out to the universe and set something else up, doesn’t mean it affects the way we feel about CASTLE.

I know there’s been stuff said online, like, “Oh, does this mean he’s not going to look in on CASTLE anymore? Is he going to drop the ball on that?” And it’s like, if you decide to have a second child, you don’t stop loving your first. At least that’s not how I parent.

Completely fair. There was a bit of a fan uproar recently when it was revealed that the end “Always” scene was trimmed and the deleted scene was showcased in a panel you and Terri Edda Miller (Marlowe’s wife/CASTLE writer) participated in at Austin Film Fest…but won’t be made available elsewhere. Can you explain a bit more about the reasoning for editing the scene down?
AM: We know our fans are passionate, and passion runs both ways…[at our panel in Austin] where we showed all of 15 seconds [of a cut scene] in a seminar on writing, where we were talking about how your final rewrite is editorial, and how certain things, ultimately, don’t work for the cut. So we showed this moment how it didn’t work for the cut.

But I know the fans think we’re keeping something back from them. I can assure them it’s probably played out much better in their imagination than in real life, and there’s a reason we did not do it — it wasn’t additive to the show. And they’re all demanding it be released, but we have dozens and dozens of deleted moments and deleted scenes across the board that didn’t make the [various] cuts and we have to make these decisions every week. And I’m sure at the end of the day, all of this stuff will be available in one form or another if people are passionate enough about it.

But we appreciate their passion, even when they get upset at us, we know it’s because they’re passionate about the show and that’s okay. And we know that when people are passionate, they don’t express it in the most mature way, but we get it. They’re passionate.

And you can’t be in the position we’re in and not expect some criticism. I know if I was a fan of the show and I felt like they were holding back something crucial, I’d be frustrated. But the seminar we were teaching was about things you don’t include that make [the final product] better. We [also] talked about a scene in “Always” that Terri and I wrote that we never shot. There was a scene with Jim Beckett and Beckett in the graveyard in front of her mother’s grave, and it turned out everything Jim was saying, Castle had already said in the previous scene. So there was just no point. But we showed them the scene on the page and that at the end of the day, it became a silent moment between Beckett and her mother, and it was so much better. So we were talking about having to keep making things better. Sometimes you make things better by taking things away.

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CASTLE airs Mondays at 10 PM on ABC.

Related:

CASTLE: ‘Disciple’ Photo Preview
CASTLE: Andrew Marlowe Previews ‘Like Father, Like Daughter’
CASTLE: Molly Quinn on ‘Like Father, Like Daughter,’ the Tension Between Alexis and Castle, and More

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