The look and plotting of Castle owe a good deal to the CSI and NCIS franchises – quick pacing, clever forensic details, intense interrogation-room sequences. But the show's real roots date back much further, to the "odd couple" crime shows of the 1980s – Remington Steele, Moonlighting, and Scarecrow & Mrs. King ...

It’s the morning of a wedding, and one of the bridesmaids is missing.  The bed in her hotel room hasn’t been slept in, the bathroom is unoccupied – but when the bride opens the closet door, an all-too-familiar corpse topples out.

By the time Castle arrives, Beckett and her team have a preliminary cause of death and a roomful of suspects.  Then the bride gets a good look at Castle...and calls him by name....

Shapely legs tiptoe out of an apartment door, as their owner scurries to dispose of an empty pizza box down the building’s trash chute...but stealth changes to screaming when a corpse slams headfirst into the box from above, pausing for a gruesome moment before continuing its freefall.

As Castle arrives in the building’s basement, ...

There's a roomful of painters laying down crisp white paint on the walls of a vacant apartment -- when a splash of red shows up on one of the rollers. Something's seeping through from the next floor up...where a bullet-riddled body is lying sprawled across the carpet.

The body is that of Patrick Coonan, a known member of an Irish crime family based in Hell's Kitchen. Castle and Beckett drop by the auld working-class pub owned by the family's head, Finn Rourke, ...