Sunday, January 22, 2012

TV’s Valentine's Day Favorite Most Dramatic Romantic Couples


TV’s  Favorite Most  Romantic Law Enforcement Couples

By

Bobbie L. Washington


In the mystical realm of television, there exist portals to several universes.  We gravitate to them like falling meteors into a planets’ atmosphere.  We never know what we might find in these universes until enough time has swallowed us whole and we find ourselves becoming a part of the storyline.  To hearken back to that most famous quote from another classic TV show which proclaimed, You unlock this door with the key of imagination. Beyond it is another dimension: a dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a dimension of mind. You're moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas. You've just crossed over into... the Twilight Zone.”  But in this scenario, the Twilight Zone is the TV Zone.  It’s a place where we sometimes wish we were there instead of the harsh realities of the real world.  In that TV Zone we find people we come to admire, their interests, their hopes, their desires and their love life can sometimes exceed interests in their own lives.  So it’s no wonder that when we look back on some of the most romantic dramatic couples, we devote long dedications to these unions.  During the past two decades, there have been many fan based sites dedicated to the coupling of their favorite star characters.  But as interesting of a phenomenon this is, it began long before the advent of YouTube dedicated channels and a slew of web sites shrines that serves as a religious gathering to the devoted followers.  As humans, we become enamored with the plight of the unrequited love scenario.  We know they belong together so why not get to it?  But the savvy producers and writers know when they have something good and they bait you along.   Here is a look at some of the most enduring couples of dramatic shows starting with the original.


PERRY MASON & DELLA STREET

        Perry Mason was the quintessential criminal defense attorney of that generation.  Premiering in   1957 on the CBS Network, it profiled this more than self-assured attorney with his trusty companions, private investigator Paul Drake and Della Street, the ever so loyal secretary/administrative assistant.      



  Della and Perry were always a mystery when it came to their relationship.  They weren’t as demonstrative as one would like but the viewers got a sense that there was something more than just a professional business relationship going on between them.  And since this was the 50’s, there was a fine line with what the networks could show couples do and couldn’t do being unmarried compared to what has gone on since the days of Archie Bunker and the new uncharted terrain of dialogue.  Still, the bottled up 50’s was a powder keg of sexuality that would not entire into the realm for network television during that era.  Perry Mason was a staple of a show.  It explored the legal elements to finding the guilty party in a procedural fashion.  Perry Mason would have the put upon client where all the evidence pointed squarely at their feet.  And in a series of over the top courtroom theatrics with the hapless prosecutor, Hamilton Burger, Mason would have the guilty party admit their crime while under cross examination.   A befuddled Burger, who looked shocked by the turn of events, would cede his position.  If Perry Mason was around today, it would have been subjected to all types of parodies based on this formulaic premise.  Straying from that tried and true formula would have been a sacrilege.  And when it ended its ten season run, there was no closure to what Perry and Della meant to one another.






But then, the powers that be that control the vertical and control the horizontal had the brilliant idea of bringing back Perry Mason as stand-alone series of 26 TV movies.  We had the duo back once more, a little more matured, but still together. 


 Paul Drake and the feisty prosecutor, Hamilton Burger had passed on in real life, one from a stroke and the other from heart failure attributed to his cancer.  But what happened to Perry and Della during that long absence?   Where had their lives taken them?     And yet, the first movie series show them apart, he becoming a judge and she working for someone else.  And the only way we see them get back together is when she is accused of killing her employer and him leaving his judgeship to come and defend her.   It seems as if some of the veil of secrecy that the two shared is still in place.  We now see that they are back together but they just don’t acknowledge that elephant in the room as their eyes connect and you still see the smoldering intensity that’s been dormant for all this time.   What made them drift apart?  One logical obvious question for a woman to ask would be why would a person stay with someone for this long if there wasn’t something more meaningful going on in their lives?         
   
 The TV movies had demonstrated that their relationship had moved beyond the point of employer/employee but the elusive dance of truth remained an enigma easing out of the hands from the viewers like fine grains of sand.                    




 Why was she still with him?  Why him of all people to call and defend her?  There were other more capable defense attorneys.  She could have picked a female defense attorney.   In that era of feminine equality being in the forefront of society, Della could have been a beacon for something other than just Perry’s secretary.  She was more than just capable, she was smart.  Why hadn’t she become an attorney by now?  Maybe she had and failed?  It could have been one of those many back story mysteries of Della and Perry. 






In this fantasy universe of alternate realities, you would have to wildly speculate that they had secretly married and then divorced during that nineteen year time gap?  Did they have a secret love child that they kept hidden in some English boarding school?  Of course they did but the child, a daughter, followed in her father’s footsteps and she is known as Sandra Bullock in the real world.  



When Della and Perry got back together was this their way of reconciling the past when they realized they were better together versus apart?  What they could not speak about or show during those uptight censored laden sponsored controlled days of the 50’s and 60’s could now be peeled away in this TV movie series that began in 1985 and ended in Perry Mason’s swan song in 1993.  But the Perry Mason TV movies series stayed true to its core, the law, the innocently accused and finding the guilty.  And while the fans of that era enjoyed seeing Della and Perry again, a newer more technically sophisticated generation a viewers were becoming a more interactive generation of viewers thanks to something called the Internet and fan based websites.                         



We didn’t just want the usual courtroom theatrics, we wanted those human moments of unspoken words that Della would give Perry whenever she looked at him or whenever he looked at her that spoke volumes.  How simple was it to see a gesture of a touch to the face and what it signified in this long lasting relationship?  And in this fantasy world at the end of the last movie when Perry took that last walk out of the courtroom, Della would give him that look, that peck on the cheek that now bore a gray salt and pepper beard, she would say nothing at all.  What more was needed to be said after close to forty years of being together?  In the twilight of their life, we imagine them sitting on a rattan bench seat on the deck of their home staring out on to a California beach as the sun slowly settles with a gentle song of Leon Russell’s Back to the Island plays hauntingly in the background.  Goodbye Perry, goodbye Della, thanks for being the first romantic dramatic couple. 




DANA SCULLY & FOX MULDER

Perhaps no other couple in the history of television that inspired a new generation of tech savvy fan devotees was the X-Files Dana Scully and Fox Mulder that premiered on the Fox Network in 1993.   Here were two characters of polar opposite ideology to life, religion, truths and what constituted a conspiracy.  By all given parameters, these two were never meant to be the subject of such lengthy literature and dedication.  


But it was something about these two, along with the unique storytelling, innovative approach to the retelling of science fiction and tossing in some governmental conspiracy twist and a needed shaking up from the run of the mill TV fare, the X-Files found is niche the first time out and created an industry onto itself that other shows dedicated to the science fiction and paranormal fare have tried to duplicate with little admiration like the X-Files.  It was not only about the cases these two agents investigated but the genius of the series was incorporating the id, ego and super-ego of Mulder and Scully.  Scully was given the new partner, Mulder, to counter or as they said “debunk” his theories of what he investigated.   

But her strident core beliefs began to shift when the unexplained couldn’t be logically categorized and placed in a nice neat manila folder and filed away if a basic tenant of scientific fact was not involved that could easily explain away the event.  And when one or the other’s life was put in harms way and the other came to the rescue, we begin to see the glimpse of something more.  That co called chemistry started to come forth. 







They began to rally for one another.  There were the subtle touches to the hand as their fingers weaved around one another in such a manner that seems to be a forbidden dance if they were to truly hold hands.  That simple gesture of Scully holding Mulder’s hand for maybe three seconds but it was the way Scully held Mulder’s hand, with slight caresses to let him know he had her support or she needed for him to support her.  The unspoken language of affection became an art between these two.  


 Perhaps this was the truest form of how on the job relationships began in the manner that they took.  In Scully’s words, “It seems to me that the best relationships, the ones that last, are frequently the ones that are rooted in friendship, then one day you look up at that person and you see something more you did the night before.” 

And because the Internet had become a more viable instrument for fan input, the amount a fan sites devoted to Scully and Mulder was in full bloom.   The fans of this show who were devoted to this romance had been given a new term by the other fan devotees, they called them “shippers” derived from the word “relationship” and mytharc which is short for mythology archive that was solely created by the fans and creators of the X-Files that links all given stories to a particular story line.  Whether it was by grand design, by conspiratorial factors or by the natural flow of the show, there lay dormant a love affair like no other.  And it would not be an easy one to surrender to, not by X-Files standards.  From abductions, to bureaucratic intervention of separating the team to Mulder’s old girlfriends or Scully running to his side on a case he was working on alone and finding smoking hot Dr. Bambi, this would not be an easy walk through the rose garden. 

But who started to fall for whom first?   Mulder did proclaim that he loved her following the time travel episode of him on the luxury liner in the episode “Triangle”.  It maybe hard to pinpoint when or where who may have started to have feelings for the other but it is a safe bet to say that the cancer that was given to Scully caused any barrier to fall between the two.  We began to see the kisses to the forehead, the hugs of support, the silent crying at her bedside as Mulder fought to find a cure for his dying partner.    She was becoming more than just his partner; this was the making of the game changer.  And that was witness by the note Scully had written that she left out by her hospital bed and he read it:           



              I feel time like a heartbeat, the seconds pumping in my breast like a reckoning. The luminous mysteries that once seemed so distant and unreal, threatening clarity in the presence of a truth entertained not in youth, but only in it’s passage. I feel these words as if their meaning were a weight being lifted from me, knowing that you will read them and share my burden, as I have come to trust no other. That you should know my heart, look into it, finding there the memory and experience that belong to you, that are you, is a comfort to me now as I feel the tethers loose and the prospects darken for the continuance of a journey that began not so long ago, and which began again with a faith shaken and strengthened by your convictions, if not for which I might never have been so strong now. As I cross to face you and look at you incomplete, hoping that you will forgive me for not making the rest of the journey with you.

And through one of their most trying times, her life is spared by design and by a price to be paid later.






Through that looking glass, they find that they have strength in each other and no words are spoken about the condition of their hearts for one another.  They move forward with the dance.  They spend more time with one another.  They learn to laugh at the end of the day after a long and harrowing case.  He invites her out to a ballpark one night on her birthday to teach her how to hit a ball.  Does she really need to know how to be taught to hit a ball?  She does have an older brother after all.  But it’s a moment that is another defining moment for the two.  The somewhat by the books uptight Agent Scully from the beginning has found a solace of comfort with this man who slides his hands over her body while making sexual innuendos.   We still do not get to see them make the ultimate step and that is the kiss. 

And when they turned it into a movie, The X-Files: Fight The Future, and when we thought we were getting close to what the fans were hoping to see, the kiss reveal, she falls to her knees after getting stung by a bee.  And we have to know by this time that whenever one of them falls into some life peril that they know that the other will do anything to see that the other will survive without having to say a word.  And when they returned to television, the separation by the bureau became their next hurdle.  No parasitic ameba spore, no liver eating serial killer, no teenage pubescent lighting boy but old fashion paperwork stalls out what is now two co-dependent people who have maintained a level of energy for such a long period of time.   This moment in their lives forces those to see how much they have come to rely on one another and that no new partner could replace what they had, professionally and personally.   But when asked if Mulder had a significant other in his life, Mulder would respond “Not in the wildly understood definition of that term”.
 
But we know other wise and they     know one another now.  In time, they are back together again.  They move closer and closer to one another emotionally and in one moment, we see some under lit scene of Scully getting dressed and a shot of a sleeping Mulder looking satiated in his bed.  No explanation is given to the juxtaposition of what was shown.  It’s just there.  You figure it out.  But this is the X-Files; it could have thirty reasons and forty truths.  But we do know that something has occurred and as much as that was long in waiting, the fans should have at least gotten a look.  And when the latest of Mulder’s quest leaves him missing in action and discovered “dead” from some torturous body probing examination, we find that Scully is pregnant with his child.  But he isn’t dead-dead and he returns to her once again.  But know there is a child on the way and they must face this new journey.  And when that child is born, we finally see them all together, as a family, in a moment of true bliss and we get to see the kiss, with all of its anticipation now muted by the stark contrast of the events that lead up to this.  It is not to be a family of a right design, as the child is marked for death by others who fear his existence.  William is born under the direr of consequences.  As his life is put in the most ominous situations, Scully makes the unenviable decision to give up her son, a decision that is still being debated to this day.       But in that decision, she writes in her journal to William about live and love that went:
"One day, you'll ask me to speak of a truth ---- of the miracle of your birth. -----To explain what is unexplained. And if I falter or fail on this day,---- know there is an answer, my child,------- a sacred imperishable truth, but one you may never hope to find alone. ------Chance meeting your perfect other,------- your perfect opposite - your protector and endangerer. -----Chance embarking with this other on the greatest of journeys ------ a search for truths fugitive and imponderable. If one day this chance may befall you,------ my son,------ do not fail or falter to seize it. ------The truths are out there. ------And if one day you should behold a miracle, as I have in you, -----you will learn the truth is not found in science, -----or on some unseen plane,----- but by looking into your own heart. -------And in that moment you will be blessed - and stricken. -------For the truest truths, are what hold us together, -------or keep us painfully, ------desperately apart. 


And in its last season, Mulder is MIA again and finally returns to the fold in the series finale. Their union is poignant, more sustained, more established as we see them kiss this time with a more sense of purpose, of love, of time lost and found, of future heartache.  William is gone out of their lives based on a decision made in desperation by Scully.  It is perhaps the biggest piece of unfinished business of a scripted show because the fan base could not believe that Scully, who had gone through so much to have him, would give him up so easily.  Surely this can’t be how this ends?  They deserved a better ending, they’d earned a better ending and the fans earned a better ending.  But maybe there were other things in play.  The movie franchise would solve this quagmire.   But that’s a different tale set in another world.  This was the land TV and this is how it ended.  Two people whose paths in life took them to journeys they never thought imagined and in the process, discovered that the truth to everything was them.  Find your son, he is not safe.




SEELEY BOOTH & TEMPERANCE BRENNAN



Premiering in 2005, Bones joined the stable of Fox shows.  Set in our nation’s capital come this socially inept but highly intelligent forensic anthropologist who goes by the name of Dr. Temperance Brennan who is assigned a self-assured FBI Agent by he name of Seeley Booth.  In most cases, there is an inkling of some similarity from first blush but these two in the beginning were complete and totally separate planets orbiting separate suns.       

             She and her fellow colleagues at the Jeffersonian Institute never associated with anyone other than their own intellectual peers thus leaving them lacking in certain contemporary social graces.  Seeley Booth, an ex U.S. Army Ranger sniper, request Brennan to assist him on a case but she will only go along only if she is granted full partner on the case.  And so, this unlikely pairing to crime solving is created through a little armchair twisting and “I won’t play with my toys unless you pick me” attitude that’s a bit juvenile.                     

Brennan’s type-A personality demands that she and her subordinates be the best at what they do without fail.  She also wishes she had he skills Booth has in reading people.  If there isn’t data to go along with empirical evidence, she is lost on human behavior and she has no point of reference for such social interaction that has lead her way of speaking to people more than off putting but down right insulting.  But it is Booth who gives her balance rather than the other way around.  He points out her character flaws in a world that’s not lab coats and Bunsen burners.  He does it in a way that doesn’t harm her ego, though she may claim that her ego was not harmed, because he knows that someone in that façade if a scientist is a woman who’s built this wall of technical journals and best selling books to mask away a less than ideal childhood.  It was Booth who gave her the nickname of “Bones”, a name she protested at first but relented only for Booth to call her that and not her colleagues or even Dr. Sweets.  Booth has taken upon him to humanize her slowly to the world so she can see how people really are outside of the clinical barriers she had come to create for herself.





But this pairing comes with certain elements that could be seen as more relatable to a more mainstream society.  Booth is a single parent to a son.  This revelation didn’t come about until much later into the series when they were in forced quarantine.  What was interesting about that moment was how surprised everyone was when they found out he had a child?  It also brought about a different point of view for Brennan because now she has started to see what drives Booth’s actions.  He has to be a role model for his son.   Some of the pieces begin to fall into place for Brennan.  She now starts to understand why Booth is the way he is about his approach to the law and how he relates to people.  She finds out that the mother of his child didn’t want to marry him, his father was a drunk and that he and his brother were raised by his grandfather.

She, on the other hand, has a brother, and that their parents went missing when they were younger and they would put in the foster care system.  The foster care system held little pleasant memories for Brennan.   

And as unlikely a scenario these two went through as children, they do share a common theme of unpleasant childhoods that marked their behavior as adults.  Booth wants nothing to be like his drunken father and tries to cleanse it from his memory by doing deeds of honor as if it will make amends for the failure of his father.  Brennan shrouds her in academia where she can insulate herself from any sort of emotional conflict.  She has consigned away any notion of what is considered the normal family dynamic.  Above anything else, work is a better ethos than religion and sex is just a basic behavior in all animals that shouldn’t warrant the importance humans give it.





And yet, with all that is going against them, they forge this alliance of the spirit, the mind and the bodies are the unlikely partners.  The separation of personal and professional becomes blended.  Brennan learns through observation, through Booth and through osmosis from the cases that people’s lives aren’t black and white textbooks.  She finds that her way of thinking all of those years left her missing out on the simpler things that contained the most meaningful moments for anyone ele. When she discovers that her mother’s remains were found and identified, we find Booth wading through that emotional field.  She may have forced out those memories of her mother but she realize those memories had not left her when the truth is revealed when she finds herself holding a dolphin figurine that belong to her mother.

For Booth and Brennan, they are surrounded by a compliment of a character that sometimes help and sometimes creates a speed bump along the evitable.  We even wait the all anticipated kissing moment.  And it seems when you think they’ve figured it out between them and they make an attempt to go for it when Booth openly declares his love for her, she shuts down.  Something as simple as this one man caring for her is more complicated to her than the double helix band from DNA.  He is shattered by her rejection as are we. 

What gives?  What is the problem, Brennan?  It’s not a textbook.  It has variables and dynamics that come with unknown outcomes. And so it stops.  He moves on.  She stagnates.  They go their separate ways, he to the military, she to do some cultural dig.  They come back together, a little tattered, a little mended, to help a colleague in trouble.  Booth has found someone new and Brennan still is fixed position until she meets the other woman and sees how happy she is with Booth.  She realizes that she has allowed her happiness to be sacrificed for some superficial ideology and pours out her regret and true feelings to Booth.  And how does this ex U.S. Army Ranger sniper turned FBI Agent with 53 kills under his belt respond?  Not like she had hoped but she now sees that telling how she feels is not the end of who she is.  She would have never known that if not for him being more open with her.  So the dream is delayed as Booth finds a temporary fix with what has been lovingly called the “obstructionist”. And just when he thinks he’s found the rebound of his choice, he proposes and she turns him down.  It’s not a good time for the cupid that’s following Booth for this is strike three.  He’s sullen and rightfully bitter with the women in his life and just wants nothing more out of Brennan other than to just solve the cases that come along.  And so we wait again.  But the wait isn’t as long as we would have thought.  It comes heavily weighted with unexpected consequences.

A major nemesis, The Gravedigger, is facing her last appeal for her crimes.  In perhaps one of the most intense scenes in Bones episodes, The Gravediggers head is literally blown off her shoulders by sniper fire.  In this story arc, the elusive sniper is identified and Booth uses his sniper training to track him down.  But the cat and mouse chase takes an unexpected and shocking twist when one of the most beloved characters, Vincent Nigel-Murray, is mistaken for Booth and takes a bullet to the heart, a bullet that also pierces everyone else’s heart as well with grief and sorrow. 

Booth must now protect everyone at the Jeffersonian and we find Brennan staying with Booth.  She comes to his room not understanding what Vincent meant in his dying declaration as Booth explains to her that he didn’t want to die.   As she lies next to him for comfort, the scene fades to black.  Booth eventually catches the sniper and Brennan has a more relaxed spirit.  Angela and Hodgins have their child and Brennan has questions.  In the final minutes of Booth and Brennan coming from the hospital, they are walking slowly and Brennan, in her quintessential scientific speak, she announces that she is pregnant and that it’s Booth’s.  No words are spoken, just a broad smile for Booth.






ANTHONY DiNOZZO & ZIVA DAVID



NCIS: Naval Criminal Investigative Service is another long running series that’s found a home on CBS.  It follows a team of skilled investigators, some with military backgrounds and some law enforcement backgrounds, who investigate criminal activity perpetrated against military personnel.  So after nine seasons, we are starting to see a little thaw in the relationship between Anthony DiNozza and Ziva David.  Now this is interesting because Ziva was a replacement for another one of Tony’s love interest, NCIS agent Caitlin Todd.   Tony’s affection with Caitlin was intriguing because she didn’t make it easy to be one of Tony’s latest conquests.  But when you looked a little deeper into the type connection they had, you would have to come to the conclusion that they could only be friends, really good friends and nothing more.  

                       But before anyone could see them come to terms, she was shockingly killed by an assassin’s bullet to the head. That messed with Tony for quite a while as we saw when Ziva came to replace her.  One of Tony’s strong virtues is loyalty.  Replacing Caitlin with Ziva the interloper took him time to adjust to.  Ziva, on the other hand, wasn’t a shrinking violet either.  Foreign to the ways of American culture, her misuse of American phraseology took a beating.  Those stumbled upon sayings showed that she wasn’t above being made fun of by the team when they corrected her.  And that also made them warm up to her as she kept trying to get it right. 

As Tony slowly slipped his hold on the memory of Caitlin away, he allowed himself to place his friendship with Caitlin deeper inside of him and started to see Ziva for who she was finally.  He had mourned long enough for Caitlin.  Tony saw that she was fun or that she could be fun and not just a deadly Mossad officer.  With Tony interjecting his personal observation of who the real Ziva David is versus the actual Ziva David who makes protest on what the opposite of what Tony thinks of her, his observations chips away with some factuality that Ziva is forced to reflect upon.          

      She has always been groomed to be trained in the Mossad and nothing more.  Now there is someone who is psychoanalyzing her and even though she is resisting the observation, she finds that Tony might hold some accuracy as to who she is and who she can become if she would open her mind up to other possibilities.   





So, what did happen in Paris?  They were on assignment in Paris and neither would talk about what happened in Paris.  McGee even inquired about it as well but neither would say.  Each held their lips tight.  Tony is assigned into a deep cover operation that causes him to lead with his feelings for a suspect’s daughter.  This complicated relationship has its problems as the case comes to an open end conclusion and a woman whose feelings were used to get to the suspect.  Tony feels guilty for using her in that manner but the rules of love versus the rules of law becomes a casualty. 

Time moves forward, Ziva is not necessarily waiting on the sideline for Tony.  She has her own life that she secretly keeps at a distance from the ever intensively inquisitive Tony.  An old love comes back with deadly intentions.  Tony is forced to kill him in a close contact battle.  Ziva comes a minute too late to see the aftermath.  She doesn’t believe Tony’s take on the incident.  He doesn’t care.  This rift shatters them as Tony stands his grounds on the cause of action.  In time, Ziva finds that Tony had been truthful and that she was being used as a pawn in her father’s personal war.

But the trust between Tony and Ziva had been badly brutalized.  It will take time for that to heal, for her to heal from the betrayal done under the control of her father.  The cases come and the cases go.  A new team comes in to track a suspect.  Ziva is clandestine in her new boyfriend.  Tony try to find out clues by snooping around her work station.  Tony, in the meantime, finds a little solace with the new team leader. 

Ziva finally reveals her new boyfriend, a CIA operative.  Tony continues his dissection of Ziva’s love life.  She defends it as best she can because the CIA operative is too secretive and isn’t there as much as she likes.  But Tony isn’t having it any better with the new team leader of the visiting team.   His boss finds it’s a conflict of interest.  Tony stands his grounds on it.  In time though, that relationship is short lived because the visiting team leader sees that Tony isn’t the one for her.  She sees that it’s Ziva.  And Ziva finds that her CIA operative has faulted and failed and lied to her.
And at the end of the day, Tony and Ziva assess on where they go from here.  Do they walk away or do they run that risk to see if it’s worth it?






RICK CASTLE & KATE BECKETT



At times heavy and at times light, the ABC Network has found success in the police adventure series, Castle.  It’s the story of a successful crime story novelist who’s penned his female detective, Nikki Heat, after the three dimensional New York City detective, Kate Beckett.  Reluctant to be the subject of such trivial fare, Beckett, under orders by the mayor and her Captain, is resigned to go along with Castle shadowing her every move as he finds Beckett to be his perfect muse.  

What began as a collaboration of the minds turned into a good working relationship as Castle’s creative solutions into the criminal thinking process and his unorthodox crime solving techniques turns out to be a valuable asset to Kate.  Right away, you can see the chemistry that’s starting to blend between these two.  Although Castle is rich, he’s earned it through hard work and struggle.  If he hadn’t, he’d be more insufferable with Kate and the rest of the team.  Kate is just your bread and butter middle class family working girl.  She keeps her beauty turned down intentionally at around six rather than the unchecked eight.           

  
 She’s a blue collar working detective, that’s what she prefers.  She could easily have turned her beauty into a vehicle to get anything or any promotion that she wants from any guy or gal but she knows that at the end of the day when she looks at herself in the mirror, she knows that it was her intelligence that got her through the day.  As Castle interacts with her more and more, he sees these qualities in Beckett.  She’s genuine and honest and at times, she can get the joke as well as give one, three of the seven things a guy looks for in woman.  As picture perfect as Beckett may be, she is flawed.  The death of her murdered mother haunts her.  With the help of Castle, she discovers that there is someone powerful involved in her mother’s murder. 





In her quest for the truth to what happened in her mother’s investigation, Castle has done more for her in the investigation that she could ever have thought.  This has caused her to reassess the very aspect of who she has been dealing with these many months.  He’s in the trenches with her.  He pushes back whenever he feels she has crossed the point of no return and where it might have come close to costing her life.  She pushes back harder because she wants to get at the truth.  At the end of the day, Caste’s intervening prevents a conflict into becoming a dire consequence.  But sometimes she doesn’t see that his presence was the thing that tipped the balance in her favor. 

The cases that have come their way have ranged from the simple domestic murder squabbles to cryogenic headless corpse to homegrown domestic terrorism.  And in between all of that, they have begun to forge this unrequited passion for one another.  Just like hot ash smoldering underneath a stack of fresh wood, Beckett is primed for Castle.         


A glimpse of that was seen when they went and improvised a situation as a romantic couple to infiltrate a crime organization.  It caught Beckett off guard when Castle planted a kiss on her and her response was that of a person who’s been walking in the desert for twenty days and this was their first drink of water.  She consumed that kiss for every ounce it was worth.  If there ever was the possibility that you could achieve an orgasm with a kiss, she definitely would have gotten a few.





But Castle has demonstrated patience and at times impatience with Beckett and her feelings.  The kiss, he felt, should have been discussed.  He’s angry that it wasn’t.  It was important.  He had intentionally steered clear of her in the beginning, even going back temporarily with his former wife and that was because she was a closed book.  So we wait and they come back, he’s still single and now she with a companion, pretty boy doctor.  But it’s an empty calorie relationship.  It looks good on the outside but there’s nothing going on inside, nothing sustaining.  Castle keeps a respectful distance up to a point.  The unrequited journey continues.  They get a few more gut checking cases that test their friendship.  He challenges her involvement with pretty boy doctor and she defends it with not much of a fight.  They nearly succumb to getting frozen.  Close to a declaration of truth in their final hours, they nearly reveal their true feelings but both pass out from the bitter cold.  They find themselves alive, close but still distant. 

It is the continued investigation of her mother’s murder that becomes a turning point for the entire team.  New leads and suspects come into play following the assassination of a retired cop right in front of Beckett and Castle. 
And in this investigation, a trusted key member is found to have known of who may be involved in her death of Beckett’s mother.  Castle runs to her aide in hopes of stopping her from meeting the shadowy figures.  He gets there to find her with the Captain, the other person who knows the people in this game of death.  Castle literally lifts her out of harms way but you have to ask, would any other person have been able to take her away from that situation?

The Captain loses his life defending Beckett.  The inner circle keeps the secret of the Captain’s involvement amongst them.  At the funeral, Beckett is hit by sniper fire and as Castle runs to her, he finally tells her how he feels, he loves her. The right questions are asked and the wrong questions are asked that prompts a mysterious figure to get in contact with Castle and inform him that if Beckett continues, there stood the chance that she would not live.    In her subsequent recovery with a psychiatrist, she claims some memory loss in the shooting.  She eventually reveals that she remembers everything on that day she got shot.  And Rick is still waiting, hopefully, not in vain.




PETER BISHOP & OLIVIA DUNHAM



The paranormal returns to the Fox Network with the series, Fringe.  Although there are some who want to compare this with the X-Files, it is not in that same vein.  This is a new world of science and the mad masters who manipulate the laws of time and space.  The things, you will need a road map to figure out who is who as you jump from one universe to another.  Peter Bishop, the wayward drop out genius son of Walter Bishop is called in to explain an unusual anomaly.  He meets this FBI agent, Olivia Dunham, a somewhat of a plains farm type woman with simple unorthodox features.  She strikes you as a woman who has the need to pile on makeup in order for her to do her job.  The bareness of her face reflects the bareness of her life when we are introduced to her.  Even though she is in a relationship in the beginning, you don’t feel that connect with that person.  It’s a perfunctory by the numbers relationship.  It’s a matter of bodies occupying a space at a given time so it’s a matter of convenience rather than passion.  So we get to walk through the inevitable as the characters are folded out.  The initial love interest is a casualty of procurement.  The plot moves on, the story thickens.  Peter enters the fray.  And somewhere in this evolution of orchestrated chaos, we follow a meandering journey and find ourselves turned around.  We will wind up needing a road map to stay connected.     

Two dimensional becomes four dimensional as we jump from one Olivia to two to three or is there a fourth?  There us a red haired Olivia who is a mother, this red haired Olivia appears to not be a mother.  Which theorem is being applied?  There is Peter; there is a voided memory of Peter.  Has the voided Peter negated all that he did in the past and wouldn’t that alter the time construct of his presence ever impacting all that he done?

The red headed Olivia invades Olivia’s world by taking over her life while the real Olivia is held captive in the alternate universe.  As we follow this journey, the former red headed Olivia waste no time in infiltrating and assimilating the very thing the original Olivia had come to discover, desires for Peter.  The much anticipated union goes to the fake Olivia.  Everything appears as normal as can be.  Peter is happy while the real Olivia is in peril.  But the real Olivia is tenaciously ingenious.  In addition to enduring the punishing interrogation techniques, Olivia figures out how to remove herself from captivity.  

She wills her presence to merge back into her universe to leave a message for the others.  Peter begins to realize there is something amiss with this Olivia.  By the time he figures it out, she also figures out that she has slipped up.  The real Olivia slips from her captors and makes her way to a portal to get home.   The fake Olivia prepares for an actionable offense to this universe with the assistance from colleagues from the other side.  But Peter and company figures out the game plan and thwarts the effort.  The fake Olivia is captured but the other side portals her back to her home while the real Olivia portals her way back to her real home.








Now safe in her own home, Olivia looks around to see signs of the other Olivia living her life.  She feels that presence including that of Peter knowing his unfettered emotions went unchecked.  She’s angry on a number of reasons and she needs someone to blame.  Peter gets the unwilling honor.  She feels Peter, of all people, should have known who the real Olivia was.  Peter and the other one were intimate.  Even though they were getting close, she feels just as betrayed as if the were already a committed couple.


Peter already feels guilty for not recognizing the other Olivia was a fake.  Still, he pursues Olivia to understand his point of view and his willingness to go along was based on his feelings of wanting to be with her.  If anything, he was guilty of the heart before being guilty of the act.  

This may be a case where Olivia would have easily forgiven Peter if he had hooked up with a prostitute versus being with her doppelganger.   In time, she comes to understand that it was not him she was angrier with than with the other Olivia and herself for denying her feelings for Peter when someone else easily saw the kindness Peter had.  And when she comes to terms with that, she was finally able to be with him.