Headhunters

**Writer**: Alexi Hawley

**Director**: John Terlesky

#### DUSTJACKETS BLURB

Beckett is busy prepping for a trial and Castle is busy avoiding Beckett, so he decides to take his life in his hands and spend a case shadowing Detective Ethan "the Widowmaker" Slaughter. And even though he's cheating on them, Beckett, Ryan, and Esposito seem to forgive him, stepping in several times to save his ass.

### Guest cast

* Adam Baldwin - DETECTIVE ETHAN SLAUGHTER
* Michael McGrady - BRIAN REILLY
* Michael Dorn - DR. CARTER BURKE

### Music

* "The Devil's Got My Soul" - THE CROSSROADS BAND

### Literary and other references

* *The Godfather* is an Academy award winning movie based on Mario Puzo's novel of the same name. One of the more memorable scenes of the movie includes a character waking up to a severed horse head in his bed as a warning.
* Investigator Jake Styles and J.L "Fatman" McCabe were the title characters of a late 80s/early 90s crime drama called *Jake and the Fatman*.
* Perhaps sly references to Nathan Fillion and Adam Baldwin's short lived (but now cult favorite) sci-fi series *Firefly*: Castle gives Slaughter his brown leather jacket as a bribe (a callback to the Browncoat allegiance). Castle also acts out a scene using a dinosaur (as Wash does in the opening scene of *Firefly*'s first episode).

### Memorable moments

* The "action figures".
* Trading Browncoats
* Beckett is willing to give up her job for Castle.
* Not being able to follow the plot because the reunion of Browncoats was so amazing.
* Castle's reaction to Slaughter's comment about Alexis' ass.

### Quotable quotes

* CASTLE: NPYD! Nobody move!
* CASTLE: He's really going to help me shake up this next Nikki Heat book.
BECKETT: Yeah, if you live long enough to actually write it.
* BECKETT: What if I waited too long?
* BECKETT: So what do I do?
DR. BURKE: What do you want to do?
* RYAN: I feel like he's cheating on us.
BECKETT: He's not cheating on us, Ryan. He's just ... branching out.
* BECKETT: Espo, if the guy's hell bent on leaving the nest then there's nothing I can do about it.
ESPOSITO: You really don't feel that way, do you?
* CASTLE: All this time, you had my back.
* CASTLE: I guess the question is, do you want it badly enough to get over the hurt?

### Just the facts

* When was the last time he wanted something "new"? Oh yeah...when he met Kate Beckett...
* Alexis applied (and got into) Princeton, Oxford, Stanford, and Sarah Lawrence.
* Ethan Slaughter turns up again in season 8, in "Cool Boys" (8x06).

### Oops

* Legally, the way that Detective Slaughter gets his information is a serious breach of Constitutional rights. People are protected against giving information under coercion, and anything Slaughter gets that way wouldn't really be admissible in court. (Not to mention the huge ethics and police regulation violations.)
* Most colleges will email out their decisions along with sending paper copies, so unless Alexis wasn't glued to her computer the weeks leading up to April 1st, then there is a small chance that she wouldn't know where she got in.

### Branch libraries

* News
	+ EW InsideTV - 'Castle' guest star Adam Baldwin talks 'turning the tables' on 'Firefly' costar Nathan Fillion (16 Apr 12)
* Reviews