You know what I don't like? It happened. The relationship between Castle & Beckett stopped being unspoken, and now the bad thing happened. I warned about this last year when it happened on Fringe, and now the same thing happened on Castle.

They HAVE to use the relationship as a source of conflict and strife, and in order to do that, especially when you have two appealing and sane characters who seem too cool for artificial relationship drama, you need a chick. In order for a relationship to exist on TV, one of the characters has to be a mere prop background character (Ryan's woman, as a Castle-relevant example) or else one of the parties in the relationship has to be a chick. Now that is fine when they hook a cool character up with a chick, but when there are TWO likable characters who are getting put together, one of them has to be debased and defiled and turned into a chick. That happened on Fringe, when Peter & Olivia finally got together in the same universe. Olivia arbitrarily broke up with him because when her analog from an alternate universe pretended to be her, he did not realize this was a different person, despite the inability of any known scientific method to demonstrate this fact. She even admitted the irrationality, but it was all about feelings and other bullshit chick crap. Relationships are not about feelings, they are about cooperation, common sense, shared values and sex. Olivia would have been great to watch in a relationship because with people regularly exploding or melting, who has time to fight over Valentine's Day? But no, they had to make her into a chick. Same thing on House MD. He was a hilarious, sarcastic misanthrope who screwed with people for his own amusement, and she was the one boss who would even give him a chance with his unorthodox ways, and at the same time, was the one person capable of standing up to him and dealing with him as he was, accommodating his eccentricities, and at the same time, keeping him in check and getting him to jump through hoops. Then they went and got in a relationship together, and she arbitrarily started dumping crap on him like not wanting him to hang out with her daughter, lest the kid get hurt, or make him play guessing games about how he has upset her this week, and finally, dumping her drug-addicted boyfriend, for popping opiates when she was undergoing life-threatening surgery. She KNEW what she was getting into with him, and they hooked up in front of his stash. She got turned into a chick, and eventually driven off the show by the end of the season. And now Castle has done the same thing. One of the few female characters worthy of a modicum of respect, and now she's a chick who voluntarily sees a therapist and lies about not remembering the day of her shooting because she is too scared to admit she heard what Castle said, and also she's all weepy because she got shot. Once. And survived, un-maimed, with all body parts and full physical functionality and stll drop-dead gorgeous, but she has whine to her therapist about it. Twelve years ago that might have been acceptable, but in a world where we have men coming back from overseas strapping on prostheses to get through their normal lives again, Beckett's weepy sniveling approach to her own shooting comes across as disgustingly self-indulgent. Hell, Rizzoli & Isles, a show that belongs on the Lifetime network had THEIR big city, pants-wearing homicide detective with a minority co-worker, grizzled male mentor and coroner best friend, shoot HERSELF through the torso to kill the bad guy grabbing her from behind, and all the glorified chicks on that show gave her a swift boot to the ass and she was over her pity party by episode two. No REAL New Yorker would let herself get upstaged by a Bostonian colleague in that manner. Also, annoyingly, I had pretty much resigned myself to the fact that Castle was going to turn into the chick, but here he is all manning up and working the case without any ego games, and setting his little snot of a daughter straight for once, and it's Beckett who's gone all whiny-chick on us.

There are so few respect-worthy women on TV these days (on most of my shows they're bikers' skanks or approaching running joke status for letting their serial killer brothers pull the wool over their eyes), and now with disgusting fare that revels in the days when they were mere commodities to be sexually exploited for marketing purposes, like the Playboy Club or the one about the stewardesses, it is a pity to see yet another one get flushed down the chick hole.