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I’m a big Nathan Fillion fan (Firefly, Serenity, Waitress), so I’m also a big fan of his new show, Castle. Briefly, Fillion plays a best-selling novelist (Rick Castle) who is shadowing an NYC police detective as she investigates homicides. Naturally, they always get their man (or woman) and there is plenty of witty banter.
The most recent episode wasn’t about a murder – it was a kidnapping. The Detective reads the facts of the case: Parents married ten years, one daughter, Angela, age two, adopted two years ago –
Says Castle: Adopted?
And that’s when I turned to my husband and said, “Please don’t make it be the birth mother.”
Sadly, they went there. Now, fortunately, it wasn’t her, or the birth father, who kidnapped the girl. But in the brief appearance that adoption made on-screen, birth parents were certainly painted in an unflattering light.
The Detective begins questioning the birthmother, who was in high school when the baby was born, with “You regretted that decision. That’s why you decided to try and find her.”
So, obviously, open adoption doesn’t exist in this reality, and birth parents who want to know what’s happening to their children can’t be trusted.
It turns out that the mother didn’t request the information, the birth father forged her signature on a form requesting the adoptive parents’ contact information. He is accosted at work, and admits to wanting the information. All he wanted was to see his daughter, because he had been in Iraq when she was born. So, he went by the apartment once and caught a glimpse. Done.
Both of the birth parents were horrified to hear that their daughter had been kidnapped. Put plainly, they freaked, just like any parent would.
The episode got one small detail right: The birth parents were called “birth mother” and “birth father”. So, that’s something.
The child is found by the end of the hour, in a twist that my husband saw coming from the beginning. (The criminal is always the guest star with the biggest name.) After they were questioned, the birth parents never came up again in the episode. I’m sitting here wondering, will they ever know that their daughter is OK? What happens now, in that adoption, especially given the circumstances of the kidnapping?
Adoption was just a red herring. It would have been nice if they could have gotten it right.
I had the same reaction when the word adoption was mentioned. I was sure that it was going to mean one more show I would have to stop watching. They didn’t do everything right in the episode (like the assumption that the birth mom would know detailed financial info as to EXACTLY how much money the parents had) but I was very happy it wasn’t an evil birth mother plot. I was also happy they showed the birth parents CARING that something had happened to their daughter.