I feel like there's something meta about Castle. Something that I should be able to put into words but haven't quite gotten my head around yet.

Because it's like this: He's a writer of mystery novels. He is helping the police solve "actual" murders by thinking about what would make the "real" murder a good story. Where's the plot twist? What are the secret motivations in real people's lives? What would make this murder a juicy interesting story? And based on that, he goes down avenues that the police might have missed or pursues a line questioning that they wouldn't have and finds more and better information.

But this whole setup is in and of itself a story... in which murders are given motive and juicy plots and unexpected twists.

So it's this guy who is taking "real" crime and imprinting the cliches and framework of fictional crime upon it to make it a narrative. But it's happening within the confines of being fiction crime turned into a narrative. I don't know if it's in some way poking fun at itself. Or pointing out how we turn that which isn't a story into one all the time, casting people into roles so the fit into preestablished molds that we can understand.

I feel like I'm grasping fog.

But I also feel like there's something there.