It's funny to me that this is coming up now bc I've long said that the decline of the show wasn't S8, PI, nor 6x23 itself, but what resulted from it. The cliffhanger paid off big time, but the storyline introduced in S7 wasn't good enough to keep people (imo because it went disappearance -> RC's at fault -> amnesia storyline + random, illogical clues -> no further info until Sleeper). I do suspect that the wedding was postponed bc network wanted sweeps, but yeah. I appreciated the soapbox rant.
* Sorry, postponed at the beginning of S7, not at the end of 6x23. That cliffhanger was all Marlowe (and I still think was brilliant, albeit something that could have been done post-wedding instead.)
Oh, it came up it bits and pieces, but it’s really one of those things that you can only confirm in hindsight when you’ve got all the numbers and such to stare at and notice the trends. And I can remember looking at the ratings numbers after Child’s Play aired and thinking that people were dissatisfied with how the early episode were playing out because they had basically gone back to that pitfall of not allowing the emotional repercussions to carry through the season, episode to episode. B-plot from season five onwards (including a section of season eight) was week-to-week and characters generally only reacted or responded to previous conflicts if there was a two parter or it would serve the storyline.
I’m not saying we have to reiterate every point every week, but there is crafting a b-plot with a throughline and there is crafting a b-plot that appears for two episodes at the top of the season, one episode at sweeps, and one episode at the end of the season and, through it all, you are never given a legitimate answer or explanation that makes it worth it. That’s sloppy, and its something that played out in the last two seasons of the show with Castle’s disappearance and with Loksat and, surprise, surprise, it all starts with the decision not to have them get married in the season six finale. I’m not saying they had to be married to make it worth it but, rather, that if you take that storytelling risk and eliminate something that the audience has been psyched up for the entire season then you’d better have a big time payoff. We never got that.
Because, yeah, I am with you Anon that if they had presented a legitimate, interesting story that explained why Castle and Beckett couldn’t have been married before his kidnapping that there would be a different trend. Would you have gotten all those lost viewers back? There is no way to know, but there is absolutely something to be said for crafting a story (even at the back of the season) that is so good and explains everything so well that people start talking about it and maybe convince those fans who stopped watching to come back and binge watch during the hiatus and maybe then return for the following season.
Castle’s disappearance was never done well. From its inception, to the not-a-two-parter that gave more questions than answers, to the half-assed explanation about Thailand that I truly think Hawley and Winter just never bothered to try and fix because, honestly, I don’t think there was much hope of salvaging anything from that train wreck. All you can do is try to clean it up and move on, which is essentially what they tried to do (and, honestly, I do appreciate the parallel of Castle and Beckett making the same choice. It’s a nice little period on that storyline), for better or worse. People left when it didn’t hold up at the beginning of season seven and, gradually, more and more people followed.
The thing about season eight is that, for all the complaining and devise choices, the ratings held. They started low, they stayed low, but also stayed steady. So while people hated it, that hatred didn’t equal out to a decline.