The death of a personal injury attorney leads the team to discover he might be hiding a dead body.
- Ambulance Chaser: Both the victim and the killer are opportunistic personal injury specialists, though of varying levels of morality.
- Amoral Attorney:
- Richie's ex-wife Elisa had no qualms about working for Modesto as their general counsel despite knowing of their misdeeds.
- Archie, the killer, was willing to murder Richie in order to retain the evidence for a blackmail scheme.
- The Atoner: When Richie was at another law firm years ago, he helped cover up that Modesto Motors had faulty airbags in their sedans. People were dying, though, so he went out to grab that test dummy as proof of the cover-up.
- Bait-and-Switch: Turns out Richie wasn't hiding a corpse... it was a test dummy.
- Crusading Lawyer: Ultimately, Richie is this. Despite his Ambulance Chaser tendencies, he genuinely wanted justice and cared about his clients.
- Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: Archie had wanted to use the test dummy to blackmail Modesto instead of just exposing them like Richie was planning to and killed him for it.
- Hollywood Law: "If that dummy was stolen from our storage facility, then it's the property of Modesto and we'd like it back" is a very dumb thing to say because Elisa just admitted to ownership and nailed the civil case against Modesto shut. Don't know why they hired her, honestly.
- Performance Anxiety: Beckett confides in Martha that she has a bad case of stage fright, but still wants to go through with her and Castle's singing/dancing routine at the charity event to avoid disappointing him. However, Castle overheard this and arranged for Jimmy Kimmel to come back as the event's celebrity guest to replace them so that she wouldn't have to perform.
- Precision F-Strike: Richie "The Pitbull" Falco at the end of his commercial:I'll make the law your bitch!
- Ripped from the Headlines: The faulty airbags sending debris into vehicle occupants is a direct reference to the scandal surrounding defective Takata airbags and the subsequent recall.
- Shadow Discretion Shot: At the end of the episode, we see the shadows of Castle and Beckett as they do their singing/dancing routine in the shower.
- Shout-Out: To a Star Trek catchphrase. When asked to examine a test dummy, Lanie says, "I'm a doctor, not a puppeteer."
