And the Firefly Easter egg on Castle is …

… a catalyzer!

“Wait, a what?” For anyone who’s up on their Firefly lore, a catalyzer is that critical piece of equipment that a Firefly-class ship needs in order to function … pretty much at all. You probably would remember this piece best from the awesome Firefly episode “Out of Gas”, being the piece that Mal needs to replace in order to get Serenity working again and able to call back his crew.

For those of you who don’t know what the heck I’m talking about, read on.

Nathan Fillion had mentioned via Twitter that he placed a Firefly “Easter egg” on the set of his show Castle, later saying that we should look for it no sooner than this past week’s Halloween episode. Days later, it seems someone’s found it.

First, here’s a decent image of a catalyzer from Firefly, so you can get some idea of what one looks like:

Pretty unremarkable, right? Well, “it’s a nuthin’ part ’til ya need one.” According to Nathan Fillion via Twitter, fellow Twitterer @andreajean915 was one of the first with keen enough eyes to have found the item sitting on a shelf in Castle’s home, as pictured and circled above. This is from about the 15-second mark of the episode.

To the left is a close-up of the catalyzer in that image. Even in close-up and lightened up a bit, I’ve got to give mad props to Andrea for figuring it out.

Whether the catalyzer will remain a part of the Castle set from now on isn’t known, but it sure would be damn cool for it to stick around. Who knows, maybe soon enough we’ll see the call-back button from “Out of Gas” appear … and Castle will press it.

Clacked by Keith McDuffee
on Oct 27, 2009 @ 23:56 EST5EDT