For several seasons of ABC series Castle, viewers sat on the edge of their couch cushions to see whether novelist Richard Castle (Nathan Fillion) and NYPD detective Kate Beckett (Stana Katic) would get together as they worked to solve both small cases and big-time conspiracies.
Katic, for her part, wanted the two characters together sooner rather than later. “I might be naively romantic, but I believe that a relationship can be just as spicy when people get together as it was in the chase,” she told Entertainment Weekly in 2011. “The complications that happen when characters like Beckett and Castle get together can make for interesting viewing.”
But Fillion wanted to draw it out. “When you get people together, [viewers] stop with the yearning, they stop with the wanting,” he observed to EW. “They go, ‘Ah, finally. They’re together. All right, what else is on?’”
Eventually, of course, the ship known as Caskett set sail — and lasted all the way through a rushed series finale. To celebrate Castle’s 15th anniversary on March 9, here’s a timeline of Castle and Beckett’s relationship.