It has been a long time since fans of ABC's "Castle" cared about anything other than when and if Beckett (Stana Katic) and her husband (Nathan Fillion) are getting back together. However, before the Season 8 breakup consumed viewers' focus, the big lingering question on fans' minds was what exactly happened when Rick Castle went missing in the Season 7 premiere. Well, the timeline of Castle's relationship status remains unclear, but showrunner Alexi Hawley is promising answers on that whole disappearance mess.

“We can definitively say that that’s coming up in the middle part of the season,” Hawley told Entertainment Weekly. “We’re definitely going to go there probably in the episode 14 area -- 13, 14, 15 -- something like that. We’re still nailing down the specifics, but we want to get into that. We want to, as we promised at the beginning of the season, tie that in to some of the stuff that we set up at the beginning of the season.”

In episode 20 of Season 7, fans found out the reason he went missing on his wedding day was that he was abducted by the CIA to serve as a negotiator between the U.S. and his old Pakistani friend Bilal, who was defecting from Al Qaeda. However, there are still a lot of unanswered questions, like how did Castle get shot and why was he gone for over two months? Perhaps fans will find out when in the midseason episodes Hawley teased, which should air in early 2016.

In the meantime, episode 5 of the current season, "The Nose," earned just a 1.1 rating (signifying the percent of U.S. households tuning in) in the key 18-49 demographic -- good for 6.94 million viewers. That matches the number for the episode 4, "What Lies Beneath," which also happens to be the lowest the series has received in eight seasons. Possibly exhausted from the "will they or won't they" drama with Castle and Beckett, fans have been checking out this season. Hawley may want to start dishing out those answers quick when the show returns in November.

"Castle" airs Mondays at 10 p.m. EDT on ABC. New episodes resume on Nov. 9.

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