What's On: Haunted Castle

The Halloween season is an exciting time for fall television, especially when your favorite series sync up with the holiday. Sometimes shows culminate their own spooky traditions (How I Met Your Mother's 'Slutty Pumpkin,' Roseanne's homemade haunted houses) and other times, it's a chance for programs to invoke bizarre scenarios (My So-Called Life's school lock-in) that frame some of the weirdest episodes in special circumstance TV history. Tonight, Castle tries to spread the holiday fear by incorporating vampires and werewolves into one of ABC's best mystery cases yet.

Castle [10 PM, ABC]

Last week, ABC surprised us all by picking up the mystery drama for a full season, tacking on nine additional episodes to its original order. Tonight, writers reward loyal Nathan Fillion fans with a costume that spoofs the actor's geeky gamer reputation before he sets off to solve the mystery of a young man discovered in a graveyard with vampire fangs and a wooden stake through his heart.

Jon & Kate Plus 8 [9 PM, TLC]

During the first few seasons of Jon & Kate Plus 8, viewers eagerly anticipated the "Viewer Questions" episode so that they could finally learn which detergent Kate used on the sextuplets' sweaters or how the family grocery shopped for 8 children while sticking to a budget. Tonight's viewer question special, "You Ask, Kate Answers," has drawn attention for other reasons: First, because Jon has been booted from the forum, and secondly, because Kate will finally answer all of the hard questions about her failed marriage and Jon's assorted mistakes that her ironclad contract has prohibited her from answering on Larry King Live.

No Excuses With Master P [10:30 PM, VH1]

Percy Miller, better known as '90s rapper, entrepreneur and Romeo's father, Master P, takes to the Los Angeles streets tonight in his new VH1 special. Like a one-man Intervention meets Gone Too Far, Master P reaches out to a former gang member who can't get his life together for his girlfriend and son. Drawing on his own past as a New Orleans hustler, Master P hopes to motivate the young man before his girlfriend leaves him and he loses custody of his child.

Beowulf [10 PM, TMC]

One of the pitfalls of performance-capture technology is that very little of the "performance" makes it onto the screen, but you can't fault Robert Zemeckis for trying to breath some life into an Old English epic by having virtual people cavort about and get their animated codpieces in a bunch over mean old Grendel. Unlike her chaste work in Kung Fu Panda, Angelina Jolie's VO and computerized body sexes up the Anglo-Saxon tale and helps distract you from the fact that Beowulf himself looks like Sean Bean but talks like Ray Winstone.