The Wife:

This week’s installment of The Bones, as Heidi Klum likes to call it, was a meditation on the value of the individual within structured groups. Booth desperately wanted a dead guy’s chair and spent the episode pontificating on the glories of that chair, what it would mean if he were to receive it and how he could manipulate the playing field so that he could get it. The Intern of the Week – a sullen, Goth-y anthropologist always on the verge of an existential crisis – tries to fit in with the rest of the squints at the Jeffersonian. Finally, Bones meditates on the nature of the common office environment as she and Booth investigate the murder of one horrible bitch of an office manager, so hated by many of her employees that she was shoved down an elevator shaft after she was dispatched, causing her body to be dragged and crushed as the elevator traveled along its 16-floor trajectory.

The employees of the office become aware of this when an elevator ride starts to get extremely smelly and a shinbone, still connected to the foot bone and the basic black pump bone, falls into the carrel with them. I’m pretty sure the prop department made that shinbone out of a turkey leg and some pulled meats this week. It was vaguely reminiscent of Renaissance Faire . . . and I know that’s very wrong of me to think. Just like how, later in the episode, when the victim’s stomach contents were revealed to be a gyro, I instantly really, really wanted one.

That’s probably a bad sign when a show about death makes me want food, right?

Mmmm . . . turkey.

Mmmm . . . turkey.

Anyway, it was the Intern of the Week’s job to reconstruct the roughly 2,000-pieces of bone fragments into a useable skeletal structure back at the Jeffersonian. Our dour intern, Colin Fisher, was played by Joel David Moore, whom I immediately recognized but had trouble placing, until my husband looked up his resume on the interwebs and reminded me that he was the best friend in Art School Confidential. I just knew that I had a vision of Joel David Moore smoking weed in a beanie with his legs spread, but I couldn’t think of where I got that image. (Thanks, baby.) I really liked this intern, perhaps because he is like so many people I know: so heady that he’s permanently a little sad inside, like a French Symbolist poet.

Hodgins: Did you discover the cause of death yet?
Fisher: Life, man. Life is always the cause of death.
Hodgins: Okay. Now you’re just a tool.

Bones and Booth interview a number of office drones after finding the butt of a joint at the top of the elevator shaft. They trace the blunt back to Ted Russo (Devin McGinn), a “reformed” stoner who is still paranoid enough to make me believe that he is still smoking. We all know weed makes you a little stupid, but I think Bones asks a really important question this week about the nature of marijuana use in a world that has criminalized it: Does smoking weed make you stupid enough to shove a body down an elevator shaft? The answer, it turns out, is no, because Fisher discovers that the victim, Patty, had too wide a pelvis to fit down the shaft in the first place, meaning that the body was dumped from the 16th floor before it shattered into so many little pieces.

Booth and Bones discover that Patty was not well-liked by many of her colleagues, because she was a horrible bitch to everyone. She always parked over the line in Dave the IT Guy’s parking spot just to make him suffer, which is why, after she got him fired, he keyed her car. She blackmailed her boss into letting her make purchases on his credit card because she caught him making fraudulent purchases. She even wanted the friendly stoner gone simply for being friendly and stoned. But with so many people having motive to kill Patty and really solid alibis, Booth and Bones have nowhere to go until Fisher can discover the cause of death.

“You give me cause of death, I give you a Kierkegaard t-shirt.” –Cam

Finally, Fisher notices a wound on Patty’s skull, which he beats himself up for not noticing before. Upon further inspecting, he and Cam realize that the murder weapon was a stapler, which Booth and Bones recover at Chip the Asian Guy’s house. Chip’s semen was found on the floor of the copy room, as well as on Patty’s skirt, leading the team to believe that he killed her because she threatened to fire him if he stopped sleeping with her. When Booth makes Chip try to hold open the elevator doors by himself, he and Bones realize that there was a second person involved: the person Chip was actually sleeping with, Christine the Receptionist. Christine threw the stapler at Patty, who threatened to expose the office romance, which was forbidden by company policy. The stapler ruptured a pre-existing aneurism in Patty’s brain, killing her. Then the two lovers pried open the elevator doors and tossed the body down the shaft.

Clearly, when a stapler is your murder weapon, all I can think of is this:


The Husband:

As this is the first episode this season that truly felt like an episode of Bones (sorry dogfighting ring, you were good and emotional and all but was definitely a tangential episode as far as I’m concerned, and the OCD one last week felt a little more Criminal Minds/Numb3rs to me), I really dug the mystery and science of the central case as it interplayed with the humorous shenanigans of Bones/Booth and the Squints. More than anything, Bones as a show has the ability to create levity around a particularly gruesome crime scene, so when I saw that Hart Hanson and the production designers were really pushing the limit with the remains of the elevator-dragged body, I knew we were in for something special.

Great ensemble work. Great guest stars. Great gore detail. Great mystery. It’s not all that complicated. Add to that the spectacular work of Intern of the Week Colin Fisher for showing the rest of the Jeffersonian team that as dour and unsmiling as Dr. Zack Addy may have been, he’s not nearly as bad as a lip-pierced Goth with a hard-on for existentialist philosophy.

INTERN OF THE WEEK

Colin Fisher (Joel David Moore): 9

Pros: Gives the team a perspective that their lives and inner turmoil issues aren’t as bad comparatively. As is true with most any intern this season is very good at figuring out the little details. Determined despite having recurring existential crises. Actor is less than five degrees of separation from yours truly. (My sister has a friend who has a friend etc. etc.) If he stays around, will amuse Hodgins with his robot impersonation (as he did in Grandma’s Boy).

Cons: So much philosophizing will incur major amounts of wrath from the team, most likely Cam at the forefront of said wrath. Too down on himself when unable to find “cause of death.” So much like Dr. Zack Addy that, if he did stick around and Addy returned upon being released, the two would literally create a physical black hole of social retardation and despair in the labs.