Bones 4.8: “The Skull in the Sculpture”

The Wife:

This episode of Bones involved the body of a man, crushed inside his own junk sculpture. If it’s murder, all signs point to the artist’s assistant, Roxie, a former lover of Angela’s who stood to inherit a large fortune from Jeffrey Thorne’s death. Roxie claims she didn’t kill Jeffrey and suggests that it may have been suicide, as she often heard him talk about becoming “part of his art,” to which gallery owner and geisha makeup enthusiast Helen Bridenbecker exclaims:

Helen: Well done, Jeffrey.
Bones: You are an extremely unlikable woman.

The Jeffersonian team wants to cut through the sculpture in order to remove the bones and examine them, but Helen and her lawyers get a temporary injunction to protect the integrity of the artwork, so the squints have to resort to examining the bones with an endoscope and very delicately scraping out particulates without disrupting the art. Unfortunately, there’s too much flesh to be able to see the bones, so Brennan improvises by dumping a bucket of flesh-eating beetles into the sculpture in order to get clean bones faster while still complying with the injunction.

Wow, those bugs sure made quick work of that flesh, didn't they?

Angela doesn’t believe that Roxie would kill anyone and suggests that maybe Jeffrey did suffer from depression and committed suicide. Because of Bones’ stunt with the beetles, the temporary injunction is shortened to a two-day time frame and the squints must still uncover the true cause of death. With the endoscope, Daisy Wick (returning as Intern of the Week) discovers 88 bone fractures that could have been consistent with the cause of death being a crushed to death in the car. However, being unable to remove the bones, there’s no way to prove that this is the case. That is, until Angela finds a way to scan the entire sculpture and reverse engineer the crushing action in her hologram machine thing. In doing so, she proves that if Jeffrey had locked himself in the trunk of the car, he could have committed suicide by crushing himself to death. In attempting to prove suicide, Angela actually ends up proving murder when Daisy discovers an 89th fracture to the back of the skull.

Because the team was able to prove murder, the injunction is removed and Hodgins can finally rip apart the sculpture. Daisy accidentally crushes the skull as she tries to remove it from the sculpture, and Bones has to reconstruct the whole thing herself. Once she does, she realizes that the murder weapon was likely a common fire axe. Female sweat on the axe handle recovered from the gallery once again leads the team to think its Roxie, especially considering that Jeffrey’s body had been rolled across the gallery floor by a tiny woman, until they realize that the sweat contains traces of a cancer drug that causes skin discoloration, which leads to the arrest of wicked geisha Helen Bridenbecker, who confesses that she killed Jeffrey in order to discover one truly great artist before she died, knowing full well that art appreciates in value after the artist’s death.

Paint me like one of your French girls, Roxie.

I liked this case well enough this week, but Angela was really the star this week. She’s been meeting with Sweets to discuss the appropriate time to move on from her divorce and break-up with Hodgins, as six weeks is the longest she’s gone without sex in, like, forever. She insists to Sweets that all of her relationships are intense and passionate and that she’s ready to begin another one. Seeing Roxie again, with whom she spent an intense year back in art school, brings back some old feelings that lead the two women to share the passionate kiss of old flames when Roxie reveals that she still has an old painting she’d done of Angela all those years ago. While Roxie identifies as a lesbian and will never sleep with a man, Angela, clearly, has a much looser construction of her sexuality, one that is pretty highly evolved on the cultural scale. Angela acknowledges her past affair with Roxie, but doesn’t choose to label herself as bisexual. She accepts all of her lovers equally and has been equally attracted to all of them. Bones clearly understands this from an anthropological perspective, but she fears Booth might not, until he reveals to her that his favorite aunt growing up was a lesbian who often took young Seeley to Phillies games with her partner. That’s the nice thing about a show based on forensic anthropology: every issue is treated with about the right amount of judgment, which is to say, none.

And props to Sweets this week for actually being balls out and revealing his relationship with Daisy to the rest of the crew. His somewhat stunted sexuality proved a nice contrast to Angela’s this week, but I’m glad he manned up in the end. Also, it’s good to know that he drinks Sidecars. Sweets and I are the same age(ish), so I’m impressed that someone in their early twenties has discovered that a Sidecar is his drink. Mine, by the way, is a Singapore Sling.

And, finally, a quote from Bones that I really enjoyed that made me laugh far too hard:

“There was no ‘before’ before the Big Bang. Because time didn’t exist.”

The Husband:

Is it just me, or was the sight of geisha bitch Helen removing her white makeup while crying about being swindled by Mexican “cancer doctors” and revealing her splotched face the most emotional the show has been this season? (Other than the dog dying off-screen, of course.) It’s always very interesting when the show truly sympathizes with the criminal even after they have been revealed as the murderer. Like my wife said, the show sidelines much of its judgment and instead focusing on human nature itself, thus making the show very unique amidst the good-versus-evil of so many other procedurals. In other words, it’s kind of borderline Zen.

As Carla Gallo has returned to the show, yet only for one week after being fired again, it is time for a re-evaluation of her Intern of the Week status.

Intern of the Week (Re-judging):

Daisy Wick (Carla Gallo): 5 (-1.5)

Pros: Is apparently getting all kinds of naked over on Showtime’s Californication. Is willing to “think about [the case] till my head explodes.” Very good at kissing up.

Cons: A full point down from her last appearance, Daisy’s weaknesses were in fuller display. Why? Here be a list. Does bad Yoda impersonations. Breaks fragile skulls that are evidence. Does not understand the concept of personal space. Dr. Brennan doesn’t like her ass being kissed.

Still, we finally got an actual Apatow universe hook-up between Sweets and Daisy.

(Wife’s Note: Daisy and Sweets should get married immediately. Daisy Sweets is a lovely name.)