Bones 4.25: “The End in the Beginning”

The Wife:

Bones finale, while I enjoyed your silly alternate universe mystery that could have been Booth’s coma or Brennan’s erased fantasy manuscript or both at the same time, you were a weird, weird way to do a season finale. Although, really, how else would you have managed to solve a murder while Booth lay in a four-day post-surgical coma? If I accept the fantasy manuscript as what that story was, then I appreciate that it functioned to subconsciously illustrate Brennan’s feelings for Booth, as she would never be able to say them in real life. And I wonder if the crux of next season will be Brennan dealing with those feelings in light of the fact that Booth, tumor-free, now doesn’t know just quite who this woman he’s spent the last four years of his life with is. Memory loss is a bit of a hoary trope, usually relegated to daytime television, but I have faith that Bones will transform it into something useful next season.

Incidentally, I am 99% percent more likely to go to a bar called The Lab than a bar not called The Lab.

That said, let me talk about things I enjoyed about this weird alternate universe:

• Excellent use of every intern (save for the woman from the airplane caper and Michael Badalucco), even Zack.
• Fischer as the chef made me long for Kitchen Confidential, which was better than FOX thought it was.
  
• I am sad that Eugene Byrd’s Clark had to play entirely toward type as a hip hop superstar C-Sync, who wants to play at The Lab, the club run by Booth and Brennan.
  
• I am, however, happy that Pej Vahdat’s Viziri got to play away from being defined by his religion and got to be a slick rival club owner, which is still kind of a Persian character type, but a much cooler one.
  
• Daisy is a sloot in any universe.
  
• It is perfect for psychologist Sweets to be a bartender, as bartenders are just as good as listening as shrinks are. And charge less by the hour.
  
• Wendell Bray is the perfect bouncer, as I think this kind of 100% street-smart tough guy is exactly what he would be without his medical knowledge.
  
• I have never loved Mr. Nigel-Murray more than as an adorable British DJ in this episode. He should always wear a hat in the lab. His best line? “I’m not going to fare well in jail. I’m lovely.” Yes, sweetheart. You rather are.
  
• Zack was apparently Brennan’s assistant. I guess a club owner might have an assistant, but it seems like less of a fit than the rest of the characters in this episode.
  
• Alternate universe Hodgins is a crime writer, and that’s pretty cool.
  
• Alternate universe Angela was basically Angela, but without computer skills. She wore a super cute pink-striped dress at one point though, and I just found it: It’s Marc Jacob’s Crosstown Sleeveless Dress, and it’s at Neiman Marcus for $428. I. Am. Awesome.
  
• I loved that Sweets band was called Gormogon, and yet played lovely, sunny pop-rock music. JFD is a fine singer, and I also loved the callback line: “Some people think that I’m Gormogon, but I’m not.”
  
• I totally believe that Booth would run a club if he weren’t in law enforcement, because that’s probably what his little brother should be doing now that he isn’t in the military anymore. They switched roles!

Found this! It's at Neiman Marcus!

However:

It is completely unbelievable that Brennan would run a club and remain so logical and fastidious. I could see her running a business, yes, but something that makes medical devices or computer parts or something. I do not see her as the kind of person who makes a business of entertainment, and that rang through loud and clear to me as her character said things about how she prides herself on being logical throughout the course of the investigation by Cam and Jared Booth. Everyone in the alternaverse was an alternate version of themselves, except for Booth and Bones. Booth’s transition made sense, Bones’ didn’t. And if she wrote the story, I’m not really sure why she would choose to insert herself into that character, other than to pair herself with Booth as husband and wife.

I guess the ‘shippery moments were pretty hot, although I find the alterna-Booth and Bones pregnancy discussion less cute than false. I don’t know, gang. This was a weird one. And Mötley Crüe was there. Why? I’m mostly just kind of confused as to how this functions as a season finale.

By the way, my pick for Interns next season would be a rotating schedule of Vincent Nigel-Murray, Colin Fischer and Wendell Bray, because they’re clearly the best. And we’ll get enough of Daisy since she’s all up on Sweets 24/7.

The Husband:

I was going to wrap up my intern-of-the-week for this season by stating my preferences for who should return, but my wife pretty much nailed it. Fischer is great comic relief for a geek like me, but Bray is the best character and Nigel-Murray is the most interesting in terms of sheer knowledge. I would have loved to see Badalucco return, but that Emmy-winning star is just too expensive or busy, I guess.

So I’ll just have to settle on a quick commentary of the final episode. I think it was cute but ultimately disappointing. If this was an attempt at trying to turn into Moonlighting, a show that constantly shifted realities for random episodes just because they could. (One episode starts with a dude reading Shakespeare while watching Moonighting, so the episode had Willis and Shepard solving a case while being characters from The Taming of the Shrew.) But Bones, while often subversive of the modern standard procedural, is still far more serious than that show ever was and still has a reality to maintain, a reality millions of people love. And so, this episode was not nearly as interesting as my new iPhone. (Not a whole lot is, technically, but I make sure to use it as little as possible if I’m watching something I really give a shit about.)

Is this the real life? Is this just fantasy?

I also don’t really care what people have to say about whether or not Brennan and Booth had sex in the real world or in a fantasy, because goddamn it, it’s supposed to be ambiguous. Just like the final sequence on Grey’s Anatomy. We’ll find out this fall. Stop freaking out with your theories, online douchebags.

And hopefully, this fall will also see Zack’s return to the Jeffersonian. I miss that apprentice twerp.

 

Bones 4.8 and 4.9: “The Con Man in the Meth Lab” and “The Passenger in the Oven”

The Wife:

I’m not going to spend much time talking about the actual case for “Con Man” because that’s not the important part at all. The important part as Baby Booth, Jared, a military man over whom all the ladies of the Jeffersonian grow quite smitten. Jared has a way of seeming like the shining member of the Booth family, but that’s only because Seeley is constantly sacrificing his own success and happiness so that his little brother can play pretend alpha male. Given Seeley’s past with Cam, Jared invited the good doctor Saroyan to be his date to a military ball, but Cam has to cancel, so Bones volunteers to go as Jared’s date. He wastes no time in kissing her, a kiss that I can only assume would have been better coming from Seeley, although, as she notes, Jared’s features are even more symmetrical than those of his older brother. Bones starts to see the failures in her partner, criticizing him for constantly maneuvering his way out of the role of the alpha male . . . until she realizes that Booth sacrificed his credit on a big case (and thus the bonus he would get to buy himself a trip to Hawaii) in order to keep a DUI off his little brother’s record.

At Booth’s birthday party, he tells his brother that he can’t bail him out anymore on advice from Sweets and Bones, to whom he finally opens up about his relationship with his alcoholic father and his constant need to protect Jared.

This is not at all how I envisioned my trip.

And then there’s “The Passenger in the Oven,” which returns us to our normal Bones antics. Only zanier. And on an airplane. Because Bones is flying to China to look at the remains of some really old dead Chinese guy and speaks of it as though she’s returning to her true passion, Booth begins to doubt her place in his life and her commitment to working with the FBI. And then a flight attendant finds a cooked human body in one of the galley ovens. For the record, cooked human flesh smells something like roast pork, a fact which will keep me away from pork until the day I die.

Because of the murder, the Jeffersonian team gets called back in to work on their weekend off to help solve the case. Sweets comes straight from karaoke with Daisy (in Bermuda shorts and a polo), and Angela and Roxie have to cut their weekend at an artist’s retreat short in order to come back to work.

Booth and Bones proceed to solve the murder using MacGuyver-esque methodologies from Brennan’s forensic crime novels, with which Booth’s seatmate (an elderly woman with a penchant for murder mysteries) is incredibly familiar. The victim, Elizabeth Jones, was a travel writer who was working on an expose about DUIs in the airline industry, of which the airline featured on the show was allegedly the worst offender. But more than any professional enemies Miss Jones may have made, she was also having an affair with a married man . . . who happened to be sitting in the same section of the plane that she was . . . and whose son was suspiciously wasted and missing a video game chip that was conveniently embedded in Jones’ baked chest.

I was really amused by the good, pulpy mystery that was this episode. As Booth’s seatmate remarked, it was just like one of Dr. Brennan’s books. Good detective work all around, and funny Booth/Bones/Passenger repartee. Clearly, the best of which is the fact that Bones simply does not understand sexy librarian fantasies.

The Husband:

Interns of the Week:

Dr. Clark Edison (Eugene Byrd) (Re-judging): 5 (-0.5)

Pros: As with most of the interns, he is no-nonsense and good is at doing his job. Keeps the employees on track and wisely ignores their personal lives.

Cons: The good people of the Jeffersonian are nothing without their personal lives, and Dr. Edison’s attempted separation of the two misses the point completely. Even more unmemorable the second time around.

Secretly, she really wanted to be Jessica on Murder, She Wrote and hates the fact that Angela Lansbury got the part over her.

Airline Passenger Charlotte Utley (Peggy Miley): 7.5

Pros: Encyclopedic knowledge of mystery novels and their stories, perfect for those cases where the Jeffersonian employees are just thinking either too hard about simple matters or not being imaginative enough about how horrible and evil murderers can truly be. Worships Brennan and her writing. Carries everything she’d ever need to solve a mystery right in her purse. (Good call on the wooden probe, legally permissible on planes.) Should, as CliqueClack TV pointed out, get her own Murder She Wrote-type series.

Cons: Not an actual intern. Is probably dying of diabetes or something.

 

Bones 4.3: “The Finger in the Nest”

The Wife:

The thing that really struck me about this week’s Bones was not the Intern of the Week, Hodgin’s breakthrough with Sweets, Booth’s relationship with his son or even really the truly horrifying subject matter that arose from finding a human finger in a crow’s nest. What struck me this week was how much some of the actors truly delivered a look at themselves through their characters.

There was a brief moment where John Francis Daley’s Dr. Sweets discusses why Parker has been acting out at school with his father, Agent Booth. Parker, who discovered he titular finger in the nest, was not traumatized by his experience with human dismemberment, but rather was being traumatized by a bully at school, a corpulent girl who likes to carry Parker around like a monkey. Booth finds this extremely odd, as he was never bullied by anyone as a child. Sweets, on the other hand, posits that “We all had our Stephanie Clydes.” That comment made me smile, not because Sweets was demonstrating something that was true for Daley’s life, but for Daley’s career. My reply to his comment was, “Yes, that you did, Sam Weir.” Since creating that role on Freaks & Geeks, Daley has made a career of playing guys who are bumbling, adorable and geeky. I have no evidence to corroborate that Daley is himself any of these things, but I doubt he’d choose to accept those roles if he didn’t feel some affinity for them.

Booth’s scenes with his son, especially the opening sequence, I like to imagine are exactly how star and executive producer David Boreanaz interacts with his own son. Seeley teaching Parker how to throw the perfect football is reminiscent of Boreanaz teaching his own son how to play his favorite sport, hockey. In a recent Entertainment Weekly interview, Boreanaz talked about how he and his son love to sing “Low” because it annoys the hell out of Mrs. Boreanaz, and I was reminded of that every time I saw Booth with Parker. Boreanaz lives for his son, and Seeley Booth does too.

Bones' extensive knowledge of human anatomy also extends to chew toys.

As for Brennan, it is no secret that actress and executive producer Emily Deschanel is a vegan and animal rights advocate (she was edged out for World’s Sexiest Vegetarian 2008 by Leona Lewis ), and I felt that a large part of this episode came straight from her heart. The mystery at the core of this episode involved an illegal dogfighting ring run by a corrupt veterinary student (played by Veronica Mars‘ Adam Rose) who set his dog, Ripley, to kill a veterinarian who opposed the animal abuse and was about to expose the illegal activities. The episode was filled with horrible pictures of dogfights and far too many sad-eyed creatures. Bones herself does not misunderstand that within every domesticated dog is the ability to kill, as she compares the “killer dog” Ripley, whom she befriends, to her partner:

Temperance and Ripley Brennan, the Turner and Hooch of forensic anthropology.

“This dog reminds me of you. He has warm and reassuring eyes and he is capable of great violence.”

But when Ripley is put to death – as by law any animal who harms a human must be – Bones is heartbroken. I, too, was heartbroken, as was guest star and Dog Whisperer Cesar Millan, who calmed the dog by saying, “I’m so sorry, boy,” after Ripley was identified as the murder weapon. Bones had wanted to give the dog a second chance. Or, more accurately, a third chance: Ripley had been turned in at the dead vet’s clinic because it’s owners “were too stupid to realize that he would grow up to be a big dog,” and then adopted by corrupt veterinarian Andrew Hopp and forced to fight. I knew from the minute the vet tech began to tell Ripley’s story that Deschanel’s heart was in this episode, and that was certainly made clear in Bones’ eulogy for her dead almost-pet.

Bones talked about the dog’s abuse by humans, how he was adopted by people who only wanted him when he was a cute little puppy, and that he would never have killed anyone if his owner hadn’t told him to, because, ultimately, dogs love and serve their masters. They implicitly trust them. Trusting a bad person was Ripley’s only crime, because dogs, as Brennan tells us, “only see the good in people.” They’re just like that.

I have never openly cried at an episode of Bones before, but I did tonight. Those who know me know that I love dogs, and movies about them. A favorite from my childhood is Iron Will, and I fucking weep rivers when Gus dies. Every time. I love all animals. I’ve been a vegetarian for 10 years, and will be for the rest of my life. I support the humane society and don’t support animal breeders. I believe every shelter animal deserves a good home. They trust us, companion animals. And we owe them the courtesy of respecting their trust, and repaying their loyalty with our own. The idea that someone would abuse an animals’ trust does not sit well with me, and it shouldn’t sit well with anyone.

If Emily Deschanel can use her show as a soapbox from time to time, I feel moved enough to get up on mine for a minute. Please, please, please support your local animal shelters. Spay and neuter your pets to prevent pet overpopulation. Don’t support breeders. I can’t and won’t ask you to be vegetarian, but I will ask that you please make informed decisions about where your meat comes from. Don’t support animal abuse. They trust us, and we need to respect that.

With that said, please go do something nice for an animal, even if it’s just giving your dog a hug or letting your cat sleep on your head at night. I definitely owe my cat for letting me cry on him during this episode. It started off all fun and games with human fingers in nests and opossums eating dead people, and then I ended up drying my tears on a cat.

The Husband:

I think my wife said just enough for this episode, showing that even goofy FBI shows on Fox can still bring about some very deep-seeded emotions. Bones does proselytize sometimes, but it’s in well planned doses such as this episode. Hell, even last season when the show had an episode that centered entirely on horseplay fetishes, it treated it with just about the right amount of judgment. Here, Emily Deschanel did have a major purpose and moral to the episode, but I admire the restraint, using her own veganism and animal rights activism to spread the word without doing something insane like throwing paint on fur coats or doing performance art pieces involving Native American chants and a lot of crying.

What I can add, however, is the fact that I got a great deal of amusement and, ultimately, sadness out of the fact that the killer dog’s name was Ripley. Ripley is also the name of my family’s younger dog, an Australian Shepherd mini. Nicknamed “The Rippers,” this little scamp is a delightful menace, a cute dog with way too much fucking energy for my mom and dad to handle sometimes. Ferocious and small, Rippers will chill you to the bone.

This is her patented move. Tremble in fear.

I can haz belly rub of doom?

And this is her face of victory.

Tremble in fear, tiny hooman!

And this is her own personal dogfighting ring, going up against the almighty Raja for domination of the bed.

Tonight, I dine in hell!

And regarding Bones as a show itself, I continue my desire that every single episode this season has a brand new intern, as Michael Badalucco’s character of Scott Starret this week, too, is out the door after merely a few episodes. Too bad, because he was a very loving, very smart character with a past connecting to Hodgins – Starret once worked as a used car salesman and swindled Hodgins out of some money over a decade earlier – but hey, his exit is a small price to pay for the appearance of yet another talented character actor.

In fact, I shall start up a rating system of each new intern this season. I’ll include the first two this time.

INTERNS (out of a possible 10 points):

Dr. Clark Edison (Eugene Byrd): 5.5

Pros: A mouthpiece for all the show’s naysayers who claim that it focuses too much on relationships.
Cons: Not in the episode much. Void of personality. Too grumpy for the world of Bones.

Daisy Wick (Carla Gallo): 6.5

Pros: Was a cooch dancer on Carnivale. Very knowledgeable about Dr. Brennan. Good date material for Dr. Sweets.
Cons: Obnoxious and overeager. She was too big for her britches.

Scott Starret (Michael Badalucco): 9

Pros: Aforementioned past relation to a major character. Sensitive and wise. Willing to give credit to coworkers.
Cons: Maybe a little too mushy for the Jeffersonian. Was a bankrobber in the 1930s that went by the name of George “Babyface” Nelson.