The Daredevil in the Mold

Spoiler Alert!: This review gives away all of the events of this episode, and some of them are big.
by Courtney Hilden

In this episode of Bones, Booth and Sweets get drunk and decide to propose to each of their girlfriends, while Cam struggles with her own love life, and the rest of the team investigates the murder of an extreme sportsman.

The theme of the episode, extreme biking, was fairly well-d0ne. One scene involved the coordination of several bikers doing stunts amongst the actors, all of which was handled flawlessly and looked fluid and natural on the screen. The subject also gave us the chance to enjoy some fun guest actors and their characters, including Naul (with possibly the weirdest name of all time). Anglea chasing people down to interrogate them was also fun to watch. (Can we please have more of the squints go out in the field to interview subjects, espeically the otherwise-annoying interns? There's something fun about their reactions to the world outside the lab.)

In terms of goofs, Cam would never have had a problem with a discussion of dog vomit slime and bed bugs, since she works with dead bodies all the time.
And finally, the most important thing about the episode: Booth's proposal to Hannah. So much of the proposal was rushed, from Booth's decision to while drunk (which felt totally false and far-to-pat) to Booth buying a ring with Sweets. On a normal episode of Bones, all of this would be drawn out enough that everything would feel genuine. Usually on this show, a case gets one of the characters to change their point of view, like it did when Bones saw herself in a victim. If the writers were not in such a hurry of getting rid of Hannah (who really has grown on me), she would get sucked into a case (another gang deal gone bad? a hostage situation?) and then Booth would realize that he loved her so much he wanted to marry her. And then, of course, she'd let him down.

It seems obvious that Hannah is not the right person for Booth. I hate to reference a certain line, but: Booth loves Hannah but is not in love with her. What a relief that Hannah said no, but not really because it gives Bones a chance at Booth. I love that Hannah knows herself well enough to know that getting married is a bad idea. But Booth was totally acting like Hannah was the problem, instead of recognizing that making her marry him would never work.
This is not to say the Bones is really a good choice for Booth. As this season has gone on, it seems clear that Bones, despite the occassional pang of lonliness, doesn't really need anything at all, and I'd rather like to celebrate that instead. Booth increasingly doesn't deserve her, and I'd much rather see us move on from that.

The montage at the end of the show, after Hannah rejected Booth's proposal, featured Booth getting drunk at the Founding Fathers, was totally boring and unnecessary and just filler.

Given the events of this episode in terms of the long story arc, this was all big stuff, yet it felt thrown together instead of the event that it should have been.

Colombo Oreo

by Courtney Hilden

The episode, "The Doctor in the Photo," was heavier than a Thanksgiving dinner and surprisingly angst-y, though in a quiet way. Bones got a case involving a brilliant scientist who was murdered in a dangerous neighborhood. Like Bones, the victim had rejected the love of a coworker who was polar opposites from her, and probably regretted it. Bones begins to over-identify and spirals into a magical realism episode.
This was an interesting opening, showing some of our characters, having Thanksgiving dinner. Don't worry, it wasn't a mushy scene, as Bones even had some time to use her forensic powers to tell how the turkey died.
Watching Bones suffer through the love of her life's great love life with someone else, who is normal and slightly imperfect but impossible to truly demonize, was painful. Watching her struggle over how unmissed this episode's victim was torture. The team mostly went unaware of her unhappiness and there was something quietly sad about that too, especially Booth's ignorance of Bones's emotional state, though given the last year of this show, where Booth has struggled to understand Bones's emotionally, this is typical. "Doesn't anyone know me?" Bones asks Sweets when everyone does say something to him about her emotional state. Then Sweets gave us an analysis that anyone watching this show would be able to give us. (Can't we give Sweets more to do? Can't he say profound things that haven't already been beaten into the audience's head?) The person Bones really needs and wants to have these heart-to-hearts with his Booth, not Sweets, but to some degree, Booth is unavailable for them.

Possibly this is one of the best episodes of Bones, ever. It was a challenge to show, within the course of only one episode, her progression to the conclusions she made, but this episode handled it brilliantly and without the usual cliches. More episodes should have us diving into the psyches of the characters, and show how bizarre and thoughtful they are.

The Babe in the Bar

by Courtney Hilden

In this episode of Bones a woman is discovered in a giant chocolate bar. Like many of the show's openings, this happened to have the gross-out moment where putrefied body liquid came out of the bar. Luckily (or maybe not) the body liquid looked like carmel and raspberry filing, not corpse juice.
Meanwhile, other characters were dealing with other storylines. Cam's daughter was about to apply to college, and decided she wanted to go to Central Maine State. It was so nice to see a character applying to a college that no one has ever gone to. Every time characters go to college on tv, they go somewhere well-known and usually prestigious, so showing a state school is a nice change. The not so good thing about this decision? Michelle's motivation for going to the school, which was where her boyfriend was going to be at. The storyline also emphasized Cam's lack of confidence in Sweets. When Angela suggested Cam talk to him, Cam said that she didn't want to "talk to a child about a child." Ouch. It was really unfair, considering that Sweets did make a reasonable argument for why Cam should back off. Of course, just because Sweets made a reasonable argument doesn't mean Cam listened, which includes applying for her adopted daughter.
Also, Hodgins finally decided it was time to announce his and Angela's pregnancy. You already knew how the baby surprise storyline was going to end, since the writers have been setting everyone up since the beginning of the season. Poor Hodgins had no idea that everyone already knew the surprise. Angela was forced into asking people into pretending they were surprise, which of course means they would accidentally tip Hodgins off.
As for the central storyline, I was hoping that the victim had lied to her family about training to be a chocolate maker. It was additionally strange that no matter what the size of evidence, there's always a table big enough to hold it, even when it's a giant chocolate lab. (And don't defend this by saying they had borrowed the table. Did you see how big that table is? Who has a table like that just so someone can borrow it?) Also lame? Making the victim, named Harriet, a spy.

The Mastodon in the Room

by Courtney Hilden
Spoiler Alert!: Some of the early details of this episode are totally spoiled in this review. The crime itself, however, is not.

In this episode, where they "get the band back together," as it were, opened up on vacation clips of what various characters were doing. It was about as boring as actually vacation clips of characters doing things. It was sort of a lost opportunity, since the episode could have shown various characters doing legitimately interesting things in their various locales. Having a few episodes that focused on characters that were finding themselves deeply embedded in mysteries where ever they were and realizing they missed the work and their teammates would have been great. They would have given the actors, especially the lesser characters, a chance to have an episode all to themselves. Instead, they were just suppose to give us a taste of what they were doing, which was apparently exactly what you expected: Daisy still be annoying in Indonesia with Brennan stoically carrying on, Booth saving the day in Afghanistan, and Cam about to douse her career into flames.
Why was Cam's apparently impending career fail the genesis for bringing these characters back together? Somehow, this felt totally false. The case felt like a reject case from lots of other police procedural shows. Another case, a much bigger case, should have brought the characters together, or even better, a character's death should have been the case that called all the characters back to D.C. (Maybe they could have killed off one of those annoying interns. I'd still vote for Daisy, who is still so annoying and socially clueless that it's a shock Sweets has not diagnosed her on the autism spectrum.)
The episode was unrealistic in a lot of other ways. Daisy was beyond stupid to bring her engagement ring to Indonesia. She was dressed totally inappropriately with her skimpy underwear and cute clothes. (And was the camera's focus on her butt in an early scene necessary? No, it wasn't.) The only good thing about these Indonesian scenes is that Brennan was at least capable of wearing clothing that was practical for the environment and that did not do her any favors.
The costume choices continued to be strange throughout the episode. Sweets looked terrible doing the jazz look, but this was hard to notice, giving his terrible facial hair. His new look makes him look like an extra from Shakespeare in Love, and not in a good way.
On a feminism note, Brennan's comment to Booth that she had to beat people up because he "wasn't there to save her" was totally out of character, considering the pilot episode showed her perfectly capable of beating people up herself and not needing the least bit of help from Booth. What happened to that Brennan? Is she still lost out in the jungle?
Cam's anger at Brennan for pursuing the career she clearly loves was uncalled for. It smacked of all that "women need to sacrifice everything for everyone else" rhetoric. If Brennan had been a man, no one would have blinked at the decision to go do research in Indonesia. It also just reeked of trying to create drama for drama's sake. And it was another example of how unrealistic this episode was. If a program was that important to both the Jeffersonian and the FBI, someone would have stepped in to keep it going. And, given the reputation that Brennan apparently has, forensic anthropologists would have probably fought over it.
This doesn't mean everything in the episode was bad. For example, most of the interns are now out of the picture, leaving the least irritating one, Wendell. (Too bad about Nigel Murray. He had real potential.)