Basically, this is where I ramble about the show Bones. A lot. To varying degrees of coherency. (Click on the tab up top for links to said ramblings.) There may or may not be some Charlie Kelly love interspersed amongst the ramblings. You've been warned.
Authorities suspect Bruce McArthur is responsible for the murders of at least five men. Remains of at least one of them have been found buried at the bottom of a garden planter.
It's past midnight on Christmas Eve and there's a "Bones" rerun on my local affiliate and instead of, you know, an actual Christmas episode, it's some random Season 6 one.
MISSED OPPORTUNITY PEOPLE.
(I mean, it's CHRISTMAS EVE DAY. THERE IS ACTUALLY AN EPISODE FOR THAT VERY SPECIFIC TIME REFERENCE.)
The case began with an innocent tiger shark, which had just been captured off the coast of the Coogee Beach and placed on live display at the Coogee Aquarium. The shark was about 14 feet long, and from the moment it was captured behaved very strangely. The shark writhed about in the tank, and initially, aquarium curators believed it was under stress from being taken from the ocean. However, the aquarium staff and eager spectators had no idea it was stomaching a key piece of evidence that would lead police down a rabbit hole of deceit, insurance fraud, and murder.
Bones 12×12 ‘The End in the End’: Squints of the world unite!
Twelve years ago, Booth and Brennan began their journey together in a rose garden, full of spark and snark and hope. 246 episodes later— spoiler alert?— they finish in the same way, a little older and wiser and battered and bruised, but as ready for their next adventure as they were in their youth. Read the rest at gottawatchit.com…
“These are all the grown-up versions of the closed-off genius, artist-with-wanderlust, angry conspiracy theorist and independent-to-a-fault leader we met a decade ago, but this Breakfast Club ends with nothing but love. Because Angela can finally merge her art and her science in a children’s book (I need this ASAP), Hodgins officially becomes King of the Lab (my heart!), Cam and Arastoo are adopting teenage foster kids (MY HEART), and Brennan is on the road to recovery to who she is again. Some things will change, some will stay the same, but these squints will always be there for each other. The hope of it all overwhelmed me, and I definitely felt all gooey on the inside leaving them on the steps of the platform like the kids they were in the pilot.”
Booth, 1x01: Spit in my hand, we’re Scully and Mulder.
Booth 12x12: Besides, we’re better than Mulder and Scully.
Also I love that, as I think @thetvmouse has alluded in the past (I think I’m attributing that correctly and if not please tell me), we STILL don’t know if Booth’s Mulder and Scully lines in either the pilot or finale refer to The X-Files the show or if M&S are like, real people in this pretend DC who are infamous for their crazy shit in this fictionalized FBI who Booth just really wants to one-up, and either way the exchanges are still awesome.
You know that as soon as she started considering fostering kids, Cam asked Brennan’s advice, and Brennan wholeheartedly lent her support and encouraged her to go for it, and helped her and Arastoo through the whole process, because once again they are going to save kids like her who might get their second chance the way she didn’t get until she was at the Jeffersonian
If there is something I’ve realized after watching, or in the time leading up to, series finales – does it feel like many long-running and well-loved shows are ending in March, or is it just me? – is that many people love to share their experiences and their feelings about something they loved.
So I guess this piece is all about mourning and celebrating life, rather than lamenting death. In many ways, this is particularly relevant with a show like Bones: superficially about death (with its crime-solving premise), but actually about family, and the celebration of life in spite of darkness.
“The show started in 2005, back when procedurals were standard fare and a safe scheduling choice. Prison Break was FOX’s big bet. It’s a testament that Bones got quite a passionate audience that would follow anywhere, without it being a huge hit (mind you, it did really well on its own). Suddenly, the little show became Old Reliable, while the big bets… were supernovae (which burned bright but died young). Medium-sized stars, like the Sun, might be taken for granted, but can be pretty interesting, too. Not only do they have more life in them, but they can also take it.”
Trust @aldoclemens to bring everything full-circle with the space metaphors and have it be absolutely beautiful.
The guy on TV just said “Yates and Brennan are working together to fix this” and I now have a mental image of Temperance Brennan and Sally Yates teaming up to fucking rule the world and that is my new post-Bones headcanon
Logically, I knew this was likely to happen. I figured that if Bones were to get renewed at all, it would be for a last run of episodes, even before all the legal drama hit the fan a few months ago. And I also know that logically, this is the best outcome, because the show can go out on its own terms, and wrap itself up properly, for both its story and for its cast and crew.
Logic, however, has no place with Feelings, apparently.
"King of the Lab!" - The Top 20 Episodes of Bones, Part Two
“King of the Lab!” - The Top 20 Episodes of Bones, Part Two #BonesWeek @BonesonFox @Bonesology
source: drtemperancebrennans.tumblr.com Posted by Kim and Kelly In September of 2005, I had just moved into a shiny new luxury building in the financial district. Unfortunately, the building was still under construction and it wasn’t equipped for cable just yet. These were the dark days before Hulu and On Demand, when if you missed something on TV, you just missed it. Knowing my plight and…
“It would have been so easy to trap Booth and Brennan together in that car. That’s what I keep coming back to: that Bones buried Brennan alive with Hodgins, because it’s about the team, because TJ Thyne is unsung, because you can face death at someone’s side and not be in love with them. Booth and Brennan just happen to be in love. And this isn’t a show about two people stuck together who learn to get along. It’s a show about two people with a lot of love between them who, with their friends’ help, find their way to each other.”
Here’s a thing. It’s not a good thing. But it’s a thing.
So, I tried my best to write some sort of little retrospective, or participate in the awesome “12 days of Bones” project , but thanks to real life, I got about one paragraph in in the last three weeks, and decided that it probably wasn’t going to happen.
To quote someone we all know and love, my thoughts, they are a jumble.
It’s weird to say, but it’s almost like I’m sad that I’m not more sad, if that makes any sense.
If you had told me when I started binge watching this show after season six, or even three years ago, that when Bones ended, I’d be more concerned over forgetting it was on than the fact that it was leaving the airwaves for good, then I would have told you to shut up. But life inevitably caught up to me and shifted my priorities and sensibilities.
What I’m trying to say is that I miss the person who loved that show, and miss that I had something I cared so deeply about. Adulting has a funny way of sneaking up on you, and suddenly writing 10,000 words a week on a TV show seems like an opulent abuse of free time that could be used doing laundry or catching up on the work I missed at my actual job or you know, sleeping. I’m sad I became one of Those People, and sad that I can’t partake in more of the fandom-esque eulogies for a show so beloved to them, because I’ve turned into someone who watches a show and then immediately switches to someone else. Fangirling, you say, what is this of which you speak?
(Except, I have been watching The West Wing on DVD for months, because that is the timeline I choose to believe is real these days. Because the darkest timeline which is currently happening is one of the big reasons I’ve stopped watching live TV altogether the past year save for my mandatory Bones visits.)
I’m not going to get into a whole spiel about the show, because I did one of those last year, about everything I learned from it and everything I’m grateful for. Those things are still true.
We still got 12 years of women being kickass at their jobs. Of women in positions of power and not a single man to take that away from her. Of women who owned who they were and didn’t apologize for it, and men who respected them and revered their intellect and experiences.
We had formulaic romances checking all the trope boxes, absolutely— yet those tropes came in good time, and at the very least, each couple put their spin on things.
We had a vulnerable lead who was as prickly as she was loving, who revelled in her professional accomplishments but failed to see the greatness in her personal ones, because they were just who she was.
We had a sidekick who rarely chastised her best friend’s eccentricities, and often rolled with them and praised them as what made them her. We had a female friendship never once based on competition and always rooted in mutual support, even when a third musketeer came in to disrupt their posse. Two of said women harboured feelings for the same man at one point, but again, it was never about them, and everything ran its course in due time. You had career highs and personal losses and boyfriends and babies and burn-outs, and the conversations about each of those were all like the ones you’d have in your very own living room with your own friends. I cannot, cannot stress enough how important this depiction is in the media, and why despite my feelings towards certain overall narrative arcs in recent seasons, the female friendships on this show are ones I will always cherish as a fan.
We had men who often eschewed prescribed gender norms, even when they were flaunting them. A lab rat who fell in love with an artist and gave her space, a tortured scientist who wrote poetry for his girlfriend, a boy-genius who tapped into the hypermasculinity of their field and put it on notice. Then we had a GI Joe who followed his heart, who publicly denounced reliance upon science but celebrated it as the thing that kept him honest, who made declarations of love and had his heart broken, but figured out how to fix it before breaking anyone else’s.
We had relationships that were mainly stable, and for this I say, THANK FUCK, pardon my French. I’m serious; the up-and-down make-up/break-up cycle so common on TV annoys the shit out of me, because it’s so tiresome, and usually by round 3, you forget why you even liked the couple together in the first place, and by round 5, you actually come to loathe both partners. Bones may have taken the long way to get there, but once its main squeezes found each other, they were in for good. Which didn’t mean there weren’t bumps in the road, but at least most of those bumps were honest, and felt like issues couples would face under the circumstances. The show took the time to care for these people, and for their relationships, and in so doing, so did we. Again, this is sadly a unique situation in the television landscape, and I’m thankful that the show got us there. I might not have always liked how they reached their destination, but at the end of the day, everyone is going to be okay (I hope), and that’s more than most people get.
I could go on and on, but due to the aforementioned adulting, I have to wrap this up. I wish I could spiral out of control like the die-hard fans, instead of feeling vaguely wistful at it, almost lamenting more the loss of my own youth, in a sense, than the show. But I can’t deny what it’s given me, and the pleasure I derived from it while I did, and more importantly, the friends I made as a result, because those I will treasure forever. And I figured out I could write, so if nothing else, I’ve got that to give to the show.
I never thought this day would come, but Bones is finally going to the great forensics lab in the sky. If nothing else, I’m thankful that I had this time here. So thank you, Bones.
"You are the Standard." - The Top 20 Episode of Bones, Part One
“You are the Standard.” – The Top 20 Episode of Bones, Part One
Posted by Kim and Kelly Editor’s Note: When we first starting tossing around the idea of Bones Week, Sage and I both knew that we wouldn’t be able to do it without our dear friend Kelly contributing. After all, Bones was Kelly’s revenge on Sage for getting HER into The X-Files. Thus, Kelly and I sat down and listed our favorite episodes of Bones and lovingly fought with each other until we were…
“Optimism was this show’s radicalism. Bones pushed boundaries by normalizing, and it normalized so well that its quiet challenge to the status quo was mistaken for the new status quo.That one guy on Billy on the Street was wrong when he said Bones didn’t open any doors; it did, just not for some kind of hypothetical high-concept Breaking Bad 2.0. It was too busy paving the way for everyone else—the women who run government labs, the Iranian poet-doctors, the bisexual artists, the Army Rangers in therapy. Bones has never been properly recognized for the world it envisions. But maybe if you all just tie your friends to a chair and make them watch these 20 episodes, that’ll be a start.”
Kelly (and Kim and Sage) is a national treasure, y’all. We are not worthy of their talent.
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