It’s been a lazy post holiday week, one of ordered in pizza and fruit juice straight from the carton. Normality was slipped back into rather than forced upon us, the kitchen, cleaned two weeks prior, was allowed to dirty, the debt of dishes to be paid back next week. Both of us had some kinda post travel flu/cold/whatever, tests assured it wasn’t covid but that was little solace. It was still very unpleasant.

With junk food came junk TV, we needed something easy to consume that didn’t demand too much attention and we decided on Bones.

Bones is a TV show that ran from 2005 until 2017, racking up 12 seasons and nearly 250 episodes. In it Dr Temperance Brennan, a forensic anthropologist and polymath type solves murders by investigating the bones of the deceased. For her trouble, nearly everyone refers to her as ‘Bones’. She is assisted by Seeley Booth, an elite military sniper tuned FBI agent. They have this will they/won’t they Xfiles Mulder and Sully thing going on for the first 4 or so seasons, which the show then just abandons. Allowing them to get married and have kids and still work together. Like many shows that did this, broke their premise and got their star-crossed lovers together, the post get together vibes are weird. Seeing your ship get married and move in together, become an odd-couple pairing with a mortgage. I don’t know if it ever really works. It just rips out this entire source of tension and intrigue, the show potters along afterwards. Somewhat frustratingly the best stuff is the season where they both know they should be together, but Booth has a super passive aggressive girlfriend and Bones just idles waiting for him. After it’s resolved nothing quite fits the same, the magic is diminished.

While I could interrogate why anyone would be named ‘Seeley’ for days, the other part of his name is perhaps more interesting. Because David Boreanaz’s character, Special Agent Seeley Booth, is canonically related to John Wilkes Booth, the guy who assassinated Abraham Lincoln. This kinda unhinged throwaway detail, something written for a show that would run a few seasons and fizzle out, it’s rife in Bones. One of the other lab types, called ‘squints’ in the shows nomenclature, as they squint at the evidence. Is a billionaire, having inherited a massive family fortune and working in the lab seemingly out of passion rather than necessity. It’s such a massive plot point, one that is frequently brushed to the side. People have money problems, there is material good he could do, but it’s rarely remembered. Eventually he loses all his money to prevent a drone strike on a school in Afghanistan and it just doesn’t change his life at all, he barely notices. At one point, Billy Gibbons from ZZ Top has a cameo as a characters Dad, he’s very clearly playing himself too. Again that kinda thing makes sense if you’re making a few seasons, but down the line when it’s season ten and it’s the seventh time Gibbons has shown up. You do have to wonder how much of Bones has been scheduled around ZZ Top tour dates.

This propinquity to go big, blow up ideas and add complicated canon to the show, I respect it. The way that things are bypassed or forgotten as required, that Booth can have taught dance to pay his way though college in one episode and hate dance a season later, it’s very TV, very episodic. But it did complicate things for us, because we were not watching linearly. For our illness driven pizza fuelled week off, Bones was on shuffle, each episode plucked from the 250 at random.

So we’d watch one where Bones and Booth had a child and a house and were fretting over a dinner party, then the next would be her staring quizzically at him over the microscope, unaware of their future wedding breakfast. Keeping track of who was alive, who was evil and who didn’t know they were doomed to be evil became a side game. We would call out the guy who becomes a cannibal and blows his hands off in episodes made years before the plot was but twinkling in a writers eye. All this b-plot and (to us) non-liner character growth, does tend to sideline the actual murder solving stuff. There is this episode about an Amish musical prodigy which has so much b-plot and complicated machinations. Hidden agendas, characters revealing life changing secrets. Then in the last 5 minutes Booth arrests a random character, one unseen until now and declares that it was just a burglary gone wrong, that all the interviews and complicated forensics were completely pointless. This bucking of the ‘who dun it’ in favour of the main characters having magical foresight happens quite a bit. Normally if you watch a whole lot of CSI or Criminal Minds, you kinda just get to know who it’s going to be, who was the killer and why. But Bones is just so scattershot, more interested in weird details and interpersonal stuff. It doesn’t mind sidelining the main plot to talk about wedding favours or who is sleeping who. Or ignoring its ‘science-based dragon MMO’ premise and having an episode where a ghost saves Booth from an exploding ship.

This came to a head when we stumbled into the JFK episode. In it, a group of shady government types burst into the lab with a skeleton in a box, lock all the doors and demand the team investigate its cause of death. Look at this skeleton we have in a box bonites, tell us it’s secrets, do not hold back but also, we are very mysterious. When pressed on their origins they repeat a bunch of ‘you have to do this for your country’ nonsense and generally don’t explain themselves, it’s a fun vibe. But, what about the positive pregnancy test Camille found in the trash, could it be her adopted daughters? Thankfully it’s Angelas, but she is with the wrong guy! having broken up with billionaire Hodgins in favour of hot intern Wendell, who might have cancer at the moment? But we couldn’t remember the continuity and he isn’t in the episode so shelve that fact, it’s barely relevant. Anyway Bones et al. figure out that these are the bones of JFK and the shadowy government suits are testing the team or testing the bones and otherwise being shadowy. They do this experiment where Booth has to reenact the assassination of Kennedy, so he picks up the weapon that was used calling it ‘the most hated rifle in America’ which is just perfect. At some point they figure out that there were in fact two different impacts and confirm the grassy knoll ‘theory’ as true in the Bones universe. But that doesn’t really matter because Angela’s pregnancy test? it’s was a false positive! So now she isn’t going to break up with Wendell and get back with Hodgins to raise the baby! But he was so willing to support her? will this have implications for their future together? The shadowy government types disappear with the bones and out of the plot. Bones then denies it was JFK, largely because Booth believes the government wouldn’t lie about the assassination. As explaining to Booth that the US government isn’t a paragon force of truth and justice, would be like telling a 5 year old the tooth fairy wasn’t real. Such cruel facts of life must be kept from David Boreanaz, he is a timid and special creature. Then the episode just sorta fizzles out, there’s no baby, no further ruminating on the coverup, the status quo is again restored. But it also isn’t, like the ghosts, this is a structural and factual change to the shows universe. One it can ignore, poke at if it needs to, or just leave as a dangling thread. Sometimes it can do all of that at once, referencing Booth’s distant progenitor killing Lincoln, invoking it very deliberately, but only if you remember that plot point, you were there for the right episodes.

Watching TV on random, that I don’t really care about, that doesn’t perhaps take itself very seriously. It is a good time, good comfort food, a tasty soup.