BONES: The Dentist in the Ditch

Hey, BONES fans, what’s shaking? How did you like this episode? To me, it felt very standard issued BONES, which is a really good thing. The show has been getting excellent ratings for a reason, right? Go ahead and pat yourself on the back and give yourself a Twitter Follow Friday for that! What I really liked about this episode was that the victim and the case were very interesting and very intricately woven into the episode as a whole. It was also cool to see Booth presented with two different situations of ‘not easy to come by’ love, something I believe he knows a little something about.

THE CASE:

A man’s body is found at the site of a Civil War reenactment, but Brennan quickly determines that he’s not a Civil War victim. Not since Bodies in the Book have we seen a swarm of bugs like the armies of spiders we saw tonight in the lab. Ew, ew, ew; swarms are the worst. I’ll take eyeballs falling out of sockets before swarms.

Danny Peniard, a local dentist, is the victim. Booth and Brennan go to his home and his contractor is kicking his feet up. But he (Pickford) has a quick alibi; why would he kill Danny? Danny owed him money. Booth and Brennan need to talk to Danny’s ex-boyfriend, Chris. Chris and Booth don’t exactly hit it off as he’s not interested in answering Booth’s questions. But when Brennan finds an arrowhead that has the potential to match the fatal blow on Danny’s sternum, Chris has no choice but to go with Booth to the FBI building.

Another suspect includes Danny’s dental hygienist, Ms Bryceson, who claims he gave her Hepatitis C from mutual nicks while getting a syringe ready. But twist, Danny never had Hepatitis.

When Nigel Murray and his rhubarb help Brennan and Hodgins figure out that Danny was a football player, which takes Booth and Brennan to the football field. Brennan wants to know if another team member was threatened by Danny’s homosexuality, but the coach quickly dismisses that. The entire team is gay. When Brennan finds blood inside the football helmet, everyone on the team becomes a suspect.

But it’s an opposing player who becomes the number one suspect. Yet when Booth interrogates him, Ziglar reveals that he struggled more with his sexual attraction for Danny.

In the end, it was Pickford, who was also contracting Ms. Bryceson’s driveway paving and who stole from Danny. He and Danny fought and exchanged nasty words and Pickford killed him.

THE SQUINTS:

I totally get Cam’s reaction to the spiders, feeling like she wanted to burn any clothes that were even associated in the same room as the many legged things. I also liked that she encouraged Brennan to be more verbal in her praise.

It’s no secret that Vincent Nigel Murray is my all time favorite squintern, and I liked how Brennan fed him the right answer (dentist), and I really enjoyed his almost diabolical pursuit to receive praise from Brennan. His lab time with Hodgins was great.

Although, Hodgins is always great, and I really liked how he encouraged Vincent and then totally sold him out! Ha!

Angela’s time was minimal, but I did like that she out-rationalized Brennan, or whatever that was. Brennan returned the favor later by saying she wasn’t a genius. Good times.

And a big thank you to Dr. Sweets for his invaluable psychological insights into the human condition!

BOOTH & BRENNAN:

I realized something this week, and that is that I have been a hypocrite toward Brennan. You see, whenever Booth makes a mistake or is overbearing, when his vulnerabilities or issues are more pronounced, he’s all the more attractive to me. When Brennan makes a mistake, I’m disappointed in her. That’s not very fair to her. This was made clear to me by Jared’s appearance in this episode. Despite the fact that Booth was right about Padme, it doesn’t really give him the excuse to be suspicious, right? Booth was wrong. Period. He was wrong, and Jared was right. Booth WOULD tell someone to go to hell. What I did and do always love is Booth openly sharing his thoughts and feelings about the whole thing with Brennan. They really don’t have secrets. Cheers to Brennan for reminding Booth that he believes in love and feelings. I think she kind of got a kick out of him being so irrational. It was very refreshing that their bickering this week was the two of them using each other’s words for their own arguments.

Raise your hand if you enjoyed Brennan being in the lab this episode! We had ourselves a good, old fashioned ‘Brennan examines the skeleton very seriously with funky music in the background’ scene, and it’s been awhile! Felt kind of good.

What also felt good was that for as much as Booth openly shared his thoughts with Brennan, she was equally open with him about her reservations about his suddenly changed value system. After all, if Booth was (and has been) so gung ho about her forgiving Max, why can’t he seem to use the same reasoning to be supportive of Jared and Padme? Despite her concerns that he sometimes is irrational, Brennan revealed a lot about herself by stating that she NEEDS Booth to be that way, otherwise, she must question many of her actions, and her trust in him. Wow. Wow, that is like major Brennan character development!

But they don’t stop there! Raise BOTH hands if you enjoyed Brennan’s toast at Founding Fathers. She believes Booth’s premise that love exists, even though she has no tangible proof. I’d say her tangible proof has brown eyes, is wearing a black shirt, a five o’clock shadow and an impressed look, but that just might be me. If you don’t agree with me, I might kick you under the table.

Talk to me! Were you surprised about the killer? Are you enjoying Brennan’s two-weeks in a row concessions for Booth’s sake? Did I read too much into the ‘meant for me’ comment? Comment!