BONES Recap: ‘The Cold in the Case’

Hello BONES fans! How did you like this episode, “The Cold in the Case”? I liked it very much. It was great to see Shohreh Aghdashloo guest starring (as Arastoo Vasiri’s mother), and I enjoyed the way the nature of the victim’s remains stumped the team (even though the episode promos and descriptions sort of gave it away). The “less than perfectly wrapped up” vibe of the end B&B scene was freshly intriguing as well. Let’s discuss the details!

THE CASE:

The Scene of the Crime: The episode begins in a suburban neighborhood, as a realtor shows a plot of land to a young couple. A boy rides his bike, and his dog keeps pace with him, but when the dog runs onto some standing water on the property and fetches part of a skull, the sale is off.

Brennan, Hodgins and Cam examine the remains and are perplexed when different parts show time of death at 3 hours, 3 days, and 14 days. Booth arrives late, explaining that the assistant deputy director of the FBI is having him examine some other case files as well. The team responds to that, but he gives them a variation of his classic, “Let’s just focus on the case.”  At this point, I think he should just carry around a sign that says that!

The Victim: Medical information from a bone marrow treatment reveals the victim is Madeline Pappadelos. Madeline was divorced and also the parent of a young girl who passed away from cystic fibrosis. She’d taken out a restraining order against her ex-husband.

The Case Progression:

Hodgins, Cam and Angela continue to examine evidence in order to determine time of death. Brennan and Arastoo examine the remains in order to determine cause of death. Both groups are frustrated when the evidence provides several scenarios. To make things even stranger, Cam finds tissue from a fox tongue.

Booth brings Madeline’s husband Ethan in for questioning. He is shocked she is dead and insists that while their relationship was strained due to disagreements on how Karine’s health should be handled, he didn’t kill her. When Brennan points out that he is a hunter and mentions the fox tongue, Booth posits that perhaps Ethan killed Madeline to make her pay for the way she pushed Karine into additional treatments.

At the lab, Cam has discovered urine in the body, something that would normally have been expelled unless the body was frozen. Hodgins picks up that line of thinking and can apply it to the insect activity. Meanwhile, Angela is able to trace Madeline’s credit card usage. There are few payments, only trips back and forth to Vienna, Virginia. The last payment is a trip there with no return.

Brennan and Arastoo use the “frozen” theory to examine the skeleton. When the body shows no sign of water crystalizing (and then bursting) as a result of being locked in a freezer, Brennan suggests cryonics. It explains Madeline’s body decomposition, but doesn’t mean she was murdered that way.

Booth and Brennan pay a visit to Vienna, to Cryonova, a cryonics lab owned by Dr. Noah Summers and his wife Michelle. Dr. Summers is honored Brennan is there…they would love the opportunity to preserve her brain. “I’m sure you would,” Brennan replies. Classic.

Noah and Michelle admit to knowing Madeline — after all, she was there often to visit Karine’s body. She also helped Noah on some grant proposals.  When Booth tells them Madeline has been murdered and suggests they are guilty, they point B&B in the direction of Trip Warshaw, a competitor whose business has gone under and who they suspect recently tried to break into their clinic.

At the FBI, Trip admits to B&B that Madeline was going to keep Karine at his facility until the Summers’ poached the business. Booth mentions that he owes money to all of his creditors and suggests that he killed Madeline over removing her financial support. Trip is shocked to hear Madeline is dead and says he is not the killer, and later he has an alibi.

When Booth finds out that the gun used to break into Noah and Michelle’s clinic belongs to Ethan, he interrogates him again, wanting to know why Ethan lied to him about Karine’s body being at Cryonova. Ethan says that wasn’t Booth’s business, and that he just desperately wanted to be able to bury Karine in a respectful way.

Meanwhile, Angela watches footage of the cryonics lab. She sees an argument between Madeline and Noah and she also sees Noah slicing a body in half.  When Booth and Brennan pay him another visit, he tells them that his main purpose is preserving brains. If he harvests organs on the side to fund his research, is it such a bad thing? Booth says yes, Brennan sees the logic in it. Noah insists that his entire life is dedicated to preserving human life; he would never kill anyone — especially not someone as close to him as Madeline.

After discovering Madeline once had a chip implanted in her skull, the team works to uncover any audio files from it. Angela is able to pull up some footage, and it features an angry Michelle, accusing Madeline of flirting with her husband.
Booth and Sweets bring Michelle in for questioning. She admits she’s the one speaking but says it was about another employee who was flirting with Noah. Sweets and Booth hammer home the evidence and point out that Noah and Madeline were meeting in secret at hotels up until the point she was killed. Michelle lawyers up.

At the lab, Brennan and Arastoo realize the skull implant was done and sewn up by a lefthanded person, and with Noah being left-handed, the evidence points back to him.

The Verdict: Noah says that Michelle is the killer but admits that he froze Maddie’s body in order to eventually reanimate her and Karine in order to have a life together. He insists that when he brought her back, she would have grown to love him.  I really liked this case, and I thought it was interesting. The suspects were a mix of imperfect people, flawed but not generally mean-spirited caricatures (as we’ve seen in the past).

THE SQUINTS:

What didn’t work:
•    Cam’s reaction to the parents’ situation annoyed me. She was unprofessionally cold to Arastoo at work. I thought her claiming to have “raised” Michelle was a stretch, and after the dinner party took place, though she told Angela she didn’t really want to talk about it at work, she barely made it five minutes without talking about it! That it was then supposed to have triggered some insight into the case was also a weak transition.
•    Hodgins’ comment to Arastoo that “working hard to forget about personal problems has rewards” on solving the case was rude and kind of out of nowhere, especially since Arastoo was being professional about it.

What did work:
•    In general, I am still not a fan of the Cam/Arastoo relationship, if only because I think that it’s kind of a cheap technique to romantically pair characters who work together. However, it was very interesting that Arastoo’s parents seem to think he is obsessed with death. Remember in season one when one of Angela’s dates was grossed out by her work? We’ve seen that creep in toward other people, too, as the series goes on. Yes, the work they do is supported (for lack of a better term) by death and decay, but if the team is obsessed with anything, it’s justice. It has been a while since we’ve seen their jobs from the outside in, and it reminded me that all of the characters share in a bond that might seem strange to outsiders. It was nice to see Arastoo’s parents accept this by the end of the episode.
•    I liked the way Sweets worked in the interrogation room with Booth, and I thought it made sense that the FBI would ask him for an evaluation of Booth’s state of mind. The idea that Sweets would push Booth toward the idea of an impressive promotion also worked, because Sweets is like Brennan in that way — striving for excellence AND pushing at Booth’s tendency to sell himself short. I did, however, agree with Booth on the confidentiality of all it. Just because someone at a government agency doesn’t say that something is confidential doesn’t mean it is share-able!
•    Like I said before, I really liked this case and the way it stretched the scientists to dig deeper to come up with solutions. It was nice to see that from each of them.

BOOTH AND BRENNAN:

Many episodes this season have included moments where Brennan gives good, intuitive advice to one of her students. I like this trend. She understood to be firm and encouraging about test scores to Daisy, optimistic toward Wendell, and emotionally understanding toward Finn. In this episode, she told Arastoo it’s theoretically good when we are disappointed by our parents — it gives us a reason to do things differently/better, thus improving the species. This moment (and the others) is practical and personal without any fanfare…a perfect combination from Brennan.

I thought the Booth/promotion storyline was full of good Booth nuance. He is an underperformer if he feels like it will benefit someone else — or at least, I think it is safe to say that he would likely have received other promotions if he wasn’t partnered with Brennan and the Jeffersonian team.  I liked Brennan’s initial reaction to the promotion possibility (she likes having him as a partner) and the way it evolved as more information became available.

I liked the conversation where she suggested that if Booth were promoted to an FBI office in Germany, she and Christine could come as well. Booth said he would never ask her to do that, her work is there in DC…which is ironic, since before they met, her work was everywhere, and (I believe) she stayed around in DC for him — subconsciously perhaps, but I believe that. She has always been open to more world traveling as a family, and for her, it’s not a matter of uprooting their lives. This is because her roots are in him, and his in her, in my opinion. This is such a special thing between them dating as far back as season two. B&B don’t have to “live wide” to prove anything, but they would be successful at it as long as they are together.

Booth was tentative about the idea of a promotion, and his itchy “let’s focus on the case” stuff is his way of deflecting. However, as the episode continued and he found out the FBI was also examining his military past, it was clear that he suspected something else was going on. His “exactly” to Sweets held a tone of knowing power…he is starting to see *why* the FBI might want him to go to Germany.

So I liked that he shared his concerns with Brennan at the end of the episode. Particularly telling was the way he said “They can’t make me do that again” about being a sniper. That was a very vulnerable insight into Booth’s emotions. I liked that the episode ended with a bit of suspense, that perhaps Booth is not as convinced as Brennan when she tells him he can do whatever job he chooses.

What do you think? Did you like the case? Were you surprised by Arastoo’s parents’ reaction to Cam?  Would you watch if B&B did end up outside of Washington D.C.?  The comments are open—speak up!