BONES Recap: ‘The Lost Love in the Foreign Land’

Hey, BONES fans! With November sweeps underway, shows are pulling out all of the stops. How did you like this episode, “The Lost Love in the Foreign Land”? I had mixed feelings on this one — there were a few things I really disliked, but what did work for me, I really adored.  Let’s discuss!

THE CASE

The Scene of the Crime: A malnourished, but uniformed heavily accessorized, body is found outdoors, and Hodgins (and Aubrey) have to extricate some additional pieces of jewelry from a goat who is near the body. Brennan has the remains shipped to the Jeffersonian. While Booth tasks Aubrey with checking whether any of the items on the body have been reported stolen, Hodgins retrieves a watch and the serial number reveals it is owned by a woman named Sandra Zins (played by DOWNTON ABBEY’s Phyllis Logan).

The Victim: Ming-Yung, an employee of Sunny Helpers, a staffing service. She cleaned houses for several clients, including Sandra Zins. She is from Yanbian, China and is in the US on a work visa.

The Suspects:

• Sandra Zins: If Ming-Yung stole from her, Sandra would have motive. She insists she cared about her and even offers to help pay for funeral expenses. Booth is less than convinced. But is it a gut reaction, or his general aversion to wealthy people?
• Victor Lin: He owns Sunny Helpers and is responsible for helping ones like Ming-Yung get to the US. But if his employees were stealing from clients, and word got out, it would ruin his reputation.
• Jeremy Walford: He’s a client of Ming-Yung’s, and she sometimes complained that he was too sexually aggressive toward her. She never filed charges, but his prior convictions of having inappropriate relationships with his Asian prep-school students puts him high on the suspect list.
• Sung Dae Park: He works for a construction company; his face shows up on a picture found within Ming-Yung’s remains, and the team finds out he’s a fugitive in China for killing Ming-Yung’s father. So if he knows she’s come to the US to avenge her father’s death, he may have killed her.

The Case Progression:

Aubrey questions Jeremy about his advances toward Ming-Yung. He insists she always rejected him, and he only once walked her to the bus stop. When Aubrey finds out the bus route, Hodgins and Cam use particulates from Ming-Yung’s body, including guano, to identify a cave along that route.

When Booth and Aubrey visit the location, they see a run down shack. Victor is there and doesn’t want to let them in, but Booth has a warrant. He and Aubrey find a small cellar with several Asian women inside, and Booth accuses Victor of keeping them as slaves.

Alex Radziwill is back from the state department (YAY!) , and through an interpreter, he and Booth and Aubrey speak with one woman, Tammy, one of Victor’s employees who primarily worked as a nail technician. She is hesitant to talk, especially with Victor still there. Booth shouts for them to get Victor out of there (which was awesome!) and then he takes another tactic and asks her kind, personal questions. Tammy admits Victor threatened their families, and she shows them a picture of her daughter. She wants to know if she can call her daughter; this brings the rest of the women forward with pictures of their own.

Booth and Aubrey question Victor at the FBI, and Booth is annoyed that he is represented by Andy Dolmar, who usually represents lowlife scum. Booth doesn’t like Dolmar’s tactics and we see that Victor is fairly smug.

Brennan and Arastoo examine Ming-Yung’s skeleton and Brennan notices evidence of osteoporosis and a puncture wound — possibly enough to identify a murder weapon.

Booth questions Sung while Alex and Aubrey watch from the observation room. They are all shocked to learn that Sung and Ming-Yung were in love, and Sung is shocked that Ming-Yung was in the US. He admits he did kill her father, but it was because he mistreated her. He came to the US to make money for them to be together. He alludes he is also a victim of human trafficking, and he breaks down in tears when he finds out that Ming-Yung has died.

Angela traces information from the construction company Sung works for and Sunny Helpers and finds out they are both owned by “Common Reach,” which has a staffing plant in China and is also run by Sandra Zins.

Booth and Brennan question her again, and this time Andy Dolmar is representing her, much to Booth’s dismay. Sandra insists she was helping needy people, but Alex comes in with enough proof to arrest her for human trafficking. But without proof, the FBI can only keep her locked up for 24 hours.

Arastoo notices a mark on Ming-Yung’s mandible. Brennan identifies it as part of a manicure set, and when she tells Booth this information, he immediately knows who the killer is.

The Verdict: Booth and Brennan talk with Tammy, who admits to killing Ming-Yung after she kept threatening to run away. Victor said he would punish all of their families if she did, and so Tammy did what she thought she had to do to protect her family.

THE SQUINTS

While I liked the idea of Brennan telling Arastoo that his assignment is not to please her, but to think of something innovative and worthwhile, most of that whole dissertation topic storyline didn’t work for me. I thought Arastoo was okay, but Cam and Angela were out of line in pressuring Brennan to give her answer after she said she wanted to wait, and then Brennan handled it badly when she did reject Arastoo’s proposed topic. And then later, Cam handled it badly when she approached Brennan about it, and then Brennan was out of line by bringing THAT up to Arastoo (out of nowhere, too, a really cheap shot). It was just so unflattering for both Cam and Brennan, and unnecessarily so, considering the result of Arastoo’s topic could have been achieved without all of that nasty drama.

I still don’t care about the Cam/Arastoo storyline, so that it was kind of heavy in this episode was not my thing.

I thought Hodgins and Angela were good in this episode. Hodgins telling Angela how Ming-Yung lost her toes, and Angela telling him not to make her cry because she was trying to work was great, and I also liked their final scene of sharing a moment before going home.

Regarding Aubrey: like we discussed last week, it is nice to see that Booth is definitely the leader in that working relationship (and he is great at it). At the same time, I didn’t need this entire case to be him experiencing teachable moments all over the place. The show is definitely about lovable misfits who find one another and grow as characters, but I thought it was a little over the top for Aubrey in this one — especially since his origins as a character had him joining the team as this excellent agent. It feels like backtracking a little bit. I thought the dog metaphor between him and Booth was also weird. BUT I did love when Alex R was like, “Welcome to Hell, kid.” I realize I can’t have it both ways — in order for Booth to be an awesome mentor and leader, he needs someone to mentor and lead, LOL. But I’m still not 100% sold on it.

BOOTH & BRENNAN

I really liked all of the B&B scenes in this episode. When they questioned Tammy, I liked seeing how much compassion they had for her. As Booth escorted Tammy out of the interrogation room (and Brennan watched), I was reminded of the end of season two’s “The Boy in the Shroud,” where B&B do solve the case and get answers, but it is still incredibly sad. The respect Booth had in that moment for the boy and his sister is what made me fall in love with his character, and so seeing that mirrored here with Tammy had me feeling all of the feels, as they say.

I also adored the final scene of the episode between B&B. They joked a couple of weeks before about “no work at home,” but what made earlier seasons of BONES so successful were the moments where B&B decompressed after a case and brought it back to their lives and the world they live in. So this scene really reminded me so much of earlier seasons where they depended on one another professionally but also personally to ensure there is still good in the world. It’s always been such a unique balance of hope and rationality and facts and fate between them. They know that despite everything that has happened to them, they are incredibly lucky — and lucky to be together, and they don’t want to take it for granted. This scene is on my list of all-time favorite B&B scenes.

Enough from me — what did you like or not like about this episode? Did you like the case? Were you surprised by the killer? What do you think will happen with Cam and Arastoo? And how about Aubrey? The comments are open!