(Image courtesy of FOX.)

“The Memories in the Shallow Grave” was a run of the mill episode of Bones, with a body of the week and a squintern. The only difference – Brennan is five months pregnant. It was a little weird jumping in on Brennan and Booth 5 months into their relationship/pregnancy, but honestly, the only difference was Brennan cried at the crime scene thanks to her hormonal state, and the two were a little more friendly than usual.

The murder of the week is a woman named Claire, found in a shallow grave on a paintball battlefield. Obviously the first suspect is her husband, a pastor, but he claims his relationship with Claire was nothing but peaceful. The team does a bit of digging, and finds out that Claire went missing for weeks a month prior, and due to a massive case of amnesia, she was unable to remember what happened when she was missing, or what her life was before.

The team investigates her doctor, and he says that she was making a lot of progress, memory wise, but everything has to do with her old life, not the one she was leading while she was “missing”. The doctor suggests that Claire entered a “fugue state” while she was gone; she created a new identity for herself as a survival mechanism when she couldn’t remember anything. Bones takes off to look into her fake life, and as it turns out, she was into some shady business. In fact, she was involved with a robbery and ended up hiding the money she stole while her partner in crime served time.

Sweets, being the supershrink that he is, is all up on Claire’s doctor’s files. It’s Booth however, that realizes that there’s nothing in the files about Claire’s missing time. In addition, there are gambler’s codes for games and buy-ins written all over the pages of her files. Using his detective moxy, Booth realizes that Claire was remembering her missing time, and had divulged the location of the stolen money to her doctor. The doctor, being a gambling addict like Booth was, killed his patient to get the money so he could get into more games after losing all of his money.

With the culprit in cuffs, Sweets turns his shrinky attention to Booth and Brennan. The two have yet to establish a cohabitation situation, as Booth wants a place to call their own and Brennan insists he moves in with her, as the real estate market is crap. Sweets gets through to Booth, and Angela gets through to Brennan, and by the end of the episode, the pair is looking for their own place.

I’ve read a lot of reviews on this episode, and everyone seems thrilled by it. Me, on the other hand, not so much. As a long time fan of the show, I was really looking forward to the courtship and awkward beginnings of the Booth and Brennan relationship. I wanted to see them at work trying to act normal after the spark had ignited, but instead, we jumped in after 5 months together. Logistically, it makes sense since it would be silly to make Emily Deschanel cover her pregnant belly, but as a fan, I was little bummed.

Bitterness aside, it was nice to see them together as a couple. The bickering is the same as when they were partners, but there’s obviously a different level of love behind it now. I guess it’s just going to take me a while to get over the fact that we missed out on the first months of their relationship … I was really looking forward to that. I guess now we can just look forward to seeing them try to evolve into a “normal” family, which should prove to be both interesting and hilarious.

Photo Courtesy of FOX

In the Mystery of the Week, a body is found near an overpass and brought to the lab immediately because otherwise it would be covered in snow by the developing blizzard. Hodgins and Wendell determine that the victim was female, in her late 20s or early 30s, and had been dead for twelve days. There’s a lot of blood on her clothes, an unrecognizable tick on her body, and a dead cell phone in her pocket. When Hodgins IDs the tick, he realizes that the victim had Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, but that wasn’t the cause of death – she was strangled. But she might have infected her killer, so they need to find the killer before he or she starts an epidemic. The disease had to be contracted overseas, but the victim’s bone structure shows she was part Native American, so she had probably traveled recently. Unfortunately, there’s no match in missing persons or passport control.

Over the phone from where she’s stuck in an elevator with Booth (more on that later), Brennan instructs Wendell on how to do an X-ray without electricity (with the help of a journal article), and the resulting X-ray shows something embedded in the bone. Booth recognizes it as shrapnel from an explosion about four years ago. Wendell and Hodgins identify the material as blown-up coins, possibly from an IED. Hodgins rigs something up from various history exhibits to help him figure out the composition of the coins, and it turns out that they’re Russian rubles. Booth theorizes that the explosion was in Chechnya, where they put Russian currency in explosives as a sign of protest, and suggests looking for news coverage of an American blown up there. Cam gets the newspapers on microfiche from the relevant time, and Angela scans through and finds the victim – an American aid worker named Ann Marie Weston, who had recently been traveling back and forth from Albania. Wendell sees injuries on Weston’s arm bones, and Brennan has him do a test with dye to make the injuries clearer. There are scratches as though from broken glass, but also bigger gouges in a regular pattern, and Booth suggests that these are from the wires in security glass.

Angela gets the SIM card from Weston’s phone, but it won’t fit in anyone else’s, so she needs a way to provide gradual power to the dead phone. Wendell hooks potatoes together to make a battery that powers the phone for a minute or so, and Angela manages to copy the call history. There are only incoming calls on the phone, and when Sweets finds out that Weston was working to help victims of human trafficking, they surmise that the phone may have been a dedicated line for women who needed help. They find the location of a call made around the time of death, but the police can’t get there because of the snow. Booth and Brennan finally make it out of the elevator and go to the address, where they find windows with security glass consistent with Weston’s images – and one of them is broken. They see scared-looking girls inside, but when Booth tries to talk to them, a man hears him and comes out to scare Booth and Brennan off. He’s clearly infected with the fever, and when he goes after Booth, Brennan knocks him out. It turns out that he’s Tariq Grazdani, a human trafficker, and the girls he was holding in the building witnessed him kill Weston.

Booth and Brennan start the episode at the diner with Sweets. Booth sees someone throwing out stadium seats from The Vet and makes the others help him get them home, but when the power goes out, he and Brennan get stuck in his building’s elevator – with the seats. (It’s a cage-style elevator, so Sweets can talk to them and pass them things.) Brennan gets mad at Booth that they’re stuck because of the chairs he wanted. She tries to climb up to the ceiling to get them out, but can’t open the ceiling panel because the chairs are blocking it. They both fall, and Booth hurts his back. Sweets, taking advantage of his captive audience, suggests that they resume therapy, but Booth yells at him and tells him to never mention Hannah again. About his relationship with Brennan, Booth says “The past is the past” and “It is over.” Oof. Once Sweets leaves, Booth finally tells Brennan why the stadium seats are so important to him: he went to a World Series game with his father in that stadium, in a two-week span when his father had stopped drinking, and it was the best day of his life. In other words, yes, the object that has them literally stuck in an elevator is a metaphor for Booth’s emotional baggage. Anyway, they agree that they should discuss their relationship at some point, and do discuss it a little then: Brennan rather hilariously gives the reasons why she always assumed the sex would be good, but Booth is clearly thinking more about love than sex. Will this cause problems? Hm. Booth eventually accepts that they need to break the chairs apart in order to get out of the elevator.

After the case is solved, Booth and Brennan sit in the stadium seats in Booth’s apartment and eat popcorn and hot dogs. He admits that he’s angry – just in general, not really at her – and needs time before he gets into a relationship. But then, he says, he wants “love and life and happiness” with Brennan. For her part, Brennan explains how impervious things don’t need strength, because nothing can affect them. When they met, she was impervious, but now she’s getting stronger, so at some point she’ll be willing to give up the last of her imperviousness and risk a real relationship. Booth suggests that they each write down a date on which they guess they’ll be ready to be together and then burn the paper in the candle flame, because that’s what he did with wishes when he was a child. Brennan clearly thinks this is a little silly but goes along with it, and Booth totally sneaks a peek at her paper before she burns it. What dates do you all think they guessed?

All the Booth/Brennan relationship drama notwithstanding, Hodgins and Angela steal the show with a dramatic pregnancy storyline this week. At the beginning of the episode, Angela is worried because she’s an LCA carrier, and if Hodgins is too, there’s a 25% chance their baby will be blind. Hodgins’s results are delayed because of the blackout, and he annoys Angela by insisting that everything will be fine, but when he refuses to give up his cell phone to one of her experiments (because he doesn’t want to miss the doctor’s call), she realizes that he’s worried too. It turns out that he is a carrier, and T.J. Thyne does a wonderful job here, showing Hodgins quietly falling apart as he works. He confesses to Wendell that he’s afraid Angela will hate him, but Wendell talks him down. Eventually, Hodgins tricks Angela into being less freaked out about the odds by talking about taking up the piano so he and the baby can do that together instead of looking through microscopes, and they end the episode by agreeing that they can handle anything together. Awww.

Poor Sweets spends the episode going back and forth between the elevator, where he tries to make Booth and Brennan talk about their relationship, and Booth’s neighbor’s apartment, where he tries to teach her to communicate with her adult daughter. Meanwhile, Cam is at the lab trying to coordinate things over the phone with Brennan and keep Hodgins’ and Wendell’s crazy experiments under control.

Our Rotating Intern is Wendell, who becomes involved in the drama with Hodgins and Angela when he overhears Hodgins on the phone with the doctor’s office. He turns out to be an exceptional friend in this situation – he’s eager to be supportive but also willing to give them their space and privacy. Given the history of his romantic entanglement with Angela and hostile relationship with Hodgins, it was great to see him and Hodgins come together and act like real friends here.

Next time: Dismembered feet! Um, fun? Ooh, and a body farm!

Photo Courtesy of FOX

The Mystery of the Week starts with a long scene of Broadsky in a hotel in DC, getting ready for “work”. He’s on the phone with someone named Paula and promises to meet her at “the cabin” on Friday night. He then goes to a parking garage, where he promptly murders someone. The victim has a suitcase full of money, and rats eat the body quickly. When Booth and Brennan get there, Brennan identifies the victim as male, and Booth recognizes Broadsky’s custom-made bullet and difficult shot.

The victim’s license says he’s Walter Crane, a construction worker born and raised in Virginia, but an analysis of the remains indicates that the victim grew up on a midwestern diet. Hodgins finds bleach on the money – it turns out that it was a suitcase of five dollar bills that had been bleached and then reprinted as counterfeit hundreds. Caroline discovers that the victim was in witness protection: his real name was Walter Kulich, and he flipped on a criminal he was working with named Ortiz, so the team assumes that Ortiz was the one who ordered the hit. In exchange for a deal involving transfer to a more pleasant prison, Ortiz confirms his involvement but tells Booth and Caroline that Broadsky was the one who approached him and picked the victim.

Booth and Brennan investigate the local US Marshals in order to figure out who gave Broadsky information from the witness protection program, and they find Paula Ashwaldt, whose life Broadsky saved in Afghanistan. Booth gets Ashwaldt to admit that she helped Broadsky go after The Gravedigger, but she denies helping him with any of the other murders. She did leave him alone with her computer, though, and there are thousands of names in her files. Booth agrees to give Ashwaldt some time to try to figure out Broadsky’s next move before he arrests her, but he soon hears that she has killed herself at her desk.

Booth and Brennan next head to Ashwaldt’s hunting cabin, where they see ravens and therefore know there’s “meat” nearby. They find a weird hallway structure in the middle of nowhere with a dead deer inside, and determine that Broadsky was using it for some sort of target practice. The deer has been shot with mysterious fragmented ammunition. When Booth gets home, he finds Broadsky in his apartment, apparently intending to mess with Booth’s head but not particularly advance the plot.

Back at the lab, Hodgins and Angela determine that the bullet was made of normal metals, but it was huge and it somehow exploded in the air. They find circuitry and theorize that the bullet had a computer chip that allowed it to be programmed to explode, and Angela calls this technology “from the future”. Since the bullet could explode in midair, the sniper could shoot through a window without knowing where the person was in the room. Winkler, an arms manufacturer Booth knows, admits to making the bullet for Broadsky and claims that Broadsky gave him fake paperwork that said he was working for the government. Winkler gives the team the information that Broadsky had given him about the target room, and tells them that the next shooting is planned for that day.

Angela figures out the parameters of the room, and Caroline recognizes it as the women’s bathroom in the federal courthouse. Angela then determines the spot from which Broadsky will shoot, and Booth and Brennan go there, but they’re in the wrong place because the target is actually the men’s bathroom. And that’s where it all fell apart for me, because seriously, none of them thought to check whether there was another bathroom with the same layout? I figured it out way before they did and was yelling at my screen. I get that Broadsky’s supposed to be scary and all, but if buying into this plot means accepting that I am better at the characters’ jobs than they are … no. Just no. Anyway, they eventually find Broadsky, and Booth shoots Broadsky’s gun and stops the murder, but Broadsky gets away.

Booth and Brennan start the episode with a scene that’s cute but seems completely out of place. Brennan’s out for a run, and Booth surprises her by appearing along her route, and they have a little race. Then she tells him she’s going to a lecture about the Peloponnesian Wars, and he insists that he wants to go along because it’s about war, but she totally doesn’t get that he just wants to go because she’s going. As I said, it’s sweet, but doesn’t match the tense and uneasy tone they’ve had with each other recently.

Booth spends most of the episode being upset that people – especially Brennan – are comparing him to Broadsky, and insists that murder is always wrong regardless of what the victim has done. He is being a little oversensitive in his reactions to Brennan, but it also seemed unrealistic that she was completely ignoring the fact that she was obviously upsetting him. (I know she tends to be oblivious to this stuff, but this was extreme.) When Sweets suggests that Booth talk to Brennan about it, he says “We don’t go there anymore. It’s over.” By the end of the episode, though, they’re talking, and they have this powerful exchange:

Brennan: “You are similar in many ways, but not in the most important way. How can I put this in a way that you will understand?”
Booth: “Why don’t you try and say it in teeny tiny words.”
Brennan: “Okay … Broadsky is bad. You are good.”

While I don’t like the “let’s pretend that Booth’s dumb” thing they do, I did think they both acted this scene well. And Brennan ended things on a hopeful note: “I’m standing right beside you, Booth. Like always. Like I always will.”

Caroline has a big presence this week, and I usually love her, but I just couldn’t get a handle on what they were trying to do with her here. For much of the episode, she was going on about how Broadsky only targets bad guys, and seemed to imply that it wasn’t actually all that important to catch him. But when Booth tells her that Broadsky was in his apartment, Caroline suddenly wants to get Broadsky, and she comes out and says that his invasion of Booth’s privacy is worse than his murders. And I … honestly could not tell whether that was supposed to be a joke. Opinions, anyone?

The pregnancy storyline for Hodgins and Angela continues when Angela’s dad shows up with big plans to name the baby Staccato Mamba. Angela is apparently willing to go along with whatever her father picks, even though she herself changed the name her father gave her, but Hodgins refuses. Angela’s dad takes him drinking and makes him get another tattoo, but eventually backs off about the name. The actual name picks: Michael Joseph or Katherine Temperance. Aww. Also, may I just point out that either a lot of time is passing on this show, or Angela is having the quickest (or at least most unevenly paced) pregnancy ever?

Sweets is too afraid of Angela’s father to give an opinion on the naming issue, but he gets involved when Booth goes to him about his anger at Brennan equating him with Broadsky. Sweets suggests that Booth is projecting his own guilt and ambivalence about his past onto Brennan. He points out that people who have killed use many different ways to deal with it afterwards, and says that it’s a testament to Booth that he’s built a whole life after his sniper past.

Our Rotating Intern is Vincent Nigel-Murray, who is trying to stop blurting random facts, because he uses it as a way to keep his distance from people. Why are all the interns suddenly making a big deal out of eradicating their distinguishing characteristics? Why?

Next Week: There’s a blizzard! And Booth and Brennan are trapped in an elevator together! Maybe they’ll Talk About Stuff!

Photo Courtesy of FOX

The Mystery of the Week starts when housekeeper Lucy Rodriguez finds an ickily decomposing body in the home tanning bed of her boss, wedding planner Wendy Bovitz. At the scene, Brennan confirms that the victim is a woman in her thirties. The timer on the tanning bed is broken, so the heat has accelerated the decomp, and they determine the victim has been dead for 32 to 38 hours. Clark finds some fractures that could be a sign of murder, but Brennan says the breaks are a few years old. Tox screen results show alcohol and diazepam in the victim’s system, so Cam theorizes that she might have just fallen asleep in the tanning bed. No such luck, though: further examination of the bones shows that she was stabbed through the heart. (Wedding planner. Valentine’s Day. Stabbed through the heart. Get it?) And Angela’s digital reconstruction of the victim’s face shows that it is in fact Wendy Bovitz.

Booth and Sweets talk to Bovitz’s assistant Darren Hargrove, who says he last saw the victim a few days ago. He left her lots of messages, but she had a tendency to get overwhelmed so he wasn’t surprised that she didn’t respond. The current stressor: the big Erickson wedding tonight; Hargrove doesn’t know how he’ll pull it off without Bovitz. When Booth says that Hargrove’s security code at Bovitz’s office/house was used yesterday, Hargrove says he stopped by to pick up fabric swatches; Bovitz wasn’t there and the fabric was by the door, so he took it and left. He’s distraught over Bovitz’s death and keeps saying that he loved her, but Booth and Sweets both assume he’s gay because of his effeminate mannerisms, so they think he means platonic love.

Angela gets into Bovitz’s laptop and finds an “In Case of Death” file. It has a picture of Bovitz with a black eye and other injuries, with the words “If anything happens to me it was my husband.” Booth finds her husband, Greg Bovitz, who does horse-drawn carriage rides for weddings. He says they were temporarily separated because he was sick of just doing carriage rides – he was a horse trainer by trade. He tells Booth that Wendy’s first husband was the one who beat her, but he was killed in a bar fight last year, so he can’t be the murderer. Greg Bovitz also suggests that Booth talk to Warren Erickson – his wife was planning Erickson’s daughter’s wedding, and she was scared of him. Meanwhile, Cam finds something in Bovitz’s hair for Hodgins to analyze. She thinks it might be a butterfly, but he determines that it was some sort of vegetation. As she continues to examine the bones, Brennan finds a recently-broken finger that could indicate a struggle.

Booth and Brennan go to the wedding venue and find Erickson and his daughter Raina fighting about money. Erickson admits that he went to Bovitz’s house a few days ago and argued over the wedding’s budget, because he thought Bovitz was taking advantage of his wealth by promising extravagant things to Raina. While they’re talking, Clark calls and tells Brennan that there’s skin under the victim’s fingernails, so Brennan tries to get a DNA sample from Erickson, but he refuses. The court won’t compel a sample, but Booth finds out that Erickson’s son is in jail, so his DNA is on file and they can use that to compare. Booth asks for Sweets’s opinion, and Sweets says that Erickson is a self-made millionaire, so he’s insecure and ego-maniacal, and he seems to lack compassion. Sweets thinks he could be a killer.

Hodgins figures out that the thing from Bovitz’s hair is an orchid, so he guesses that Erickson got mad while they were arguing over the flower budget, threw the orchid at Bovitz, and then stabbed her. When they get the DNA results, Clark thinks there’s a match for Erickson, but Cam points out that the DNA they found was female – so it actually belongs to the bride, Raina Erickson. Booth and Brennan confront Raina, who at first denies being at Bovitz’s house. “You mean that DNA stuff is really true?” Hah. She eventually admits that she went there are argued about the orchids, and threatened to call her father to hire a new wedding planner. Bovitz tried to take the phone from her and they fought a little, but Raina swears they made up, and her alibi checks out.

Clark makes a cast of the broken bones to try to identify the murder weapon, and Angela helps with a rendering of the weapon, but they can’t figure out what it is. Hodgins discovers it’s made of cast iron. Angela digs around on the laptop some more and finds articles of incorporation that say that Hargrove gets the whole company upon Bovitz’s death. When Booth and Brennan tell him this, he’s shocked; she’d told him she had a surprise for him, but he didn’t know what. He insists that he didn’t kill her and tells Booth and Brennan that he was in love with Bovitz. But Booth and Brennan recognize the cake topper Hargrove just put in a cake as the murder weapon, and Booth arrests him.

This is a bit premature, though, as Angela discovers that Greg Bovitz checked his email on his wife’s computer right around the time she died – and there’s horse hoof oil on the murder weapon. They bring Bovitz in for questioning, and Booth tells him that his wife was having an affair. Brennan then lies about finding Bovitz’s DNA on the murder weapon, and goes into a whole Wuthering Heights analogy about how hard it must have been on Bovitz to watch his wife with Hargrove. Bovitz is caught up in Brennan’s supposed sympathy and confesses.

Booth and Brennan both say they’re strongly anti-Valentine’s Day, although Booth insists it has nothing to do with his recent breakup. Instead, he objects because it’s a Hallmark holiday, blah blah, and this is one of those times when I really wish the show would remember that Booth’s supposed to be Catholic, because it would make much more sense for him to point out that it’s the feast of a martyred saint. Instead, he says that the only important thing that happened on February 14 was the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre. Angela suggests that he find someone else who’s doing nothing that night so they can do nothing together, and I kind of assume she means Brennan, but it’s not completely clear. Brennan, meanwhile, keeps getting offers for Valentine’s Day dates and turning them down. She’s insulted that all these men assume she’ll be available at such short notice, while Booth seems a bit jealous and rather interested in who these guys are. After they solve the case, Booth ends up going to the shooting range, and of course Brennan shows up. She brings a “gift” of the actual guns from the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, which she borrowed from the Roaring Twenties exhibit at the Jeffersonian. (Can she just do that? REALLY?) They shoot the guns together, and she ends with a “Happy Valentine’s Day Massacre, Booth.”

Honestly, Cam‘s story line drove me NUTS this week. She keeps trying to rush everyone to solve the murder quickly because it’s Valentine’s Day and she has plans with Paul. She gives them a deadline of 6:45 – but why? Since when are they not allowed to take a few hours off when they’re in the middle of a case? They usually go home to eat and sleep and stuff, right? And since when does Cam herself have to be there if Brennan or one of the squints is working late? All this hurrying made no sense to me and seemed like a dumb way to try to add tension or suspense or something. Anyway, Paul brings her roses at work, and eventually picks her up in a limo with more roses, and I guess it’s sweet and all but I was just so annoyed at the manufactured drama that I didn’t even care.

Angela insists that she doesn’t care about Valentine’s Day now that they’re married, but Hodgins is determined to do something to prove they can still be romantic. His first idea is earrings to match a necklace he gave her, but Cam tells him that Angela doesn’t really like the necklace in the first place. Hodgins then gets an Egyptian tear vase that Angela had admired in the Jeffersonian gift shop, but Clark convinces him that it’s wrong for Valentine’s Day. He points out that Angela doesn’t care about things and advises Hodgins to “give her something that only [he] can give her.” After Cam suggests something from the lab, Hodgins makes a new hybrid slime mold that smells like roses and names it Angelicus montenegris. He tells her “It’s going to be very famous in, you know, certain circles,” and it’s all very cute and very them.

Sweets gets Daisy a bouquet of daisies for Valentine’s Day. Aww.

Our Rotating Intern is Clark, who’s still doing his new soul-baring routine and won’t stop talking about his girlfriend Nora. Nora always tells him what she wants for Valentine’s Day, but this is the first time he’s been hesitant about giving it. He talks to Angela, who tells him that if it’s not illegal or painful, he should do it. Clark won’t tell Angela what it is, but it turns out to be some sort of Cupid roleplaying/stripping routine that I found a little odd, to be honest. But I guess that’s what Nora wanted!

Next time: Angela’s dad is back! And so is the sniper storyline.

Photo Courtesy of FOX

The body of a male in his early twenties is found on the roof of a warehouse in the navy yards, devoured by an aggressive mold. There’s a dent on the roof where the victim was dropped, and a trail of blood shows he was dragged behind an air conditioner. The door to the stairs was locked from the inside, so it’s unclear how the victim got onto the roof (or how the killer got on or off). When they get the body back to the lab, they discover fractures on almost every bone; some are recent and some are up to two years old. Hodgins discovers that the mold – dog vomit slime mold, to be precise – came to the rooftop on the victim, and the A/C runoff combined with the heat made it spread so aggressively. Also in the mold: bedbugs, which Hodgins tracks to three motels with recent outbreaks. One gave their discarded mattresses to BMX bikers to use as soft landing material.

Angela creates a likeness of the victim and surmises that he’s a daredevil, which lines up nicely with the BMX connection. She goes to the bike park with Booth and Brennan, and sure enough, the infected mattresses are there. A guy at the desk named Pete claims not to recognize the victim, but another biker identifies him as Dustin Rottenberg. He tells them that Rottenberg was making videos of himself doing stunts because he was trying to get sponsorship, and one of his stunts involved jumping from roof to roof in the navy yards. Mechanical engineering student Staci admits to designing a ramp for him but says it wasn’t ready to use. She suggests someone might have killed him for his expensive bike, so Booth has an informant named Noel find the bike for him. It turns up at a hot dog stand, where the young man who has it tries to escape, but Booth brings him in. He says he found the bike between two building in the navy yards.

Meanwhile, Fisher determines that Rottenberg died from internal decapitation caused by blunt force trauma to the chin. Angela examines the bike, recreates the accident, and decides that this decapitation could not have been caused in the accident, so Rottenberg was definitely murdered. Hodgins and Fisher find a tooth in the mold, and they trace it back to a biker named Ty, but this is a big red herring, because Ty and Rottenberg had each others’ teeth as souvenirs of a big bike crash. The team talks to Staci again, and she thinks that Rottenberg made the jump from the ground to the roof using one of her designs, which she didn’t even think was possible. She tells them that someone would have had to tow him to get enough speed for that launch. Fisher finds threads of glass in the bone and the mold and decide they’re from the weapon – a fiberglass cast. Someone kicked the victim in the chin with a broken leg. They trace the cast to Pete at the bike park, who admits that he towed Rottenberg to help him with the stunt. After Rottenberg crashed on the roof, he was mad and he and Pete fought. Pete kicked him, and he died.

Now that we’ve dealt with the mediocre mystery, let’s get to the actual point of the episode. We’re going to start with Sweets, because it’s easier to explain this week’s giant subplot that way. He and Booth go out drinking, and he starts talking about how much he loves Daisy, and how he doesn’t want to be unmarried like Booth. He considers proposing (again), and though Booth at first says Sweets is too young to get married, by the end of the rather torturous conversations they’ve both convinced themselves to propose to their respective girlfriends. (Is Daisy even Sweets’s girlfriend at this point? Who knows.) They go to pick out rings together, and when the obnoxious jewelry store lady tells Sweets not to bother proposing with a less-than-gigantic ring, he backs out and says he’s not ready.

Booth, on the other hand, is upset by Sweets using him as a model of what NOT to be when he grows up, and goes through with proposing to Hannah. But she rejects him, saying that she’s not the marrying kind, which she has apparently told him many times (offscreen). She admits that she knows he is the marrying kind, but explains: “I thought we would have more time before we got to this.” On the face of it, that sounds like she thought she’d have more time before inevitably breaking Booth’s heart, which is not a very convincing excuse. But I’ll give her the benefit of the doubt and assume she thought if they were together longer, Booth would be more okay with the level of commitment she was willing to provide and stop thinking marriage was so important. Anyway, she wants to forget he said anything and go back to how they were, but he won’t do that, and they break up. Hannah leaves, Booth throws the ring into the Potomac, and I start yelling at the TV, because that was an expensive ring, and Booth isn’t made of money. Seriously, sell it or give it to Sweets or something. Sheesh.

Booth heads to the Founding Fathers to get drunk, and Brennan meets him there because Hannah called her. (I know this call is controversial, but I thought it was perfectly correct of Hannah to call his best friend to check on him.) Booth doesn’t want to talk about it and insists that he’s just “done.” Rebecca, Brennan, and Hannah have all rejected him, and he’s angry. “What is it with women who just don’t want what I’m offering here?” Oh, Booth, honey. (I must note that Boreanaz is amazing in this scene. He and Deschanel both deserve meaty emotional scenes like this more often.) He ends by giving Brennan two options: if she stays and has a drink with him, they can be partners and make small talk and get a drink occasionally, but not be real friends or anything more. If she leaves, he’ll find her a new FBI guy.

Brennan: “Those are my only choices?”
Booth: “Yeah. Those are your only choices.”
Brennan: “Then I’ll have a drink.”

No one actually thought they were going to dissolve their partnership, but this scene was heartrending all the same. They’re going to have some serious work to do to repair their relationship now that Hannah is out of the picture and things are somewhat reset. I know Hannah had to go, but I wasn’t thrilled with how it happened: I’m afraid it will be hard to make it look like Brennan is anything but a consolation prize at this point, and I wanted Booth to realize that his relationship with Hannah wouldn’t work himself rather than being rejected. But the follow-up scene in the bar was amazing, so I can’t complain too much.

In light of all the crazy bike stunts in the episode, Angela starts worrying about her baby playing dangerous sports, which leads to a discussion with Hodgins about their wishes for their child’s future. Hodgins has all sorts of wild ideas – musician, astrophysicist, stand-up comedian, all of the above – but Angela thinks it would be nice if the child grew up to be a mad scientist like Hodgins. This … I don’t know, this is fine, and they’re still cute and everything, but I’m getting bored with the all-adorable-all-the-time. (Not that I want something bad to happen to the baby! I don’t!)

Cam apparently used up all her plot time last week, so she has little to do.

The Rotating Intern is Fisher, who is now using herbal tea and and a noise machine to make himself relaxed and productive while driving his coworkers insane.

Next week: Just in time for Valentine’s Day, we have a wedding planner stabbed through heart – and maybe a new boyfriend for Brennan?

Photo Courtesy of FOX

The Mystery of the Week: There’s a body in a cornfield, and the state of decomposition and height of the plants under it suggest that it’s been there for about four weeks. The victim, a male in his early forties wearing work clothes, has a bullet wound from a gun held close to his chest, but there’s no obvious exit wound and the bullet isn’t found at the site. When they get the remains to the Jeffersonian, Brennan’s examination shows that the victim did a lot of manual labor but also sat a lot, so Wendell suggests that he baled hay and drove a tractor. They also conclude that the victim had a lot of sex.

Booth finds a missing person case for a 41-year-old named Ed Samuel who was in the farm equipment rental business, and Booth and Brennan head to Samuel’s house, where they find his wife, Maryann, and their eleven children, along with Maryann’s father and two sisters, Beth and Carol. The widow says that Samuel just never came home one night; he had no enemies and everyone loved him. One of the sisters leads Booth and Brennan to the bedroom to show them Samuel’s gun, and on the way Brennan notices that three of the children in a picture on the wall are too close in age to be full siblings unless they have some sort of congenital deformation. When she finds an album that includes wedding pictures of Samuel with all three sisters, she realizes that the family is polygamous.

Back at the lab, Wendell finds potato particulates in the chest wound, and Booth tells him that potatoes are used as silencers. Hodgins finds some other unknown plant particulates. Meanwhile, Booth and Brennan meet with Sweets, who tells them about the type of polygamy practiced by fundamentalist Mormons. Brennan believes that polygamy can make anthropological sense, but Booth thinks the Samuels are just swingers, and Booth and Sweets agree that jealousy is a good motive for murder.

Dan, father of the Samuels sister wives, tells Booth that he thought their lifestyle was shocking and “nuts”, but that they didn’t deserve the big deal people made over it. Specifically, he points to a pecan orchard owner named Pete Mill who scratched “plig” – a slur meaning “polygamist” – in Beth’s windshield. Sweets talks to Mill, who rants for a while about how the Samuels were living in sin and brags about how many guns he has. His guns and Dan’s are all brought in for testing.

The team continues its scientific investigation: Wendell finds odd deterioration of the mandible and bruising to the pelvis. Cam figures out that someone was trying to poison Ed with radium salt, and that’s what caused the mandible damage. Blowback in the wound suggests that the bullet struck a hard surface right behind the victim, and Angela’s recreation suggests that Samuel was probably lying down on the floor rather than standing against a wall. Hodgins finds that a flower particulate was from the pecan tree, and another particulate in the wound is digested pecan, which points to a farmer using pecans to feed his animals.

Cam and Booth agree that the murder was probably about jealousy and love, and that all three wives couldn’t have been happy. Sure enough, Maryann filed for divorce six weeks ago, and says she didn’t mention it earlier because the other wives didn’t know. She’d found out that Ed was having an affair with grad student Heather Lakefish, who was tutoring one of his sons. Lakefish tells them that the wives all showed up at the lab one night and Maryann called her a whore. There’s also radium salt missing from the lab. Coincidence? When radium salt is found in the Samuel house, Carol confesses that she was poisoning her husband, but she didn’t want to kill him. She just wanted to make him sick so she could have more time with him, since nursing was her responsibility.

Carol insists that she didn’t kill her husband, though, and Brennan thinks the killer was a man because of the size and strength required to hold Samuel down while taking the shot. Hodgins figures out that it was a man who feeds turkeys, which leads them back to the wives’ father, Dan, who keeps turkeys. They find the bullet in his barn and the gun in his septic tank, and he confesses that he killed Samuel because of the affair with Lakefish.

From the beginning of the episode, Booth and Brennan clash over whether polygamy is ever understandable, and Brennan points out that Booth can’t take some parts of the Bible literally and not others. Booth is still hearing none of it: “You pick a wife and go with it.” Hmm. After they solve the case, Brennan asks Booth if he believes that Ed Samuel loved his wives equally, and Booth insists that he loved the first one the most. What does this mean?

Booth: “It means, Bones, that you can love a lot of people in this world, but there’s only one person that you love the most.”
Brennan: “But how do you know which person you love the most when you’re confused by chemical messages traveling throughout your limbic system?”
Booth: “You just do.”
Brennan: “What if you let that person get away?”
Booth: “That person’s not going anywhere.”

This conversation is chock full of smiles and earnest looks and meaningful pauses, and let’s just say that Booth/Brennan ‘shippers shouldn’t be losing hope any time soon.

Cam gets the main subplot this week as she tries to have a life outside of work. She’s still dating ob/gyn Paul, but he keeps cancelling dates. Cam goes to Booth for advice – a nice reminder of their history together – and Booth tells her that it’s all about communication and to give Paul a chance. Instead, Cam starts ignoring Paul’s calls and takes out her frustration by “testing” guns in the lab. Angela surmises that she’s blowing Paul off so that he’ll come crawling back, which Cam denies, but Angela then advises that Cam should just make her own plans and not wait around for Paul. Paul eventually comes to the lab and tells Cam that he cares about her more than his job. He made dinner reservations, and though Cam tells him she can’t make it because of the investigation, she ends up putting her work aside to go.

Hodgins and Angela continue to be adorable, especially when Angela feels the baby move and Hodgins is jealous. Angela jokes that she wants another wife to help out, but when she asks Hodgins if he’d want a second wife, he responds: “If I could marry you twice, I could do it in a heartbeat.” Aw. Angela’s reaction is to wish they could have sex at work, but – didn’t they used to do that pretty regularly? Huh.

The Rotating Intern is Wendell again, and he and Sweets lay low this episode, just helping with the case and occasionally providing a sounding board for the other characters.

Next week: Is Booth going to propose to Hannah? Oh, and there’s probably a murder too.

Photo Courtesy of FOX

The Mystery of the Week first looks like an epilogue rather than a beginning: Heather Taffet, the Gravedigger, is headed to the courthouse for her final appeal. Sweets is with her, because she requested counseling, and Booth and Caroline Julian are outside with an angry crowd of protesters as the van pulls up to the front of the courthouse – because the parking garage gate is unexpectedly closed. Coincidence? Booth, scanning the crowd for anything out of the ordinary, sees someone filming the scene – and then Taffet gets out of the van and immediately has her head shot off. Silently. And graphically. (Seriously, there are a lot of shots of the headless corpse.) Sweets, who was standing behind her, is splattered with blood, and the crowd runs away – except for the guy with the camera, who just keeps filming.

The team, of course, immediately gets to work. Booth finds the bullet hole in a wall and uses it to figure out the bullet’s trajectory. Since he didn’t hear the shot, he concludes that it came from far away, and requests data from DC’s ShotSpotter system. The skull fragments are sent to the Jeffersonian, where Cam determines that a single bullet, at a faster than average speed, made Taffet’s head explode. Hodgins retrieves the bullet from the remains: it’s quite large and looks like copper. Angela determines that it’s 12 grams of pure copper and has grooves “unrelated to internal ballistics.” She promises to try “unsquishing” it. Wendell works on reconstructing the skull and determines that the entry wound was at the left parietal.

Meanwhile, Caroline suspects that Brennan’s father Max might have shot Taffet to protect his daughter, and Booth puts Max on the suspect list. Once Brennan sees this, she begins to suspect him, but Angela does her best to talk her out of it. (Hilariously, each person thinks Max is in a different country.) Max soon calls Brennan, supposedly to check on her in the wake of the shooting, and claims he’s in Maui, but the audience can see he’s somewhere with snow. When Brennan tells him that he’s on the suspect list, he denies involvement and confesses that he’s actually in New Hampshire. Max later shows up and gives Brennan receipts as an alibi, but doesn’t want to talk to Booth. Brennan believes him, but Booth is skeptical: “Just tell Max that drunk in New Hampshire is not an official alibi.”

Booth questions the man who was taping the crime scene: It turns out he’s James Kent, father of two of Taffet’s victims. Kent says he was there with some of the other families, and that he didn’t run the way everyone else did because he didn’t know what was going on. He denies involvement in the shooting and gives his footage to Booth. The tape confirms to Booth that the shot was from the south-southwest, but he still can’t hear it.

Angela creates an image of what the bullet probably originally looked like, and Booth realizes that it was a custom, hand-made bullet, which suggests that this was a professional hit. The bullet hit the wall at over 1000 feet per second and with very little angle, so it was an extremely long shot, and Angela doesn’t think Max would have been capable of it. Booth and Brennan recreate the scene and suspect that the shot came from nearby law offices. One of the suspects, Harvey Morrister, works there as a paralegal: he’s a former military marksman, and Taffet had him disbarred. (What? How? Why? I missed the explanation of this, if there was one. Anyone?) When they bring him in for questioning, though, he’s nervous and fidgety, and Booth and Sweets agree that he couldn’t have done it.

The team finally gets the ShotSpotter data and traces the location of the gunshot to the apartment of an escort named Tracy Leveque. Booth and Brennan go to the apartment, and Booth brings a gun so he can mimic the sniper’s position. He can only just barely see the courthouse, and concludes that the sniper picked the apartment for the challenge of it: “Only the best sniper in the world” could have made the shot. Brennan concludes that Booth must know the shooter, and Booth agrees. An odd smell leads them to the bathtub, where they find Leveque’s body dissolving in what they initially think is lye, but turns out to be caustic potash. (Second graphic scene of the episode!) Brennan determines that Leveque’s head was severed from her spine, and the markings on the bones suggest the the sniper stabbed with his left hand (even though he shot right-handed), used a hunting knife, and might have been Israeli-trained. Hodgins experiments with caustic potash and estimates the time of death at six days ago. The date and time of Taffet’s hearing wasn’t public knowledge at that point, so Caroline still thinks it was some sort of inside job.

There’s a list of only six snipers who could have pulled off the shot, and Booth says he knows all of them. Sweets is assigned to look into their psychological background. Booth questions a sniper he knew in Afghanistan named William Preston. When Preston protests that Booth just doesn’t like him, Booth says no one likes him, but it turns out Preston was on assignment elsewhere. He suggests that Booth is avoiding facing the fact that the killer is a man they know named Jacob Broadsky. At first, Booth insists that Broadsky isn’t a suspect, but then concedes. Broadsky disappeared after a hostage situation in which he killed someone before getting permission to shoot. When Sweets suggests that Booth approves of this behavior, Booth insists he doesn’t approve, but understands why Broadsky did what he did.

Under the alias Gary Gray (after a famous long-dead British sniper), someone created a bank account and deposited $2 million – the same amount James Kent recently withdrew, and the amount Taffet had demanded as ransom for Kent’s sons. Kent confesses that he paid someone to kill Taffet, but he didn’t get a name or even see the killer. The killer picked the victim and price, and Kent just agreed.

A witness reports seeing Broadsky at a gun shop in the middle of nowhere, and it turns out that Broadsky purchased a property nearby – under the name Seeley Booth. Booth concludes that “This is between me and him” and goes to the property to confront Broadsky. Broadsky claims that he didn’t kill Taffet, but then refers to Leveque as collateral damage. He claims: “We’re the same, Seeley. We both want to do the right thing.” Broadsky runs, but Booth realizes he can chase him onto the property without a warrant because the property is in his name. Broadsky remotely blows up his trailer to distract Booth and gets away. Booth decides not to shoot him because he isn’t 100% sure that Broadsky is guilty.

This episode definitely centered around Booth, and it’s nice to see his past come up. I also enjoyed seeing him leading other agents – we so often see him with the squints, but don’t get much of a sense of how he relates to his peers. I did find myself wishing that the show had remembered Booth’s Catholicism in this episode: How does he feel about the death penalty, anyway? He didn’t interact much with Brennan this week, but they did have a few nice moments that showed how much they care about each other. Brennan’s first words when she found Booth after the shooting were “I’m so glad you’re okay,” and at the end of the episode, Booth is looking at Brennan as he says, “I just didn’t want to let anyone down.” When Brennan is talking to her dad at the end of the episode, Booth watches through the window with a rather inscrutable expression on his face.

Sweets was definitely the MVP of this episode for me. Before she’s killed, Taffet gets into his head, calling him a little boy and claiming that “Everyone knows who’s the weakest link in the chain.” She claims that Sweets’ testimony at her appeal would guarantee her release, and her words haunt him in the wake of the shooting. He becomes withdrawn and starts doubting his abilities. He insists to the rest of the team that he’s fine, but when Booth sends him home to get some rest, Sweets thinks this means he’s not needed.

It takes Caroline to snap him out of it. In a powerful scene, she confesses to Sweets that she had never been so scared in her life, but convinces him not to give Taffet power over his psyche:

Caroline: “We’re all just people, cherie. You’re an expert with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Now, who’s Heather Taffet?”
Sweets: “A dead serial killer?”
Caroline: “You’re damn straight … it’s over. She can’t get to any of us anymore.”

Sweets gets his head back in the game, and when Booth rather adorably notices and asks what changed, Sweets gives the credit to Caroline “hollering” at him.

It’s always fun when Brennan’s father Max shows up, and this week he has two purposes: to be a brief and unconvincing suspect, and to take his turn as the Greek chorus/audience stand-in demanding to know why Booth and Brennan aren’t together yet. (This job usually goes to an intern.) His very first question to Angela is about his daughter and Booth, and he’s upset that they’re not and that Booth is with someone else. He tells Brennan that she’s prettier and smarter than Hannah – what a good dad! – and admits: “I just always thought that you and Booth would get over the nonsense and settle down.” Brennan, unsurprisingly, doesn’t want to talk about it. Later, he thanks her for believing that he wasn’t the killer, and gives her a fake ceramic conch shell toothbrush holder. They have a whole bit about this that I found unconvincing: the upshot is that Brennan will at least pretend to believe that she can hear the ocean in a seashell, despite knowing it’s scientifically incorrect, because her father told her she could. This could have been a touching moment for a father-daughter duo with a less fraught history (and less commitment to science). Or it could have worked to show how Brennan is learning to meet people on their own terms, if it had been with a character she actually trusted, like Booth or Angela. But for these two characters? I didn’t buy it.

In another subplot I wasn’t really feeling, Hodgins is thrilled about Taffet’s death and says he would reward the killer if he could, and Angela freaks out about his enthusiasm. “The father of my child cannot condone a full-out assassination.” But Sweets tells Hodgins that his feelings are normal, seeing as how Taffet buried him alive and all. And this is … never really resolved between Angela and Hodgins, actually.

The Rotating Intern is Wendell, but neither he nor Cam have much to do this week aside from their lab duties.

Next week: Polygamy! I’m sure that’s completely random, because it’s not like there’s anyone on this show in love with two women or anything.

Photo Courtesy of FOX

The Mystery of the Week begins when Brody Mannings finds a body in the shower of his young socialite girlfriend, Paisley Johnston. The body is particularly disfigured because of the water pressure: the shower has been on for three days at 105 degrees. Because the victim is female and in her early to mid-twenties, the team assumes it’s Johnston. The cause of death is an epidermal hematoma from a fracture that caused the facial bones to fragment; the initial examination also shows that the victim had mild scoliosis. Booth looks into Johnston’s financials and finds that she was a big shopper, but nothing suspicious turns up. Sweets has more luck with her social networking account: Johnston has uploaded so many pictures of herself that Sweets thinks she may have narcissistic personality disorder, and many of these pictures include her chinchilla, Chichi. Johnston had lots of admirers but only interacted directly with one Nicole Twist, with whom she exchanged hundreds of messages for months until a fight four days before. When they bring her in for questioning, Twist says they fought because Johnston gave her a fake Chanel purse, and Twist was arrested when she tried to exchange it. Twist was humiliated and wanted revenge – but says she got this revenge by defriending Johnston on the social networking site, not by killing her.

The squints’ examination of the skeleton soon reveals that although the victim was 5’4″, like Johnston, her femur measurement was off, and suggests that she was actually of Asian descent. When Hodgins snakes the shower’s drain, he finds a paper with Chinese writing in with the hair and bone fragments. Angela enhances the writing and Brennan identifies it as a Daoist charm designed to cure bone ailments, probably used for the victim’s scoliosis; it was in the shower because the victim had it pasted to the affected area of her body. This charm leads to an apothecary named Ming Tsou who identifies the victim as his fiancee Jenny Yang. He hadn’t seen her in a week, but hadn’t reported her missing because they’d had a fight. He thought she was trying to be American and turning her back on traditions that were important to him, but he swears that he just wanted her to be happy, and didn’t kill her. Specifically, he says that Yang was trying to be part of Johnston’s crowd, and that she met Johnston at the restaurant where she (Yang) worked. Tsou tells them to look for Mama Liu at the restaurant. Mama Liu shows Booth and Brennan to a storeroom full of counterfeit bags – and her operation is busted by the police while they’re there. The investigator, Eric Anderson, says that Yang was the one who tipped them off. Mama Liu tries to bribe Booth and Anderson, but seems honestly shocked that Yang was murdered. She tells them that Yang had gone to Johnston’s house to collect money Johnston owed them for purses, and that “she tried to be white. That’s what killed her.”

Meanwhile, Sweets discovers a few more clues in Johnston’s social networking history: Johnston had ignored a friend request from Yang, and she had had Chichi the chinchilla “lojacked.” This lets them track down Johnston herself – she had been missing because of an overdose. Johnston claims that she barely knew Yang, but that Yang knew where she kept her key. Booth tells Johnston that they found a small electronic device under her mattress, and … you know, I don’t think this is ever actually explained. (Did anyone else catch an explanation?) Johnston thinks Booth is talking about the teddy bear cam that her boyfriend used to spy on her, but Booth says they didn’t find a teddy bear or camera. Back in the lab, the team figures out that Yang was killed by a very violent blow to the back of the skull, but that the weapon must have been smashed upward into her skull in a really unlikely way. It turns out that Jenny was actually picked up and smashed downward onto a shower nozzle. Mama Liu, for her part, has an alibi – she was in New York, and turns in her supplier to Anderson, giving him an even bigger bust.

Mannings shows up with the teddy bear cam and says that he doesn’t care that Johnston was sleeping with other men – he’s just happy she’s alive. The camera has recorded Yang having sex on the night of the murder, but the video doesn’t show the man’s face. Rhinoceros horn is found with the remains, and Brennan tells the team that it’s a male aphrodisiac that Ming Tsou sells. Tsou claims he actually gave it to Yang to “cool her spirits,” and Brennan can tell from his leg measurements that he’s not the man on the tape. Angela makes a composite image of the man’s face from bits of images in various reflective surfaces in the room, and it reveals that the killer is Eric Anderson, the detective who made the counterfeit purse bust. He tells Booth that he made a mistake by sleeping with an informant, but denies killing her until Booth shows him the facial reconstruction and an arrest warrant. Anderson eventually tells Booth that Yang wanted him to arrest Johnston instead of Mama Liu, and threatened to tell his boss about their affair. In order to protect his job and marriage, Anderson killed Yang and ran, without even turning off the shower.

Thanks to Brennan‘s declaration to Booth in the previous episode, the dynamic between the two of them and Hannah became even more complex this week. Booth tells Sweets what Brennan said and asks for advice, but Sweets suggests that Booth doesn’t want to tell Hannah about it because he actually still has feelings for Brennan. Booth denies this and tells Hannah about the conversation with Brennan, but swears that his feelings are all in the past. Hannah seems a little upset but says she’s glad Booth told her. She’s mostly concerned about Brennan figuring out that she knows, so she starts cancelling plans that they’ve made together. It takes Angela to point out to Brennan that Hannah is avoiding her because she’s embarrassed about keeping something from her, and Angela advises Brennan to get Hannah to tell her what’s wrong in order to maintain their friendship. So Brennan intercepts Hannah on her way to the White House and Hannah eventually tells her what’s going on. Brennan is upsets that Booth told Hannah, because she didn’t want to hurt her friend, but they’re both committed to being friends. They meet up for a drink later and agree that Brennan should try to move on, but the guy they think is hitting on Brennan is actually trying to pick them both up for a threesome. They’re shocked, because it’s not like the same man would tend to be interested in both of them or anything! I know some fans are upset about the way things are progressing with Hannah, but I actually like it: all the characters are really trying to act like adults, and it’s refreshing.

Sweets didn’t get much of his own plotline this episode (and Daisy was absent), because most of what he had to do was comment on the Booth/Brennan/Hannah issue. In a cute moment at the beginning of the episode, though, we learn that he listens to (and sings along with) “Coconut” at the gym, where Booth tells him “Treadmills are for mice.”

Hodgins and Angela continue to be generally adorable as they prepare for parenthood, and we get to see the baby during a DIY ultrasound at the end of the episode. Angela loves Paisley’s house and neighborhood, and it prompts her to confess to Hodgins that she’d rather raise their baby in a real neighborhood instead of a secluded estate, and that she wants to make their own history in their own place. Hodgins seems somewhat less than thrilled with this idea at first (which seems odd given how much he usually tries to ignore his wealth), but by the end of the episode he buys Paisley’s house for Angela.

The Rotating Intern is Clark Edison, who had previously asked for a more professionally detached workplace. He has seen the error of his ways – to the point of asking all sorts of intrusive questions and making Cam and Hodgins, at least, deeply uncomfortable. He also starts volunteering information about himself: he has nine siblings and thinks he has abandonment issues because his parents traveled a lot. He tells Hodgins that he briefly worked for the NSA, and Hodgins, of course, becomes highly suspicious. Edison also continues the practice of having the intern act as a sort of Greek chorus (or stand-in for the audience) on the subject of Booth, Brennan, and Hannah: he comments that “the potential emotional fallout could be cataclysmic,” but that his “money’s on Doctor B and Booth.”

Next week we’re in for a dramatic episode: the Gravedigger is shot by a sniper at the courthouse, and the team must figure out what’s going on and whether they’re in danger.

Photo Courtesy of FOX