Bones – The Crank in the Shaft

Greg Gayne/FOX

(Season 4, Episode 6)

Stop the presses! Hold the phone! Hit the brakes! I may have had a change of heart about a former decision. As some of you may know I had previously mentioned that Michael Badalucco’s intern character on a recent episode of Bones was the perfect replacement for Zack Addy. He was worldly, smart, and a good father figure for the rest of the Sqints. Now, I’m not too sure.

That’s thanks to Colin Fisher, the slightly maudlin intern-of-the-week who gave a hand to the Squints this episode. All right, he was more than slightly maudlin — I considered calling and putting a suicide watch on him. But there was a charm underneath that depression that made him a likable character (despite the fact that Hodgins, at one point, called him a tool). Plus, he’s ‘Zack’ smart when he comes to putting the pieces of a body together to help determine the cause of death. Though, some of his analytical skills have to be worked on. That’s why he’s still an intern, of course.

Thing is, Bones didn’t seem to fire him, or he wasn’t leaving for another dig, or he didn’t decide to give up for some unknown reason (which is what last week’s intern did). In fact, it doesn’t seem like anything was said about Fisher’s fate. So, does that mean he’s coming back next episode? Possibly, but we’ll have to wait and see. Regardless, Both Fisher and Badalucco’s Starret should be the top two candidates to replace Zack

Now, onto the actual review of the show. At first, there was uncertainty that this week’s show would work. For some reason, a murder at an office building sounded somewhat mundane…a ‘been there-done that’ type of scenario. Thankfully, there were enough twists and turns in the suspect pool, and a killer revealed that wasn’t even expected, that the case worked out in the end. In addition, this week’s case wasn’t the true focus of the episode. It was evenly split with the events going on at the Jeffersonian.

For some unknown reason, last season seemed to focus more on Bones and Booth rather than the goings-on at the Institute. It was unfortunate, since the characters that inhabit those halls of science really help make Bones as a show. True, David Boreanaz and Emily Deschanel are the stars, but it would be awfully boring if those two were on the screen all of the time without any additional interaction. Cam, Angela, Hodgins and, previously, Zack were the ones who helped flesh out the characters.

Maybe the Squints have become more interesting because of what is happening over there right now. Not only are they dealing with Zack’s loss (and, by the way, wasn’t the reveal in last week’s episode that he didn’t knife that guy last season just a bit too convenient), but they have to constantly adjust to a new intern each week, and they have to confront the tension between Angela and Hodgins.

The intern adjustment is the easy part since the Squints don’t really change the way they act around these folks. If anything, they are trying to get them used to the way they operate. A good example of this is Cam telling Fisher to buck up after he feels his diagnostic skills are not the greatest. Her best line came when she told the young man that his disposition was making all of the death that surrounded her look like good times. Look, they can’t shutdown the Institute just because they lost one of their strongest members. These folks need to push ahead.

Not as easy to adjust to was the estrangement between Hodgins and Angela. It just wasn’t pretty. An angry Hodgins is not someone I enjoy watching. Particularly when he’s a smart-ass to his supervisors (a big pet peeve of mine). No matter how intelligent you are, someone as angry as Hodgins is not a person you can work with. That, and everyone else had to walk around on eggshells every time those two got together. Luckily, it all seemingly came to an end this episode as Angela came to terms with the fact that she and Hodgins had something that was great and now they need to move on.

This was all good stuff because, frankly, what was going on with Bones and Booth wasn’t very interesting at all. A chair? Anxious about a dead man’s chair? Really? Bones and Booth have had plenty of philosophical conversations over the years, many of them made you think about both sides of the argument. But, a chair? It really didn’t fit into this show, let alone Seeley’s persona. I have never known Booth as being that, um, materialistic about something. Since there really wasn’t much conversation between Bones and Booth this week that little sub-plot threw the show off slightly.

Good thing the case turned out to be interesting. It seems that there have only been one or two suspects who were profiled in cases over the last few weeks. There were four, five viable candidates for murder this time around? They all seemed like good choices. Even Chip was believable in his confession of how Patty was killed. Never did it cross my mind that the receptionist was the actual murderer. However, after watching the episode a second time (with my wife, who missed the original airing) I should have known that it was her: her blue-fingernailed hand lingered on camera just a bit too long when she was first shown earlier in the show.

Also impressive was the death of Patty. Not her initial death by stapler, but how her body was just shredded to pieces in the elevator shaft. Ugh! All of that bone, skin and sinew splattered across every surface. Yet, surprisingly, I was able to eat something during that time. Which probably means that I am getting used to all of the Bones’ gore and that I need some serious psychotropic medicines.

That’s it for this week. Let me know what you think about this week’s Bones and if there is anything that you’d like to see covered during these reviews.

Clacked by Richard Keller
on Oct 02, 2008 @ 11:30 EST5EDT