Bones – The Skull in the Skeleton

Fox

(Season 4, Episode 7)

Temperance and Booth continue to creak toward each other at a snail’s pace. It’s a good thing we have Angela’s sex life to titillate us in the meantime (and when are they going to give Cam another lover? Poor Hodgins, too!). Maybe I need to include Sweets and Wick (the reversal of their names absolutely kills me — hilarious!) in the titillation category as well, though it didn’t really do anything for me personally….

Between House and Bones, we’ve had a lot of girl-on-girl action lately. Here’s a question: Why not have Temperance have a female lover? She always talks about being open-minded sexually. In fact, did anyone else pick up on a little tension between Temperance and Angela in this episode, while they were discussing Angela’s past with Roxy? It would be interesting to see that relationship explored a bit more. However, it’s my theory that certain female lead characters can’t get away with sexual experimentation in the same way that supporting characters can. What do you think? Do you think the network would ever let Temperance have a female lover? Because unless I am forgetting something key, Brennan has had male lovers on the show, to date.

The murder was interesting in this episode. I knew the death must have been murder due to the nature of the show. However, I did think it was kind of beautiful to have an artist who would potentially integrate himself into his art in the most literal and symbolic of ways. It was great to see Vicki Lewis, formerly of NewsRadio, appearing as the white-powdered gallery owner. Rich noted recently in one of his reviews that the show seemed to have several viable suspects. That was true last night as well, though I thought it was kind of obvious that Lewis’s character was the killer just because they were focusing so much on the other suspects (especially Roxy).

I had the sense that this show was a bit out of order as well as last week’s show, which Rich mentioned. For one thing, Sweets got together with Wick by calling her after her first episode and sympathizing with her being fired. Then, suddenly, she is back “in the rotation,” according to Cam. And yet … sweets has to fire her. So, shouldn’t there have been a bit more consistency? Although the approach is altogether different for finding a replacement for Zack, the show is going to suffer a bit from House syndrome last season as different replacements for Zack keep showing up. It’s not amusing as much as it is distracting. It makes me wonder whether they are really trying to imitate House, or whether they are just biding time while Eric Millegan pursues another project … whatever is going on, it would be fairer to us as viewers to just give us a replacement and be done with it.

I’m also getting sick of the squints praising Sweets constantly for being really good at his job when Sweets is just making ordinary observations that anybody with common sense and perhaps Psych 101 under their belts could make. It just makes Sweets seem incompetent — or the Squints look like they haven’t ever been to college. Is any group of people *this* clueless about human relations? Angela especially has had great instincts and even served as a bit of a consultant on human affairs before Sweets showed up. It’s wonderful that they are trying to give John Francis Daley constant work to do — but it’s wearing thin. Give him something that will really show his chops — or that will really show his lack of life experience and shake his arrogance a bit.

All in all, though, a solid episode, moving some things forward, and the case itself was interesting enough to mitigate my minor annoyances about certain plot points. I just really want Angela and Hodgins to get back together, so I’m cranky.

Clacked by Jen Creer
on Nov 06, 2008 @ 16:20 EST5EDT