Griping about "Bones" season finale

May 20, 2008

Anybody see the season finale of "Bones" last night? Sucked didn't it? Unfaithful to previous scripts, illogical, weirdly and unsatisfyingly complicated, with a B.I.G. T.W.I.S.T. that is likely to just piss off regular viewers (like everyone in my family who regularly watches the show). In fact, last week's cliffhanger was so well done, I was all ready to download it and the season finale to my iPod until I watched last night's episode and decided, "Oh, to hell with it."

Way to go, guys. Cheat the viewers. And I hear the network has plans to move the timeslot not once but twice in the fall, first to Wednesday, then to Friday. This is a FOX show with good ratings, what USA Today has described as a good show with a potential to be a great show, but last night's episode was like watching a drunk shoot themselves in the foot with shotgun they think is empty. (And thanks guys. I only watch 2 TV shows regularly--Bones and House. Way to go.)

SPOILER.

Okay, if you haven't watched the show, here's the set-up. It's a team of forensic experts working out of the Jeffersonian in Washington, DC. There's "Bones" who is Dr. Temperance Brennan, a forensic anthropologist. Booth, an FBI agent. Cam, who is the boss of the department, a forensic pathologist. Jack, who is a double PhD, an expert in bugs and dirt; Angela, computer imaging and forensic artist; Zack, who is a forensic anthropologist. There is also a forensic psychiatrist, Sweets, who spends most of his time analyzing Booth and Bones.

Earlier in the season they were hunting down a serial killer dubbed Gormagon, who was killing people and building a skeleton out of various part, replacing silver parts from a silver skeleton (or vice versa, it was confusing the first time around and not much clearer after last night's mess). Gormagon had been around a while and in fact, somewhere along the line they found him in a nursing home with Alzheimer's. Because Gormagon, sort of like Sith Lords, had an apprentice. So they were trying to track down the apprentice, but now that they had caught Gormagon, the apprentice had become Gormagon and presumably was looking for an apprentice. (You know, maybe this story line was a bad idea from the very beginning. Hmmm.)

Now, if you haven't watched the show, the tone tends to be very light. The characters make up a family and one of the show's strengths has been the ensemble's interactions, built around very good mysteries, typically. Lots of humor, well-acted cast.

A recurring theme of the show has been Zack and Jack's "experiments" to see if they can duplicate some bit of forensic evidence. The first and most memorable was when they ran a frozen dead pig through a wood chipper. Last night they were trying to duplicate some ceramics and the upshot was it exploded with Zack in it, burning and damaging his hands and probably ending his career. The show can be a bit gory and the shot of his bloody, mangled hands was harder to take than your typical rotting corpse.

Then, by the end, we find that Zack, three months earlier, was recruited by Gormagon to be the apprentice.

I noticed in an interview I found today that the producer, Curtis Hanson, said he expected and hoped for a violent reaction from fans. Why he would want that is a mystery to me, given that the show's overall tone tends to be light. But then again, I'm often confused by the way TV people seem to sabotage their own shows. From a writer's perspective, I just don't get the changes. If it's some gimmick that went awry, it's still going to seriously affect the tone of the show, and if it's a "dream" which they've played around with a bit anyway, or a set-up, like the beginning of the show where Booth was shot at the finale of last week's episode, and this episode began with his funeral, which was faked (something they've done a couple times on this show, so the writer's really need to stop going back to that particular well) in order to draw in an unexplained killer with "national security implications", then the writers are pushing our credulity (of course, it's TV, so that's probably to be expected). I've just got to say, though, that I thought they were adding a tonal note, a very, very dark tonal note, to a show that has always managed to keep things light, even when it's at its most serious. Weird.

Cheers,

Mark Terry