By Kimberley Veart
This week begins with a body found under a merry-go-round, and young Christine (Sunnie Pelant) calling her stuffed toy a jackass. It’s an unusual beginning for an interesting episode that quickly turns into Bones’ own version of The Wolf of Wall Street, as the victim was high-flying trader who enjoyed the perks of hookers and cocaine on the side.
Christine’s use of ‘profanity’ has Booth and Brennan arguing; Brennan thinks it is a great way to express oneself without aggression, while Booth isn’t exactly thrilled. It seems that Christine is turning out very much like her mother, making her both infuriating and endearing to Booth. This episode illustrates well the nice rhythm that Bones has settled into, with marriage and parenting conflicts driving the Booth/Brennan relationship. These are fresh and fun to explore and also allow the characters to grow.
Identifying the victim was particularly gross this week, even by Bones standards. The skull had been badly damaged at the playground and though Brennan and exasperating intern Dr. Wells (Brian Klugman) fight to reconstruct it, Cam succeeds in doing it her way. Which is disgusting. With the help of a queasy Angela, Cam literally pastes – there are glue sticks involved – the skin of the nose and ears back onto the skull so that computer identification can take place. Later, in another disturbing visual treat, the two of them also rehydrate an eyeball.
When the victim is identified as a trader, this is somehow traumatic for Aubrey and he oversteps the mark with the victim’s distressed wife. It is eventually revealed that his father worked on Wall Street and was arrested for fraud when Aubrey was thirteen, skipping out on the family to escape arrest. While exploring the character of Aubrey is great, it felt a little unnecessary to have this additional layer to the storyline this week. However, it did lead to a sweet little bonding scene between Brennan and Aubrey at the end as they compared criminal fathers.
Back at the lab, Brennan gets to use her ‘profanity’ to let off some steam, as Dr. Wells truly is annoyingly competitive, wanting to surpass Brennan’s position as the best forensic anthropologist in the country. She calls him a “real pain in my ass.” When he asks her if she swore to stop herself from hitting him, she coolly replies, “given your personality I imagine you are quite used to that.” Brennan gets the victory, of course, as she finds a microscopic nick in the skull with a fragment in it. This leads to the murderer, a colleague of the trader upset with the victim’s lack of loyalty to the company.
The murder itself wasn’t particularly fascinating this week, though I was glad it didn’t turn out to be the wife discovering her husband’s double life as that would have been too predictable. Yet, it was fun to watch the team interact with the excesses of the fabulously rich, especially seeing a stern Booth deal with a self-confessed ‘coked up’ witness. While Dr. Wells definitely isn’t my favourite intern, his irritating presence gives Brennan so many opportunities to firmly and hilariously put him in his place that it makes for great viewing.
Rather sweetly, the episode ends with Brennan attempting to teach Christine why it’s not okay to swear at her teacher. It’s nice to see her flustered by these trials of parenting, as she is usually so confident and self-assured.
Review Score: THREE AND A HALF STARS (OUT OF FIVE)
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