Bones (TV series)/Headscratchers

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


How can someone that unaware of her own emotions write novels?

  • I guess it's possible, as TV!Brennan is more inspired by Kathy Reichs than Book!Brennan, but c'mon. How is that going to be convincing fiction?
  • Still, a novelist should at least be capable of writing realistic dialogue, while Brennan is often shown to be incapable of any thing other than Spock Speak, and is thrown by common expressions.
    • Well, she at least had help with the sex scenes, who knows, maybe she had some help with the dialog as well.
  • Could be a case of The Cobbler's Children Have No Shoes.
  • Or maybe the readers in the show's 'verse really like dry, emotionless stories about anthropology.
    • This troper has read some of Kathy Reichs' works, and while it's not really dry or emotionless, the character writing definitely takes a backseat to the science and mystery. It could be that TV!Brennan's books are meant to be similar.
  • Tolkien was writing a work about his own language-geekdom. Sometimes people are at their best when they are just left alone.
  • Despite the obvious flanderization, reality is unrealistic. If Brennan is based on Reich, this is obviously at least somewhat realistic. More than that though, writing dialog is far easier than understanding people talking to you. When you write dialog you know what the other character is implying, you don't have to work it out. Brennan is quite capable of understanding everything she misses, she just doesn't pick up the social cues that let her know its actually happening.
    • This troper can vouch - this troper is pretty sucky at all things social in 'real time'. But is aware enough to be able to pick up those same missed cues and what have you when reading, writing, and other instances where time is not an issue.
    • On the one hand, Brennan's lack of emotional awareness goes well beyond missing cues. Even when she has he cues explained to her, she still often doesn't understand the emotion underlying them. On the other hand, she wouldn't be the first bestselling novelist who couldn't write actual characters.
      • On the other, other hand, this is steadily becoming more true, and wasn't really that true at all in early seasons. Fanon has decided, probably rightly, that Brennan is subconsciously shaping herself to be what Booth expects.
      • To put it another way, you don't need to feel like a serial killer to 'figure out' or understand why they do what they do. You may not feel the anger or loneliness that someone feels in order to kill or understand how someone can allow that emotion to make them do stupid things though you may understand why they they did those things from a rational standpoint. In short, 'I know why people do bad things but I do not understand how they can do evil things'. And conversely, for positive emotions.
        • Actually, at one point she says she understands killers better than mothers, so maybe she could write that kind of book... plus apparently the sex scenes are very, very hot.
        • More broadly, there exists in reality things like psychopathy and Aspergers, among other things, that can inhibit or outright prevent empathy and emotion. Psychopaths (of which about one percent of people are) can generally fit right in because while they're pretty bad at emotion (if any), they're 'just good enough' to get by in most situations. They learn how to mimic other people and outwardly show emotion. While the idea of someone not really understanding emotion is odd to most people, it's not some realm of fantasy.
  • Judging by the writing Brennan reads out in "The End in the Beginning", she can understand and use metaphors and literary language.
  • Maybe her books just aren't that good? Bound with literal red tape? Ugh.
  • Amazingly this was finally addressed in the show. Angela is basically Brennan's Unofficial Editor and she's the one that comes up with the good characterization and the really hot sex scenes.
    • Some of which she bases on her own experiences. Notably, Hodgins recognizes his own "handiwork" in the latest book.
  • A lot of this is also a relatively recent development in Bones. Back at the start of season one she was much more normal.

If they invoke the No Bisexuals trope with Angela, it will be very annoying. They did it to Willow, let's hope this show is better at it.

  • Sucks to be you.
    • Oh wait, you meant... okay, it doesn't suck to be you
  • Wasn't there an episode a few seasons back when Zack and Hodgins are fighting over who a hot deliverywoman would go out with, and she chose Angela?
    • Now that the TNT reruns have rolled back to season one, the hints about Angela being bi are clearly sprinkled liberally.
    • Remember the FBI Chick that Hodgins found hot? She agreed. She's bi.
    • "Hints" that she's bi? After she broke off her engagement with Hodgins, she hooked back up with her college girlfriend long enough to want to move in together.

Despite the fact that Bones is a best-selling author, and has been on television more than once, someone thinks having her undercover at a circus is even a remotely workable idea. Riiiight.

  • Yeah, something tells me that those guys don't read much.
  • Even if you've appeared in TV more than once, most people might not recognize you.
  • Like this woman. Not only a best-selling author, but a producer of several TV series.
  • Look at people like J.K. Rowling. She wrote one of the biggest selling book series ever and even though I'm a fan of the books I wouldn't recognize her unless she told me her name. About the only author I would probably recognize straightaway is Spider Robinson.
  • Wig, Dress, Accent, people. Only she doesn't use the accent. Much. And in television, that's enough.

This show has got to be one of the most anti-intellectual shows on television. No one, no one on this show with an education is either needlessly rude and abrasive or sad

  • Even Sweets is turning down the same path all the other Docs have gone down.
    • Angela's doing okay. Except for being a knucklehead with Hodgins.
      • Angela's not a science type, though. Not that I can understand what the hell the original poster is trying to say here.
        • I think they meant to say "everyone", but I'm just guessing. That said, I personally wouldn't class Cam as any of the above, and in any case I just don't think a show in which most of the main cast and one of the leads are scientists--who regularly use their smarts to solve crimes and catch killers--can be said to be anti-intellectual. There is some TV Genius stuff going on here, but the "intellectual" characters aren't cast as antagonists.
      • While not entirely anti-intellectual, the show does have a tendency to put 'traditional' values much much higher than anything else. In a recent episode for instance Bones talks about being a single mother via artificial insemination. -Everyone- that isn't Bones or the intern objects and -everyone- feels that Booth has to be a 'real' father by having sex and what not. The other single mother in the episode is shown poorly. Similarly, while Sweets is suppose to be comic relief, more often the 'joke' is that psychology is a bogus science rather than Sweets himself being funny or trying unconventional psychology. This sort of thing has happened in many episodes where Bones unconventional ideas are put more negatively than everyone else's values - and that she only 'gets it' and 'becomes a better person' by accepting traditional values. Similarly, non-traditional characters in the show are shown has worse, inferior (morally, intellectually, ethically), or just mischaracterized and heavily stereotyped such as the heavy metal bands, goths, roleplayers, ren fairs, and so forth. In other instances, divorce is always shown as preventable (which it is) but the solution to them usually is simply 'being strong' rather than actually working through the problems. Likewise, the fact that Booth is a divorced father is rarely brought up and when it is, it is -always- as a 'he is being responsible'... differently than any single mother divorcee.
        • In their defense (with regards to the heavy metal, role players etc.), that's basically how every show ever depicts any group not in the mainstream. Not that this justifies it, but Bones certainly isn't the only one doing it.
        • Booth isn't divorced. He was never married to Rebecca.
        • The cast objected to Bones being a single mother (well, it's more like open-mouthed shock) because a) it's a decision that comes very literally out of nowhere and b) anyone who's spoken to Bones for five minutes is probably going to have misgivings about her parental abilities. Likewise, anyone who knows Booth is likely to work out that he isn't going to be able to just provide the sperm for his partner's kid and then not get involved, even if it's what she wants; he's just not built that way. Skepticism about these two people making these decisions was totally warranted; it doesn't necessarily transfer over to all such situations.
        • What's more, the main objection as I read it isn't to Bones being a single mother, but rather to the idea that Booth would be happy to not be a part of his child's life. Bones expected him to be, no one else agreed.
        • And whatever happened to Brennan not wanting children? In The Bodies in the Book, didn't she say that, due to the nature of her work - which takes her to crime scenes, mass graves in third world countries, and archaeological sites often in harsh climates - it would be irresponsible for her to have a child at this point in her career? (Or has she just given up on ever going out of the country again because of how, seemingly every single time she's tried in the last three seasons, the trip has been derailed by an FBI investigation?)
          • Brennan's decision to have children makes absolute sense given Brennan's character. She made it clear in earlier episodes that she didn't want children (in The Woman in the Car she outright tells the TV interviewer "I'm not going to have children.") She then gathers several seasons worth of additional data on the issue and makes a rational decision that refusing to pass her genetics on to a child is selfish. Note that, unlike everyone else that knows her, Brennan doesn't think that she would be a bad mother, just that having children isn't part of her life plan.
    • I'm with the OP here. The geniuses might be the good guys, but it's pretty clear that the writers think higher education and social skills are mutually exclusive.
      • No, they think genius-level intelligence - not higher education - and social skills are mutually exclusive.
      • You know, having rewatched quite a few episodes, it seems more like Social Skills Do Not Exist. Almost no one they meet is ever convincingly polite or friendly.
        • Angela springs to mind, as does the random guard from "The Doctor in the Photo".
      • I'm with the OP as well. When you look at other shows where "science is crime-solving magic" (CSI, Criminal Minds) there is usually a wide variety of personalities on the team and even the nerdiest ones are still emphathetic and have basic social skills, even if they are kind of akward at times. For example, on Criminal Minds, every cast member is brilliant and most of them have had nerdy moments. In that group we have nerdy Reid and Gideon, smooth ladies' man Morgan, stoic family man Hotch, charismatic if distant Rossi (who replaced Gideon), tough and principaled Prentiss, motherly small-town girl JJ, and quirky, vivacious, flirty Garcia. And even Reid and Gideon are far more empathetic than most of the Bones cast, and Reid is awkward but at least tries not to be. I could illustrate the point with CSI:NY (the one I'm most familiar with) and probably CSI: Las Vegas as well. On Bones, however, most of the "sciency" characters have three personality traits; smart, and varying degrees of awkward and insensitive.
  • I completely disagree with the OP. They don't have 'no social skills', most of them have some social issues or quirks, but they're generally quite rational. Bones can be insensitive, but rarely intentionally, and she can also be sensitive and kind. She just has difficulty responding. Booth doesn't even deserve mention, he's really quite normal. Angela is very kind and sweet too, and empathizes well. She even struggles with her job at the Jeffersonian because she can't deal with the death and sadness (A Boy in the Bush). Hodgins, of course, has some quirks (conspiracy theories) and some anger management problems, but he gets over them, and turns out to be an interesting character and a great father. Zack, too, clearly has social issues (implied to be Aspberger's Syndrome) but even he empathizes (A Boy in the Bush, when he can barely work on the remains because they're so small). In the same episode, Brennan tells him it never gets easier, but he should try to 'put his heart in a box'. They clearly all care, they just deal with it differently, and especially in the case with Aspberger's Syndrome, his struggles with metaphor and normal interaction are perfectly acceptable.

The way they handled the explosives to scuttle the ship in the last episode with the Gravedigger REALLY bugs me.

Let me count the ways:

  • 1. The explosives would have been placed against the hull, meaning the Booth would have had no access to them.
  • 2. These were 'professionally placed' demolition charges, not something the criminal rigged up, meaning that they weren't booby-trapped. HE COULD HAVE JUST PULLED THE WIRES OUT OF THE BRICKS OF EXPLOSIVES!
  • 2A. OR DISCONNECTED THE RECEIVER!
  • 3. Using WAY too much explosive to get through the bulkhead. Technically the ghost/hallucination did that, but that just raises further questions.
  • 4. The way the ship explodes at the end. What. The HELL. SCUTTLING DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY!

Also, earlier in the episode when the Gravedigger blows up the... plinth? with the suitcase of evidence on it, they don't even TRY to recover it. I'd say that whole episode bugs me, but seeing the way the Gravedigger gets served at the end (and beaned by Bones) leaves me with a fuzzy feeling inside.

    • That's your biggest issue with the episode? Really? Not the fact that, despite the Ghost being a hallucination, multiple parts required two people to pull off?
      • Unless Booth also hallucinated the presence of those multiple parts, and was actually just stumbling around at random when he thought he and Parker were cooperating?
    • The Ghost isn't a hallucination, or its a shared one, as it says hello to Brennan and she responds at the end of the episode.
      • Or Brennan really interacted with some random passerby, and Booth hallucinated that the person looked like Parker.
    • Not poking around the plinth may have been self-preservation. If the Gravedigger'd already left one bomb there, the possibility that the perp might have double-rigged the plinth, and/or could be watching the site through a sniper rifle, surely occurred to them too.

For a bunch of geniuses, they sure get thrown the Idiot Ball a lot.

  • Examples: Not knowing that tetrodotoxin is used in "zombification" in Haiti, taking forever to realize a "black knight" could be wearing chain-mail rather than plate armor (and in the same episode, Bones forgetting to get the Black Knight's license plate).
    • What gets me is when they get handed the Idiot Ball just to create some commercial break drama. Bones, queen of all science, doesn't recognize bioluminescent bacteria? In another episode, Bones wonders aloud, puzzled: "How could a person have two sexes?" After the commercial break, she's haughtily explaining to us plebeians that the victim was transsexual.
      • I can offer some justifications for the above, She was just in a car accident when she fought the black knight, she didn't have any time to record anything. The commercial breaks can be her pondering to herself or the others then recalling aftewards (still annoying though)

The whole "kei doctor" thing.

  • Firstly, it'd be visual kei. Secondly, did none of them stop to think that GEE, maybe this doctor was a transman or transwoman? And that futzing around over "ooh, is that a boy or a girl? A boy or a girl?" might be really offensive? I got the feeling they were trying to establish "him" as genderqueer, but didn't plain know how. That whole subplot just felt so skeezily badly handled. Even for a crime show. Why does his sex even matter? I can see maybe Booth being a little weirded out, but the way the entire lab joined in seemed ridiculous.
    • Reality is unrealistic. Most people out there would react similarly, if perhaps with more social grace than people in the bones universe have, but that seems to be a defining trait for everyone, bit-character or not.
      • It's a little easier to accept from people who don't have their anthropological interest hat on.
    • Given that Brennan can sex a half-denuded human skull at a glance, and diagnose a spinal condition by watching a young girl take a bow, why couldn't she deduce the doctor's gender from facial and jaw proportions, finger lengths, hip rotation while walking, etc?
      • Brennan, at least as far as I remember, did not say anything in regards to Dr. Tanaka's sex. It was everyone else who was curious and unable to let it lie. Maybe they would have managed to answer it without Angela's 'hug' at the end if they had just asked Brennan. Likewise, it was probably meant to show culture clash - in Japan, it is accepted and no one would ask such a thing. In America, we want to know everyone's business and have a difficult time with leaving private matters private.
    • You'll have to excuse the unenlightened here, but, why would being a transman/transwoman impact the questioning. Yes it might make the hug at the end pointless, but as far as I am aware most transpeople still identify as a specific gender, just not the gender they were born with. In this case the confusion was over which gender Tanaka identified with as much as which s/he physically was.
      • You are Completely Missing the Point, GEE specifically did not identify with either gender, which is why GEE avoided all questions regarding gender. This is a Japanese subculture that is totally foreign to westerners. If she were a guy who claimed to be a woman, or vice-versa, it would not have been NEARLY as much of a matter of perplexity to the crew (such things are considered somewhat normal nowadays). However, denying ANY semblance of gender makes them all wonder 'what gender is it, really?'
  • I think it might have more to do with cultural differences than anything. For most Americans, not knowing someone’s gender is very distracting and confusing. Remember Pat from SNL? Also, Americans tend to be pretty ethnocentric, so while it is offensive, I didn’t find it at all surprising that they would be so curious about Dr. Tanaka’s gender. Plus, considering Brennan’s tendency to immerse herself in and accept other cultures as an anthropologist, it’s also not surprising that she was so uninterested in Dr. Tanaka’s true gender.
  • This episode made me seriously dislike all the characters involved, to be honest. I was thinking they'd end it on a "wow, this is actually incredibly rude of us to be prying into something so personal in a stranger's life, we have seen the error of our ways and will be better people from now on" sort of note. Instead, they go with "Well, I'm just so darn curious I will invade the stranger's personal space to sneakily figure out which set of genitalia they possess, and now that everybody knows that there is a dick in those pants, we can handily dismiss their chosen identity because 'He's a Dude!' and there is nothing wrong with this at all." Also, the whole episode reeked of racism. I was not comfortable at all with the fetishization of Japan, anime masks and feudal warnings and the constant emphasis on "honour" or the oh-so-exotic Japanese belief systems of incense and kami. This show just doesn't handle subcultures very well, whenever they pop up.

You can tell someone's nationality from their skeleton how again?

  • Teeth Fillings mostly.
  • Did they ever look at those?
    • The Norwegian authorities were able to ship Mayhem and his cross back to the US because they recognized his dental work as American.
      • At a glance? Didn't realize that doctor was a dentist.
  • Yes? You can also trace particulates that are absorbed into the bone, which I seem to recall is how they actually solved that one. It's a real scientific practice.
  • Not to mention that basic race (Caucasoid, mongoloid, negroid) is a snap to determine with only basic forensic anthropological training (sometimes without even the skull), and a really GOOD FA can narrow ethnic groups down to sometimes-absurd degrees of specificity without even having to resort to destructive analysis on a chemical level. Throw in mass spec and DNA and you can pretty much tell exactly who they are and where they came from. (Heck, a female pubic symphisis will tell you, from the skeleton, if they've had a vaginal childbirth and how many.) Race, age, sex, it all goes to the bone.
  • To the above troper: there is no way to tell biological race from bone structure or in fact biologically in any way. Perhaps where or how that person was living at the time of their death but not Caucasoid, negroid or mongoloid mostly because race in those terms really does not exist. It's one of the things that most annoys me about this show. You cannot tell race biologically at all, only culturally, as it is nearly completely socially constructed. Race does not in any way go down to the bone, it just barely gets through the skin.
      • Facial features, such as protuberant noses in Europeans or squared-off cheekbones in natives of the Arctic, certainly do have a basis in underlying skull features. Racial self-identification is a social construct, but every human being on the planet does, indeed, inherit distinguishing biological traits from one or more ethnic groups. Why else would hereditary ailments like Tay-Sachs, cystic fibrosis, or sickle cell anemia be associated with specific ethnicities?
  • I remember hearing Angela say multiple times that she is making a guess when adding racial muscle structures and skin tones. In reality she would probably make a series of sketches for each possible race but TV relies on conciseness so we only get the final, sketch close enough to be identified.
  • One thing to be wary of is mixing up nationality, ethnicity, and cultural identity. An Asian-American who grew up among Italians for instance in the middle of Nebraska will have many different markers but some things may not show up at all.
  • They also look at the chemicals, minerals, and vitamins in the bones to find out where the victim is from. That, plus bone structure, could tell you if someone were, for instance, an Asian person who spent a considerable amount of time in Utah or something.

Why is Hodgins scared of Angela's dad?

  • Seriously....sure, Angela's dad is made of awesome, and sure he's pretty scary, but Hodgins could afford to hire most small police forces with his freaking pocket change!
    • This troper likes to see it as a combination of Mr. Montenegro's Papa Bear tendencies, his ability to unnerve people, and the fact that Hodge doesn't want to piss Angela off by taking legal action of any sort against her dad...
      • Angela's dad is not named "Mr. Montenegro", his name is Billy Gibbons.
        • Actually, they never give his name and specifically avoid naming him. Probably because they want people to think he's a fictional musician from Texas with a long beard who has the same guitar (Pearly Gates) as Billy Gibbons.
        • Angela's dad might not be Billy Gibbons but he's not Mr. Montenegro either. Montenegro is the last name Angela gave herself (along with the first name Angela) on her 18th birthday, because the name came to her in a dream.
  • Sweets is also scared of him, partially because of some sort of Texas voodoo devil pact.

The Portrayal of Britain in "The Yanks in the UK"

  • Even this American troper, who has never been closer to Britain that watching BBC America, was somewhat offended by the ridiculously stereotypical portrayal of England in that episode. Partly because it was Flanderization of an entire country, but mostly because of the Viewers are Morons attitude that the producers would have to have in order to assume that people would take that portrayal seriously.
    • Painful, painful, to this English-Canadian troper, but also a little bit hilarious. There came a point - it could easily have been the point at which the Welsh Oxford undergrad ate jellied eels because... No. Ugh. - where I figures that it must be a very clever satire of American views of England and that it ought not be taken seriously. My favorite was the elderly patrician woman telling B&B that her grandson had sex with the victim. If the writers had ever met an actual English patrician, they would know that anyone who talked like that would be thrown out of the "palace" (no comment) so fast they wouldn't know what hit them.
      • And the butler? Hilarious. This troper's grandfather is a peer, and the idea of hereditary butler following him around and taking the fall for him killing someone is completely ludicrous.

Who played the Gormogon?

  • This has been bugging me for ages - the Gormogon made a full appearance in the last episode of Season 3, but went uncredited. Granted, he had no dialogue, and some actors can opt to not be credited in a given production (or have the decision made for them by their agencies), but come on! We saw the guy's face! It'd be nice if we knew who actually played the guy!
    • He was played by Laurence Todd Rosenthal.

Angela.

  • Why are we supposed to like her, again?
    • This troper really likes Angela... why aren't we supposed to like her?
      • I always fond her to be a bit of a Mary Sue myself. Beautiful, an exceptionally talented artist in multiple fields of art, a downright impossible computer programmer, and more socially well-adjusted than most of the rest of the cast.
        • Doesn't a Mary Sue have to be the center of attention? Angela's nice, but she's largely Brennan's sidekick.
    • People are hating on her for dumping Hodgins and hooking up with Wendell. Oh and for being a flaky person in general. This Troper is ambivalent towards Angela but thinks that if Angela and Hodgins roles were reversed, people would dismiss Angela as too "clingy". Ah, sexism.
    • If Hodgins had dumped her near her wedding and then moved in with an old college girlfriend I think that people would rightfuly be pretty pissed off at him. Anyway if you are fond of her just remember it wasn't Angela that broke up with Hodgins. The writers did.
      • But, by that logic, everything Angela has done wasn't her--it was the writers. In other words, Angela doesn't exist. So that doesn't really accomplish the goal of preserving Angela as a character someone likes.
        • The complaint is really that the breakup was out of character.

Bones isn't a very good anthropologist.

She's a fantastic forensic scientist, but you'd think somebody who knows that much textbook anthropology would realize that in order for the science to work, people have to actually believe in the framework of their society. And yet she still insists on treating anyone she disagrees with as if they have some interest in learning how the world "really" works from her.

    • Mmm. I think if you consider the first season as a completely different show to the third season and beyond, with the second season as a sort of transition period, it makes more sense. (I know that sounds ridiculous.) First season, apart from some rather sharp sarcasm and a bit of ignorance of pop culture, Brennan is pretty much a regular person, and a good anthropologist. As we progressed, she became less and less like herself. Who knows why?
      • Well Secret Invasion was just starting up around the time of the second season....

She is a horrible anthropologist, as she seems to have zero understanding of human beings at all. What kind of anthropologist can't understand why people are grieving at a funeral? She's so incompetent at understanding human behavior that at this point it's just laughable.

  • Brennan is a Forensic Anthropologist, a subfield of physical anthropology and osteology that is solely concerned with the study of the human skeleton as pertaining to legal and criminal purposes or the elucidation of human evolutionary development. Anthropology is one of those subject with a such a wide preview that the term is practically meaningless (then again, when you define your subject matter as simply "humanity"...). Anthropology is actually composed of 4 more or less distinct branches: physical, archeological, cultural, and linguistic, each with its own level of scientific "hardness". Doing physical anthropology (the hardest branch) does not require one to believe in any of the preconceptions of the "softer" branches of anthropology (and it can be argued that cultural and linguistic anthropology is edging into humanities territory). And is would be perfectly in character for Brennan to look down on her cultural or linguistic brethens for their perceived lack in scientific rigor.

The holograms

  • Here's a show with supposedly a modern-day real-world setting and they have absurdly futuristic holograms that everyone just accepts. Okay. But not only do these holograms defy all modern projection technology, but they are also capable of generating lifelike CGI figures and creating unique, fluid animations for them in real time on command.
    • I just resign this to a Hand Wave called Alternate Reality. Their reality has the Jeffersonian and better holographic technology.

Is it a spoof show in part?

Am I the only one who can't take it seriously? It seems to have a heavy satiric tone clinging to it. It actually makes me feel uncomfortable, because I cannot figure it out.

How is it that nobody has called Dr. Brennan on her default hate of psychology?

    • A scientist who (correctly) recognizes pseudo-science for what it is? In its current state, the field of psychology is NOT A SCIENCE!
  • There's an entire cast of intelligent, fairly perceptive people, none of whom have ever brought up the fact that when Dr. Sweets proposes a psychological solution to the problem of the week, he's usually correct. Yet Dr. Brennan continues to dismiss psychology as a pseudo-science. Then she says she's being rational.
  • Sweets did call her on it once. When one of his predictions (which of several suspects was the killer) proved true, she asked him how he'd known. He refused to tell her, saying that she'd just refuse to believe it anyhow.
    • This has pretty much becoming a running gag by season six.
  • I always found it pretty weird that an anthropologist would hate psychology so much for being a “pseudo-science.” Her forensic work is very much hard science, but anthropology is maybe not as soft a science as psychology, but it seems to me that at the very least, there is a strong connection between the two. She understands the gender roles of some obscure aboriginal tribe, but doesn’t acknowledge that gender roles in her own society might have a role in a murder? How is anthropology not just large-scale archetypal psychology?

What the hell was up with that subplot involving Cam's sister

  • In "Intern in the Incinerator" Cam pretty much guilts Booth into pretending to still be her boyfriend to impress her father. Cam's sister kisses Booth just to piss of Cam. When Booth reveals this to Cam, Cam is only mad at her sister, with Booth trying to referee things between them. When Cam's sister reveals she only made out with Booth to piss of Cam, Booth is a little pissed off about this and when he tries to call her out on this they both flip out on him and walk off into the sunset. And this is played for laughs.

Anybody else disturbed by playing the severe depression of one of the interns for laughs?

  • Personally I was very uncomfortable when they seemed to be joking around about the guy being in the hospital due to sleeping 20 hours a day and constantly alluding to suicide, having dealt with severe depression and suicidal ideation for years myself.
  • To an extent but as the intern mentioned, he never tried to kill himself. Depression, yes, is serious. Depression in this one particular instance maybe not so bad.
    • This troper, who suffers from a depression roughly as severe as the character depicted, finds the character portrayal largely realistic, and is optimistic that someone with severe depression can hold a job in a respected field. The character is predominant enough and realistic enough to give viewers who have never had to experience this enough information to know what people with a mental health disability go through. It had to be played for laughs, or it would be way to serious. (Note: the character alluded to suicide, but never actually tried co commit it.)

Anybody else annoyed in "The Bones That Weren't" when Booth says at the end, something like, "When a woman kills a man, there's -always- more than just money" or some such and suggests the victim and murderer had a sexual relationship?

  • It came across as... wrong. That women only kill out of sex or love. That they can't be greedy or just nasty or whatever. :/
    • Booth has been wrong before.

"The Doctor in the Photo". The victim is suppose to represent Bones... but they note, quite bluntly and often, things like the victim being alone, socially inept, etc etc etc.

While ostensibly true, the comparison is a poor one. Because we've -seen- Bones being quite social and while single with no kids, has many friends and romantic/sexual encounters. So the victim could have been like this as well and/or the comparison and implication is flat out silly. More so because Bones -knows- that while she may not have a family per say in a traditional sense, she most certainly has one in any other definition of the word.

  • You realize that this is pointed out by every person in the episode, repeatedly, except by Brennan herself, right?
  • Brennan doesn't have a family, she has a cadre of close friends. There is a difference. The season five finale/premier was pretty much made of showing this. It also showed that Brennan really doesn't value any of these relationships anyways, or at least only thinks of them in selfish terms. She gets to leave for a year and just figures everyone will wait for her. But why should they? On a whim she might decide not to come back because of another offer. Life moves on. Booth coming back with a lady illustrates it quite well also, even if we did all know that relationship would be axed to get back to the UST.
  • The similarities were better than people seem to want to give credit for as well. The victim wasn't socially inept, she had a man who'd have loved to have been with her but she couldn't be assed to cared (Booth, by comparison, even with Hannah). She had plenty of colleagues who knew her fairly well (Dead on). The idea was that she represented where Brennan was heading. She's been getting more and more withdrawn as the series goes, which this ep seems to show was at least intentional this season. Yeah, she wasn't just like the victim in every way. YET.
    • Indeed, the whole way she solved the "murder" was that they were similar enough. She saw what she could become in time, and deduced what she would do in that given circumstance. People don't just start out as withdrawn as Brennan. This case was supposed to be a warning to her.

Booth ditches Angela and Hodgins' announcement of her pregnancy to have sex with Hannah

I found this incredibly out of character and just plain jerk-ish. Granted, everyone knew what was happening, but it still meant a lot to Hodgins to have all his friends there and Booth just blew it off for sex. All together now; What the Hell, Hero??

    • Hodgin's is a bro; he wouldn't stand in the way of Booth getting some.

Booth has no problem poking fun at Voodoo or Wicca, but when Bones uses logic and facts to point out that some things Booth believes may not be accurate, he gets pissed off.

  • Um, you do know this happens in real life too, right?
    • Yeah, it bugs me in real life, too.
      • So basically just here to complain, then?

The way Booth consistently condemns alternative lifestyles and how Bones always eventually agrees with him.

I can think of two episodes right off the bat: the pony play/BDSM one, and the recent polygamy one. Bones tries to correct his biases and misconceptions, but always agrees with him in the end that these people are weird and should stick to the social norm. On a related note, I'd like to see episodes like the two mentioned where the alternative lifestyles wasn't what got the victim killed. Just saying.

  • At the risk of sounding un-PC, most of the time relationships like those DON'T fare well long term. You won't find many polygamists in western worlds with relationships that stand the test of time. There are many examples of it outside the western world, but those societies have much more misogynistic tendencies, to put it lightly.
  • I'd like to see a show that has a variety of murder scenarios instead of a white male killing another white male for white male reasons. Seriously, the show is about tracking murders, but as soon as people try to spice things up a bit in the motive department to keep it from being stale as hell there is a problem. Booth believes in monogamy. Angela doesn't. It's called character traits, and different ones for everyone make for watchable tv.
  • Also, The polygamy episode served to give a nice hotbed of other suspects. The father was supposed to be the twist.
    • There's also the fact that Booth, the lapsed catholic with a child out of wedlock, really isnt in any position to condemn anyone elses lifestyles as "immoral". But of course, since he's the straight, white everyman, he gets to always be right.

How insensitive the team is to Lance Sweets in The Bullet in the Brain.

Seriously? Lance gets covered in blood, brains and bones after the Gravedigger gets sniped at her final appeal hearingand is obviously traumatised after the event. Booth just dismisses his behaviour since the shooting as Sweets being "off his game", while Hodgins is too busy enthusing about how he feels to give the man time to think. I know the team aren't the most emotionally tuned of people, but come ON. If it takes Caroline to make someone feel better, the guys are seriously lacking behind in the social skills department.

  • I think they are all insensitive to Dr. Sweets very often, dropping by his office without an appointment, dismissing psychology as a 'soft' science', not calling him "Doctor" Sweets, to name just a few examples.

The graft in The Graft in the Girl.

If the bone was so degraded that it was immediately obvious even to J. Random Viewer on an x-ray, how the heck did it slip by the doctors and surgeons in charge of actually putting it in? Did they just not look at it or something? Seriously.

Isn't the message of Girls Need Role Models in "The Body and The Bounty" undercut by placing Bones in such a ridiculous costume?

  • She doesn't look like a real scientist to a kid; she looks like a lady in a funny suit. She could've easily done it without dressing up like a member of Cobra Kai mixed with DeeDee.
  • It didn't make sense to me, either. She comes out in a weird costume and dances around a little bit... end of episode. They couldn't at least have given her a few lines where she starts talking about what she does?
  • Actually, it made sense to this troper - judging from the audience, most of the children appeared to be around the age of six to ten - a time when presenters can and do dress up on children's shows. Look at the set - zany, strange things appear to be the norm for the show. Besides - how well do you think Brennan would cope well without some sort of character on a show like that?

What denomination was the church in The Devil in the Details (with the horned body on the church altar) meant to be?

It looked very Catholic (the church, the vestments) and Booth implied but didn't seem to outright state that it was a Catholic church like his at the beginning of the episode, but the pastor was called a pastor and he insisted that Satan and his minions were the sole direct cause of all evil. Catholicism doesn't have pastors, and they have a firm stance that while Satan is a huge influence, individual, mortal people are a huge source of the world's human evil. Was it a case of Christianity Is Catholic? Was it supposed to be Catholic and they had a Critical Research Failure (I would think Booth's actor would have noticed and corrected them)? Or was it some other denomination, or no identified denomination at all?

  • Catholic churches do have pastors. He would be the head priest of a parish.
  • No they don't.Priests,archbishops,the pope but no pastors.That's protestants

Um...how much did the writers and everyone in the show fail at basic math so badly?

    • OK, so Brennan's parents disappeared in 1991, when she was 15. They specifically say that was seven years ago, which would make her 22 at the end of the first season, and in 1998. These are specifically stated, yet so is the fact that she sifted through the debris at 9/11. If you follow the initial math, that would also make Brennan younger than Zach. Ironically, this would all work out if they hadn't said specific time spans in The Woman In Limbo. Why is subtraction so hard?
      • Having just watched that episode: they said that the bones were found in 1998 and were then at the Jeffersonian for 5 years. I can't remember if they said there was any time in between them being found and being sent to the Jeffersonian.

Booth and A Man Is Not a Virgin.

Let me just quote the trope page where the issue is pointed out nicely. "...He also has an illegitimate son, from an old girlfriend. This is all made more surprising by the fact that Booth is frequently depicted as a very serious Catholic; while it's certainly not uncommon for Catholics to fall short of or ignore the Church's prohibition on sex outside of marriage, it never seems to even occur to Booth that there might be a problem, probably because the writers couldn't conceive of a "tough guy" character actually having a problem with sex... hence the trope. " So, yes. It's just such a blatant example of manly man=sex, regardless of whether or not it would contradict with the basic tenements of his faith. Do we even see him comment on it?

  • He comments on it a few times, mentioning that he wanted to marry the girlfriend. And he would very much like to have some legal standing in his son's life. But the girlfriend really, really didn't want to get married, and he can't force her to.
    • It's not so much the fact that he has an illegitimate son as it is that he has no qualms whatsoever (apparently) about having sex with women outside of wedlock, and that the religious implications of this are pretty much ignored. Basically, they explained really well why he didn't marry her after getting her pregnant, but not why he randomly ignores the whole 'no sleeping with someone unless you're married to them' them.
  • Not the most relevant thing in the world, but I think it's worth mentioning Booth is not necessarily the world's most devout Catholic. As he says in one episode, in reference to the story 'Abraham Tested' in the Bible, he would never kill Parker if God asked.
  • The standards viewers hold religious people to on TV shows (and in real life) are absolutely ridiculous. If they're adherent, they'll still eventually get dinged for some minor point they didn't follow and called a hypocrite. If they're ridiculously adherent, they'll get called a wacko extremist. If they're only mildly adherent, they'll be decried as hypocrites and "unrealistic" or whatever.

How exactly did Brennan get to be so completely out of touch?

This is, I suppose, somewhat related to previous Wild Mass Guessings. I can forgive and understand someone being a pop culture idiot. I can understand someone having a strong interest and expertise in her work such to have limited knowledge of things outside of it. What confuses me is how someone gets to be so...out there...that she can barely comprehend everyday figures of speech, or is confused by perfectly acceptable or expected behaviors. Are we ever told how or why Brennan is like this?

    • Asperger's has been said to be a possiblity, but never confirmed.
    • On a similar front, what annoys me most about Brennan is that she will talk about people like they couldn't hear her, like she's an announcer in a Nature Documenterty or something. She and Angela are at an African-American nightclub and she talks loudly about the "tribal" aspects. Fine, OK, she doesn't see that that could sound offensive - but why does she talk about it while they're in the same room, not five feet from the people she's talking about? A similar thing happens in "The Maggots in the Meatbag" - in order to intimidate a Guido she "throws the crab" but sumultaneously she talks about it calmly to Booth as if the Guido she's trying to intimidate won't hear. Does she not realize that doing stuff like that completely destroys whatever message she's trying to send to the Guido?
      • Double plus, everywhere she goes she acts like she's a visitor to a Planet of Hats. All Guidos do this. All Paraguayans do that. She should know better.

Booth and Brennan are a couple now

  • Gah...RealLifeWritesThePlot what with Emily Deschanel being pregnant and all...but they just start living together and sleeping together on a regular basis because, in a fit of drunken lust, they had sex and made a baby.
    • This troper isn't too sure about the "drunken lust" part, since it's implied it's more of "comforting" each other after Vincent Nigel-Murray is killed, but seems slightly OOC (at least to this troper) for Booth to not stop or hold back when Brennan is very clearly emotionally vulnerable. With six years of them dancing around each other, it seems that the writers fast forwarded past some growing pains in their relationship. (Not that this troper wasn't jumping up and down now that they're together, but still...)
  • And they seem to live a fairly cohesive domestic life from the very start, which I find to be a little OOC for Brennan. She's shown in the past to be uncomfortable and awkward in sharing physical and emotional intimacy--one would think she would feel rather vulnerable and affronted by living with Booth, who challenges that on a daily basis just by being him. Not to mention she's just spent several years living by herself and she enjoys her privacy and her independence. Plus her social awkwardness would make the move to living with someone else probably really hard. Add to that the stress of a new baby in the house? Their home life should not be as picture-perfect as it is.
    • But remember, there are two things that are capable of overriding Bones' awkwardness: her rationality, and her affection for Booth. The affection for Booth is obvious, but her rationality would also tell her that a two-parent household would simply be more efficient and that she should focus on that efficiency and sharing of responsibilities rather than any aggravation over loss of privacy or full independence.

Pelant is doing all of this...how? And why?

  • Some of the things he's doing are frankly impossible given the conditions of his house arrest. I can accept that he's able to somehow fool his ankle bracelet and sneak around. Creating an analog computer virus from bone scratches? Out there, but still somewhat believable. But the rest of the things he does to frame Brennan? Capturing and editing together audio clips from her cell phone? Manipulating security camera footage? All without access to any technology more advanced than a clock radio? Impossible. I don't care how much of an evil genius you are. You can't do all that. Further, what is his motivation for doing all this, exactly? Just to discredit the team trying to keep him under house arrest? Originally he was set up as a sort of Well-Intentioned Extremist, using a gruesome murder to bring attention to an overlooked miscarriage of justice. Now he's just another serial killer with a grudge.
Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Bones_(TV_series)/Headscratchers?oldid=2048820"