This week, we skip the opening where someone stumbles upon the gory body parts and get straight to “Squintland.” Here are your Top Five BONES moments!
Brennan is persuaded to let Wendell head off to his appointment, after she learns he’s finishing up his clinical trial. I have to say, I’m glad she’s being really cool about this, because we’ve long gotten past the point where she wouldn’t. Sometimes they like to backtrack her character, so I was holding my breath. Brennan does suggest getting extremely intoxicated to celebrate.
But it looks like Wendell has found his own way to celebrate, in the form of a cute nurse named Andie, who totally makes up excuses for him to stick around then suggests finishing the rest of her fake survey over lunch. Both look smitten. Cute! I love the Wendell episodes.
Oh, they have a picnic in the park, and I find out Wendell loves lame eighties music. It’s like we’re soul mates. They kiss! Awww…and when Wendell says all they’re missing is an eighties power ballad, Andie plays Waiting for a Girl Like You by Foreigner. Did I mention I love Wendell episodes? He deserves some happiness.
Then, oh no! Wendell, I know why you’re doing it, but c’mon. You can’t start pulling away from a girl right after you’ve just done the deed (unless the term nooner means something different in Bones land.) I’m guessing he’s freaking out, because he thinks his cancer is going to come back, and he doesn’t want to get too attached to anyone. Sigh. Don’t make this The Fault in Our Stars, Wendell.
But my girl Andie is a smart cookie. She figures it out after he ignores all of her texts and goes to The Jeffersonian to confront him. She doesn’t cry and scream. She just tells him she knows the deal. She’s an oncology nurse, and though Wendell is afraid for her to watch him die, she’s well aware of the process and is not scared at all. This is one healthy woman. I love it. She finally gets through, and they kiss. Yay for smart, healthy women.
Seems Booth has racked up one or two traffic tickets that I guess his shiny, fancy FBI badge didn’t manage to get him out of, so now he’s taking online traffic school. Aubrey berates him then goes into detail about how Angela is triangulating more body parts, but Booth ain’t having no squint talk from Squintland, so just get to the point, thank you very much.
That may explain him being MIA from the lab, but I do miss him dropping in there every once in a while. Kind of selfish of him, but I guess with Skype, he doesn’t need to take his butt out of his chair.
Brennan tries to help him at one point, but she gets the answer wrong. Booth has been looking for something to hold over her head, so he’s thrilled she was wrong. I am, too. It’s nice to see Brennan eat a little crow every once in a while.
Here a bone, there a bone, everywhere a bone. Seems someone cut up a dude and scattered him in dumpsters and other assorted trash cans. The hunt is on for more parts, as the team seeks to identify the victim.
As the team looks through trash cans, two young boys, one of whom uses the term “chillax,” decide to make a YouTube video. They’ve got themselves some helmet cameras, because of course. Then one of them hops into a shopping cart, while the other one hangs on to the outside of it, and they roll down a hill into a bunch of garbage cans. Future brain surgeons! During their high five ritual to celebrate their future careers at McDonalds, as well as having parents who clearly keep no eye on their young children, a head flies into Brennan’s hands. There are two people there with young children who aren’t horrified enough to tell the boys to get their asses home. Baffling.
It turns out the victim is Professor Randall Fairbanks. Teaches psychology at Kenmore College. They didn’t file a missing person’s report, because he was on sabbatical.
With Booth stuck in the office trying figure out traffic signs, Aubrey and Brennan must partner up. Somehow I have a bad omen when Aubrey says, “I like original.” Oh, dude, you have not witnessed Brennan’s brand of original, but you will.
First off, while Hodgins and Bones sift through the trash, Aubrey tries to speculate that this is a mob thing, and if you watch this show for more than five minutes, you know Brennan is not a fan of speculation. She tells Aubrey his speculation is a waste of her time then gets on him for saying how lucky Booth is for having to take the test and not be there for the garbage search. Aubrey, since you’re just standing there watching it, I would shut up if I were you.
And while Aubrey thinks it’s “really cool,” with them partnering up, Brennan is going to reserve judgment until she can “judge his value as a colleague.” Hey, he said he liked original, right?
At the professor’s place, Brennan notices some of his blue hydrangeas are pink, and there’s blood saturated into the soil. Aubrey shows off his chemistry knowledge by informing us that the high PH of blood can change the color of the flowers, so it might be the murder scene. Then he admonishes himself for his own speculation.
A small group of ummmm…mature women (Aubrey refers to them as the Golden Girls, so let’s go with that) come out of the neighboring house to tell Brennan and Aubrey they’ll call the police about the snooping, until Aubrey announces he’s FBI, which is the “super police.” Don’t be condescending, Aubrey. But I guess it’s tit for tat, when they make fun of Aubrey’s age.
Anyway, they’re quite excited about hearing a murder has taken place. It turns out the ladies have been hearing screams coming from the house for years, but what with him being a smarty-pants professor, and the police thinking they were some crazy old ladies, nothing was done.
They certainly don’t help that perception when one of them suggests they’re not surprised the professor was murdered, and she’s wanted to do it herself a number of times. I guess she missed the part where Aubrey said he was a federal agent, so he reminds her.
Brennan does notice a bird feeder on the neighbor’s property with a camera attached. The neighbor reluctantly gives up the camera but makes Brennan promise not to delete the photos, as it’s the hooded warbler migration season and all. Wouldn’t want to miss that.
By the end, Aubrey and Brennan develop a verbal shorthand Booth is jealous of, and Brennan congratulates Booth for hiring someone so competent.
Ewww…there’s blowfly maggots in the soil, as well as blood, tissue, and bone fragments all over the garage. Brennan, I think the speculation can stop now. Anyway, like in any good horror movie, there’s a creepy rattling in one of the cupboards that winds up being a cat. They don’t speculate as to how the cat could have gotten in there and closed the door. At least it didn’t screech and jump out at them.
Aubrey has found a tablet in the lovely professor’s house that contains a video of a woman screaming that he’s killing her. Good times!
Turns out the woman, Tabitha, wasn’t screaming for real. It was for an experiment in blind obedience. People in one room were told they were administering a test to someone in the next room. For each incorrect answer, the person was supposed to hit a button they were told delivered a shock to the test taker. With each wrong answer, the shocks were supposed to get bigger. Tabitha pre-recorded herself screaming, so no real shocks.
Most of the subjects administered up to 450 volts, which is supposed to kill a person. Nice! And I guess once these sadistic bastards found out it was all an experiment, they got resentful. Why? Because they didn’t really kill someone? Aubrey’s request for the video files falls under doctor-patient confidentiality, so Tabitha can’t release them. Really? Ummm..if you say so, Tabitha.
Oh, sheesh. Hodgins is using his own blood to test the hydrangea absorption as Skinner the cat looks on. I’m sure Skinner won’t be at all important to the case.
Through Hodgins knows Angela has magical facial recognition software that can turn an incomplete skull into an identification of an actual person, he’s astounded that she was able to find out the identities of the students who participated in the study, based purely on the close-up pictures of their faces.
Anyway, Angela located an Alex Heck who went from a clean-cut all-American dude in his freshman year to what he is now, a scary-looking guy with a neck tattoo, facial piercings, and a criminal record. Apparently he’d tried to break into the professor’s house a number of times and sent threatening emails. Then he went to a mental hospital. Yikes! All of this was a by-product of the experiment.
In his email, he said he didn’t know what a monster he was, and that what he is now is all the professor’s fault.
He’s brought in for questioning and kind of goes off the rails. Even though Aubrey says it wasn’t real, Alex insists he killed an innocent person and doesn’t know how to live with that. He kind of semi-admits to killing the professor but not really, and since we’re only halfway through the show, I’m going with Alex not being the killer. Aubrey must agree, since he doesn’t lock up the case. I don’t know what he does with Alex.
After Hodgins estimates the professor’s death as eight days previous, Angela can narrow down the birdcam footage.
So it turns out two years previous, Mr. Professor was in Brazil parasailing with one of his grad students that was not Tabitha but Victoria Andrews. One month after they got back, Victoria got expelled for trashing the lab. Then he started seeing Tabitha.
Meanwhile, Victoria has just moved back into the area to sell her garden art. One of her sculptures could be the murder weapon. Since Aubrey found it, he hopes Brennan will be impressed.
Yes, we know. Everyone and their brother wants to impress Brennan.
Victoria denies the killing, but her sculpture was used as a weapon, the kind of saw she uses was employed to dismember him, and she just got back into town. But she again insists getting expelled was the best to happen to her. That doing his experiments made her angry and anxious, and art is freeing and cathartic. But the way she says it sounds like a woman whose sanity is about to snap. She also says she was driving to a craft fair in Fredericksburg, but since nobody can back it up, she’s on the hook.
However, Wendell found a bite mark on the body that doesn’t match Victoria. Angela’s still working on the birdcam that caught a shadowy female figure going in and out of the professor’s house, but they’re basically back to square one. Only not, because like all fuzzy camera footage in TV shows, Angela is magically able to figure out who the shadow is. Tabitha.
But it boils down to this: Tabitha just snuck in to the professor’s place to spray her perfume in his bedroom, because maybe smelling it would make him more attentive. What has this man done to these women? He caught her, however, he wasn’t mad she was being a stalker but that she was conducting a study without his approval. Seriously? He also didn’t give her credit for any of the studies. This guy is a total winner. Still, Tabitha insists she did not kill Fairbanks.
Turns out someone was putting antifreeze in Skinner’s food. Why? Well, he ate an endangered bird. And who is into birds but the head Golden Girl, his neighbor, Miss Von Martens. She didn’t realize Fairbanks was on sabbatical, so he caught her with the cat food, they struggled, she bit him, and he impaled himself on Victoria’s garden art. Then she used the saw she used to make birdhouses to cut him up.
Okay, look, I can accept this elderly woman would possibly poison a cat for eating an endangered bird and that she killed the professor by accident, but slicing up a dude with a saw and scattering his body parts all over town? Hmmm…I call foul, even if she does sound just a little unhinged when she talks about putting a stupid bell on the cat and knowing she’s being arrested for murder doesn’t really seem to faze her at all.
Next week is the 200th episode!