Oh, the unequivocal joy felt when a favorite television character returns to your small screen. It’s as if they never left.
That’s right, Zack (Eric Millegan) is back on Bones, for an episode at least. Until now the former cast regular has been referred to this season like a Harry Potter-esque nemesis: the Squint Squad member who shall not be named. Now we discover most of the other characters have been paying him visits in his high-security mental institution, to which he was banished after confessing to helping a serial killing cannibal terminate members of a secret society. Both Hogdins and Angela (TJ Thyne and Michaela Conlin) having been paying him visits – separately, of course, since their rather awkward split (see: Zack and Hodgins claiming “King of the Looney Bin” instead of the usual “King of the Lab”) – and Sweets (John Francis Daley) has been acting as his therapist. It’s by stealthily swapping the magnetic strip on his own library card with that of Sweets’ access card that he’s able to escape the institution, running straight to the lab to help with the case that has everyone stumped.
And needless to say, he solves the mystery faster than a chubby kid going downhill on roller skates.
What proves hard to solve is a set of bones discovered in twelve separate pieces, sans the skull, found floating in an industrial, algae-filled pond. Once discovered, it’s to the lab the remains go, where they are scrutinized by new intern Wendell Bray (Michael Terry), a good-looking scholarship kid who’s depending on the job so he can pay back people in his wrong-side-of-the-tracks neighborhood, after they pooled their cash together to send him to school in the first place.
When partners FBI Special Agent Seeley Booth (David Boreanaz) and Dr. Temperence Brennan (Emily Deschanel) discover the bones belong to an obsessive compulsive sci-fi author who was dating an older woman, Brennan asks Wendell what he thinks about May-December relationships. He assumes she’s flirting and worries about losing his job, but Angela quickly sets him straight on the social clumsiness she tends to infuse into conversations. At the end of the episode, we’re left to wonder whether he’ll stay or go. (Let’s hope he stays: he’s cute, Brennan likes him and he’s (gasp!) nearly as smart as Zack, plus he told a great story about his father. I’m won over.)
Meanwhile, Booth and Brennan continue the hunt for the killer, bouncing from his psychologist to his barista, his publisher to his girlfriend’s son. But none of them prove to be the culprit.
Lucky for the team, Zack appears just as straits are becoming dire. He notices the victim’s mother, too, suffers from OCD. It turns out she had a murderous breakdown when her son was becoming free of his disorder but she wasn’t of hers.
But the biggest reveal comes again in the form of Zack: as Sweets is walking him back to the institution, he confesses once again. He didn’t commit the murder he’s convicted of – not literally. He simply told the real killer where the guy could be found. Sweets urges him to make it known, but Zack feels just as guilty for accessorizing murder as if he’d done it himself. This may be a little backpedaling by writers, especially after Zack’s leaving the show went over so poorly with fans. Either way, it’s good to know, and leaves a flickering hope he could, someday, be back in the lab.
And, in this latest installment of the will-they-won’t-they Booth and Brennan storyline, the bickering banter is especially thick and charming. Combined with the gimmick-free case that included lots of cool science-y stuff and Zack‘s triumphant but brief return, it made this episode reminiscent of the best of seasons past.
Jennifer Morris is a journalist and frequent contributor to the What’s Up Arts and Entertainment movie review column The Screening Room.
