I have zero experience in the realm of parenting, so I found this week’s episode of Bones to be very informative. For example:
– You’re not a bad parent if you can’t afford to buy your kid a private education; you’re only a bad parent if you don’t wish you could.
– If you abandon your child for more than a decade because you’re a bank robbing criminal on the lam, when your child is an adult they probably won’t want you working in their office.
– And if you catch your kid committing murder, cleaning up the mess for them as if they’d only spilled Spaghetti-O’s will only land the both of you in the dog house.
The first lesson comes via Special Agent Seeley Booth, who visits a private school during a murder investigation and starts thinking about his son’s future. It’s the ever-present Dr. Sweets who steers him in the right direction, assuring him little Parker won’t go down the drain if he’s subjected to a public school education.
The second lesson comes from Dr. Temperence Brennan, who’s accused killer dad – a former science teacher and criminal mastermind – takes a job giving kids tours through the Jeffersonian. At one point, he introduces a group to Brennan and asks her to tell them about light refraction. Ever the smooth social operator, she says “I have to examine the frontal bone of a dead person’s skull. Maybe another time kids!”
(For the record, the line of the night certainly comes from Brennan’s dad, Max, played by Ryan O’Neal. When Sweets comes to the diner where he and Brennan are eating, he looks up with a lackadaisical grin and says “Oh look, there’s the doctor that told the jury I was a sociopath.” “A pleasurable sociopath,” Sweets responds.)
But Brennan’s upset at her dad‘s new job, and makes him promise he’ll keep his evidence-tainting hands far away from any pertinent case information. When he takes part in an experiment with Hodgins (which, by the way, goes well, prompting Hodgins to name himself Most Valuable Player, a new version of “King of the Lab” from the Zack Addy era) Brennan fires him. But by the end of the episode, she hires him back, after seeing him teaching Parker how to explode diet soda with Mentos.
The third lesson comes courtesy of Calvin Warren, or his remains to be more specific. A Marine-turned-“manny,” Calvin’s charred bones were found spread throughout the branches of a tree, and after a glance at his MySpace page, Angela puts it like this: He’s “tall, dark, handsome… and dead.”
As it turns out, he’s dead because his charge (the spoiled rich girl he was nannying) didn’t want him to tell her school that she was paying to have other kids do her homework. So she shot him at her mansion, just to watch him die. (Sorry, couldn’t resist.) Truly though, she shot him, and when her mother discovered what she’d done, she swept up the mess and threw the bones to the wind, literally. A big Nor’easter carried the evidence away, and both thought they were in the clear. Not so.
Brown Coats will especially enjoy this Bones installment: Gina Torres of Firefly (and Alias) fame takes on the role of a woman having an affair with Calvin.
And in the end, the writers throw Booth-Brennan romance fans a nice little treat. It’s been awhile since Bones has dabbled in the potential relationship between its two leads. But when Max confronts Booth about why he’s not sleeping with Brennan, Booth is quick to make it known: he thinks Brennan’s beautiful.
And when Booth and Brennan observe Max and Parker making diet cola fountains, Bones paints a pretty picture of what could be: a family with its share of skeletons in the closet, but a family all the same.
Jennifer Morris is a journalist and frequent contributor to the What’s Up Arts and Entertainment movie review column The Screening Room.
