BONES: Walk a Mile in His Shoes

Bones 7.02: The Hot Dog in the Competition

Character Development: There’s a new squintern at the Jeffersonian – a Southern boy named Finn Abernathy. He graduated college at 16, and is working on a PhD. He also has a dark past – a juvenile record that was expunged when he turned 18. Apparently he assaulted his stepfather with a hunting knife and his stepfather disappeared a year later. Although Cam fought hard to get him as an intern, the rest of the team isn’t as immediately taken with him. Hodgins in particular, is outwardly hostile. Cam starts to rethink things after finding out about his stepfather from Caroline, the federal prosecutor they work with. Cam asks Angela to look into his past and when Finn catches Angela looking at some newspaper articles about his stepfather, he walks out of the Jeffersonian. He later returns and Brennan confronts him.

Brennan asks whether Finn’s interest in forensics had to do with planning to kill his stepfather. He admits that it did but tells her that he didn’t kill his stepfather. He decided not to after reading one of her papers and realizing that he would never get away with it. He tells her that he told his stepfather that if he ever touched his mother again he’d kill him and he never saw him again. Brennan believes him and once word gets around, Finn is finally accepted as a member of the Jeffersonian team.

Meanwhile, Brennan has an ultrasound and finds out she’s having a girl and doesn’t tell Booth about the visit or the results until she announces it at the crime scene later in the day in front of Hodgins and others. Of course she doesn’t see a problem with this and Angela fails to set her straight. Then she makes an appointment with a financial advisor to set up a trust for their daughter without telling Booth. After discussing it (in a surprisingly amiable way), Booth suggests that she should walk in his shoes for a while.  Brennan takes this to heart and tries to react to things how Booth would – by getting really excited at an eating competition, driving erratically, and thinking about “intercourse” all the time.  Eventually, Brennan apologizes for hurting Booth and shows him a DVD of the sonogram.

Case of the Week: A female competitive eater, Tina “the Python” Thomas, is found dead with the upper half of her body in a python enclosure. Hairless rats have eaten much of her from the waist up and the missing python is later found in her abdomen, with a whole rat inside it with a bone from the victim inside the rat. (It remains a mystery why at least a dozen rats were in an enclosure with a python that would eat at best 1-2 per week – rats don’t multiple *that* fast!) Hodgins doesn’t want to kill the snake but can’t figure out how to get the rat out otherwise until Finn gets the idea to get the snake really cold, then scare it. The plan works – the snake vomits up the rat and Hodgins and Finn are suddenly on much better terms – “like the little brother I never had.”

Booth initially suspects one of Tina’s eating rivals who they figure had motive to kill Tina so he could win the competitions. Then they home in on an executive of the hot dog company that was Tina’s sponsor after they find a piece of his tissue in her teeth. He claims that he was trying to help her “train” when she bit him. She told him that day, after throwing up and breaking down sobbing, that she had decided not to continue competing.

Brennan then finds out that Tina was quitting the competitive circuit because she was 8 weeks pregnant. Her husband is a suspect as he told Tina before she died that he didn’t want her to quit to have a family. However, some computer analysis by Angela, based on some figures done by Finn, shows that the person who threw Tina through the python tank was over 300 pounds. When they find a lung fluke egg (native to Japan) on Tina’s body, Mitch, the head of the Competitive Eating Alliance becomes the number one suspect. He admits to shoving her when he found out that she was quitting the eating circuit after he just signed a big contract in Japan for a TV show with her as the headliner.

My Thoughts: Overall, a fun episode. The scenes of the competitive eating competition were both disturbing and fascinating. Although Brennan once again blew it when it came to giving Booth appropriate consideration as her partner and the father of her baby, she somewhat made up for it in the end by showing him the sonogram. She also turned out to understand Finn quite well (birds of a feather?) and by getting the real story from him, enabled him to be accepted and start a new life at the Jeffersonian. On the down side, the plot about her walking in Booth’s shoes was a bit off – it seemed like just a vehicle to get her to say “intercourse”repeatedly, which didn’t strike me as being particularly Booth-like. The addition of Finn should be interesting, if for no other reason than his constant string of Southern-isms – “well, cut my legs off and call me shorty!”

Favorite Quotes:

“There is something here that is odd as my cousin Bobby.” – Finn

“Once I saw her make a foot-long wiener disappear.” – Tina’s husband (NB: at the time, Sweets and Booth are sure that Tina is a prostitute)

“65 hotdogs…in 12 minutes… 65 hotdogs… I’d love to see that!” – Booth

“Someone’s not getting their security deposit back.” – landlord who finds Tina’s body

“The fetus growing inside my womb has female genitalia.” – Bones

“I like it when you call me a Jedi.” – Sweets
“Most kids do.” – Booth

Bones airs Thursdays at 9/8c on FOX.