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BONES Recap: Artisanal homicide

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BONES 8.05: Method to the Madness

Case of the Week: Two opera-singing garbage men find a decomposed, dismembered, eviscerated (is there any other kind on this show?) body in the trash (again, shocking!). It’s a young woman and she was apparently still alive when she was eviscerated.

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Photo: Ray Mickshaw/FOX

Sweets has been sleeping in his office for two weeks since he broke up with Daisy. Booth shows up with some apartment ads and tries to encourage him to find his own place. Sweets looks so pitiful, though, that Booth feels bad for him, so he offers to let him stay with him and Brennan for a night or two. He takes him home and sets him up in Parker’s bedroom. Team Jeffersonian starts a pool as to how long Sweets will live with Booth and Brennan.

Angela is able to perform a facial reconstruction using the strips of skin torn from the face (eww!) and both her and Hodgins recognize the woman from their son’s favorite applesauce label. The woman, Jessica Pearson, is one of the owners of a small artisanal business called Them Apples. Booth and Brennan visit her partner who last saw her when she dropped her off at the free clinic to get treatment for her lupus several days before. She tells them that a local butcher named Adam was getting kind of “stalker-y” with Jess, the victim. They interview Adam the artisan butcher and he tells them that Jess was really poor and could barely afford to eat, so he gave her meat. He stopped talking to her after he was threatened by a large man who told him to leave her alone.

Back at the Jeffersonian, they find $2000 in shredded $100 bills in the victim’s clothing. Cam tests the victim’s tissue and it’s negative for lupus and any other major disease, leading them to wonder why she was really going to the clinic every month.

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Photo: Ray Mickshaw/FOX

At the Brennan-Booth home, Sweets has been helping out around the house, even folding Booth’s (Captain America) boxers. Brennan suggests that Sweets should stay with them until he finds the perfect apartment, but Booth doesn’t want him touching his underwear.  He drags Sweets out to FBI headquarters, where they interview the doctor from the clinic, who tells them that the victim was in great health and came to him monthly to be tested for STDs, which would suggest that applesauce is not the only thing the victim was selling…

The Jeffersonian’s creepiest squintern, Fisher, gets a bunch of pig bones from Adam the butcher so they can compare the marks on the bones. He also determines that the victim’s throat was slashed by a right-handed person and the butcher is left-handed. Moreover, he realizes that the murderer was imitating Jack the Ripper.

At home, Booth walks in on Sweets taking a bath in *his* bathroom, which leads to a discussion between the three of them (Brennan suggested he use the tub) in the living room while Sweets is wearing nothing but a towel. Because this scene isn’t awkward enough, Fisher shows up at the door, eager to tell Brennan what he’s found out about their latest victim. Booth is not impressed by his Jack-the-Ripper want-to-be theory, but Brennan thinks it’s plausible.

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Photo: Ray Mickshaw/FOX

Cam analyzes the victim’s stomach contents and finds a rare liquor. Turns out that liquor is handmade by the doctor that the victim saw at the free clinic. The good doctor is now top suspect for being her killer.  Booth and Brennan go to the doctor’s place and find the door ajar. The entire place is an anachronism – right out of the 1800s. They hear yelling and barge into his bedroom, where a woman in old fashioned lingerie is handcuffed to the bed while the doctor, dressed in an old fashioned suit and top hat, stands over her with a knife.

At FBI headquarters, the doctor tells them he was just role playing, as he did with the victim. Sweets points out that he got her drunk and she had broken bones in her wrists and the doctor tells him that the victim was nervous about the handcuffs, so he gave her a drink, but she started to freak out and hurt herself before he could unlock the cuffs. They were then interrupted by a huge man who barged in and threw him into a closet, without saying a word. They confiscate a bunch of antique medical tools from his apartment as well as some modern surgical tools from the clinic.

Fisher and Bones wax poetic about famous serial killers and how those murders would have been solved had they had modern forensic technology. None of the doctor’s tools match the damage to the bones, so they turn their attention to the large man, presumed to be her pimp. Angela works her magic and finds a pic of the man on a traffic camera near the doctor’s apartment at the time he supposedly showed up. They send the pic to the news stations.

The man turns himself in after seeing his face on the news. He was Jess’s dad’s best friend and he always tried to take care of her since her dad died. She called him when the butcher was harassing her, so he threatened him to protect her. He then rescued her from the doctor and tried to find her investors for her applesauce company so she’s stop prostituting.

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Photo: Ray Mickshaw/FOX

Sweets wonders if the threat of investors may have caused Jess’s applesauce partner, Brooke, to lose it. They go to the applesauce place to speak with her and find the murder weapon – a blender they use to mix spices into the applesauce. The two women had argued over the investors, she pushed the victim and she fell into the blender and was killed. She didn’t know what to do, so she dumped the body in the trash.

Brennan and Booth are having a warm moment on the couch when Sweets comes into the room with a suitcase and announces that he’s leaving. Booth encourages him to stay and Brennan asks if his change in sentiment is just because he wants to win the Jeffersonian pool as to how long Sweets will stay. Booth doesn’t deny it…much.  Brenna

n knows just what Sweets needs – he needs to celebrate his freedom…by dancing… strangely…with Brennan, apparently.

My Thoughts: Squintern Fisher is seriously creepy; he gets stranger every episode he’s in, and not in a good way. This week’s episode seemed a little uneven. After the big Jack-the-Ripper lead up, it seemed like everything got tied up too neatly in the end when we found out it was an accidental death by blender instead of a famous serial killer copycat.

On the plus side, I’m hoping that the dancing routine did its job and Sweets will move on from Daisy forever. I really like him and Booth as the unlikely partners and the scenes between him and Brennan were kind of fun as well.

Memorable Quotes:

What kind of freak feels nostalgic over human sacrifices? – Hodgins
I’m gonna go ahead and plead the fifth on that –  Fisher

“Olden Times” is not a legitimate historical reference – Brennan

Watch BONES on Monday nights at 8/7c on FOX!

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