BONES Recap: Feeling Blue

Bones 7.09 The Don’t in the Do

Case of the Week:

An evangelical preacher is out in a landfill with some supporters, trying to raise money to build a new church on the site. Just as he finishes his plea, dead birds start raining down around them. If that’s not bad enough, all the birds have blue heads and other parts of their bodies and one of them has a human eye in it’s beak that comes loose when it falls. Clearly a sign from God…

The rest of the body is found elsewhere in the landfill. The body is stained blue and all of its hair is missing, presumed to have been removed by the birds. They take the body back to the Jeffersonian and find that much of the damage on the body is from scavengers. They remove the tongue to do a tox screen.  Angela does a facial reconstruction and the victim is identified as Santiago, a local hair dresser. He was reported missing by three of his clients.

Sweets and Booth interview the three client but they aren’t saying much. They suggest that Santiago was worried about his regular Saturday afternoon client and don’t deny that they were sleeping with the victim. Booth and Brennan head to the salon and talk to his shampoo boy and the salon owner.  The shampoo boy fingers Kevin, another stylist who wanted Santiago’s chair. They ask about Santiago’s Saturday client and Kevin breaks into Santiago’s drawer and hands over his client book. Inside, Booth and Brennan find an envelope with $1000 and a note: “You’re mine darling, don’t forget it. XOXO – Ruby”

Booth interviews Ruby who claims that they were in love. She would never hurt Santiago – she gave him the money because he had debts from drugs.  The tox screen confirms that he had drugs in his system when he died.

Squintern Arastoo gets the idea to scan the dentition of all the dead blue scavengers they found in the landfill – birds, foxes, raccoons, etc – and use the Angelatron to remove their teeth marks from the bones to determine what the pre and perimortem injurie are. Once the teeth marks are gone, they find out that the body was scalped.

Sweets and Booth go to one of the last places that the victim was seen – an Indian store – and the trip starts out as a Camry commercial and ends up as a discussion of Booth and Brennan’s sex life. At the shop, they find a fountain filled with a blue liquid, but not the right blue liquid. One of the store employees tries to escape and Booth catches him. In his hand is a bag of human hair – the victim’s scalp? The team uses old fashioned wool cards to try to separate out the different hairs.

Meanwhile, Bones finds vertebral fractures on the victim. Turns out the hair in the bag was from 25 different victims, and definitely from corpses, but not the victim. Booth interviews the Indian shop keeper and he admits to taking the hair from corpses about to be cremated as his uncle’s mortuary. He would sell the hair to the victim for use in hair extensions. His wet-behind-the-ears public defender is totally horrified by this news and withdraws herself as his council, after ripping her hair extension from her hair and running from the room.

Hodgins identifies the blue liquid the victim was doused in was antifreeze. Booth and Brennan head back to the salon. Turns out that Kevin has skipped town, leaving the salon very short handed. Booth tracks him down and he admits to having sold drugs to Santiago. His credit card records show he bought antifreeze around the time of the murder. He claims that someone must have stole it from his trunk.

After Arastoo finds evidence that the victim’s throat was cut, Bones and Brennan go back to the salon to look for blood residue. Brennan assumes that Kevin killed Santiago after offering to cut his hair as pretext. Booth (whose father we are reminded several times was a barber) thinks she’s wrong – Santiago wouldn’t trust Kevin. But he would trust someone else…

The shampoo boy now has his own chair and Bones and Booth confront him. He admits to killing Santiago and scalping him so he could keep his hair (on display, in the salon). After he took the hair, he stole antifreeze from Kevin’s trunk and doused the victim, trying to burn the body. It didn’t work, and all the extra antifreeze on the body then killed the birds and other animals who scavenged the body (antifreeze causes the kidneys to fail within 1-2 days).

Character Development:

Brennan is feeling uncomfortable with her body since having the baby and of course won’t listen to Booth when he tells her that she looks great. He enlists Cam to tell her how good she looks, but of course she picks an awkward time to do this and Brennan immediately recognizes that Booth put her up to it. Sweets suggests that Booth buy her some sexy lingerie and they go to a boutique together. While there, Sweets tells us way more than I ever wanted to know about Daisy’s lingerie preferences.

Everyone’s favorite Muslim squintern, Arastoo Vaziri, is back, and he’s a bit slap happy because his paper  is finally being published in the Journal of Forensic Anthropology. He’s not supposed to tell anyone until the journal comes out, but of course he tells everyone, leading to much embarrassment when it turns out that his paper gets bumped for an account of Selena Gomez’s fossil hunt.

Angela convinces Brennan to go to a spa for some pampering. Brennan has a hard time enjoying the experience, though and when she makes a breakthrough in the case after a phone call from the lab, she dashes off (in her bathrobe with a mud mask on), leaving Angela to herself at the spa.

After solving the case, Booth and Brennan go home. They are having a sweet dinner together and Booth presents her with the lingerie. At first, she tells him that she complains but that she isn’t really upset with her body and suggests that maybe he is. Luckily, she quickly dismisses this thought and the two of them decide to run upstairs so she can try on the lingerie. Of course, as they both get to the stairs, Cristine starts crying.

My thoughts:

I liked tonight’s episode. It reminded me more of the older Bones episodes then some of the more recent ones. The story focused around the case, but also provided some really nice scenes between Booth and Brennan at home and some funny scenes with Booth and Sweets. The scenes with Booth and Brennan at home, doing normal couple things, are my favorites. After so many seasons of will-they-won’t-they, it’s so nice to see them openly treating each other with so much tenderness and love.  Bones in general seems to do a pretty good job of portraying healthy relationships – whether it be Bones and Booth, or Angela and Hodgins.

The Sweets and Booth combo is another device that I hope that we continue to see. I love Sweets (san Daisy) and his interactions with Booth are always entertaining, as seen by the hilarious awkward scene in the lingerie shop. (Total aside: I wish Sweets would figure out whether he’s a psychiatrist or a psychologist as he seems to go back and forth from episode to episode!)

Memorable Quotes:

You think you’re smart, don’t you? – Booth
Oh, I know I am…top of my class, honors society in graduate school, youngest psychologist…” – Sweets

Academia’s a bitch, bro! – Arastoo

What size is she?….Are we talking apples, or melons? -lingerie store clerk
Mangoes – Sweets
You lookin’ at her fruit? – Booth
I’m a doctor – Sweets

I’m sure Booth could help. His father was a barber – Brennan

[my paper]…got pulled for a puff piece about Selena Gomez going on a fossil hunt – Arastoo
I’m not aware of Dr. Gomez’ work – Brennan

What were your favorite parts of the episode? Tell me in the comments!

Be sure to watch BONES on Monday nights, 8/7C on FOX!