BONES Recap: Sticky Situations

BONES 8.08: The But in the Joke

Case of the Week: A scrawny shirtless guy in a Utilikilt gets the honor of finding the corpse this week. He falls off a billboard while vandalizing it and in the process knocks his glue bucket over. Of course the glue bucket and the kilted wonder miraculously manage to fall right on the only decomposed corpse in the area. This leads to the guy, dubbed Michelangelo by Booth when he refuses to provide his name, being taken into the Jeffersonian (rather than a hospital), so they can investigate the death and separate living guy from dead guy.

At the Jeffersonian, Mr-glued-to-corpse and the gang trade wisecracks about his situation until Angela realizes that she knows who he is – Zed, aka Seth Zalinsky, a near mythical street artist. He denies he’s the artist, however. Hodgins decides that the best way to get the glue off is by smearing him with peanut butter. Zed is not too keen on this, so  Fisher obliges him by giving him something from his secret pharmaceutical stash.

While they wait for the glue to melt in the peanut butter, Zed and his dead doppelganger (which happens to be wearing a fake arrow headband) are left alone. Angela comes up and finally gets him to admit that he is Zed. She’s a bit starstruck, despite the fact that he’s not a particularly impressive specimen, he’s covered in peanut butter, and he’s glued to a rotten corpse. He offers to make out with her and she tells him that before she got married, she’d be very interested in him. Now that she’s married, though, all she’ll do is kiss him…on the lips, which she does. [Seriously??]

The victim turns out to be Morgan Donnelly, a telemarketer, based on tracking some spinal implants in the body.  Booth and Brennan interview his boss, who suggests that they talk to his girlfriend, Alexa Eaton, as she ran into the office the week before and was yelling at him, accusing him of cheating. He gives them Alexa’s address. Booth and Brennan get in her Prius and proceed to present a rather unsubtle commercial for the navigation system. Thanks to their trusty GPS, they get to the house, where she lives with her brother. They tell the two siblings that Donnelly is dead and they seem to find it hilarious that he was murdered.

Booth turns her over to Sweets, for obvious reasons. Alexa tells Sweets that she’s not crazy, she just thought that it was the victim’s practical joke to get back at her when she got mad when another girl kissed him. She tells him that Morgan was actually a stand-up comedian  and had tons of fans and suggests looking for the person who owned the arrow headband.

Fisher and Brennan examine the victim’s bones further, with Fisher giving her and us further insight into his dark, twisted mind. Apparently he has his own, underground dark and most certainly disturbing comedy routine. They determine that the front of skull of the victim was crushed with a heavy object.

Sweets and Booth watch some of Donnelly’s routines that Alexa’s brother, Elliot, had recorded and see the same person heckle him during every act. Elliot tells them that he’s the bartender at a comedy club. When they confront him, he tells them that the heckling was part of the show – he wrote many of the jokes that Donnelly used in response to his heckling. It was his way of getting laughs. While in the club, they see an ad for another performer – a man named Rex.

Rex’s act includes a large wooden mallet (murder weapon?) and a fake arrow headband. The headband is missing, though, and he blames Donnelly, who he claims stole props, jokes and woman from him. Brennan tests the mallet for blood and it is positive. Hodgins figures out that it’s a false positive from smashing turnips, though.

Sweets analyzes a bunch of jokes from Donnelly’s shows and recognizes that they weren’t all written by the same person – some were written by a woman. He (and Fisher) gets the idea for Booth to go undercover at open mic night, using stolen jokes as well as ones written by Sweets and Fisher. Sweets will go with him and look for people unhappy to have their jokes stolen. Predictably, the first few jokes bomb badly (written by both Sweets and Fisher) and then Booth gets ticked and does his own thing – joking about shooting people – and the crowd loves it. At Sweets’ urging, he goes back to some of the stolen jokes and no one laughs, but a woman in the audience stands up and accuses him of stealing. Booth stops his act, flashes his badge, and takes her back to the FBI.

Both her and Donnelly worked at the same telemarking firm as their day job. Booth asks about him stealing her jokes but she tells him that she sold jokes to Donnelly; he didn’t steal them.

Angela determine that the victim was hit 3 times – twice in the face and one in the arm.  Hodgins analyzes some ceramic particles found in the victims stomach – the ceramic is from a toilet. It seems like the victim was bent over a toilet bowl when his head was smashed twice into the bowl, with his hand under it.  Hodgins is put on toilet duty at the comedy clubs and the girlfriend’s place.  At Alexa’s place, he finds a small chip and loose porcelain on her toilet rim.

Booth and Brennan confront her and she tells them that she made dinner for him and her brother, and then left the two men alone. Eliot tells them that he and Donnelly were drinking after she left and he told him he was going to dump his sister and move to New York to concentrate on his comedy career. He admits to smashing Donnelly’s head on the toilet to protect Alexa’s honor and because he felt betrayed by Donnelly, who always promised to help Elliot with his own career. After he killed him, he dumped the body out by the billboard.

Character Development:

Angela gets a ticket for an illegal right turn on red and when she isn’t hyped to fight the ticket, Hodgins asks what happened to the crazy girl he married? She reminds him that he doesn’t want her to go back to those days.

Angela finds Zed sleeping on the couch in her office after he gets unstuck from the victim. He was sleeping off the “roofies” Fisher gave him. He points out to her that Hodgins isn’t happy that she kissed him (really?) and asks her about her paintings (apparently she paints at work?) and asks her to promise not to reveal his identity, which she promises. He tells her that he’ll add some art to the intersection where she got her ticket.

Later, she and Hodgins talk – he’s understandably jealous that Angela kissed Zed, but mostly because he doesn’t feel like he’s cool anymore. He wants to know why she kissed him. She tells him who he actually is and that he told her that she had “excellent technique”, which apparently isn’t a good thing, because she apparently went from “real art” to painting unicorns and rainbows (literally) after getting married. Hodgins seems to accept this explanation and accompanies her to the intersection where she got her ticket. Angela has painted a mural on a wall in protest and they wait for Zed to arrive. He comes up to check it out and approves, telling Angela that her “technique blows”, which makes her extremely happy.

Not much on the Booth and Brennan front this week, other than while everyone at the comedy club thought Sweets’ jokes were horrible, Brennan loves them when Booth repeats them later. I guess they need to have separate comedy clubs for  super nerds.

My Thoughts:

The glued-to-a-corpse plot this week may be the strangest thing we’ve ever seen on BONES, which is saying something for sure. The Zed character was good for some comic relief, but otherwise I could have done without, especially the kiss and the resulting discussions with Hodgins.

I really enjoyed the scene with Booth in the comedy club and thought it quite amusing that Sweets and Fisher thought that Booth wasn’t funny and needed their jokes, when in actuality, it was the other way around. Other than the glue, the case of the week was interesting enough and definitely more developed this week than in last week’s episode. Just when I was overjoyed that Daisy seems to be gone, they are replacing her with Fisher, who is just as annoying, but in a totally different way. His off kilter comments are much funnier in small doses and he’s getting rather overexposed lately. Give me more of pretty much any of the squinterns. Please.

Memorable Quotes: 

I have a large, rugged pelvis? Boo-yah! – Zed

Everyone here is a weird combo of smart and dumb – Zed

This guy’s going to rub me down with peanut butter? – Zed
Yep, and then cut off your clothes – Hodgins

It’s weird when the remains talk – Fisher

God, it’s so weird when they move – Fisher

I do a bit of stand up myself – Fisher
I imagine you are not very skilled at it, as you are not a humorous person! – Brennan

If anyone knows heckling, it’s Fisher – Sweets

I’ve been a very good influence on the sophistication of your thinking – Brennan (to Booth)

Catch a new episode of BONES next Monday at 8/7c on FOX!