BONES Recap: A Juvenile Perspective

Bones 8.09 The Ghost in the Machine

This week’s episode is the 150th of the series – a milestone that many series never get to in these days of shortened seasons and intense competition from cable and online media. To celebrate the milestone, this week’s episode gave us a very different perspective – that of the corpse, the skeleton of a 14 year-old boy found in a greenhouse at a vacant property.

Speaking of unusual perspectives, this episode had a blast from the past, eighties style as Cyndi Lauper guest starred as Avalon Harmonia, a psychic with an interest in the victim. After looking at the skull, Avalon tells everyone that the boy is there watching and so Angela (and all of the others) start talking directly to the skull.  This case, more so than most of their cases, really strikes an emotional chord with team Jeffersonian, even Brennan.

The victim is identified as 14 year old Colin Gibson, who was reported missing 2 years prior. He woke up that day and ate breakfast with his parents, left for school and then disappeared. They identify his cause of death as acute spinal trauma (broken neck). There are also abrasions to the kneecaps and fractures of the clavicle, hands and pelvis as well as a gash across his sternum. The body apparently was left to decompose above ground for a while before being buried in the greenhouse.

Two of the victim’s friends, an older boy and girl, arrive at the Jeffersonian with his skateboard and a mix CD. The skateboard was left in a skate park the day before he disappeared and the CD was given to his friend Miranda the day he disappeared. Hodgins finds a paint chip among the bones which is identified as coming from a blue El Camino. He is examining some discolorations on the skull when Avalon shows up saying that she needs to talk to Colin. Hodgins is weirded out and takes a coffee break, leaving her alone with the bones. She tries to talk Colin into “crossing over” but it doesn’t work. She promises that she’ll be back and help him leave.

The paint chip is found to be consistent with a car registered to the victim’s father, which is missing a hood ornament. Sweets and Angela investigate Colin’s social network profiles. It appears that Colin and his parents were close and that he had lots of friends and no obvious enemies. Booth interviews the father who comes to pieces emotionally when he realizes that Booth suspects him. He tells him that the car was a project that he and Colin worked on together and he covered the car and never looked at it again after Colin disappeared.

Brennan takes the skull home as she’s not quite ready to give up for the night but Booth doesn’t like it when she stays at work too late. She is talking to the skull in the middle of the night when Booth wakes up. Even though he acts annoyed at Brennan for bringing the skull home, Booth stops to talk to it and pray for it when he gets up the next morning. Booth and Brennan take the skull for a drive to an area where they think that the victim may have been dumped right after he died, based on Hodgin’s analysis of the wasp nest found in the skull. Brennan and Booth listen to the victim’s mix tape as they drive with the skull in the backseat.

They investigate a pump house on the site and find both the hood ornament to the El Camino and notice that the sunlight coming through the pump house windows corresponds to the discoloration on the skull – it was likely sun-bleached while sitting in the pump house for an extended period of time.

Using the Angelatron, the team realizes that Colin was surfing on the hood of his father’s car when he fell off and was struck by the car, breaking his neck. The team calls in a bunch of Colin’s friends. Two of the guys turn on each other and one of the guys admits to driving the car. The other dared Colin to stand on the hood. It was an accident but the boys panicked and put the body in the pump house. Later, they had nightmares that Colin came and told them he was cold, so they moved him to the greenhouse where it was warmer.

According to Avalon, Colin still hasn’t left his skull even though his case has been solved. He’s due to be cremated, though, and Angela wants to make sure that he’s gone before that happens. Angela takes the skull to Brennan and tells her that Colin wasn’t sticking around to have the cause of his death determined. Angela has realized that the end of his mix tape had a video on it. It’s a song for Miranda, his friend who he had a crush on. Team Jeffersonian invites Miranda in by herself and they play the video for her. On the video, Colin is playing a song on the guitar for her and then tells her that he loves her. Apparently Colin skipped school the day of his death because he wasn’t sure how Miranda would react. Miranda thanks them for showing her the video.

We see Colin leave his skull and ride off on his skateboard.

My Thoughts:

My taste in movies and TV definitely runs to comedy and action rather than sentimentalism. That said, this was a sweet episode and the case of the week actually seemed a bit more plausible than many BONES episodes of late and it was nice to see the team, especially Brennan, drop a bit of clinical detachment and acknowledge that working around death every day can be emotionally draining. This “very special episode” could have been further separated from the 9-11 themed episode that brought up similar emotions in some characters a few weeks ago, though. BONES is usually at its heart a quirky comedy set in a forensics lab and occasional episodes looking at the darker or sadder side of forensics seem appropriate but too many of these episodes in a short period of time can just be depressing.

They obviously tried to go for comic relief with Cyndi Lauper as a psychic, but her character just made those scenes seem really ridiculous. There was no good explanation given for her presence and the character was just goofy in general. They definitely could have included a psychic character without the corn factor or used one of the regular characters to come to similar conclusions about the victim’s spirit without the gratuitousness.

All-in-all, the episode was an interesting one to leave off with as BONES will be going on hiatus until mid-January.

Memorable Quotes:

I love it when you hang on to your humanity, even if it means I get yelled at! – Hodgins

Colin, if you see my mother on the other side…please tell her that I’m fine and that I’m happ..87% happy and I love her very much – Cam

Something is bugging me – Brennan
Yeah, me too, there is a human skull in our living room – Booth

Do you think it’s too soon to learn the periodic table of elements? -Brennan
For you or for her [Christine]?  – Booth

Catch all new episodes of BONES starting January 14 at 8/7c on Fox!