FOX
BONES Recap: Death wishes
Bones 8.13 The Twist in the Plot
Case of the Week:
A couple is on a Segway tour through the woods. The wife races off while her husband videotapes the experience. She speeds up, hits a tree root, and manages to get herself ejected from the Segway, landing face down in the dirt. When her husband arrives, he helps her up and there are huge bugs all over the side of her face. Her husband helps her knock them off until he notices the skull in the dirt. Screaming ensues, following by the husband videotaping the scene.
Sweets, Booth, and Brennan are at home, enjoying their morning coffee. Booth comments that Daisy will be back working in the lab and asks if Sweets is ready. Brennan thinks Sweets is over Daisy, but Booth thinks he isn’t – that’s why he’s still living in their house. The discussion is put on hold when Booth gets a call about the body.
The team finds a second body in the shallow grave
Team Jeffersonian goes out to the site and finds not one, but TWO bodies. They are covered in bugs, of course, which makes Hodgins very happy. Both bodies are female. One of them is definitely a murder victim, but the other seems to have been buried as part of an elaborate ritual involving anointing with sandalwood, frankincense, and cloves.
The ritualized body is identified as Monica Craig, a woman who died from lung cancer. She was intentionally buried in the park by the natural funeral company she hired, Green Passages. Sweets interviews her husband and tells him that a murder victim was buried with his wife. He asks the husband who else knew about her grave and shows her a facial reconstruction of the murder victim. He immediately recognizes the woman as Rachel Knox, Monica’s “death doula” at Green Passages.
Brennan and Booth drive out to Green Passages and interrupt a practice “interment ritual” for a terminally ill man. They meet the director of the company, Akshay Mirza (played by Vik Sahay, [easyazon-link asin=”B009GYS73S”]CHUCK[/easyazon-link] fans!) and tell him that his business partner, Rachel, is dead. He is very distraught over her death. He tells them that she disappeared all the time, so the three weeks she’d been gone was not that unusual – she’d give herself entirely over to a client and then need time to recharge. Mirza can’t think of anyone who would want to hurt Rachel.
Booth looks into previous clients of Green Passages to see if any were disgruntled. They find several lawsuits filed by a competitor against Rachel that alleged that Rachel backed out on a business deal – she owned the land zoned for green burials and they were going to work together. The competitor tells him that Mirza and Knox were a couple.
Mirza is distraught over the death of his business partner
Mirza tells them that he and Rachel broke up about 7 months earlier, which is conveniently about the time that she sustained a broken nose, based on damage to her skull. He tells them that the injury was an accident and that the two of them stopped their relationship after 3 months (she never stayed with the same guy for longer than that and he knew that going into the relationship) and went back to a platonic business relationship afterward.
Daisy investigates Craig’s body and determines that metastatic lung cancer may not have been her actual cause of death – she potentially had several weeks or more before her cancer would have killed her. Meanwhile, they determine that Rachel died when her chest was crushed by a heavy object, specifically a stone grave marker, lacerating her heart.
Booth and Brennan go back to talk to Mirza, who hand carves all the grave markers. He again denies it and tells them that he loved Rachel. They tell him that they suspect his stone is the cause of death. and decides that he will lawyer up.
Hodgins notices that while all the beetles he collected at the scene were the same size when he collected them, now some are very fat, which shouldn’t be possible unless they are under the influence of some toxin. He crushes up the fat beetles (he previously sampled them when they were all the same size) and analyzes them. He finds evidence of “bath salts”, the recreational drug. Cam and Daisy suspect that Monica Craig may have been poisoned with the drug, resulting in her dying prior to her cancer killing her. Daisy confirms it by detecting the drug in Craig’s bone marrow.
Sweets interviews Craig’s husband, a medical doctor, again. Sweets suggests that he may have helped his wife along. Dr. Craig tells Sweets that his wife was in horrible pain and begged to die. He didn’t help her, but he watched her commit suicide.
Sweets takes his theory and this admission to Booth, who is reviewing Craig’s phone records. He notices that Dr. Craig called Knox regularly for exactly 3 months up until his wife died. Booth confronts him – he thinks that Knox advised him to euthanize his wife while he was having an affair with her. Craig confesses – he was placing the stone on his wife’s grave when Rachel showed up to plant a tree and tell him it was over between them. He couldn’t stand losing both his wife and Knox, and so he hit her with the grave marker before burying her with his wife and putting the marker back on the grave.
Character Development:
Daisy is back and both her and Sweets are determined to be professional, but everyone else is waiting for a blow-up. Sweets approaches her first and they compare what’s happened in the time since they broke up.
They later have coffee together and Daisy tells him that she’s seeing a pathologist. He lies and tells her that he is also dating someone. They both admit to each other that they wanted to see each other again to see if it was a mistake. Daisy tells him that they weren’t meant to be together and he somewhat halfheartedly agrees.
Cam later finds Daisy crying at work and advises her to keep moving forward, rather than looking back.
Everyone starts thinking and talking about their personal funeral wishes – Hodgins wants to be shot into the sun from a spaceship (no mention of him losing all his money last episode), Booth just wants a coffin and a priest, and Cam wants cremation after seeing someone come who was pronounced dead but actually in a coma wake up in her coffin minutes before being buried (I guess burning to death is preferable to being buried alive?).
Brennan wants a “Tibetan sky funeral” – her body to be pulverized on a mountain plateau and left for vultures (of course!), but then changes her mind and decides that a volcano would be better, because Booth always wanted to be close to an active volcano.
Booth works on a new will and a video for Christine after Brennan gives him grief about writing his will on a sticky note. Brennan overhears him making the video and watches him fondly as he tells the camera what a lucky man he is and how much he loves Christine and Brennan.
My Thoughts:
I enjoyed this episode, mostly because I really like Vik Sahay and because there were some really witty lines. It didn’t hurt that Daisy was used in a limited capacity – in my opinion, the only thing better than no Daisy is minimal Daisy! She’s also not as annoying when her and Sweets aren’t fawning over each other. I really want Sweets to find a nice (normal) girl, although the scenes with Sweets, Brennan and Booth at home are always fun and Sweets would definitely have to move out if he found another girlfriend.
Compared to most episodes, the actual murder investigation seemed a bit rushed to make time for all the characters to muse about how they would want their funeral to be, but the change wasn’t unwelcome. Although funeral wishes are rather heavy material, it was kept pretty light and never descended into the “very special episode” realm, thank goodness.
The scene with Booth making the video for Christine while Brennan looked on was very poignant. I really hope that they get married, or at least engaged by the end of the season.
Memorable Quotes:
Kind of hard to bring home a woman when you’re sleeping on Wolverine sheets – Sweets
My last Will and Testament is 312 pages long – Brennan
Mine’s on a sticky note…everything goes to BONES! – Booth
It looks like this death business can be lethal – Angela
That is amusing! Because we’re investigating a murder! – Brennan
Grief really makes you a smart ass! – Booth
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