FOX
BONES Recap: Near Death
BONES 8.15 The Shot in the Dark
Case of the Week: A broken body is found on the rocks below the New River Gorge Bridge. The initial exam suggests a suicide, but changes to the heart suggest the victim had a recent heart attack.
Booth wants to take Brennan and Christine to rent a cabin in the woods so they can go fishing. Brennan thinks it’s impractical because Christine won’t remember and Booth gets upset because he just wants them to spend time together. They get in a big fight because Brennan thinks Booth implied that she was a bad mother. She storms out to go back to the Jeffersonian.
Brennan is shot while working late
Brennan is working late on the bones. The security guard, Hal, comes in and asks her about the bones. She tells him that she thinks the victim was murdered and then thrown from the bridge. He leaves, and she continues to work.
She hears someone enter and she looks up through her magnifying shield and sees a blurry figure. A quiet shot is heard and Brennan falls to the ground with blood spreading from her abdomen. Booth comes with Christine to see talk to her and apologize after she ignores his calls. He finds her on the floor in the bone room, unconscious and bleeding heavily.
Brennan, meanwhile, is having a near death experience in which she visits with her [dead] mother in her childhood home. Being Brennan, she has a hard time believing that it’s not just a hallucination. She tells her mother about Booth and Christine. She tries to leave the house, but she’s locked in..
Back in the real world, she’s in the OR and the surgeons can’t find the bullet. No bullet, no exit wound. She goes into V-tach and they defibrillate her and manage to bring her back.
She is back talking to her mom. She tries to leave but the door and windows of the house won’t open. She’s wearing the clothes she was wearing when her mother left. Her mother asks her about Max. She tells her that it killed her to leave her daughter behind.
Cam comes out of the OR to tell Booth that she’s stable. Her heart stopped, twice, but she’s now stable but critical. Booth tells her that the security guard, Hal, was also found dead. Cam is going to go back to the Jeffersonian and autopsy him. She explains to Booth about the missing bullet – she can use Hal’s body to help Brennan.
At the Jeffersonian, Hodgins and Sweets watch the crime scene techs work. Clark has also shown up – he’s going to see if the bones Brennan was examining could be related to her shooting. Cam tells to Clark and Hodgins that no bullet was found in the guard either.
Booth at Brennan’s bedside
Booth is at Brennan’s bedside when she starts murmuring. She wakes up and he tells her she was shot. She tells him it was cold when she was shot. He tells her that no bullet was found in her or Hal, who is dead. She wants to help solve the crime, but Booth and Max insist that she stay put in the hospital (as if she could go anywhere). She asks Booth about how long her heart stopped, and he tells her that she was dead for two minutes.
At the Jeffersonian, Sweets discusses the case with agent Sparling (remember, she kissed him back in The Gunk in the Garage) – she doesn’t have much yet. All of the cameras were disabled prior to the shooting and Hal’s badge was used to access the lab. She and Sweets interview all the Jeffersonian employees who were in the facility at the time of the shooting, but don’t get much useful info.
Hodgins, Angela, and Cam discuss the lack of a bullet and Brennan’s report that the bullet felt cold. Hodgins suggests an ice bullet. Cam asks him to see if it’s possible.
Clark finds what appears to be a taser prong in one of the bridge victim’s bones. The taser prong matches the taser that Hal, the security guard had. Angela arrives to tell them that they have identified the victim based on facial reconstruction – he’s Johannes Groot. Multiple taser blows can cause cardiac arrest, so maybe Hal killed the victim with the taser and then threw him over the bridge to hide the crime.
Sweets and Sparling visit the Groot’s apartment. He has expensive taste – a fancy clock, model airplanes of his companies’ fleet, a closet full of expensive suits – that seem well above his current salary. There are also some subtle signs of a struggle in the apartment, including some confetti on the floor. The confetti is numbered – it comes from a taser. Hal’s taser.
Angela is visiting with Brennan when she says she feels really good…and then she slumps in her bed and the monitors start going off. Angela calls for help.
Brennan is back with her mother. They talk about the last time they saw each other – Brennan was 15 and they had fought about a boy because her mother thought she was changing herself too much for him (including taking up smoking). The next morning, she woke up and her mother was gone.
Back in the hospital, Brennan wakes up. Booth and Max and her doctor are there. She had a reaction to the blood transfusion that they gave her, which is weird because they cross-matched her at surgery and it went fine. She tells Booth that she went to another place and talked to her mother, but Booth called her back. She tells him that she wants to sleep for a while.
So far, Hodgins hasn’t managed to make an ice bullet work – it either shatters or melts. Hodgins realizes they need something denser than water – like human blood! A blood bullet would also explain her reaction to the blood at the hospital. He’s made one by freezing red blood cells in liquid nitrogen and it readily pierces his forensic dummy when shot from a special air gun, leaving no exit wound.
The team examines the fake artifact
Clark examines the guard’s radiographs again and notices a small skull fracture near the guard’s ear. They examine the body and find an infected wound full of particulates for Hodgins to analyze. They turn out to be wood from an ancient olive tree from Crete and gold flakes – likely from an artifact at the Jeffersonian.
Max stops by to visit Brennan, bringing her ice cream. He asks her about seeing her mother. She tells him it was a hallucination, but he wants to know if she said hi or asked about him. She says that she misses him. He tells her how much he misses them being together as a family.
Team Jeffersonian identifies a 12th-century artifact in storage that fits the description, but it’s fake. They find out the location of the real version – it’s being restored by a Jeffersonian employee named Dr. Batuhan. At his work station, they find the original artifact, which he is actively working on restoring. Hodgins confirms that the artifact matches the particulates. They also find a liquid nitrogen container and an airbrush that could be used as an air gun.
Sparling tells Booth that the guard’s last phone call was to a burner cell assumed to belong to the shooter. Groot, and Hal and the shooter were all working together. They tried to kill Brennan to prevent her from solving Groot’s murder. Booth determines that the shooter must work at the Jeffersonian, based on the timing between the phone call and the shooting.
After going through the records, they find 11 more fake artifacts in the Jeffersonian storage. One of the originals has been traced to a collected in Europe. The paperwork for the artifact that he was restoring is also missing. Batuhan denies his involvement. Sparling and Booth show him security tape footage of him leaving the lab with something under his lab coat just before Brennan was shot and returning a bit later. Sparling suggests that Hall stole the pieces, and Batuhan and Groot would fly with them to authenticate them for the buyers.
Batuhan has lawyered up and they fight every step of the way. Booth loses his cool and grabs him by the collar, but calms down and releases him. Just then, he gets a text saying that Brennan is going back into surgery, so he leaves the interrogation to Sparling to go to the hospital.
At the hospital, Brennan is being moved back into the OR. She tells Booth that she noticed an irregularity in one of her ribs on her radiographs – the blood bullet struck the rib and would have left evidence behind. She has convinced her doctors to take her back to surgery to biopsy that area. She assures Booth that it’s “100% risk free”. She is wheeled into surgery and anesthetized.
Brennan talks with her mother
Brennan is back with her mother, and she tells her to find some of the little girl that she keeps locked inside. They will see each other again. She loves her and Max. She tells her to tell Max that she always knew that he stole the first gift he gave to her.
Brennan wakes up with Booth and Max at her bedside. They tell her that the blood evidence on her rib matched – Batuhan was arrested for murder and attempted murder. She tells Max that her mother knew about the stolen gift. He was sure nobody else knew.
Her and Booth talk about her seeing her mother and he leans over and kisses her in her bed.
Character Development:
Sweets and Sparling talk about their failed relationship – they dated a few times, slept together once, but it didn’t work out. Sweets tells her that he was not over Daisy yet. Maybe we’ll see them try again?
Although Brennan is an atheist, seeing her mother seems to have shaken her a bit. It will be interesting to see if she develops some faith, or takes her mother’s advice and lightens up a bit.
My Thoughts:
The blood bullet was pretty cool, but I’m not sure that the motive for Betwan to kill two people (plus Groot killed by Hal) was made clear enough. I initially assumed that Pelant was probably behind the shooting, although seemed a little clean and painless for him and it took me two views to put all the pieces together for Betwan, Hal and Groot.
Over the past few episodes, both Booth and Brennan seem to be realizing what they have in each other. I suspect (and really would like to see) them engaged or married finally, by the end of the season.
Memorable Quotes:
I don’t believe in Heaven. – Brennan
Yet, here you are, having a conversation with your dead mother.
My middle name is “Danger”, well, actually, it’s “Thomas”. – Clark
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