FOX
BONES Recap: Young Folly
BONES 8.16 The Friend in Need
Case of the Week:
A homeless drunk tries to sell a filthy suitcase that he found to a pawn shop. When he opens it, there is a badly decomposed body inside (of course!). The victim is a 15-year old boy who had been missing for two weeks. The tox screen found ketamine (AKA Special K and a veterinary tranquilizer) in his tissue, but it turns out he was carrying it on his body and hadn’t ingested it. Booth and Sweets find a large amount of money and a bunch of cell phones and electronics in his room. Text messages on the phone lead them to another teenager that works at his dad’s moving company. He would help the victim sell tricked out smart phones.
Brennan, Hodgins, and Cam examine the body
The girl who lived next door, Cat, the victim’s crush, convinced him to go to a party right before he disappeared. At the party, he got into a fight with another kid who was dancing with her. She later admits to Sweets that she was raped at the party, possibly drugged. Her mom convinced her not to tell the police. Sweets tells the authorities and they are able to figure out who raped her based on following her in hundreds of pictures of the party posted online by various attendees.
The team determines that the victim was killed by being shoved in a suitcase and then crushed as three ratcheting straps were slowly tightened. The straps caused a previously injured vertebrae to sever the nerve roots responsible for breathing, killing the victim and then flattening him enough to be able to close the suitcase. Booth and Brennan go to interview the kid at the moving company again and find evidence of blood on some straps at the facility. He tells them that one of their phone customers payed them in Special K, so he was going to pay the victim with it.
Booth talks to one of the kids from the party
Cat’s mom confronted the victim thinking he raped her and then he confronted the real rapist, suspecting that he’d used the Special K to rape her. The kid then killed him to keep him quiet. Brennan, Sweets, and Booth trick him (I assume legally) into confessing to both the rape and murder.
Character Development:
Finn Abernathy is back in the lab, which gives Brennan the chance to start a wildly inappropriate discussion of his and Michelle’s sex life, much to Cam’s dismay. Michelle comes home to spend the weekend with him as a surprise, but doesn’t tell Cam. Finn can’t handle the lie, so he spills it to Cam. Cam suggests that they plan to get together and he can tell her where, so she can wander by and see them and be mad at Michelle, without it looking like he betrayed her trust. The setup works perfectly and Cam and Michelle end up talking and Cam tells her about her relationship with Aristoo.
Sweets tells Cat about how he was beaten in one of his foster homes and he thought it was his fault until someone helped him to see that it wasn’t his fault and to helped to get his foster father arrested. He swears to do everything he can to see her rapist arrested.
Booth and Brennan have a friendly argument back and forth about who is really the smartest, but we all know who is going to win that one!
My Thoughts:
There was a lot to like in this episode. It portrayed a pretty realistic scenario (the rape, not the murder) with appropriate gravity, without getting overly sentimental or preachy. The side plots of Booth and Brennan “fighting” over who is smarter, Michele, Cam, and Finn having trouble keeping things from each other, as well as a bit more of Sweets back story were interesting and didn’t distract from the A plot. The science of the episode didn’t seem too far off the possible and following the kids at the party via hundreds of candid pictures that the party-goers had posted online was pretty nifty.
My one gripe is that Brennan was on death’s door in the last episode and would have required weeks of recovery, yet in this episode she’s totally healthy and not a single mention of the experience is made. I realize that sometimes they air episodes out of order or prefer to keep them stand alone, but it really makes “very special episodes” seem even more like ratings grabs when they are later ignored in the overall story arc.
Memorable Quotes:
Gilligan’s Island – where is it located? – Brennan
Hollywood. It’s in Hollywood. – Booth
There’s no body of water big enough in Hollywood…I will consult an atlas before work – Brennan
You’re suggesting cause of death is stupidity? – Cam
You’ve been reading my psychology books again, haven’t you? – Sweets
Well, you leave them in the bathroom. They’re good tub reading – Brennan
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