Raise your glasses, Bones fans. Temperance Brennan now believes in love. Or, at least Booth’s premise that love could come first between a recovering alcoholic and a former prostitute-turned-elementary school teacher, and then the chemical reaction. We’ll get to the case — a murdered gay dentist/football player — in a minute. Let’s talk about Brennan’s revelation first.

I’m not sure why the show insists upon making its point in such extreme ways — last week, that Brennan can value Booth’s feelings over the truth (about the lone gunman theory!); this week, that if you believe love conquers all, it means you don’t worry when your younger brother tells you he wants to marry a girl he’s known for a month who is also a former high-priced call girl. I don’t actually think it’s that awful that Booth ran a background check on Padme Dalaj (guest star Dilshad Vadsaria). I’d kinda love a background check on my dates, frankly. Should he have assumed that Padme and Jared hadn’t discussed her past? No. Apparently, that’s something you tell someone within the first month of meeting him. I’m not saying call girls don’t deserve a happily ever after. I’m just saying that you can’t blame someone for being concerned when things are moving that quickly. READ FULL STORY »

Could we have ourselves another Bones episode that will divide fans? Or am I the only one not sure how she feels about Brennan placing Booth’s sense of self and country above the truth about the JFK assassination? I can see why she halted her investigation prematurely, the development it’s supposed to show in her character, and the depth of feelings for Booth it reveals. And you could argue that she was never going to be able to say with 100 percent certainty that those were the bones of JFK with the time and testing limitations placed on her, so it wasn’t worth leaving Booth rattling in a state of limbo and doubt. But I think the odds that JFK’s scarlet fever would have resulted in an undiagnosed case of osteomyelitis — which Brennan said 1 in 100 people who had scarlet fever get — might be greater than those of there being a man with all the other tells JFK’s bones would have had having his head blown off in the same way, no? READ FULL STORY »

Truth: I am not an X-Files fanatic, so aside from the show’s theme song being a ringtone and guest star Dean Haglund (X-Files‘ Richard ‘Ringo’ Langly) playing the murderer, you’re on your own to point out references. I am, however, a David Boreanaz fan, so I can tell you that Rocketship 7, which Booth mentioned in the diner/UFO Museum Research Center, was a children’s TV show hosted by his father. There, I’m not totally worthless! READ FULL STORY »

Before we get into last night’s episode — part homage to the must-see 2007 documentary The King of Kong, part ad for James Cameron’s Avatar — we need to discuss the promo for next week’s holiday episode in which Brennan strips Booth down to his boxers after bits of a blown-up bomb-wielding, bank-robbing Santa Claus land on his suit and make it evidence. “Clothing as evidence” was one of the ideas I pitched in my August 2009 open letter to showrunners of procedurals starring actors we’d like to see shirtless. I would never presume that Hart Hanson reads anything I write, so please, someone tell him thank you for the early Christmas present. READ FULL STORY »

Is it just me, or did this episode feel like a bit of filler? Yes, it’s always fun to see Brennan get giddy (for her) over investigating sexual fetishes, but they failed to make the “feeders and eaters” as compelling as the “horsey play” from Season 3. Getting to meet Booth’s grandfather Hank (guest star Ralph Waite) and having him try to play matchmaker for Booth and Brennan was sweet, but for this to be a proper Sweeps episode, Pops needed to die. There, I said it. (Note: I do realize that had Pops died at the end of this episode as written, it would have been too cliché. We’d have needed to meet him under different circumstances.) READ FULL STORY »

When I first saw photos of Booth in a wrestling ring with a little person, I feared we were looking at a mistake the size of last season’s circus episode. I’ve never been so happy to be wrong. This could be my favorite hour of Season 5. The “midget wrestling” was a little wacky, but it produced a classic Brennan moment as she realized the Iron Leprechaun they were watching be defeated by Bumble Bee Man was not the real Iron Leprechaun, whose body they’d found in a sink hole: “Boo! That man is not The Iron Leprechaun! Boooo! Fake! Fake!… Fraud! Look at his femur!” she shouted. Also, I did laugh when Booth jumped in the ring to nab the impostor, who tried various wrestling moves on him that I could have identified when I was in the sixth grade and a Rock ‘n’ Roll Express fan. “What do you expect me to do, he came at me like a rabid ferret,” Booth said after flattening the suspect, raising his arms to celebrate, and being booed. READ FULL STORY »