Double Death of the Dearly Departed– REVIEWS

Post reviews here; hopefully the trend they started last week will continue and Bones will keep given peeps good things to talk about!

Zap2It report.

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'Bones': Putting the "fun" in "funeral"

By [Only admins are allowed to see this link]
April 20, 09:56 PM


After last Thursday's amazing episode, just about anything they did would seem slight. Instead of fighting it, "Bones" embraced the fluff with the obligatory wacky funeral episode. After all, what could be funnier than body snatching and murder plots?

A colleague from The Jeffersonian died of a heart attack in the office,
so everyone is off to the wake. Brennan is surprised they have to go
when they all barely knew him. Speak for yourself, Tempe -- everyone
else in the car (including Booth) had bonded with Dr. Hank Reilly. Ah,
but Brennan's dispassionate eye catches what everyone else missed --
Hank was murdered!

After a judge refuses to grant an injunction
to keep Hank from being cremated, Brennan decides they have to get the
body back to the lab. She and Booth smuggle the corpse out the back way
while Hodgins gives an increasingly crazed and incoherent
honor-the-dead speech. Hint to funeral-goers: Whenever someone is really trying to keep your eyes on him at a funeral, that usually means it's time to look over your shoulder.

But the ruse works, the writers work in a couple of product placements, and
Cam and Brennan get Hank back to the lab. There they find:

• The body had bruises that weren't mentioned in the medical
  examiner's report. That means Hank was still alive when he'd been
  pronounced dead.
  
• Hank had several cracked ribs, and the cracks weren't consistent with CPR.
  
• Those cracked ribs were consistent with stabbity stabbing, and the stab wound were consistent with a trocar used in embalming.
  

Booth confronts the undertaker -- who had just been bonking the
grieving widow -- and he freaks out. OK, I stabbed him! But dude, he
was all dead and stuff, and then I put the embalming needle in, and he sat up,
and I dropped acid in high school and watched zombie movies so I was
all die, zombie die! and yeah, I need a drink. So, that's where the
stab wounds came from. But why was he declared dead without actually
being a ex-parrot Egyptologist? Well, that's because he was
poisoned with a paralytic agent. And how do we know that? Because Cam
and Brennan stick a needle in his eye. Urg.

The toxin that paralyzed Hank is used in heart meds, and occurs naturally in fugu. A
researcher specializing in the Caribbean ordered some of the toxin,
which is used to make zombies. Not, like, rarr, brraaaaaaaaains Romero
zombies, but voodoo zombies. But nope, he didn't do it, because...
well, because he didn't.

Hank he had sushi as his last meal, so maybe it was a fugu accident? Or maybe it was fugu murder, since he was seen arguing with a woman with Cleopatra hair over sushi. Nope, someone put the poison in his tea. Aha! His wife talked about making his tea every morning! But she lied -- it was just a good speech, and something she did to piss off Hank's graduate assistant/mistress. Catfight! Booth intervenes and distracts with
spirited spirituals, and this is the point where someone really
needed to shut down the open bar. (Kudos to Booth for going for it,
though, especially when he couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket.)

At the burial, Brennan decides to psyche out the killer -- Hey, everyone,
Hank research death rituals, and sharing the deceased's favorite
beverage was something the Egyptians totally dug. (As it
were.) So let's all have some tea from his special stash! They're sort
of expecting his stepbrother or wife to freak out -- they get the most
cash form Hank's death -- but it's his mom who wigs. She used some of
her heart medicine to kill Hank because she thought the terms of her
husband’s will -- which gave 90 percent of his cash to Hank, and next
to nothing to Barney -- was unfair. Fine, arrest me! She says. And five
days later, she's dead, too – because she was on half-rations of her
heart meds, she died herself.

Highlights, thoughts and odds and ends

• Yeah, there wasn't much to this episode. It was fine, and fluffy, but after last week... well, I hoped for more.
  
• Hodgins and Booth both know Hank as the leader of the best fantasy
  football league in DC. Hodgins owed Hank $20 from the game, and he
  tucks it in the corpse's pocket. Hank owed Booth $20, so Booth takes it
  right back.
  
• Booth decides they need a code word -- Hank wasn't murdered, he was "translated."
  
• Cam went to Hank for advice because her adopted daughter --
  remember her? -- started smoking. Because Egyptologists are renowned
  smoking cessation experts... Booth says that maybe Michelle is smoking
  to get Cam to stop smoking. OK, why not.
  
• Booth and Brennan have one really nice moment -- at the graveyard,
  Booth asks Brennan that, "when I inevitably drop dead before you," she
  come talk to him at his grave. She agrees -- she believes pretending he
  was still there would make her feel better, and looking at herself
  through his eyes "would make me live my life more successfully." That
  was pretty sweet.
  

Here is our usual EW's report on last night's eppie by Mandi Bierly. Enjoy!

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'Bones' recap: Goofy done right



Apr 21, 2009, 10:33 AM | by Mandi Bierly
Categories: 'Bones', About Last Night, Television


This is what I want from a lighter episode of Bones:
A fast pace, some fun for everyone, and Booth still wearing a suit.
Thank you! So the team attended the wake of 50-year-old Jeffersonian
colleague Hank, who died of heart failure from a congenital defect --
or so we thought until Brennan attempted to pay her respects (to a
fabulous Danny Elfman-esque soundtrack) and realized that he'd been
murdered. Booth didn't want to believe her because he has respect for
the dead -- unless they owe him $20 from the fantasy football league --
but his attempt to silence Brennan failed. ("Drink up, will ya?" "Why?"
"'Cause I'm hoping you're gonna pass out.")

I'm not sure which physical comedy bit I enjoyed more: Booth
coaching Brennan to put on a sad face (which she was incapable of
because she was happy that a murder investigation had interrupted the
mourning) or Brennan using the wrong hand gesture to tell Booth that
the undertaker and widow were having sex. I'm thinking the latter. Her
enthusiasm won me over. I must have still been giddy because I wasn't
even bothered by the RIDICULOUS site of Brennan and Booth stealing the
body, which Hodgins saw through a window as he gave a toast to Hank.
How much had Booth had to drink to go along with that plan? (He was
packing a flask.) All I kept thinking was that Angela would not be
happy when she found out that they used her car to transport the body
back to the Jeffersonian so Cam could find the evidence needed to get
an injunction to stop the cremation of the body.

After Cam found stab wounds and poked Hank's eye for trace evidence of a
toxin (not as gross as I thought it'd be), they ruled that Hank had
been poisoned with something that made his heart and respiratory rates
mimic death in some kind of coma, which fooled the medics and medical
examiner. When the undertaker started embalming Hank, he hit a nerve
and the pseudo corpse shot up like a zombie. The undertaker may have
officially killed Hank with stab wounds, but only because he'd gotten
to Hank before the drug could finish the deed. So who poisoned him? We
had the obvious fake outs -- the colleague whose Caribbean Studies
department was being shut down and would now have to report to the
deceased. I applaud the writers for being in tune with what some fans
have been saying this season about Brennan. After she said there was no
such thing as Haitian Zombieism, the man said, "And now you've managed
to insult an entire culture and their belief system." "She does that to
everyone," Booth responded. Ha. (Kudos to them as well for having Booth
ask Brennan to leave him alone to interrogate the family's estate
lawyer, a beautiful woman, because "I can be devastatingly charming if
you aren't watching me." Also quite true.)

The widow (who reminded me of Annette Bening) also had motive. She
confronted Hank's graduate assistant about their affair at the wake.
Booth must have had multiple drinks with that lawyer because
he broke up the fight saying, "He wouldn't want to see us fight. He'd
want to see us sing!" and launching into an off-pitch rendition of
"Swing Low Sweet Charity." I'd say he was just doing that to stall so
Sweets and Cam could get the body back into the coffin and Hodgins and
Brennan could test all the loose tea in the house for the toxin, but he
seemed to be enjoying it a bit too much. Against my better judgment, I
laughed out loud when he broke it down. I half expected him to start
popping and locking. Total commitment on David Boreanaz's part. But
where was Angela during all this? Disinfecting her car, maybe.

Angela was present and accounted for at Hank's funeral, where
Brennan had the genius idea to ask all the mourners to drink tea from
his collection. The person who wouldn't drink was the killer. I have to
admit, I hadn't suspected the mother, who was actually his stepmother.
She was angry that her husband had arranged for their money to go to
Hank upon her death instead of the son they'd had together, Barney the
aspiring novelist. We ended with a funeral scene that
made far more sense than the one at the end of "Hero in the Hold."
Leaving Barney, who was now mourning his brother and his mother, Booth
made Brennan promise that when he inevitably drops dead before her, she
will come visit his grave and talk to him. (Kinda eerie since we know
Booth will face a major health crisis before the season is over...but I
like it. Remember that early session they had with Sweets where they
decided they'd only have coffee if they were no longer working
together? We've come so far.) Naturally, Brennan protested at first,
because she doesn't believe he'd be able to hear her. But she changed
her mind when he stopped, shot her a look, and said, "Promise me." She
agreed to visit him because she'd feel better if she pretended that he
were still here for a moment, and because she'd temporarily look at
herself through his eyes, which would make her live her life more
successfully. Does she have any idea what her occasional words of kindness due to Booth?
I really don't think so. I love that he found a way to put his arm
around her as they left the cemetery. But the man totally needed a
bigger umbrella.

So, do you agree that if Bones is gonna go goofy, this is
the way they should do it? Not a total homerun like Season 3's "Mummy
in the Maze," but still thoroughly entertaining.