Bones 8.17: "Not Time Share, Time Travel"

How, we're asked in Bones 8.17, can the same victim be found dead twice - in two different places, with one victim 20 years older than the other?  After a tasty UFO romp a few years ago, Bones gives us  an equally enjoyable time travel caper tonight.  Actually, the two victims turn out to be son and father, and not really involved in time travel, but my favorite kind of science fiction - as a reader, viewer, and author - was still the topic de jour tonight.  "Not time share, time travel," as an early suspect explains the passion of the younger victim.

The team gets it - time travel and all its complexities - precisely right.  Hodgins correctly says that time travel to the future is more possible than time travel to the past, which pitches us into paradox.  No time on a network television show to explain why with examples, so here are two:  I go back in time and prevent my grandparents from meeting.  So how did I exist in the first place to go back in time?  Or, an old guy (yeah, older than me) knocks on my door and gives me instructions on how to build a time machine, which I build, and then travel back in time to knock on my door to give myself the instructions.  So where did the instructions come from in the first place?  (Only a multiple universe muti-verse, in which every act of the time traveler creates a new universe, can get us out of such paradoxes.)  But travel to the future is no bed of roses either - it robs us of free will.  If I travel to the future and see you wearing a red shirt tomorrow, that deprives you of your free will to don a blue shirt tomorrow, if you choose.

Anyway, conundrums like this are what make time travel so much fun to think about it, as we see tonight again in Bones.   A new intern, who may even be brighter than Bones, thinks time travel is a possibility.  His name is Wells - a good name, given that H. G. Wells wrote the time travel classic, The Time Machine.  He gets Bones to see, at least a little, that luck can be a factor in solving cases, and you have to be open to all possibilities, however unlikely.

Tonight's episode is really about unlikely possibilities paying off.   Booth wants to invest in asteroid mining, Bones is skeptical about such a literally far-out venture paying off, and Booth in the best line of the night says, well people didn't think that we would pay off.  Exactly right.  And although time travel may forever be beyond our reach because it would shake up the very cause-and-effect nature of the universe, Booth and Bones certainly are not, and, in fact, according to the ratings, are doing better than ever as a couple.  Time well shared.   Viewing well re-paid.

See also Bones 8.1: Walk Like an Egyptian ... Bones 8.2 of Contention ... Bones 8.3: Not Rotting Behind a Desk  ... Bones 8.4: Slashing Tiger and Donald Trump ... Bones 8.5: Applesauce on Election Eve ... Bones 8.6: Election Day ... Bones 8.7: Dollops in the Sky with Diamonds ...Bones 8.8: The Talking Remains ... Bones 8.9: I Am A Camera ... Bones 8.10-11: Double Bones ...Bones 8.12: Face of Enigmatic Evil ... Bones 8.13: Two for the Price of One ... Bones 8.14: Real Life ... Bones 8.15: The Magic Bullet and the Be-Spontaneous Paradox ... Bones 8.16: Bitter-Sweet Sweets and Honest Finn

And see also Bones 7.1: Almost Home Sweet Home ... Bones 7.2: The New Kid and the Fluke ...Bones 7.3: Lance Bond and Prince Charmington ... Bones 7.4: The Tush on the Xerox ... Bones 7.5: Sexy Vehicle ... Bones 7.6: The Reassembler ... Bones 7.7: Baby! ... Bones 7.8: Parents ...Bones 7.9: Tabitha's Salon ... Bones 7.10: Mobile ... Bones 7.11: Truffles and Max ... Bones 7.12: The Corpse is Hanson ... Bones Season 7 Finale: Suspect Bones

And see also Bones 6.1: The Linchpin ... Bones 6.2: Hannah and her Prospects ... Bones 6.3 at the Jersey Shore, Yo, and Plymouth Rock ... Bones 6.4 Sans Hannah ... Bones 6.5: Shot and Pretty ... Bones 6.6: Accidental Relations ... Bones 6.7:  Newman and "Death by Chocolate" ...Bones 6.8: Melted Bones ... Bones 6.9: Adelbert Ames, Jr. ... Bones 6.10: Reflections ... Bones 6.11: The End and the Beginning of a Mystery ... Bones 6.12 Meets Big Love ... Bones 6.13: The Marrying Kind ... Bones 6.14: Bones' Acting Ability ... Bones 6.15: "Lunch for the Palin Family" ...Bones 6.16: Stuck in an Elevator, Stuck in Times ... Bones 6.17: The 8th Pair of Feet ... Bones 6.18: The Wile E. Chupacabra ... Bones 6.19 Test Runs The Finder ... Bones 6.20: This Very Statement is a Lie ... Bones 6.21: Sensitive Bones ... Bones 6.22: Phoenix Love ... Bones Season 6 Finale: Beautiful

And see also Bones: Hilarity and Crime and Bones is Back For Season 5: What Is Love? and 5.2: Anonymous Donors and Pipes and 5.3: Bones in Amish Country and 5.4: Bones Meets Peyton Place and Desperate Housewives and Ancient Bones 5.5 and Bones 5.6: A Chicken in Every Viewer's Pot and Psychological Bones 5.7 and Bones 5.8: Booth's "Pops" and Bones 5.9 Meets Avatar and Videogamers ... Bad Santa, Heart-Warming Bones 5.10 ... Bones 5.11: Of UFOs, Bloggers, and Triangles ... Bones 5.12: A Famous Skeleton and Angela's Baby ... Love with Teeth on Bones 5.13 ... Faith vs. Science vs. Psychology in Bones 5.14 ... Page 187 in Bones 5.15 ...Bones 100: Two Deep Kisses and One Wild Relationship ... Bones 5.17: The Deadly Stars ...Bones Under Water in 5.18 ... Bones 5.19: Ergo Together ...  Bones 5.20: Ergo Together ... Bones 5.21: The Rarity of Happy Endings ... Bones Season 5 Finale: Eye and Evolution

"A thinking person's time travel story... I felt like I was there." - SF Signal