Bones 5.21: The Rarity of Happy Endings

Maybe the best Bones of the season tonight - 5.21 - which featured the return the Grave Digger, i.e., the sociopath serial killer brilliant DA who tasered and buried Jack and Bones, who escaped with not much time or energy to spare (in Season 2), and then almost did in Booth (Season 4), and did kill who knows how many more before and along the way.

Tonight she's in custody, on trial, and acting as her own defense counsel.  She's a suitable antagonist for Bones, who recognizes the GD's brilliance, and in fact notes that she have even better use of her sharp mental capacities than does Bones, since the sociopath is unencumbered by human relationships.   The GD's first swift move is to get almost all the evidence our good DA Caroline Julian has against the GD dismissed, on grounds that it was improperly obtained.   Our team would fight on, but in a second brilliant move, the GD tempts our people by giving them a clue to one of her other victims - a boy.   As Bones correctly points out, the team cannot investigate this case as well as present themselves as victims of the GD - our guys have to choose.   They decide to drop the charges against the GD regarding them, and focus on the new case at hand.

This is no easy matter:

• Angela decodes the GD's voice from a complex recording, in which the voice has been layered and scrambled by the GD, but the GD astutely points out Angela's lack of experience and training as an acoustic engineer in court
• Bones comes up with good incriminating evidence about the size, etc of the killer - which matches the GD's - but the GD makes Bones look emotional, i.e. unreliable, on the stand (Bones is still having nightmares about her own near-death at the hands of the GD, and is more emotional than usual - see also below)
• Jack spurs the team to get excellent, convincing DNA evidence against the GD - found in the system of a bug in the teeth of the boy who bit the GD before she killed him - but this evidence is in such small amount that all of it is destroyed in the testing, which means none is available for the GD to examine on her own.   This, technically, is legal, as per a California ruling, but the GD is able to raise doubts about this with the jury.

Frankly, had I been on the jury, and only knew what they knew, I might well have gone for acquittal, on the basis of not guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.  (I think Max was right in his early view that the GD could well escape without a scratch from this trial.)  But this jury convicts.

A happy ending?

Well, not completely.  Bones was more emotional tonight than usual - reliving her burial, reacting to the boy's remains, despite her protestations to the contrary.   As she looks out the back of the cab that drives away from Booth on the corner, we get the strong feeling that all is not right - especially since she has just told Booth, on that corner, that maybe it's time for a change in her life, one which would take her away from Booth and their professional partnership.

We'll see more about this next week.  Happy endings, with the exception of Angela and Jack, which took long enough,  are not the stock and trade of Bones. 

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



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