Bones 10.11: Life after Death, Sweets in Wonderland

Bones has always been about life after death, about the bones of the dead telling their stories to Bones, who is able to use that information to help bring the killers to justice in our world of the living.   But Bones 10.11 was about this in a different, less metaphorical, more literal way, as the psychic Avalon, played by Cindi Lauper, is in touch with Sweets - on this birthday, no less.

Because it's his birthday, all of our heroes and heroines are thinking about him, in their own ways.   Avalon, called in for the case at hand, is able to segue easily into being in touch with Sweets.   Unsurprisingly, Angela has no trouble believing in her and what she's saying.  Eventually, Hodgins does too - also unsurprising, because Hodgins' love for Angela makes it difficult for him to oppose anything she profoundly endorses.  And we the audience are supposed to believe, at the end, that Avalon has been guided by Sweets to get the book he wrote about Bones and Booth to them on his birthday.

Or are we?  In classic Bones fashion, we're also allowed to believe, if we choose, that maybe Avalon's insight about the thumb drive was just coincidence, and the drive would have been discovered in the car anyway.   At least, I hope so, because I don't believe in psychics, and am not inclined to, since I'm not in love with Angela.

The denouement of tonight's episode is beautifully set, though, in a tea party with Christine, who's a little older and adorably articulate.   This tea party, like all good tea parties, features an imaginary friend. Thus, Bones and Booth and everyone at the party are like the revelers at the Mad Hatter's tea party in Alice in Wonderland, where make-believe reigns supreme.  Is the episode's way of saying that Sweets communicating from beyond the grave is all make believe?

Tough to say, but the party made for a very merry unbirthday Bones, indeed.


Bones 100 and 200 podcast reviews

See also Bones 10.1: The Fulcrum Changes ... Bones 10.2: J. Edgar and the DNA Confession ... Bones 10.3: Meets Rush and a Dominatrix ... Bones 10.4: Brennan and Angela on a Bench in the Playground ... Bones 10.5: Two Jokes and Three Times ... Bones 10.6: A Thousand Cuts ... Bones 10.7: The A-Word and Quarks ... Bones 10.8: Daisy's Doula ... Bones 10.9: The Milgram Experiment and the Birds ... Bones 200: 10.10: Just like Bogey and Bacall

And see also Bones 9.1: The Sweet Misery of Love ... Bones 9.2: Bobcat, Identity Theft, and Sweets ... Bones 9.3 and NCIS 11.2: Sweets and Ziva ... Bones 9.4: Metaphysics of Death in a Television Series ... Bones 9.5: Val and Deep Blue ... Bones 9.6: The Wedding ... Bones 9.7: Watch Out, Buenos Aires ...Bones 9.8: The Bug in the Neck ... Bones 9.9: Friday Night Bones in the Courtroom ... Bones 9.10: Horse Pucky ... Bones 9.11: Angels in Equations ... Bones 9.12: Fingernails ... Bones 9.13: Meets Nashville, and Wendell ... Bones 9.14: "You Cannot Drink Your Glass Away" ... Bones 9.15: Hodgins' Brother and the Ripped Off Toe ... Bones 9.16: Lampreys, Professors, and Insurance Companies ... Bones 9.17: Spartacus in the Kitchen ... Bones 9.18: Meets Day of the Triffids ... Bones 9.19: The Cornucopic Urn ... Bones 9.20: Above the Law ... Bones 9.21: Freezing and Thawing ... Bones 9.22: Promotion ... Bones 9.23: The New Intern ... Bones Season 9 Finale: Upping the Ante

And 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 ... Bones 8.17: "Not Time Share, Time Travel" ... Bones 8.18: Couples ... Bones 8.19: The Head in the Toilet ... Bones 8.20: On Camera ... Bones 8.21: Christine, Hot Sauce, and the Judge ... Bones 8.22: Musical-Chair Parents ... Bones 8.23: The Bluff ... Bones Season 8 Finale: Can't Buy the Last Few Minutes

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

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Neanderthal bones

   

Defiance: Alien DJ, Great Music, Star Wars Bar on Earth

I caught the first season of Defiance over the past few nights.  The new SyFy post-apocalyptic drama joins The Walking Dead, Falling Skies, and more in this now flourishing television genre.   But Defiance has a few special facets going for it:

• The music is just fantastic, starting with the Johnny Cash - June Carter "We Got Married in a Fever" (aka "Jackson") in the first episode to Raya Yarbrough's outstanding cover of Cindi Lauper's "Time after Time" near the end - and even a fine cover by Yarbrough of The Five Stairsteps' "Ooh Child" somewhere in the middle.   Bear McCreary, of Battlestar Galactica fame, has done his customarily brilliant job with the music throughout.
• Speaking of BSG, there's a lot of its flavor and feel in Defiance, which I take as a good thing.
• There's even a kid in a radio station in Defiance - making a pair with the DJ in Under the Dome - but in Defiance the kid is an alien.   Anything that harkens to Alan Freed, Murray the K, and Wolfman Jack is a plus in my book.

But speaking of aliens, there's a tad too many of them - seven different alien species, that is, which came to Earth as part of the Votan collective.   I'd be happy with just the three major brands, Irathient, Castithan, and Imogen.   The additional species, including Earth mutants which add to the seven, give Defiance the ambience of a Star Wars bar scene, and an everything-but-the-kitchen sink effect, which has the unintentional consequence of giving Defiance a slight touch of parody.

The sex, though, is pretty good - between Castithan Datak Tarr and his wife, and Irathient Irisa and Tommy, her human lover.   Thanks to our childish, unconstitutional FCC, we see no real skin - and the Castithan custom of bathing privately in bathing suits is inconsistent with their otherwise hedonistic culture.   But expecting our television networks to stand up to the FCC is a hopeless case, even if the FCC has never tried to exercise power over cable television.

The plot works well, with a good mix of unexpected heroes and villains, and characters you can care about.  I'm looking forward to season 2.

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Bones is Back is for Season Five: What is Love?

Bones came back for its fifth season on Fox tonight, with an opening episode that gave us a satisfying exploration of the feelings between Bones and Booth, which of course were left unresolved, if a little closer to what we'd all like to see.

Booth is pretty much recovered from his brain dangers and adventures at the end of last season, which featured him dreaming in his hospital bed after surgery that he and Bones were married and night-club owners. Booth took a long time to wake up, with Bones by his side. Was that purely due to medical reasons, or in part because he was happy, fulfilled, to be with Bones in that dream?

The answer resides in the extent to which he is actually not yet 100% tonight. Sweets shows Booth that the emotional part of his brain is much more charged than it was before Booth was hospitalized - is this an effect of the operation?

In contrast, the appealing tarot-card reader played by Cindy Lauper says Booth and Bones really do just want to have deep fun - i.e., he loves her truly, not just because of his traumatized brain, and she loves him.

Whom should we and Booth believe? He does seem to have lost his loathing for clowns - is that another consequence of the intervention on his brain?

Well, romantic that I am, I'm wondering if the two possibilities - true feelings vs. feelings brought on by surgery - may not both be at work here. Maybe the surgery released Booth's true feeling for Bones?

We likely won't get a definitive answer this season, but it will be fun watching it all play out...

See also Bones: Hilarity and Crime


6-min podcast review of Bones

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