Bones – The crispy body at 36,000 feet

(Season 4, Episode 10 – “The Passenger in the Oven)

Airplane episodes are always good watching when it comes to television. Not only does it confine the characters to a smaller space than they’re used to, but it also allows for some MacGyver-esque ingenuity on their part as well. The results are normally more entertaining than a normal episode when they have all of the tools at the touch of their fingertips.

What these episodes also do, particularly in the case of a criminal procedural like Bones, is to limit the suspect pool. This gives us viewers a better chance of figuring out who did it before the characters do. In my case, I had it figured out about 15 minutes before Booth and Bones made their discovery. But, I’m not here to talk about my detective abilities. I’m here to list some of the prime moments from this week’s installment of the show that you can comment upon. So, put your seat backs in the upright position and let’s get started.

A FBI agent and a forensic anthropologist fly on a plane: Sure, Bones and Booth spend most of their time together in their native environment (they’re really married — they just don’t know it yet), but they also have the ability to go their separate ways for some space and to work on a case using their individual expertise. Neither of these characters had that ability this time around. In fact, they spent most of their time in a space of only a few hundred square feet. Rather than having it all go south for the character’s relationship, the writers decided to keep everything as normal as possible between the two.

This was expected from Temperance, who would probably be the same if she was performing an investigation of a dead alien on a planet in the western spiral arm of the galaxy that was about to be demolished by the Vogons. What got me was Booth’s reactions to Temperance’s autopsy of the body. Since he has rarely been around when the Squints begin to disassemble the body I had forgotten how squeamish he was when they were pulling out body parts and cleaning eyeballs.

We need a gum wrapper, tweezers and a Buffalo-head nickel to solve this crime: I don’t think Richard Dean Anderson could have done any better in getting the necessary tools to solve this murder. Except, in his role as the adventurer MacGyver, he would have used the denture cream and butane lighter to make a particle transportation device to get the body over to the Jeffersonian. There is a lesson to be learned from this episode for all of you couch forensic anthropologists. If you have a pair of tweezers, reading glasses, a needlepoint needle, and baby powder you too can solve crimes. Just as long as you have a multi-billion dollar support staff ready to help you via a satellite Internet link and the approval of the federal authorities. So, it’s pretty simple when you look at it.

Booth’s seat mate — The new Jessica Fletcher: Get that lady a new series! Sure, she doesn’t write novels, but she reads them enough that she knew Temperance needed some sort of probe to examine the body. I see the series Murder, She Read premiering next season after Bones. Should the programming nitwits at FOX ever decide to expand their primetime to 11:00 pm you could add House on the night as well and make it Must See Mystery Wednesdays.

Blame it on the boy: As I mentioned in the beginning, airplane episodes really keep the suspect pool down. Since everyone else was accounted for, the only logical suspect in the end was the boy. Oh, there was a fleeting moment where I thought it was the boy’s ailing mother, but she was too sick to barely do anything. Oh, the lawyer/affair dude could have done it as well — what lawyer hasn’t committed a crime on and off the television screen? But, he was so adamant to stress that he was a lawyer that he fell out of the suspect pool fairly quickly.

Angela and Hodgins — the never-ending story: I don’t know how long this ‘after-relationship’ friendship is going to last between Angela and Jack, but I do hope it come to a resolution soon. I am personally beginning to feel awkward when these two characters are in the same scene together because you never know if they are going to talk work or talk about what happened. If their continued relationship issues continue their excellent working partnership has the potential of disintegrating, which is not going to make the Jeffersonian a nice place to visit.

Sweets and Caroline do some investigating: With Booth and Bones winging their way to China, it was up to Sweets and Caroline to talk to some folks about the murder victim. Caroline was as expected: direct, no-nonsense, and scary. Sweets, on the other hand, showed a lot of tendencies of Booth in his questioning of the suspect. Perhaps he should be involved in more interrogations rather than coaching Booth and Bones behind the one-way mirror.

No wonder no one wants to fly anymore: Drunk pilots who like to have sex in bathrooms; stewardesses (excuse me, flight attendants) who give passenger credit card numbers to their boyfriends; unsecure galleys that anyone who has a grudge can enter and microwave someone else. What is this? An Airport movie from the 1970s? Forget it, I’m no longer flying anywhere again.

This and that and other stuff:

• This was a 13-hour flight to China. Only two flight attendants? And, where was the co-pilot and navigator on such a long flight? I know that Bones needs to watch their money when it comes to casting, but they need to be just a bit more realistic when it comes to those things.
• I normally don’t sit in First Class on my flights to China, so this goes out to all of you that do. Is the beverage cart usually stopped in the middle of the aisle, and right in front of a minor no less? Just want to know so I can begin filing suits with the FAA.
• I want the quality satellite telecommunications equipment that Bones and Booth were using to communicate with Caroline and the Squints. Everything was amazingly clear, despite the plane flying at several hundred miles an hour several tens of thousands of feet above sea level. Perhaps they were bouncing off of the Justice League satellite to get such clear reception.
• Sweet’s off-hours clothing: I just had a flashback to 1985.

Next time on Bones: The good doctor’s father joins the Jeffersonian as a teacher. Nothing good can come of this.

Clacked by Richard Keller
on Nov 20, 2008 @ 16:26 EST5EDT