'Bones' recap: To love!

Raise your glasses, Bones fans. Temperance Brennan now believes in love. Or, at least Booth’s premise that love could come first between a recovering alcoholic and a former prostitute-turned-elementary school teacher, and then the chemical reaction. We’ll get to the case — a murdered gay dentist/football player — in a minute. Let’s talk about Brennan’s revelation first.

I’m not sure why the show insists upon making its point in such extreme ways — last week, that Brennan can value Booth’s feelings over the truth (about the lone gunman theory!); this week, that if you believe love conquers all, it means you don’t worry when your younger brother tells you he wants to marry a girl he’s known for a month who is also a former high-priced call girl. I don’t actually think it’s that awful that Booth ran a background check on Padme Dalaj (guest star Dilshad Vadsaria). I’d kinda love a background check on my dates, frankly. Should he have assumed that Padme and Jared hadn’t discussed her past? No. Apparently, that’s something you tell someone within the first month of meeting him. I’m not saying call girls don’t deserve a happily ever after. I’m just saying that you can’t blame someone for being concerned when things are moving that quickly.

It’s nice that Jared has matured and wanted both Padme and Brennan to be there when he and Booth sat down to talk about his situation rationally. We got to see how much Booth and Brennan value each other’s opinions. He was ready to accept Padme because Bones made him realize that what Jared was doing — forgiving someone their past and loving them for who they are today — is what he’d told her to do with her father. Bones thought he was abandoning that belief system — love is all that matters — and it was the sole reason she’d given her father another chance. Of course, she conveniently forgot about Booth’s other belief system — that sex is best when it’s between people who are in love. I can totally see why he would have a problem with Padme being a prostitute. A lot of what Max did, he did to protect his children. I wish we would have found out why Padme had worked as an escort. That would actually matter in real life, but for the cut-and-dry premise of Bones’ argument, it did not. Booth thought about what Bones said and realized she was right: All that mattered was Jared’s happiness. After Brennan tried to kick him under the table but struck Jared instead, he agreed to be Jared’s best man. So, that’s the wedding we’re getting on Bones this season? Or just the engagement? Remember, Emily Deschanel has hinted that they may be two separate couples…

About that case… Civil War reenactors (always fun) found a skull that turned out to be the remains of Dan, a dentist who played on a gay football team coached by Queer as Folk‘s Robert Gant. We found out many things through this storyline, besides Cam has arachnophobia: Brennan is pro-gay marriage, Mr. Nigel-Murray thought many men ogled him in the locker room in school, and gay men enjoy bow hunting (“Yeah, I’m gay, and I hunt. Get over it,” Dan’s ex told Brennan). After the usual fakeouts — the killer wasn’t the ex who put him through dental school, or the former assistant who claimed he’d given her Hepatitis C to cover an affair, or the closeted firefighter/ex-marine (Eltony Williams, well done) who wasn’t ready to go public with his feelings for Dan but who sweetly carried a picture of them together in his wallet — we found out it was the contractor. Dan must have discovered that the guy was using paving stones he’d paid for on the former assistant’s driveway and gone to confront him. The contractor called Dan a fag, and Dan exploded with rage. The contractor stabbing him could have been self-defense, if he had called 911. Instead, he let Dan bleed out, then paved over the blood stains, and dumped the body to protect his contractor’s license. Moral: Hate speech is serious to the person it’s directed at no matter who it comes from.

Finding a cause of death was more of a struggle this episode than usual. It was complicated by Nigel-Murray’s sudden need for Brennan’s approval. Wasn’t it nice to see Brennan in the lab, working with an intern, trying to teach him something for a change? Cam got Brennan to finally tell Nigel-Murray something she distinctly remembered telling him once before — good job. He determined the murder weapon was some kind of tool (they thought dental, but turned out it was a grout scraper). Hodgins, meanwhile, had stepped up and acknowledged that Nigel-Murray was a genius. “Yes, but so are we all, except for Angela,” Brennan said. Maybe not her best putdown out of the episode, but definitely the most concise. Of course, Hodgins does tend to love anyone who partakes in cool experiments, and Nigel-Murray did let him stir the tank during the clay-removing rhubarb bath.

Your turn. What did you think of the episode and Brennan’s newfound belief in love?