David Boreanaz

Bones Remind me never to eat a large plate of spaghetti covered in sauce and parmesan/romano cheese just before watching a TV show where a woman puts on gloves and reaches into the carcass of a dead bear and pulls out hot dogs, beef jerky...and a human hand.

Bones is back after weeks of baseball, and we pretty much take up where we left off, with Booth needing Brennan’s help in a case. I think she’s the only person in the world that knows how to unravel clues and identify bodies.

Booth and Brennan go to the town of Aurora, and verbally spar while driving to the crime scene. This isn’t just a case of a bear eating a man. The hand shows signs of it being sawed off, which means that someone killed the victim and then fed it to the bear. Nice.

Booth tries to find out if there are any missing persons reports locally, and the gang back at HQ tries to figure out who the victim is. Meanwhile, the sheriff tries to hit on Brennan constantly (Booth to the sheriff: "I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that you don’t get many women passing through this town.")

I realized tonight that this show is like The X-Files not only in the most obvious way - a man and a woman who work for the FBI, spar verbally, and investigate mysterious crimes - but in another way: the gang back at HQ is sort of like the Lone Gunmen. They help out Booth and Brennan, sometimes while everyone is together in the same city, sometimes (like tonight) while Booth and Brennan are in another city investigating a crime. Those secondary characters are what give this show the zing that it has (not much, but it has a little). That’s not to say that Boreanaz and Deschanel aren’t the core of the show. Of course they are. As the leads the show pretty much hinges on them. But it’s the secondary characters - the gang - that gives the show its color and humor. Sort of like the fellow investigators that Dr. House has helping him on the show that follows Bones.

Oh, and if the hand-in-the-bear stuff didn’t make my spaghetti leap into my throat, this episode also gets into cannibalism. Yikes. Halloween comes a day late to FOX.

This isn’t a great show, but it’s good. I like the emphasis on comedy (sometimes black) in this episode: overnighting the mysterious meat they find in the suspect’s freezer, Booth and Brennan going out drinking and dancing, all the guys in town hitting on Brennan, Booth explaining why the flashlight went out in the woods, Zack and Jack fighting over a woman, etc. It’s an enjoyable show, one that I like even more than the CSI shows because it doesn’t have an inflated sense of importance and isn’t afraid to pile on the funny.

I mean, the last scene, where they find the killer and he starts the typical TV show/movie scene where the crazy killer explains why he killed and Brennan just hits him over the head with a bed pan and says "no one wants to hear his crazy speech!" You gotta love that.