Bones

I’ve been reviewed the Kathy Reichs series of books featuring Temperance Brennan over the last few months but we’ve also been watching the current season of the TV series that started me reading them. It was way back in (I think 2005) that Bones first aired on Sky1, it was the sort of thing that my family liked to watch and, having been a fan of CSI, I watched too, thinking it would be right up my street.
I wasn’t overly keen on the very first episode. I watched the first two episodes before everyone else in the house and wasn’t sure what to make of it, but watching them again with other people, it started to grow on me. Suffice to say I was hooked. When I got some money for my birthday I decided to investigate the books that the series was based on and read the first three in about four days.

Of course, the Temperance Brennan in the books is totally different to the Temperance Brennan in the TV series. Book!Brennan is in her forties, estranged from her husband with a daughter in college and commutes between North Carolina and Montreal plying her trade; TV!Brennan is in her late twenties (when the series starts), has very poor social skills, knows a lot about marginal cultures but very little about aspects of the one she inhabits, and has a relationship FBI Special Agent Seeley Booth which is (in the earlier series at least) fuelled by Unresolved Sexual Tension.

In the course of the last seven series, Tempe has discovered that her parents were criminals on the run, buried her mother and been reunited with her father (who thinks nothing of offing people if they pose a threat to his family), been kidnapped and held hostage by a selection of murderers and serial killers, found that a member of her team was working with a serial killer, identified that her partner (the aforementioned Agent Booth) has a brain tumour, witnessed the shooting and death of one of her interns in her lab, and hooked up with Booth and had a child with him.

At times it’s not particularly believable. But it’s a show about horrible murders with a real sense of humour and I can overlook the scientific inaccuracies because it’s really good entertainment (and David Boreanaz isn’t bad to look at either). It’s the only TV show that we actually watch on TV, thanks to my in-laws’ Sky+. So far I only have the first two series on DVD and I considered not bothering to watch it as it aired, rather just buying up all the DVDs and then getting the seventh series when that came out too, but after the cliffhanger of a season finale last year (Brennan announcing that she was pregnant with Booth’s baby) we kind of had to just go ahead and watch the next series without waiting.

I’m glad we did. My in-laws’ have been very good about letting us take over the TV on a Sunday afternoon after lunch, despite the fact that within the first ten minutes of any episode there will be a bloody corpse, decomposed body or some other bizarre remains, which isn’t really what you want to be looking at right after a big Sunday dinner! I think my father-in-law has actually become quite interested in the programme too, he rarely sits through a whole episode but likes to be filled in on what happened and who did it at the end.

What with OU revision and End of Module Assessments to be worked on during the last month, we’d not really been watching them as religiously as usual so we ended up with the last three episodes to watch during this last week. I’ve really loved this series, it’s had some really funny bits, plus Brennan and Booth have finally gotten together which has been a long time coming.

When Emily Deschanel got pregnant, it was written into the show, with her staying with Booth following Vincent Nigel Murray’s death in the lab. Staying with Booth that night evidently turned into something more because in the series finale she announced that she was pregnant. So after Angela and Hogkin’s son, Michael, was born last year, baby Christine was born midway through this series. It’s nice to see Booth and Brennan being a family together, especially because they can be such polar opposites (like on the issue of whether or not to get Christine baptised). It’s a shame that it’s all been a bit rushed to take Emily’s pregnancy into account, though honestly I much prefer this route to spending best part of the series hiding her behind desks and folders, or pretending that she’s suddenly put a lot of weight on; it would have been nice to see the relationship develop between Booth and Brennan a little more slowly considering how long it took to get to the actual sleeping together stage.

As we watched this series, especially as we fell behind and had more and more episodes building up on the Sky+ box still to be watched, I did find myself rethinking the whole watching-it-as-it-airs thing and debating whether we might be better getting the next series on DVD after it’s been on TV. Then we watched the last episode where some crazy psycho killer has set Brennan up for a murder and her father convinces her to take Christine and go on the run, and all plans for waiting have gone out the window. Bones has been renewed for series eight so as long as my in-laws’ done mind us hi-jacking the TV once a week for the duration of the next one, I think we’ll just watch that as it’s on as well.