Bones 9.04 Review: Down the Rabbit Hole

This is your only warning. All those that have yet to watch last night’s episode of Bones, titled ‘The Sense in the Sacrifice’, then now would be a good time to do so. This is not a spoiler free blog. THIS REVIEW MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS! You’ve been warned.

So Pelant’s dead now. Not as great an ending to his killing spree as I would’ve liked. Yes, this was a good episode compared to what this series has been putting out for the last few years, but it wasn’t a good enough ending to Pelant’s chapter. It felt like most of the tense parts were thrown in in the last third of the hour, I almost expected them to continue on into next week’s episode, but Bones rarely does two-part episodes. For someone they’d spent a good year and a half, two years hunting, he was taken down pretty easily. And by feelings.

There were some interesting components to the episode. Them finding out the body they’d excellently staged was not in fact the body they themselves had staged, but Flynn the way Pelant had staged him. The very beginning when they’re rolling in the body that had been donated to the Jeffersonian, and then they go about creating a murdered body, almost like we were seeing what the effects people do for the series. I also liked the whole confusion with the toy bomb, and Pelant toying with Brennan.

I’m still really disappointed with the way they went with Flynn. The first time he comes in and Pelant is captured but manages to create a new identity to get out of prison, implied Flynn would have something to do with Pelant. But then he goes and saves Booth’s life, and gets killed by Pelant, and so grieved by the Jeffersonian team. I wasn’t so unhappy about their grief part, but justifying the implication he’s involved in the murders by saying Pelant was using him without his knowledge was disrespectful to the audience. It’s quite disappointing the writers thought they could do that to us.

Both Booth and Brennan did well enough in this episode, and everyone was good at the part where they learn Flynn is the victim on the table. But I didn’t really feel the great acting for Sweets this week, like I did last week. It was all more or less the same as every episode before.

The writing for this episode felt rushed. They bring Sweets back in when he really wasn’t given any time off from viewers’ eyes, and kind of rush this idea he came up with to try and lure Pelant out. It felt very quickly put together, and not at all explained well enough for the audience. For the first five minutes of the episode I was extremely confused by what the hell was actually going on. It almost felt to me like the showrunners were trying to rush getting Brennan and Booth down the altar, and so skimmed through this Pelant story’s ending. But then again, this series has never been great about resolving prolonged storylines with complex but appropriate conclusions. The conclusions for stories like Pelant, and the Gravedigger have always been rushed. Though that could also be because they throw conclusions randomly into seasons, and not at the end of a season like I prefer.

My rating: 7 out of 10.

Best Lines:

“We can have sex.” – Brennan suggests to Booth, in her logic voice.

“What? I don’t- That’s not a thing.” – Sweets flabbergasted by Booth’s rendition of what he came in to define Pelant’s condition as.

Okay, I’m off to go watch The Blacklist now, and hopefully review that next. But it’s looking like I’m going to be too exhausted to get to Sleepy Hollow tonight, so expect that tomorrow evening.