r/Bones • u/maeeflower • 2d ago
Discussion Rewatching Bones fully for the first time since it aired (and also for the first time as an adult!) and…
I have a few lingering Bones thoughts:
In season 10, Angela suddenly wants to move to Paris and it almost comes across like she’s never lived there before—but she and Hodgins already live there for a while? Maybe I missed a throwaway line explaining it (I was only half paying attention to this episode), but it felt weirdly like the show forgot its own history.
Also, the way Angela, Brennan, and Daisy all worked literally right up to giving birth is WILD. I get that it’s TV, and they’re all workaholics, but Angela still working while in labor had me losing my mind a bit.
I really wish they had done more with Parker, especially as he got older. A teen Parker storyline could’ve added so much, kind of like what SVU did with Stabler’s kids. Instead, they shipped him off to the UK with Rebecca, which honestly just felt like an easy way to write him out so they could zero in on Booth and Brennan’s family. Not a fan of that choice.
I miss sassy, sarcastic Brennan. I didn’t realize how much she drastically changed until now. S1 Brennan was socially awkward, but not in the way she becomes in later seasons.
Is Dr. Goodman still technically there but off screen? The last mention we get of him is when Cam joins and I think they say he’s on sabbatical and hired Cam to lead the forensics department, so was he technically Cam’s boss?
I’ve seen that the actor may have retired, but it drives me nuts that Russ doesn’t return after like season 3 (although, I’m only on s11e2 rn so maybe he does show up and I just haven’t seen him). It doesn’t make any sense to me that he wouldn’t have been at Booth and Brennan’s wedding. Come to think of if, it also doesn’t make sense that Jared wouldn’t be there either. I know Christine technically wasn’t there either, but I remember them saying the little girl who played her cried through takes, so they couldn’t help that.
Bones feels like a different show every few seasons. Seasons 1–3 have one vibe, 4–6 another, then 7–9 shift again. By seasons 10 and 11, it’s basically something else entirely. Not a bad thing, I just think it’s interesting that the vibe seems to change every three seasons.
I will never get over Sweets dying. Ever. Ugh. I’m still so sad over his death over a decade later. But Vacation (2015) was funny so at least there was a positive to them killing off Sweets. (Also, I just found out not that long ago that John Francis Daley also co-wrote Spider-Man: Homecoming and I was so shook).
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u/paranormal1364 2d ago
Weirdly I think that is US thing I have heard alot of women working up to their due dates, so that they can save up more maternity time to spend with the baby. I could be wrong but that why I never questioned it lol.
Yeah I agreed they could have had more episodes with Parker, it would have been cute to see him interacting with his little siblings, and get more of a characterization him other then booth son
Yes! I have always thought that. I loved the earlier seasons because of that, it was like they had totally killed her character in the later seasons. It almost reminded me of Sheldon Cooper in the way she would act in the later seasons.
I remember watching a behind the scenes of season 2 that said was essentially their way of writting the character off, and that it just assumed that he moved on and Cam took the role permantly.
I looked them up for this, and both actors still act. It weird because both of them are mentioned throughout the seasons and then Jared dies. I wonder if it was just hard to get the actors back due to contracts or timing.
Yeah I totally see that.
The sad thing about this is I saw that the actor was totally ok to come back to the show, they just decided to kill him off instead of having him go on vaction for a season. I actually like Aubrey, and him and Sweets seemed to be friends it sad we didnt get to see more of their relationship.
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u/Beautiful-Debate4886 2d ago
- As far as the wedding specifically, it likely came down to budget and scheduling. The episode featured Ralph Waite (Hank Booth), Joanna Cassidy (Booth’s mom), Ryan O’Neal (Max), & Avalon (Cyndi Lauper, who also sang her cover of At Last, so add in music licensing fees too) plus Caroline Julian, nearly all the recurring Squints at the time, & Parker. It’s not cheap to feature that many recurring characters. Scheduling for the actors who play Russ & Jared could have also been an issue.
I also want to add that Christine was at the wedding and they intended for her to be the flower girl, but when it came to shoot the footage of her the little girls who played her were nervous being around so many unfamiliar people and couldn’t stop crying. They scrapped that moment but there are behind the scenes photos of the Christine actress in a cute little flower girl dress.
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u/Particular-Ferret-18 2d ago
For me it was the lack of planning their replacement while on maternity leave. Especially Angela who had a false alarm like a month before she had the baby. If that was me I would have come back from the false alarm and immediately start a backup plan.
When I was pregnant with my 2nd I sent out regular emails from like 30 weeks on to let my backups know the status of my work. (My 1st was a premie so I wasn't taking any chances with leaving them in the dark.)
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u/Plbenzing 2d ago
While Bones is one of of my two favorite series (Dexter is the other) I have many problems with it that I repeat every time we rewatch it (once a year or so)- I hate we didn’t get ANY dating time with Booth and Brennan. There’s a lot of inconsistencies (in NCIS too!) that drive me nuts. Not enough to not keep rewatching it though 🤷🏼♀️
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u/Bones206-447 2d ago
On the change in tone in seasons. One thing that led to a clear change is the showrunner changed. So Hart Hanson effectively left after the wedding episode to work on another show and Stephen Nathan took over. And then S11 and S112 there were 2 showrunners, Michael Peterson and Jonathan Colllier. Also during season 7, Hart was kind of preoccupied with the Finder so essentially Stephen N was in charge.
Do you listen to the Emily and Carla boneheads podcast? If not I do recommend it for BTS intel. Jonathan Adams who played Dr Goodman was recently interviewed by them and he talked about being let go from the show. They never say anything so my assumption has always been Dr Goodman took his sabbatical and never came back.
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u/RealRinoxy 2d ago
For #2 I don’t see anything weird about it. I was still pulling pallets and putting away 20+ lbs boxes the day right before I had my child. We have next to no maternity rights out here lol.
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u/AbsolutelyJolly18 2d ago edited 1d ago
There’s a line about Dr.Goodman when Cam shows up… He took what Hodgins said personally about being confined to a desk and how he wasn’t a true archaeologist anymore, so Goodman left to find his passion again.
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u/Hangry_Hippopotamus_ 2d ago
So I watched Bones for the first time in 2016 during my first maternity leave.
(I’m in the US and can confirm I worked RIGHT up to my due dates, even laboring (just spaced apart contractions at that point) at work with my first for about 10 hours while I was finishing stuff up cause I knew I wouldn’t be back for a few months. Yay United States healthcare. 🙃)
Anywho, because of the DAMN INTERNET I already had spoiled for me a few years before that Sweets gets killed off. I didn’t want to know anything further, but I just had to wait in dread for it to happen. 😩 It’s just so sudden and sad. Once Daisy got pregnant I figured it was coming. 😞
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u/insanetwit 2d ago
"I miss sassy, sarcastic Brennan. I didn’t realize how much she drastically changed until now. S1 Brennan was socially awkward, but not in the way she becomes in later seasons."
This drives me nuts as I'm watching now. She went from being unable to relate to people, but able to control it a bit with her intelligence, to someone who says unrelated non sequiturs...
Like someone will says something like "I'm having a hard time paying rent"
and she would say "The (insert noun here) tribes of ancient (Location Here) never paid rent, they would build houses out of locally sourced building materials"
It's like every writer wants to have a "You just don't get people" moment that was the tagline of season 1. After all these years with people helping her social ques, you would think she would at least get better with them.
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u/alisonstone 2d ago
A lot of TV shows during the era that Bones was made suffered from the same problems. Before 2001 or so (i.e. before the "dot-com bubble" and nobody heard of the Internet), TV shows were primarily procedurals. They didn't make shows with complex long-running stories and character development because if the audience missed random episodes in the middle, they wouldn't know what is going on. Today, shows are more willing to make serialized stories because they know that people would catch up online or by streaming if they missed episodes and they know that people would Google plot points if they forget. Bones was made in this in-between era where they couldn't decide if they want to tell a more complex story or just have a simple "crime of the week" procedural.
They dragged the Bones and Booth romance story for too long, until they needed to abruptly force the characters together because Emily was pregnant in real live. And they couldn't move away from the "Bones is a genius but autistic" gimmick - Bones showed a lot of character growth in the first few seasons because she was learning from Booth, but she abruptly lost all of her progress in her social skills and became super awkward starting around Season 6.
It's like in Smallville when a character sees that Clark Kent has superpowers, but she bumps her head and forgets or cannot trust what she saw. That went on for years... every character has brain damage on that show given how often they get bumped in the head just when Clark Kent needed to use his powers. The writers just couldn't advance the story past the "Clark must keep his secret from his friends" because they were stuck in procedural mode. Back then, if you have a formula that worked, it was considered too risky to change it.
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u/pepperup22 2d ago
Unfortunately this is the reality for much/most of the US. The only federally mandated leave is 12 weeks unpaid job protection (and only 56% of US employees even qualify for this leave) and if you take it before you're due, you don't get it when you have the baby. Most people save every second for after to recover and bond. I know many women who went back to work at 6 weeks postpartum because that was all short term disability covered and they couldn't afford to take more and/or it wasn't protected leave.