Rann:  I have a tendency to let episodes of Bones build up in my DVR, at least two or three deep. It’s one of my favorite series, and yet it requires a certain… mood, a certain time to sit down and properly enjoy it. I guess for me it’s just one of those series where I can’t sit down and watch it just any old time, despite how much I like it.

If you’re not familiar with Bones, here’s a quick crash course. Doctor Temperance Brennan is a forensic anthropologist at the Jeffersonian Institute, heading up their in-house forensics lab. (They solve crimes sent to them by various organizations, but also do historical reconstructions, investigations, and authentications.) She’s partnered with FBI special agent Seeley Booth, to solve strange crimes that occur on federal land or otherwise grant the FBI jurisdiction. (Which, this being a TV show, is pretty much whatever crime they feel like writing. Some episodes don’t even really bother to explain why Booth has the case.) It’s a procedural show that works on the strength of its characters as much as anything, standing in contrast to most other shows of the type where the most we see of the characters’ personal lives are occasional tiny clips of their primary hobbies, their inter-office quipping, and the low-level sexual tension going on.

It’s also a show that distinguishes itself because the episodes never really fall below the level of “mediocre”. Which doesn’t sound like a big accomplishment, but think of any other show you like. Isn’t there just that one episode that just absolutely sucks so bad you won’t even watch it if it comes on? Maybe more than one? Maybe that one whole season? While some episodes/seasons of Bones have individual aspects that make you want to thunk your head against the wall, I can’t think of any episode where the whole thing was just bad. Knowing that the worst you’re likely to get out of a series is an episode that’s rather “meh” is a pretty good deal, these days.

Of course, it can be a little confusing when you run across episodes that display some of the series’ greatest strengths and some of its greatest weaknesses back to back.

Take the episode of a few weeks back, “The Foot in the Foreclosure”. This episode demonstrates most of the series’ greatest strengths, those being the interactions between the characters, as well as the characters’ integrity and heart. In a day and age where the “edgy, hip” thing to do is to have an entire cast composed of some of the most unsympathetic assholes ever whipped up for fiction, Bones occasionally takes some time to remind us that these are good people with good motivations for what they do who produce good results because they work hard for it. This episode’s crime is in a house that was for sale, where the victim was incinerated in bed. Like most procedural shows, this ties in a little bit to an odd subculture (“feeding” fetishism in this case). But the real focus of the episode is that Booth’s grandfather Hank has come to stay with him for awhile.

Booth was raised by his grandfather for most of his life, and it’s clear that if his grandfather comes to live with him permanently, that will now be reversed. Much of the episode deals with Booth explaining his values and dealing with such a responsibility. Unlike in other cases, no one ever really questions this particular “old-fashioned” value of Booth’s… they caution him what a lot of work it will be, but even Sweets (the psychiatrist member of the team) doesn’t try to headshrink him over it. Probably because Brennan and Sweets, both of the people most likely to pick apart Booth’s motives for anything, know just how much Booth’s grandfather means to him.

It’s not a stellar episode… it has some rather weak points, and the balance between the A plot and B plot feels off… but it’s a good episode. The characters are behaving like they should at this point of being familiar with each other and having gotten to know one another, which is a bonus, as one of the series’ flaws is that while the characters often take five steps forward every season, they seem to take between four and six steps back during the season break.

This stands in stark contrast with the episode that followed it the next week, “The Gamer in the Grease”, aka “The Hour-Long Bones-themed Commercial for Avatar”. Seriously, the entire B-plot revolves around how awesome Avatar is going to be and that people are lining up days in advance and their whole lives are revolving around Avatar oh don’t you want to see Avatar sure you want to see Avatar oh for the love of god please see Avatar don’t you understand how much this fucking anti-human screed COST us?!

The A-plot isn’t a lot better, revolving around a murdered “gamer” who supposedly played a perfect game… of some almost-thirty-year-old fusion of Pong and Donkey Kong. Seriously. The episode at least tries to salve this a little by saying that it’s a “retro” hit and has been rereleased as a virtual game on modern consoles, but it still comes off as having a bit of that “Pac-Man Fever” feel to it. The rivalry over who holds the high score is a reference to a real-life thing, including the drama over possibly doctored videos, a ref who’s clearly on a particular gamer’s side, and so on… I read the story once, years before the episode, but can’t recall details and the place where I read about it seems to have purged that tidbit. But it isn’t so much “ripped from the headlines” as “tugged from the archives”, we’ll say that.

The episode is weak not just for its stumbling A-plot or for its purely promotional B-plot (the show seems to fall victim to being forced to write in advertising for other Fox properties a lot), but because the character interaction is weak and shallow at best. It was like it was written by someone who had watched the show and was trying to emulate it without understanding it, or even trying to understand it. The lessons Sweets learns after talking with Hodgins towards the end comes off as less “talking things out with friends and understanding yourself better” and more “hastily wedged-in after school special lesson”.

Spoiler alert! I need to spoiler the end of the episode to really fully get why this episode bugged me.

See, turns out the perfect game was actually played by this Autistic kid who really does nothing but play this game all the time. When the kid’s father learned about this guy “stealing credit” from his son, he beat the guy to death with a golf club. The guy sobs about how the gamer “stole the only thing my son HAS!” and Bones and Booth sit there and look sympathetic. Then, when they’re talking afterward, Booth makes the requisite comments about how he understands, because when you’re a father and your kid is heartbroken, it can drive you to do things. Bones points out, ridiculously half-heartedly for her, that the kid was autistic and his heart wasn’t broken. Booth brushes it off with “So the father loved him twice as much!” This then devolves into some limping comparison of the different ways they think to ancient cultures’ base 60 style of math.

This scene is the one that feels the most false, and again gives that feel of emulating an episode of the show rather than being an episode of the show. I dunno if they brought someone new in to write this because the regular writers balked at turning half of their running time into a commercial for James Cameron’s big blue piece of cat shit, or if the regular writers just didn’t give a crap because, again, they were being forced to write a piece of the media campaign to sell us on Avaturd, but it just comes off as if the script said “Booth says something homespun and simplistic about the power of fatherhood. Bones yammers something sciencey about not agreeing with him but respecting his viewpoints.”

If this had been an actual episode instead of a thin veneer of one over an Assatar promo, Sweets or Brennan, or even Booth himself, would have pointed out that the father didn’t do it for his son at all… he did it for himself. After all, his son was never going to be the high school football MVP, or the track star, or any of that, but by god he played a perfect game on an arcade cabinet and that would have been something to go on TV or to the water cooler at work and brag about. His son didn’t care about getting credit, he didn’t care about the video… as his father himself opines, he doesn’t even recognize his parents, let alone that anything’s been “stolen” from him. His father didn’t kill the guy for taking something from his son, he killed the guy for stealing his only chance, after being denied so long, to have some bragging rights.

Booth shouldn’t have been sympathizing with the guy, he should have thrown his bullshit in his face and been furious with him for using his son as a shield for his own hubris and vanity that resulted in murder. But then, I guess too much emotional intensity might have distracted people from just how kewl Avatar is going to be, and we couldn’t have THAT.

But anyway, I suppose it says something about the series that this episode is about the closest I’ve ever seen the series come to having just a flat-out terrible one. And even it’s not that bad. I probably wouldn’t watch it in reruns, but I wouldn’t feel compelled to change the channel in disgust. Even the shittiest episode Bones has probably put out to date can’t inspire a ragequit. That’s saying something in a day and age where any given episode of, say, Stargate Universe could inspire you to burn it to disk just for the sake of throwing it in the toilet and pissing on it like it’s pissing all over the franchise.