Article about 'Bones' Season Finale

'Bones' finale deets!
By Amber Dowling

2008-05-19

'Bones' creator and exec producer Hart Hanson dishes on tonight's finale!

Is there any pride in being the show that can go anywhere and be successful or would you rather be left somewhere to grow?
Hart Hanson: I would rather we grow. We’re good at hanging onto the eyes that come to our show. Not so much pride as gratitude, but our audience just keeps following us. I’ve heard that we’re the only show that came back from the strike and went up in viewers. Everyone else has been down by double digit percentages. That’s just our viewers finding us and watching us.

This finale will be the ending of the Gormagone arc, what did that serialized arc accomplish this season?
HH: for us it was a very episodic show, we solve a murder every week and hope that we have a few laughs and tears along the way. Any serialized stories we do are more a tip of the hat to our viewers who tune in all the time because you want to give them something extra for coming back week after week. It was changed by the strike, we had a few more twists and turns in it in mind when we started, but being as we’re very episodic we decided to wrap it up and not carry it on to another season. The culmination of that story is slightly different than we had in mind, and in the end the result is the same.

What did you want to accomplish in finishing this season and starting next year?
HH: going into our fourth season it’s time to make a few changes to shake things up. Although we’re light hearted about it every once in a while you feel the necessity to acknowledge that it’s a murder show and that world is going to touch your characters.

At this point Bones is a much a romantic comedy as it is a murder show? How much was planned and how much evolved?
HH: From the very beginning it was going to be an amusing character driven murder show. There’s not the same rush to solve the murder, it’s not immediate. It wasn’t going to be a CSI. David and Emily had that thing you cannot manufacture and once we wrote to that you could see, around the time someone was eaten by a bear we hit our stride in how touching and romantic this show could be with those two going out in the world.

Can you tell us if Eric Millegan will be returning as a regular cast member in Season 4?
HH: I shouldn’t tell you that! [Laughs.] Let me say this, we haven’t seen the last of Eric Millegan.

A lot of fans have been wondering if you’re ever going address the Goodman storyline again of if you’ll bring back the Gravedigger?
HH: We will definitely bring back the gravedigger. That story was one of the casualties of the strike. We knew we had to choose between the Gravedigger and Gormagone, which to pay off. The reason we chose to end Gormagone was it was a complicated back story.

Where did the original Gomagon storyline come from? Are you a fan of the Free Masons?
HH: No, not at all. The original storyline came from a million directions. You listen to your studio and your network what they would like, and certainly they were interested in a serial killer when we talked about what kinds of cases could reoccur. Then we were thinking at one time… someone started talking about tying into video games as a possibility. The minute that was in my head I started thinking about the Gormagone vault. It was what kind of killer would have a complicated and mythological layer or vault. Then we knew we would want to suspect some of our own people as being in league. And then I was stuck with a cannibalistic serial killer.

The season finale of Bones airs Monday, May 19 at 8 p.m. ET, Fox/Global.