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Zap2It Reports. A "Zack attack"? lol
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'Bones' gets a Zack attack

By Sarah Jersild

September 24, 08:14 PM

It's all about prodigal sons this week on Bones -- sons returning, sons fleeing, sons trying to make good, and sons being grumpy as hell. Plus there's a mysteriously purple pool, toilet-candy therapy, a missing head, and a peevish psychologist. Good times!

This spoiler urges you to hold it until you can get to a bathroom.

A headless corpse hacked into 12 pieces shows up in an evaporation pool. Icky! Careful study of the bones reveals a rare illness. Careful study of the footwear reveals that the deceased had whimsical taste in shoes. Putting those two bits together, the team identifies the corpse as Jared Addison, a sci-fi novelist with a raging case of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.

But Jared has been breaking out of his OCD habits -- he's started dating a (much) older woman, and he's been undergoing an experimental desensitization therapy. Booth and Brennan think that maybe Jared snapped during therapy and the leader of the workshop killed him, but he insists Jared was his best student. One of Jared's fellow suffers confesses to killing Jared, but that's just a part of his disorder -- he believes if he doesn't eat at a precise time, someone near him will die. Well, he delayed a meal and now Jared's dead. See?

Evidence on the body suggests Jared was killed in a warm, moist place -- maybe a flower shop or plant nursery? His girlfriend worked at just such an establishment with her son. Brennan sees flies clustering around a specific shovel, and preliminary tests show it may be covered with blood. Nope -- potato gunk. Oh well.

Sweets tries to put himself in the mind of the killer, but it takes a REAL killer to set them straight. Hodgins gave Zack the file on the case so Zack would have something to do in the loony bin. Zack saw what no one else did: Jared wasn't the only one with OCD. His mother was obsessed with the number 12. The only thing that deviated from the 12-things pattern was one lonely birdbath. Booth and Brennan dig under it and find Jared's head. He was taking control of his OCD and was ready to move on with his life. That upset his mother's obsessive pattern, and she went nuts and killed him.

Booth and Brennan
Booth is pissing Brennan off by jumping to her defense and protecting her -- I can take care of myself! she fumes. Booth doesn't seem to care -- we're partners, we do things for each other! Brennan notices that said "things" do not include Booth letting Brennan manipulate his sore back. I can't say I blame him there.

But Booth proves his worth as a friend and confidant after Brennan hears something she doesn't like -- Jared's publisher says she's just an ok writer, and that it's her picture and image that really sell books. She throws out her newest manuscript, but Booth stops her and admits that he not only has read everything she's ever written, he also knows her reviews by heart. A[Only admins are allowed to see this link] Brennan finally gets to heal Booth's aching back with a nice (thoroughly platonic, but still kind of sexy) clinch.

Booth lets Brennan in on the secret life of the opposite sex: "The way you really help me is to make me a guy. It's a guy's thing to fix things, to make them right. When I fix things, I feel like I'm one with the universe." All of a sudden, my last couple of boyfriends make a lot more sense.

The Lab Rats
This week's NotZack has the distinction of also not being Ryan Atwood from the OC. Therefore I dub him Ryan Notwood. When Brennan asks him if he's ever slept with an older woman, Ryan Notwood thinks she's hitting on him -- a reasonable assumption, with anyone else. He tells Angela about it, and also confesses that he "owes people money." Angela assumes he owes money to the mob. Nope -- he just means that his entire neighborhood chipped in to get him through college, and he wants to do right by them. Whatever, Ryan Notwood -- you're gone!

Hodgins is still using hate as his coping mechanism, and Cam finally calls him on it. About time! Everyone in the lab has a great time when Zack shows up -- they're happy to hug him and take him out to the diner even though he ostensibly killed someone and was the apprentice to a cannibalistic murderer. The only people not enchanted by Zack's presence are Booth, who knows Zack belongs in jail, and Sweets, who Zack duped by stealing the magnetic strip off his security card. Doh! Still, Booth seems to care about Zack, making sure Sweets knows how to make it look like Zack was out under his supervision.

Sweets has his own reason to reconsider Zack -- Zack confesses that he never actually did the deed himself. No, not sex ("Why doesn't anyone ever believe I've had sex?") -- hands-on murder. He's responsible for a death in that he told the Master where to find a victim, but he didn't actually kill the man himself. He refuses to let Sweets tell his friends.

Highlights, thoughts, and odds and ends

* Sweets, to Zack: "A sane person would regret murdering someone more than being taken in by a line of crap." "Define crap," Zack says. "Drivel," Sweets responds. "Blarney. Nonsense. Uh, balderdash. Twaddle. Bull. Bunkum. Hooey. Like that." Zack looks at him sincerely and says "Well NOW I realize it was drivel-blarney-nonsense-balderdash-twaddle-bull-bunkum-hooey. Then I perceived it as logic." His delivery -- running all the terms together without taking a breath --- makes the scene.
* The FBI agent who leads Booth and Brennan to the remains says the missing head is an anomaly. I've got to side with Brennan -- the water turning purple when it got peed into fits the word better.
* And about the purple water... it was completely superfluous. Unless I missed something, it didn't have anything to do with the case. It was just a weird thing to throw in. Why?
* Sweets evaluates Jared's room: "The action figures? They're awesome."
* I wish Ryan Notwood had been handled better. He had potential, if they just let information come out over time. Instead, Brennan introduced him as "my best scholarship student," thus telegraphing he's a scrappy kid form the wrong side of the tracks. Again, why?
* When Zack solves Hodgins' puzzle, he dubs himself "King of the Loony Bin." Oh, Zack...
* Ralph, the fellow OCD sufferer who "killed" Jared, recommends that Booth "only put me next to terrible people who deserve to die." That WOULD save the State money on executions...
* I know the lab rats all love Zack, but taking him to a diner when he escaped from a facility for the criminally insane? Doesn't that make them accessories of some sort?
* I loved this exchange when Brennan is throwing away her book: Brennan: "I don't want to be sexy scientist!" Booth: "That's like me saying I don't want to be the sexy FBI agent. We can't change who we are." That's right -- Booth is sexy, and he damn well knows it.