The Passenger in the Oven-REVIEWS

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'Bones' joins the mile-high murder club

By Sarah Jersild

November 19, 08:47 PM

Bones does its part to save the airlines money by making its viewers swear off airplane food for life. Distract yourself from your flight-induced hunger pangs by wallowing in all the spiffy Bonesian banter, celebrating the return of "scary woman" Caroline Julian, and contemplating Sweets' competitive-karaoke chops.

Return to your seats and fasten your spoilers.

Brennan and Booth are on their way to China -- Bones will be inspecting some 40,000-year-old remains, and Booth will be protecting sensitive American technology. OK, if you say so... I'm willing to go with it, if only to see poor Booth sandwiched in the middle seat in coach while Brennan reclines in first class. Booth keeps trying to sneak into first class (and these flight attendants are clearly not at the top of their game, as they let him sneak past the curtain twice), and finally, he's given an excuse to stay when a flight attendant starts screaming. You'll have that when find a human body overdone in the oven. Ick!

So now they've got a crime scene, and the suspect is most likely not going anywhere for the next several hours, but there's a problem -- once they land in Shanghai, the whole shebang becomes custody of the Chinese government and... Ok, you know what? Just go with it. They need to solve the crime before the plane touches down, yadda yadda plot-convenience-cakes, and if you tilt your head and squint you can totally see it.

So: How to solve a gruesome crime in a limited amount of time with minimal equipment? Improvise! That includes using denture cream and baby powder to make a cast of a wound, snagging the blue light from the movie projector and a gun-lover's shooting glasses to make one of those lights that reveals blood, and enlisting super-strength reading glasses as magnifying lenses. It's pretty cool.

After some searching, and with the help of the team on the other end of an internet connection (but they told me I couldn't check my gmail in flight!), the team identifies the victim as Elizabeth Jones, a travel writer from D.C. She recently did a story on pilots with hidden DUI convictions -- and surprise surprise, the pilot on this flight just happens to be one of the subjects of her story! He denies everything, and agrees to delay the landing to Shanghai to give Booth and Brennan more time to figure things out.

Sweets finds out Jones was having an affair with a married man. Shockingly, that man is on that very same flight! What are the odds? He's traveling with his sick wife and their teenage son, who had been filching teeny tiny liquor bottles this whole flight. (Like I said -- lax flight attendants.) Booth and Brennan find blood spatter on the kid's first-class slippers, and there's a tense confrontation over whether they could get a warrant from Caroline before the plane landed, but they managed and they got their man. Kid. Killer. Then they turn around and fly home with the kid, apparently on an empty plane. No wonder the airlines are in trouble!

The lab rats -- plus the flight crew
Hodgins has a few moments of discombobulation seeing Angela and Roxie as a couple, especially after he and Angela have such good work mojo together. He eventually asks her if it's just that she's really a lesbian, but Angela says no -- she capable of loving a man, she just doesn't quite love Hodgins the way she should. Later, she asks Roxie to move in with her. Roxie is shocked -- it's always the other way around with you! She also turns Angela down -- it's too soon, and there are too many unknowns.

More amusing it the impromptu assistants Booth and Brennan pick up en route. Booth was sandwiched between two Miss Marple wannabes in cattle class, and they keep contributing materials to the investigation. Even better was the running commentary -- I didn't hear a shot, so it must be a stabbing! Oh, look, they're building the blood-seeking light! Here, take my knitting needle -- you can use it as a probe! (Apparently the security agent at the airport was just as half-assed as the flight attendants, because I know I've seen knitting needles confiscated.) They were kind of adorable, in small doses. I wouldn't want to see them as NotZacks, of course, but for the story, they served.

Booth and Brennan
This was a pretty fluffy episode, but there were still some nice moments. Chief among them was one that the commercials gave away: Brennan has her hair up in a bun and is wearing the massive cats-eye magnifying glasses. Booth sees her and says, "All right, what I want you to do is take off your glasses, shake out your hair and say 'Mr. Booth, do you know what the penalty is for an overdue book?'" Hee!

The best Booth/Brennan interaction came when Brennan told the flight attendant that she was going to China to pursue her real passion -- ancient remains. Booth gets concerned-- I thought you loved working with me! "You're bored," he worries. "The spark is gone." In the end, Brennan reminds Booth that she insisted on being included in field operations. She willingly gave up old bones to work with Booth.

The other recurring bit was that everyone seemed to think that Booth and Brennan had a bom-chicka-wow relationship, much to Brennan's confusion. When Booth tries to steal the seat next to Brennan in first class, saying he wants to be close to his partner, the flight attendant replies with "Your sexual relationship is not relevant, sir. This is first class." "Why does everyone think we have a sexual relationship when we barely ever touch each other?" Brennan wonders. It's called chemistry. Brennan. That counts as science -- you should know something about it!

Highlights, thoughts and odds and ends

* Poor Booth -- I’ve made the trip from the East Coast of the U.S. to China in coach. It's not fun.
* Sweets tries to entice the team to hang out with him and Daisy by promising a little competitive karaoke. Angela and Hodgins have plans, and Cam suddenly remembers she's driving Angela and Roxie to the train station.
* Sweets shows that he does have skills when he gets information out of Elizabeth's publisher that "scary woman" Caroline was unable to unearth. Go Sweets, with your psychological mojo!
* Kate, the snotty flight attendant, goes into shock when she discovers the body in the oven. I love when she starts playing with Booth's tie as he's trying to (gently) question her.
* Still more evidence that this airline needs a much better HR department: The other flight attendant is using the in-flight phone to make calls to her boyfriend, which, the pilot gasps, is against the rules "So's having sex with a passenger in the bathroom!" she shoots back. That shuts the pilot up. But that's not all -- boyfriend-chatting flight attendant is actually stealing credit card numbers from passengers and passing them along to her boyfriend, who sells them. Nice! I'm so taking the train home for Christmas...
* Booth is kind of adorable as Brennan digs into the body. "Can you turn her around so she's not looking at us?" he asks. Still, he can rise to the occasion -- when Cam asks about the state of the flesh, Brennan doesn't know how to deal with something so inexact. Booth steps up -- "If she were a turkey, she would be dry and overdone." Nice recovery there, Booth!
* I loved the banter at the end. Booth and Brennan are hanging out in first class, contemplating the return trip. The both recline their seats. Brennan's goes flat; Booth's doesn't. Booth complains. "Maybe it's because you're supposed to be in coach," Brennan suggests. Hee!

This is what EW's Whitney Pastorek has to say about last night's episode in Popwatch Blog. She seems to be liking the show!!

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Bones': Baked on a Plane

Nov 20, 2008, 09:56 AM | by Whitney Pastorek

What I want you to do is take off your glasses, shake out your hair, and say, "Mr. Booth, do you know what the penalty is for an overdue book?"

All together now...

Why?

It was another instant classic episode of Bones last night, a forensic adventure in the sky as Brennan and Booth had to MacGyver (MacGruber?) their way through a murder investigation involving a dead mistress cooked like roast pork in the oven of a flight to China, and they had to solve the case before the plane touched down. All Brennan really wanted to do was go look at 40,000-year-old bones in a cave, but the poor thing just can't stop getting herself into the murder mystery biz—much to the delight of at least one old lady back in coach who helped out by donating the contents of her purse to the cause. (Special thanks to the guy with the denture cream.)

I get a big kick out of concepts like this, where the world of a show is forced to constrain itself to a very limited space and still work. Lots of great lines tonight—coach class as "Gitmo," Hodgins getting his "meerkat look," every word out of D.A. Caroline's mouth—and plenty of random stuff to snicker about (like how maybe Sweets shouldn't do karaoke, because at Bones karaoke, people tend to get shot). As for the ongoing Angela-Roxy story line...well, I'll let you guys fight out the merits of that on your own. Also, it's hard to say how I felt about the murderous kid being played for humor when it was really just kinda sad, and I'm wondering how many more times the cause of death is gonna involve some form of blunt force trauma to the head (though I've been assured that the writers are aware of this repetition). Still, any show that uses floating eyeballs as a zippy sight gag and madras shorts as a punchline gets a long leash in my book.

What did you think, PopWatchers? Leave it in the comments.

Why?

Because this is the United States of America.