Inexplicable TV Review: Bones, almost literally limping to the finish line

You can tell this is from a past season because they're smiling.

Warning: Spoilers follow for the current and past seasons of Bones. Like for real, don’t read this if you’re honestly concerned about the fate of certain characters.

Hey guys, remember when Bones was a plucky, forensics-based weekly procedural that mostly served as a convenient excuse to see attractive people like Emily Deschanel, David Boreanaz, Michaela Conlin and Carla Gallo, make cute and flirt with one another?

Well, surprise! Much like the death spiral of Psych, Bones seems content to smash all of the characters you love to bits while its burns off its final episodes, much like a toddler destroying its toys in a fit of rage. I thought the previous seasons’ focus on ridiculously implausible computer hacker Pelant was veering too much into Very Special Episode territory, but someone in charge of the show apparently decided that was the way to go for the final two seasons as well.

Bones has already been renewed for a final season, which will probably be 13, 18 or 23 episodes of misery. But in this season and the previous season, we’ve seen Sweets killed after we learned he got his lady pregnant, Bones and Booth almost breaking up because of his gambling addiction, Hodgins becomes paralyzed, and then, he starts emotionally abusing Angela. Ye gads.

On a better show, this subject material could be handled well. However, Bones has always been more about breezy fun, or at least, it used to be. I’m tuning into Bones because I want to see them solve some murder mysteries while Temperance “Bones” Brennan hilariously misinterprets everyday social actions. I’m not watching because I want to see the characters’ lives destroyed.

This seems to be a common problem for shows as they age – I wrote earlier this year about how Suits has turned into a serious-but-lighthearted legal show into an over-the-top weekly melodrama. The worst example though is the show I mentioned in the opening paragraph, Psych, which got really heavy-handed as it neared the finish line. The last season of that show is just all sorts of ugh and meh.

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