'Bones' Season 11, Episode 1 Review: The Loyalty In The Lie

Season 11 of the long-running FOX procedural Bones premièred 8 p.m. ET Thursday night with as much drama as promised.  In the season finale last June, the Jeffersonian and FBI teams dealt with a copy-cat serial killer, someone taking on the m.o. of longstanding "big bad" Christopher Pelant, first introduced in season 7. The case proved to be a turning point for the characters -- as "squints" Jack Hodgins and Angela Montenegro planned to move to Paris with their son, the world's best forensic anthropologist, Dr. Temperance Brennan, and her husband, FBI special agent Seeley Booth, also walked off the lab platform of the fictional Jeffersonian Institution, opting to start over with their two kids in a less stressful life. This may sound like a series finale; in a way it was, as most of it was written before the show was picked up for an 11th season.

Six months have passed since everyone dispersed from the Jeffersonian, but nothing is said about why all the main characters are still around.  Booth is consulting at Quantico, Hodgins and Angela are working at the Jeffersonian, and Brennan has written two books (in addition, we assume, to birthing little Hank) and is examining an ancient bronze plow because if there's anything the world's best forensic anthropologist knows, it's metal farm implements from Medieval Europe. Lab director Camille Saroyan has spent six months without an anthropologist, because she thinks Brennan needs to anoint her successor, and settles on her partner, Arastoo Vaziri, just in time for FBI agent James Aubrey to alert them that a body has been found torched in a van.

The Jeffersonian team quickly assesses the skeleton when they arrive at the scene, a vacant lot owned by a paper company. Vaziri guesses from the long bones that the remains are of a man over 6' tall with an athletic build. From a single central incisor, he estimates the man was around 40 and that he was Caucasian. The professional-grade gun fused to his leg and titanium insert for a tactical boot suggest this was no run-of-the-mill murder. Angela traces the serial number on the gun, and it's Booth's. Brennan finds his guns missing but his wedding band in the gun safe.

Brennan insists on coming in to the Jeffersonian to examine the remains herself. Remodelled fractures on the calcanei are consistent with Booth's paratrooper training. Old fractures to the scapulae and ribs are defensive wounds from when Booth was abused as a child. These injuries add up to an identification of Booth, at least for Vaziri and the others.  But Brennan is not certain.  She looks at the bullet wound that the skeleton sustained to the left-central chest; while Booth's injury caused a piece of his scapula to break off, the remains on the table have an intact scapula. Vaziri also mentions the low density of osteoblasts in the vertebrae indicative of alcoholism, which also does not match with Booth. The remains are not his.

But Vaziri also notes striations on the wound to the man's left anterior (superior?) iliac spine that suggest he was shot in the pelvis. The bullet would have passed through his body and severed the external iliac artery, causing death. The really interesting wounds, however, are the remodelled sharp injuries to the ilium from a scalpel.  Brennan knows that Booth's brother Jared had an emergency appendectomy by field medics; all the other injuries line up with Jared.

The FBI involves Agent Miller to help with the case, as Booth is now a suspect in a murder. But Angela and Aubrey get the first lead: they check cell phone calls and note that Booth got three calls the morning he disappeared.  The number of rings is code for GO. Angela also finds a cluster of burner phones bought at the same time and speculates a team of people was involved. Aubrey and Miller go to talk to Jared's ex-wife Padma, and she says that a friend named Kevin O'Donnell was helping to get him back on track financially.

Another clue on Jared's bones leads the team to a location.  Brennan and Vaziri find fractures to the posterior portion of ribs 4-7 and the spinous processes of the thoracic vertebrae, likely the result of a fall from a height of about three stories. Particulates in the occipital are lead-based glass manufactured in Turkey. That, coupled with the rare variant of buffelgrass that Hodgins found in the burned van, narrows the search down to one house: that of Victor Masboriat, a notorious criminal. The SWAT team moves in and finds several dead people, but Booth is not among them.

The dead are moved to the Jeffersonian, where Saroyan works on DNA analysis of the blood spatter.  She finds a match for Booth, in a puddle near a wall.  But Booth's body wasn't there.  As the episode ends, Booth is triaging his gunshot wound in the bathroom of a basement with two guys concerned about his wellbeing and one who does not seem to particularly care: Kevin O'Donnell.  The camera pulls back to reveal the $2 million that Masboriat had in his wall safe, and we get a To Be Continued.

Anthropological Comments

• Long bones indicated to Vaziri that Jared was male, over 6', and athletic, all of which tracks with forensic methods.  One upper incisor telling him that the person was Caucasian, though, does not.  My guess is that this is short-hand for spatulate incisor (as opposed to shovel-shaped), which is more common in whites and blacks as opposed to Asians. But if they'd wanted a dental short-hand for ancestry, Carabelli's cusp would have been better.  Also not sure how the one tooth gave Vaziri age-at-death, since 40-somethings don't have that much dental wear.
• While I thought the coloring of the skeleton was a pretty good approximation of burned -- not too even -- the anterior ribs in the articulated skeleton shot were strangely flat and tall. They did not look like ribs at all.
• As I mention in nearly every review, standard anatomical position has the radius on the outside of the arm (palm up), which uncrosses the two lower arm bones.  And as usual, the skeleton laid out in the Jeffersonian has the radius on the inside. If you look closely, you can see it in the photo at the top of this post.
• I am not convinced that remodelled fractures from either of the Booths' boyhood would be seen on their adult skeletons. Perhaps if they were severe injuries and the boys were closer to adolescents. Very old fractures would be difficult if not impossible to see without x-rays.
• "Anthropologically, there are seven basic modes of behavior and many subsets," Brennan insists.  I have no clue what she's talking about, and a google search didn't help things.

Stray Comments

• Do you think that the show will ever address why Angela and Hodgins didn't move to Paris?
• I hadn't realized until the montage just how many times Booth almost died on this show.
• I love that there are two vans full of full-gear SWAT guys, and yet Aubrey and Miller are alone on the third floor to find the bodies.
• Offhanded shout-out to Parker!
• I covet both Angela's dress and Brennan's ability to finish writing a book.

Rating 

As with most Bones premières, this one was full of drama, half-decent forensics, and good pronunciation of anatomical terms.  Brennan and Vaziri figured out whom the skeleton belonged to, and the plot -- even if it had some holes -- moved along nicely.   I'd give The Loyalty in the Lie a totally respectable A- .

Read More: Forensic TV Post-Mortem: The 5 Most And Least Accurate Episodes Of 'Bones' 

A word about these reviews: I've watched Bones since the very first episode, when Brennan gets waylaid in airport security and tosses a bag containing a human skull on the table to freak out the TSA agent.  The show often contains laughably unprofessional moments like this, and since season 6, I have snarked weekly on the things that Bones gets wrong about forensic anthropology, on analogy with the blog I used to follow of a doctor who reviewed House, MD.  But in all honesty, the show has gotten significantly better over the years, and it's become harder to assign my students the task of critiquing the show for extra credit in my human osteology course. For better or for worse -- no, definitely for the better -- the character of Brennan, created by forensic anthropologist Dr. Kathy Reichs, has evolved over a decade into the most well-known fictional anthropologist of all time. In bringing my reviews here to my Forbes blog, I will be summarizing, critiquing, and even praising the show each week for its portrayal of  the subdiscipline to which I also belong: biological anthropology. While I do not study the recent dead (I prefer Romans who've been gone for millennia), don't chase murderers, and do not have a hunky FBI agent husband, I feel a certain kinship with Brennan. We share a general physical likeness and age, and a passion for human skeletons... and she's only a bit more socially awkward than I am. So enjoy these reviews, and please feel free to leave comments on the show and my reviews, including goofs I may have missed!