Grab my rack of bones

4 05 2013

Yeah, yeah, another bitchfest about Bones.

I got nicked up over at TNC’s joint last week for writing that I’d hoped this was the last season, but, dangnabbit, that’s my ‘pinion and I’m stickin’ to it!

Consider last week’s episode (spoiler alerts blah blah): Brennan stuck a man in the neck with a syringe he thought was full of a mutated RNA-virus/botulism mix in order to, ah, motivate him to reveal the whereabouts of an antidote which could save Arastoo, who had pricked himself. . . really, does it matter?

Small thing first: It’s gotten to the point in Bones that if they bring a body into the lab full of terrifying microbes you know someone’s gonna get it. It didn’t used to be this way—utterly predictable—but there you go.

BIG THING: Brennan fucking stuck a man in the neck with a syringe of what he thought was full of killer germs! And nobody said anything!

Oh, wait, there were a few gasps in the room, and afterward Mr. CDC Man told Booth how lucky he was to have Brennan and Booth agreed and as they were walking out Brennan said You know I didn’t really inject him with a killer bug and Booth said I know and Brennan said But I would have and Booth said I know and he smiled and they decided to go out to and drink champagne!

Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee………………………….WHAT?!

She fucking assaulted a man and inflicted psychological torture on him and. . . that’s cool? Not arrested? Not fired? Not even the slightest bit chagrined because, hey, they saved Arastoo and got the bad guy so it was all good?

NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO NO. NO.

They used to give a shit about crossing lines on Bones. Yeah, I know, t.v. show, fiction, procedural, what did I expect, but Booth, at least, used to hold the line against shit like this because he knew that the lines mattered. (Brennan was always a more mixed case: on the one hand she cared about torture and genocide and on the other she did wanted to do what wanted to do and that was that.) But even if our plucky lil’ Jeffersonian gang was happy for the result—yay! Arastoo lives!—you’d think there’d be at least some blowback.

Nope.

Maybe there will be in later episodes, although I doubt it; in the meantime: champagne!


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I was so excited

7 04 2013

No, I didn’t get into the High School of Performing Arts (tho’ back in the day I loved loved loved me some Fame): I was happy that Netflix started streaming the The West Wing.

I watched all of the early episodes, missed most of the mid-run shows (blame Canada!), then picked it back up again in the last season and a-half. Now I could watch them all!

Except. . . I didn’t.

Yeah, I dipped in here and there, but wet toes were enough; I felt no need to dive in.

Then some time later, bored with re-watching shows I’d re-watched already, I though, What the hell, and waded back in.

(Here endeth the water metaphors.)

And then I realized, upon watching some and re-watching other episodes, why I hesitated: I remember liking The West Wing, but, really, I both like and loath this show. The Sorkinisms are irritating (tho’ those are toned down considerably after the first season), some episodes are filled with enough cheese to make a vegan weep, and lawdy are some of those storyline stinkers (Zoe’s kidnapping, among others, and early-season handling of Bartlett’s MS). And, shit, I think they just get so much wrong.

But this is also a show that takes politics—the whole of politics—seriously. No one is wholly good (and only rarely are characters wholly bad), people on “our” side can be pricks and those on the “other” side can be principled, and amorality and morality fought over the course of the show’s run.

There’s more to say, but I’ll end with the observation that I wouldn’t have liked it much at all had I not liked the main characters, especially CJ and Toby. I’d like to be as tall and competent as CJ, and Toby, well, I just liked Toby.

Nice to see someone so dour do so well in the world.


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Stop right there!

17 03 2013

Never happens.

As a fan of adventure/thriller/nuke films (which provenance ought to make clear are always of the B variety), I am willing to leap over any number of realities in order to join the fun, but I do have to retain some belief that there is ground at the takeoff point.

War Games: kid hacks into government computer (believable) and inadvertently starts countdown to nuclear war (leap). Red October: Soviet sub captain seeks to defect (believable) along with innovative tech (ehhh. . .) and American analyst figures this out in time to help him (leap). Peacemaker: corrupt Russian soldiers hijack a ten-pack of nukes to sell (believable) and only the Americans figure this out (ehhh. . .) in time (leap). The Sum of All Fears: Israel loads a nuke onto a plane during the ’73 war, which, after having been shot down, is left to be found 29 years later (skid to a stop at the edge).

The Israelis don’t recover a lost nuke? No. No no no no no no no.

The opening scene already doesn’t make sense—Israel is invaded and overrun, so sends aloft a solo-piloted fighter jet with a nuke, which is shot down when the pilot is distracted by a photo of his family and thus sees a missile too late—not least because no mention is made of the purpose or destination of such a flight. More to the point, that the Israelis would lose track of a nuclear missile and apparently just shrug their shoulders at the loss requires not a leap of faith but a stumble into stupidity.

Of course, once the viewer folds her arms and raises her eyebrows, the rest of the events can only be viewed with snorts.

It’s too bad, really, because loose nukes are a fine premise on which to build a movie; then again, The Sum of All Fears relies yet again on Nazis (Alan Bates, underused; et. al.) as the bad guys, aided by an amoral and cosmopolitan arms dealer (Colm Feore, also underused). This movie was released in 2002: do we still need Nazis as the Big Bads? And are all arms dealers sophisticated foreigners with a chilling accent?

They also stole a line from The Peacemaker (I’m not afraid of the man who wants ten nuclear missiles, colonel. I’m terrified of the man who only wants one):

President: Let’s see, who else has 270,00 nukes for us to worry about?

CIA Director Cabot:  It’s the guy with one I’m worried about.

I did enjoy James Cromwell as the president and Liev Schreiber as an apparently worn-out assassin-spy, and Ciarán Hinds has such a magnificent face how could I not want to watch him? Ben Affleck once again demonstrated his limited skills as an actor, although the role hardly demands anything of interest from him. And Morgan Freeman as Cabot, hell, it’s Morgan Freeman; I originally mistook him as the president.

A waste all around.

The filmmaker would have been better to take the lead from the ridiculous premise and jettisoning any relationship to realipolitik whatsoever. Ditch the Tom Clancy-solemnity and substitute a gleeful malice instead—now that might have been fun to watch.


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And it’s gone, gone, gone

23 02 2013

Stick a fork in it already.

Bones done gone jumped the shark.

Two cliched metaphors: too much? No, not really; quite apt, actually.

Dr. Temperance Brennan has held to her atheism throughout the entire run of Bones, even as the show’s creators have given space for Booth’s religious beliefs and various other supernatural phenomenon (i.e., the episodes with Cindy Lauper’s character Avalon).

I don’t particularly mind those flights into fancy, if only because they represent the beliefs of the flight-y characters. These representations can be done well (the first Avalon appearance) or not so well (the second Avalon appearance), and they can, as with Booth’s dead comrade’s appearance at the end of a Gravedigger episode, come off as both playful and poignant.

But the key has been that the show allows for both belief and unbelief. Even if Brennan is characterized as arrogantly rational, they’ve allowed her to score real points against supernaturalism, and to have some fun doing so. (See, for example, the episode “The He in the She” in which she comments on the fashion choices of the Pope.) The viewers are offered a menu without being prodded into picking a particular item.

That, along with everything else, has been slowly disintegrating in the past two seasons (again, season 6 isn’t worth mentioning), but last night [actually, last week’s episode, the latest one free on Hulu] it all fell apart.

First, there was the cliched Brennan-gets-shot-almost-dies bit. Yes, the show has put its characters in mortal danger before, but usually in service to some larger storyline. Last night, the reason why Brennan got shot was a sideline: the whole point was for Brennan to die so that—wait for it—she could experience an afterlife. With her dead mother.

Awww, shit, really?

At first, Brennan dismisses the experience as a neurochemical response to trauma, but by the end the game is given away: Brennan’s mother tells her something  no one else would know, a telling confirmed upon Brennan’s waking.

Superficially, this is akin to the dead soldier’s appearance at the end of that Gravedigger episode, but as the soldier was a manifestation of Booth’s consciousness—and that Brennan didn’t know who he was—it worked. Belief and unbelief bumped into one another, and both went on their way.

This time, however, we were pointed on the way, and whether or not Brennan tries to make sense of this latest experience—which, if handled intelligently (and which, given the writing of late, I doubt will be), could be intriguing as a character study, that tension between the natural and the supernatural went slack.

I’m one of those people who aren’t bothered by spoilers, and who like to re-watch old shows. I don’t know why I enjoy watching things I’ve seen before—there’s a kind of comfort in it, I guess—but having seen something three times in no way interferes with my desire, after some lapse of time, to see it a fourth.

Thus, I watch and re-watch old episodes of Bones. In fact, last night, after having watched the latest free episode on Hulu, I went back and watched a couple of old shows on Netflix. There were from the third season.

I don’t know that I’ve re-watched any episodes from season 7, and when season 8 hit Netflix, I might pass those by, as well. It’s not that the show is terrible, it’s just that it’s not what it was. It’s gone flat.

And last night? It pancaked after flipping over that shark.


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Don’t raise your eye

12 01 2013

Oh my Hera, how bad is it going to get?

I just watched—ye gads, I can barely believe it—yet another episode of CSI: New York, and Athena have mercy on my soul.

Yes, I dig police procedurals and yes, I dig New York, but CSI:NY is so terrible it could make someone less steadfast than me hate both procedurals and New York. This last episode? The one where the off-duty got shot shortly after getting off the phone with his cop son of whom he is proud and loves and is shot during a mugging by three black men who turned out to be two white guys and one Latino guy in black masks, one of whom was a career criminal who was picked up and held in interrogation and never even thought to ASK FOR A FUCKING LAWYER and who was totally and completely lied to by the cops (who are shocked(!) that the other career criminal demands a lawyer)—which we’re supposed to applaud because, y’know, they catch the bad guy? That episode?

I can’t even talk about it.

(And if you think I spoiled it for you, well here’s a tip: IT WAS ALREADY SPOILED.)

In some ways, CSI:NY is even worse than CSI:Miami, and CSI:Miami was a truly terrible show. I liked the first season well enough, and watched even after they killed off my favorite character, Speedle, but at some point the posturing Horatio Caine and the stupid my-brother-his-wife-my-employee-his-sister, topped off by the sideways putting on/taking off sunglasses became laughable—and not in a good way. I stopped watching.

But even though I hit the ugh point with CSI:NY years ago, I can’t manage to stop watching. It’s gone beyond hate-watching into a kind of contempt-watch, where I feel like my world gets worse because I can’t turn away from this horror.

I admit that I’ll watch shows long past their prime; see, for example, Bones. I still watch the original CSI, even though it really lost its mojo when Gil Grissom left for the jungle, and I miss weird-Greg. Still, while it’s burnt out it’s not actively offensive, and while the most I get out of the show is a not-unpleasant passage of time, sometimes on a Friday night (I watch on my computer) that’s all I really want.

Law & Order also went on too long, but their ripped-from-the-headlines approach at least gave them something new to film. I didn’t watch the last few seasons, after  Ed (Jesse Martin) left, but I always did like Anita Van Buren. I go back and forth on L&O:Criminal Intent: Bobby bugged the shit out of me, but he was a great character, a bent, psychological version of Gil Grissom; plus, y’know, Kathryn Erbe.

L&O:SVU is the more interesting case. I missed a few years when I didn’t have a t.v. and before the episodes streamed, but I have watched a fair number of post-Elliot episodes. I think I might finally be done, however, because the show has gone beyond burnt out into the nihilistic. No, it’s nothing like MI5—it doesn’t insist on killing off all of its characters—but it’s gotten to the point where I think Why bother watching? It’s all going to shit, anyway. There are occasional ‘happy’ endings, i.e., ones in which the bad guy is caught, the victim, vindicated, but for the most part these are amorality tales in hell.

And that, in a sense, is what makes it the more interesting case: There is no redemption, everything is awful, and you know that if the younger detectives don’t get out soon, they’ll be trapped in the same Sisyphean agony as Liv, Munch, and Finn. It has gone beyond procedural into existential despair, No Exit for the criminally-minded.

It is this numbness, this darkness which might make it worth airing, even if I may not be able to bring myself to watch it anymore. L&O:SVU has gone beyond good and evil and into a kind of overwhelming corruption of everything and everyone, a corruption noteworthy precisely because it is assumed, rather than remarked upon. It is a strung-out losing game, in which everyone, regardless, keeps going ’round. That, in and of itself, makes me wonder how far it could go.

Unlike, say, the simplistic moralizing of CSI:NY and. . . ugh, I can’t even. . . .


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The thrill is gone

6 01 2013

Bones should have ended awhile ago.

No, this isn’t a complaint about the eighth season—it’s like the seventh season, fine, not like the wretched sixth—but more an observation about exhaustion.

The show is tired, and that tiredness shows. The writers are practically shouting that Angela is going to leave the Jeffersonian, and the whole Cam-Aristoo thing? Hmpf.

The main problem, of course, is that Booth and Brennan have settled into domesticity with one another, and as much work-chemistry as the two had in the first five seasons, they have no home-chemistry. In fact, their lack of a home fire burning is dampening their work-mojo.

(No, I don’t hate that they’re a couple, although I would have preferred that they not be. I also think it would have been better, from a dramatic perspective, if they wanted to go with the whole Brennan-Booth-baby thing, to have had them either tried and failed to make a go as a couple, or have tried simply to figure out how to raise their kid together without the two of them getting together. But, y’know, they didn’t ask me.)

I still like all of the characters, and the plots, hey, the plots are fine, but the frisson has fizzled. There was an unpredictability in the early seasons, an unpredictability predicated in large part of the audience’s ignorance of the characters. As we got to know them, we settled into a kind of comfort with them, which is in and of itself not necessarily a problem.

But it did become one for the writers. Whereas before there was a sense of what if with the characters—a what-ifness heightened by or illuminated by the plots—now there is only a kind of here-we-go-again sensibility, i.e., the comfort with the characters’ quirks has deliquesced into laziness.

It was, I think, in reaction to the comfort that wrecked season 6:  the plots frantically tried to zap some zip back into the characters, so much so that I, as a viewer, thought, Shit, they’d never do that.

Consider the interns on an improvement kick: Clark tried to be more open, and Fischer attempted to find peace and happiness. Now, I’m not against change—trying to do a bit of that, m’self—but these attempts came out of nowhere and, more importantly, went nowhere.

And Brennan, well, Brennan they twisted around most of all, having her go back to patterns she’d dropped in the first or second season, upping her coldness factor and downplaying the curiosity that always took the edge off her clinical approach, and, worst of all, treating her emotions less as a dimension of herself with which she was not wholly comfortable than as something which occurred outside of her, afflicting her.

Example? There was an episode late in season six which involved a runaway deaf girl murder suspect. (Yeah, I know, but that’s part of the territory of police procedurals.) Brennan is just nasty to this girl, nasty in a way that she rarely was with any other suspect, and certainly more than she had ever been to any troubled kid. It took Sweets to remind Brennan of her own fraught childhood—something which never would have been necessary in the preceding (or succeeding) seasons.

Anyway, it seems in the current and last season that the producers figured out how they erred in season six, and returned us to the comfort the show had attained in season five. Clark is back to uptight, Fischer is back to dour, and while I still miss Vincent Nigel-Murray, the crew is complete.

Alas, completeness is the death of drama.

I still watch Bones, and will watch through to the end of the season. I just hope that this is the last.


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The needle and the damage done

18 06 2012

MI5 hates me.

The show, that is, not the actual service. And I don’t take it personally, because I think MI5 hates everyone.

I’ve previously discussed my weakness for caper flicks and police procedurals, so it should come as no surprise that I like spy stuff. (I mean, I even watch Covert Affairs, which is a really lousy show. Really.) I turned off 24 after the first season, as it was less clever than angry, and CONSTANT SHOUTY ANGER bores and CONSTANT SHOUTY ANGER justifying torture offends, but if you can get past that low bar (i.e., not constantly shouting angrily in favor of torture) in making a show, I’ll watch it.

There’s shouting in MI5 (known in the UK as Spooks), and torture, but the truly interesting dialogue tended to be quiet, and the torture damaged both victim and perpetrator alike.

And I guess it’s that damage that leads me to think that MI5 hates everyone (SPOILER ALERT!!): All of its characters are damaged, but with the exception of only a handful of it many characters, only a few of them live long enough to have to come to terms with the damage done, both to and by them.

In other words, just as you get attached to Danny or Fiona or Jo or Ros, they’re shot or blown up or shot or, er, blow up. And just as I was starting to warm to Adam (who replaced Tom, one of the few who was ushered out of the service rather than sacrificed to it), he gets, yes, blown up.

Huh, now that I think about it, I stopped watching MI5 after Adam took over the lead, but I picked the show back up again (skipping episodes and perhaps even a season or two) this weekend. Hermione Norris (who I liked in Wire in the Blood, even though I ended up truly not liking that creepfest) was cast as Ros against Adam’s lead, then took over after Adam went boom, only to go boom herself a season or so later.

(Huh, I should put a spoiler alert somewhere near the top of this post, shouldn’t I? Okay, done.)

I mean, for crying out loud, they even killed off Ruth—Ruth! And you knew as soon as Sasha picked up that bit of broken glass that she was going to get it, because no way would MI5 let anyone (well, okay, Zoe got a happy ending—but only after she went to prison and then was smuggled to South America, and Malcolm got to retire) walk away whole from the Grid.

Harry survives. He’s got nothing else in his life than Section D, nothing to live for beyond the job—hell, maybe that’s why he gets to live: With the exception of Ros, everyone else has something else, or the hopes of something else, off the Grid.

Maybe that’s why Ros’s death hit Harry so hard: She was him, and she was dead and he was alive.

MI5 flayed its characters and it flayed us for watching its characters. There were no redshirts in MI5, which from a plot point of view was good, but killing off everyone is, in its own way, equally predictable, and even more cynical.

Followed Danny through his credit and impulse-control problems and grown to admire his decency? Shot in the head.

Like how Ben Caplan reacted to almost getting (yup) blown up and deciding to abandon journalism for intelligence work? Then turn away as Connie slices through his throat.

Colin and Tariq, the tech guys—tech guys!—hanged and poisoned, respectively.

And Jo, Jesus, Jo and Ros. Jo so much like Danny, so decent in her need to hold the line against the consequentialism of spy-trade in lives, signalling to Ros to shoot Finn as she stands clutched behind him, trying to prevent him from (oh, man, this is getting ridiculous) blowing up the room.

Forcing Ros to shoot Finn, which means she shoots Jo.

That’s just some fucking hateful writing.

So I’m pissed for having dipped back into the show, for forgetting how pissed I was last time I watched at the sheer cussedness of getting rid of the people we, the audience, have the gall to care about, and pissed about the laziness of the constant killing itself.

It’s not so much the brutality—if you kept watching after the second episode, you knew the show wouldn’t skimp on the brutal—but the repetition of it, the leaching away of cleverness in favor of killing that ultimately turned me off.

I’m open to the idea of a morality of brutality (any Game of Thrones fans here to chip in a thought or two?), but as a mere dramatic device, it cannot exist unto itself if it is to retain its power. And a brutality which bores is a waste, in every way.


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Dese bones gonna rise again (redux)

25 11 2011

I was opposed to Brennan and Booth having a romantic relationship.

Yes, they had chemistry and affection, but, dangnabbit, I’d like to see a good working relationship between two people who have chemistry and affection simply remain a good working relationship.

Colleagues: cool; friends, fantastic. But lovers? Isn’t that a bit. . . lame?

Why does a spark always have to flare out into romance? Sure, Diane and Sam were always going to get together on Cheers, but that was the set-up from the outset. And, okay, some might argue that Booth and Brennan’s bedding was built into the base of Bones—but not me!

No: I liked that they became friends, confidantes, but I always thought they were linked through the work. I wanted the relationship to remain cemented in the work. I didn’t want the series to degrade into a I love B. soap opera, about a mismatched pair of misfits maundering into true love.

Please.

(As an aside, this was why I found ER less and less compelling over the years. Yes, it was a nighttime soap, but the drama coursed through the patients, the medicine; once the work was sidelined, it was just a nighttime soap, nothing more.)

The sixth season gave me plenty of reason to despair of this show: the writing was flat, the eccentricities of the interns were flattened, storylines were forced, and the work was an afterthought. Still, even mediocre Bones was better than most t.v., so while I wasn’t sure if I would continue to follow the show, I thought I should at least check out a few episodes of the new season.

Cue the music and sunrise: It’s good again! Third or fourth season good! The scriptwriters have resharpened their metaphoric pens, the dialogue pops, the humor is back, and I even rejoiced in Daisy’s mega-annoyingness. (She was toned down last season, which made her boring and annoying; amped back up, she’s amusing and annoying.) Most importantly, they started the new season with Brennan and Booth already mid-adjustment to her pregnancy and their romance: instead of having to sit through all the cloying new relationship nonsense, we get them (back) in their comfortable repartee, with the romance serving as an irritant rather than a soporific.

I still would have liked them to have remained spark-y friends, but at least the spark is back.


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It’s all about the peace, baby

6 11 2011

I love the move The Peacemaker.

Not as a guilty pleasure, not ironically, not contrari-wise. And no, not (just) because of this guy:

Devoe, Tom Devoe.

Or my general attraction to tormented Eastern Europeans:

Marcel Iureş , as Dušan Gavrić , the man who'd bring the Bosnian war to the US

Nope. I love The Peacemaker because it takes bureaucracy seriously.

Seriously.

Now, no, this is not a documentary and all the usual suspensions of belief—getting information at the last minute, getting out of the car/truck/church just before it goes up in flames/falls off a bridge/explodes—apply, as do the usual tropes of the roguish operative who clashes with the beautiful and smarter-than-he-is woman. It’s a combo spy-action flick, not Godard.

But unlike so many spy-action flicks, the hero and heroine (a likably brittle Nicole Kidman as Dr. Julia Kelly) work for and more importantly within agencies. She’s a part of the Executive Office of the President, thrown into the interim position as adviser to the president on nuclear issues; he’s a lieutenant colonel in the US Army Special Forces, and while both rely upon their wits and experience as they try to prevent 9 Russian nukes from ending up on the open market, their authority is clearly drawn from the positions they hold within their respective agencies.

Kelly discovers that the alleged accidental nuclear explosion was deliberate by looking at spy satellite photos provided by the NSA. Devoe gets information on the corrupt Russian officer from his contacts within government. They fly to Europe on a jet filled with staffers, and Devoe acts on the information he and Kelly find by calling the army and setting up a special op (which he commands, natch).

And then the crucial scene, at the launch site of the special op: three choppers would have to cross Russian air space in order to intercept the nuke-loaded truck before it enters Iran and almost certainly disappears. They can’t do it, however, without authorization. Devoe pushes, says, hey, at least let us get in the air, “it’s only jet fuel”:

Up he goes, to the border, and. . . waits. He waits! He doesn’t do the I’m-a-motherfucking-warrior-god and order the crews across, but sits on the border, however impatiently, waiting for authorization.

Which he gets, of course. Duh. (Around the 6-6:45 minute mark)

Kelly and her team trace payments to an address in Sarajevo, wherein IFOR (the NATO-led Implementation Force operating in the former Yugoslavia)—not some punk kid or homemaker-slash-freedom-fighter freelancer or burned-out ex-spy roused to one last sacrificial act—find Gavrić’s tape explaining his final act.

On the flight back to New York, the team notes that, again, they need authorization to shut down the airports. Once in New York, the military works with the city police to block off traffic (too successfully, as it happens). The team works with airport security to track Yugoslavian passengers, realizing they missed their man when an airport official notes that official delegations do not go through customs. At the hotel where Gavrić is staying, a State Department official cautions that internationally-agreed-upon protocols mean they can’t just barge into delegates’ rooms.

(The hotel scene also provides the biggest groaner of the film: Really, you have a man with a backpack nuke staying there, and you don’t think to cover all entrances and exits—including all elevators?!)

The Department of Energy tracks radiation concentrations, and a special agency (NES?) team is tasked to deal with they nuke. They get stuck in traffic, of course, so it’s up to our heroine to defuse the nuke.

Which she does, just in the nick of time. Of course.

Okay, so not a great movie, and one with more than a few flaws. But it’s grounded movie, one which tries, not always successfully, to remain tethered to political and bureaucratic realities.

And physical realities: In an early scene, Kelly is swimming when summoned to the White House by an officer. The next scene shows her at the office with her hair still wet. Not a big deal, I know, but one which rings truer than a scene in which an adviser to the president takes the time to dry and style her hair before responding to a nuclear emergency.

This is too much for what is, really, just a diverting B-movie, isn’t it? Maybe I am too overcome by Clooney and those tormented Eastern Europeans, and maybe I adore Armin Mueller-Stahl (as a scene-stealing Russian office) just a little too much. And yes, I do have a weakness for nuke movies.

But I also believe in the necessity of government and thus, by extension, of the necessity of the bureaucracy. I get all of the complaints against both—I’ve made more than of few, myself—but if you want government to work then you need agencies within the government to work. You need bureaucracy.

It’s nice to see a movie which gets that.


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Dese bones gonna rise again

31 05 2011

This was not the best season of Bones.

Which is to say: this was the worst season of Bones. Not a single episode was as good as previous episodes, and while there were no truly terrible episodes, the best it got was only “all right”.

Alyssa Rosenberg argued on Matt Yglesias’s blog (now her own, at ThinkProgress) that the problem was with the overarching theme (the sniper), namely, that is was weak and centered on a boring character. I think she has a point: Although the first season didn’t have an overarching theme, two were set up for the following seasons, one regarding Brennan’s family and another with the serial killer Howard Epps.

Now, I kinda think the whole sexual-sadist-serial killer is played out (yeah, I’m looking at you, CSI, with the truly boring Nate Haskell), but they undercut the superman-superevil bad guy schtick deliberately: Howard Epps thought he was a genius but, as Zack pointed out, he really wasn’t as smart as he claimed to be.

Season two was backboned by Brennan’s backstory, with her plastic-surgeried criminal father dipping into and out of a number of episodes. (“Judas on a Pole”, which introduces him, also includes a great cover of Kate Bush’s “Running up that hill”.) It also introduced the Gravedigger, a nasty piece of work who appeared again in single episodes in seasons 3, 4, 5, and 6.

The Gormogon thing (season 3) was weird, and the Zack angle on that was weird, but it was also satisfying: so over-the-tops nuts (ritualistic cannibalism of secret society members) that there was a certain brio to the writing. Everybody seemed to be having a good time—well, you know what I mean.

Season 4 didn’t have any major arcs, save, perhaps, the Angela-Hodgins fallout, as well as an somewhat underdeveloped bit about Booth’s brain. (It didn’t really cohere, but that it didn’t really cohere didn’t really matter.) Oh, and the introduction to a rotating cast of interns/assistants. Anyway, it had a fine, fine, season ender.

Too much about the Booth/Brennan relationship interfered with season 5, but there were still some very good stand-alone episodes, as there were in each of the preceding seasons. I’m one of those who did NOT want Booth and Brennan to get together—yes, adults who have chemistry may nonetheless desist from dating—but I was even more annoyed at how forced those episodes were. Stephen Fry, who brought back his utterly charming character Gordon Wyatt, then ruined the moment by pushing (against character) for a romantic relationship. Brennan’s father talked about it, Angela talked about it, Booth and Brennan separately brooded about it—blech, it was all too much.

Yeah, we get it: they have chemistry, but enough already! Anyway, the Angela-Hodgins arc was more interesting.

Still, there was an energy and wit running through these seasons, a humor and affection comingled with the murder and mayhem, such that even amidst the utter unreality of the television crime procedural, you got the sense that these were real people doing real work.

The people mattered, the work mattered: a fine balance.

This year, however, that was thrown off. Again, I think Rosenberg may be onto something about the boring sniper arc, but I think the greater problem was that the balance got thrown off. The crimes were almost beside the point, or existed only to drive the personal plot-lines; thus the play of earlier seasons was missing, as the writers sought to reduce the looseness and otherwise force into a pre-exising cutout every damned storyline. This not only took away much of the wit of the dialogue, it also signaled a certain impatience with the characters.

So, for example, Sweets entertains doubts about his expertise and has those doubts resolved all in a single episode; both the doubts and the resolution were, erm, doubtful. (And Miss Julian opened up to Sweets, which, frankly, was not believable.) Brennan’s father was brought in for a couple of completely superfluous scenes, and there were bits about Cam and about Angela’s pregnancy (guess, no, really, just guess how the season ended), but it was all rather listless.

And having a number of the interns each undergo a character change? Please. Give me back my uptight Clark. (f only they could give back my favorite intern, whose death scene was devastating.)

It was never truly awful and, really, only a few episodes were bad, but it was such a letdown. I’ll watch again next year (even though I was not particularly happy with the last episode set-up for the new season), but I hope this season was a lapse rather than a harbinger.

I did, however, watch a truly awful show this year, even after swearing off it. Yes, I moaned my way through yet another season of CSI-New York. Ye gads. They brought in Sela Ward to replace Melina Kanakaredes, and I thought, Oh, well, I like Sela Ward.

I might still like Sela Ward, but her character, Jo? Do. Not. Like.

This show just got sappier and more moralistic as it went along. God, I can’t even be bothered to go through everything that was wrong with this show because everything was wrong.

The only good thing: it may finally have gotten so bad that even I will look away.


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