Two months after the fall show line-up returned to televisions everywhere, Bones — a crime procedural featuring Temperance Brennan, a forensic anthropologist at the Jeffersonian Institute, and her unconventional partnership with FBI Special Agent Seeley Booth — began its seventh season.
The delay in filming, due to Emily Deschanel's (who portrays Brennan) pregnancy, pushed the premiere of Bones to November, but the show will follow a normal schedule from now until the end of this TV season.
The previous season proved extremely unsatisfying for fans, who were tired of the will-they, won't-they dance Brennan and Booth performed for six years. The show seemed to stall because of the lead characters' inability to develop their relationship.
However, the showrunners had a surprise for the viewers: when Bones ended in the season six finale, Brennan confessed to Booth that she was pregnant. With his child. After sleeping together once.
Needless to say, viewers were probably just as shocked as Booth was at this sudden news, which pretty much came out of the blue.
This season opens several months later. Brennan is five months pregnant at this point and apparently spending most of her time staying with Booth.
They have a conflict over moving in together — with Booth saying that they need "our place" and Brennan maintaining that Booth should be the one moving into her own place because, "the baby is in [her] and [she is] more financially secure. . .and objectively, [she is] more rational."
To be honest, even though Bones is a procedural, the case presented in this episode doesn't even merit mentioning in this article, as it was extremely forgettable: it was overshadowed with the Booth-and-Bones plot.
And the times when the story wasn't clogged with Brennan-baby talk, there was Hodgins and Angela-baby talk, because their son was born at the end of season six. So maybe Bones has changed into "The Baby Show," and it's not a change that is for the better.
Of course, insight into characters' personal lives is always helpful in caring about the character, but having it take over the whole point of the show (the crime aspect) is when it's taking it too far.
Another issue that was a bit irksome was that the show forced its viewers to jump from a non-relationship — a very close friendship, sure, but a non-relationship nonetheless — into Bones and Booth getting serious and starting a family together.
It would have been a much smoother transition if the audience could have seen them dating and starting a romantic relationship instead of dumping viewers into the middle of their lives five months after the fact.
By doing this, the writers took away the development of their lives together, for which a lot of people waited six seasons.
A lot of stories could have been told about how Booth and Brennan slowly learn how to balance with their personal relationship and their work relationship, but here, all viewers get is that they've apparently learned to manage these two parts of their lives already.
At this point, it is probably futile to hope that the writers can return to writing Booth and Brennan as they had been in the first two or three seasons of the show.
Back then, Brennan was confident, kick-ass and didn't have to depend on Angela for every single little thing when it came to emotions and understanding people.
Now, she is obtuse, oblivious and even cruel, and many viewers miss the original Brennan that they fell in love with in the first place.
It's like the original Brennan has been replaced with a caricature that includes all of her faults blown up and her good qualities hidden away.
These issues with Bones means that while people still watch it for nostalgia's sake, many of them miss the good old days when the show managed to balance the crime with the personal.
All this criticism makes thos show seem like it is something to be avoided at all cost, but that is not the case.
It is still a fun show to watch when you've caught up on all your other shows.
However, it is no longer an "OMG I HAVE TO WATCH THIS NOW!" kind of show.
The next episode of Bones, "The Hot Dog in the Competition", comes out on Thursday, November 10, at 9 p.m.
