A quick review of tonight's "Bones" coming up just as soon as I turn to page 187... Fienberg and I joked on yesterday's podcast that this episode was made 100% for me, and while I doubt Hart Hanson even knows who I am (what with me not regularly watching or writing about his show), "The Bones on the Blue Line" did manage to neatly hit two of my buttons.
First, it gave a nice showcase to John Francis Daley, who's as good an expressive an actor as a grown-up as he was as l'il Sam Weir on "Freaks and Geeks." (I also don't know if it was intentional, but I appreciated the Apatovian symmetry of Daley's character getting engaged to Carla Gallo's, what with her being the female lead on "Undeclared.")
Second, it finally addressed a question that's been bugging me since the pilot: how does a woman like Temperance Brennan, who has so little aptitude for or interest in understanding the emotions and motivations of others, become a best-selling crime novelist? Particularly since her books are, as described here, clear roman a clefs based on her work with Booth? (And with a heroine named after Brennan's creator, Kathy Reichs, in a bit of real-world/fictional-world quid pro quo.)
Well, it turns out that Brennan doesn't write the books - or, at least, that she doesn't come up with the parts dealing with emotion, or romance, or whatever it is that's on page 187. It does seem a little sketchy that Angela wouldn't realize just how much she was contributing to the books (I imagine the first drafts would be entirely technical), nor that Brennan wouldn't have realized before now that her success as an author comes as much from the "unimportant parts" as from the science, but it's about the most plausible explanation we're going to get.
What did everybody else think?