TV Review: BONES – Season 8 – “The Fact in the Fiction”

By RACHEL REITSLEFF / Contributing Writer

Posted: March 14th, 2013 / 11:45 AM

Stars: David Boreanaz, Emily Deschanel, Michaela Conlin, Tamara Taylor, TJ Thyne, John Francis Daley, Brian Klugman, Maurice Compte, Kevin Binley, Ken Weiler, Amanda Jane Cooper, Tony Pasqualini
Writer: Keith Foglesong, series created by Hart Hanson, based on the life and writings of Kathy Reichs
Director: Dwight Little
Network: Fox, Mondays @ 8 PM
Airdate: February 25, 2013

On BONES, it is a given that our heroine Brennan (Emily Deschanel) will always be the smartest person in the room. However, she gets a run for her reputation in “The Fact in the Fiction,” withCam (Tamara Taylor) hiring the impressively qualified Dr. Wells (Brian Klugman, nephew of the late Jack) as a lab intern. Wells has degrees in a number of different fields and has taken on this gig as a way of staving off boredom. He has the powers of observation of Sherlock Holmes – and, alas, the same sort of ego, which doesn’t entirely fly at the Jeffersonian. He does strike up a genuine kinship with Hodgins (TJ Thyne), who is delighted to find someone who not only embraces Hodgins’ lab-drenching experiments but readily proposes new ones.

The case at hand is that of a dead young man, Benjy, found in a field. It turns out that Benjy was researching time travel. According to his grieving older brother Alex (Maurice Compte), Benjy was working with a college professor (Tony Pasqualini) to investigate time travel, which the professor confirms. It turns out that Benjy wanted to venture back to the past to visit with his father, who Benjy believed was dead. In fact, the father was a drug-addicted no-goodnik who abandoned the family – Alex told his little brother their dad was dead because he thought it would be less traumatic. In an ironic tragedy, it turns out that Alex accidentally shot Benjy while shooting and also killing their father, who had returned to hit Benjy up for money.

Dark as the solution to the case is – we can’t help but feel for Alex – the rest of the episode is BONES at its romping, bantering best. Most of the main characters talk about where they’d like to go temporally if time travel were real, with Booth (David Boreanaz) wanting to go and rescue Lincoln from Booth’s ancestor, even if Booth wound up wiping out his own existence, and Brennan touchingly saying she is happiest right here, right now, surrounded by those she loves.

There’s also a lot of fun to be had with Brennan’s consternation over Wells’ continually being able to assess what she’s thinking, to the point where she starts blurting out her responses long after Wells is away and she’s alone with Booth. Thinking about a “would you rather” question Wells has posed earlier, Brennan responds that she’d rather be run over by a steamroller (in preference to multiple mopeds), which causes Booth to wonder if he’s hearing her correctly or if he’s suddenly hallucinating: “Am I having a stroke?”

There’s also a running riff on Booth’s desire to invest in asteroid mining, with Brennan thinking it’s impractical and Wells and Hodgins staunchly backing up Booth. Then there is the great joy of seeing Hodgins and Wells play together – Thyne and Klugman rock their respective characters and achieve the kind of instant bro chemistry that usually exists only in show runners’ dreams. When Angela criticizes Wells for being arrogant and rude, we take her point, but he actually does brighten up the lab.

The fact is, “The Fact in the Fiction” is a fine episode, full of elements that show off many of BONES’ strengths.

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