It's that time again, Boneheads! Time to bid farewell to the Jeffersonian team for the summer, and eagerly await their return in season 11.
Season 10 has brought us so much; Bones engaging in blackmail to save Booth from wrongful imprisonment, Sweets's death, Agent Aubrey's introduction, Angela and Hodgins return to wealth, Wendell's return to romance after kicking cancer's ass, Jessica teaching Brennan about Twitter, Arastoo returning to his homeland and Cam following him, ANGELA'S REAL NAME, and so much more!
If you've been following the show for all ten of its seasons, then you know that it can pack a wallop of a cliffhanger: Booth and Brennan bidding each other farewell at an airport, Brennan going into hiding, or Booth going to prison. It's often an intense experience, and leaves you itching for the show to start back up in the fall.
But the conclusion of episode 22, "The Next in the Last," was lackluster. I'll have more to say on that topic at the end of this piece, but for now, let's recap.
Change was in the air all throughout this episode. We already knew that Hodgins and Angela were planning to leave for Paris, and the episode starts with Booth and Brennan discussing a lifestyle change, too - perhaps in a new city, or occupying different jobs.
Yet the murder of the week was eerily familiar, hearkening back to the days of cyber-terrorist Christopher Pelant. To refresh everyone's memory, Pelant was a technically-inclined genius who threatened the team on several occasions between seasons 7 and 9. He framed Brennan for murder, destroyed the Angela-tron, murdered multiple people, and stole more than 4 billion dollars from Hodgins before Booth killed him with his sharpshooting skills.
Although the money that Pelant stole was untraceable, it turned out that this week's victim had discovered it in the accounts of his shady employer, Dunlop Investments. With the help of a coworker, he was attempting to take the $4 billion for himself...but his girlfriend/Call of Duty buddy wanted the money for herself.
As Brennan and Booth revealed their plans to leave the team, we also got to see Cam unravel a little bit. Cam's had a rough year, between stressing Arastoo's safety and dealing with so many of her team members departing. When she defeatedly wondered aloud, "What is happening?", I totally related; it left me wondering just how the next season would progress.
Unless I missed it (which is totally possible, because I've been binge-watching the new season of Orange is the New Black), the show left Brennan and Booth's next steps pretty vague. They're just going away for a change of scenery. That was the part that felt lackluster to me; the show had some really fertile areas of conflict that could have kept us in thrall over the summer, like another relapse in Booth's fight against his gambling addiction, health complications with the birth of their second child, or even the threat of Pelant - who hid a posthumous message in some data that Angela was decrypting. But instead, Brennan turns off the message and walks out the door with Booth.
I guess there's something to be said for a tranquil season ending, but I've always been more of a fan of the bated-breath cliffhanger. For example, this season of Supernatural ended with the Winchester brothers getting their Impala stuck in the mud as they attempted to escape a massive cloud of evil black smoke called "The Darkness" - it left my adrenaline pumping, and made my cry out in excited frustration, antsy to know what happened next. That seems like an important experience to provide viewers, especially viewers of a show that's been on for ten years (as both Bones and Supernatural have been)!
What did you think of the ending? What do you think Booth and Brennan will get up to while we aren't watching? And what, if anything, will bring them back to the Jeffersonian next season? Comment below...and have an awesome summer, Boneheads!
