..This I know…

After last week I felt like Bones might be hitting its stride. The bloated and mostly rotted bodies have been coming  with increasing gooey improbability and the cotton candy-like scripts have been rolling. Bones is a funny show in that way, you simply have to let little things like character development, plot believability and continuity be swept away in the wake of gory corpses and unbelievable forensics. Its a tightrope. The writers have to make it believable enough to be compelling while being unlikely enough to be palpable.

Two stoners find a woman’s rotted skeleton by the ocean. Its been floating around for a few weeks and is severed at the spine. This week’s stiff wasn’t nearly as nasty as the woman who was ripped apart by elevator hydraulics last week. As it turns out, the woman has had lots of plastic surgery and a serial number on her breast implant. The number leads them to her home at what appears to be a small commune. The victim was the commune’s religious leader. Luckily for the corpse lovers, the bottom half of the victim is found and it appears as though the pelvis belongs to a man. The victim had a sex change! Hooray for the gimmicks!

A message from what sounds like a jilted lover on the victim’s voicemail leads Booth to a member of the commune. He and victim seemed to have a love affair going but when Booth presses him on the revelation that the victim had a sex change, he’s unaffected saying he knew about it all along and wasn’t bothered at all. The trail seems cold.

The team tries to imagine what the victim looked like before the sex change and hit upon a mega church pastor who disappeared several years ago. The scene where Angela sketches the victim with more masculine features will absolutely stretch your ability to suspend disbelief to its limit. Booth discovers that the child of the victim had taken over the family business of hate mongering from the pulpit. Years later, the kid had a crisis of conscious and also abandoned the church. After Booth finds the prodigal son, we get a ridiculous sappy moment where the son loves and respects his father for becoming himself and looking for redemption. Sure, its heavy handed but at least there is a genuine attempt at emotion.

Unfortunately, with just a few minutes left, there really isn’t a suspect. Lack of sensible plot won’t slow down the Bones train however, as suddenly all becomes clear. After determining that she was killed by a boat and determining what kind of boat it was, Bones and Booth go boat hunting. The earlier suspect and member of the commune is the owner of the boat/ murder weapon. It wasn’t him though. It was his jilted wife.

I haven’t mentioned the rotating grad student role much over the last few weeks. I haven’t  simply because the gimmick hadn’t really panned out very much as a plot device. The various actors filling the role just haven’t been given much meat in the script to work with. This episode only bore that out more. The british kid who filled the role this week was as empty as he was useless. I sure hope they either inexplicably bring back the serial killer enabler from last season, or settle on a new cast member. This game of musical chairs with the grad assistants is getting old.