Gabriel García Márquez Writes “Bones” Episode Descriptions
Season 1, Episode 1: “Pilot”
When Temperance “Bones” Brennan is taken by her father to see the bones of a hockey player who was murdered by a volunteer fireman, she is young and graceless, like a calf in darkness, but has the natural curiosity of her dead grandmother. It is during this time, in the hellish noonday heat, among the bones and the begonias, that Brennan discovers her dream of becoming a forensic anthropologist who never exists completely until the last possible moment.
Season 1, Episode 8: “The Girl in the Fridge”
The femur of a young Catalonian girl drops out of the fridge, tumbles across the kitchen floor, rolls out into the street, continues on a straight path through a lopsided veranda, passes by twenty-one brick buildings with wooden blinds, turns to the right and then to the left, heads toward the renowned Jeffersonian Institute, enters in an open door, continues on to the laboratory, makes an abrupt turn to avoid a pot of begonias, travels through the Forensic Division, clinging to the walls so as to not dirty the bones of a hairdresser who was murdered by another hairdresser, keeps down the hall and comes out in the evidence vault, where cocky FBI Special Agent Seeley Booth prepares to drink eight quarts of black coffee and twenty-three raw eggs.
Season 6, Episode 6: “The Shallow in the Deep”
When it rains for three years, seven months, and thirteen days, all Dr. Lance Sweets can do is clear his workstation of floating bones. Dr. Brennan finds him in the testing center, waist-deep in water, trying to grasp the two-hundred-year-old floating skull of a girl named Rosalba the Beauty, who was as slippery in death as she was in life. Dr. Sweets remarks that if it had not been for the evasiveness of the skull, the rain would not have upset him, because, after all, he had been treading water for his entire career.
Season 10, Episode 4: “The Geek in the Guck”
When Dr. Brennan opens the bone room at seven o’clock in the morning, the sour air from the ossuary washes over her, leaving her chalk-colored lab coat yellowed by the saltpeter of the dead. When the begrimed skeleton of an Italian evangelist awakens from a centuries-long nap, Dr. Brennan becomes intoxicated by fastidiousness and begs the skeleton to let her soap its spine. The skeleton thanks Dr. Brennan for her good intentions, but rejects the offer, claiming that skeletons never soap their spines, no matter how foul-smelling they might be.
Season 12, Episode 12: “The End in the End”
When Agent Seeley Booth investigates the murder of a well-known entomologist, clusters of tiny yellow butterflies begin following him everywhere he goes. When he grabs for a nearby bone to shoo them away, a rogue butterfly lodges itself into his spinal column, reducing him to a futon for the rest of his life. As the final credits roll, Booth withers away in solitude and oblivion, without a single moment of respite, ceaselessly tormented by the faint fluttering in his spine and the memories of Dr. Brennan on the begonia porch.
