Bones Finds Gold At The End Of The Rainbow

Bones enters the world of midget wrestling…yes, midget wrestling…in an entertaining, affecting and generally much much better episode than last week’s. Why does the show do this to me? One week I’m lamenting the great decline of a show I was once madly in love with, the next week they’ll have a perfect episode that restores my faith completely. Why can’t they be consistent? If they can do a good episode this week, why can’t they do it all the time? I understand that shows can (and often do) jump the shark a few seasons down the line, but it seems odd for the quality of a series to fluctuate so much from episode to episode within the same season. But whatever, this week was good and I am happy.

We open at the gun range, with Booth firing up a storm at a poor, unsuspecting paper target. There’s some jackass next to him (of course), who starts distracting him and talking up a storm about how Booth is supposed to be a legendary shot. But Booth retrieves his paper to find a sheet of widely-grouped near misses. Yikes. So much for legendary. I guess Booth still has some brain misfiring issues. Or maybe it’s psychological. Finding the root of this problem forms the B storyline of this episode, and it’s a worthy storyline. Here’s a guy who has recently seen all of the things he cultivated to become the person that he is—his marksmanship, his gut instincts—get all screwed up. That’s conflict baby. And while Bones doesn’t have any big issues that she’s currently dealing with, it’s affecting to see her worried about Booth and experiencing his issues vicariously. It speaks tremendously to the deep connection those two characters have.

As for the murder of the week, as I may have mentioned, it involves a midget. And never mind this “little person” business, they call them midgets in the show so that’s what I’m calling them. The crime scene: a collapsed water main sinkhole, at the bottom of which is a tiny skeleton that looks bright green. There are also gold coins scattered on the ground. And the light reflects off the water coming out of the water main and creates a rainbow over Brennan. Booth grins like a little boy: it must be a leprechaun he reckons! He starts wishing quietly to himself and Brennan smiles back. She tells Booth that instead of wishing upon a rainbow to become a better shot, he should just practice more. Booth glares. She ruined his wish and he didn’t even tell her what it was. He didn’t have to; she already knew, because she knows him inside and out.

Hodgins discovers back at the lab that iron oxide in the soil turned the dwarf (okay, I’ll use dwarf from now on) green, who was killed three months ago. Brennan looks at the bone structure and determines that the dwarf was exceptionally strong, perhaps even a wrestler due to the nature of his injuries. Online they find a wrestler that matches the bone structure of the victim, and the wrestler’s moniker is the Iron Leprechaun. So Booth was right, in a way. Except the website says that the Iron Leprechaun is fighting that night. How can that be if he’s dead? Booth and Brennan head to the arena to find out.  And after Booth lays the smackdown on him in the ring with Bones watching (very entertaining by the way), they determine that the real Iron Leprechaun was indeed their victim, and this guy just took his moniker after he disappeared.

But who killed the dwarf? The case gets further complicated when Booth and Brennan discover that the gold coins were stolen from a shop right by the crime scene, and that the dwarf was also an ex-con who ratted out his cellmate to get out of prison early, had a bitter ex-girlfriend and an estranged relationship with his normal-sized brother. It’s an interesting mystery and, like the best Bones murder setups, it provides ample opportunities for Booth and Brennan to interact and bounce their different world views off each other (and us).

The other main attraction this week (besides the relief of not having any more sex crap with Angela and Wendell or pointless drivel from Cam) is the return of Gordon Gordon Wyatt, the former FBI psychologist who worked with Booth and Brennan before Sweets came along and before he gave up psychology to become a chef.

Booth seeks out Wyatt at his restaurant to talk about his shooting problem (oh boy let’s not get into the Phallic undercurrents there), because he feels that Sweets’ first priority is to the FBI and he doesn’t fully trust him. So Gordon decides to tag along and try to help Booth pro bono. He even teams up with Sweets in an interview with one of the suspects. And he makes a great reference to Quigley Down Under—a little-seen, amazingly fun and entertaining postmodern Western starring Tom Selleck and Alan Rickman and featuring a transcendent, bright score by the late great Basil Poledouris—that happens to be one of my favorite movies. Therefore, that character is forever golden in my book.

This is a great Bones episode because it focuses on Booth, Brennan, and the often funny and always complex emotional dynamics between them. When Bones sticks to that mandate, it is first-rate television and a joy to watch. They just need to make every episode have the qualities of this episode and be more consistent. Until next week…

Season 5, Episode 7: The Dwarf in the Dirt (originally aired November 12, 2009)

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