I'm not normal. I'm extraordinary.

It’s weird to say, but it’s almost like I’m sad that I’m not more sad, if that makes any sense.

If you had told me when I started binge watching this show after season six, or even three years ago, that when Bones ended, I’d be more concerned over forgetting it was on than the fact that it was leaving the airwaves for good, then I would have told you to shut up. But life inevitably caught up to me and shifted my priorities and sensibilities.

What I’m trying to say is that I miss the person who loved that show, and miss that I had something I cared so deeply about. Adulting has a funny way of sneaking up on you, and suddenly writing 10,000 words a week on a TV show seems like an opulent abuse of free time that could be used doing laundry or catching up on the work I missed at my actual job or you know, sleeping. I’m sad I became one of Those People, and sad that I can’t partake in more of the fandom-esque eulogies for a show so beloved to them, because I’ve turned into someone who watches a show and then immediately switches to someone else. Fangirling, you say, what is this of which you speak?

(Except, I have been watching The West Wing on DVD for months, because that is the timeline I choose to believe is real these days. Because the darkest timeline which is currently happening is one of the big reasons I’ve stopped watching live TV altogether the past year save for my mandatory Bones visits.)

I’m not going to get into a whole spiel about the show, because I did one of those last year, about everything I learned from it and everything I’m grateful for. Those things are still true.

We still got 12 years of women being kickass at their jobs. Of women in positions of power and not a single man to take that away from her. Of women who owned who they were and didn’t apologize for it, and men who respected them and revered their intellect and experiences.

We had formulaic romances checking all the trope boxes, absolutely— yet those tropes came in good time, and at the very least, each couple put their spin on things.

We had a vulnerable lead who was as prickly as she was loving, who revelled in her professional accomplishments but failed to see the greatness in her personal ones, because they were just who she was.

We had a sidekick who rarely chastised her best friend’s eccentricities, and often rolled with them and praised them as what made them her. We had a female friendship never once based on competition and always rooted in mutual support, even when a third musketeer came in to disrupt their posse. Two of said women harboured feelings for the same man at one point, but again, it was never about them, and everything ran its course in due time. You had career highs and personal losses and boyfriends and babies and burn-outs, and the conversations about each of those were all like the ones you’d have in your very own living room with your own friends. I cannot, cannot stress enough how important this depiction is in the media, and why despite my feelings towards certain overall narrative arcs in recent seasons, the female friendships on this show are ones I will always cherish as a fan.

We had men who often eschewed prescribed gender norms, even when they were flaunting them. A lab rat who fell in love with an artist and gave her space, a tortured scientist who wrote poetry for his girlfriend, a boy-genius who tapped into the hypermasculinity of their field and put it on notice. Then we had a GI Joe who followed his heart, who publicly denounced reliance upon science but celebrated it as the thing that kept him honest, who made declarations of love and had his heart broken, but figured out how to fix it before breaking anyone else’s.

We had relationships that were mainly stable, and for this I say, THANK FUCK, pardon my French. I’m serious; the up-and-down make-up/break-up cycle so common on TV annoys the shit out of me, because it’s so tiresome, and usually by round 3, you forget why you even liked the couple together in the first place, and by round 5, you actually come to loathe both partners. Bones may have taken the long way to get there, but once its main squeezes found each other, they were in for good. Which didn’t mean there weren’t bumps in the road, but at least most of those bumps were honest, and felt like issues couples would face under the circumstances. The show took the time to care for these people, and for their relationships, and in so doing, so did we. Again, this is sadly a unique situation in the television landscape, and I’m thankful that the show got us there. I might not have always liked how they reached their destination, but at the end of the day, everyone is going to be okay (I hope), and that’s more than most people get.

I could go on and on, but due to the aforementioned adulting, I have to wrap this up. I wish I could spiral out of control like the die-hard fans, instead of feeling vaguely wistful at it, almost lamenting more the loss of my own youth, in a sense, than the show. But I can’t deny what it’s given me, and the pleasure I derived from it while I did, and more importantly, the friends I made as a result, because those I will treasure forever. And I figured out I could write, so if nothing else, I’ve got that to give to the show.