#bones meta

"Oh, well Booth was briefly unconscious in the process of getting a concussion. In television, situations like this are rife with characters experiencing dreams where their subconscious solves the case for them. Plus it's a clever way to include their cameo from Luc Robitaille."

"The show really wants me to believe that that really was a ghost that helped Booth and this is another instance of Booth being right about magic in the world while Bones is wrong, but even if I prefer that small space they leave for a little ambiguity, characters in life or death emergency survival situations on TV see visions of a person who's death they blame themselves for as a way to explore a characters relationship with guilt all the time."

And it's not really until both Bones and the show essentially say "screw the case of the week, something is Wrong" that you're, rather abruptly and forcefully, prompted to consider what these incidences might mean when put together, and it's not a very happy list of possibilities.

Before I dive in, I would like to thank @popmatchburn for being the best partner, supporting me in all things, listening to my rants, proofreading this, and adding the conclusion to succinctly pull together all the big points. <3 You're one in a million and I love you.

I have seen a lot of content regarding Booth, and how people can't like him (and in severe situations judge other people for liking Booth) and like a buzzing fly, I would like to add my opinion where nobody asked for it.

So, this is a "Booth is one of Eldrich's favorite characters in television, and this is why":

One of the main reasons that I have seen people being anti-Booth is because he's pro-military, pro-cop, pro-government. Which, firstly, is that really all that we're judging people and fictional characters on? I'd say especially fictional characters.

Facts:

Grew up as an odd child out due to her neurodivergence & Specific interests.

Abandoned by her parents.

Spent time in foster care & abused 

Felt abandoned by her brother, who didn’t care for her after their parents left.

Got into good colleges regardless of a difficult childhood

Has three doctorates in anthropology, forensic anthropology, and kinesiology

Did work with genocide victims and 9-11 victims

Joined the Jeffersonian

Successful Author 

Forms a bond with Booth. 

Had to do the investigation on her own mother’s murder

Deals with her father, who is a criminal and lied to her

Forms a family with her team at the Jeffersonian, later adding Sweets to this bond.

Is targeted by any serial killers

One of her own interns is murdered. 

Has two children who help continue to open her up to life

Has to live on the run away from Booth 

Loses sweets

Booth is put in jail, and they are separated again. 

They quit their job temporarily but come back.

Booth ends up gambling again, which damages their relationship.

Injured at the end of the story but able to return to work 

Temperance “Bones” Brennan deals with a lot of traumas throughout her life and a lot of love throughout her life. She has been abandoned and hurt as well as surrounded by the love of both her birth family and, just as importantly, the family she was able to build at the Jeffersonian. The people she found loved her with all their hearts and would do anything for her. The way the people she found can open up the hurt heart she had is beautiful. 

She struggles completely reasonably with opening herself up. Having your parents and brother abandon you and then being mistreated by foster parents and peers will make you unable to form close bonds easily and cause damage to your views of how relationships work. 

Brennan’s intelligence and skill at her work are impressive and regarded as some of the best in the world, and she holds this with a sense of great pride. Her ego built around her intelligence can also be problematic because she can use it as a shield against having a real connection. 

Brennan struggles to truly understand and process emotions due to her neurodivergence. Her skill to deal with her emotions is to try to rationalise them. She blocks other people's emotions at the end to not let herself truly bring the feelings in from the outside world. Her own emotions might be turmoil within the walls she built, but she keeps those on the inside. And her own affect can become confused.

Her emotions often come out in fits and bursts. In the beginning, they come out in times like when she has to deal with her parents or when children and animals are harmed. We see that there is a dissonance for Bones with her emotions, not understanding what she is showing and feeling and disliking showing it. Later in the show, when she learns to allow her inside emotions, her affect and others to flow together. 

High intelligence can also create an ego. Brennan experiences this and it causes friction with people who work with her who are of equal stature, like Cam and Clark.  Being Bennan’s version of “smart” can cause her to disregard people who have emotional intelligence. 

 One of Brennen’s earliest close relationships we see is with Angela, a person who seems very different from her. She is spiritual, artistic, flirty, open and leads with her heart. However, they match each other in intensity of love for each other. That’s what matters the most to Angela. Brennan also believes in Angela’s skills, asking her to come work with them at the Jeffersonian. Brenna knows Angela's art and technology skills are good enough to warrant the trust. They also both have abnormal childhoods. Angela, having a rocker father and mother who seemed to have never been in the picture, was adopted, or for some other reason. Angela also helps Brennan with her books. Angela supports Brennan through emotional situations, giving her advice when she struggles to know what to do. Angela is the only person Brennan communicates with when she’s on the run and Angela is extremely angry with Booth when he halts the marriage due to Pelant. She is the first piece of a family Brennan built. 

Hodgins and Brennan have a less defined relationship, but are close, going through many things together, like being buried by the Grave Digger. They are both supportive when the other goes through hard times and work to catch people who put the other in dangerous situations. They respect each other’s work in their fields. He is Angela's husband and the father of her child, making him Brennan's family that way, but their friendship also makes them necessary for their family to work. 

Cam and Brennan butt heads to begin with. Brennan does not like feeling like she is out of control in what she considers to be her space. Brennan has a deep need for control due to all the out-of-controlness she experienced as a child. She feels intellectually superior and more important. Brennan learns to see Cam as a necessity within the system. They come to not only respect each other but also consider one another to be part of the family. They invite each other to family-style events like weddings and celebrating child births. They come to help each other during hard times. 

Brennan originally had a relationship with Zack Addy as her first intern, whom she shows a great deal of love. He is much like her, showing neurodivergence to an even stronger extent than she. He is very much like a little brother to her. When he betrayed them, it affected her; she talked Zack into helping them. She proved to Zack that he loves Hodgins more than his overall beliefs. She still shows affection for him, even touching foreheads. When they see each other again, we see Zack kidnap her in an effort to prove his innocence. She sides with him being framed for the crime, and helps get him exonerated. Her love for Zack shows that her ability for familial love existed even before her long-term relationship with Booth. 

The group of Interns she has over time means a lot to her, and she cares deeply for them. When she loses parts of her memory at the end of the show, she remembers things about them as they mean so much to her.

Arastoo: He is part of the Family as the husband of Cam and she shows great respect for him as a scientist as well as a person for the trauma he suffered as a young person.

Clark: He becomes a Doctor and they clash once he takes charge of historical anthropology. She comes to respect him after seeing his work. While originally finding their family dynamic non-conducive to work, he becomes friends with the whole squad. Clark comes to help when they need it. 

Daisy: She is one of the interns Brennan seems to like more than the others. Taking her with her when she leaves on a sabbatical later taking her on her "bachelorette party”. She is also more folded into the family as the Fiancée of Sweets and mother of his child. 

Finn: Brennan and Cam are willing to take him in as an intern and Jeffersonian employee with his background in crime. Brennan finds his background to be non-pertinent in most situations. This shows her logic-focused worldview can be part of compassion.

Fisher: His sardonic pessimism and her general flat faculty can comically conflict. He also once offered her his sperm, which she turned down. For the most part, they get along generally well, Fisher even loving her novels. 

Fuentes: Doesn’t get along with Brennan to begin with, as he is flirtatious and arrogant. 

Jessica: She helps Brennan learn about social media.

Oliver: Probably the intern she gets along with the least, like most, she thinks his know-it-all and blase attitudes to be grating. But she also often states his genius status is warranted. 

Vincent Nigel-Murray: She sometimes shuts down his fact giving, but he is well-liked and cared for by Bones; his death affects her deeply, being a catalyst for her relationship with Booth. She awkwardly brought a flower to put on his casket. 

Wendell: He is helped out by Brennan to be able to stay in the Jeffersonian because she respects his work and she cares about him. She also shows compassion when he has cancer.

Sweets is a psychologist, so originally, she dislikes him because she doesn’t like his profession. He needs science to fit her rigid view of “logic”  to trust it. His usefulness in helping re-solidify her and Booth’s working relationship isn’t something she finds necessary. Sweets ends up finding his views of them smashed funnily when he learns Booth and Bones first met they almost had sex. 

Over time, Sweets and Brennan learn to respect each other, and as they work together if she never loves psychology. On a more personal level, Gordon Gordon points out that Sweets is imprinted on them like a baby duck. Brennan and Booth deeply love Sweets as a family member.  They take him into their house, Brennan expressing when he leaves that she wasn’t sure about bringing him into their house, but then was very unhappy about him leaving because she actually loved having him around her; she does care for protecting him. Losing wounds her family.

This is his best friend — not his comrade, not his brother, his best friend — and they've been through so much, everything together.

'Don't do this, Cas.' Don't leave me, Cas. Don't do this to me.

How does the man who was raised to be a weapon, to put his brother and everyone else first, find the words to say how he feels? How does he even begin to comprehend what Cas is telling him, what it means for them, when he's met with the stark reality that after this, Cas is gone?

Dean isn't a particularly prosaic man. He talks a lot, yes, but to him words are like a shield. Crack a joke, make some self-effacing comment, do anything but say what he feels, because if he does that then he can't take it back and if he can't take it back then that's the end of everything.

No matter all the shitty things he does, he can take it back, he can make up for it, but the words are what really matters. The words are what stick around long after the bruises have faded.

I need you.

It's those little moments that betray how he really feels, and he's more vulnerable than he'd ever knowingly allow himself to be.

Even just calling Cas his best friend is letting his guard down a little too much for comfort. Like... this is a man who can't hold down a relationship to save his life. Who's lost so many comrades that it feels inevitable that anybody who joins their fight will become a casualty for the greater good. Sometimes you have to remember that death doesn't stick in their world except when it can be used to hurt the most, but every time Cas dies, every time he goes away, it hurts Dean like it could be the last time.

And every time, it might be. There's that little bit of hope that despite all odds Cas will come back, they'll figure it out, they'll move heaven and earth to save him—

But not this time. Because you don't say the things that Cas said unless you don't plan on coming back. Dean certainly wouldn't — hell, he saved it til the very end to tell his own damn brother he was proud of him, because it didn't matter if he made himself vulnerable in his dying moments because after that, he'd be gone. No consequences to deal with. No uncomfortable acknowledgement of what he'd said.

So Dean doesn't say anything when Cas spills it all, because even if Cas is gone — even if the only person to hear those words isn't around to echo them — Dean still has to live with whatever he says. If he says 'I love you, too', if he begs Cas to stay, then those words can't be taken back.

And anyway, it doesn't need to be said, right? These are two men who'd fight through purgatory for each other — whether they say they love each other or not, it doesn't change what they have.

But for Cas, that isn't enough. Tiptoeing around it, ignoring the elephant in the room, it isn't enough.

Happiness isn't in the having. It's in just being. It's in just saying it.

Because for Cas, whose actions so often backfire on him, whose intentions could be perfectly pure and yet his actions could still betray him, speaking his truth is the only way to make his love manifest. To remove any ambiguity. To shatter the last little scrap of an illusion that what they have was only ever friendship, was only ever kinship.

So no, Dean didn't say 'I love you', just like he didn't say it back in 8x17 when the script called for it (bless you Robbie), and even if we had another ten seasons which were somehow entirely devoted to making Destiel canon I doubt he would've said it by the end of it all because he's just that bad at making himself vulnerable. That's just who he is. I need you, don't do this, but never what he really feels.

So the third post shows Bones being forcibly melded with by mirror Spock in Mirror Mirror (tos), and the second one talks about how Bones can barely walk after this meld. And the first post is when Spock has to meld witj Jim, Scotty and Bones so they don't die in a simulation.

My first point is how scared Bones looks in mirror mirror, which is completely expected when such a private man is having his mind forcefully entered into. And this look carries onto the other time (in the show at least) we see Bones' melded with.

So this raises this question of how much trauma Bones holds, and doesn't tell anyone, about that event. Because, as I said before, he's such a private man. Was it difficult for him to undergo another meld at the hands of the same man who's only physical difference is facial hair?

Does this mean that it was difficult for him to come to terms with Spock's meld in the Search for Spock? Because it's stepped up from a meld to actually holding someone's consciousness and the process of transferring it was even more dangerous than a meld. Or had he healed and talked about it by then?

Did he avoid Spock for weeks after mirror mirror just because it's the same eyes he stared into as all he is was reluctantly shared to a man who could bribe him with all his being? Because the pain of someone pushing their way into your soul like a deep stab wound hadn't healed and there's no psychologists on board to help?

Did this influence him in any way? It's said in a star trek book that there wasn't anything in a modern medical bay thay he didn't influence and some fans have suggested that the reason in tng why there's a cmo and a ship psychologist is because of Bones.

Parent Character of The Day: Angela Montenegro (Bones)

Seeley Booth from Bones.

See...well...I don’t think Seeley Booth is the type of character I was thinking of to begin with. I mean maybe he was pre-Army, pre-sniper, pre-tortured days but when the show starts I think he is already a firm cynic about people and the world. I am thinking more of a character who is optimistic, idealistic, has a strong moral center, and generally positive outlook on the world and on people. 

And how much I dislike her characterization lately.

At the beginning of the show, Bones is out of touch with pop culture and show little to no romantic attraction to others. She is obviously a very sexual creature but she states on multiple occasions that she doesn’t understand/feel romantic love. So she is possibly aromantic. This characterization was extremely important to me because I saw Bones as a role model and I also am unsure how I feel in regards to romantic love.

Here was a very successful woman who knew what she wanted from her life and knew what she wanted from the sexual partners in her life. 

Then there is Booth, who believes in all consuming romantic love and who obviously is deeply in love with Bones. Somehow, through 10 seasons, Bones does a complete 180 in her beliefs on romantic love. Now, it is totally possible that she just hadn’t met someone that deserved her love until Booth but it angers me that she just suddenly flips a switch into romantic love.

The same arguments can be made about her views on marriage and monogamy and her emotional compartmentalizing. All of which I identify with.