Now that the team has dealt with the loss of Sweets, we return you to your regularly scheduled Bones episode. Here are our top five moments!
Booth is not sleeping, and Brennan is concerned. She’s so concerned, she’s quoting Sweets. She thinks Booth has avoidance issues, but of course Booth denies it and points out Brennan doesn’t even believe in psychology. In Brennan’s defense, he tries to deny Aubrey is his partner, and Aubrey reminds Booth he’s not the reason Sweets is gone.
He does take Aubrey to some of the interviews, but not all, and doesn’t let him look at the evidence. Brennan says Booth needs to start trusting more people than just her and that he hasn’t been to church. Eventually Aubrey puts his foot down and takes his life in his hands by calling Booth an idiot. But he manages to calm Booth down by telling him that Sweets trusted him to work with Booth, so when Booth treats Aubrey like crap, he’s treating Sweets like crap as well. At last, Brennan knocks some sense into him, and he trusts Aubrey to come to an interrogation. In the end, Aubrey comes to their home to bring them some wine, and it’s Brennan who needs to be reassured she and Booth are still partners.
When last we saw Intern Fuentes, he was hitting on Brennan. He does hit on Angela right off the bat, and Angela tells Hodgins Fuentes is eye candy, so he needs to get used to it. I wonder if she’d feel the same way if Hodgins was hitting on female eye candy. Fuentes offers his condolences about Sweets. He also tells Brennan about how his brother was betrayed by the police he worked with and had to learn to accept there were things beyond his control. Brennan equates this to quantum physics, and it seems to help her a great deal.
I’m glad to see he’s dialed back the whole Casanova thing quite a bit.
Weasels (aka stoats) had nested inside the corpse and made it look like the body was moving. Gross. Hodgins is stoked, though, as he gets to capture the little guys, as well as their nest, which they decorate with the body parts. Aubrey decided to show up, only to see the (half of a) rotting corpse and immediately get ill. Turns out the corpse is an obese right-wing radio icon named Hutch Whitehouse, and his cortisol and oxytocin levels make it seem like he enjoyed getting killed. The injuries show he was tortured prior to death.
At last, everyone gets on the same page and figures out Hutch was into S&M. He had an empty office space he spent a ton of money to soundproof, so that’s where he had his fun. Of course, when Booth and Brennan check it out, they find blood and lots of bodily fluid. Yuck.
Hutch’s wife promotes women’s rights issues all over the country, which explains why she didn’t report him missing. She can also understand why Booth sees her as a suspect, since she stands to come into thirty million dollars. At her hotel, she threatened the front desk clerk to get a ground floor room. Booth thinks it’s because she was having an affair, but she insists she wanted to be discreet when she bought drugs, because she knew it would ruin Hutch’s career. She also knew about the dominatrix.
Among the threats Hutch received was from a man who believed Hutch was too soft. His name is William Byers. It also appears he’s ordering fertilizer to make bombs. He calls Hutch a traitor, because Hutch wouldn’t spread the word about the armed uprising. Then he lies about murdering Hutch, because it’s obvious he wants to be famous and spread his hate message, but Booth catches him in the lie and promises Byers that because of the whole bomb-making thing, he’s going away for a long time, and nobody will know his name.
Alan Spaziano is Hutch’s partner and “punching bag.” Hutch called him a demo-crap. Booth immediately seizes on him as a suspect. But Spaziano points out that Hutch didn’t believe half of what he said, and without Hutch, he has no career. Therefore, not much of a motive to kill him.
Hutch’s producer, Bob Gordon, is a mega-billionaire who gives to conservative causes. He does have a record of two DUIs and hunting deer without a license. Hutch had left him a message that he was sick, but Bob thinks Hutch is being a diva and goes to drag him to the station, only to find he wasn’t there. He also says he deleted the message. But when it’s discovered Hutch was dangled by a deer hoist, he becomes the number one suspect. However, he admits only to disposing of the body, since after he couldn’t find Hutch at his house, he called the wife, who told him about the fun space. Bob found him there in leather with the ball gag in his mouth. He didn’t want the cops to find him like That.
With computer graphics, Angela is able to put a (squash) ball gag in Hutch’s mouth and figure out he was hit in the nose. With Hutch’s swollen nose and his mouth obstructed, it led to his death. But why didn’t the dominatrix remove the ball gag and save his life? When Booth interrogates her, she insists that wouldn’t happen on her watch. She’s a licensed therapist, etc. Hutch felt bad he earned his money inciting the worst in people, She “disciplined” him, which satisfied his need to be punished. Plus, all of the restraints had releases he could use. She insists Hutch was making progress. He was thinking of quitting the show to become a moderate. A voice of reason.
Angela was able to retrieve the message Hutch left for Bob and figure out that it wasn’t Hutch but Spaziano pretending to be Hutch to mess with the time of death. He found out Hutch was quitting the show, and without Hutch, as he said, his career was finished. So thinking Hutch was all bound and gagged and couldn’t do anything, Spaziano decided to make a blackmail video. Only problem was the safety release. Hutch came after Spaziano, who struck Hutch in the face with his cell phone. Spaziano tries to say it was an accident, but Booth just walks out on him.
It looks like Aubrey is going to be a great addition to the team. They’ve fallen into a nice groove. Bones and Brennan are cozy in their new house, and it looks like Booth may actually get some sleep. It’s nice to see everything returning back to normal.