This week’s Bones relationship problems don’t focus on our happy main couple. Instead, it’s the Arastoo and Cam show. Here are your top five Bones moments!
Here we go. It’s the when/if we talk about marriage discussion between Arastoo and Cam, prompted by his mom sending Cam a recipe for a traditional wedding dish. Cam is more than relieved when she gets a message about a dead body.
The other drama involves Brennan approving his dissertation subject, which is based on something Brennan had spoken about. When Cam acts like Arastoo’s mommy and pressures Brennan to let him know if she approved it or not, Brennan says she didn’t. Who didn’t see that coming a mile away? I hope nobody.
So Mommy Cam decides to go see Dr. Brennan, who says she wants a trailblazer, not a sycophant. She also rightly calls out Cam for speaking for Arastoo and how she may feel an underling’s poor performance reflects badly on her. Zing. Brennan-1, Cam-0. Cam slinks away.
Then Brennan lets it slip to Arastoo that Mommy Cam went to Brennan about his dissertation. He is so not pleased about that. He immediately lets Brennan know he did not ask Cam to do that. She informs him she wants him to be more original, and he says he trusts her, which is why he asked her to be his mentor. All in all, he’s being way more adult about this than Cam is treating him.
Cam also gets her ass handed to her by Arastoo, who says she doesn’t have respect for, or faith in, him. This brings him full-circle to the whole “if” marriage thing, because like he was going to let that slide. He says it’s not Brennan he can’t deal with, it’s her. OUCH.
With all of the horribleness of the episode, of course this ended okay. He decides to do his research on forensic methods to prove human rights atrocities. Brennan approved it. Arastoo apologizes for pressuring her into marriage, and she invites him over for the wedding dish.
This week, we have a corpse discovered by eco-herders who use goats instead of plows. They eat everything but the person, so that’s helpful, but the clothes are fair game. That means some nice goat poop for Hodgins to sift through. Also, though they wouldn’t eat the body, the goats did manage to trample all over it. There is a funny bit where Aubrey has to chase a goat that got the victim’s watch.
The victim has some missing toes and is malnourished with osteoporosis, even though she’s too young to have the disease. Also, all of the bling she had on her was a man’s. The first assumption is that she’s a thief. Nice to just judge her right away, guys. Why don’t you wait for, I don’t know, evidence before you put labels on the poor, malnourished dead woman?
The first assumption for cause of death is sexual assault, but Cam can’t find any evidence of it.
Min-Yung also has cave disease, which I guess means she has bat guano in her lungs, which leads once again to poop and Hodgins getting to use the term “bat cave.” That info, plus the bus stop, leads them to where she was living.
The goat pooped a bunch of pieces of photo paper that Angela was able to salvage. She got five matches, but Brennan is able to identify which one it is.
Min-Yung lost her toes going over snow and mountains to be with Sung. So sad.
The murder weapon turns out to be a cuticle pusher.
Sandra Zins: Okay, so maybe they weren’t far off. Turns out that fancy watch belonged to a rich woman, Sandra Zins, and that rich woman recognizes the dead woman as Theresa. Sandra speaks Chinese, due to her spending a bunch of time in East Asia, working for an international relief agency. She’s not upset about the stolen watch. She just says she would have given Theresa the money if she’d asked for it. And she’s more than happy to do the funeral arrangements. She also tells them the agency where she found Theresa. Sunny Helpers.
Jeremy Walford: Former teacher. Victor leads them to him. He apparently hit on Min-Yung, but she’d told Victor not to do anything. Since the cause of death is at first ruled sexual assault, this guy goes to the top of the list. He’s a registered sex offender who got the boot from his teaching job for fooling around with his Asian female students. A prince of a guy.
Once he’s brought in, at first he’s insistent about how good he is and to ask his court-appointed psychologist. Then he cops to getting insistent enough with Min-Yung that she had to physically push him away. He does give one piece of useful information. What bus she would take to go home toward Highlandtown. But when he asks if that’s enough not to get him locked up, Aubrey tells him it isn’t.
Victor Lee, owner of Sunny Helpers. He says Theresa had worked there for three months. He just found out about the stealing situation. He and Theresa were from a poverty-stricken village called Yanbian. He just found out about the stealing but never got to confront her. He calls her Min-Yung and says she had so little money, she didn’t have a permanent place to stay, so he couldn’t contact her.
Once they figure out where Min-Yung lives, they go to the remote place. There’s a lot of weird noises before Victor opens the door. He tries to say the noises are the creaky house, but then there’s coughing. When Booth locates a door located on the floor, he opens it to find a bunch of women beneath the house. Welcome to Sunny Helpers, the slave edition. Needless to say, Booth has to restrain himself from killing Victor and instead just throws him up a wall with a hand to his throat.
Andy Dolmar represents Victor. He’s a sleazebag, but a high-priced sleazebag Booth is convinced is paid for by someone else. Victor maintains his innocence, but he’s still going to jail.
Sung Dae Park, the man in the poop photo. He’s wanted in Yanbian for the murder of Min-Yung’s father. He works construction, and they find him at his job. But…
He is shocked as hell to find out “his” Min-Yung is in the states. He admits to killing her father, but only because he sold her to a man in the village. He witnessed the dad beating her. He came to the states to make a new life for them, but the men who brought him over took everything. They were both trafficked.
He’s devastated when Booth confirms it’s Min-Yung who’s dead, and he blames himself. Alex has to put him in the system. If they don’t find Min-Yung’s killer, Sung will be blamed for it.
Holy moly, what the heck is going on here? Now we’ve got a chocolate/peanut butter issue when State Department Official Alex Radziwill becomes involved, since this is a human trafficking case. So Booth makes him promise not to get his human trafficking all over his homicide case, and vice-versa, but it’s immediately rescinded when Aubrey gets upset that the women might be locked up in a holding facility. Alex tries to placate him with how the women might get asylum and wants Booth to get the whole questioning thing over with, so he can do his job. The good thing is, Alex has provided a translator.
Someone named Chao-xing, but in the states she’s known as Tammy, speaks for the group, since the rest of them are too freaked out and beaten down to do it.
When Booth asks Tammy who hit her and Min-Yung, she looks at Victor all fearful, and they get him the heck outta there. Once he’s gone, Tammy is a lot more forthcoming. She tells them Victor threatened her daughter, Yena, and her entire family, in order to keep her in line. Victor wouldn’t let her call home, and she says she wants to speak with her daughter. That’s when the entire group comes forward with pictures of family members they want to talk to as well.
Both Sung’s construction company and Sunny Helpers used the same recruiters. The company that owns them both is a company called Common Reach. Which is run by Sandra Zins. Whoops!
She’s also, coincidentally, represented by Andy Dolmar. After Alex brings in a whole file folder filled with proof of her human trafficking, and they slap the handcuffs on her, the proper Englishwoman falls totally apart.
She may be a trafficker, but she didn’t murder Min-Yung. Oh, this is so sad. It was Tammy, who worked in a nail salon. Victor found out Min-Yung was sneaking out, and he threatened everyone that if she did it again, he would punish everyone’s families. Min-Yung said she wouldn’t stop, so Tammy felt like she was protecting her daughter by killing Min-Yung.
He had them so brainwashed, they would have believed anything he said. A tragedy all the way around.
Aubrey is taught a little lesson in humility. At first he’s all gung-ho to get the positive press about taking down a pedophile like Jeremy, but after he sees those women, he realizes he was being “ass like,” because he was looking at other people’s pain for what it could do for his own career. Lesson learned, kid. Now go do your job.
All’s well that ends well. Brennan reminds Booth that without the death of Min-Yung, all of those women would have remained slaves. And while Booth can relate to Tammy’s reasons for killing Min-Yung, Brennan can relate to her search for Sung and how she almost missed her opportunity to live her life with Booth. In the end, they dance together, safe in each other’s arms and thankful for what they have.