This week we’re back with the Booth/Brennan relationship and whether Christine can use swear words. Also, don’t bring up “hedge fund” in Aubrey’s presence.
Here are your Top Five Bones Moments!
Christine calls her stuffed animal “jackass.” Booth throws a gasket, of course, and calls it a “gateway swear word.” Brennan is all for moderate swearing and thinks it’s good for Christine’s wellbeing. It should surprise nobody when Booth does not get onboard the Good Ship Profanity and has a little swear-word meeting with Little Miss Potty Mouth. Christine proves she’s got a little bit of her mom in her when she insists Bunny is, indeed, a jackass.
In the end, Christine winds up calling Brennan a jackass and reports she also called her teacher the same. She then told the teacher her mommy said it was okay. Booth is thrilled over being right and sits Christine on his lap while they both wait for Brennan to explain why calling your mommy and your teacher a jackass, is wrong.
One of the many obnoxious interns is back and is immediately obnoxious. What is it with this show and thinking I want to watch someone be smug and jerky? I don’t care if he is Jack Klugman’s nephew.
He ups the jerk meter further by asking Brennan how many hours she used to spend in the lab, because he intends to surpass her. Then he reminds her he’s a genius with a 160 IQ, and I just want Brennan to take this nimrod down about ten notches.
I get my wish when Brennan practices what she preaches and calls him a pain in her ass, so she wouldn’t smack him then says with his personality, he’s probably used to it. He complains about it to Cam, who cheers for Brennan.
He even manages to piss off his doppelganger, Hodgins. Someone does need to smack him.
In the end, Brennan shows him up by discovering something he missed, which winds up being the final piece of the puzzle. As Oliver said, she handed his ass to him. She makes a quip about how being second best can be good enough for many people and vows to make it her obligation to destroy him.
Ewww. A squiggly piece of the victim falls on Cam’s shoulder, and Hodgins manages to get a picture to display at the Christmas party. Those squints know how to get down and have a good time!
Aubrey is bored doing his paperwork that nobody will read anyway, he assigns himself to the case and accepts Booth’s facetious offer to take a bite of his sandwich. Booth should know better than to offer food to the human food Hoover, who immediately takes the whole dang sandwich for himself.
This episode is also headed for even more of a huge gross-out factor, when Cam and Brennan have a literal tug-of-war over the skull. Brennan wants it to discover cause of death, but Cam wants it to discover who the victim is. Though Angela says it’s too damaged to do a facial reconstruction, Cam decides to be Dr. Frankenstein and put the actual facial features of the victim on the skull. “Pass me the nose” is a phrase I never want to hear again. Oh, and she attaches the ear with a glue stick.
It works. His name is Toby Wachlin. He works as a trader at Horizon Equities. They’re a hedge fund. But Booth is concerned Aubrey might take this rather personally, since he hates the one percent more than Booth does. This strikes me funny, since Aubrey looks like a one-percenter. But Aubrey insists he just wants to catch the bad guy.
Turns out, our Toby liked a bit of the nose candy, so much so, it caused a hole in his nasal septum. What Cam had thought was a special blend turned out to be pollen mixed in with the cocaine. Hungarian Oak pollen, to be exact. Toby also had insecticide in his system, and it’s a highly regulated chemical used only by Insects No More. With this info, they’re able to narrow down where Toby was killed.
Angela discovers a locked file on Toby’s phone that can only be opened with his iris.
Mrs. Wachlin, who just wants to pace and say “Oh my God” a lot. You see, she won’t be able to function without ol’ Toby, as he’d taken over both of their lives. Poor dear can’t even change a light bulb. How long was she with this guy? Since she was ten?
She insists everyone loved Toby, but I’m getting a distinct control freak vibe.
Things couldn’t have been that bad, though, since she just got finished spending a week in Miami with some friends, and she has a housekeeper.
Derek Walker: Turns out the house that was fumigated was his, and when Aubrey and Booth get there, it’s Wolves of Wall Street. A woman in a bra and panties answers the door, ignores the badges hanging from their belts, and tells them the blow is in the back, and the women are everywhere. Inside, there’s a raging party going on, complete with hookers and coke.
Derek goes total frat boy and acts like an idiot due to being completely “coked up.” The techs find blood in the back bedroom and evidence someone tried to clean it up. But while it would seem he’d have motive to kill Toby, what with Toby firing Derek from the High Frequency trading division, the prints on the presumed murder weapon, a candlestick, are a hooker’s.
McKenzie Solloway: According to her, she runs a linen service online, but they found Toby’s phone, wallet, and wedding ring at her apartment. She insists the sheets she sold Toby were worth four thousand bucks, and Toby didn’t have it, so she took his stuff as collateral. Toby charged her, so she took the spikey candlestick and swung it at him. She insists all she did was nick his arm. Further investigation reveals she’s telling the truth.
Mason Barnes, Toby’s boss. Aubrey breaks his promise about being professional, when he’s immediately hostile and accuses Mason of cheating the clients by using a computer algorithm to front-run the market. As Aubrey sits there and fumes, there’s much whooping and hollering from the other employees. Derek comes in to give the good news, and Mason tosses him a huge roll of money to give to the employee who made him ten mil.
Turns out Toby recently “hit the wrong key” and cost the company around eight million dollars, but the year previous he made the company half a billion dollars, so it was a forgivable mistake.
The locked file on the phone, that they used Toby’s actual eyeball to open, is a recording of Mason telling Toby he wants him to get 500K to the Chief Technical Officer of the CitiCore Stock exchange. I guess the closer your computer is to the main server, the faster you can get in your trade. One or two nanoseconds can mean tens of millions, so the 500K is nothing.
When Booth and Brennan go to arrest Mason for securities fraud, Brennan identifies Mason’s drawer handle as the object that made the mark on Toby’s mandible, and she blue light special’s his desk to see a ton of blood all over the corner of it. But his alibi is that he was with a hooker, and he has the selfies to back it up.
Blair Ellis: Despite Mason’s claim that Blair only wants to kill the market, the amount of vengeance he took out on his phone would say otherwise.
He lost 500K due to Toby’s mistake but insists when you’re on a team, you don’t kill the quarterback just because he’s had a bad day. Though Blair claims to be all about the team, Aubrey insists old-school traders like him hate high-frequency ones like Toby and feel they’re locking guys like Blair out.
Blair continues to toe the company line, until Booth brings up how he used to be a real quarterback for the Spartans but got suspended after he punched out a ref.
Then a piece of emerald is discovered lodged in Toby’s skull, which came from Blair’s championship ring. He claims it was an accident. He caught Toby stealing cash from Mason, so he smashed Toby’s head nine times into the corner of the desk to teach him a lesson about loyalty. I can see where that would be a lesson he wouldn’t soon forget.
Aubrey’s dad owned his own investment firm but got arrested when Aubrey was thirteen for running a Ponzi scheme. The man skipped bail, went to Croatia, and left his wife and kid with nothing. So, that explains his extreme hatred for stock brokers, as well as his knowledge.
As expected, he loses all objectivity and manages to yell at the widow about how her husband didn’t love her then tells Booth he needs to get back to his neglected paperwork instead of making the big arrest.
In the end, Brennan finds him and commiserates with him over the whole “My father was also a criminal who ran out on me” thing. At first her comforting talk is not that comforting, what with her saying she never got over the pain. But she says he needs to stop fighting the pain and pushing it away. It’s just a part of them.
She compares it to the discovery of the quark and how at first it upended all of these physics theories and everyone fought over it. But it was the truth and in the end wound up giving them a better understanding about life. If they’d denied it, there would have been no progress. She finishes by saying that nothing of value is easy. Then she says she left her wallet at work and asks Aubrey to buy her a beer out of gratitude.