It’s a sappy Bones this week, as Daisy is just about to pop. Here’s your Bones Top Five Moments!
After last week, I’m glad to see Daisy. Everyone is concerned about her condition, but she thinks Sweets would have wanted her back out in the world. And though she hasn’t even set up the baby’s room yet, she’s quite zen, because her Doula said the baby would let her know from the womb how to decorate it. She’s also getting Daisy to buy crystals for a painless delivery, despite her previous need for general anesthesia for a tooth-filling.
Everyone, even open-minded Hodgins, thinks Daisy is taking a ride on the crazy train. Angela is convinced Daisy is having a nervous breakdown and for once she wants Brennan to keep telling Daisy she’s ignorant. Ooh. The sweet, weird one who’s had some pretty wacky ideas of her own, wants Brennan to be mean to the recently widowed, pregnant woman? Whose hormones are probably doing The Macarena right now? Nice!
Hodgins takes a much kinder and gentler approach. Also, a more direct one. He thinks Daisy is pushing all of the science people away, because she’s afraid of losing someone else, but Daisy is adamant that is not the case.
Brennan tries the ignorant approach, and Daisy is rightly offended by it. Brennan once again cites her bad people skills, which isn’t in play here, since Angela told her to be horrible to Daisy on purpose.
Then to make this whole approach look even more nasty, Daisy comes clean to Brennan that she’s alone and is just trying to connect to the baby without Sweets there. Dang, people, she’s just trying to cope. Lighten up!
Angela takes Daisy to the real doctor, but Valentina, the Doula, does show up, and it’s Mindy Cohn! Oh, but she doesn’t endear herself to anyone when she’s kind of passive-aggressive and condescending. Then won’t allow Angela to come into the examining room because she’ll “mix up the energies.” Oh, Valentina, don’t make Angela look like the good one.
Also, all of the medical people aren’t alarmed when Daisy ignores contractions. It takes her water breaking for them to finally take it seriously. Daisy wants to solve the case, but she’s going to the hospital where she’ll be in a darkened room with bird sounds. That would scare the living hell out of me.
The room does look nice, and there’s a lovely bath with candles. Apparently everyone at the Jeffersonian can abandon their posts, because Brennan, Angela, and Cam are there. So is Valentina, who is being obnoxious and is telling everyone to leave. Daisy puts her foot down and says she wants her friends there, as well as the godfather, Booth. And Cam tells Valentina to shut the hell up when she tells Daisy she’s making the baby feel unwanted with all the screaming and to picture a forest. Amen to that, Cam.
Daisy has had it, as well. To hell with the bath. She wants shiny machines that beep, and she wants the lights on. Oh, yeah, and the epidural. Turns out real pain is a whole lot worse than imagined pain.
Booth shows up and just wants to shove the teddy bear at Daisy and leave, but he’s got a roomful of women, plus Hodgins who showed up at some point, guilt-tripping him, so it looks like he’ll be added to the list of spectators. And it gets worse, because Daisy had wanted to be on the “crystals for pain” plan, it’s too late to get the epidural. Instead, Brennan gets her to focus on the case, and she winds up solving it. Booth can’t get out of there fast enough to inform Aubrey.
Meanwhile, Booth and Brennan have amassed an entire baby store’s worth of stuff they’re giving to Daisy. The usually stoic Brennan is feeling quite sentimental about the whole thing, even if she’s not on board with Daisy’s baby speaking to her from inside the womb
It’s all about the fracking. Apparently protestors found some bones at a fracking site, and to make matters worse, there’s a bunch of hydrochloric acid in the water, which is eating away at the tissue as well as the bone. But Hodgins to the rescue with the best cure-all, baking soda. That stuff has a million and one uses. Like duct tape.
It turns out he’s Lawrence Brooks. His skull surgery made national news, and geeky Cam knows him as “the puzzle master.” Crossword puzzles, to be exact. And he was a recluse, not a protestor. He lives close to the site, and his wife Emelia never reported him missing.
Lawrence was wearing a cast, and there’s puzzle clues on it. Cam can identify what is and isn’t his writing, due to her getting him to sign a completed puzzle. Oh, Cam. But the other way they can tell is that the clues not in his handwriting are easy to solve. And they all have a theme: attack, vendetta, payback, justice, punish, etc. Could they be from the killer? DUN DUN DUN!
And it seems Lawrence’s bones were deteriorating before the acid got to them. Turns out it was from medication for Alzheimer’s that he might have gotten after his head injury. But if he had Alzheimer’s, how was he able to write all of those awesome puzzles?
Alexis Sherman – Lawrence’s assistant. I guess on top of everything else, Lawrence was a control freak (wasn’t there one last week as well?) and never let her create a puzzle on her own. And though Lawrence promised to make her co-editor, Aubrey thinks she’d get impatient enough…to kill him? That’s a big leap there.
Yeah, sure she may have screamed and yelled, but she still feels she had the best job in the world working for Mr. Puzzle Man and seems genuinely upset he’s gone. Booth and Aubrey, forgetting the good cop/bad cop routine, both are openly hostile and insulting, and she calls them on it.
Booth does back off and asks for her help. She obliges by playing an answering machine message from a guy calling Lawrence a thief and a hack. And a couple of days before that, a guy had shown up saying he had an appointment with Lawrence, when he didn’t. Now that Booth has remembered to be pleasant, Alexis says she’ll be more than happy to sit with a forensic artist to get a picture of the stalking dude.
Emory Stewart – The stalker guy. He used to be highly intelligent and have his life together until a couple of years ago when his parents died in a car accident. Since then he’s been a drunken mess.
He doesn’t look like one when Booth interrogates him. He seems nice young boy who’s put together and sputtering and stuttering all over himself when Booth accuses him of murder. He’s no stalker. He views Lawrence as a god and is writing a book about him. That mean message wasn’t his. He was angry after his parents died but went to counseling and is fine now.
But he’s got another name for them. Donald McKeon, who was Lawrence’s roommate in college. He’s also a puzzler, but a lame one who only has his crosswords at car washes. Loser! Emory claims Donald is crazy-jealous of Lawrence.
Donald McKeon – He was the angry voice on the machine. They were able to trace the call to the Granville Hotel, where he’s been staying for the past week.
At first he’s all self-righteous, until he finds out Lawrence is dead. Did they go to the hotel, picked him up, drive him back to the FBI offices, and not tell him anything until they got him into the interrogation room?
He’s furious that they messed with his proof that Lawrence was stealing from him. He’d sent his own puzzle to Lawrence, who published it under his own name.
Emilia, the wife – She assumed he was off creating a puzzle. Where does one go to create a puzzle? We don’t get an answer to that, but it seems the poor woman led a very lonely existence. Lawrence’s puzzles were his children, so they never had any, and it seems he was away for long periods of time. At that point, you might as well be single.
She knew he had Alzheimer’s but kept it to herself. Even after he’s dead?
Also, her argument that she thought he was just away creating a puzzle doesn’t hold water because a) she knew he wasn’t creating them any more and b) when someone with Alzheimer’s wanders away, you contact the authorities immediately.
Anyway, Lawrence had a bunch of unpublished puzzles he didn’t think were good enough, but Emelia was the one publishing them. She also published McKeon’s puzzle, but it was by accident, since it was on Lawrence’s desk.
Lawrence couldn’t retire, because they were broke. He forgot where he put all of his money. I’m assuming it’s no place where they send statements.
It turns out there were bank statements with clear clues, so wifey must not have looked very hard. There are e-payments to LPAK, LLC that started five months previous. It’s a front for an online gambling site. Lawrence had some broken fingers, and it turns out this gambling site is local. If you want to stay off the grid, you can meet with the bookie in person. Is this real? Because why leave yourself open to broken bones like that, when you can be anonymous? And how off the grid are you if your bets can easily be traced through your bank statements?
Booth is all hopped up and excited about placing a big bet and purposely losing. But of course nobody is letting him onto this particular playground, what with his gambling past, so Aubrey is the one who got the account and did it. He even shuts down Booth’s computer for him. Way to be subtle there, Aubrey. He gets less subtle, when he straight-up calls Booth an addict and says he doesn’t want Booth to jeopardize his sobriety. Gosh, I miss Sweets.
Booth takes it surprisingly well.
Aubrey meets with the bookie who cops right away to the broken fingers, but it was only to send a message through him to the actual person doing the gambling. Alexis. She took advantage of the Alzheimer’s and used Lawrence’s accounts to pay off her debts, but she’s no killer! However, she is arrested for stealing the dude’s money and probably won’t be able to pay it back with her snazzy new Lawrence job if she’s in jail.
Lawrence’s neck was broken. It looks like he might have been the attacker, and the killer pushed him in self defense. It wasn’t Lawrence’s blood at the crime scene. It was a partial match, which means it’s from a relative. Daisy is the one who figures out he has a son.
Aubrey found the answer in Emory’s book. Lawrence got his college girlfriend knocked up, but he had to give the baby away after the mom died during childbirth. Aubrey has already unlocked the adoption records.
To nobody’s surprise, the son is Emory. The book was a way for him to get close to Lawrence. When his parents died, he found the adoption papers. He told Lawrence he was his son. They made plans to meet at a diner, but when Lawrence didn’t show, Emory went to his house and followed Lawrence when he went on a walk. Of course, Lawrence had no recollection of the conversation and even attacked Emory, who did push him just to get him away. Lawrence just fell wrong.
When Emory finds out Lawrence had Alzheimer’s, he cries and said he would have been a good son and taken care of him. Then maybe you should have admitted to what happened, rather than throwing him in the pit and pouring acid all over him? Just saying.
To a bouncing two-month-old. Or that’s what it looked like to me. Booth and Hodgins were behind the curtain for the final stages but are there once the deed is done. Everyone agrees he looks like Sweets. As you’ll remember, Sweets wanted his son to be named Seeley, so his name is Seeley Lance Wicks-Sweets. Goodness. That’s a big name for such a little guy. Booth is the first to hold him. It’s all very bittersweet that Lance isn’t there to see his son, but everyone did their best to make Daisy and the baby feel loved.