Hello, Bones fans! It’s Halloween at the B&B house, and Booth is prepared with fifteen pounds of candy, no matter how bad it is for a child’s endocrine system. And it’s Sleepy Hollow crossover time! It’s a good thing your recapper watches both shows. Here are your Bones Top Five Moments!
Brennan fires the first shot, when she makes Booth think he’s eating real brain.
Of course, there’s Hodgins’s demon eyes. He only has one pair of contact lenses, as all contact lens wearers do. Michael Vincent flushed them down the toilet, so all he had were the demon eye ones. Yes, he took the time to make sure those were on hand but not an extra pair of regular ones. Happens all of the time.
Booth does get Brennan back when he pretends to be a reanimated corpse.
Next to the corpse the gang finds a mortsafe, or an iron safe that was used to prevent grave robbing. I don’t know how effective it was, since somebody has already opened it. I guess they didn’t get the memo about not opening up old coffins with a weird symbol on it. Bad juju. Baaaaaaad juju. And look! Inside is an eighteenth century soldier in full Redcoat regalia! And he has no head! I wonder how that fits into the whole Sleepy Hollow thing…and you know what kind of episode this is going to be when a carved pumpkin rolls into the coffin and lines up nicely with where Redcoat guy’s head should have been. Cam: “Happy Halloween.” WAH WAH. Never mind that it’s a corpse from the EIGHTEENTH CENTURY and maybe you would want to get that pumpkin out of there, no?
Back to the more current COTW, she’s Sarah Lippman, a third-year medical student. She’s usually all magenta-haired and pierced goth girl, but she was found with Mary Sunshine’s pink dress, pink shoes, and blonde hair. Her boss, Chief Resident John Cruz, explains she was trying to look the part of a doctor and points out her boyfriend, Joel Brown, in the anatomy lab. A bearded guy who was standing next to Joel and digging through a dead body with him, seems overly interested in what’s going on and watches the door longingly after Joel leaves with Booth and Aubrey.
Joel insists that even though people thought they were an odd couple, because he’s a good Catholic boy, they were good together, and she was happier than she’d ever been. The new appearance, he insists, is because he’d rubbed off on her. But inside Sarah’s locker, there’s an old witchcraft book with the same weird symbol on the cover that was on the mortsafe.
The Redcoat COTW was a high-ranking British officer, so it’s odd that he was buried under a church in the middle of nowhere.
Just as Hodgins says there’s something otherworldly going on with the corpse and the symbol, etc., Abbie Mills and Ichabod Crane show up. I don’t care how ridiculous it is that they’re standing in the middle of the lab. I’m just happy to see them.
Ichabod explains he’s from the historical society, and he helps F.B.I. agent Mills. Brennan’s not about to give up the bones, and Abbie says she’s not leaving without them, so this forces Abbie and Ichie to stick around the lab.
Hodgins immediately mancrushes hard, when after he makes fun of Crane’s garb, Crane goes off on one of his famous rants. And a guy names Seeley takes it a little personal when Aubrey makes fun of Ichabod’s name.
Anyway, Crane and Abbie believe that the Redcoat COTW is Abraham Van Brunt, aka Mr. Headless Horseman, born in 1749 and decapitated on the battlefield in 1781. Angela is immediately charmed by Crane. Because she’s human. She’s also done facial reconstruction on the faceless dude and begins the facial recognition process.
While they wait for the results and Crane’s big head blocks the screen, Brennan says she finds Crane’s and Abbie’s persistence both irritating and impressive. Crane says, “We are a partnership of opposites, yet our affinity for one another bears the ripest of fruit.”
Brennan rightly assumes they’re sexual partners. Crane, of course, is highly offended by this accusation and insists they’re not. Brennan says, “Then I would suggest you consider it” and talks about how rewarding it was to take her relaysh with Booth into the personal realm. For once, Crane is speechless. That’s quite a feat.
If around this time you heard great, heaving gasps and squealing, that would be Ichabbie shippers everywhere.
Anyway, I guess they’re saved by the facial reconstruction, and the result is surprising and ominous for Crane. It’s not Abraham but General William Howe, Commander of the British Forces during the War for Independence. Dude was a cruel bastard, apparently. Crane throws around phrases like “mystery of the highest magnitude,” and he will not rest until it’s solved. Brennan gives him a look like, “Whatever, you intense weirdo.”
And it’s kind of cool, because Booth and Abbie have teamed up to scour Sarah’s apartment. Booth finds a note that reads, Last night was insane. XX. and we all guess it wasn’t written by her good, Catholic boyfriend.
Anyway, they find a hammer next to a fine-tooth saw with some red threads in it, so this must be the way he became Headless Howe.
Crane identifies the book found in Sarah’s locker to be Librum Sub Umbras, which Brennan translates to Treatise on the Subject of Shadows. It’s filled with Alchemical recipes, blood rituals, druid rites, and necromancy. Then Brennan makes the humongous error of calling it a book of nonsense. Crane tries not to go on a rant while he explains it’s a book of spells, and the key to unlock it is a mystery to all but the most learned scholars. They’re replicas of an illuminated manuscript first painted by Bavarian monastic scholars.
The word “illuminated” sparks an idea in Hodgins. He says they need to illuminate the text with candlelight, and I kid you not… Angela puts a burning candle onto the Angelatron. And y’all? It totally works. This episode is insane in the best way. Crane reads the hidden text. It says the text is the guide by which the Witness will procure the skull and give him the power to raise the dead.
Rut roh. I guess Sarah missed the part about the Witness. Which she isn’t, but Abbie and Crane totally are, in the biblical sense.
Crane gives shifty eyes as he says he wishes he had the resources to delve a little deeper. HINT, HINT. Brennan gives him free rein of the Jeffersonian archives. That’s like Disneyland for Crane.
To add to all of the strangeness, it appears Sarah’s brain neurons had been dead for two weeks, which would have made her clinically dead two weeks before she died. Wendell helpfully explains that maybe the person Sarah brought back from the dead was herself. DUN DUN DUN!
Aubrey figures out that Sarah died and was resuscitated two weeks ago, but according to her insurance, there’s no record of it. Aubrey also discovers Sarah went to a bar and spent $250 on a bottle of champagne. And, ew. She was beaten to death with Howe’s skull.
Would it surprise you to find out that Booth knew Corbin, Abbie’s mentor? Corbin said Abbie was a lot like Booth back in the day, and I laugh when Booth chastises Abbie for wanting to save the world overnight. Pot, meet kettle.
I was right to suspect bearded guy, since he was the one sharing that expensive bottle of champagne with Sarah. He wrote the “insane” note. However, he’s gay, so there goes that theory. He tells Aubrey he and Sarah became friends, because they both were close to death. He was really sick as a kid, and Sarah had a sister who died young. Not exactly the same thing. Sarah became obsessed with finding out what happens after you die.
And oh my goodness, we’re now dropped into the movie Flatliners, where he induced Sarah’s heart to stop and brought her back. Sarah said it was transforming. I wonder if she was visited by people she’d harmed in her past…Well, I guess not. She saw her sister, who told her to let go of all of her fear. That’s what they were celebrating.
After swabbing Sarah’s injury, Hodgins comes up with stuff you spray on the underside of morgue tables, so off they go to the anatomy lab to sift through the corpses and find some recent blood spatter. It’s on the ceiling. `
In the archives, Crane finds an edict from George Washington that says not to bury Howe in England but in the colonies. Crane pushes it further and says he meant preferably in Sleepy Hollow. Brennan notices the signature is off from the handwriting, and Crane can’t hold back his pride when he says the letter was dictated to a trusted captain. But Brennan being Brennan, she’s wants to wait for proof the letter is authentic, which must be aggravating to the guy who wrote it. So, the bones are still hers.
Angela analyzes the note, and she states what we all know. That the handwriting in the letter is Crane’s. But when confronted, Crane has an easy explanation. His ancestor, also named Ichabod, wrote it. Brennan accepts this explanation but still won’t give up the bones until the case is solved.
Howe’s skull is found in the medical waste from the anatomy lab, along with two empty vials. The prescriptions were filled the night Sarah died by the Chief Resident of her program, Dr. John Cruz, who we met for two minutes at the beginning of the show.
Anyway, long story short, John not only knew about the experiments, but he supplied her with the drugs to do it. After his wife left him, he drank too much, and Sarah smelled it on his breath. Rather than report John, she blackmailed him for the drugs.
Howe’s canine tooth is missing, and when Brennan finds out from Crane it was porcelain, she realizes it must have injured the killer’s hand as he was, you know, using the skull to bash Sarah. The tooth was found in and among some coffee cup debris, and voila, skin cells. Who do they belong to?
The boyfriend, Joel. He admits to touching the skull, as he was there when Sarah dug up Howe. This is a fact that if he wasn’t guilty, he probably should have copped to earlier. Sarah’s new goody-two-shoes persona wasn’t so much a result of him rubbing off on her, but her Flatliners experience. She wanted Joel to experience as well. The couple that dies together…
Except Joel, the guy with all of the faith, saw nothing when he went to the other side. Sarah took his faith away. So when he came to and saw her holding the skull, he snapped and killed her with it.
Anyway, case solved, B & B and Crane and Abbie head to The Founding Fathers for a drink. Except Brennan and Booth bead a hasty retreat, in order to give Abbie and Crane some alone time. Maybe after Crane finishes his Sex on the Beach, or as he says Benjamin Franklin referred to it, Fondled in the Forest, he’ll be in the mood.
That’s it, folks! How did you like the crossover? As a fan of both shows, I have to say, I didn’t know how they’d pull it together, but I think because they went for fun and lighthearted, it worked. Did you watch the continuation on Sleepy Hollow?