Hello, Bones fans! Fall is in the air, and Brennan is a bad liar. Here are your Bones Top Five Moments!
Brennan tries to distract Booth from the telephone call she just finished that clearly involved a surprise for Booth, by telling him they will not have turkey on Thanksgiving. First she tries to humanize the bird, and then she tries for the waste of food option, all to no avail. Booth will invite Aubrey, which admittedly is a good option for the wasted food argument, along with Angela, Hodgins, and the whole dang neighborhood if he has to, as long as he gets to eat himself into a coma and watch the game. Of course, he has to cook the dead bird.
Meanwhile, Booth is convinced the surprise is a jet ski, so he’ll be in his footie pajamas on Christmas day, waiting for his new toy.
Vivian Prince. Per Hodgins, front page, left column of the DC Sentinel and the finest political reporter in the country. She broke an NSA snooping story. Apparently she out-Snowdened, Snowden.
In the car, Booth and Aubrey have an argument about freedom of the press, and afterward it seemed like David looked directly into the camera. Weird.
At the Sentinel offices, they meet with David Pyne, Vivian’s boss, who is sure that an NSA hit squad, Greystream Solutions, got to her. He says he doesn’t know who gave Vivian the documents, a source known only known as “The American.” Then he just loses it and yells, “Kolfax, get in here!” But it turns out he’s all worried he’s going to lose his job if he’s not the first with the story about Vivian getting killed. How compassionate of him. Kate Kolfax is just as upset, in that not at all. I guess Vivian was real popular. And unless Booth has something quotable to tell her, she’ll be off to do her Vivian is Dead story.
Aubrey makes a crack about how Vivian had to get tons of plastic surgery to compete with the younger, prettier, perkier Kolfax. Pyne makes no apologies about putting that pretty face on the front page and video blogs. Booth is dismayed that the news is no longer about telling the story. Because I guess he’s been living under a rock.
A Mr. Gill from the NSA comes into Cam’s office to tell her that he’ll be heading up the Vivian Prince investigation. Cam tells him to go away. She doesn’t want to hand over information to the very agency that may have killed Vivian. She doesn’t work for him, she doesn’t answer to him, and unless Mr. NSA can come up with a court order, she’s not handing over anything. And by the way, she can get security to escort his ass out of there.
B&B have it out about if Greystream is right or wrong on the way there. It’s like a live version of my Facebook feed. Where is the mute button?
The Greystream guy, Cooper Blackthorn, is all “blah blah blah…above your clearance level,” so Brennan figures as long as they’re stonewalling, she might as well cut to the chase and asks if they killed Vivian. To which Blackthorn answers, “Yes, of course we did! I’ll just go get the dudes who did it and be right back.” Or not. What he really does is give them a hypothetical that goes something like, “I’m not saying we killed her, but if we were this totally awesome hit squad she said we were, you wouldn’t have found her.” And then he makes some reference to the evidence that Booth thinks points to a professional, that he considers to be the work of an amateur, even though no evidence was presented to him. So they may or may not have listened in on conversations pertaining to the case. Well, that was productive. And not a little bit scary. If Blackthorn was trying to paint Greystream as this benign organization, I’d say they need another mascot.
And when Hodgins finds out the NSA guy, Gill, came calling, he’s convinced it was all just for show, and he just placed bugs all over the place. Hodgins is worried the NSA is trying to use the Jeffersonian to find The American, so he collects everyone’s phones and basically says all communication will be done by carrier pigeon from here on out.
When B & B get to Vivian’s, they find a glucometer. There’s no laptop, but Booth does find out Vivian was going to cut off alimony payments to her loser ex. He’s a sports writer named Sal Raymond, but he’s not quite as successful as his wife, since he has the high school sports beat. Yikes. But loser ex insists everything was amicable, and that no more payments was his idea.
Then the guy who is NOT an FBI agent makes the logical argument that the NSA couldn’t have killed Vivian, because it just makes them look worse and points them toward Kate Kolfax, our perky and ambitious reporter. Vivian had promised her the front page, until The American stories came out, and she decided she wasn’t going anywhere.
Gill shows up at the F.B.I. right after Aubrey gets done questioning the ex, creepily knows he’s going to interview Kolfax, and says to ask her about the encryption key that decodes the emails between Vivian and The American. He also insists there are some people at the NSA who want them to be better and knows things need to change. He says if somebody “on their side of the fence” killed Vivian, they want this person found, and now I’m beginning to get a clearer picture of Mr. Gill and what he’s about.
Aubrey goes to Kolfax as an interviewee. Then he tells her they got fingerprints on whoever broke into Vivian’s, they know this person is using an encryption key to try and read the emails, and that person is about to be arrested for murder. Kolfax, being a reporter, picks up right away that the interview was a ruse, and I’m trying to figure out why Aubrey took that tack at all, since he didn’t even try. She hands over the laptop and the encryption key: George Orwell. So she just thought it was a passphrase, tried it, and it didn’t work, and that’s what she spent three hours doing? If she didn’t try “1984” she needs to be fired like yesterday.
But okay, if I have this straight, the glucometer they found at Vivian’s is a dual access system. Essentially you need an access code plus the biometric encryption in order to read the files. The verification code was drawn from her blood. Vivian’s blood has her genetic markers. Without her blood, they can’t read the encryption. And though you can’t draw blood from a stone, you can from a bone, and voila, an email from The American about meeting at the Riverbanks Inn, room 43.
But the Riverbanks Inn can’t provide any records, because they cater to Washington insiders who want to conduct their affairs off the grid. No security footage. No TV. No phone. No wifi. Jammers on the property. Not a hotel I’d wanna stay at, that’s for sure. Then the front desk dude mentions their “associate,” and Booth busts down the door, gun drawn, to find the lovely Mr. Gill already snooping.
Brennan finds blood all over the curtains and conveniently catches the room service guy and his sterling silver plate covers with a nice spike on top, and identifies it as the murder weapon. Room service guy is extra helpful and says Vivian stayed there six months ago, was cheating on her ex, and the ex nearly killed her. The ex still insists they were totally fine, mentions the guy she was cheating with wore Ferragamo shoes, and says he had an interview at another paper in Tallahassee the night Vivian was killed. Though how this guy would know Ferragamo shoes from Payless will remain a mystery.
When Hodgins does a fingerprint analysis on the room, he discovers Gill pretty much touched every available surface and comes to the accurate conclusion that an NSA guy wouldn’t be that stupid and had to touch everything on purpose to cover up that he’d been there before wearing his Ferragamo shoes. Then he says something I figured out when Gill talked with Aubrey. He is The American. Essentially Vivian lied to hubby about having an affair. She ruined her marriage to protect her source.
Hodgins, Booth, and Brennan talk at the Royal. Hodgins wants to protect Gill’s identity, while Booth is all for exposing him. He tells Hodgins off, and for good measure his wife as well for her secrets, even though he’d deduced that secret had to do with a jet ski, but whatever.
Parker, Booth’s son who we haven’t seen in…forever, shows up from London. And of course, he looks a hell of a lot older. When he said, “Hey, Dad,” it actually took me a moment to remember Booth had a son. That was the secret Brennan had been keeping. And she got them tickets for the Flyers/Predators game. Booth does not apologize for throwing a tantrum.
It turns out Vivian was tortured. Lucky for everyone, the squintern this week is Rodolfo, who is familiar with torture. He not only knows it’s called palmatoria, he also happens to know the exact region of West Africa it comes from And remember creepy Cooper Blackthorne, the head of Greystream? He was stationed in West Africa for five years.
I guess Parker and some Flyers tickets softened up Booth, because he meets with Gill at the Riverbank and manages not to scream at him.
After Booth spells out to Gill what he did wrong, like he doesn’t know, he tells Booth the drive he gave Vivian had thousands of documents. The first story was only the tip of the iceberg. She was going to keep hammering at Greystream. And I guess the sweep for bugs at the Jeffersonian wasn’t effective, because he knows they figured out Blackthorn was the one who tortured Vivian.
Now that Booth knows they’re going to take Blackthorn in for the murder of Vivian, he wrongly figures Gill’s life is no longer in danger, and he arrests Gill for treason. I guess he skipped the part about proving Blackthorn did it and putting him away first. But it’s too late now. Gill is on the front page already.
The NSA has thrown Blackthorn to the wolves, so he’s cooperating. Apparently he was operating on their orders to use “enhanced interrogation techniques” on Vivian to retrieve the documents. But Vivian took the torture and kept on ticking, so he just walked away. He tortured, but didn’t kill, Vivian.
And guess what? Vivian was actually killed with a metal detector. And who did we see with one of those? Gill. It seems he didn’t like the way Vivian ran the story about Greystream to where she put innocent lives in danger. Dude, she’s a reporter. Anyway, he just wanted his jump drive back. He figured out she was just using the documents to keep her job because of Kolfax. How naïve could this guy be? So, he was using the wand to find the drive, they scuffled, he hit her, and she fell into the room service cart.
He never found the drive, but when Hodgins takes a late-night snoop in Vivian’s office, he finds it in a pen holder with a quote from Orwell at the bottom of it. Instead of broadcasting everything that’s on it, he gives it to Booth who still doesn’t apologize for his tantrum. Ah, well.
That’s it! It ends at the B&B house for a lovely Thanksgiving dinner, with Angela thinking of having another kid. We won’t be seeing our Bones crew for three weeks, and it looks like that may be the season, if not series, finale. Stay tuned!