After 12 seasons on the air and 246 episodes, BONES finally came to an end this week. The penultimate episode ended with a literal bang as the Jeffersonian was blown up by Kovac, a man seeking to destroy Booth and Brennan. The pair of them, along with Angela and Hodgins, were still trapped in the building when it exploded.
The good news, as we quickly learned in the series finale, is that all members of this crucial group of characters did survive the explosion. But the bad news came soon enough.
And that’s where the series finale picked up…
We panned over the destroyed remains of the show’s signature location, as well as the unconscious bodies of our squints and heroes. Hodgins, Angela and Booth all quickly realized each other was alive and Booth started screaming out for his wife.
Outside the Jeffersonian, Aubrey and the rest of the FBI tried to get in touch with Booth. When that didn’t work he headed over to the explosion site and was reunited with Cam and Arastoo.
Brennan was soon found, but she was very injured. Once she was conscious, however, she was desperate to remember what she had been looking at before the explosion. And then Brennan announced that something was wrong with her…something very serious and relevant to her brain.
Panicked, Booth tried to find a way to get all of them out of there, but the rescue crews arrived in the nick of time. Outside, an on-site test by a neurologist revealed that Brennan’s fears were real and her ability to process complex information had been compromised by the explosion. Still, Brennan wanted to get back to work inside the bone room.
As the squints headed back inside the lab, Booth went back to the FBI to try and catch Kovac. Some photos from Cam’s wedding actually led them to a possible accomplice.
When Brennan headed to the FBI and told Booth she was afraid of who she was if she didn’t have her intelligence, he assured her that she was so much more than just her forensic knowledge — she was the woman he loved and an incredible person to boot.
Meanwhile, thanks to some work by Cam and Hodgins, the team realized that Jeannine Kovac wasn’t Kovac’s wife — she was his sister. Soon after, a raid at an abandoned house led to Brennan recovering her complex thought processes and Booth shooting and killing Kovac, thus ending his vendetta against Booth and Brennan.
Back at the Jeffersonian re-construction had already begun and Brennan happily told Cam, Angela and Hodgins that she would be fine.
At the FBI, Aubrey announced that he was going to get the same promotion but remain in Washington, D.C. And while Aubrey’s most recent girlfriend had broken up with him, it seemed like there might be other romantic possibilities for him in the future…perhaps with Leslie Green.
A nice montage of various lab artifacts led to a lot of memories for BONES fans, but there was some big changes to come, even as the group reminisced about the past.
Hodgins and Angela revealed that they were working on a children’s book with characters based on people from the lab. Cam, meanwhile, announced that she was adopting three young boys with Arastoo, which is why she was going on an extended leave. Finally, Hodgins was told he would become the interim Director of the lab (a.k.a. the ultimate King of the Lab).
The final moments of the series finale found Booth and Brennan outside the Jeffersonian where Booth assured his wife that she would return to the lab soon enough.
Thus BONES came to an end, with a few changes for some characters and a future for all of them. And long-time BONES fans got one last nod — Brennan showed Booth a clock from her office that had stopped at the time of the explosion: 4:47.