TV is the New Reading

“Bones” third season

finale exciting, jaw-

dropping … familiar

“Bones" turned in another jaw-dropper this past week – literally, a rogue jawbone turned up at the Jeffersonian – but it seems in this third-season finale like they might be going to the well once too often.

Zack Addy, a lab tech played by Eric Millegan, is laid up in a hospital bed healing from an explosion that it turned out he himself had engineered as a distraction from the fact that he was working with a serial killer the team had been tracking since the season opener.

In order to stay out of prison, Addy takes a deal that sends him to an asylum. He sees the error of his ways and he will use the time to recover mentally and physically, possibly one day even to return.

Hunky and dory both. But I recall a second-season finale subplot in which Addy – newly recovered from a traumatic explosion then as well – was sent to Iraq to investigate mass graves or some such.

It seems like another situation where everyone makes tearful farewells – in this case, to the same character, even – leaving open the potential for emotional reunions. In "Bones," the team is a character unto itself, and the opening episodes of the third season showed that Addy was practically irreplaceable.

That's a wrap

Mostly it feels like they tried to wrap up far too much. The trial of lab tech Temperance Brennan (Emily Deschanel)'s father, FBI Special Agent Seely Booth (David Boreanaz) getting shot by a crazy person and then the government staging Booth's fake funeral – all of these are worth more time than the show had to give. Wrapping up the Gormegon serial killer storyline was perhaps the greatest bobble of all.

Roping in Addy as his apprentice was one thing. But after detailing Gormegon's theatricality – that he's an extremely wealthy and well-connected cannibal who uses the bones of his victims to construct eye-grabbing silver-plated skeletons – and then revealing Gormegon as nothing more than some creep in a basement is almost ... rude.

Honestly, how much potential was lost in that shootout? The show had just this season introduced an extraordinarily capable psychiatrist, and it's not likely we as a viewing public would ever encounter a mind like Gormegon's anywhere but in fiction (knock wood). Since the writers introduced him, I wanted them to explore his character and motivations. Not as a main storyline, of course – he'd be in jail, and "Bones" is primarily about investigation. But even if they'd captured Gormegon, he could have other apprentices and other victims that they could get him to talk about.

Familiar

Beyond any of these considerations, the whole tear-jerking funeral for a main character that turns out to have been a dream sequence or faked to flush out a bad guy has been done to death. It's a huge time-waster, unnecessarily manipulative, dishonest and above all, tired. It should stop. It won't, because it's an easy switcheroo and writers are often lazy, but it should.

More than anything else, it hurts the impact for when writers actually have to kill off a character – it will be sad and touching and lovely, but in the back of their minds, everyone will be edgily suspicious that the character will pop out of a cake somewhere during May sweeps, or when the actor in question gets back out of county lock-up.

So Season Three ends as it begins – the team facing the loss of one of its own as Bones and Booth remain unable to express their feelings toward one another.

With any luck at all, Season Four won't be troubled by a writers strike that forces too many storylines into too implausible a space.

Features Editor Terry J. Aman compiles the Best Bets for The Minot Daily News.

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