TV is the New Reading

Going out big

In a week packed with finales,

‘Bones,’ ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ loom large

Dave’s a murderous creep who targets Mike’s girlfriend, strangles his own wife and gets Susan’s fake fiance deported on the eve of a camping trip wherein he planned to kill them anyway. Also, Orson has stumbled upon Bree’s storage shed of treach- ery and schemes revenge.

It’s all “go” on Wisteria Lane this weekend, but “Desperate Housewives” isn’t even the most amazing season finale on deck.

We’ve had exciting season finales this week on “Brothers and Sisters” -- bowing out just in time to make way for this weekend’s two-hour conclusion on “Desperate Housewives” -- and with the good doctor’s gradual realizations and consequent self-admission on the fifth season finale of “House,” and the jaw-dropping extra-dimensional astonishment in the first season closer of “Fringe.”

Coming up tonight, we’ve got the season finale on “Bones.” We’re told this one takes Booth and Bones’ relationship to the next level and the preview does show them in bed together. While I can see the writers doing that, I haven’t seen their relationship develop in a way that would lead there.

See, last week Bones determined, based on a word-association exercise, that she’d like to carry Booth’s baby and went about securing his contribution.
This is where Emily Deschanel gets to demonstrate what a fantastic actress she is. Her assertions in these passages -- a cold, dispassionate assessment of what makes Booth such an ideal candidate genetically -- are such that I’ve never encountered in my young and clearly sheltered life, but delivered with a perfectly clinical detachment.

Characterwise, Bones apparently forgets all of the interpersonal calculus she’s been working so hard to decode in the past four seasons. The writers are clearly going for comedy. For his part, Booth has been seeing things for several episodes, now, and finally his hallucinations are diagnosed for what they are -- a brain tumor. This week finds him fresh from surgery and ... well, it would appear that for all her initial plans for artificial insemination, Bones and Booth are going to go about this the old-fashioned way after all.

‘Grey’s Anatomy’

More to the point, however, cast your mind back to a year ago, where actress Kathrine Heigl was complaining publicly that none of her storylines for that season of “Grey’s Anatomy” were Emmy-worthy. Critics were abuzz and agog, and for a show that lives so much of its contract-negotiation process in the public eye, this looked like the door her character Izzy Stevens would get booted through with her cancer diagnosis.

Now I’ve got to wonder. Certainly that opened a lot of public speculation that Heigl was out by the end of this season. After the big brouhaha that got Isaiah Washington kicked, we barely see enough of his squabblemate T.R. Knight to remember he’s still in the cast. And after Dr. Hahn got kicked for being Callie’s lesbian lover, they just brought in another hot blonde for her on the rebound, and there’s no real difference there besides her replacement being quite a bit younger.

But I digress. It’s entirely possible that all of that media buzz was to lend more drama to Izzy Stevens’ cancer. Izzy could survive and thrive for years with her new husband -- as of last week, fellow surgeon Alex Karev. Or she could die on the operating table.

Either way, through some intense hallucinations of her dead lover, the process of her character’s self-diagnosis and her recent efforts to plan a friend’s wedding while suffering the effects of chemo, it would be hard to argue that she hadn’t been given anything Emmy-worthy to do this season -- and indeed, Heigl has carried through like a champ.

The fourth-season finale of “Bones” airs at 7 p.m. on FOX, and the two-hour fifth-season finale of “Grey’s Anatomy” begins at 8 p.m. on ABC.

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