Friday, May 15, 2009

I wish I could forget...

(Fair warning: This post contains spoilers, however vague, for the season finale of Bones (and House, but mostly Bones.)

That's it. I am so done with Bones. The season finale was not just an hour-long "fuck you," it was an hour-long "fuck you" that, by the end, made absolutely no sense at all.

They made mincemeat of a character trait of Brennans--she's supposed to be a bestselling writer, but now we know she's actually not a very *good* one. Not that you have to be good to have a bestseller, but it's depressing to know this about her: As a scientist, she may be world-class, as a writer, she's a hack.

This was before leaping head-first into one of the biggest soap-opera clichés in history. Amnesia? I mean c'mon, really, amnesia?

They are officially out of ideas.

At least on House, the "it was all a dream (or hallucination)" ending worked because of how good an actor Hugh Laurie is, and because it didn't violate the series or the character. Here...

5 comments:

Cal's Canadian Cave of Coolness said...

Concider the shark full jumped...I too am done with this show. Booth is great but Brennen is the most annoying 'smart' person on TV. Totally unlikeable - that 'I don't get the nuance of human interaction' character flaw is beyond cringe. Can we have a show with all the other characters without her? No...so its all got to go.

jeopardygirl said...

I haven't seen the series, but I have read one of the books it's based on (Deja Dead). Despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that it's written in the first person, I had absolutely NO feeling for Temperance Brennan. There is nothing particularly witty or endearing about her. She doesn't seem to have any quirks apart from the usual post-Boomer feminist sense of entitlement of needing to be taken seriously (I have it myself, so I recognize it). I had no interest in reading any more of the Reichs books, and even less interest in seeing the series. This clinches it.

Ben Varkentine said...

The thing is, my Canadian friends, it's only in these last two or three weeks that Brennan has crossed the line, for me, from socially awkward to "What are you, retarded?"

I've never read the books but the series actually started out good and got better.

I have no problem at all recommending anyone watching the first three seasons.

It's just that it's now peaked...and it's all downhill.

Unknown said...

Third season was ok until the last episode, when everyone was acting out of character because the idiotic plot demanded it, especially the big reveal of the "bad guy". I'm not saying that character couldn't have done it, but not in the way it was written. Maybe if they would have had more time to flesh it out, but the strike precluded that.

As for the finale, I thought it was funny, and figured it was a hallucination of Booth's. When I saw the reveal, I just remembered previous characters pointing out how 1-dimensional some of her characters were. Her social dysfunctions were the biggest problem I had w/ the show from the beginning. If she is that inept (see the episode dealing w/ the jury coach) how can she write anything that the mass market can read, much less enjoy?

Ben Varkentine said...

That's always been a sticking point for me--I perceive of writers as having to have a certain amount of self-knowledge, and she has little or none.

But as long as they just told us she was a writer and didn't expose us to her "writing" I could overlook that.

But now...