What Drew's Watching: Bones

Bones: Season 6, Episode 6 “The Shallow in the Deep”

In the hard and fast details, this one's pretty ho-hum. The plotline is formulaic but cozy, like your favorite sweater -- I solved the mystery straight away but refused to believe my initial suspicion. There's a good turnout in the comedy department--Sweets on the cruise ship is a lot of fun, and I got a kick out of Hodgins's and Daisy's reenactment of the murder at the end. (Also, Booth rolling his eyes at Bones's pedantic corrections had me chuckling.) But what really drew me in was the background stuff -- you know, the stuff you usually gloss over. I groaned at the beginning when after the revelation that the Jeffersonian's staff would be working on an old slave ship, the camera gave each character an opportunity to showcase his or her best long-suffering, slavery-is-horrible expression. Wonderful, I thought. I came for a murder mystery, and I get a lecture on slavery. So you can imagine my shock toward the end of the episode when Cam says almost exactly the same thing! In fact, Cam's and Angela's natural and self-aware treatment of the slavery topic stands miles above most similarly themed discourses, which all too often devolve into sanctimonious white guilt trips. The relationship conversation between Sweets and Daisy in the final scene touched me in the same way: it makes sense on a bone-deep level that many hokey "life lessons" wrap-ups in similar TV shows (or in other episodes of this TV show, frankly) never reach. Of course, I'm not here to grade these episodes based on their quality, not on how they make me feel, so this one gets a B-...but personally, I may well watch it again.

Plot: 6/10
Action: 1/10
Characters: 10/10
Comedy: 8/10
Bones's Makeup: 2/10 (And thank goodness, because whoever did Daisy's makeup this episode must have wandered in off the set of “Zombie Guido House Party.”)

Overall Grade: B-