Bones crunching: seven days, 12 seasons, 246 episodes and one addled brain

Monday

In an attempt to battle the pandemic, I have decided to watch every episode of the television show Bones in a single week. Why? Maybe I think if I watch enough I will suddenly have a perfect understanding of the human body via osmosis and be able to manufacture a vaccine out of tins of tomato soup. Or maybe I find the concept of the real world so terrifying right now that I can only function by escaping into a fantasy world where David Boreanaz can shoot my problems away. Whatever the reason (hint: it’s definitely the second one), you need to get on board. Just be thankful I didn’t start a podcast.

Today, I watched most of the first season, and it’s fine. Your standard procedural cop show with your standard twists – Dr Bones (Emily Deschanel) is a forensic anthropologist working at the Jeffersonian Institute in Washington DC. She loves bones, but (twist!) hates people. Also (twist!) she’s a bestselling author of trashy crime novels and (twist!) shoots bad guys even though she isn’t technically part of law enforcement. One final twist (which, assuming each twist is 90 degrees, should turn you back round to facing the right way) – her name isn’t actually Dr Bones, it’s Dr Temperance Brennan. Bones is just something her FBI partner calls her because she really likes bones. It’s like calling a baker “Cakes”, a paper salesman “A4 Glossy” or me “Convoluted Metaphors”.

Tuesday

Deep in season two now, and clearly we’re supposed to be shipping Dr Bones and Special Agent Seeley Booth (David Boreanaz). That’s his actual name, by the way – I’m assuming he was named after a section of a restaurant at Seaworld (“We don’t have any space at the Dolphin Stools right now, but if you wait 15 minutes a Seeley Booth should open up”).

Each episode has a familiar rhythm to it. First, some poor civilian finds a skeleton in a place they weren’t expecting to find a skeleton – maybe in a water filtration system, maybe under in a bath, maybe in a fridge. Then they call in Dr Bones, whose team analyses the skeleton, gathers clues and digitally reconstructs the victim’s face using pointlessly flashy graphics. FBI agent Dolphin Stools then questions the suspects, using his cop instinct – something that’s anathema to the cold hard logic of Dr Bones (which causes lots of arguments, and on TV, an argument between a good-looking man and a good-looking woman in a will-they-won’t-they relationship is basically foreplay).

They spend about 20 minutes going back and forth between suspects, they get stuck, then Bones looks at some more bones while Cannonball by Damien Rice plays (I have no idea why). By minute 41 of 44, she has solved the case and Agent Tuna Three-Seater-Chesterfield slaps the cuffs on the bad guy. Credits … and repeat.

Wednesday, 1pm

I probably should have checked how many episodes there were of Bones before committing to this. My uncle, who has watched all of Bones (of his own volition, he’s not doing a competing article for a rival paper), has told me that the 246 episodes adds up to 10,824 minutes; there are only 10,080 minutes in a week. But then what is time at the moment? Why should I measure in hours and not episodes of Bones? In this temporal cocoon we find ourselves trapped in, why can’t I decree that a week is not seven days, but instead as long as it takes me to finish every episode? Is this not an opportunity to break free from the bondage of time, to find a new way to value life?

Wednesday, 1.15pm

Checked with my editor and it turns out I still have to file this by 9.30am on Monday.

Thursday

After 80 or so episodes, the show has either gone seriously off the rails or it’s a work of genius. I can no longer tell. The writers have given up on the boring normal procedural storylines (serial killers eating victims, terrorist plots with generic Muslim characters, blah blah blah) and have moved into the realm of glorious absurdism. Bones and Booth join a travelling circus; Stephen Fry has a role as a psychiatrist/culinary chef/retired rock god; the father of the lab technician Angela is the real-life lead singer of ZZ Top and he turns up to kidnap random members of the crew for his “biker missions”; Stewie from Family Guy turns up as a kind of Great Gazoo character for Booth, and also it turns out Booth has a brain tumour that gives him amnesia and that’s why he and Bones can’t be together, which is something I now crave more than oxygen.

Meanwhile skeletons are turning up in ludicrous places (at a bungee jump hot air balloon wedding! Inside a giant chocolate bar! Eaten by a tiger at a zoo!) and doing ludicrous things (exploding! Glowing green! Becoming foamy like a Lush bathbomb!). Is it real? Is it a satire? I don’t know. I don’t care. I cannot stop watching.

Friday

Today, during one of his experiments, the entomologist Dr Hodgins froze a turkey and chucked it off a balcony in front of a big crowd, and it inexplicably bounced and hit Angela in the face. I laughed so hard I cried. Then I thought about the crowd, all standing less than two metres apart. It’s funny how we can now look at something as simple as throwing a bouncy turkey at a group of people and see something sinister.

I had my first Bones dream tonight. I was with Bones and Booth on a London Overground service to Gospel Oak because a skeleton had turned up in my old school sports hall. It’s odd which specific parts of that are now unrealistic.

Saturday

One of my favourite secondary characters, Vincent Nigel-Murray, an eccentric British intern who likes to spout random trivia tangentially linked to whatever case they are working on, died today. He was shot by a vigilante sniper who was aiming at Booth in the dramatic season finale. He kept saying: “Please don’t make me leave,” as Booth tried to save him, and for some reason this has floored me.

You could see it coming (any time a disposable character is happy towards the end of a season, you know they are not long for this world) and the pain was the necessary catalyst for Bones and Booth to get together (finally!), but his death still comes as a shock, even in a show filled with corpses. Maybe it’s the fact that he has the character closest to mine? He has been replaced by a young intern from North Carolina who comes out with hackneyed, stereotypically southern exclamations (“Well, hack my legs off and call me Shorty!”) and it’s hard not to take it as a personal insult.

Sunday

I’ve reached the end of the week and have made it to halfway through season eight. At this point I know the show so well I feel like Bill Murray towards the end of Groundhog Day: an all-powerful god, in my dressing gown, able to predict what characters are going to do with perfect accuracy. Dr Hodgins will come out with a crackpot theory about the US government; Dr Sayoran will roll her eyes, but not in a mean way; Bones will fail to recognise anyone famous from the past 70 years (even though in season one she stated she was a fan of Kanye West and Cat Power, by season eight her understanding of pop culture is the same as that of a Puritan settler); most importantly, by minute 41 of an episode, Agent Booth will catch the bad guy.

The show is gloriously formulaic – and I don’t mean that as an insult. Right now, it’s something to cling to, a pocket of predictability in an uncertain world. Where everything resets after 44 minutes, where characters can be tormented by grief and trauma one minute and go undercover in a ballroom dance competition the next. Because that’s how TV works. Free from long-term consequences, from existential doom.

I love being here. Just don’t make me leave.