2015-2016, 22 episodes. Police procedural in the CSI mould: a team of
forensic experts at the "Jeffersonian" consults for the FBI.
Once more this is more of the same, but it continues to have
moments of interest. The directing (i.e. senior hands-on) producer
(Ian Toynton, who'd been doing the job since the start) was replaced
by Randy Zisk, but he doesn't seem to have rocked the boat much.
There's a fair amount of arc plotting here: Booth and Brennan start
the season having left their jobs, and have to be got back into place;
and the precursor to the season finale comes several episodes (and two
months of real time) earlier, rather than turning it into a
two-parter. Most seriously, Hodgins gets injured in a bomb explosion
in episode ten (just before the Christmas break), and over the second
half of the season gradually learns to cope with his paralysed legs
and the implications for his relationships and professional life.
There's also crime-of-the-week, of course, sometimes attempting to be
topical in that slightly wrong way that network TV always does (a
murder victim had founded a men's rights organisation); and in a
series that's often grim there are some welcome touches of humour.
Booth and Brennan have to investigate at an old-west-style shooting
competition and among college a cappella groups; a film crew follows
the team around the lab; and Booth meets an old rival from his
college-hockey-playing past for whom those were the glory days of his
life, while to Booth they're just a vaguely good memory from before he
joined the Army and then the FBI.
There's certainly no point in jumping into the series here: insofar as
it rises above generic procedural, it's because it's run for 235
episodes (longer than any other one-hour drama on Fox) and it's full
of parallels and references to earlier material – not the heavy-handed
"remember when"s, though there are some of those, but more the way the
writers and actors have clearly kept previous series in mind when
considering the way characters react to things.
The show was renewed for a twelve-episode final season, which seems to
be the best modern approach to cancellation: yes, the show is
stopping, but the writers are told about it in time to wrap up ongoing
storylines.
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