2017, 12 episodes. Final season of this police procedural in the CSI
mould: a team of forensic experts at the "Jeffersonian" consults for
the FBI.
Everybody knew this would be the last season, so there's a lot of
effort put into wrapping up loose ends: relationships are resolved and
opened to future possibilities, fan-favourite characters are brought
back for one last outing, and the last episode in particular ends in
an orgy of reminiscence.
There isn't really a through-line story for this season, except for
the general theme of endings and goodbyes: characters who've been
around for a while can be sent off to new lives, and the effects crew
can do some serious damage to the standing sets. The physical part of
the previous season's cliffhanger is defused as quickly as possible,
but leads into what one would expect to be a season-long investigation
of the details behind it… except that it's mostly a few brief
sequences among the regular crime-of-the-week stuff.
I applaud the scriptwriters who tried to write the effects of a
temporary loss of intelligence on Bones, who defines herself as a
person who is intelligent; the way everyone says "oh, hey, you're
still you so that's OK" while completely failing to understand the
significance of losing a chunk of one's cognitive capacity rang true,
though I'm not sure they meant it to be quite as dark as it felt to
me.
The show has always had six core characters, and has kept four of them
from the beginning, something of a rarity in a programme that's run
for this long. This certainly helps in the portrayal of an effective
team, particularly once the scriptwriters stopped trying to push
various sorts of tension into the group and allowed them to work
together against the criminals; those four, and the fifth who joined
in season 2, are clearly used to working with each other and spouting
technobabble, so they can concentrate more on getting into character
and in particular effectively portraying the interactions between
these long-term friends.
Of course like most cop shows the police are (almost) always right and
anyone opposed to anything they do is a Bad Person. One has to hold
one's nose and accept it, or just not watch.
This has never been a really great series, but from unpromising
beginnings it managed to make something surprisingly interesting,
particularly in its last three years with a fully stable core cast.
Comments on this post are now closed. If you have particular grounds for adding a late comment, comment on a more recent post quoting the URL of this one.