The One Where I Write Way Too Much About Fictional People

(Originally posted December 11, 2011.)

So, this idea has been kicking around my head, pretty much since the season started. I’ve seen a lot of stuff written about Brennan’s character over the course of this season, and after the second and third episodes, there were a lot of things said that kind of had me a little up in arms. I started typing this up back then, and have been toying with the idea of posting it on and off since, but figured I’d wait until the first crop of episodes was done. Since that came even earlier than expected, I guess now’s as good a time as any to actually get this out there, right?

Basically, I spent way too much time thinking about and defending a fictional TV character, but gosh darn it, Hart Hanson and co. appear to own my soul with this little show, and I just had a lot of thoughts and feelings about Brennan’s evolution that I kind of had to spit out. Blame too much university education, and nowhere to use such skills, or something like that.

While I seem to be on my soapbox, I’ve got some more thoughts about the whole Brennan issue that I need to get off my chest, for no particular reason other than I’m trying to kill time during this hiatus (that is only 4 days old, Lord help us all) and I’m liking all the Brennan love I’m seeing on my dash so far, which counteracts the nasty crap I see elsewhere. Which I swear I generally try to ignore, as harping on the negative opinions is no better than those people harping on the positive ones.

So, without further ado, here goes nuthin’.

Whew, this is a long one, people. I’m sorry about that. This show just does things to me, guys.

I’m going to say right off the bat that there are some aspects of Season 1 Brennan I love and that I do miss, because I fully acknowledge that they have fallen to the wayside. She was snarky and sarcastic and feisty and more overtly “normal.” Clueless about a pop culture, sure, but still “with it.” She had relationships — friendships with Angela (and I choose to ignore that they supposedly only knew each other a year by the pilot) and even Hodgins and Zack, and romances with Douchey McTeach and Internet Dude and Blair Witch Hacksaw Firefighter Guy, with whom she displayed affection (though I think we can all agree that she kinda had shitty taste in men). She used colloquialisms in appropriate settings (“I want you to go federal on their ass!” Hee, I love that line), high fived when merited, joked when called for (like when she tells Zack to get the garlic and chant to protect them from evil spirits over a body, and when he thinks she’s for real, she mutters that it’s going to be a long day)  and freely displayed empathy.

As the seasons have progressed, there’s been a definite shift in her character, there’s no denying that. She’s become far more literal, far less cognizant of pop culture  and colloquial language than she was beforehand, and on the surface, much more aloof and “insensitive” (which is not an opinion I fully agree with, but I am getting to that point). I have absolutely no doubt that one (perhaps large) reason the writers have chosen to do this is for comedic effect. On any show, first season characterizations are always a little bit of a crapshoot, because the writers are still trying to flesh them out and figure out what works overall. And I am sure that the gang at Bones decided when they jumped on the “dramedy” bandwagon after the first few years that there was more humour to be mined out of “clueless” Brennan rather than “Pilot” Brennan (I still see some of the Pilot in later seasons, but I see why some people don’t).

I’ve seen some people online say that the shift happened after Season 3 and the Gormogon debacle, and I think that’s a fair assessment. Whether that change was practical — because the writers decided they needed someone to fill the Out-of-Touch slot in Zack’s absence — or deliberate — because Brennan shut down after Zack’s betrayal — is often up for debate. I think it’s a bit of both, but I do give the writing team the benefit of the doubt and for the most part lean more towards it being Brennan’s coping mechanism. They’ve planted some clues towards this, most notably in her interaction with the squinterns. After Zack, all the students are referred to by last name only, and she makes no effort to get to know them personally. She does not hang out with them outside of the lab, they wear different coloured lab coats (Zack and Angela always wore the same blue coats, even before the former got his PhD and the latter doesn’t have anything higher than a BFA) to distinguish them from the “real” team, and always holds them at arm’s length (until Vincent dies, but that’s another story). This is the “retreat” people see, and I think this is also when we start seeing the super-literalism and brashness some have complained about.

Yet, at the same time, when she’s alone with those she’s close to, like Angela or especially Booth, we start seeing some other walls come down as the others go up to the outside world. The guarded, scared, slightly bitter and hardened woman from season 1, who believed all relationships were ephemeral because the people she trusted and loved the most in her life abandoned her at a crucial time in her development (and that is another issue I could write an essay about), who relied on science to explain her world, because emotional ties failed her,  reunited with her estranged family and wanted to do things for them, realized that maybe there was more to sexual relationships than biology, and most importantly, started to think that love was more than just brain chemistry. And we all know what (who) the reason is behind that change. Like Coma!Booth says, she’s cool to the touch, but underneath, she’s all volcano.

Then the 100th episode happens. We know she has a tendency to shut down and retreat when she’s overwhelmed or when there’s been a major upheaval — there’s the whole Zack drama, and this is also implied in Man in the Fallout Shelter when she talks about what happened after her parents left and she was left alone with Russ. Booth was basically her safety net, and all of a sudden he challenges their status quo, after which she freaks the fuck out, because part of her is still the scared 15 year old who thinks everything is going to implode around her if she gets that close again (and was proven by Zack’s downfall). So she does what she always does when she gets overwhelmed, she withdraws and she runs — as does Booth.

So we move onto Season 6. Brennan’s so happy to see Booth again, and I do think the writers were trying to show that she was at the very least accepting of her feelings for him when she returned, if not willing to actually give them a shot. But then she finds out he made good on his vow to move on, and Hannah happens, and it seems like she goes all DANGER WILL ROBINSON! I’m guessing they were trying to depict her as confused — once again, she starts to trust her feelings, only to have them rejected (which is also revisited in Doctor in the Photo). And on top of that, she’s basically lost Booth for real, because she’s coming to the realization that they were never “just partners,” since now that Hannah is in the equation, “just partners” really does mean “just partners,” and nothing more. So not only is she missing out on a relationship with Booth, but she’s also effectively lost her best friend (which is a major point of contention in Season 6, but that’s a whole other post). Plus, as the season wears on, she “loses” Angela to marriage and baby preoccupation too (which is normal, and I’m still peeved that the one scene that summed all of this up perfectly was deleted, but at least it ended up on the DVD right?).

Meanwhile, throughout most of Season 6, we see what a lot of people call Robo Brennan (I’m not one of them, but again, I can see why they think that). She is probably the most literal and rational that she’s been in all seasons thus far, acts more awkwardly than we’ve ever seen, makes terrible jokes that no one gets and laughs hysterically at things that aren’t necessarily funny. All alarms are blazing, and it’s like she’s swimming, trying to find her footing after her world’s been turned upside down. And because both her BFF and her best friend are MIA(because of lazy writing) with their own personal issues, we don’t see the unguarded Brennan scenes we’ve seen in previous seasons, which makes the supposed aloofness even more glaring. I think it starts being toned down after Daredevil in the Mold (and more so after Blackout in the Blizzard), but I can see how it could be perceived throughout the season as a whole. By the time we get towards the end of Season 6, she’s hanging out with Booth again, and slowly seems to get her groove back (like the “date” at the end of The Finder), but I know how it may seem like I’m grasping at straws. Nonetheless, there are enough of those moments throughout the second half of the season that lead me to believe this schism is done purposefully — the bar scene in DitM, parts of Killer in the Crosshairs (I think that’s the one I mean. One of the Brodsky eps anyway), Signs in the Silence, etc. (Even the deleted Brennan & Angela scene shows this, and I’m choosing to include it in canon.)

Which brings me to the part I wanted to talk about. When I was doing one of my rewatches this summer (yes, plural), I did honestly wonder if the “regression” (which I do not see as such, but I understand why others do) was on purpose, or if the writers were acting as showrunners do in long-running series and were exaggerating character quirks as a plot device. Especially after visiting fan forums trying to catch up on the show, I was hearing that it may not be such a great idea to trust the writers, based on fan reaction. When the first spoilers started coming out (particularly about UltrasoundGate, about which you know my feelings by now), I was worried that maybe I had in fact been rationalizing the writing choices and that they were going to treat the baby plot as “Spock!Brennan Learns to be Human,” making fun of Brennan’s oddities as a means to an end.

But then Season 7 started, and any worries I had disappeared from the very first B&B scene in the premiere. After the first five episodes, I’m more convinced than ever that the “clueless” facade is just that, and is a writing choice to convey Brennan’s inner conflict, and here’s why. I think that they’re using the “cluelessness” and rationalism as a marker to separate Public Brennan from Private Brennan.  Compare the B&B scenes this season to the others, or to anything from Season 6. They are both so at ease with each other, and Brennan in particular is very comfortable with life at this point. As a result, she lets her guard down and acts much more “normally” (which is a word I take issue with, but that is not the time for that) at home and in private.

The end scene in the premiere, or either of the home scenes on The Prince in the Plastic are perfect examples — she jokes (naturally, not forcing laughter like she did at some points last year), she teases, she talks about what’s bugging her without resorting to technobabble just for the sake of it, and she intuits when things are bugging Booth. I said this in my squeecap of the premiere, but I feel like in these scenes, we’re not only seeing shades of Season 1 & 2 Brennan (the good parts), but also kind of seeing some of the girl that withdrew when her family disappeared. Meanwhile, when she’s back at the lab or in the field, she’s still got some of those walls up, which is arguably a way of keeping professional distance. And that makes perfect sense to me. She’s still trying to maintain her professional coolness, but at the same time, she doesn’t necessarily need to keep people at bay the way she did in season 6, because emotionally she’s in a much stabler (and happier) place. It appears as though she doesn’t need to put up those defences to quite the same degree, because she’s no longer trying to hide behind them the way she has been not only the last season, but the series as a whole.

This is not to say that some remnants of out-of-touch-Brennan don’t still exist. Yes, episode 2 and UltrasoundGate prove that. I’ve said over and over that that plot didn’t bother me nearly as much as it did some, but I fully acknowledge that it was more a case of lazy writing going for an “easy” conflict than anything else. However, the fact remains that despite that apparent oversight on her part, she did see how and why it bothered Booth, and did her best to make it up to him, because she just wants him to be happy. (You could even argue this is exactly what she did in the Valentine’s Day episode last season too.) Even so, compare Brennan at the crime scene in that episode, to Brennan alone in her office with Booth, and her whole demeanour changes again. With everyone else, she’s still business as usual, but in private, she’s a lot more unguarded and demonstrative, for lack of a better word. Remember that episode with the Japanese detective trying to solve his sister’s murder, where Brennan asks if it’s worth it to have one’s happiness so contingent upon someone else? This Brennan totally gets that and feels it now.

What I’m trying to say, I guess, is that while there have been a lot of changes to Brennan’s character over the last seven seasons (as there have been to everyone’s), they’re changes that make a whole lot of sense to me. Certainly, some aspects are played for laughs, sometimes to an annoying degree, but I think that for the most part, these ebbs and flows are deliberate choices the writers make to show what is going on with these characters we know and love. If they intended to turn Brennan into a socially inept robot just for the sake of a joke, we would not be seeing the characterization and relationship we’re seeing now. The fact that they ramped it up to such a jarring degree post-100th, and have retreated on it just as much towards the end of season 6 and certainly by the start of 7, proves to me that this was their way of showing Brennan dealing with a shitstorm and trying to find her way back out the other side. I don’t necessarily always agree with the writing on this show, but I do appreciate what it’s trying to do, and especially after watching the series in one big chunk, this evolution comes across as very “organic,” based on how they’ve presented these characters to us.

I could probably keep writing about this kind of stuff ad nauseum, just because there is such a vast and rich body of work to choose from. That’s the advantage of being a long-running series! Maybe it’s because I’ve been a fan of other long-running (and sometimes, not so long-running) shows in the past that have completely assassinated characters for the sake of drama or plot, but I really can’t fault Hart Hanson et al. for what they’ve done to Brennan (or Booth) on this one. My formative high school television viewing experience (where I learned to “ship,” among other things, ha) was based on shows like The X-Files and *cough*JAG, and later on others like Gilmore Girls and How I Met Your Mother, which did such a number on its beloved characters that by the end of their runs, I often could not bring myself to care or even like them, to the point that for most of those, I never even bothered to re-watch DVDs of seasons I actually enjoyed.

I know Bones isn’t over yet, but I have to say that overall, I’m very encouraged by what the producers are saying about the rest of the season, especially when it comes to the characters, particularly in light of what we’ve seen in the first batch of episodes. I’m just really enjoying the ride right now, and I’m glad that I can pick aspects like this to look at and not want to pull my hair out. I adore just about all the characters on this show, and could probably write essays about many of them, but I really love that the complexities of Brennan’s character can lead to such interesting discussions. Yes, there are aspects of her character from early seasons that I wish were more visible today, but I think the tradeoff we’ve gotten for those has been pretty incredible, all things considered. There are very few shows I can think of that have let their characters grow to this point, at least not on network TV. Sure, there’s a lot of fanwanking involved, and I may be completely full of crap, but if I am, it still allows me to be entertained by this show, and that’s all that matters to me. I’ve drunk the Kool-Aid, and I can’t wait to see what we get in the second half of this season.

You know, if I put this much thought into other things I do, I probably would get a lot more done. But, this is more fun, isn’t it?

[ETA: Here’s a little more from Crack in the Code that further proves my point.]