[Originally posted on Tumblr February 22, 2013. This will be relevant for a recap posted tomorrow, hint hint.]
Apparently this week has been all about strolling down memory lane for me.
Now, I’m a giant nerd, and reading early versions of scripts — not just for Bones, but for anything I like — is so much fun for me, because I love seeing how scenes, or even episodes, change over the process of filming. When that Pilot script was floating around Tumblr a few months back? I laughed for days. (Ehhhhhhhhhhhh.)
I had some old Bones sides on my computer, and was looking through them for something, when I came across this.
[I’m not too sure what the etiquette is about posting sides snippets is; I know it was a no-no back when they were still made public for upcoming episodes, due to legal issues and whatnot, but I figure it’s probably not a big deal for an episode that was shot six years ago, right? There’s gotta be some sort of statute of limitations. Anyway, if it’s still not kosher, I’ll take this down.]
That being said, I just wanted to post this bit from the video message Stargazer in a Puddle, because I thought it was rather illuminating regarding the whole Mom business in Shot in the Dark:
Don’t get me wrong: I absolutely understand that this is in no way canon. The scene changed quite drastically from this draft to the final product.
However, what I do find really interesting is that the sentiment in the highlighted section was echoed in Shot. I saw a lot of surprise (even a little of my own) after it aired, because Brennan’s mom saying she used to act on her heart, instead of her head, seemed a tad incongruous with the Brennan we met in the Pilot. Even though, as I mentioned, I also had no trouble believing this was the case after the fact.
Why this was so interesting to me is because it seems, based on this excerpt, that the writers at least considered this part of Brennan’s character as far back as season 2. As I said, I know this can’t be taken as canon in any way, because none of this ended up in the actual episode, but it says to me that the writers had this in the back of their minds all along — that Brennan, as a teen, felt as deeply as we’ve gotten glimpses of over the years and acted upon it, but that at some point (her parents’ disappearance), she had to effectively lock her heart away and used her head instead.
I also find it really curious that in this early version of Stargazer, it is Ruth/Christine who is the “brain,” and Max is the heart. As I said last week, I always assumed it to be the other way around, based on the Max we know now, but I can also totally buy this. After all, as we know from the actual video message in Stargazer that made it into the episode, it was Ruth who convinced Max to leave grumble wish that had been addressed grumble from a place of reason, when he wanted to keep the family together regardless of the danger, because he didn’t want to split up his family. It’s in line with what “she” later actually says (on-screen) in Shot, about Brennan following her advice and using her brain. (Maybe Brennan isn’t the only family member who took that advice to heart — no pun intended — after she left.) Again, it’s really neat, to me, to see how, despite ultimately being cut from the script, these lines planted a kernel for what we would learn about both women six years down the road. I didn’t think it was out-of-character last week, but it appears to me that this wasn’t out of left field for the writers, either.
Plus, there’s that whole “Brennan grew up to turn into her mother in more ways than one” aspect of character analysis that that warrants a whole essay in itself, I bet, but I am not lucid enough to get into it. (I thought of it last week, but that post was long enough as it was without getting into that discussion.)
Oh, and then there’s Brennan’s “That’s not how I turned out” answer to her mom, which would have been pretty damn crushing had that actually come to pass. I think that would have probably displayed a level of self-awareness on Brennan’s part that, on-screen, she may not have actually had yet. (Or, that the writers wanted to save — since that would have made a lot of what we saw in later seasons harder to swallow, I imagine.) Still, I want to give her a hug for something she never even said, because I don’t doubt that’s what Brennan thought of herself too, as the 100th episode kind of alluded to.
There you have it. I am a humongous dork. But, I still think it’s really interesting that it seems like the seed was planted for the interaction we saw in Shot so long ago in the writers’ room, even if it took another six seasons for it to actually come to fruition. I do believe, though, that it still falls in step with a lot of what we’ve seen of Brennan over the years — again, as I mentioned in the Shot recap last week. I would really, really love to hear what the writers’ “canon” is for each of the characters, because I assume they’ve got tidbits like this in their minds for each of the characters and write with that in mind, if this scene is any indication. It’s fascinating to me.
I just really love this show, you guys.
(No seriously, reading original scripts for episodes is pretty much my idea of a perfect weekend. That’s how much of a dork I am.)
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