Bones: The Complete Sixth Season [Blu-Ray]

BY Robert BellPublished Oct 28, 2011

At the end of the fifth season of comedic forensic procedural Bones, surly FBI investigator Booth (David Boreanaz) ran off to Afghanistan to fight and anthropologist Brennan (Emily Deschanel) went off to some war torn country with Daisy (Carla Gallo) to look for more bones. While a fun cliff-hanger for fans of the series waiting for Bones and Brennan to finally hook up, it wasn't much of a surprise when the season six premiere found everyone heading back to Washington, DC to help Saroyan (Tamara Taylor) solve a particularly cumbersome case involving the bones of a missing child. The main clincher being that while Hodgins (T.J. Thyne) and Montenegro (Michaela Conlin) continued their romantic shenanigans, Booth brought back a journalist girlfriend named Hannah (Katheryn Winnick), throwing off the group dynamic and causing the very literal Brennan to stumble verbally and emotionally on occasion. This drives the character interaction for the first half of the season, giving the robotic Brennan (think a cross between Sheldon from Big Bang Theory and Anya from Buffy) reason to analyze, quite amusingly, her emotional reactions and states while befriending the girlfriend of the man she has a quiet crush on. Procedurally, the series remains consistent, starting each episode with a grotesque discovery (a human baked into a life-sized candy bar, a man that literally explodes, maggots that jump from a decaying body and so on) and a resulting investigation that relies on specified social subsections to propel and vary the episodic nature of the series. While standard looks at the skateboarding subculture, the busker world and the wedding planning industry go through the usual motions, providing minor amusements and unlikely murder scenarios, an episode that takes the gang to the Jersey shore stands out as uniquely hilarious, as Brennan demonstrates her in-depth knowledge of the "Guido tribe" based on the uninformative MTV reality series of the same name that assesses their culture. Despite being repetitive and corny, there's a magnetic fun to the comic handling of gruesome cases and good-humoured cast members. Included with the Blu-Ray set is a brief look at the visual effects (i.e., the gore) and a supplement on the "Blizzard" episode, which was shot almost entirely in an elevator. There's also a gag reel with Deschanel routinely flubbing her science-heavy dialogue and the pilot episode of murder mystery series The Killing, which is far darker and thematically different than Bones, despite skewing towards a similar demographic.
(Warner)

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