Bones - Season 7, Episode 7 (Review)

The Prisoner in the Pipe

Episode Summary

So there's this kid who looks to be at least 5 who won't poop in the potty without a kitten and an ice cream truck or something.  She lifts the lid and - bam! - is surprised by some floating body parts.  Cue staggered screaming from her father.

Meanwhile, Booth and Brennan are taking a tour of a local hospital.  Because you wait until your due date to do that.

At the kid's house, Brennan identifies an entire sphenoid and half a maxilla, but there's no mention of the hilarious toe floater from the first scene.  The Jeffersonian team figures that all the bones are from one person, since there's no duplication (MNI = 1).  From the maxillary sinus, Brennan assesses the skeleton as male.  She also notices a lens implant in the eye, which Saroyan excises and Angela traces to Rob Lazebnik, a man in Jamestown prison for perpetrating a Ponzi scheme.

The Jeffersonian team attempt to figure out what caused Lazebnik's death.  The ocular fluid has a negative tox screen.  A fragment of the right 9th rib has striations consistent with a stab wound, but Brennan can't conclude from just this one bone that the man was stabbed.  Hodgins sends a robot into the sewer, and he and Daisy find more pieces of the dead man.  Daisy notices some remodeling of fractures to the manubrium, the left clavicle, and two upper ribs.  These breaks occurred more than a year ago, around the time Lazebnik entered prison.  Angela reconstructs the skeleton, and Daisy notes a nick on the anterior portion of the first lumbar vertebra.  This suggests a stabbing, if a 3.75" object went through a doubled-over Lazebnik and slit his inferior vena cava. The body was likely dismembered using acid, as Daisy finds micropitting on the bones.  They also realize that Lazebnik was killed in prison and dumped into the sewer, which sends Booth and Brennan to Jamestown to see what they can find out.

B&B meet with one guard and the warden.  Both are creepy, but not killers.  Because of the micropitting, they suspect that Lazebnik was dismembered with hydrochloric acid, which is being used in the mailbox-making facility on the prison grounds.  They talk to the head of the operation (whose name I didn't catch), but even though his parents were swindled out of money by Lazebnik, he didn't kill him.  They also find the shiv that likely killed him.  Brennan starts having contractions, but Angela finds another clue: from the paper that made up the shiv, she reconstructs a recipe from a prison cookbook.  Brennan takes a crappy cell-phone picture of fingerprints she got by dusting the cookbook with cocoa, and Angela runs them through the Jamestown database: Hayes Jackson, who works in the kitchen and befriended Lazebnik, eventually killed him.  Because Hodgins found prison-grade rubber in the bones, Brennan chases Jackson asking to see his shoes, because four weeks after a murder, there would still be tiny bone fragments in them.  She goes into labor in the middle of a prison fight.

This being TV, Brennan is going to give birth immediately.  She can't make it 10 miles to the hospital.  So Booth pulls over at a swanky B&B, but the proprietor turns them away.  He relents and lets them use the stable.  Cue ridiculous and utterly unnecessary Christian overtones.  Brennan pushes, and Booth delivers the baby.  They gaze at the baby, not bothering to warm her up or nurse her.

It's unclear if they go to the hospital, since Brennan is wearing the exact same clothes, but the Jeffersonian team is waiting for them at home.  In the dark.  Because they're unafraid of an FBI agent shooting them.  It's actually kind of endearing that they put up a banner with Welcome Stapes.  They name the baby Christine, after Brennan's mother (and, you know, after Jesus himself, because of course an anthropologist who thinks religion is stupid would name her baby that).

Forensic Comments

Dialogue and Drama

• I hate TV baby-birthing scenes.  They seem to all be written by men who have never attended an actual birth.  Anyway, many of my complaints can be summed up with this link to Angela's birthing episode.
• But really, Brennan's labor was way too fast (car baby!).  She didn't warm the baby up afterward.  She didn't immediately put the baby to her breast.  These are things you learn in birthing class.  And, well, as an anthropologist.  At least they smeared the 3-month-old newborn stand-in with jelly. (Guesses at to whether it was Deschanel's real baby, Henry?)
• I simply cannot get over the manger-birth scene and the fact Brennan named her baby after Jesus, immediately following her complaints about baptism, religion, and mythologies.  Do the writers hate Brennan?  Because they're writing her as compromising more and more of her principles every episode.
• Let's talk about the characters' appearances back from hiatus... Deschanel's hair is sooooo shiny.  I remember when my hair was that shiny thanks to prenatal vitamins.  And is it me, or did John Francis Daley gain some weight?

Ratings

Forensic Mystery - C-.  So, they got the victim's name from his corneal implant.  And they knew he was stabbed pretty early on.  There wasn't much mystery here.

Forensic Solution - B-.  Most of the forensic work didn't stretch the imagination too much.  The cocoa fingerprints were suspicious, though.

Drama - D.  Manger.  'nuff said.

I am vaguely interested to see what happens next week.  Angela and Hodgins' baby was featured for, like, two episodes (but didn't even make an appearance at the B&B baby homecoming in this one!), but this baby is the product of the two main characters, so I'm curious how the writers will handle it.