Wednesday, November 14, 2007

Bones - 3x07 "The Boy in the Time Capsule"

When Vladimir Nabokov fled Russia for western Europe and later the US, one of the ways he supported himself was to write chess problems, of which he held a decidedly idiosyncratic procedural view. His chess problems were contrived to have elaborately convoluted solutions, but if you hated fun, they could also be solved through blandly pedestrian moves. The pleasure of his puzzles didn't come from the mating black's king; rather, pleasure derives from the convolutions and vicissitudes of the solution's process.

And if I've learned anything about Bones having watched about 14 episodes, it's that the whodunit hardly matters in the grand scope of the show or in terms of its appeal, which this latest episode aptly demonstrates. At the show's outset, when Gil Bates (obviously a spoonerism for Bill Gates, and I have to say, the name of a character in one of my stories) exclaimed to Brennan and Booth his shock at the body in the capsule because he was the one who sealed it, he should have been the first person investigated as a suspect. Instead, the episode proceeded on a circuitous path, the investigative details of which merely provide the backdrop for Booth and Brennan's repartee.

Indie rating: Arovane - "The Storm"

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