Traveling on the subway, Dr. Sweets strikes up a conversation with a young man who’s broken into tears after receiving a text in his phone. It turns out the man, under treatment for leukemia, just learned he was cancer-free. A sudden earthquake shakes the city, breaking water mains, tossing Sweets’ new friend into a pole, killing him–and turning up a skeleton in the subway tunnel.
This episode might have been derailed, pardon the pun, if it focused too heavily on Sweets’s trauma and evaluation of his life. Sometimes on Bones, the main victims’ deaths are peculiar, but their lives aren’t fully developed. I was glad to see many angles of human interest in this episode, from the victim’s life to the other lives he affected.
The team determined the skeleton to be the remains of Martin Aragon, a blind man who worked as a professional letter-writer, writing everything from complaints to Dear-John letters. He may have been killed by someone he complained about or by someone dissatisfied with his service.
While Brennan worked on the case, a Japanese journalist interviewed her about her fiction-writing career. This tied in nicely with Aragon’s background as a writer. The two sides of Brennan–socially inept rationalist and bestselling author–have never quite jibed for me. And this episode revealed that Angela–known for her warmth and humanity–acts as a sounding board for Brennan’s books, making suggestions here and there to humanize her characters. That made perfect sense and was a nice tribute to their years-long friendship.
Sweets’s encounter with the miracle cancer survivor killed by the freak subway accident was too obviously a setup, but I did enjoy the rethinking it forced Sweets to do, and I was surprised by his decision about his relationship with Daisy. Meanwhile, Brennan did some rethinking of her own. After Aragon’s death was brought on by a client’s taking credit for his letters, Brennan decided that Angela’s contribution on her books should be rewarded with twenty-five percent of her fiction-writing income.
FOX has been hyping next week’s milestone 100th episode, but No. 99 was a keeper, too.
