Hello! This installment was originally written for the first volume of “Liz Tells Frank What Happened In…: The Book.” But as that was published in 2012, it feels like it’s been long enough to warrant resurfacing. (Does it warrant actually covering seasons past Season 7 in the future? That’s a mystery not even BONES could solve.)

Dear Frank,

As you remember, in 2006 the first thing I ever told you about was an episode of the now-long-running crime drama Bones — in fact, I told you about a large percentage of the first season of Bones, because you asked nice.

But at the end of the first season, I became convinced that the show was too wary of the Moonlighting curse (AKA “They can’t get together — it’ll ruin the show!”), and stopped watching it. I did, however, pledge to pick it up once again if its main characters started banging: Since that day, the people I appointed to tell me if I should re-add it to my DVR never alerted me to a change in this circumstance. So today I delve into the bowels of Wikipedia summaries and episode guides, to see what we’ve missed since I stopped telling you what happened.

To remind you, Frank, Bones is about a forensic anthropologist (nicknamed Bones) who, with her team of lab techs, helps solve gross murder crimes with Angel from Angel (nicknamed Beau in my original retellings, because apparently that’s David Boreanez’s real nickname and it made me laugh).

To make things easier, let’s take this season by season, starting with Season 2, where these appear to be the big things that happened:

• Bones’s original boss got replaced by a younger hotter lady boss, who apparently used to hook up with Beau.
• Hot Half-Asian Lab Tech hooks up with Conspiracy Freak Lab Tech.
• Drama-rama with Beau’s ex-ladyfriend/baby momma. (Beau has a young son. It’s cute.)
• The obligatory “our hero gets buried alive!” episode happens (like two seasons earlier than it usually does in network dramas), and introduces a serial killer nicknamed the “Grave Digger” because he kills his victims by DIGGING GRAVES oh good lord.
• David Duchovny (!) directs an episode where “a man’s body was found gutted, burned and hung like a scarecrow on the roof of a hotel that housed Federal witnesses” (jeez louise).
• Stephen Fry shows up!
• Bones gets a boyfriend, but then he literally SAILS AWAY ON A BOAT.
• There’s an episode where they use MySpace pages to solve crimes. (It was 2007, so I guess that’s acceptable.)
• Bones’ dad and brother show up a bunch and there’s some stuff where apparently she learns that the reason she grew up an orphan is that her parents abandoned her because they loved her. Okay.
• Hot Tech and Conspiracy Freak nearly get married but turns out she was already married so they don’t get married. END OF SEASON.

And then, in Season 3:

• The nerdy lab tech goes to Iraq to be a soldier! Okay. Sure.
• There’s a serial killer who’s a cannibal which GROSS and also comes off (from this Wikipedia entry, anyway) as very Silence of the Lambs-y. There is SO MUCH of him in this season, it’s like every other episode they’re like “oh, remember that cannibal guy? I bet he did this cannibal murder!” Bold stuff, Bones.
• Hot Tech is still married to some guy she doesn’t remember, so she tries to track him down for divorcin’.
• From the Wikipedia summary: A victim is “discovered to have stayed at a pony play retreat and was killed with a hoof knife.”
• The nerdy lab tech comes back from army and it’s fucked him up quite a bit.
• Stephen Fry shows up!
• There’s this other psychologist guy played by one of the freaks from Freaks and Geeks who’s hanging around, I don’t really get why, but he’s a permanent part of the show going forward.
• Beau gets shot! There’s a funeral! But the funeral is a lie! I don’t know why they faked Booth’s death, but that seems like a big deal.
• They catch the gross cannibal serial killer guy, but remember when I said the nerdy lab tech got fucked up by Army? He apparently got so fucked up by Army that he BECAME THE CANNIBAL SERIAL KILLER’S APPRENTICE. Holy SHIT that’s a plot twist. A plot twist any rational human being might buy? I dunno, but DAMN that’s fucked up.

Okay, let’s see if Season 4 can top that…

• Bones and Beau go to London! That’s fun.
• Hot Tech finally tracks down her mystery husband! But he won’t divorce her. Dick.
• I guess that leads to Hot Tech and Conspiracy Freak breaking up? Sad.
• And Hot Tech is also bi and one of her ex-girlfriends stops by and they end up getting together?
• Why are the only interesting things in this season happening to Hot Tech?
• That gravedigger guy comes up again briefly…
• They solve a crime at a circus. Beau is afraid of clowns.
• Hot New Boss’s ex-fiance is found half-eaten in a tiger cage.
• Hot Tech’s ladyfriend dumps her and Hot Tech sleeps with Conspiracy Freak again.
• Stephen Fry shows up!
• Bones wants a baby, and asks Beau to be her baby daddy! Just like Mulder and Scully! But then Beau has a brain tumor! (WHAT?!?!) So he has to go into surgery…
• …where he has some crazy hallucination where he and Bones are married and own a nightclub together and everything is upside-down and backwards…
• …and then Beau wakes up from the surgery not remembering Bones at all! Because that’s medically possible!

Okay, Season 5, bring it on:

• I guess Beau gets around to remembering who Bones is, though he’s not sure his feelings for her are real? I guess he has feelings that he doesn’t understand? Okay. Practically every episode summary includes the line “Beau deals with the effects of his tumor,” so at least there’s continuity.
• Hot Tech starts hooking up with one of the interns. Man, Hot Tech is really the show bicycle at this point.
• Beau’s grandfather gives Beau and Bones relationship advice.
• AN EPISODE THAT TAKES PLACE IN ROSWELL, NEW MEXICO IS CALLED “THE X IN THE FILE” I SHIT YOU NOT.
• Stephen Fry shows up!
• Hot Tech has a pregnancy scare.
• They maybe investigate JFK’s assassination? RESULTS: INCONCLUSIVE.
• The 100th episode (that’s a lot of episodes!) is all about how Beau and Bones first met and the flashbacks include Nerdy Lab Tech before HE WENT CRAZY AND BECAME A SERIAL KILLER.
• Also, apparently we see in flashbacks Beau and Bones nearly boned (heh) during their first case, but they didn’t because they were drunk (maybe I should watch this episode?) and in the present Beau confesses his lurrrrrve for her. But Bones is like “I don’t know how to love!” and Beau is like “well, I need to get over you then” and it is SAD! I just went on YouTube to watch it and it is sad!
• Hot Tech dumps the intern.
• Bones and Beau start dating other people saaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaad.
• From the Wikipedia summary: Hot Boss “looks for a gynecologist for her stepdaughter Michelle.” (Hot Boss later dates said gyno.)
• Hot Tech and Conspiracy Freak get married after remembering in a jail cell that they love each other. (Sure.)
• That Grave Digger murderer is a lady! Who’s on trial! And she goes to jail but “it’s not over!”
• Everyone splits up at the end of the season to travel or go to Army or investigate really weird bones, which I’m sure was very heartfelt on screen.

And then there’s a TIME JUMP! Very exciting. The show now takes place in the future! Maybe. I don’t know. I just know it’s Season 6!

• The gang gets back together, but Beau found a girlfriend in Afghanistan booooooooooooooo.
• Bones watches Jersey Shore.
• Hot Tech is pregnant for reals this time!
• Beau’s girlfriend got shot! I shouldn’t be happy about that. She’s okay. I mean, she doesn’t die. I don’t know if she’s a decent person or not.
• Stephen Fry DOES NOT show up! Boooooooooooooooooo part deux.
• From the Wikipedia summary: “A case involving a liquid explosion of human remains causes [Bones], [Beau] and [Hot Boss] to become covered in evidence.” EW.
• That Grave Digger lady shows up again! But then she gets sniped by a sniper! Frank, in case you forgot, Beau was a sniper in Army and was really sad because of all those people he killed that one time. So he’s a suspect in the sniping!
• But then it turns out that the sniper is the mummy from The Mummy. He shows up later to snipe more things.
• Beau proposes to his girlfriend, but she can’t commit.
• There’s all this stuff with a guy who’s good at finding things because he’s the Finder, the spin-off show that did not “find” an audience the following season BOOM I’LL BE HERE ALL WEEK TRY THE VEAL.
• The sniper guy gets caught, but not before killing the British intern! Sad for him. (But he got killed because he’s a series regular on Alphas now, so really, good for him!) [Hello from 2020, where unfortunately “Alphas” is no longer on the air, but Ryan Cartwright does still get work!]
• Hot Tech gives birth! Good for her.
• And the season ends with Bones telling Beau that she’s pregnant and he’s the daddy and WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAT?

Seriously, this show does love its finale cliffhangers. Onto Season 7!

• Wait, no, I just had to ditch Wikipedia for a little while because Season 7 opens with Bones and Beau happily living together and kissing and pregnant and I am SO FUCKING CONFUSED what is happening?!??
• Okay. Okay. I dug deep into the Internet and I think I got this now. After the British intern died last season, Bones and Beau had a sleepover where they may or may not have had grief sex, and so that finale ending last week was confirmation that they did bone. So now, here at the top of season 7, Bones and Beau have skipped all that dating stuff and are now just preparing to be parents.
• So TECHNICALLY, per my vow to start watching when they started doing it, I should have started watching with the second-to-last episode of Season 6. But I’ve been busy, okay?
• Beau’s father dies? I don’t think we ever met him. But apparently he was a dick.
• Hot Tech and Conspiracy Freak, the first new parents of the show, don’t sleep much because of baby NO SHIT.
• Bones has her baby! Good for her.
• She LITERALLY, by the way, gives birth in a MANGER. This show gets very very weird sometimes.
• Someone makes a movie out of one of Bones’s books (remember, Frank, how she not only investigates crime, she writes crime fiction?) and Bones and Beau go to visit the set and solve murders there. If you’re playing the “I remember that happening on X-Files!” drinking game, you are now drunk.
• And then the season ends with Bones getting framed for murder and having to go on the run with her baby daughter! Very dramatic conclusion to what otherwise seemed like a pretty dull season.
• I mean, Hot Tech didn’t break up with anybody ONCE!
• Also, no Stephen Fry.
• Maybe I’ll try watching Season 8, to see what happens? Maybe.

For, ever since The X-Files carved a fondness for professional-turned-romantic partnerships into my heart, I have gone seeking that same high from other TV shows. But I rarely get what I want, because so many show creators worry about the Moonlighting curse — forgetting that what ruined Moonlighting was behind-the-scenes in-fighting and back-and-forth narrative stalling, and that it’s possible to tell a compelling love story that doesn’t sacrifice sexual tension. The most exciting moment of a romance doesn’t have to be the final seconds before the first kiss.

Bones dodged these issues pretty effectively in the long run, but MAN some of these cliffhangers would have pissed me off were I watching in real time and not skimming plot summaries. However, I’ll keep my eye on Season 8 — if only because Liz Tells Frank was founded on one central principle, Frank: Making sure you don’t have to watch Bones.

I remain ever vigilant, Frank. I shall never waver.

Love,
Liz