‘Bones’ Series Finale Recap: “The End In The End”

Bones ended last night after twelve seasons on Fox.

BONES SERIES FINALE RECAP

After the bombing of the Jeffersonian in the penultimate episode, the show picked up in the rubble, with Hodgins and Angela worrying about the fate of their unborn baby. Booth, however, finds Brennan facedown in her office. Brennan finds a list of bones written on a paper in het pocket, and, in possibly the scariest moment of the show, she utters, “I don’t know what that means.”

Thankfully she clarifies that she knows they are bones, she’s just not sure why she had written them down or their significance to a case. Clearly she’s been taken for a ride with this explosion and her brain isn’t quite working right. She checks Angela’s fetal heartbeat with a makeshift Doppler – she is impressed by the technique Hodgin’s used to make it, not recalling that she was the one who taught him in the first place.

The baby is alive and well, and Hodgins and Booth have a moment that solidifies their friendship. Anti-war advocate and conspiracy theorist Hodgins tells Booth that, “killing Kovac’s father, that was the right thing to do.”

Finally, a rescue crew appears and gets the gang out of there. Brennan, however, is not clear yet. Her brain appears fine on her CT scan but she can’t understand all the medical jargon. Basically, her memory is fine, but her ability to comprehend complex information has been damaged. Nevertheless, she insists they get back to work to take down Kovac.

Now that the lab bones are strewn into a giant heap, she enlists all her interns to help sort through them, and along the way must convince them that her memory is intact. She gives a heartfelt speech about her moments with each and every one of them, in a very final sort of way.

“I remember the day each of you was hired,” Brennan says. “I remember the name of every victim I’ve ever identified. I remember just how meaningful this work can be. But I don’t remember how to do it.”

“I started crying,” Emily Deschanel described during that scene to EW. “My character is looking back and thanking them for everything all of their characters have done, so that was an emotional thing on camera and off, and it really allowed us to recognize the importance of that time.”

And that’s when we get to the point of the final episode. It’s the story of Bones herself. “So much of my life. my intelligence is all I’ve had,” she confesses to Booth. “I may not have had a family, but I understood things that nobody else could. My brain, the way I think, is who I am. Who I was… I mean, if the thing that made me me is gone, who am I?”

He goes over the reasons he loves her and reminds her who they are together. He says he would love her even if they couldn’t do this job together anymore.

Luckily for the fans, the majority of this episode was focused on the character relationships, and not on the case at hand. It does, however, intertwine nicely, and we discover that it was Jeannine who set the bomb – turns out she is Kovac’s sister, not his wife. “You’re accusing me of incest?” she asks when they find her. “No, we’re accusing you of murder.”

Lastly, Booth and Brennan go to a farm where the squints discovered Kovac grew up and is probably in hiding. Booth, one last time, asked Bones to stay in the car, which she obviously declines. “Where you go, I go.”

In the firefight, Booth hurts his wrist, and suddenly information comes flooding back to Bones. She knows exactly how to bend his arm to get the bones back in the right places. After some more fighting, Booth shoots Kovac in the head.

The final eleven minutes of the episode, and show, sees the regulars chat and say everything they need to say before the show wraps. They clean up the lab of their stuff in anticipation of a full remodel. The show takes us through memory lane, packing up Hodgins rubber band ball, Arastoo’s Farsi poems for Cam, a photo of Max on Brennan’s wedding day, the dolphin he left on her mother’s grave, etc. etc.

Angela and Hodgins air a children’s book they’ve been working on, featuring each of the gang as farm animals. Cam admits her 6 month leave is not for a vacation, but because she and Arastoo are going to adopt three teenage brothers. And finally, Hodgins is named interim director of the lab, finally making him the king of the lab as he’s always wanted.

The final moment sees Booth and Brennan on a bench outside the Jeffersonian, neither quite ready to let go. “It’s a special place,” she tells him. They both rummage through their boxes of things, both holding items important in their relationship. The last thing is the bomb timer, frozen at 4:47. “Why would you want to be reminded of the moment when everything almost ended, Bones?” “Because it didn’t,” she replied.