So, I spent a lot of last week figure out The Rest of My Life (details to come soon, I promise), and as a result, missed the climactic 100th episode of Bones. I'd quit reading now if you're concerned about spoilers. But if you're not, well...I thought it was a masterful mid-run episode of television:
At the end of the last season, Bones finished with a special episode that was supposed to be a gift to fans. Instead, it was a disaster, both on an artistic level, and for the intended purpose. The resulting dream sequence was weird, painfully unfunny, and a tease in ways that needed to be augmented with yeoman work this season to move the plot forward. But this episode, effectively an origin story for the partnership between the show's main characters and the team Bones works with, was much subtler in execution and vastly more emotionally impactful.
I thought a couple of things in particular were well-done. First, the episode makes it clear how much all of the characters, not just Bones, have grown. Whether it's Hodgins perpetually snapping a rubber band hard against his wrist as an anger-management technique, Angela in high-flake form as a park sketch artist (I really do want to see the first meeting between her and Bones), Zach almost affectless, Bones retreating as fast as she possibly can from complex emotional situations and with a really childish tendency towards violence, and Booth in full-on cocky mode, the paths all the characters have come along were clear, and I think it retroactively made the show's run so far quite gratifying. That said, the episode didn't feel like a retcon: as something that happened a year before the show's first episode, it flows quite smoothly and sets everything up quite well, and even effectively prefigures both Cam's arrival and the difficulties she has managing Bones. I also liked that the gifts to the fans were subtle things, like a recurrence of the oft-mentioned, never-seen Naomi from Paleontology. And when the reveal came, when at long last, Booth kissed Bones for the second time, and the depths of their feelings for each other became clear, the reality was much more awkward and painful than Booth's surgery-induced dream of Bones--and he wanted her anyway. It was lovely, and beautifully acted, calling on a range the show doesn't usually need from the actors.
I think it's very hard to do a climactic episode of a television show that's not either a season finale or in the last season. Buffy the Vampire Slayer did this well in both "Innocence," and "Smashed," I think. So did The Wire with "The Hunt," which I think is an interesting example because it's not actually the episode where Kima gets shot--it's the aftermath that is game-changing: McNulty cares about someone, Rawls becomes a different character in giving him the least-comforting comfort talk of all time. This is quieter than either of those examples. It's just the human heart at stake after all. But sometimes that's more than enough.