Who's Who in LTFWHOBTW-world

Dear Frank,

Sorry about being two episodes behind -- nearly three, now! -- but life gets a little crazy. While I find time to catch up, though, I figured it might be time to remind you how all these silly nicknames got started, especially since more people are dropping by to see what all the fuss is about, it's become apparant that we should probably do some clarification. You agree? Great.

Who's Who in the World of LTFWHOBTW:
Lesser Deschanel: Because I am lazy, oftentimes I just call the star of Bones "Bones," because like President Bush and Beau, I do love a good silly nicknames. But occasionally I'll refer to the actress who brings our favorite robot girl to life, and given that this actress is the older sister of a significantly more successful indie darling (co-star of Hitchhiker's Guide, Frank!), it seems only fair to show our respect for the Greater Deschanel, while not purposefully denigrating the excellent qualities of the Lesser. (What of Caleb Deschanel, you might ask? The Non-chanel? It is better not to ask these questions.)

Beau: Frank, remember how you told me that story about how the friends of David Boreanez call him "Beau"? Too many Davids in their cell phones, I'd wager. They so they call him Bo. But boyfriend's just a little bit pretty, Frank. Just a little bit.

Hot Not Asian: She's hot, she's no more than half-Asian, and there you go. Oh, and sometimes she has feelings. And sometimes, she wants to do Beau. That's canon, Frank. I didn't make that up. Though I kind of wish I had.

ParaNerd: He's the paranoidiest, but he's also got girly curly hair and lots of money. I like him all right when he's not being an stubborn idiot about something. I don't like him much of the time.

Virgin Nerd: Sure, there's proof he's not a virgin. But I don't put much faith in this science jive.

Deep Bass Boss/Boring Black Boss/Some Other Permutation of Boring, Black, Bass-voiced, and Boss: He's all of these things. And nothing else, sadly.

The Smithphonian: The institute that's run by the government and enables crime-solving! Yeah Smithphonian!

Liz: The girl who watches this damn show, albeit very sporadically.

Frank: The one who hears all about it.

All Those People Beau Snipered: The ones who, ultimately, bring us all together.

Love,
Liz

The Skull in the Desert

Dear Frank,

Sometimes, an episode of BONES is adorable. Sometimes, an episode of BONES is boring. But it's the rare episode of BONES that is actually actively bad. How bad? Normally I only fall asleep once or twice during an episode, Frank. This episode put me to bed for a solid week.

Hot Not Asian is on vacation in the desert (apparently, you can take three weeks of vacation when you work with dead people all the time, which probably makes putting up with the smell somewhat worth it) when she calls up Bones mid-freak-out. Apparently, when Hot Not Asian goes on vacation, she has a Vacation Boyfriend, but this time her Vacation Boyfriend has gone missing in the desert, which is not a particularly healthy place to go missing. A point reinforced by the fact that a skull just turned up on the local sheriff's doorstep, and Hot Not Asian needs Bones to confirm that it's Vacation Boyfriend. She has "a feeling" that it is, you see. Hot Not Asian has a lot of feelings over the course of this episode. Annoyingly, they all turn out to be right.

Bones hops the first plane and quickly confirms that it's Vacation Boyfriend's skull. So we can stop caring, right? No, no, because apparently there's some evidence of foul play, so Bones hauls Beau out to help solve some crime. But all Beau does is hang out in shorts and whines about the heat, and no one ever said that Beau's calves were his best feature.

Everyone wants to figure out where Vacation Boyfriend bought it, because he was out in the desert with a missing woman named Danni, which looks cute on the page but quickly starts to grate on the ears. We are supposed to care intensely about Danni's well-being, despite the fact that we've never met her and know little about her aside from the fact that she would often go out into the desert by herself, which makes this whole disappearance thing seem just a little, y'know, Darwin-esque. However, Hot Not Asian can feel that Danni is still alive, and out into the desert they go. This leads to the Most Artificial Mortal Peril Ever: The sheriff who took them out into the desert takes off with the car to search elsewhere, and our intrepid threesome immediately assume that they've been left to die. They spend some time calculating the nearness of their demise, pondering the direness of their situation. Beau and Bones share an intimate glance, each glad not to be facing their tragic fate alone... Until the sheriff returns and they all pile back into the car. Drama!

More desert. How Spielbergian. They wander around until Hot Not Asian has an incredibly silly vision of Danni walking in the desert, and rather than getting concerned about possible heat stroke, Hot Not Asian follows SpiritDanni until she finds NearlyDeadDanni in a rock crevice. I guess she was hiding from the drug dealers who killed Vacation Boyfriend? I don't know. I hardly understand why any of these people were out in the desert to begin with, but my people are a Nordic people. We have little patience for heat.

Anyways, everybody goes home semi-safe, and Hot Not Asian cries -- not because Vacation Boyfriend, a man she's loved for several years, is dead, but because she's afraid that she'll never find another Vacation Boyfriend to love her. Girlfriend's got great priorities. But Bones uses her robot logic to assure Hot Not Asian that yes, she will love again. And then there's hugging.

Perhaps the great love story of BONES is not Beau and Bones, but Hot Not Asian and Bones? No, that's unlikely. Sure, they'd make a cute couple. But Hot Not Asian's past is so lacking in tragedy that I fear they'd have nothing to talk about.

Not that snipering a whole bunch of people is as tragic as having tragically missing parents -- but hey, it's something.

I mean, he killed SO MANY PEOPLE, Frank. Dead.

Love,
Liz

The Woman in the Tunnel

Dear Frank,

Wow, it's been a few weeks, huh? And I'm like three episodes behind! Blame it on my infernal need to sleep, which has been kicking in every time I start watching an episode after 11 PM. Or, you know, blame it on BONES itself. After the cuteness explosion last time, the show has taken one big step back from adorable. And since BONES pretty much operates on exactly two levels -- cute or boring -- this is never good.

So I'll make this short. There's this woman, see? In a tunnel. And she's dead, probably from falling into the tunnel from a great height. For it seems there are all these sewer tunnels below DC and they're inhabited by a strange population of what everyone refers to as "mole people." To me, mole people sound like the adorable protagonists of a Disney flick, but they're actually sad broken humans who are hiding from the world above and/or their Tragic Pasts. Deschanel feels right at home! Well, she feels right at home because she's an anthropologist and can be a robot study people objectively. But anyways.

The dead lady was making a documentary on DC homeless living conditions, which is how everyone downstairs knew her, and the investigation brings Bones and Booth to interview this one mole person who was a friend of dead lady, a very sweet guy who's only a little crazy. And he has a very Tragic Past -- he was a Vietnam vet who had to sniper a pregnant lady with a grenade in one hand and a baby in the other. Booth empathizes, just a little too much, which leads Bones to ask exactly how many pregnant ladies he snipered when he was into snipering, and leads Booth to say "Don't ask me questions you don't want to hear the answers to." It's kind of hot, actually. Deschanel's lucky that Buffy wasn't around. (Or the BuffyBot, if Booth's interest in Bones is any sort of indicator of type.)

Anyways, Mole Duder keeps talking about how dead lady was looking for something guarded by "a blonde lady with dead eyes," and Hot Not Asian gets assigned as a sketch artist, despite the fact that she's terrified of crazy people she's not dating. (According to her witty repartee, that is.) The blonde lady is not a lady, though, but a portrait of a lady that was buried with bunches of other national treasures beneath DC during the Civil War as part of some national treasure hiding program. I don't know. All I know is that the dead lady wasn't exploiting the mole people so she could make a documentary about their lives, but exploiting the mole people so she could find the treasure. Too bad those rock climbers she hired to help steal the treasure were all greedy and armed with climbing axes. Whoops! But it's cool, because Booth and Bones find them in the nick of time and Bones gets to point guns and kick butt. Which girlfriend cannot get ENOUGH of. So everyone's happy!

Well, except for Mole Duder. And Booth. And Bones. And everyone else with a tragic past. So really, just Hot Not Asian is happy. But we take what we get, in this life. We take what we can get. Just ask Booth. But only if you're ready to know about all those pregnant women he killed.

Love,
Liz