Bones - The Beautiful Day in the Neighbourhood, S05E04

This episode of Bones was just goofy. Not necessarily in a bad way, but overwhelmingly so.

There are three lines of development: 1. Parker (or Baby Booth) (Ty Panitz) wants to find his dad a girlfriend. 2. Arastoo Vaziri (Pej Vahdat), the Muslim intern, does not in fact have an accent. and 3. A suburbanite was murdered and his body was burnt in a luau pit with a roasting pig.

I'll discuss them in that order.

So Parker wants Daddy Booth (David Boreanaz) to have a girlfriend. Apparently Booth needs a girlfriend very badly "to sex up." Yes, those were the lad's exact words. Booth, of course, does not know how to deal with the entire situation, asks Sweets (John Frances Daley) how to deal with it, and never discusses it with Parker. At the end of the episode, Booth convinces Bones (Emily Deschanel) to come hang out with him and his son so that Parker will see that his dad does have good relationships with women, and she asks Parker why it is so important for his dad to find a girlfriend. The reason? So that he will move into a house where there is a pool and Parker can go swimming. So yes, fathers, ask your sons what they are thinking because when they are that little, their logic hasn't been pushed off track by any sexual distractions.

I would like to note that there has yet to be any mention of whether or not Booth is still feeling more affection than before for Brennan. Apparently a crime show which is all about character development can neglect to tell us the gossip we really want to hear. Sigh.

The plot point of Vaziri and his fake accent was just bizarre to me. Perhaps there have been complaints about him sounding stereotypical or discriminatory or something. I can't imagine that when they originally created this devout character they intended to have him lose the accent later. I don't know. It was entertaining, but I was as surprised as the characters were when suddenly he spoke perfect English. Wouldn't his application forms for the internship have revealed that he hadn't just arrived in America? There must be some reason for it, but I don't know.

So finally we get to murder...It was a goofy murder, perpetrated by three people together who lost their tempers because they hated a guy's wind turbine. Makes me not want to move to the suburbs.

While there was nothing particularly awful about the episode, and I realize that it can't be easy coming up with interesting murders week after week, if this had been one of the first episodes of the series, they would have lost viewers. In fact, it is apparently one of the shows that has been losing dedicated viewers because it's just not hitting our standards.

Pull up your socks, Bones, because I know you can be great and this episode missed the mark.