It was not the first time that Bones ventured into the realm of the nerd; last time, I was beside myself with joy and giggling as our team searched through D&D playing knights to discover the killer of the possessor of a mythic sword. This time, the champion of a fictional arcade game was murdered, and competitive nerds are the suspects.
The first mistake was that the game was fictional, thus it did not strike a nerdy cord with anyone out there.
The second was that, though the victim died from being drown and cooked in a vat of fat (really gross, by the way), the entire investigation was based on the injuries he received to incapacitate him before he ended up in the vat, while it's hard to imagine there would be nothing to learn about how he was transported and dumped in the vat in the first place.
The third mistake (and no, we are not near done yet) was for the murderer to be the father of an autistic boy whose single joy and victory, the playing of punky pong, was stolen by the victim.
Now you might say that such a choice for the murderer might be quite interesting and heart wrenching, but I have not yet mentioned the worst mistake of the episode - its terrible writing.
The episode was shallow, the characters - including our familiar friends - all felt like caricatures, and the nerding out missed the mark of reality, and was likely more a ploy to advertise the movie Avatar than an occasion to rejoice in nerdiness.
Sweets (John Francis Daley), Hodgins (TJ Thyne), and Colin (Joel Moore) ran back and forth between the lab and the movie lineup; they rushed through their jobs, but still determined important truths...which I guess was lucky, if not particularly believable. And it speaks to how uninteresting the arcade game was that all three were more interested in waiting in line than having a chance to play the game.
I don't even want to discuss how ridiculous I found it that Sweets felt unsure about his manhood cause Colin had slept with more women than him. Regardless of anything else, Daisy and Sweets have not had any problems in the bedroom area and I can't believe Sweets would feel unmanned just because he hadn't bedded plenty of unimportant women.
In the end, the only thing interesting and memorable about the episode is the tattoo of Angela (Michaela Conlin) that Hodgins apparently sports on his bicep, though that too is a little incredible, that in all time time Angela had not seen it. When was he supposed to have got it? I seem to recall that we and Angela have seen him without a shirt since their break up.
At least I know that episode 10 has to be better, unless it tried very hard not to be.
