Professional Fangirl!: Geeky TV commentary - Bones 11.3, Sleepy Hollow 3.3

Bones airs at 8pm on Fox Thursday nights.

Bones and Booth are back in the field! The case is about black market organ dealing, and the people who do that, but by this point in the run of the series, that's not really the point of the show at all, and it hasn't been in a long time, so why pretend? They barely got into the morals of it, and the science was cool, but there wasn't any really experimental testing or anything. And of course they got their killer.

The real story this week, as most weeks, is in the characters.

Booth is back at work, but he's been gone long enough between retiring, then going missing, then recovering, that his office has been given over to Aubrey, who is quietly becoming the new Booth in the FBI-focused alternate show that we don't get to see. He's also having trouble getting a hold of his brother's ashes, which should have been mailed to him from wherever they were being kept, and went missing. Adapting is hitting him hard.

Bones is trying to help him, Aubrey is trying to help him, and really, none of it is working because he's really having trouble with his brother being dead and under the circumstances it happened, rather than the actual job situation.

Meanwhile, Cam is having a hard time being single again. Aristoo and she are taking a break while he goes to find work somewhere else, since she can't hire him full time and date him. And there's a feeling in the beginning of the episode that she has beef with Bones over that, since Bones coming back made him leave once and for all. She assures Bones later on that that's not it, but she's still upset and it's still hard, and can we just agree that Cam needs a break for once? Everyone she falls for keeps leaving or winding up dead since she was introduced, and she's the last main cast member in the Jeffersonian that hasn't just been allowed to be in love. Hopefully Aristoo will find a forensic anthropologist job somewhere close enough to visit, at least, so he and Cam can work out their conflicts and get married already.

And Hodgins has set up a showing of Angela's photography without telling her that he was going to or asking her permission, and has invited everyone ever. She's freaked out by it, but she doesn't stop it from happening, and when it goes on, a Pullitzer prize winning photographer buys one of her pictures. Hopefully, that will lead to good things for her, since the whole going-to-Paris thing from the end of last season was sort of totally dropped and, I think, never mentioned again.

It was great having B&B back in the field together! They were barging in on funerals, Bones made someone faint, Booth tried to get her to be respectful, it was like old times for a minute.

And then they found Jarrod's ashes in the nursery where Christine was using them as a stool to get into her baby brother's crib so that she can take care of him in a whole sibling-helping-sibling symbolism thing, and maybe it will help Booth move on. Because he's had a hard several episodes, and he could use a bit of a break these days, too.

Sleepy Hollow airs at 9pm on Fox Thursday nights.

You know, Pandora could have been Katrina 2.0--you know, a weird witchy drag on the show--but she's actually turning out, so far, to be neat. She's got her box of tricks. She's raising some really weird subterranean roses. And she's throwing semi-random past-linked baddies at them in what looks, more and more, to be an attempt to find their weak spots. And it looks like it's working on Abbie, who looks more and more doubtful every time Crane says he's glad they're partners with a shared mission and he's happy they've found each other.

It's very worrying.

This week's villain is Jack the Ripper! Who, of course, Crane almost met when he was a teenager at Eton, and of course turns out to actually be a cursed knife that makes a jealous or rageful person into a ripper, and has been doing so for around 900 years by the time he kits Sleepy Hollow. This time's chump is a nerd from an office who can't get the attention of his lady crush. They figure that all out pretty quickly, and also figure out that the way to stop him is to infect the blood that the knife feeds on, breaking it's hold. They've got two darts full of malaria-blood, so two chances to take the dude down. One fails, of course, and then the second, Crane goes and does something CRAZY and infects himself just as he's stabbed in the stomach, and the way the episode was cut, there was not nearly enough time for the horror of that really dumb choice to sink in.

Thankfully, he's apparently immune to malaria because of trench warfare during the Revolution, and we'll just forget about how modern malaria has been around for two hundred years longer that the strain he would have been immune to, because he's okay. He's also sleeping on Abbie's couch, though it seems more like he should be in a bed (does he have a bed? did he tell Abbie not to give him her's? did she not offer??), and maybe, really, should be in a hospital. There were sirens, so they must've taken him to a hospital, but the show skipped all that.

But there was a great moment where he was failing and Abbie was holding him in her arms and brushing his hair from his face and patting his cheeks and begging him to stay with her. That moment, also, could have used a little more time to happen and sink in, but it was also edited short and fast.

And then Pandora showed up and was all "what does it feel like, to know his life is slipping through your fingers?" that sounds like a set up for Abbie's biggest fear being losing Crane, though she's been holding him at arm's length since they got back together.

Off in the various B-plots, Crane is trying to save the Archive, still, and his paperwork is continually being denied because they won't give funding to a non-US Citizen, so he decides to become a full citizen. Abbie likes the idea, and her smiling at him makes him smile. The girl who was telling him about the paperwork, and seems really sweet on him, offers to help him with his learning and everything, and he seems charmed by her attention. She's cute and nice; in previous seasons (season 2 - cough), that would have marked her for a horrible death. Whether that happens or not will be another test on how much the writers have actually turned a leaf.

Abbie and Danny still have unresolved business, and he wants to take her to dinner and talk about it, in a way that doesn't sound entirely like "we're over", but Crane getting evil-shanked puts and end to that plan. He does say that he thinks Abbie can go far, and he wants to keep pushing her if she'll keep pushing him. It didn't seem like that's what Abbie wanted to talk about, but she had a bedside to get to.

And Jenny and Jo had to go after the Shard of Anubis that was stolen from them last week. They track the Big Bad Voodoo Daddy to a motel where some girl says she was incidental and gets the drop on all of them. Jenny gets it back because she's awesome, but the implication of that conversation is that Jenny wasn't the only girl that Corbin was running all over the world to get mystical artifacts, and that doesn't sit well with Jens. I guess we're just running with the idea that Joe doesn't know anything about all this, though I'm pretty sure he learned something about it when he was a wendigo last season. What evs. Jenny wants to let him in, and it'll be nice when he's up to date and can work with Team Witness for real, and then Jenny can come back to the fold, too.

Three episodes in, and this season is pretty solid. It's not as madcap or as light as season one was, but it's appropriately more adult--they've all been through a lot, and they're working out the new ways they all fit together, and in spite of that, it's still fun and charming and goofy enough to counter the potential darkness in the story. Three points is a pattern, and hopefully the pattern will keep on!