TVSquad

Handy tip: if you ever find yourself in a situation where your seared flesh (or someone else's, hopefully) is stuck to metal, you can use vegetable oil to separate the two. That's just one of the things I learned on tonight's episode of Bones.

This episode may have been a little too realistic for many viewers, as it opens with a man with a foreign accent in a SUV pulling up in front of a restaurant. The SUV expodes, killing several and injuring many. In these times, viewers might be disturbed by that.

Was the man a terrorist? Was the man in the SUV even the same guy they think was in the SUV? What does the wife know? If he did do it, why did he do it when he worked for the government and even met the President just a few days earlier? 

Hey, any anthropologists or CSI-type experts or medical professionals out there? Do they really use flesh-eating bugs to clean the bones of burn victims? That's wild if it's true, only half-wild if not true. But still kinda wild.

Besides the flesh and metal thing above, the other thing I learned from this episode is this: the thing you take away from Bones, and all the shows of its type (partners who aren't alike investigating a crime, arguing and joking with each other), is an appreciation for what David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson did on The X-Files. Maybe it was the writing or just the chemistry between the two, but Duchovny and Anderson made every argument and/or witty banter ring true, when in most shows it just seems a bit forced and slightly over the top. That happens a bit on Bones, though it doesn't really distract from whether the show is good or not. It just stands out and you remember how good Mulder and Scully were.

But Bones is doing something interesting too: just when you think they are going overboard with the whole CSI, science, "how are they going to figure this out" apsects, they throw in a little character development, like tonight when Brennan goes over to Booth's home and sees he has a girlfriend she didn't know about. Or when they start thinking the wife of the man in the SUV might have been having an affair. I hope they really build on the personal stuff (including why Brennan's parents vanished when she was 15), because if they don't, it's just another investigation show. I welcome the romantic comedy banter mixed with the deadly serious crime investigation and dead bodies. I like these characters.

Bones remains (no pun intended), in its second week, a solid little show. There's absolutely nothing groundbreaking about it (X-Files meets CSI meets House is still the best way to describe it), and some of the "Booth goes up against his superiors" and "will Brennan and Booth get together" stuff is predictable, but that doesn't mean it isn't entertaining and well done.