TV Review: Bones Episode 1.20

Wednesday, April 26, 2006

From FOX: Booth’s boss, FBI Deputy Director Sam Cullen, is anxiously awaiting information from doctors as to why his daughter Amy is dying of a rare form of lung cancer. When Brennan learns of Amy’s condition, she questions the rarity of the cancer in a girl of Amy’s age and background and discovers Amy had a bone graft as a result of a previous accident. Brennan enlists Booth’s help to dig deeper into the origin of the bone graft she received, and they are shocked to learn Amy is not the only person with the rare terminal cancer and that she may be the victim of a crime in “The Graft in the Girl.”

My Rating: 4 out of 4

This week on Bones has Brennan, Angela and Booth entering the scene as they walk down the hall of a hospital's pediatric cancer wing to meet with FBI Deputy Director Sam Cullen. However, the case they are their to discuss doesn't turn out to be the case that they decide to follow in this episode. Bones is immediately interested when she hears Cullen's daughter is suffering from an extremely rare form of cancer. Even when Booth tells her not to ask questions, she still does, but as it turns out her questioning leads to the discovery of the cause of her cancer.

When Bones looks into a bone graft the teenager received when she broke her leg, she can see that the bone could definitely be the cause of her illness. Once she is certain of it, the bone that was used in the bone graft isn't that of a twenty-five year old, but it is more in tune with a bone of a cancerous sixty year old, and it is possible others have received bones and other organs from the same company that provided the hospital with the bone graft used in Amy's operation.

Brennan and Bones go to Deputy Cullen, and they tell him the cause of his daughter's cancer. Even with knowing the cause, there is really no hope for his daughter's survival, so he tells them to send the case to the CDC. However, Bones and Brennan stay on the case because it is possible others have been affected, and because the two find out that the company that sold the bones to the hospital doesn't even exist. All the two have on the company is an email signed to a factitious name.

They return to the hospital, and one of the people working there tell them there was another accident victim that received bones from the same fake company. Booth calls on the woman, and he finds out that the woman has already died of lung cancer eight months before. Once they find the one victim other than Cullen's daughter, they find thirteen other victims that also received bones around the same time from the company.

The other victims are brought in for testing, and some are found with early forms of cancer. Amy sees these other victims with chances of being saved, and she has some hope for her own changes. However, Brennan does tell her that there is no chance for her own survival. That instead she is saving the lives of others. The man, as they discover, has no idea what he has done by giving bits of his own cancerous bones to others. Booth labels a serial killer, and once they get more into things, this does become an FBI case. Up to a certain point, Booth had been using his sick time to follow the case.

After Angela is able to identify how the man looks like, Hodgins is able to analyze where the man's bones to find out where the man is from. Soon they have narrowed it down to a sixty-five year old man that died from lung cancer within the last year from West Virginia. They soon work to find the body of the man, but their first two aren't where the bones came from. They next interview the wife of a third man, and she is less than cooperative with them. The two go to the funeral home she mentioned, but the mortician says there was no man by that name at his funeral home.

As the two continue on, they feel that the wife isn't the one responsible for selling her husband's bones for harvesting. They start to lean towards the funeral home, so they return to it. After speaking to the mortician briefly, they go to the showroom, or what looks to be a showroom. After a few moments, Bones determines that is the room that was used to harvest the bones before cremation.

Bones takes in the bone dust she found in the air vents of the funeral home, and she finds that this is the location where the bones of the male victim that caused Amy's cancer, as well as bone dust from seven other bodies. However, the mortician can't have been the one to harvest the bones. Someone had to work with him. Bones goes back to the hospital and confronts the woman they had been speaking to since the beginning of the episode. She had some medical background, and she was the one that did the harvesting.

Also during this episode, Angela makes friends with Amy. They share a love of art, and the two become quite close. When the case is solved, and Amy is still left the same as she started, this upsets Angela, but she is able to fulfill one of Amy's dreams - the one of letting her see The Louvre in Paris, even if it is only virtually. Hodgins and Angela also continue to form a basis for some type of relationship, and I'm really enjoying this slow development of these two as a couple.

This episode had me emotional at its end. It was an intense episode, and the case wasn't similar to ones this show has had in its past. This was a case that they really couldn't make right even by solving it. No matter what they did, someone would still die. Bones will return with an all new episode in two weeks. Next week, there will a special episode of House in its slot.