It’s Christmas at the Jeffersonian Museum, and a team of freakish forensics scientists is clashing over the meaning of Christmas. Seely Booth, the Catholic, sees it as a time to revisit the man upstairs. T.J. Hodgins, the paranoiac, says just because organized religion is another political movement designed to control the masses, “that doesn’t mean God doesn’t love me.” And Zach Addy, the least socially adjusted scientist, says, “I’m an empirical rationalist all the way, unless you talk to my mother. Then I’m Lutheran.”
Debates like this recur in Bones, a FOX drama that tells the story of a painfully logical forensic anthropologist, Temperance “Bones” Brennan, and her soft-hearted FBI partner, Seely Booth. Bones (Emily Deschanel) is brilliant to the point of social maladjustment. If she has a god, it’s logic. If she has an ethic it’s based on anthropology. Booth (David Boreanaz) is her partner – an ex-military FBI agent who sees all in black and white.
Bones and Booth are fiercely devoted to each other and just as fiercely disagree on everything. It’s Bones’ bones vs. Booth’s theories. Bones’ science vs. Booth’s psychology. Bones’ evidence vs. Booth’s intuition; and most of all Bones’ empirical rationalism vs. Booth’s devout Catholicism. Bones and Booth show the tension between the rationalistic worldview and a view that places some faith in mystery. Whose view wins in the end?
Bones’ plots detail the gruesome and extreme. When it comes to morally aberrant behavior – from fetishism to cannibalism – Bones can understand the behavior from an anthropological point of view and give the logic for its evolution, but Booth reacts viscerally. Immoral behavior disgusts him. Bones and Booth argue about a group of fetishists with Booth stubbornly standing for traditional sexuality:
“When you turn someone into an object of sexual pleasure, it’s wrong.”
“How do you know?”
“It’s in the Bible.”
“It is not.”
“Then it got left out by mistake.”
In an episode where Booth and Bones catch a cannibal, Bones says she can intellectually understand the evolution of cannibalism and might even consent to try it if she was trying to inculcate herself into a culture for anthropological study.
Yet when they capture the cannibal and Booth explodes that he doesn’t want to listen to his “psycho speech,” the cannibal turns to Bones expecting she’ll listen to him. She lobs a bedpan at him and echoes Booth: “No one wants to hear that rambling psycho speech!” She can rationalize cannibalism but when she meets one, she throws bedpans.
And it’s Booth, whose puritan modesty she sometimes mocks, who wins the discussion about sexuality.
“Making love – making love – that’s when two people become one.”
“It is scientifically impossible for two objects to occupy the same space.”
“Yeah but what’s important is we try and when we do it right, we get close.’
“To what? Breaking the laws of physics?”
“Yeah, Bones – a miracle. All those people with their role-playing and their fetishes and their little sex games – it’s crappy sex. At least compared to the real thing.”
Booth is startled when Bones replies, “”You’re right.”
Bones is about logic’s power but also its limitations. The team finally solves the case of Gormogon, a serial killer who targets the members of secret societies, when they discover Gormogon’s apprentice is one of their own team-members. Logic leads Zack to become the Gormogon’s apprentice. When Booth and Bones confront him and Booth says, “I’d love to hear the logic of killing people to save the world,” Zach replies, “The Master’s logic is irrefutable.”
Then Bones points out Zach’s inconsistency. Zach believes that he’s justified in killing members of secret societies, because secret societies adversely affect the human experience. He should believe that the historical human experience is more important than a single human life, but Brennan notes that he sacrificed his cause and himself to save his friend.
Zach sees the truth of the value of a single life immediately. Both the logicians and the mystics share this belief and it’s the show’s whole premise. But where does that premise come from? Isn’t it more logical that the entirety of the human experience is more important than a single life? Does this premise come from logic or some truth that transcends it?
The show never comes down on one side or the other. The question is always open for debate, and the sparring never ends. It’s clear, though, that the logician and the mystic need each other. Booth and Bones are a good team and sometimes, Bones needs Booth’s beliefs even though she doesn’t share them. In one episode, she makes a promise to a foster child that only Booth can help her keep. He helps her keep her promise:
“I knew you’d back me up. I knew you wouldn’t make me a liar. Because you want to go to heaven.”
“But you don’t believe in heaven.”
“But you do.”
Sometimes the empirical rationalist needs to lean on the mystic’s belief.