Bones – The postmortem of the plot device

Ding dong, another Bones plot device is gone. Because honestly, that was pretty much the entire point of this episode. Forget the BMX riders and Sweets and whatever else passed for “plot”, the real take-away is that Hannah is now out of the picture. Even though I’ve gone from hating Hannah to being, well, not exactly fond of her, but not thinking of her as all that awful, she still never was quite able to shake the fact that she existed for no other reason than to be a giant walking plot device. And what’s more, she was a poorly written one. She was a bad choice for the writers to make.

Television writers make terrible choices all the time, because everyone makes bad choices sometimes. And like everyone’s bad decisions, there’s no shame in making a few. But here’s what I love about television so much more than any type of media — not only are the mistakes broadcast, quite literally, to the world at large, but once they are, there’s real-time feedback that allows for writers to hear what they did wrong and fix it. No, they can’t change the past, but they can write around their blunders. You can’t do that with a movie or a book. Once it’s done, it’s done. The ability to grow and tweak your story as you go is what makes television so great, and is the reason I love it so very much.

I just wish someone would convey this point to the Bones writers, because I don’t think they’ve learned a damn thing.

To be fair, the idea of how to get rid of Hannah was a great one. Booth getting defensive and drunk and proposing as a challenge instead of because he genuinely wanted to marry Hannah? Genius. And excellently if subtly laid out in the whole ring scene, where he seems to erroneously believe that the bigger the rock, the more valid this decision would become, which is ridiculous on so many levels — not only because it’s patently untrue, but because it illustrated how clearly Booth wasn’t actually considering Hannah so much as going on a pure whim. If he was actually thinking about Hannah, he might have realized that, say, her job takes her to dangerous places where having a giant rock on her hand would be a bad idea, or that really, if she’s the type of girl he met in a firefight in Afghanistan, she isn’t going to also be the type to want to get blinged out. The logic behind this episode was great, the writers just forgot one thing: they hadn’t done the groundwork necessary for the plot to stand on.

We, as an audience, don’t know Hannah at all. We’ve never seen her be her, we’ve only seen her when it was necessary to have a hot blond plot device walking around. And there was never a moment where the utter lack of character development became clearer than in the proposal scene, which was probably the most awkwardly-done thing I’ve seen since Bones had to work in some product placement. Is Hannah really not the marrying type? Did Booth really know that and ignore it? As an audience, we have no idea.

Using poorly disguised plot devices to keep Booth and Brennan apart isn’t new to the Bones universe, and I wouldn’t have stuck around so long if I minded them. What sets the Hannah storyline apart from the others is that, for the first time, it serves absolutely no purpose. There have been plenty of plot devices, but at least they served to bring Brennan and Booth closer together, or get over some sort of hurdle that stood in the way of a relationship. You felt like even if it was prolonging the wait, it would make the destination worthwhile. There was no point to Hannah besides to keep Booth and Brennan apart.

And what’s more, none of this helps us get over the whole problem of Booth being an emotionally insensitive, completely out-of-character jerk this entire season. Sure, it helps to know that he’s been lashing out and angry at Brennan the whole time for not being willing to fall into his arms, but that still sits pretty weird. First of all, after knowing her so well for so long, did he really expect her to? He’s never given up before when he made overtures and got shot down. And yes, this was one that was bigger than usual, but why would he have thought a grander gesture would somehow get her over her fear of taking a risk on him? And what the hell was that ultimatum at the end of the episode — you go along with my way, exactly my way, or I leave you forever? That’s been Booths problem all along, hasn’t it? People have to agree with him and do things his way, or they get dismissed or ignored. Everyone knew what he was doing with Hannah, but they let him do it because they’re not allowed to say anything without him getting defensive and lashing out. Anything that might hurt his game plan, he covers his ears and ignores. And we’re supposed to believe he’s the emotionally intelligent one? At least Brennan, for all her social deficiencies, is willing to look at the reality of a situation with unflinching realism.

In an ideal world, the television medium would respond to this criticism. The writers would look at the fans being disgruntled, realize they did something wrong, and write in a correction. The problem is, this is Bones. There’s a weird, weird relationship between the fans and the writers, this sort of abusive chicken-egg scenario. Which came first, the fans complaining about every tiny thing (and yes, Bones fans, I’ve written for a lot of shows and can say with utmost authority that you are by far the whiniest of any television show fans to my knowledge), or the writers being patronizing and smug and convinced they can do no wrong? It’s an endless, vicious cycle of constant crankiness on one side and condescending martyrdom on the other, and I’m stuck somewhere in the middle, looking at the show and wondering what in the hell kind of point were even trying to make anymore.

So let’s call a truce, you guys. For everyone’s sake. Or, at the very least, for mine. Because a meaningful plot device, I can take, but another Hannah? I don’t think I have it in me.

Clacked by Julia Hass
on Feb 12, 2011 @ 17:02 EST5EDT