Bones Retro Recap 1.10: “The Woman at the Airport”

Booth and Brennan head out to LA for a case and Goodman and Hodgins clash back in DC. We’re bicoastal, kids!

It’s a big day at the Jeffersonian as Dr. Goodman brings in the remains of what is very possibly an Iron Age Warrior. It’s up to them to confirm that. Goodman would do it, but he has a museum to run, so it’s up to Brennan and Zack. They’re excited, because, you know, it’s what they’re actually there at the Jeffersonian to do, but killjoy Booth arrives and convinces Goodman that it’d be good press for Brennan to come out to LA to help him investigate a body found in pieces near LAX. Besides, Goodman can authenticate the Iron Age guy; he used to be an archaeologist, after all.

Once B&B arrive in LA (in a swank ’66 Mustang), Brennan finds that identifying the victim won’t be cut and dry. Her skull has been operated on numerous times. Fortunately, there’s a breast implant with a serial number in the remains. Unfortunately, it was from a batch that were stolen from a plastic surgeon’s office. Man, everyone’s just making this case difficult. The doctor had found out that a few weeks ago, another one from the stolen shipment was traced to a botched boob job, though, and that doctor leads them to a call girl service. The madam had one girl missing, Rachel LaChance (not her real name, of course). She was in Las Vegas with a client, and hadn’t been heard from in over a week.

When the doctor she was with checks out, Booth turns to Rachel’s most frequent working partner, Leslie. Leslie explains that Candace (although that probably wasn’t her real name, either) had a boyfriend who had recently found out the was an escort and was pissed. Booth and Brennan go to question the boyfriend, who says that Sandra (maybe her real name? Maybe?) couldn’t ever believe she was beautiful, she just kept having more surgeries.

With no real evidence to go on, Zack notices that marks on the fatal wound match marks from one of the surgeries. They find the only plastic surgeon to do that specific procedure and he admits to operating on her in exchange for favors. He had been seeing another escort, who had gotten too attached. The surgeon finally had to cut it off with Rachel/Candace/Sandra/Susan (as he knew her) because he thought she was addicted to surgery. Turns out, the other escort got jealous and guess who it was? Yep. Leslie.

Using indicators that the mystery girl had been in a car accident around age 12 and was originally from the Northeast, Booth tracked her true identity down to Allison Holmes. Her mother was killed in the accident that injured her, but Booth found her father and brother and arranged to have the remains returned to them.

In the B plot, Dr. Goodman uses the squints to assist him in authenticating the Iron Age body, but his archaeologist/story teller side clashes with Hodgins science/fact-driven work. Hodgins goes so far that if he didn’t, you know, own the Jeffersonian, he’d have totally been fired. Goodman decides that there are too many conflicting facts about the body to definitively authenticate it and Hodgins snarks about this. Later, Goodman calls Hodgins in and tells him that he did like hearing someone call him out and that he did bail on the authentication. To fully authenticate it, he would have had to destroy the remains and he couldn’t bear doing that to what he thought was a real artifact. Hodgins suggests says that he’s waiting for imaging technology to get to the point where he would haven’t to dissamble and Goodman likes this suggesting. Yay, resolution!

The “case” in this episode is really a vehicle for two things: fancy shots of beautiful people in bikinis next to roof top pools and Brennan monologuing about how plastic surgery is barbaric and erases the real person behind that surgery. I really don’t think I can go into everything that’s messed up about that, so I’ll just leave that there and let you ladies discuss amongst yourselves.