New Show Recap: Bones Episode 8.04 “The Tiger in the Tale”

As a warning: if you’re triggered by depictions of violence against animals, don’t watch this episode. I obviously won’t be including the relevant screenshots, but tread carefully if you’re sensitive to such topics.

A bickering couple tries to get their car out of the mud and as the wife guns it, red mud splatters up against the husband. Oh, dear… I don’t think that’s mud. He starts choking, thinking a rock went down his throat, and when he stands up, there’s a disembodied face stuck to his chest. Y’all, I’ve been watching Bones for over seven years now. I’m pretty immune to the body discovery gross-outs. But this one… man, I was eating chips and salsa during it and it was thisclose to putting me off my salsa. Almost. That’s saying something.

At the site, Brennan does a quick estimate on the body to ID it as a male Caucasian, mid-twenties as Hodgins creates a “bug rapture” with a vacuum (yeah, I laughed at that). Brennan gives the poor husband who found the body some ipecac so that he regurgitates what he thought was a rock and ends up being a tooth. Nasty. Just nasty. From the victim’s neglected teeth and newspaper stuffed (too big) shoes, Brennan suggests that the man was from a lower caste. Squintern of the Week Daisy chimes in to tell her that “We don’t have castes in America,” to which Cam asks her, “Want to look me in the face and say that?” Angela is having trouble creating a face (since, you know, it was splattered onto that guy’s shirt) and Hodgins professes having trouble, too. Then he goes into a super long and complicated spiel that basically sums up as lots of teeny tiny details leading him to deducting that the victim was at a fairgrounds that had an antiques show last week. “This is you having trouble?” Angela deadpans.

At the fairground, Booth and Brennan find a grounds manager picking two out of twenty day laborers… that’s all he has work for that day. Brennan shows him a few of the reconstructions Angela made and one of them he recognizes as Jared Drew. Booth investigates Drew and finds that he used to own a hardware store until the crash, when he lost everything. No criminal history, but a restraining order has just been taken against him by his ex-wife Marcy. They bring her in for questioning, and her new husband seems really aggressive, but they’re cleared quickly.

One thing perplexing the team was the existence of two gun shot wounds: a 9mm to the hand and a .45 caliber through the head. Cam realized (way too late and thanks to her NYC coroner experience, which has been name checked twice this season) that the hand was a defensive wound and the difference in size is due to a hollow-point bullet. Some slash-type wounds on his hand, along with DNA from those wounds point Cam and Hodgins to the victim being attacked by a tiger pre-murder. Not just any tiger, a purebred Siberian Tiger. Drew was working a pet expo at the fairgrounds prior to his death, but Kneebly, the manager of the expo, claims that all his animals are on the up and up. No surprise that Kneebly’s lying; he didn’t want Drew to go to the hospital for his tiger wound because his illegal trafficking would be found out, so he shot him. And then had the buyer shoot the tiger to destroy the evidence. It’s a sad case, and one of the rare cases that gets to Brennan, as she breaks down after they discover the tiger’s corpse.  Caroline cuts Kneebly a deal, though, to get the names of his suppliers, which is a rare deal that everyone seems to approve of.

The B-Plot

Brennan is weighing the idea of running for president. Honestly, this whole side plot seemed so contrived to me that I don’t even want to discuss it. We’ve never seen Brennan show the slightest interest in politics and now she is coming up with economic policies and healthcare plans? I’m not down on the idea of a fictional character thinking about the concept, it just seems like it was shoe-horned in to be topical and it grated on me. So, moving on to the:

C-Plot

Daisy and Sweets are taking the big step of moving in together. Sweets doesn’t think it’s a big deal, but through the episode comes to realize that to Daisy, it’s the last step before marriage. In one of the coldest things that any characters ever done on this show, just as they’re getting ready to enter their new apartment for the first time, Sweets tells Daisy that he can’t do it. And he’s not just backing out of the living situation; he’s breaking up with her. Damn, Sweets… I didn’t like Daisy, but that was just wrong.

Oh, yeah, there was a D-Plot

There was also something about Angela feeling unfulfilled and unneeded at the Jeffersonian, but I’m not sure whether that’s going to grow into something of was just a way of showing Hodgins and Angela as a functional couple compared to Sweets and Daisy. Your guess is as good as mine.

I felt this was a kind of blah episode. The case seemed to go all over the place, we had a record number of sub-plots, and none of it seemed very connected. Maybe I’m just not feeling it this week. Anyone else feel the same way or did you love the episode?