TRASHFUTURE - UNLOCKED - The Boney Island Whitefish in: The Last Blockbuster On The Left (Feat. Will Menaker)

Episode Date: September 3, 2020

Riley and Andrew from Boonta Vista have a semi-secret second podcast that is released weekly on both the TF and BV Patreons that you may have heard of: the Boney Island Whitefish, where they discuss Season 5 of the Fox police procedural Bones. It aired during 2009/2010, which was a singularly weird moment in our collective memory. There are many more episodes of the Boney Island Whitefish on both the TF and Boonta Vista Patreons - but why not try this episode to wet your whistle, with Will Menaker from Chapo Trap House! Here's the original text from the Patreon post: Chest passes! Carefully aimed jump shots! Ball control without hot-dogging! That's right, Chapo Trap House's Will Menaker joins Andrew and Riley for an all-showrunner display of podcasting fundamentals.  This week the brave technicians at the Jeffersonian-Medico Institute for Sexual Harassment are forced to investigate the cause of death of a very mysterious and influential historical figure! Deep respect for the boots of the American empire is sure to follow.  We also spring a gotcha Breakfast Update on Will and plan our future endeavours running a Airbnb Blockbuster so that we can lecture teens about Michael Mann films. Enjoy!

I'm Andrew, as always, I'm here with Riley. Hello, Riley. Hello. I think for the second time ever, I have waited to be introduced and not stepped all over you. Immediately started talking before I could finish saying the two syllables of Riley. Normally, Riley is recording early in the morning and I'm recording in the afternoon for our Australia London time difference. But today I'm going early in the morning and Riley is going in the evening because we needed to triangulate our positions around the globe so that we could line up a wonderful, special guest. It's Will Menica from Charpo Trap House. It's great to be here. All points, all of the important points on the map of this planet

are being covered right now to talk about bones. Right. There's Jason Bourne style surveillance, footage, satellites, Lincoln. Oh my God, it's Emily Deschanel. So I noted this in pre-show chat, but I'd like to note this in the show as well. This is officially a showrunner excellence podcast. The Boney Island Whitefish is the official podcast of showrunners. It's like playing three on three with all point guards. That's what this episode is

like. We're the player coaches of our three mighty empires. It's like dueling banjos, but with detailed notes. Well, there'll be no cross talk. There'll be no fat on this one. Just good information and like a steady smooth pace to everything. That's right. Now, something that has wound up happening as we did this show is that as we go along, we need to give an important bit of news each time, which is of course breakfast update. So Riley, what happened for breakfast today? Well, today, again, it happened about 12 hours ago, so I'm reaching back into holiday antiquity.

This is very unusual for me. I usually give like, I'm usually eating breakfast furtively while this happens, trying not to have my horrible chewing sound in the microphone, and then talking about which of my preferred mugs I'm using. Because that's good podcasting. That's what people pay to hear. No, I had a three egg omelet with a little bit of sourdough toast. I was keeping it very normal. I was also having coffee in one of the mid-tier mugs. Andrew, I'm more interested in what you're having. And of course, what our special guest has had at some point, I believe, is midday for him. I had a nice sunny side up fried egg, a bit of buttered toast, and a cransky, a nice cheese cransky from the local butcher,

which I split and grilled or broiled for the American perspective. When telling somebody this, I realized that Australia is the only country in the world that refers to this sausage as the cransky. And everybody said, what the fuck are you talking about? Apparently, it is known as the Carniolan sausage, which in Germany is known as the Krinerwurst. South Africans call it Russian. Thank you, South Africans. But it is a Slovenian sausage, most similar to what is known as a kilobasa or Polish sausage in North America. Oh, it's very good. And then we just had to fuck it up and call it our own thing. That's what you guys usually do. Very tasty. Shout out to the elite meats butcher down by my house and the guy who works there who will not shut the fuck up

and let me get out of the store. Irish butcher who just this is this is what actually happens, right? I went down there to get some pork because I was making some sausages. I decided to get my KitchenAid sausage stuffer attachment out and grinder and everything and have another go at it. And I went down there and said, I would like some pork to make some sausages. And he said, do you know what you're doing? Because he's Irish. And I said, yes. And he went, what fat content would you like? I said about 25%. He said, here's what you're going to want to do. You're going to want to get yourself a book and start writing down everything that you do. And so like he was beginning the process, which I was already aware of with you

need to write your own recipe book. And it went from there and it just goes for like 20 minutes until you get the product and just not inching towards the door. Eventually he will let you leave. So now we know what an Australian version of Seinfeld is, which I had not clocked yet. I mean, I would just like to express my general frustration as well with anytime anyone in the service industry or anyone I have to buy anything from looks me in the eye or attempts to talk to me or does anything other than fulfill the task I'm demanding of them forthrightly. Oh, look, I think Australia generally, we have a very good, good friendly customer service relationship. Everybody's kind of

on the same level. But I think, I think you got to be able to read the cues of this has been going it's been going for so long. It's been going for so long. I explained to him before we started what I was planning to do with the thing. And then he repeated the whole process of sausage making back to me. Will, what did you have for breakfast? Well, first of all, I mean, I don't mean to cut against the showrunners theme here, but I was I was not prepped whatsoever that they would be talking breakfast on the show. And, you know, we're, you know, were I to have been informed of this, I would have let you know that like, I would not be doing this podcast. I do not talk about breakfast, because, you know, I'm very bad at eating breakfast, you know, I mean,

I feel like an asshole now. I'm very I'm like, I'm like a no breakfast ever. I've very, you know, I've got a light stomach in the mornings. And I just I drink like a big mason jar of like cold brew coffee in the summer times. And then I wait till about three or four o'clock until I'm like bleeding from my eyes and just incredibly angry and mean to everyone around me. And then I'll like, you know, have something very unhealthy. Today it was cold scallion pancakes from the Chinese food I ordered last night. Very fucking depressing. I did not want to like give over this this part of myself publicly. But I suppose I'm trapped now. See, that's the thing, the Boney Island Whitefish actually has a lot more in common with like Axios, because an Australian

will ask you a gotcha question. Like, what do you have for breakfast? Yeah, I've been I've been rumbled. That's it. It's all over. Hope you're happy. I used to be a no breakfast guy, because I used to spend every night getting extremely high and binge eating until like two a.m. or three a.m. or whatever. Oh, that's my problem. I was wondering what it was. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's the thing, you wake you wake up with just very thoroughly laden intestines. And your body goes, No, I'm good. I'm good for how long I got a digest. I had a sleeve of Oreos at three in the morning. Fuck, get out of here. I'm not going to have a grapefruit now. Who are you? Fine. Yeah, that's what I'm saying. I'm an adult. I do what I want.

You got plenty of calories sitting there ready to go. I got little kids now. So they're getting me up at whatever time. Yeah, it used to be how the fuck do you expect to be eat breakfast? There was a marathon of super jail on last night. That's right. Or as I was telling somebody recently on Plex, they have just put a whole bunch of like free live streaming TV channels. And they're all like American style, terrible cable channels, which is wonderful to me. Last week and I ate a bunch of edibles and then watched like the game show channel for however long haunted myself with a game show called cram. Okay, hold on. That because that sounds like the kind of thing that would have been like a British game show in the 1980s or 90s where like you have to confess to a

you have to confess to a minor crime and get an asboe, but you also could win a boat. What happens on cram? Cram is well, much, much like we'll get into with bones. Cram is like a CIA black site torture thing done as a game show. So basically they they get teams of contestants and they have to cram they have to study a whole bunch of things. So they'll they'll give them categories like, you know, famous couples from sitcoms, or, you know, they'll have to to memorize facts from like a passage from somebody's autobiography or something like that. They then quiz them on these things in high stress scenarios, like flinging cards through through pieces of tissue paper, six feet away kind of thing. And I'm like,

how can these people, why do why do both these people know how to throw cards? It turns out that the card throwing is also something that they make them learn to do in the lead up to the show. And they make them learn to do it in the prior 24 hours when they don't let them sleep. Is Ricky J a consultant on the show? So so you have to stay up for 24 hours, learn a whole bunch of stuff, including facts and new skills, and then be quizzed about it all in a high stress environment while trying to stay awake. And then for the very final round, they put you into a big comfy soft bed with a sleep mask on, and a lady sits next to you and softly reads facts from a book

in a very gentle voice. And they do this for several minutes while you try not to fall asleep. And then they blast an air raid siren and you have to jump up and answer questions. So wait, you're saying this is basically who wants to be a millionaire, but if you had it run by John Yu instead of Regis Philbin. Yes, sounds great. Well, it is my nightly intake of high test cannabis that keeps me going. But also, Andrew, it's gaining access to your Plex server. I mean, this is what I do with my evenings until like three, four in the morning is watching the wonderful resource that you have curated of some of some of the great it's like browsing your Plex server is like it recreates the experience of like going to a video store and like sort of just aimlessly

browsing the aisles and like looking at all the box art and then and then, you know, going home with something that you're not very happy with. But you know, that's right. No, it's great. As many things as you can carry that you're not really sure about. But as long as you haven't seen them before, that was my that was my video store experience growing up with our local. We didn't have blockbuster for a long time. We had the local one for me was there was a video easy, which I think might have been a Canberra franchise and the video 2000, which is very futuristic sounding. And they had the they had the deals where you could get like, you know, five or eight weekly rentals for like 10 bucks. So so for me, I would rent so many video tapes

that it became the challenge of I'm just trying to find stuff in this store that I haven't seen. Right before I came on here, I did see a news item from here in America that the our countries are the last blockbuster in existence, I think is in a town called like Bend, Oregon, or whatever, and it is about to be converted into an Airbnb property. So I was I was I don't know, I just had the idea like I would love to to rent that the blockbuster Airbnb property. But I would only if it like still looked like a blockbuster and had the sign and I'd like to like stay there for a week and try to run it as a video store like an sort of a Nathan for you style social experiment where I just you know, I want to talk to people about movies and but like live there

sleep there and just like stock it with them. I'll bring my own DVD collection and all my physical media and like, you know, all the all the old DVDs I used to I used to burn back when you know, Netflix had like sent you DVDs and stuff like that. And I'll just sort of like curate it like my own library and run it as like this small Oregon town's video store. I think I think they should run it as an Airbnb, but they don't convert anything about it. They don't put a bed in or anything like that. But staying there is basically the same as like doing a late night shift working at a video store. You can just sit behind the counter and watch some of the movies on the CRT monitors that are like up on the roof. Well, it's the it's the natural extension of the like

recreational basket weaving or pasta making class, whatever, right, where you do an antiquated job, but you pay to do it for fun to learn a new skill where it's now it's yeah, Airbnb is just offering the blockbuster version of that where you can just like talk down to local tweens as they try to rent an action film and you sort of suggest that they might they might be interested in something more like, you know, interesting or French or, you know, Paul Verhoeven or whatever. I was very much interested in that some local teens come in and they're like, oh, you have end game and I'll just be like, no. What do you think this is? Airbnb is actually offering the opportunity of for people to be a snide video store clerk and like an experience. Awesome. Like you said,

Riley, it would be like a it would be like going out and learning how to do wine tasting and recognize the different notes and make recommendations and everything. It's that except somebody coaches you on how to listen to somebody who's coming in and find just the right movie for them. And then maybe like in the because, you know, one feature that blockbuster video never did have as opposed to the, you know, the more fable mom and pop video stories is like the little separated by a curtain closet area with the pornography in, you know, so like, I just want to I'll just I'll just have my laptop in there. And it's just like, you know, if you're over 18, just just go click around on my desktop, you'll find it. We are. We never had the porn section

in video stores here, but I wonder if that's because we we just have in the in the city I grew up in, which is the city I still live in. Canberra, where all of the clowns go to Congress was also like also one of the one of the places where it was just like legal to buy a porn. So in an industrial area of town, there's also all of these like massive blockbuster sized porn stores. So you could go in and browse the many thousands of videotapes of porn. You didn't have to have to go into the little the little back room of the blockbuster. You could just go to the to the big porn buster. Yeah, I would like to become like, like, yeah, like, I'd like to become like one of those snotty video store got clerks or whatever,

but only for pornography. So like, like, like, you know, like some like horny teenage boy will come in and be like, do you have anything with Jenna Jameson? And I'm like, yeah, if you've never fucking seen a porn before, man. Are you going to be like, come on, this is the green door, it'll change your life. Exactly. This is back when they shot it on film. And then the people doing it, the people doing it were like, you know, non consensual. What are you afraid of a little body hair? Yeah, a little pussy referring to implants as bad special effects. I'd be like, I could technically get arrested for letting you rent this Tracy Lord's VHS, but you know, it'll change your life.

What are we suggesting? A garden state, but instead of the shins, it's porn. Yes. Yes. Yes. See, we don't need, we don't need the Felix's and the Milo's and the bends. Nope. Get those guys. Get those ball hogs out of here. Oh, they're flashy hip hop style slam dunks. Yeah. Oh, boy. Well, look, as fun as it is to contemplate the idea of running an Airbnb all porn blockbuster in Bend, Oregon. I'm still doing this podcast. I think we've got a killer business idea here. All we have to do is rent it from Airbnb forever. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you're getting, you're getting more into the, the we work style. What if I pay to rent this place and I never make any money from it form

of business? But it's an experience. And we know that that works. Someone will give you money to do that. So as long as you can get investors in. Like TF is, we are a little peak, I mean, part of the kimono, just a tiny bit. You can, you can get a peak behind the curtain. We do have an office in London just because like London sucks and like no one has any space to do anything and everyone lives like an hour apart. Just by definition, no one lives near anything and everything is tiny and sucks. It's fucking awful place. Living the dream. Yeah. Living, living a strange fever dream. But so we have an office, but because commercial real estate has just crashed as a category, we were thinking it would be very funny. Like we're now looking at

getting an office in one of these like strange architectural monuments to finance capital that are in the city. But I just like trash, you know, is based in the Gherkin, which I'm, I'm very or like these, these just very weird sort of sculptural buildings that are made out of glass that are usually like hedge funds and political influence peddling firms or whatever. No, we're going to be in one of those. This is my, this is my promise to you, the listener. This is your dream to get yourself some of those bad Wall Street guy suits. Yeah. Everything else is the same. Anyway, should we talk about bones? This, we should, we show that we all love. We asked Will to come on here and give his perspective on

the, uh, the, the late 2000s crime procedural comedy forensic thing, Bones. And, and, and as things happened to line up, it was basically the perfect episode for Will to come and talk to us about because it's a Diedrich Bader vehicle. It's always good to see Diedrich Bader. He's looking well, or he was looking well 11 years ago. I don't know how he's doing now. Well, uh, yeah, as you said, uh, so you, you, you write me on the bones cast. And I think this is like the perfect way to do it. Cause you know, you guys have been, you guys have been cataloging bones. Um, and you guys are, you guys are bones experts. And I was of course aware of the show bones when it was on TV and you know, see ads for it. And I was aware that it was phenomenally

popular, but I had never seen even like a minute, like even one commercial breaks worth of this show. I was aware of like the stars of it and like the general conceit of it, but I had never seen an episode and never having seen it before jumping in and you know, season five, like, you know, well, well into season five of this show, which is when this episode was, um, as best I can understand it, it is a show that revolves around the FBI's crack, uh, soy division. That's, but that's the thing. That's actually where you are wrong. They are just academics who are constantly working for the FBI and you have several FBI agents embedded in their university department, essentially, or department at the Jeffersonian, which is an allegory for

the Smithsonian. It just seems like they like, you know, like sort of like Hannibal to catch a serial killer, you know, you have to have to mind hunt one with a serial killer. Like I was just, just, just from what I could instantly glean from the show, I thought the conceit was like to catch soy based criminals. They needed soy based forensics experts and FBI agents to do awful weediness bants with one another. Just like, just, oh, terrible. I'd say, you know, uh, go from, you know, a con to con, uh, you know, hunting down sex sickos or whatever. It's, uh, yeah. Like if somebody said, what if we could give you a decade of a show with like C grade weed and, uh, impressions, you know, but speaking, but I want to, I, before we go on, this is, this is a question I like to

ask people who have only tangentially aware of bones and maybe have only ever encountered it by listening to or being on this podcast, uh, which is that there was a lawsuit settled between the creators of bones and Fox for a portion of the profits of bones, uh, a portion of the rights, the profits of bones. Will, I'm going to ask you to give me a ballpark guess. Uh, how much do you think that was for like the portion of bones that like the creator and a couple of the producers would get is for four of them? Hmm. Well, I did, I did notice that, um, Emily Deschanel and, uh, David, uh, boring anus are more producers of the show. So they were, they got a, they must got a big cut for doing this as long as they did. Yeah. Uh, okay. Uh, given, given the insane

popularity of the show, I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to, I'm going to say, um, half a billion dollars. Uh, you, you fucked me on it. It's 180 million dollars that they got from a lawsuit to do with this just God awful C grade weed and ask show where they're all sexually harassing each other. Uh, yeah. $179 million. Good for them. I mean, I can't remember the last time the Murdoch family took a loss anywhere, you know, close to that. Yeah. It's, uh, it's, it's very weird. And as, as we have sort of discussed on the show, we are only looking at season five. Never season six, nothing before. Never. Um, I've never seen, I also had never seen a minute of this show before Riley suggested doing this and being a sucker for punishment. I said, sure. Um,

so season five and season five only, and we have noted before that season five, uh, was the one Riley wants to look at because of all of these bad shit plots, but also, um, because things just have kind of totally gone off the rails. And it was right at the end of season four that Deschanel and Borealis became executive producers of the show and started to have a hand in the actual direction of the thing. Uh, so I like to personally blame them for the plots that we encounter throughout this season. Yeah, that's right. Um, so, and also if you took everyone listening, this is Marxism, by the way, this is historical materialism. You're looking at a, a, a class analysis of the, of the economic forces that produce this moronic program that is about

this area of will's interest. And also, I think the longest we have gone without starting the episode. Whoops. Let's get to it. We are talking about season five, episode 12, the proof in the pudding. Uh, they all have terrible like friends style, the one with the murder format kind of episode titles. Uh, the bones count on this one is 16. The bones count for your reference will is when I review the script and see how many times the word bones was spoken in the duration of a 40 minute episode. Although I did, I did also do a scan for the word bone singular. Oh, right. The expanded bones count to the EBITDA. That rockets up to 28. This is worth hundreds of millions of dollars. And they're like 180 million dollars. And that's

just for a lawsuit for a bit of it. Have you seen this bone? I will take it down to bone storage. Okay, Barnes, million, please. Yes. I'm off to bone storage. It's in the bone basement. You know that. Buy me bone storage or go to hell. Yeah, Riley, you alluded to the other thing I picked when it's like they they they their lab is in the Jeffersonian Museum in DC. I'm like, yeah. Okay. So just just just the taste of this show, just to wet your beak is 180 million dollars because they not afford the fucking rights to say the word Smithsonian on a fucking TV show, which is like, you know, the Smithsonian is like a federally funded like National Institute. How are they? Are they charging royalties to say the name of this fucking museum in a TV show?

Well, okay, two theories. One is they're so ruthlessly they have no professional or ethical or standards of any kind. Like they would basically be portraying the Smithsonian as a bunch of like, you know, sex crazed bunglers. So I think Smithsonian might take exception to that. And two, it's so lazily written, they probably just assumed they couldn't say it and didn't bother to check. Imagine if imagine if they could copyright that stuff and any movie that didn't have the money together had to call it like Grey House Down. The President Mansion has fallen. Oh, we have to go and see the President of the Mother of Pearl House. So so we do we do open in the lab at the Jeffersonian Medical Institute for sexual harassment.

And in something that would fuck with anyone from 2020 who is watching this, but instead, it's 2009. So it's fine that we open on a cheese pizza making Michael Jackson references. Yeah, wow. Yeah, yeah. Big eye looking. It begins and David boring anise is is just sort of he's doing his soy bands with Emily Deschanel about seeing patterns in the sort of cheese topping of a cheese pizza. And he's like, oh, like you don't see Michael Jackson in there. And he starts doing like MJ moonwalking bullshit. And then like I said, this is the first like, you know, the 60 seconds I've ever seen of the show. And it takes a hard left turn from that from that soy band to just talking about their sex

lives. And then like someone left a pregnancy test in the bathroom that's positive. And then it becomes like the mystery of like, you know, who pissed on this trip. And then like, they just ask Emily the bones, Dr. Bones character. And she's they're like, is it yours? And she's like, no, I haven't had sexual intercourse in quite some time. And then they just start going through all the women in the office. And they're like, Angela is currently a very sexually active. So it's probably her. And they're like, um, and then she's like, that character Angela is apparently having sex with like a teenager or like this is a kid from freaks and geeks, I think. Yeah, this is he doesn't look he doesn't look any older than when he was on that show. And then and then

Dr. Bones is like diagnosis of it is like, he's a he's 16 years old. He's been groomed on discord. So his sperm is very motile and good. It's probably him. Yeah, this is this is actually a great introduction to the staff of the Jeffersonian Medical Institute for sexual harassment, because somehow the B plot of every episode is somebody in the very small staff fucking somebody else on the very small staff and introducing some of the main characters that everyone wants to have sex with each other. Like, by the way, I mean, is it ever is it ever acknowledged or become a plot point on this show that Emily DeChanel's character is autistic in any way? It's heavily it's because the weird thing is it's based on like a real person who was like,

here's all the stuff I would say in these situations called Kathy Rikes. But like the way it's actually written, I've made this observation a few times is that her how autistic she is flexes with the needs of the plot. Like if it's a if it's an easygoing, you know, B plot scene, like, you know, it's like, you know, who pissed in my chair or whatever, then then she does not understand a single metaphor or social cue. But like when the plot needs to move along, she can pick up on any vibe. Because basically, like I said, these writers are incredibly lazy. Right. Like, you know, here's a like, you know, a gorgeous, successful professional woman. And they're like, Is this your pregnancy test? And then she's just like, you know, blankly, like,

impossible. I have not had sexual intercourse in five years, four months and 37 days. Yeah, she also she also frequently responds to things with like, you know, in Terminator two, when like Edward Folon is teaching the Terminator, like how to smile and do some stuff. Or in like, in other movies where, yeah, somebody is learning and they go, Oh, I am an alien. I see you were making a joke. That's that's how she responds to a lot of things. She goes, Oh, I see that your expression of this was actually sarcasm. And then she smiles and they go, Yes, good job, bones. $180 million for the like 3% of this that producers get. Just keep that figure in your mind. Yep. So, um, so it has what was interesting to me was that, um,

bones revealing that she is basically in cell because the the previous however many episodes before Angela started fucking again, was a whole vol cell plot line where Angela kept explaining to everybody that she met with including children with no prompting whatsoever, that she was not currently having sex and had not had sex in a long time and really wanted to have sex, but she wasn't going to because she was doing a voluntary celibacy thing. And it's like, please stop telling people that you work with. And then she broke that streak with a what appears to be a 14 year old boy who's working as a psychologist for the FBI. That's right. Now, of course, before the streak, she was dating the other

scientists for the FBI because, you know, you could only know eight people and you have to date every one of them like around Robin, obviously. So, um, so, you know, Angela says, it's not her. I am fucking, but I'm not pregnant. She says, um, but it might be Cam, the lady who's walking around quizzing everybody about this sexual activity. It might be the 16 year old girl that she is looking after. But then all of a sudden here comes a secret agent, Richard T. Jones. Here comes the A plot. I thought, yeah. Yeah. And I thought for a second that it was, uh, Morris Chestnut. And I Googled to see who it was. Um, but Morris Chestnut was also a guest star in a different episode of bones, but instead this is Richard T. Jones, who we all

know from, uh, event horizon, uh, classic event horizon, Joel Schumacher's phone booth, and of course the Danny DeVito vehicle, Renaissance man. Movies that we will be pushing on you in that Airbnb blockbuster. Yes. Yes. Absolutely. We will be insisting you watch event horizon instead of guardians of the galaxy. Yeah. So I'm like, just some 12 year old, uh, some 12 year olds want to have a sleepover and watch a fun movie. And instead of, uh, instead of an infinity war, I'm like, yeah, check out event horizon. I think you're really, I think you're really going to like it. Oh, sorry. Excuse me. You want to see the Iron Man? Can I interest you instead in a cinematic tour to force that is the filmography of Diedrich Bader? So, uh, they declare that they're not going

to let anybody leave. They're locking everybody in while they wheel a big suspicious body bag. They announced that they are from the general services administration. And the true, the true deep state. Yes. And, and that the agents are all named Mr. White, Mr. Smith, and Mr. Jones on some real, the matrix type shit. Yeah. I mean, they kind of did, they kind of fuck up the, uh, the parallelism there. Uh, you know, colors, common last names, classic, classic G men, hijinks, half, um, half reservoir dogs, half the other one. So they announced that they are tasking the bone squad with figuring out how this corpse in this box died, which led to this very confusing exchange for me. Mr. White says your government

requires you to figure out how this person died until you do. We are all locked in here together as a matter of national security. About two seconds later, he says, you have until dawn tomorrow to fulfill this task. And then he follows that up by saying the sooner you figure out what killed this individual, the sooner life gets back to normal. Although it kind of sounds like life is getting back to normal at dawn tomorrow. Yeah. Yeah. Um, yeah, like it was again, never, I mean, I guess, I guess they do kind of explain why there was like a, there's a, there's a time limit on this. But the first thing I noticed with this, like, and also he makes it clear that they can't really do any of the actual forensic tests on this skeleton that they would otherwise use to

determine cause of death, because they have to like preserve the skeleton perfectly. So like, just the first thing I noticed is like, they wheel in this, like it's like, it's a completely, like bleached, just like totally like perfectly preserved skeleton, like all the bones are perfectly arranged. And they're like, okay, we're coming to you, the experts, we need to find out cause of death for this skeleton. And like, but also do not identify like, like the, the, the, the person that he said, like identifying the corpse is zero priority, just we only want to know cause of death. And they wheel out a perfectly preserved skeleton safe for a giant fucking divot missing from the skull. Well, I mean, I think I could give you a pretty good guess about what killed

this person. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it seems kind of obvious where the problem might be, when you have like a third of a skull blown out, you know, yeah. Yes, it was his cholesterol. Yeah. So down in the down in the car park outside, the agents have miraculously teleported down there and they are stopping Booth from going inside and there's all a bit of a bit of posturing from everybody. Booth leaves and calls the others on his phone. And the others in a very 2009 touch say, what if these, how do we know these guys aren't terrorists? Yeah. And a morale sham is notable for, you know, A, existing in 2009, but B, yeah, just like getting a bunch of, you know, government, just like fat guys to put on suits and then,

you know, use a bunch of cop talk to, to try to intimidate you into looking at some skeletons. Classic terrorist move. Well, Booth immediately states with complete confidence, they're not terrorists. They're just unidentified people who have come in and held us captive in like a kind of threatening to disappear us if we don't do what they want, you know, that's not terrorizing anybody. That's fine. So back in the lab, Bones is having a look at the body. She says, male from the sub pubic angle, last phase development at costochondral junctions, we can clamped it, came to declare that this person was older than 39 at the time of death. There is our first clue. Yeah. Also, you know, when you turn 39,

you know, it's, it happens to every man is your, your pelvic tilt gets that, that classic 39 angle. You can tell these things exactly, of course, from looking at bones. So, um, so they also declare that the body has had multiple corrective surgeries and has like a fucked up back. So yeah, they were also able to determine that whoever this person was, chances are somebody was shooting them up with amphetamines every day and was fucked a lot, but was very bad at it. Yeah, they appear to have some kind of Irish moron curse. I can't tell you more than that. But the pelvic joints are worn out completely smooth. The knee, the knees appear to have been fractured from kneeling to the pulp. Yeah, according to the, the, the, the,

the pelvis region, we can tell that he was suffered from what's known as the Irish curse, but also is suffered from it mentally by being in very close proximity to another much larger individual who is renowned for having one of the world's largest penises of all time. Who may have even been involved in his death, he intends. So yes, our, our clue so far is that the body that's been ferried in, uh, suspiciously by government agents over the age of 39 and has a big section of their skull blown out. Leading to a beautiful line. Um, so, so like you said, Will, they're not allowed to do any type of destructive testing. There are some, some samples of like particulates and fibers and stuff,

which they are also allowed to, uh, look, but no touchy. And so they're like, how are we going to date these bones? And bone says, I'm going to compare it to, to bones that we already have dated. I'm just going to hold them up next to each other and eyeball it. That's right. Yeah. So she pockets one. She pockets one. Yeah. I'm going to compare this pelvis to Lucy and just get a rough sort of general idea of how old it is. Yeah. So they died, um, sometime within the last 40,000 years. This is a classic Anthropocene femur, if I've ever seen one. So bones pockets one and goes running off with it. And, uh, Mr. White stops her and says, Hey, where are you going? Leading bones to say to bone storage. It's in the basement.

Oh, 180 million bucks. Beautiful. So, uh, back out of the diner. Booth is on the phone to his boss, the which is, of course, one of the three places. One of the three places that exist in Washington, DC. There is the Jeffersonian lab. There is the diner that they all eat at every single day. And there is the Founding Fathers pub that they go to. You've actually been to DC. Yeah. I've spent more time in DC than I would have liked to. Yeah. I mean, I'm going to say this very confidently. There are no diners in DC. There are no nice places to eat. They're all like cigar bars filled with defense industry

contractors and then like just sort of, uh, awful, just gastropub style eateries called like, you know, signatures or like the, the legislators and shit like that where, you know, yeah. Yeah. With the capital steps go to do crushed up Adderall in the bathroom. Awesome. Yeah. Exactly. Um, there's an area diner, a drive in or a dive. What a terrible town. So, um, so he's talking to his, his boss, Deirdre Bader, who's some big wigger, the FBI, and he says, oh, well, I can't help you get in there, but I'll, I'll help get you out of like a nameless government prison that they take you to afterwards, which is a nice funny poster rock joke. You're going to get tortured, but you're going to be black bad by the general services

administration. Yeah. Take him to a black site somewhere. And, um, and that's funny. That's funny to bones, um, especially because this, like this came out like halfway through Obama's first term and it was like, time to start killing some American citizens. I mean, it's just like, like I said, like I, uh, this, this, this show was, I mean, this was like, this was, this was the most wretched soy I think I've ever, I've ever come across. But like, you know, as the, we can get into it, like as the plot develops here, but it's not just that it's, it's, it's we didn't ask and it's, um, just awful, uh, just the cadence and rhythm of the way they talk to each other. And just the, um, is this happening now? Sort of style of the way they're talking.

But it's like, if, if this were just in the service of, you know, uh, undermining Western culture and doing the things that soy, um, you know, we like it to do, but this is soy in service of like, you know, the American empire, which is the worst of every fucking world imaginable. I have this written down later on in my notes, uh, which we'll get to, but like, I had this, this is the perfect Democrat show, right? Where it is, where we, it is, as you say, soy in service of the American empire, you know, where it is, it's all about the, it's, it's, it is, uh, norm's humping. Uh, it is nonetheless treating sort of the, um, it is treating the it is treating this as something sort of light and fun, uh, but sort of under it, you know,

I mean, and again, we'll see this like, Oh no, uh, you, for reasons we'll get into, oh, you can't damage these bones because we have to treat these with a symbol of reverence because they are a symbol of our nation and so on. And so forth, right? Like this is, this is kind of, this is something that's sort of, especially this episode, it just drips off of it. Yeah. And it's just like, uh, it's just like, of this very strange era in American culture, like, uh, this is, you know, probably around the same time that like NCIS was the other like biggest show on TV and like everyone's favorite character on that show was like the goth chick who for some reason, you know, dresses like she shops at hot topic and wears black lipstick,

but it's like, you know, high up in some, the naval criminal intelligence service or something like that. And like, I guess on this show, they're like, well, don't we made every character like that? This is like this idea that like, you know, yeah, like I go to, I go to a dragon con on the weekends, but during the week, I, um, I work for the CIA. Will, I am not joking when I say a few episodes ago, the major, uh, B plot revolved around, somebody who we hadn't seen all season turning up with three tickets to the premiere of James Cameron's avatar. And they then spent, they then spent the rest of the movie, like, sorry, the rest of the episode watching the trailer for avatar in the lab and saying things like,

I can't tell the difference between like what's special effects and what's real anymore. And then the other character is saying, wait until you see it in 3D. I hate to do a digression from this, from the avatar thing, but can you please play the sound effect that plays when we reach the length of the episode? Yeah, this is my, this is my, this is all, it's my favorite part of the Boney Island whitefish is we take a 43 minute episode of television and then we really fucking get into it. We talk about it for twice as long. Well, yeah, recording this show certainly took with, you know, is a, is a bigger investment of time that it took to write this fucking episode. That's a very recurring theme and,

and just to come back around to, to what we were saying, I think a thing that's been a very, very strong theme throughout all the episodes of the season that we've watched is this underlying I guess, um, underlying constant threat that while, while the characters of this show are the heroes and they're doing the right thing and they're serving justice and everything, if somebody is to get in the way of that and to be anything other than 100% cooperative at any time, they will immediately be threatened with being charged with multiple felonies, take it away, walked up basically just like, you know, we can put you away for like 10 years, without anything on you. This dude is an FBI agent. We don't give a fuck. We are trying to solve this

crime. That's how seriously, that's how seriously they take bone law. And then I guess the other thing I thought that is revealed in this episode that I guess is, is, is a, is a facet of the, of the, the lore and plot development of the show is that not only is Booth David boring in this, not only is he a fucking Fed, but he's also like a fucking special ops sniper that he's, he's a fucking sniper, which becomes like a big part of the plot of this episode. Just to where, where this episode goes with his fucking like sniper fucking past is so obscene to me, but we'll, we'll get there. Also, the fun thing is the sniper past, not talked about before, not talked about subsequently. This was introduced like this episode. Oh yeah. For example, like

none, no, every character's traits exist for one episode and one episode only. The only ones that stick about their backstory are just the completely unspeakable things they invent. Like, for example, given like, they were like, well, I get well about Booth. Obviously, you'll be close to our subject matter, given that you're the descendant of a presidential assassin. Oh my God. Oh yes. Oh God. Yeah. He's related to John Wilkes Booth and, you know, assassinations. I wonder where this is going. Yeah. But it's like, it's this is, but that's the kind of like lazy character is it's like, it's something I notice as well, where they're just like, well, in order to make this character interesting, we just have to give him a lot of

attributes. And the more attributes, the more three dimensional he is. And they're like, well, he loves his country, but he's descended from a presidential assassin. How conflicted he must be and so on. So, um, so Booth gets a call from the baby faced sweets who has used his psychological powers to detect speed for analogy. He used his psychologist powers to determine that these guys are a unit of government agents who have been trained for the thing they are currently doing, which is some incredible insight, just incredible insight. But, but he can tell he can tell that they don't respect Mr. White, who is the leader, but they do have a deep reverence for the body on the gurney. Democrat show. See. Yeah. So back in the lab, Angela and Hodgins are speculating that

maybe they've got Jimmy Hoffa here or DB Cooper, but Angela can definitely tell how handsome this dead body was by the skull's jawline. Yeah, exactly. She's able to positively identify the body by having WAP. Yeah. So, um, this, this prompts Hodgins to suggest that she do one of her famous bullshit reconstructions. Um, will you all enjoy this, uh, like, um, like Paulie Perrette in NCIS, who seems to just be like, uh, a hot goth that they said, Hey, you want to come work down the lab? Um, they, they find Angela in like one of the first episodes of the season and she's just like an art student and they get her to come and work at this fucking lab. And then somehow, somehow she becomes this like forensic expert doing reconstructions and stuff. So sometimes

it'll come up that she's like, when I was in art school learning about different kinds of crayons. It's, it's the thing, right? It's again, like, uh, you know, Booth is, uh, he was a trained sniper for this episode. Uh, she has match. She basically has magical sort of plot caulk where she, she can just use her abilities to just fill any hole that the, because the thing is, right? This is actually a very unusual episode of bones. It's very well structured and almost like an actual mystery compared to other episodes of bones where the mode of storytelling is they will set up a possibility and then debunk it and then set up another possibility that they stumble across by luck. And then they'll do that for 40 or so minutes until they've gone through about 40 minutes of

possibilities. Then whatever the possibility they're on at 40 minutes, that's the one that it was. Um, and usually to get from possibility to possibility when they can't think of some way to do it, that's involved with the story of the world and the mystery, uh, Angela's supercomputer, which is actually called the angel later in the early seasons. Uh, I didn't see the early seasons. I happened upon this fact from reading. I'm staying true to the spirit of the Boney Island Whitefish and confining myself to season five. Um, nevertheless, she is just able to sort of use a kind of flexible technological superpower, uh, that again is sort of timed quite conveniently with the needs of the plot that was written for this one of the most financially successful

entertainment pro pro pro products ever created. So Hodgins is on to something. He's starting to look all frenetic. Uh, and he says one of the fiber samples turned out to be pink wool, the bad back a nick from a transiting bullet 1963. Uh, Cam says pink wool as in Chanel and severe head wound. Oh my God. This is president John F. Kennedy. That's right. And okay. So like, uh, okay. So, so once that happened, it was just like, okay, what's the point of this exercise again? It's not a fucking mystery how he died. They're like, Oh, they're like, please determine what happened. It's like, okay, well mystery over a bullet fucking ripped the top, the top of his skull off. But of course, that's not really the mystery at play here. It becomes

the whole, you know, was there a second shooter? What, what, what was the angle that the shot that killed him? Uh, and like, and that's what all the secrecy is going, going on for. Yeah, they don't want to, um, you know, they, they don't want them to identify the body or anything because if they were to say, this is JFK and we want to know, was he actually shot from, you know, the book depository? Was he actually shot? Yeah, they instead, instead they say, we want to, we want to determine the cause of death for this thing. Uh, I feel like someone in the lab could have just pulled up the Zapruder film on their phone. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I was, I was trying to anticipate like, you know, how are they going to write themselves out of this?

And like, they do it in the most cowardly way imaginable, but I was sort of hoping that like, that, that Dr. Bones would be able to determine. It was not actually what we all saw in the Zapruder film of his brains coming out of the top of his fucking head that killed them, but actually a heart attack that was happened to some 10 seconds before the first shot. Yeah. The whole thing is just, it's about exonerating a group of simple, uh, uh, like, uh, nymphomaniac methods who just love to fuck and hang out in book depositories. Yeah. So Hodgson's here is kind of representing the conspiracy theorist. He says, you know, people have a thirst for the truth. Um, he also says it's naive of us to imagine that

Kennedy's remains were actually ever interred at Arlington because as you said, um, well, it is just a perfectly bleached skeleton laid out in this fucking thing. Very funny. Yeah. Well, everyone knows that when the CIA kills you, they then put your body in the desert in a far side cartoon so that they become like a, like a Halloween skeleton. No, I like, I like, I like, they, they exhumed his corpse and it still had like a fucking, like a suit on it or whatever. And some, like some, some dead, like some meat still on it or like whatever they used to, uh, embalm him. And then they just put him in one of those beetle tanks to like strip it bare before they brought it to the, brought it to the bones lab. Yeah. That's right. At one point, bones

actually does say, uh, uh, flesh. I don't deal with flesh in another episode. She does. She does. Well, she hasn't had sexual intercourse since quite some time. According to her. It's true. Yeah. That is part of the thing that we've really struggled with in the run of this season is trying to determine like the, what it is that actually makes a case suited to this particular team. Cause sometimes it's, it's a skeleton like this and it's from the past. Sometimes it's a corpse that they found like 20 minutes ago with a bunch of flesh all over it. Sometimes it's clearly a murder. Sometimes they're trying to just figure out what the cause of death is. At one point it was a mummy. That's true. Uh, one, one they thought was a leprechaun. Pretty cool.

So Booth turns up, Booth turns up, tries to break in, shoots out the window with a gun. Yeah. So they're officially on lockdown. Like no one can enter or leave. And like Booth gets around that by, um, just like using his service weapon to just shoot the glass door and walk in. Yeah. And for some reason, for some reason he gets tackled by the, the secret agents instead of immediately being shot to death, which I wasn't, wasn't quite sure about, you know. So, um, that's why they weren't able to protect Kennedy is that they, that is that the, the damn rules imposed by the ACLU mean they have to tackle first. That's right. Um, so, you know, Booth's in there now and he says, did you figure out who the skeleton is yet? And Bone says, uh,

they, you know, everybody thinks it's JFK, the 35th president of the United States who was assassinated in 1963. Um, and also Cam is certain that Michelle, uh, her 16 year old ward is pregnant. And Booth reflecting the interests of the audience and the writers alike says, usually that'd be big news, but not really right now. That's right. So I was like, cool. It's good to know that neither the characters nor the writers or I am expected to care about the fucking B plot of this episode to show me right now. This is one of my favorite resolutions of a bones B plot as well. Uh, I've just got, I'm going to, I'm going to go ahead. I'm going to get, I'm going to give away the, should I do it folks? I'm going to give away the resolution of the B plot where they're just like,

Oh yeah, it was false positive. Nevermind. Turns out nobody's pregnant. Okay. But, but not before, um, like, uh, the Hodgkins, like the, the sort of conspiracy dork guy who apparently had a prior sexual relationship with Angela, uh, finds out that, um, she's like I said, been impregnated by a 16 year old and, and then he begins doing psychology on her about how like, um, yeah, uh, you're not going to, you're, you're not going to get rid of this baby. Like we all know you want this kid, you're going to raise it, but because I've, how, you know, what the person I know who you are, you're going to like consciously raise it on your own because you don't want to like, you know, put all that pressure on a guy who's, you know, taking the SATs next week. Um, and then like,

he just puts all this pressure on her. Like he's like, first of all, immediately being like, yeah, uh, yeah, I know, I know you're not going to end, you're not going to end this pregnancy because you know, then the bones gang would have another murder to investigate. Um, uh, no, yeah, like, and, and then he's just like, but I want to let you know I'm going to be that guy. I'm going to step up and I'm going to, I will raise the teenager's son as my own and marry you if need be. And it was just sort of like, this is, go to jail, dude. What the fuck, man? Like this is not, yeah, this is, like you said, this is, this is the least professional workplace with like the, the biggest sickos imaginable. And it's just like, yeah, like, uh, my, my coworker and former

lover has just found out that she's pregnant and like doesn't, you know, obviously like this is a very, uh, uh, personal and like highly, uh, stressful moment, uh, emotionally and to deal with and he just like immediately gives her the full court press to just be like, yeah, I'll raise the kid. Um, but like, we're getting married, but you'll marry, we're getting married now. And it's just like, yeah, it's just so odd, so strange. I just want to say it's a, it's a completely, it's a completely Chad move to have someone, you know, say, I think I might be pregnant and then to just immediately make it all about yourself. That rules. Yeah. While they're being basically held hostage to find out who killed JFK or how JFK actually died, that's what makes the B plot

kind of so funny for me. It's like we're investigating the, the death of John F. Kennedy and we're also figuring out his pregnancy snap. Mr. Repregnancy. Now just for Will's benefit, when Cam says the 16 year old that I'm looking after, um, who isn't the one who fucked Angela wasn't her daughter. Okay. Oh yeah. So she, she's adopted someone because that's another thing about her. You know, it's another attribute that they can just fucking slap onto the pile. That's, that's her main thing that they slapped on as, as the thing she has going on outside of work when they need another bit of plot to work with other than in a recent episode where, um, the, the one in Roswell where there were some, some people speaking Spanish and she was like,

I used to be a cop and coroner in New York city so I can speak Spanish. Never comes up again. Never again. Uh, but so she's talking about the, the boy that, that this, uh, stepdaughter or whatever is dating. And she says, she told me to my face that she wasn't having sex with that boy. So for your benefit, Will, the boyfriend they're talking about is Michael B. Jordan, uh, from the world and, and Creed and Josh Trance Chronicle, which I just rewatched and it's still good. Um, and has, as has been previously established on this show, Michael B. Jordan's very first screen appearance was in down neck from the seventh episode of the Sopranos, which is also the only episode in the entire run of the Sopranos to be directed by a

woman Lorraine Center. There we go. Uh, but I digress. That's just a reminder of a better show that's out there. So, so now, now that we've, now that we've resolved, we've, we've breezed over this B plot and I'm happy to skip over it for the rest of this thing. Um, other than the one note that I have here, which is turns, finally, all of that unbridled sexual harassment at the Jeffersonian medical Institute for sexual harassment has finally come back to bite Angela. It turns out that fucking every single person that you work with and also telling all the people you haven't fucked that you're thinking about fucking them, uh, is not the greatest move. Yeah. Uh, last, last thing also, Will, this is building off your observation that this is

the most, uh, soy show imaginable. It is also extremely, extremely soy behavior to be like, ah, yes, another man's child. I'll be raising that one. This is my strategy to continue to have sex with a female is raise a teenager's child. I'm, I'll be the, um, dependable, uh, reliable, uh, marriage option for you, ma'am. As soon as the child reaches adult age and moves out, we'll be alone together and then I make my move. They call that the long game. Yeah, right. So, uh, Neil Strauss is writing about. So Booth calls his boss again and he's given him the heads up that he thinks these are probably secret service agents and his boss, Dietrich Pater says, secret service. Do yourself a favor. Don't tell any Reagan jokes or mention

the Bush shoe incident. Uh-huh. Remember George Bush. Yeah. I wonder why somebody threw some shoes at George Bush. Let's not get into that. Yeah, it was to embarrass the secret service, the clowns of the, uh, uh, the treasury cocks of the United States armed services. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And when, and when he brought up, like, you know, don't make any Reagan jokes or bring up the Bush shoe incident, I was like, well, yeah, Bush shoe incident, but originally they did the Reagan reference. I just, I was assuming all the jokes would be about how he had Alzheimer's for like the majority of his presidency and not that he was plugged with a 22, uh, walking out of a building. Yeah. Well, it's, it's those are the two main ways to get girls, uh, is either, uh,

you offer to raise the child of them and another child, uh, or you assassinate a sitting president and that's really deep over two ways. Yeah. I mean, yeah, we don't know how Jodie Foster feels about that. You know, maybe she's, uh, a little bit turned on. I mean, or rather would be more how to use the higher caliber bullet. So, um, so, you know, hey, let's all go and have a look at Angela's stupid fucking reconstruction, even though we already all agreed that it's JFK and hey, what do you know? It looks like fucking JFK. Yeah. Yeah. It's just, it's like, it's like, I'll let it's, it is being battered over the head with hints that it's JFK, including them saying it's JFK. And it's like, it just gets revealed every 30 seconds for about 10 minutes. It's rules.

Well, this, that does actually fit in with the pattern of how these episodes are written in that, um, like you were saying, Riley, what they normally do is they say, could this little corpse that we've found be a leprechaun? And then 30 seconds later, they say, no, it turns out it's just a regular guy. But then everybody refers to it as the leprechaun for the rest of the episode. I can't believe it's a real leprechaun. Um, oh yeah, like felt like the, because this is, this is true. Like it takes 43 minutes to write a 43 minute episode of bones because they'll just forget that they said stuff. They're, we've actually found like, like sent just clear, like, like transcription errors that just make it into the dialogue and so on.

Like it's so good. But yeah, they just like, they forget that they've done the reveal already and they do it sort of four or five times. So, um, so another, another very convenient thing here, which is that they're back in the lab and they're, they're having a look at the skull again. And Booth says, Hey, if it was JFK, Angela's facial reconstruction would have shown us whatever it is that we're looking for, right? And Bone says, no, facial reconstructions are not photographs, Booth. There is a wide latitude for interpretation. Except on this fucking TV show, where we constantly use them. It's, it's, it's a pseudo science and should not be taken seriously except if we need to for the plot of any other given episode. There are so many other episodes

in this season where they use a facial reconstruction from Angela to say, cool, we now have positive ID on this body, except for this one, uh, specifically. So Booth says, uh, I do like, uh, the, the, the, the CG, uh, like the computer, uh, her computer is reconstruction of the face. It like, it looks like the shittiest version of Kennedy imaginable. It looks like, like call of duty version of, uh, JFK. Well, that's what it was like back then. It's, you know, everyone, there was a higher poly count for people. Yeah. Yeah. It's JFK rendered on a PlayStation too. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Um, but I, okay, like, so, uh, I don't know, like, I mean, maybe skipping over some shit, but like, uh, like then when, when it, when it starts to be given about

like, uh, being about like reconstructing the shooting itself with, um, cantaloupes and using the FBI's own perfect exact replica of the carcano fucking infantry rifle that Julia Harvey Oswald allegedly used to shoot John F. Kennedy, which is stored in the Jeffersonian medical institute for sexual harassment in a secret fucking underground like storage room that's connected but to the, the, the fucking, the janitor's closet by like a, he like, they mentioned like, oh, uh, uh, the Jeffersonian building was, um, actually, um, built by the Freemasons, uh, based on the Temple of Solomon. Um, and then like, and then the guy takes out of his pocket, like a fucking, uh, a masonic like ancient map of the building that's like national treasure

as a map. Yeah. Like they're written on like the, someone's scalp. It's like, you know, like, like stretched and treated flesh and they're like, Oh, by the way, uh, there, there's a door to the rifle that we need to get in the janitor's closet so we can sneak away to do that. So fucking casually revealed that it blew my mind because just, just before that point, they had been talking about doing one of Angela's stupid fucking recreations. Um, and as, as you said, Will, um, Booth has said, Hey, look above the right temple, for this thing. Um, that's where JFK's exit wound was and bones is like, how do you know so much about the Kennedy assassination? And he says,

for the first time ever bones, I'm a trained sniper. And then like it, it, it, it, it kicks into a new gear of, um, not just like I said, not just wretched soy, but like actually, um, uh, cultural and political obscenity, um, in that, uh, case like bones in her, in her, in her perfect recall actually knows that Booth has, um, fucking punched the ticket of 50 human beings for the United States government as a sniper. And that he is invested in the outcome of this investigation into, uh, was it pot? Was there a second shooter or did Lee Harvey Oswald fire the only shots that killed Kennedy that Booth is so invested in this, not just because he himself is the descendant of famous presidential assassination, John Wilkes Booth, but that it

would, uh, if for him to find out that the US government lied about literally anything would sort of shatter his psyche, not in the fact that like, uh, he's, uh, looked like, looked down a fucking telescopic lens and seen the pink mist shoot out the back of the head of some Afghani teenager 50 times over and over. That doesn't disturb him. But to find out that the US government like lied about anything would sort of shatter his fucking ego and just entire worldview, which I'm just like, I didn't even know that they just introduced that he was a sniper. And I'm sorry, if you killed that many people in the fucking army, like you don't give a shit about them. You understand that the government lies about everything. And like you probably have a much

larger conspiracy part of your brain than any other normal person. But like for this asshole to find out that like, ooh, gee, maybe the Warren commission wasn't totally on the level would be enough to like ruin him emotionally, which was just like that. So when I, uh, yeah, my brain was completely 50 people in service of the government as a sniper, it's almost certain that you've been involved in something that government has fucking covered up. Yes, but although, my God, this, this is, that's why I keep coming back to this idea that it's the perfect Democrat show because it's all about responsible and moral, imperial management. Yeah. At one point, Dr. Bones just said, this will crush Booth. And I'm like, oh,

that and not the PTSD. That's probably been fucking like dealing with the last five seasons of the show. Because in the universe of this show, the like Booth could only ever have made keys because he's like a chipper soy guy, you know, he could only have done like righteous kills or whatever, right? Like he is, he is a good guy, which means everything he's ever done has always been good. His last connection to something bad was the fact that he's descended from John Wilkes Booth, right? Like, and the idea that he needs to maintain this kind of like storybook innocence so he can just continue like his basically just serial murder campaign, like around the global south on behalf of the US government. And just the idea that, well, no,

we need to maintain this very moral, very straightforward, very good guy image. And like ultimately, right, at the risk of jumping ahead a bit, I think it's heavily implied, right, that there were in fact two shooters that the Warren Commission did lie. And then the Bones team says, look, we need to hide this fact from Booth so that he will not realize that maybe like a child, like a child, like, yeah, they're like, they're like, oh, if it turns out that this corpse isn't actually Jolly Old St. Nicholas, this will destroy the Marine Sniper we've been working with six years. Booth often represents the role within the series or the part of, you know, season five that I've seen. He often represents the role of the government is good and righteous

and shouldn't be questioned. And anytime there is a conflict within an episode, the way it eventually gets resolved is with everybody saying, yeah, you're right. Like there's a previous episode where they basically rip off the, you know, the necklace bombing incident that they sort of turned into 30 minutes or less. The guy who gets a bomb padlocked onto his neck and gets forced to rob a bank. So they basically just steal that for an episode of this show. And it turns out through the course of the show that the thing that set off the guy's bomb was somebody's pirate radio station frequency. And that person was like a fucking, you know, leftist complaining about the government veteran, no less, a leftist veteran complaining about the government. And Booth is

like, you are a bad person because you are complaining about the government. And the episode resolves with the leftist veteran apologizing for being mad at the government. Oh my God. So, so, so like they have this pretense of there being any form of conflict. For example, all of the moments in this show where Hodgins is like, hey, the government would actually hide something from you. And at the end of the day, it's all brushed over for, yeah, but what's more important is keeping up appearances. So, so something else that I loved is a line from Booth here when they are discussing the direction that the head went, which is will back into the left. Okay, when they were when they were doing back to the left,

all I could think of is like the dialogue should have been written like, did the head go back into the left? Yeah, it went back into the left now. I'm thinking it went back into the left. I'm thinking I'm, I'm thinking back into the left much. So back into the left, please. So they're discussing that even though the the head was allegedly shot from from like what the the back right from the yeah, from the back. Yeah, from behind from behind his head. Yeah. That the head went back into the left and Booth says, look, heads do all sorts of crazy things when you shoot them, which is a really a really cool thing for your like romantic comedy lead

to say in your TV show. Well, the other thing, right? He is constantly and we mentioned earlier, right? We're like, one of his things is always threatening to extra judicially execute rendition or just beat people within an inch of their lives every single time it's played for laughs. There's like a little staccato like the comedy soundtrack behind him any time he's like, oh, I wouldn't get in the way of this investigation or my gun might go off accidentally and those cameras are off. Well, there's there's a moment in this episode where Hodgins in order to cause a distraction tells Mr. White that he's leaving and he's going home even though they're locked in. He says, well, I'm an American live rights and he goes to walk out and to make a distraction,

he says, good job on the on the shoes getting thrown at George Bush. And so this this agent just grabs him and immediately like kidney punches him. Yeah, extremely hard just gives him this massive liver shot and drops him to the deck. And nobody is like, I don't think you're allowed to do that actually. No, and Booth and then Booth says to him after he's like, oh, brought up the shoe thing. You're lucky he didn't paralyze you. Yeah, you know, for just like making a just for making a joke about about, you know, the checkered past of the Treasury Cucks. So yeah, you're lucky you didn't get permanently injured and paralyzed by that. It's every single time, every single time it's played for laughs every time. I mean, like the other I guess like the the biggest like the set

piece of this episode is that they trick the Treasury of the GSA goon, Mr. White into allowing them to what he thinks will be to fire his service weapon inside this lab, inside a fucking closed room. But it's really a trick, because they're going to allow the David Boreganis to use the carcano rifle to see if he can get off the two kill shots and the 1.6 seconds necessary to have to maintain the official narrative of the JFK assassination. And they do that by like putting two cantaloupes on like a little fucking cart and pushing it down the lab. And while he's on like a sort of like a like a walk a skywalk like a walkway. And then he like instead of shooting the handgun, he just grabs the replica carcano rifle, which they got from the secret Freemason

vault underneath the Jeffersonian Medical Science Institute for sexual harassment, that he just switches that out. He takes the bolt action rifle and places like, you know, two kill shots in under 1.6 seconds onto the cantaloupe. But look, it's a big lab, but it's not even close to the distance that they would have necessarily had to recreate to make it any like anything like a scientifically accurate recreation of this shooting. Like he's like not that far away at all, like not anything close to where he would have been in the book depository. This is a perfect encapsulation of like a piece of bones writing, right? Because number one, we have when they're down in the Masonic basement, getting the rifle. Sweet says, is that the actual weapon? And Booth

says, yes, it's a perfect replica made by the FBI. I'm like, well, that's not the fucking weapon then, is it? Yeah, it's not. Why? Why make that leading to the amazing line from sweets, perhaps the most hated weapon in United States history. Oh God, that was so good. Oh my God, I forgot about that. That is so funny. That is so funny. Yeah, it's not it's not Fat Man and Little Boy that celebrated weapon in American history. So also just the idea, right? They are writing to a national consciousness. They're writing about a sort of national consciousness that just maybe it existed in 2010. I don't know. But I think you would be hard pressed to sort of the idea that there is the most hated anything in American history, the idea that there is anything even cohesive

enough about that country to be like, ah, yes, everyone everyone like, you know, spits on the ground to hate the the karkato rifle that killed JFK. It feels like it feels to me right like these writers, the writers of bones different they are every episode have simply just never they have never been outside like either of the two pervert coasts. Like they have never under they've never asked one critical question about the about the country they're writing about. It is simply just like, well, JFK is a famous president. Everyone hates the gun that shot him and they curse his name. That's why it's sealed away in the Masonic basement because, you know, if anyone knew it was still there, the museum would be thronged with

rioters trying to trying to attack the weapon. The most that most hated weapon, even a replica of it is too dangerous to be let out from Solomon's temple underneath the Jeffersonian Museum. Yeah, I also like the idea that like this is the most hated weapon in American history after we've already mentioned the fact that they're well aware enough of the audience of the of dum-dums who watch this this drivel that they had to just be extra careful to be like, yes, John F. Kennedy, the 35th president of America who was assassinated on November 22nd, 1963 in Dallas, Texas. Yeah. So the thing about this that is perfect bones writing to me is that they go through all this effort to set up this simulation, like you said, well, with the

melons on the cart and like scaled for speed and all this sort of stuff. Booth makes the shot. There is this triumphant music indicating that they have accomplished something. The music indicating that the Warren Commission was right. I had a note here because I did not catch the part about them trying to make the shots like so close together. I had written here, does anybody else get what this is meant to be proving? It couldn't be that Oswald could have made the shot because Booth is about seven meters away and indoors. Yeah. It's almost like it's a coup de gras shot. It's like it's like what it's what Booth would have done to a let's say a POW in Afghanistan and then posed for a picture

after. Yeah. So that's about the distance he did was we pulled the trigger. So Booth says, case closed, Oswald could have made the shot and Hodgen says, Booth, Oswald was a lousy shot. You're one of the best again, which we have just learned in this episode. And they say, yeah, you know, with none of the assassin, none of the nerves that a real assassin would experience in a lab, no wind, no distraction, you're only aiming at fruit, not a president. So they set this entire fucking thing up, do the shot, and then they say, yeah, that doesn't prove anything. By the way, after discharging a rifle twice in like very close very close space, like very dangerously, and then also without the approval of the Secret Service,

which again, does not cause the Secret Service to shoot him to death. It's just like, I like the idea that like the Secret Service agents, what they're really touchy about is making jokes about like Reagan or the shoot incident. And what they're not touchy about at all is just firing guns like randomly or like catching them off guard in a closed area. That's sort of like, that's the thing I would think that they'd be a little bit more, I don't know, yeah, trained to react to. Well, it turns out that in the writing of this show, the way to get around the extremely restrictive requirements that the Secret Service has put on them was simply to say to them, no, this is what we normally do. And then they go, oh, in that case, go ahead, yeah,

have my gun. What I want to mark here as well, right, they did the classic bones thing of setting it up and then say, oh, well, of course, this couldn't possibly be it, just sort of wasting everyone's time. But the fact that they still put the triumphal music in before they were like, oh, yeah, no, that's bullshit. Sorry. And they followed this up. The triumphal music is supposed to underscore what you, the viewer are seeing as a perfect recreation of John F Kennedy's fucking skull getting ripped apart by a rifle bullet. Yeah. And the government being not lying, you know, it's it's everyone's on the ever all the watchers of bones in 2010, like I said, they're they're on the edge of their seat, seeing if the Warren commission will be, you know, vindicated.

So, so we set all that shit up, we do it all, then we instantly dismiss it. And then we follow that with a conclusion. Again, classic bone style, bones, looks at the skull and says there is a simple entry wound here. If you look closer, there are micro fractures radiating from the exit wound, which suggests it wasn't an exit, but an entrance. If this is another entry from a completely different angle, logically, there was a second government. So I'm glad that they managed to steal a fucking replica rifle from the Masonic underground of the Jeffersonian Institute, set up a fucking simulation of a presidential assassination, fire off a rifle indoors without permission from the Secret Service before looking at the skull one time.

So they would seem to have forensically deduced that there is no way it was at the very least there was a second shooter and that Oswald did not act alone. Then just as quickly as they introduced that, they dismiss it just like 30 seconds later with a test involving two giant tubs of chocolate pudding in which bones just like puts the arm bones from the skeletons in a vat of pudding and one of them sinks because it had severe osteoporosis, which Kennedy was never diagnosed with determining that the skeleton that they were looking at was not John F. Kennedy. But then they, you know, walk that back as well as by giving some like, you know, some sort of the fig leaf of like, Oh, well, actually, Kennedy had scarlet fever as a boy in

late life. It actually won in 100 cases does lead to osteoporosis. So or like if the government were dealing with, they could have just switched out the arm bones on the fucking skeleton that they wheeled in there. It's just like, so nothing is resolved. But save for the fact that they just at one point in the episode, I think Dr. Bones or one of the head of the lab, I fucking forget who tells the secret service agent. That's what you don't understand about us. We don't do half truths here. So after like interest like like going back about three times on was Kennedy killed by conspiracy or a lone gunman, what they resolved to do at the end is like, it doesn't really matter as long as you preserve the feelings of our friend.

Yeah. And that's what it's all about. As long as we preserve the feelings of our friend as well, again, related to a campaign of bloody imperial murder. Yeah, it just, yeah, just let's just cover up the Kennedy assassination yet again, to save the feelings of some fucking moron sniper, who's our buddy. Yeah, well, the now there's there's a few great insights into Booth's psychology here. I have to read a few lines of this dialogue because I love them so much. Booth says, if he was killed by two gunmen, then that means the government lied and they covered it up. And Bones says throughout history, governments have lied with impunity to other governments and to their own citizens. Booth, does this have anything to do with the fact that your ancestor was a

famous assassin, John Wilkes Booth, who killed President Lincoln, and he jumps out of his chair and says, you promised you'd never mention that. But why mention it to her in the first way? I'm going to tell you something that you can never repeat even to me. Oh my God. This gave me the tantalizing thought. I mean, it's it's pretty much canon on this podcast that the writers of Bones do not consider anything that has happened before or anything that might happen in the future. They write solely in the present, you know, but it really did make me wonder when they named this character Booth was somebody like at some point, we're going to reveal that he is related to John Wilkes Booth or after several seasons, did somebody just go, you know what we

could do? Yeah, could just leave the conceptual money on the table here. Could just make this make him a top flight sniper who is also related to John Wilkes Booth, which is funny because John Wilkes Booth wasn't a sniper at all, famously. I mean, there is no point blank in the back of the head. If anything, the recreation of the Kennedy assassination was much more in keeping with Booth's ancestry than with the project they were actually taking. Yeah. And I mean, the thought I had at the end of the show is that I was really hoping that they would come up with something like truly fucking birdbrained, like determining that it was actually like an embolism killed Kennedy a second before the bullet tore through his fucking skull. That would have been fucking hilarious and awesome

and actually kind of clever. But then I was thinking, can you fucking imagine like how offensive this episode would be if it was the body of Martin Luther King Jr. instead of John F Kennedy, which by the way is another very, very, you know, like there's probably more evidence that that was a conspiracy than the JFK assassination, but it's much less talked about. But could you imagine if they tried to deal with that subject matter in the in the funny, hijinxy way that bones was is, you know, I guess is the bone style. We're like at the end of it that they determined that the FBI for sure and the Memphis Police Department, like for sure, participated in a cover up and like James Earl Ray wasn't even in the fucking state at the time it happened or something like that. And then

like the teenage grooming victim will just say something like that was totally ninja at the end of it. If it was if it was this show, Booth would bring that body in himself and say we need to prove that this person shot themselves. He would just like he would get his like like Queesad's Hatterac FBI instincts would just set in and he would start like trying to just planting a gun on the skeleton and be great. So so basically, like we said, we've we've rounded everything out by determining that the most important thing that could possibly consider when talking about this event that changed the course of history is Booth's feelings. There is this exchange a bit earlier on where they say you don't understand.

Booth is a very patriotic man. He believes this is the greatest country ever. And Sweet says it's naive to think that a country the size and influence of the US doesn't pursue secret agendas. Cam says the Kennedy assassination wasn't a secret agenda. It was a black stain, a dark moment in history. Do you know how many people Booth has shot for his country? And that's when they reveal that he has fucking killed 50 people. Nice round number. Yeah, he trusted that it was right. And who did he trust? The US government. If they lied about the murder of a president, they can lie about anything. So it's more important to just say, no, they've never lied. The US government has never lied about anything. That's right. And they really did.

I agree that they really, really wrap this up in the most cowardly way that they possibly could, which is to say, hey, it is JFK, except that it's not, except it might be. Yes, yes. The little wink at the end, the little wink at the end where Cam says, oh, he had scarlet fever and that can cause that. And Bones gives a very knowing look and says, it's statistically unlikely that it was Kennedy causing Cam to say, I will never forget what you did for him. So basically it fucking was JFK. They established that it was multiple shooters, but no one wants Booth to feel bad about all the people that he murdered for the American government. It just makes me wish that the show was still running so that the Agent White could wheel in

another skeleton and be like, this is a male victim of suicide by hanging, but his hynoid bone was broken. Can you come up with a convincing narrative about this, please? Come on. Booth loves the filmography of Chris Tucker. He realized it. Yeah, he can't watch Rush Hour anymore. You don't know what that'll do to him. He modeled his career on Detective James Carter. Oh, Andrew, you need to get this Airbnb video story. Yes, absolutely. Your ability to pull facts about the popular films of the last 30 years is astonishing. And there is an illusion both throughout the episode and at the very end,

when they're all sitting in the stupid diner they go to, they're all sort of speculating what this was all really about, especially if it wasn't JFK, which it might be. They, you know, they're like, what if this was some kind of test for us to see if we can solve a thing or run a lab or whatever the fuck. And there is also the speculation. What if they're actually looking to exhume Kennedy's body and try to figure out what really happened, but they want to see if it can be solved. And now that they've solved it, they're going to put it back in and say, don't look into that. So the very end of the show, as they walk off down the street, the camera pans over to a TV which is pointed

outwards of a window. It doesn't even seem like it's a TV store or anything. It's just a fucking TV in a shop window pointed outwards with the news on it. And the banner at the bottom reads, breaking news. Congressional committee denied a motion to exhume President John F. Kennedy, citing quote, respect for the family. So that's what it's about. That's the lesson of this show is have a little respect. Yeah. You know, the government is involved in doing cover and doing cover ups and committing atrocities and all kinds of stuff and be fine with it. Well, the government is involved in all types of atrocities and cover ups, but it's kind of classless to talk about it.

You know, it's not very polite. Yeah. I interpreted the end of this episode where they try to, they try to figure out, you know, what we learned. What is, what was this really all about? Is like the fucking, is the bird brain totally literal ending of burn after reading? If that movie like didn't have an ounce of self-awareness when they're just like, what did we learn? Nothing? What do we do with the body? Burn it. Get rid of it. I don't give a fuck. Nothing matters. Yeah. So I guess what, so in conclusion, thank you for coming to our Airbnb video store. You should do not rent the season five of Bones if you're into Kennedy. Please just watch the Oliver Stone film. Yes. Please watch Oliver Stone's JFK. Instead of this, you've come to the last

existing blockbuster and you are going to be, this is, this is, this is a boutique experience. It's a curated affair. You can't just choose to watch Bones about the JFK when you could, you could have a much more learned source of information about this pivotal moment in American history from Oliver Stone. That's right. And we've taken an, and this is, this is why you come in to the Bend Airbnb, Bend and Airbnb present blockbuster and the three clerks of the store will talk to you for an hour and a half if you do not make the right choice. It's like that damn sausage merchant in Australia. That's going to be me. The interstitial elements, the before, the, the beginning matter and end matter of this podcast has better narrative coherence than Bones.

We have brought more threats together than this show ever does. And you know what? That would only be possible on the showrunners. Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. That's right. Well, we'll thank you so much for coming and joining us. Thank you for your time. Thank you very much. This has been great. Oh yeah. This is a blast. I want to thank both of you guys for sort of introducing me and initiating me in the mysteries of Bones. I will never watch it again. That's right. You've done your time. Yeah. Yeah. You've got that, that beautiful glimpse into, into 2009 poster. I watched 50 episodes of the show Bones for the US government. Yeah. Whereas unfortunately Andrew and I stole that mysterious old woman's

jar of water she was taking from a well. And so now we have to watch the entirety of season five and curse to watch 22 episodes of Bones. Good luck, gentlemen. Thank you again. Is there anything you would like to plug? Yeah. Just chocolate drop house. Check it out. Yeah. I've heard of that shot. All right. Absolutely. Beautiful. All right. Well, that's it from us and we will see you next time. Bye-bye. See ya. Cheers, guys.