Spoiler warning for anyone who hasn’t watched the Season 11 premiere of Bones.
Oh, Bones. You’ve had some good years behind you, and even though you’re kind of long in the tooth now, we’re extremely glad to know that you’re still capable of bringing out some big surprises. Such as what happened tonight in the Season 11 kickoff episode “The Loyalty in the Lie,” as the world was led to believe that Booth had gone missing and was then killed. Say it ain’t so! Well, it ain’t so.
But the same can’t be said for Booth’s brother Jared, formerly played by actor Brendan Fehr. We haven’t seen Jared Booth show up on Bones since Season 5, but some fans have been wanting him back in some capacity. That won’t be happening, though, as the character was burned to a crisp inside of a van, with most of his identifying features gone. Of course, it took a while to get to that realization. Before getting into that, let’s take a second to pay our respects. R.I.P. Jared.
Because Booth’s gun is fused to one of Jared’s bones, and other bones signify injuries that match up with Booth’s past, everyone thinks that it’s his remains. Brennan does her thing and figures out, thanks to an intact scapula, that this isn’t Booth at all. But as soon as he’s declared a non-corpse, Booth is declared a suspect in this murder. But that can’t be, right?
Even though those aren’t Booth’s bones, that doesn’t mean he’s walking around healthily. While it seemed like we might deal with the “where is Booth?” story for longer than just most of a single episode, we got to see just what Booth is up to, although we aren’t exactly sure why. When we catch up with him, he and two other hoodlums are in the basement of the house of Kevin O’Donnell, a buddy of Jared’s who is pretty good at home robberies. (Jared apparently hit a downward spiral with his wife Padme and was using stolen goods to try and win her back.) Booth is trying to tend to a bullet wound in his stomach, which explains why blood was found at the home of the now-deceased human trafficker Victor Mosborian. But why is he hanging out with these people, and what the hell happened at that corpse-filled house?
Booth either isn’t taking his new job as a Quantico instructor too seriously, or he’s taking it very seriously and is a part of an undercover sting. One that isn’t going extremely well, from the looks of things. Booth was sending Jared money, that much is clear, but was there an ulterior motive behind it all?
Hopefully everything will be explained in the weeks to come. What do you guys think is happening? We’ll have to wait until Bones airs next Thursday night on Fox.
