Confessions of a Liberal Puritan

I hate to say it, but I'm feeling more than a little ripped-off by last night's episode, after the build-up in last week's previews.

No offense to the cast, who did the best they could with what they were given, I'm sure, but I found Booth's sudden 'resurrection' at the gravesite in the opening minutes of the show so unconvincing that for the first 30 minutes I actually entertained the idea that this whole, far-fetched scenario was something Booth was dreaming up under anesthetic while his wound was being operated on, or something.

I don't know what it says about my mind or about my perception of Booth's character that I would suspect him of somehow dreaming up a sequence in which (with almost no visible trace of the bullet wound he supposedly suffered only two weeks previously) he's naked in the bathtub, wearing a beer-hat and reading a 'graphic novel' when Dr. Brennan walks in on him.

Yes, I know the "it was all a dream" excuse is just about the oldest and lamest cliche there is, but such was my sense of unreality during last night's episode that I actually found that option to be the lesser of two evils, preferable to thinking that the writers actually expected me to take all this guff as canon.

By the halfway mark in the show, I accepted that not even the most inept writer would ask me to believe that Booth could have dreamed up some of the conversations taking place between other characters.

And while casting sweet, socially inept Zack Addy as Gormogon's latest apprentice might have been intriguing under other circumstances, the fact that this episode started out with such a cheap bait-and-switch trick over Booth's supposed death left such a bad taste in my mouth that I couldn't take anything that followed seriously.

I feel like last night's episode did to me what Sweets did to Bones in willfully withholding the information that Booth was still alive in order to conduct an unauthorized and unethical experiment on her: I feel like I've been manipulated and used by someone so convinced of their own cleverness that it never occurs to them that their behavior merits a severe beat-down.

Earlier this season (and especially after episodes like the one where Booth and Bones 'double-dated' with Sweets and his girlfriend), I'd felt pretty okay about the idea of Dr. Sweets becoming a more regular part of the ensemble, as someone who provided a 'fair target' for Bones and Booth to close ranks against or to tease unmercifully, since he wasn't exactly defenseless in return. He made a fairly likable foil for Booth and Bones to sharpen their wits upon, I thought, as well as providing an otherwise-under-represented (since the departure of Dr. Goodman as the story-telling archaeologist/administrator after season 1) psychological perspective that could come in handy when dealing with certain personalities.

But if he's meant to replace Zack as the sweet, baby-faced-but-brilliant regular component of the cast, then the writers have certainly gone about it in the worst possible way: they've given me (as well as Dr. Brennan) ample reason to consider Sweets thoroughly unlikable and untrustworthy, now, and as less emotionally mature than Zack (in spite of Zack having confessed to a cold-blooded murder -- because it seems that at least Zack would never be so abusive or uncaring towards someone he KNEW, as witnessed by his self-sacrifice to keep Hodgins from being killed).

Maybe my expectations for this latest episode were simply way off-base, and maybe that's making me think it was worse or more manipulative than it was. But I am not a happy camper.