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'Bones' Season 11, Episode 8 Review: High Treason In The Holiday Season

Kristina Killgrove
Former Contributor
Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.
Archaeologist, Writer, Scientist
This article is more than 8 years old.
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This week, the team gets called to a ritzy golf course to recover a body from a water hazard when a couple of guys trawling for golf balls find it. Based on hypostasis, Saroyan thinks the body has been there for two to three weeks, but Hodgins pinpoints the body dump at two weeks, four days, seven hours, and 12 minutes... based on the victim's stopped watch. Brennan notices brushite forming on the body, which is strange because that's generally found in cave environments. The only forensic ID technique mentioned was wear on the mandibular dentition, which puts the female victim in the far too precise age range of 55 to 60 years old.

At the Jeffersonian, Dr. Fuentes is acting intern this week and notes the T5-T7 vertebrae are fused, making it unlikely the victim played golf at the club. Her humerus has traces of shrapnel, and there are traces of platinum sterling in her eye socket as well. Angela notices that the facial bones were shaved, Brennan sees a healed fracture to the nasal bones, and Saroyan mentions sutures behind the hair line and collagen, so Angela readjusts her muscle attachment points to take into account plastic surgery.  Hodgins recognizes her from the facial reconstruction as Vivian Prince, a star political reporter for the DC Sentinel who'd broken a massive story on NSA spying recently.

The FBI checks into Vivian's ex husband, Sal Raymond, a sports reporter who was collecting alimony. They also head to the DC Sentinel to tell Vivian's boss, David Pine, that she is dead.  They meet Kate Colfax, the reporter who wanted Vivian's job.  Pine tells them about threats following Vivian's publication of her article, and he thinks that Gray Stream Solutions has something to do with it, since Vivian was trying to expose them as related to the NSA and to The American, her informant. Cooper Blackthorn, the head of Gray Stream Solutions, denies killing Vivian and insists he knows more than the FBI does.

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Back at the Jeffersonian, an NSA agent named Ryan Gill insists on supervising the investigation, but Saroyan shuts him down since he doesn't have a court order. Fuentes notices that the point of impact on the fractured orbital socket may have been made by a candlestick. The perimortem blows to the skull no longer make it seem like the murder was carried out by a trained professional. There are no defensive wounds on the arms and hands, but there is a healed rib fracture from six months prior.

Booth and Brennan check out Vivian's house.  They find that someone must have closed the shades recently, and they also find a glucometer even though Vivian does not have diabetes. Booth notices that Vivian was in the process of cutting off alimony payments to her ex-husband. He admits to Aubrey that it was his idea; he didn't want to live off her anymore. He thinks that Kate Colfax killed Vivian, and she would have taken over her column. As Aubrey goes to interview Colfax, Gill from the NSA suggests he ask about an encryption key. Colfax eventually hands over the laptop to Aubrey, having been unsuccessful at finding emails from The American. Angela can't break into the laptop, until Brennan realizes that the glucometer was modified. By entering a pass code and a drop of blood, Vivian could access the files.  The body has been submerged for weeks and then clearly cleaned, but remarkably Fuentes is able to tap into the medullary cavity of the tibia and magically find blood, which they use to access the computer. They find the email from The American with a place and a time just prior to her death.

Booth and Brennan head to the Riverbank Inn. It caters to DC insiders, so there are no security photos, TV, wifi, etc. As they enter the room that Vivian had used, they run into Gill again.  Brennan finds blood spatter on the curtains, and notices a sterling silver lid with pointy finial on the room service cart. The busboy recognizes Vivian, who'd had a fight with her husband there six months earlier, when she claimed she was having an affair. Sal admits that he got mad and shoved her into a table, causing the broken rib.  He doesn't know who the other man was and has a solid alibi for the night of Vivian's death.

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As the Jeffersonian is running the evidence from the Inn, Hodgins notices that Gill's prints are all over everything. He thinks this means that Gill is The American and was trying to cover up his tracks. Fuentes sees tiny avulsion fractures that were made around the time of Vivian's death. She was tied down and tortured for information. Fractures to her right proximal tibia also suggest some sort of shin torture that Fuentes recognizes as palmatoria, a kind of paddling that is used in Guinea-Bissau, where Cooper Blackthorn had once been stationed. Blackthorn lawyers up but admits he did torture Vivian for information. He wanted to learn the location of a jump drive with information on it from The American. She refused to give it up and was tougher than he thought; he left her alive.

Booth invites Gill to meet him back at the Inn and confronts him about being The American.  He admits he gave Vivian a jump drive with thousands of NSA documents on it.  What she had on Gray Stream Solutions was just the beginning. Gill suggests that Blackthorn killed her.  Since Gill's life is not in danger from Blackthorn, Booth can arrest him for treason.

Brennan notices, though, that the re-creation Angela did of the murder weapon is not quite right; it doesn't fit with the fractures to the back of the skull.  Rather, those fractures suggest Vivian was hit with a long, rectangular weapon that knocked her into the lid. Fuentes also finds tiny abrasions from metal prongs on a motherboard. They realize that Gill might have killed her with a long metal detector wand. Gill is brought into the FBI and confesses.  He thought he could trust Vivian to be prudent with the information he gave her, but she wanted to expose more and more people.  He tried to get his jump drive back (because, you know, she didn't just immediately copy everything to her laptop and sync it to the cloud) but she refused.  Vivian got mad when Gill tried to use his wand to find the drive. She grabbed the wand, but he hit her, and she fell into the room service cart.

Since Gill never found the jump drive, Hodgins goes to check Vivian's office for it.  He notices a pen stand with a George Orwell quote.  When Colfax handed over the laptop, she claims she'd found a note with Orwell's name written on it.  Hodgins finds the jump drive hidden in a false bottom of the pen stand. He hands it over to Booth rather than publicizing the documents, and Booth suggests they destroy it.

Anthropological Comments

  • Dental wear is a terrible method of estimating age at death. It's not precise at all and subject to lots of variation with diet. There's no way to get a five-year age-range for someone based on dental wear along.  Also, this woman had had a lot of cosmetic surgery... but not to her teeth? The team said she was female but not based on the bones, they didn't do ancestry, and the facial reconstruction was immediately recognized by Hodgins. (One of my students complained recently that far too many Bones episodes involve one of the Jeffersonian members recognizing the victim, and I'd never noticed it until she pointed it out.)
  • I'll admit I don't really know what brushite is, but when I looked it up it doesn't sound like anything that would be on a body in a golf course pond.
  • Why does the victim's arm have traces of shrapnel? Did we ever find out?
  • As usual, the radii are placed on the inside of the lower arm when laid out on the table, which is not standard anatomical position.
  • Extracting blood from a bone that has been submerged then defleshed, degreased, and bleached?  No.  Just... no.

Stray Comments

  • Quoteable quote from this episode: "Mendacity is not god-given; it is coded into our genetics and passed down in our gene pool to ensure Homo sapiens' survival." -- Brennan
  • Parker watch!  He was last on when Brennan and Booth got married.  Seems it's a new actor now.
  • Why would Vivian have written down George Orwell's name?  I mean, is it that hard to remember where you've hidden secret documents that were gotten by treasonous means that will further your career? Orwell is so on point a reference that it'd be impossible to forget that.
  • The entire Gill plotline was madness.  No one at the NSA was keeping tabs on him?  He went back to the scene because he knew there were latent fingerprints... where?  Why was there still blood on the curtains? Did no one clean that?  He seemed to be going through all this to get the jump drive back, although it was never explained why the files were still on a jump drive and not backed up all over the place -- to the laptop, another jump drive, the cloud, etc.

Rating

Honestly, not a lot of forensic work this week, since the victim was ID'ed by Hodgins and only dental wear was used in a half-hearted attempt at figuring out her stats. The plot was confusing in an attempt to be dramatic and high-stakes. Inane Thanksgiving chatter didn't help things, but it was nice to see Parker. I'd give High Treason in the Holiday Season a C-.

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Kristina Killgrove
Kristina Killgrove