Bones 7x06: The Crack in the Code

Original Air Date: 12 January 2012

Storyline: The team investigates what appears to be a murder scene at a national monument, but the only clue left is a coded message made of human blood that will be the beginning of a scavenger hunt for the solution, courtesy of a new, technologically-proficient foe. Elsewhere, Booth and Brennan look for the perfect house for their family.Trivia: Originally scheduled for December 15, 2011, as the mid-season finale and break for star Emily Deschanel's maternity leave, Fox network switched this episode with the scheduled rerun of the Bones backdoor pilot episode, "The Finder." Presumably this swap was made in hopes of giving The Finder a bigger lead-in audience than the rerun would have done.

This episode aired at a special time, 8:00 pm E/P (7:00 pm CT), as The Finder took over Bones' time slot for the duration of Emily Deschanel's maternity leave.

Best Quote:

Cam: Word of advice: Do not mention Booth to Booth or he will shoot you.

Review: December came and went and now, a month after it was originally scheduled, Bones winter finale aired and left me sad for taking such a huge break until the next episode is aired. You might say that this show ended its first half of the season with a bang - and I'm not talking about the one that somehow killed the Danish girl from the inside, leading to that disgusting spam body that Hodgins and Wendell blew up. It was the perfect story before this forced hiatus - forced by Emily Deschanel's maternity leave, as it concluded with Booth and Brennan finally finding the perfect house after months of searching for something that needed to be "a man cave, a girl cave, and a perfect baby's room with at least an acre of land", but it also gave us one of the most interesting villains in the show's seven-season run. 

So, why exactly is Christopher Pelant interesting? Well, to start, he's a genius. Not a genius in a Bones way, not even in a Zach way, but a tech nerd or, as he defined himself, "a hacktivist" - a patriot who dedicated his life to exposing the corruption from the US administration through hacking the websites of virtually every major governmental agency, including the FBI. He's someone who doesn't mind going from hacking computers to hacking people into itty bitty pieces to make a point, and that's just what he did to expose some of the cover-ups the FBI had to so in order to protect their CIs.
So, if people already know who the killer is, why is Pelant the season's villain? Well, because no one can prove that he committed the murders, because he has the best alibi in the world: an ankle monitoring device confining him to the interior of his home.
The investigation was, indeed, a scavenger hunt; a hunt for clues that put Hodgins into making his grandfather proud mode by trying to figure out the code embedded in the victim's bones - the same bones that put a malware right into Angela's million dollars computer and literally fried it. Although he was just introduced this week, I am already ranking Pelant second in my list of this show's best villains, after Gormogon, and he has good chances of surpassing him if he continues to kill people from the comfort of his home, and without any working computer or internet connection available to him.
Is it too early to call Pelant epic? Maybe, but hell if I understand how someone if capable of encrypting a malware into bone. This sounds like something right out of the craziest SCI-FIs ever made.
The personal side of this week's installment was focused on yet another scavenge hunt - the one for the perfect house to hold the growing Booth family (and didn't that house look just like Ted Mosby's?). But also Sweets' for the perfect gift for Daisy, which, in his vision, turned out to be a blue Vespa. Both arcs delighted us with great moments well placed to give us a break from the killer search, the funniest of which was probably Caroline Julian's "Why is this man wearing an Easter egg on his head?"
The episode was so great that I didn't even miss having baby Hodgins around, though maybe I would have liked to have more of Wendell in it. It would have been great to see Brennan give birth before the winter finale, and now I just can't wait for the show's return. And no, I will not be watching that idiotic spin-off in the meantime.Bones 7x05: The Twist in the Twister Back to Season 7