“Bones and Booth and an Imaginary Baby” opens with the secondary plot. This whole episode is basically “Oh, there’s a dead person who’s interfering with the story.” But since I have to recap both storylines, here we go…
… Somewhere in Virginia…
The Bedford Creek Winery is having a tasting of its excellent 1997 Cabernet. The people, the tour guide and the winery owner Sean Mortenson fill their glasses with anticipation. The wine looks a little murky but it is fresh from the barrel and some sediment is normal. They smell the fragrant bouquet and take a sip. And promptly perform the “spray while exhaling” maneuver. If the nasty taste weren’t enough, one poor woman actually opens her eyes and looks at what she was inhaling and finds a human finger in the bottom of her glass. This is why I stick to vodka.
Cut to Booth and Bones having their weekly session in Sweets’s office. This week, Bones must do word association while following Booth’s lead. Why? Because it is the only way the writers could come up with to introduce the completely irrelevant, asinine story that follows. Why, yes, after four years of getting to know these characters I am a little bitter, thank you.
You know word association, right? Sky – blue. Night – day. Not this time. Booth says “Donuts” and the response is “hungry.” Booth says “hunger” and Bones says “sex.” Easy, tiger. “Horse” leads to “cowboy.” Which leads to – wait for it – “It would be selfish of me not to have a progeny.”
That’s right. The ice queen who has said repeatedly for four years that she never wants children has decided that after giving us no warning, she wants a progeny. Despite the PhD, I don’t think she realizes that progeny start out as poopy, scream-all-night babies that can’t talk or do science until they are at least, oh, two. Isn’t she in for a disappointment.
Anyway, Bones wants a baby and she says that Booth would be a good donor. Booth’s primary response to that is that a woman just can’t ask for sperm. (Oh, yes, fair warning, “sperm” and “semen” are the words of the week.) Fortunately for the telecom company who really should be sponsoring this show what with all the cleverly timed phone call interruptions, the phone rings and they have to go work on a case while Sweets is left behind screaming, “We really should discuss this!”
They arrive at the winery where they discuss sperm some more and are overheard by one of Booth’s fellow FBI agents, and he tries to make it sound like the punchline of a joke but the bottom line is that he’ll think about making a deposit at a sperm bank.
Booth and Bones meet up with Sean Mortenson, who is still trying to convince people that it isn’t a human body in the barrel. It’s a rodent or something. Not much of an improvement, I’ll admit, but I would prefer a rodent to a person.
Bones dons her gloves and fishes around in the burgundy soup. (Burgundy the colour, not the wine, which has already been identified as a cabernet. Come to, oh come to the cabernet… nope, not funny. Sorry, I tried.) She pulls out some bones. Booth says it looks like they found a purple smurf. She bends the bones. “A rubber purple smurf,” he amends. Mortensen insists the barrel was sealed in 1997. Obviously not, says socially-oblivious Bones. Obviously the wine was exposed to air when the barrel was reopened sometime after 1998 when somebody added the body, thus turning the wine to vinegar which in turn leached the calcium from the bones resulting in Bendy Smurf.
