Bones Season 12 Episode 4: “The Price for the Past” Review

THIS POST CONTAINS SPOILERS.

This week’s episode was a personal one for Booth. I appreciate that when they revealed the victim to be Aldo Clemens they took a moment to explain who he was. Upon seeing a picture of him, I did recognise him, but I still would have been a little unsure and most likely would have had to look him up, so it was nice to get that confirmation within the episode, and it didn’t seem too expositional. This was pretty easy for them to avoid because Jessica Warren (the intern of the week) didn’t know who Aldo was.

 

Booth’s religion and military background have always been constant factors within the show, so it’s always nice when we get an episode that focuses primarily on at least one of them. This episode was centered around his military background, but his religious beliefs did seep in a little. When we get this close to Booth and his past, it’s inevitable that that’s going to happen.

Finding out that Aldo sacrificed himself to protect someone was heartbreaking, but it opened up the door for a potential story line for this season. With this being the last season it would make sense for the big case/mystery to be personal and/or to affect the entire team. Family is a big theme within Bones, so to have something that would bring them all together and have such an emotional impact seems fitting. So when we find out at the end of this episode that Aldo was protecting Booth, and that someone could still come after him, it only seemed right that this could be the big story line.

It’ll be interesting to see where they go with it. This season is only 12 episodes long so they could realistically spread this out over the rest of the season, and this story line doesn’t have to be a big thing in every episode. There’s still other things going on this season, and there’s still room for some more filler episodes.

Something else I appreciated about this episode was the mention of Aubrey’s dad. It was nice to see that that was still a thing. From this we got the comparison to Brennan and Max’s relationship (we still need to know what’s going on with him), and we saw more of Jessica and Aubrey’s relationship.

Aubrey is a big character in the show in the sense that we see him in every episode (or close to every episode), but he’s still pretty separate from the lab stuff. Booth is more connected because he’s married to Brennan and has a relationship/history with most of the people there. Aubrey doesn’t seem to work as closely (at least not constantly anyway) with them, and sure he has Jessica, but being an intern means she’s not there all the time. So it was nice that he has his own thing going on which makes it feel like we’re getting a lot of Aubrey in this final season, despite him not being as closely intertwined with the characters at the Jeffersonian.

Those were the major happenings of this episode. It was nice to see Jessica again, and Caroline Julian too, but most of what happened focused around the two big things mentioned above (Aldo’s death/Booth’s past and Aubrey’s dad) and I’m definitely interested to see where those go and how much of an impact they’re going to have on the season as a whole.

Bones as a series has never let me down, and so far this season as been just as good. We’re getting closer to the midway point and it’s crazy to think that soon the series will be over forever. With the way things are going so far their pacing seems good and I have every faith that this season will end on a satisfying note.