At the end of the last season, Temperance "Bones" Brennan (Emily Deschanel) had decided to take a bit of time away from her crime-fighting day job and go back to some more typical forensic anthropology. She and Daisy (Carla Gallo) have gone off into the woods to study an ancient civilization. The result of Bones leaving the group means that the crime-fighting team goes and finds other things to do. Booth (David Boreanaz) returns to the Middle-East to train soldiers, while Hodgins (T.J. Thyne) and Angela (Michaela Conlin) head to Paris, Sweets (John Francis Daley) takes a sabbatical to find himself after he and Daisy split up, and Dr. Saroyan (Tamara Taylor) continues her work as a federal pathologist.
While the plan was to have everyone meet back up after a year, an emergency case that Saroyan is working on has the gang all returning five months early. The question is, can the various pieces pick up where they left off, or have they all grown too far apart? Chief among these relationships is, of course, between Booth and Brennan. The last season ended with them recognizing their feelings for each other, but Brennan eventually decides to put her professional career ahead of her personal one. By the time Booth comes back, he has a new girlfriend, a field reporter named Hannah Burley (Katheryn Winnick).
The introduction of the new female character causes quite a turmoil as Temperance struggles with being happy that Booth has found someone to be in a relationship with and the fact that she seems to still have feelings for him.
While the growing and shaping of the relationships in Bones is a major driving force in the series, it wouldn't be a mystery series without crimes to solve. This season has some unusual cases as the team finds a recent murder victim in an old slave ship, a skeleton that appears to be melted to the inside of a truck, and what looks to be a death caused by the mythical creatures, the Chupacabra.
These are only the tip of the iceberg, though. This season sees a new recurring enemy in a former army buddy of Booth's. Jacob Broadsky (Arnold Vosloo) is a highly trained sniper who seems to rival Booth in his abilities. The problem is, he seems to have taken the law into his own hands. His first victim this season is none other than recurring killer Heather Taffet, AKA The Grave Digger. Broadsky makes several appearances this season as Booth and the rest of the group struggle to track him down and catch him before he commits more killings, but before the season ends, the rival sniper will leave a surprising hole in the show's cast.
There are several other great episodes in Bones: The Complete Sixth Season. One has Brennan testing the knowledge she gained from a TV "documentary" about a "tribe" of rich kids that live on the New Jersey beach, while another one has Booth and Brennan stuck in an elevator during a blizzard while the rest of the team is locked into the lab and trying to track down a killer before he inadvertently causes a pandemic. To make things even better, Angela's dad, ZZ Top's Billy Gibbons, shows up again to make Hodgin's life even more ... interesting.
One episode causes Brennan some unusual internal struggles when a body is discovered in the bad part of town. The more Brennan finds out about this female doctor who doesn't associate with anyone outside of work, the more she identifies with her and the more she worries about people actually missing her if she disappeared. Brennan identifies with the victim so much that she hears her own voice in the audio recordings and sees her own face in pictures of the dead doctor.
In a much lighter episode, "The Finder," we are introduced to not only a new collection of characters, but, a whole new series. This episode is a pilot for a new show involving war vet Walter Sherman (Geoff Stults), his legal advisor, Leo Knox (Michael Clarke Duncan) and his pilot, Ike Latulippe (Saffron Burrows). It seems that Serman didn't quite leave his tours of duty completely intact, and while his injuries have left him extremely paranoid, he has the ability to find anything. He describes it as seeing hidden connections between everything. Well, when a murder in the Florida Everglades has Booth and Bones heading south, they enlist in his help to find a stolen treasure map. This was a particularly unusual episode, and, if the new series is anything like this sneak peek, I have a feeling I will have a new series to keep up with.
This season's special features are a little light, but still enjoyable. There is a gag reel and some audio commentary, but there are also featurettes on the aforementioned blizzard episode, which was directed by Boreanaz, and one on the visual effects of the series. This DVD set also includes the pilot episode the new series, The Killing.
I have to say that this was one of the show's better seasons. Not only does it advance some of the characters' development in a few interesting ways, but almost every episode is top notch. While I wouldn't recommend jumping into the series this late in the game, Bones: The Complete Sixth Season is a must-see for even the most casual Bones fan.
