Bones – Season 9 (DVD Review)

Starring: Emily Deschanel, David Boreanaz, Michaela Conlin, Tamara Taylor, John Francis Daley
Director: Various
Running Time: 1036 mins
Certificate: 15
Release Date: September 15th 2014 (UK)

Most shows that have made it to Season 9 are long past their prime and are pretty much coasting until the day they get cancelled, while everyone involved makes as much cash as they can in the meantime. However that’s not true for Bones, which is still fun, entertaining and slick, with a great cast and a good mix of crime-solving and humour.

Season 8 left things on a bit of a cliffhanger, with fiendish serial killer Christopher Pelant forcing FBI Agent Seeley Booth (David Boreanaz) to break off his engagement to forensic anthropologist Temperance ‘Bones’ Brennan (Emily Deschanel), without even allowing him to tell her why. It certainly adds a lot of angst to the early part of the season, although it does become a little annoying and over the top.

Bones has always had a tendency to go a little too far with its recurring villains and that’s certainly true with Pelant, who gets to the point where you feel the only way for what he does to make sense is if he reveals that he’s got magical superpowers.

Thankfully though the other thing Bones has been good at is realising it’s gone too far and then quickly cutting it off, and that’s what happens here. That allows the show to go back to what it does best – giving us gory crimes where there’s very little of the victim left, and then Temperance using the skeleton to piece together what happened and who the killer is.

Sure it’s a bit silly but it’s also a lot of fun. In Season 9 Temperance has to sort out everything from the death of a sperm donor to man whose body went through a meat grinder. There are also plenty of personal issues to deal with, from one of Bone’s interns contracting a potentially deadly illness to her interrupted engagement. But after nine years – much of if spent in will-they-won’t-they get it together mode – will Brennan and Booth finally make it down the aisle? And while there is an ongoing plot about the Ghost Killer, that’s largely a damp squib.

It’s not high art but it’s not meant to be. It is though an incredibly entertainment procedural show, helped immensely by a good cast who all seem to enjoy what they’re doing. It’s a series that knows what it’s doing and even nine seasons in it’s still doing it well.

Overall Verdict: Far more fun than a show full of mutilated corpses probably should be, nine seasons in Bones is still a great show.

Reviewer: Tim Isaac