Bones / Tropes M to Z

Bones provides examples of the following tropes:

Tropes A to L | Tropes M to Z

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M

• MacGyvering: Practically Dr. Hodgins's main role. He usually ropes whichever squintern there is into helping him. Cam frequently disapproves. Special mention goes to Wendell Bray, who managed to take X-rays with scotch tape supplying the needed (static) electricity during a blizzard, and used a potato battery to power a cellphone.
• Magic Plastic Surgery: Max has it and even his own daughter doesn’t recognize him until he slips up talking about the past in “Judas On a Pole”.
• Magical Computer: Lampshaded in the pilot. But still played straight most of the time. Angela's computer (and Angela herself) can do almost anything with her combination computer-hologram projector. Such as recreating detailed hieroglyphics... from the stains of an object inside a several thousand year old mummy or being able to reconstruct an accurate corpse from a body that had been crushed with a car crusher... enough to be able to identify markings on the bones.
  • Parodied in episode 100 "The Parts in the Sum of the Whole", a flashback to the first collaboration between Booth and Bones, where Angela, new to the Jeffersonian, reenacts the murder with a flip book animation of stick figures. Caroline Julian says it won't convince a jury unless it's a computer simulation.
  • Angela has a minor in computer science to explain her tech-savvy.
• Malaproper: Bones, after getting out of her "I don't know what that means" phase, and moving onto guessing.
  Bones: Serious as a gas attack.
  Booth: Heart attack, Bones.
• Marijuana Is LSD: Averted.
  Bones: Marijuana doesn't make you a killer.
  Booth: But it does make you stupid.
• The Man Behind the Man: Angela's input on relationships and sex are a major part of Brennan's success as an author.
• Mass "Oh, Crap!": In the Season 11 Finale, when the team believes that Zach Addy has become a serial killer.
• A Master Makes Their Own Tools: In season 6 the Big Bad of the Half-Arc Season is an expert sniper who makes his own bullets.
• Maternally Challenged: Brennan, naturally. "Just because I have breasts does not mean I have magical powers over infants." She does grow attached to the kid by the end of the episode, though.
  Bones: Phalanges! Dancing phalanges!
  • She eventually decides it would be "selfish" of her not to procreate and chooses Booth to be her sperm donor; this is put on hold due to Booth's brain tumor.
  • Back on, now that Bones is pregnant.
• Maternity Crisis:
  • Brennan goes into labor while investigating a prison connection to a murder case. And she’s in the prison at the time.
  • Angela goes into labor in the lab during an earlier case.
  • Daisy rounds out the trio, going into labor in the lab in season 10.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane:
  • Was Brennan drugged or bespelled in New Orleans? And did Booth really see a ghost, or was it just a hallucination?
  • Was Booth’s friend Teddy a hallucination from Booth’s brain tumor or a ghost?
  • Was Brennan hallucinating like she insisted or really seeing her mom?
  • Is Buddy just Christine’s imaginary friend or is she really having talks with Sweets’ ghost?
• Meaningful Funeral: Sweet's wake/funeral in the second episode of season 10 will be (according to Word of God) going to be very moving but also rather quirky.
• Meaningful Gift: In The Man in the Fallout Shelter, the gang are trapped in the Jeffersonian by a Contamination Situation that could keep them in over Christmas. They decide to make the best of it and hold their own Christmas with improvised decorations and presents, but Booth is still annoyed that he didn't get to go Christmas shopping for his son. When they open presents, he finds that Zach has given his the robot he was working on earlier, explaining that, "I thought, if we get out on time, you could give it to your son." He does, and Tyler loves it.
• Meet the In-Laws:
  • Cam meets Arastoo’s parents in season 9. He’s scared because they’re rather old school and she’s not the kind of woman they imagined him marrying. He gets angry and storms out with Cam when he fears they’re rejecting her but in the end of the episode, they stop in to say they do accept her.
  • Hodgins meeting Angela’s dad counts. He’s rather scary to Hodgins every time he shows up
• Merchant Prince: In the two-part episode "Yanks in the UK", a powerful American businessman in London uses his political influence to get Booth and Brennan (who are in town for a conference) seconded to Scotland Yard to investigate the death of his daughter, despite the fact that the FBI has no jurisdiction in the UK. Things get more complicated when the businessman becomes a suspect in a second murder.
• Mind Screw: Hodgins tells Angela to record Sleepy Hollow. It can't be another adaptation, because the real story was never written in-universe, according to Sleepy Hollow's showrunners. And yet later, there's a crossover, Abbie and Ichabod are showing up at the Jeffersonian as real people.
• Mini-Golf Episode: The episode "The Putter in the Rough" focuses on a murdered "superstar mini-golfer."
• Misplaced Accent: In-universe; Vaziri fakes a Jordanian accent despite being Iranian.
• Missing Mom: The one main character parent we never either see or hear anything at all about is Angela’s mom.
• Mistaken from Behind: An episode has a terrorist with a dioxin bomb about to blow up a peace conference. At one point Booth nabs who he thinks is the guy, but he turns around and it's someone else.
• Mob Debt: Played With in 'The Perfect Pieces in the Purple Pond.' Angela becomes concerned after Wendell makes a comment about people he absolutely has to pay back for his college tuition and thinks he means the Mob; obviously if he owed the Mob money that could cause serious trouble in any Mob-related cases the team investigate. In fact, Wendell was talking about people in his neighbourhood who contributed to his college fund despite not having much themselves, and so he's determined to pay them back.
• Moment Killer: That bloody clown in the season 5 premiere.
• Monster Clown: "The Mummy in the Maze"
• Mood Dissonance: Or it would be if we didn't know her so well — Bones behaves at a body farm the way other people would at Disneyland.
• Mood Whiplash: Constantly. This is a lighthearted sweet comedic show about serial killers, mutilated corpses, cannibals, murder, and death. There's an episode where the team finds a body in a river. The bones have been removed, meaning they can't get a facial likeness from the skin of the head. So two of the characters rig a way to inflate the eyeless, boneless, water-rotted face like a balloon to give it the rounded shape of a human head. This scene is played for laughs.
• Monster Fangirl: Howard Epps gets married to one while he's in prison. Then he escapes and kills her.
• Moral Guardians: Booth is extremely conservative many times, and becomes annoyingly overbearing when defending his beliefs. For example, when trying to convince Brennan to have their baby in a hospital (a Catholic one, as noted by Bones) while she wants to give birth at home because hospitals tend to be infested with germs and bacteria, and then proceeds to show how the ENTIRE PLACE is covered in dried up bodily substances such as blood, spinal fluid, etc. He then tries employing Sweets into scaring her to his choice, and gets chewed out over it. Moments like this make some people want to slap Booth upside the head.
• Moral Myopia: Dr Brennan and the squints have no problem talking down to people they feel are less intelligent than them, correcting people’s mistakes or refusing to dumb themselves down. However they don’t like Oliver Wells because he does the same thing to them. What makes matters worse is that he only started doing this after a one episode Flanderization. During his initial appearance he was incredibly charming and witty and only Dr. Brennan didn't like him.
• Motive Decay: In the early episodes, the scientists at the Jeffersonian spend most of their time on historical and archaeological work, and only put up with the FBI commandeering their services in order to justify their federal funding. By the middle of the first season, they're a dedicated crime lab. More Characterization Marches On, since at least one episode actually addresses this: they find the FBI cases are much more exciting, challenging, and rewarding. They still do the other work, it's just that they're not as enthusiastic about it anymore.
• Motor Mouth: Daisy and Karen. Never shutting up was Daisy’s quirk among all the intern quirks and Karen was a Sweets replacement in seasons 11 and 12 who never shut up when she was in a scene.
• Mr. Fanservice: Angela's husband, finally seen in the season 4 opener. There may even be slashy implications in there, what with two separate male cast members volunteering to take him to the airport.
  • Booth. 'nuff said.
• Mundane Made Awesome: Wendell and Hodgins frantically attaching wires while Angela yells, in the background, "Guys! The phone!" and rock music ramps up the mood... the fact is that Hodgins and Wendell are frantically hooking up potatoes for a very, very big battery.
• Murder by Mistake: One Victim of the Week was killed just for being the intended target's identical twin.
• Murder by Remote Control Vehicle: Pelant tries to use a drone to kill a school full of girls in “The Corpse on the Canopy” but is stopped.
• Must Let Them Get Away: Pelant, in spades. He kept using his abilities as a hacker to manipulate things so Booth and Brennan wouldn’t be able to arrest him.
• My Friends... and Zoidberg: The second season opens with a new person in charge of the team at the Jeffersonian, A Twofer Token Minority in Dr. Saroyan who, after an episode with some small conflict between her and Brennan, defends everyone on the team at the Jeffersonian by way of strong-arming a federal prosecutor into taking a case to trial.
  Saroyan: Yeah, it's scary, the whole country will be watching the trial and you don't want to go to trial with less than a sure thing, but you put my people on the stand and that's a sure thing.
  Everyone: Not Zack.
  • Bones doesn't think much of Sweets's choice of career.
    Bones: We're all scientists here. Well, not you. Where's your evidence?

N

• Names to Run Away from Really Fast
  • Subverted with Bones herself.
  • The Gormogon, Arthur Graves and the Master.
  • The Gravedigger.
• Name-Tron: The Angelatron, which replaced the Angelator after the first few seasons. It’s Angela’s Computer invention that is used for simulations and reconstructions.
• Nausea Dissonance: This comes up all the time. The Jeffersonian crew are all unfazed by decaying corpses and the like, while other characters get squicked to varying degrees, including having to vomit. Surprisingly, even Bones is not immune to this. When Angela plays a scenario of a girl with a belly-button ring shimmying in a narrow space, in the part where the girl's belly-button ring gets ripped off, Bones immediately looks away from the computer screen and takes a few deep breaths. Angela calls her out on this.
  Angela: What?
  Brennan: That just... makes me feel sick.
  Angela: You pick dead bodies out of mass graves, and yanking out a belly-button ring makes you sick?
  Booth: Hey, I've shot a lot of people in my time; I gotta admit, that whole belly-button thing makes me nauseous too.
  Brennan: Thank you.
• Near-Death Experience: Brennan in 'The Shot in the Dark'
• Neck Snap: Booth kills one of the Delta Force guys this way when they storm the house and attack him and Brennan.
• Nerdy Nasalness: When agent Booth dresses as a lab tech for Halloween, and purposely starts talking in a nasal voice. Nobody in the lab actually talks like that, he just thought it made him sound less like the aging jock he actually is.
• Never Suicide: Played straight in several episodes have either Booth not believing it was suicide or Brennan finding some evidence that suggests murder even if suicide would have made sense. This is Inverted in "The Lost in the Found": No one considers suicide, least of all Brennan because she overcame her troubled, lonely childhood while the victim didn't (there's also the fact that the victim numbed herself so she could wrench her non-dominant arm out of its socket and stab herself multiple times with a pair of scissors).
• New Baby Episode: This show has three birth subplots:
  • "The Change in the Game"-Angela goes into labor and tries to continue helping with the current case while she is giving birth.
  • "The Prisoner in the Pipe"-Brennan helps Booth investigate a murder with a connection inside a prison and goes into labor. She can't get to the hospital and Christine is born in a shed by a hotel as part of a pseudo-Away in a Manger plot
  • "The Puzzler in the Pit"-Daisy gives birth to Sweets's son after his death.
• Newscaster Cameo: The final episode has David Boreanaz’s weatherman dad Dave Roberts makes a cameo on one of the Hoover building’s TVs where broadcasts of the lab explosion are being shown.
• Nightmare Fetishist: Sweets pops into the Jeffersonian to discuss the Gormogon in "The Knight on the Grid." The team is somewhat disturbed by how enthusiastic he is. We later find out that in his youth he was a fan of both Black and Death Metal and still has the clothes — or lack thereof — to go incognito at a concert.
• No Badge? No Problem!:
  • Bones frequently helps interview witnesses and conduct interrogations, despite being a forensic anthropologist with no law enforcement training. In the pilot she even went to arrest the murderer by herself, kneecapping him in the process. (The show admitted this was technically assault with a deadly weapon and she was chewed out for that and general foolhardiness, but no charges were filed.)
  • A Body of the Week was a data analyst for the CIA. When his superiors refuse to investigate a possible diamond smuggling operation he discovers, he investigates it himself despite having no field experience, training, or authority.
• No Bisexuals: In one episode the Victim of the Week was a gay doctor who at one point in the episode they found out was having an affair with a female co-worker. This plot point was quickly dropped and for the rest of the episode he was treated as 100% gay.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed:
  • Bunsen Jude, the Science Dude.
  • In "The Wannabe in the Weeds," the closing credits include characters identified as "Kanye West Wanna-Be," "Dolly Parton Wanna-Be" and "Springsteen Wanna-Be."
  • Judge Trudy
• No Doubt the Years Have Changed Me: Brennan took a while to recognize her father when he first reappeared. Justified in that he also had some plastic surgery done to hide his identity, being a wanted felon.
• No Man of Woman Born: When Bones and Booth discuss whether they could catch each other if one of them committed a murder, Booth boasts "I always get my man," and Bones replies smugly, "I am a woman."
• No Social Skills: Zack, and Brennan to a lesser extent. As Angela puts it when they attempt to fist-bump (and immediately start deconstructing the entire concept): "It's so cute when you try to behave like earthlings."
  • Zack's been shown to be extremely blunt to the point of rudeness with people he doesn't know well. What's strange about this is that from what we see of Zack's family, it's normal. Like, mind-numbingly normal. His descriptions of them fit the stereotype of the average American family to a T. If anything, this seems to have exacerbated his strangeness.
  • Brennan misses nearly every pop-culture reference made in her presence, it is rather unbelievable for a successful writer of fiction novels to be so unfamiliar with it in general. Though there's a reason for the last bit. Brennan plots out the forensic aspect of the novels, then Angela comes over, has a glass of wine, and fills in the interpersonal bits.
• No Sympathy for Grudgeholders: One sub-arc was about Cam getting her identity stolen. She wound up living on a minimal income and faced the possibility that she'd never repair her credit. When they found the woman who'd done it, she turned out to be an old "friend" of Cam's who was jealous of her life and never shows the slightest hint of remorse. Cam is given the option of adding years to the woman's sentence by proving that the harm was done maliciously (targeting her, rather than just taking a convenient identity). Arastoo (who is dating her at this point) acts as if this would somehow make her the bigger monster and send her down a road of hatred and bitterness. She ultimately decides not to pursue the additional charges.
• Not Really a Birth Scene: In "The Dude in the Dam", Hodgins is host to a larvae in his neck, which eventually needs to come out... screaming, controlled breathing, and all. Earlier in the episode, Wendell even asked if he needed to boil some water. The whole thing played out like a pregnancy.
• No Warrant? No Problem!: Sometimes used, where Booth will say "Did you hear that?" to Brennan before breaking down the door. Other times he'll mix it up, telling Brennan "if anyone asks, we found the door open."
• Non-Idle Rich:
  • Hodgins, as well as Bones, who makes enough from her books to discuss the merits of having a Cayman Islands account.
  • "The Male in the Mail" also features a lottery winner who, despite his fifteen million-dollar windfall, contuse to work as the manager at a shipping an packaging center, saying it gives him purpose.
• Nonuniform Uniform
  • Booth wears a standard FBI suit-and-tie get-up, but varies it with strange socks and a ludicrous belt-buckle.
  • Angela decorated the collars of her lab coat, though it's the same lab coat all the time.
• Noodle Incident
  • In the episode "The Man in the Fallout Shelter," Brennan mentions a Fourth of July fiasco when Hodgins and Zack tried to spike the eggnog.
  • An agent from the State Department asks Bones about an incident involving a South American drug lord:
  Bones: [makes call] Yes, you said to call if anyone asked about, you know, him.
  Agent: [stunned after taking the phone] ... They're checking my credentials... I am to wait here until somebody comes to destroy my notes.
  • Booth referring to "that time you dropped a dead monkey down the elevator shaft."
  • In "The Bones on the Blue Line": a sexual position described on page 187 in one of Brennan's books.
    • Page 187 is mentioned again in "The Last Shot at a Second Chance", but is rejected in favor of page 214.
  • The newly-personable Edison refusing to talk about what he did while working for the NSA. Naturally this drives conspiracy-buff Hodgins nuts.
  • The case we never see solved: a skeleton curved all the way around into a backwards circle. This is before Brennan is pulled off the case for her father's trial. It does get more closure in season 12, though.
  • Dr. Nigel-Murray's hedonistic trip during the one-year break using the money he won on Jeopardy!.
  • The reason for Wendell being in juvenile hall for a weekend is never elaborated on.
  • Ken Nakamura states in season 4 that his friendship with Booth is based on mutual respect – that, and "a situation incited by a gallon of sake, a police boat and Uraga Harbor at dawn".
• "Not So Different" Remark: Broadsky invokes this when comparing himself and Booth, as does Bones when comparing the two. Booth vigorously rejects the notion but has trouble with the fact that Bones sees them as similar.
• The Nothing After Death: In the crossover episode with Sleepy Hollow the victim promised her religious boyfriend he would see the afterlife like she did when she had her heart stopped; he saw nothing which broke his faith and her artery after he freaked out and beat her to death with a skull. More generally, in the same episode, Cam and Bones assert that they don't believe in the afterlife.
• Not That Kind of Doctor: Dr. Temperance 'Bones' Brennan is an anthropologist, and she is quick to correct anyone who refers to her as anything but Dr. Brennan. In one episode, when Brennan is introduced as Doctor Brennan to a physician, he immediately asks "M.D.?", to which she replies "Ph.D". The physician then makes a snide remark about academics, which is rather galling considering an academic doctorate is often harder, and almost always requires more time to obtain than a medical one.
• Not That Kind of Partner: Often but not always averted - everyone seems to think Booth and Brennan are a couple but they always say "we're not a couple, [he/she]'s my partner," and the corretee almost always knows what they mean.
• Nude Nature Dance: In "The Witch in the Wardrobe", when a self-proclaimed witch is found dead, Brennan and Booth decide to check out a local group of Wiccans. They show up at a ceremony in the woods just as the (all-female) group begins to disrobe and start dancing. Scenery Censor and Toplessness from the Back shots are used to hide the actual naughty bits.

O

• Obfuscating Stupidity
  • Booth does this continuously; notice he is more prone to having great ideas and Eureka Moments in times of greater urgency.
  • In "The Bones That Foam," Angela had apparently figured out the ruse — that Booth was smarter than he let on, citing it almost by name.
  • Max Brennan is a natural at this. He seems like a fairly harmless old guy and few people know just how dangerous he can be when his family is threatened, and most aren’t aware of his criminal past.
• Odd Couple: Booth and Bones' outlooks on very nearly everything are polar opposites. Certain other characters have noted that they really shouldn't work as well together as they do because of it. Dr. Sweets drafts a book centering on exactly that during season 4 (Opposites Attract: Yin and Yang in the Workplace), but seems to eventually change his viewpoint after discussing it with retiring psychologist Gordon Gordon Wyatt.
  Sweets: Ok, now I'm hearing a caveat.
  Gordon Gordon: It's a small one. It's just... that Brennan and Booth aren't in any way opposites.
  Sweets: Wow! Small? What is that, British understatement?
  • At least four in the crossover with Sleepy Hollow: in addition to Booth/Bones and Angela/Hogins there's the goth victim and her religious boyfriend; Bones encourages Ichabod Crane to take his relationship with his partner to the next level because it had such a positive effect for her and Booth.
• Odd Friendship: Angela and Brennan have opposite views on most things, yet are great friends.
• Official Couple Ordeal Syndrome:
  • Booth and Brennan, full stop, between Pelant, the conspiracy that sent Booth to prison, Booth’s gambling relapse, the arc with Jared dying and Booth going missing, and Kovac hunting Booth.
  • Jack and Angela to a lesser extent. A lot of roadblocks to marriage in the early seasons, followed by the struggle with whether their child will be blind, Pelant taking Hodgins’ money, and Hodgins becoming paralyzed.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome: Six seasons of Unresolved Sexual Tension climaxing off-screen? REALLY? Then there are not one, but two time skips jumping ahead to five months into the relationship.
• Off the Wagon: Booth's gambling addiction is triggered by very bad experiences. Ironically what causes him to apparently fall off the wagon wasn't the recent horrible experiences of having his house destroyed, getting shot, forcing Bones and Christine to go into hiding, having Sweets die in his arms, and spending months in prison but the happy news that he's going to be a father again (very happy experiences can be triggers too). Sadly everyone thinks he's fine (they all saw him turn down a big bet to arrest a suspect on camera).
• Oh, Crap!:
  • Broadsky, the evil sniper, the Dark Booth, killing people not on orders, but as "the hand of God". Part of his games is that he steals other snipers' identities for his work, including Booth's to buy the land he's hiding on. When Booth tracks him down and they confront each other across the gate leading onto Broadsky's land, they make it clear that Booth is constrained by the law, and entering without a warrant would make any arrest worthless.
  Booth: I don't need a warrant. [hops the fence] This land belongs to Seeley Booth.
  Broadsky: Beat [runs]
  • The killer in “The Pathos In The Pathogens” when Brennan jabs him with a syringe she says is full of distilled virus.
• Old, New, Borrowed and Blue: Angela gives Brennan a hair pin that counts as Old, Borrowed and Blue.
• Older Than They Look: Daisy's actress, Carla Gallo, is actually a year older than Emily Deschanel and ten years older than John Francis Daley (Sweets). Sweets himself falls victim to this. In his first appearance, he's 22, but looks like Sam Weir if he grew a foot taller.
• Old Shame: In-Universe with Cam's role in an amateur schlock movie as '70s bloodsucking vampire with a Funny Afro, from "The Suit on the Set".
• Omnidisciplinary Scientist: Mostly averted. The squint squad is a team of highly-focused specialists, and many episodes will have someone rattle off some fairly dense bio-babble that needs to be translated, even for the other scientists.
  • Zack, on the other hand, seems to be a whiz at math, chemistry and physics, besides his doctorate in forensic anthropology. Early on, Zack is revealed to be working on an engineering degree as well as anthropology.
  • Hodgins is also revealed to have three doctorates — explaining why he can do bugs, plants and material science (don't say 'dirt' around him) It's best not to look too closely at how long it would take to get the background/experience the team has, and their relative youth.
  • Also Vincent, who can spout random useless facts on a wealth of topics. And yes, there are people who can actually do this. He won a large sum on Jeopardy! doing this, and promptly spent all of it.
• Once Done, Never Forgotten:
  • Agent Booth once, in a moment of personal stress, drew his weapon and fired two rounds into a robotic clown-head atop an ice cream truck. Several seasons later, after he'd completed counseling, got reinstated and received commendations for his work, it still gets brought up by folks from other government agencies when they want an excuse not to trust him with sensitive documents.
  • Bones shooting an unarmed man. He was trying to set her on fire.
• One of Our Own:
  • Hodgins was a murder suspect three times over the years.
  • Brennan when she was framed by Pelant for murder.
  • Booth was framed and spent 3 months in prison.
  • Zack and his aiding of Gormogon.
  • Cam was accused of fraud before she proved it was identity theft.
• Only Sane Employee:
  • It's FBI Agent Seely Booth's job to work with the No Social Skills "squints." Angela often served as the Only Sane Man of the crew who could reliably communicate with Booth. Later, Cam is hired to oversee them all and take the role from Angela, who then apparently felt free to act more quirky.
  • Clark Edison, one of the interns, also falls into this category. He prefers a professional environment, often expressing annoyance when the topic of conversation switches from investigation to the episode's side-plot. Which makes it all the funnier on the rare occasion that he joins in, and the others think that his reaction is 'too much'.
• Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping: Done in-character. Arastoo (the Muslim squintern-of-the-episode) slips his around Cam, then decides to not even bother with the accent any more when it's revealed that he was faking it all along — he thought his religion would not be accepted if he did not have a heavy accent like he was a recent immigrant.
• Open Relationship Failure:
  • Played for laughs in "Man in the Outhouse". Bones dates two men at the same time, arguing that one provides her with intellectual stimulation and the other with physical. She neglected to actually inform either paramour that she would be pursuing this arrangement, and therefore both men promptly dump her when they find out about each other, leaving Bones to ruefully "consider the argument for monogamy."
  • In "The Sin in the Sisterhood", the Body of the Week is the husband in a polygamous marriage to three sisters. Although the investigation encounters plenty of drama around this marriage, including a fundamentalist neighbour and a fourth woman on the side, the murderer turns out to be the wives' father, who killed their husband for cheating on them.
• Opposites Attract: Lampshaded when Sweets writes a book with this title about Bones and Booth.
• Origins Episode: Episode 100 gives us the story of how Booth and Bones first met, their real first case and why they were at odds in the premiere episode.
• Our Ghosts Are Different
  • When Booth is trapped on a ship set to explode, he's reunited with Corporal Teddy Parker, the dead guy he named his son after. Teddy is 100% tangible and picks up stuff, helps Booth open doors, Booth physically picks him up... but disappears just as Booth gets rescued. Later, Brennan (who sees him later, but doesn't know the guy's identity) points out that some of the stuff Booth did to get out really did require two people. An odd episode to be sure. In-universe, Booth was drugged (though this is not confirmed by anyone other than himself) and it's later established that he has a hallucination-causing brain tumor but still, you can read it as you like.
  • An earlier episode involves college students filming a Blair Witch knock-off in the woods when one character was apparently "possessed" by the ghost they were looking for and goes on a killing spree. Although the real course of events is solved, it turns out the camera actually caught the ghost on tape. Angela and Hodgins decide that it's an optical illusion, and try to convince themselves of it very hard.
• Out-of-Genre Experience
  • Bones is usually a drama with some hints of comedy. But a 4th season episode "The Double Death of the Dearly Departed" is a pure comedy. It's filled with out-of-character actions that in any other episode would be considered utterly ridiculous. Such as Brennan and Booth stealing a body because they can't get a warrant to examine it, as Hodgins distracts the funeral guests. However due to Rule of Funny this episode actually works and currently has an average rating of 9.2 out of 10 at TV.com.
  • And "The Death of the Queen Bee" is mostly Shout Outs to horror movies, complete with Scare Chords every few minutes.
• Out Sick:
  • A variation when Hodgins can't investigate with them because a wheel on his wheelchair fell off during sex.
  • In one episode, Booth is sidelined because his back is injured.
• Overly Narrow Superlative: In season four's "The Crank in the Shaft", an office worker uses his phone to take a picture of Cam (Booth thinks he's taking a picture of the body):
  Office guy: I'm not taking a picture of the body! I'm taking one of her... she's the most beautiful woman I've ever seen in the elevator.
• Over-the-Top Christmas Decorations: The victim of "The Santa in the Slush" is a Santa who lived the part 24/7, including having decorations all over his apartment. For a brief moment they consider the possibility that the guy really was Santa.

P-Q

• Panicky Expectant Father: Hodgins spends most of “The Change In The Game” going “is it time?” in a panicky voice every time Angela comes to talk to him in the lab. When Angela’s water actually breaks, he’s slow to get that it happened and starts off calmly. But as soon as Angela yells at him to get the car, he runs off yelling “where the hell are my keys??”
• Papa Wolf
  • Max Keenan does NOT take it well if you threaten Brennan or her brother Russ, as seen in the episode "Judas on a Pole". The rest of the time, however, he comes across as more bumbling than menacing. This is intentional.
  Brennan: I don't want you to kill people for me, just buy me a sweater like a regular dad!
  • Also Angela's dad. He is Billy Gibbons after all.
  • Booth is on record as saying that if "God Himself" told him to sacrifice his son, "That's not gonna happen." Considering that he's a devout Catholic...
  • The killer in "The Sin in the Sisterhood". The victim was in a polygamous marriage with three sisters, and cheated on them with yet another woman, so their protective father killed him.
  • The father of two of The Gravedigger's victims was approached by a sniper with an offer that he'd kill her for two million dollars. He gladly paid the money to have the murderer of his sons killed.
• Paranormal Episode: The Gravedigger trapped Booth in an old submarine and he saw his late friend, Parker. Brennan seemed to see him too at one point. There was also that episode that riffed on The Blair Witch Project.
• Parental Abandonment:
  • Brennan's parents disappeared when she was fifteen.
  • Aubrey’s dad left him and his mom when he was a teenager.
  • Booth’s mom left home to get away from his abusive dad and didn’t take the kids with her, leaving Booth very resentful over the years.
• Parental Substitute: Mostly in backstory, and related to Abusive Parents. Booth and Sweets are both abused by their parents... but rescued and raised with great love and care by substitute parents, Booth's grandfather in his case, an older couple who adopted him for Sweets.
• Passing the Torch: The Season 10 finale had Booth and Brennan leaving Washington DC for the much safer environments of Kansas and Bones anointing Daisy, Edison, and Wendell (and possibly Arastoo) as her successors at the Jeffersonian.
• The Password Is Always "Swordfish": Brennan's authorization password was "daffodil". When Booth lampshaded this trope by telling her her own password, she changed it. He immediately guessed the new password. Twice.
• The Patient Has Left the Building: Booth in the episode "Two Bodies in the Lab". He insists on leaving the hospital to go save Brennan.
• Peek-a-Boo Corpse: Once an Episode, on balance.
• Performer Guise: Booth & Brennan go undercover at a circus as a knife-throwing act — Booth learned knife throwing in the Rangers, Brennan is his Lovely Assistant.
• Person as Verb: Wendell tells Hodgins “I’m about to Brennanize you” before launching into science talk in “The Change In The Game”.
• Physical Therapy Plot: Hodgins references his physical therapy being challenging after he's paralyzed. He doesn't walk again, but the workouts to build his upper body strength enable him to hang onto a ledge long enough to be pulled up when he starts to fall after his rope malfunctions. He also begins to have muscle spasms in his legs, though he later loses all feeling in his legs.
• Piano Cover Slam: In "The Plain in the Prodigy," the Victim of the Week is an Amish boy on his Rumspringa. During the investigation, the team discover that he was a secret piano prodigy, using his Rumspringa to decide whether to pursue that or return to the community. His finger bones show signs of having been broken with what they work out is the lid of a piano. For a while they believe he was attacked by another Amish man trying to force him to return, then by his rival for a music scholarship. In fact, the victim did it to himself, to remove the temptation to leave his community.
• Piecemeal Funds Transfer: When Pelant hacks Hodges's bank accounts to drain them, the program uses the "rapidly dwindling funds" variant. It might have been intentional in this case, so that Hodges could watch the money slipping away in real time while piggybacking off the program in order to stop a drone Pelant had sent to bomb a girls' school in the Middle East.
• Playful Hacker: The "hacktivist" who claims he's only trying to expose government corruption. His methods are a little unorthodox: he explodes an innocent girl with a tiny bomb on a stick, rearranges her spine into a riddle, soaks it with donated FBI agent blood, sneaks it into a museum(?), puts the rest of her in an FBI file room, etches a computer virus into her bones to short out the Angelator, and explodes a reporter who was on his side because he was on the verge of revealing him. He's been studying Bones & Co. for a very long time and is doing these things to challenge them personally. And he does all this while under house arrest with no computer access.
• Plot Armor: Pelant once had a suit of it so thick that not even the typically-fatal Boom, Headshot! slowed him down, though it cracked enough to leave him with scars and a ruined eye. Early in season 9, however, the armor completely shatters.
• Polymath:
  • Brennan, Zach and Hodgins hold about eight doctorates between them.
  • Intern Oliver Wells is also said to be a polymath and it’s the only reason they put up with him being such a Jerkass.
• Poorly Disguised Pilot: "The Finder" for The Finder. It was the launch pad for the attempted spinoff before its own pilot aired and Booth and Brennan were barely in it at all.
• Post-Coital Collapse: In "The Maggots in the Meathead", we cut to Booth and Hannah collapsing on the bed right after finishing having sex, with both panting loudly and each wrapped up in their own Modesty Bedsheet.
• The Power of Lust: "The Dwarf in the Dirt" has Agent Booth facing his marksmanship test. He is advised to bring Dr. Brennan along as he won't miss his shots with her by his side. He does bring her, and he doesn't miss.
• Pragmatic Adaptation: Very enjoyable, if admittedly quite divergent from the novels.
• The Pratfall: A disturbing-but-still-funny version. Booth is in a hurry to find a missing head. He slips on a muddy riverbank, and slides on his rear into the water, then triumphantly holds up the head.
• Precision F-Strike
  • In "The Man with the Bone," upon discovering that a skeleton has disappeared:
  Brennan: Where the hell are my bones?!
  • And in "The Baby in the Bough:
  Brennan: There was a baby in that car! You son of a bitch!
  • When Angela goes into labor:
  Hodgins: Where the hell are my KEYS??
• Preclimax Climax: The circumstances of Booth and Bones finally hooking up. Booth was planning on finally confronting Broadsky the next day.
• Pregnancy Scare: Cam panics when she finds a positive pregnancy test in the lab's bathroom, thinking that maybe her teenage daughter had used it. She interrogates Brennan—not guilty—and realizes that it was Angela's. Who got a false positive, naturally.
• Pregnancy Test Plot: As said above, Cam finds a positive test in the lab bathroom and thinks it’s her daughter Michelle’s. It’s actually Angela’s false positive.
• Pregnant Badass: Brennan. She still stands up for herself and even goes into a prison riot while pregnant.
• Previously Overlooked Paramour: Booth and Brennan. Brennan in particular would deny that she should be with Booth every time it came up in the first few seasons. And both spent the early part of the show feeling they were too different to be compatible. Booth had a girlfriend for part of season 6 and Brennan eventually broke down fearing she’d missed her chance. Fortunately they did end up together later in the same season.
• Prison Episode: a couple.
  • Pregnant Brennan goes into a prison riot in one season 7 episode
  • The season 10 premiere has Booth in prison after a Frame-Up until Brennan resorts to blackmail to free him.
• Product Placement
  • The B-plot of "The Gamer in the Grease" is a big ad for Avatar. Apparently Bones takes place in an alternate universe where said film is as hotly anticipated as a new Star Wars flick, with people camping out to see it and painting their faces blue. And where Joel Moore has a doppleganger. Or just isn't in Avatar.
  • Toyota has a lot of scripted references, some quite obvious.
  • The Sienna, which Angela describes as having plenty of room and says how much she loves the backup camera.
  • The Prius, when Hodgins swerves and the Prius beeps at him, prompting Angela to say "Look! The Prius helps you stay in your lane!" Unusually, this has a lasting effect, as Hodgins and Angela end up in jail after being arrested for erratic driving, and they both have bench warrants. While in jail, Hodgins and Angela reconnect and get married while still in jail.
  • Two season six episodes in a row ("The Shallow in the Deep" and "The Babe in the Bar") feature some almost comically blatant product placement for Windows Phone 7, which fills up the entire screen for several seconds as Brennan is using it.
  • Season Six has another incredibly jarring Prius advert, this time without any plot significance at all. The same scene devolves into Big Lipped Alligator Moment territory as it ends with Booth and Bones giggling like six-year-olds while calling a dead man names like "bonehead" and "asshat."
  • Booth always drives a black Toyota SUV on FBI business, which is improbable given that in the real world US Government vehicles are invariably domestic.
  • Bones using a Windows phone to send pictures to Hodgins' giant screen with the Windows logo and namedropping Skydrive three times in the episode with the severed feet.
  • "The Pinnochio in the Planter" has an extremely off-putting scene: Bones, Booth and Sweets are in a car, talking about the case of the week, they stop abruptly to marvel at the fact that the car can park itself; Booth makes a lame joke and then end scene.
  • "The Promise in the Palace" had a scene which shoehorned in dialogue which would have felt forced in an actual car advert.
  Booth: I think that we can agree that I’m the driver in this family.
  Brennan: Usually, yes, but this car is too technologically advanced for you.
  Booth: Bones, I know how to fly a helicopter, all right? And besides, this car is as user-friendly as it gets.
  Brennan: I have to admit it is easy to drive and when the car’s not moving Christine enjoys playing with the reclining rear seats.
• Professionals Do It on Desks: Sweets And Daisy liked to do this.
  Sweets: We have to stop having sex on my desk.
• Promotion to Opening Titles: Tamara Taylor (Cam Saroyan) in season 2, John Francis Daley (Lance Sweets) in season 3, and John Boyd (James Aubrey) in season 10 in the episode after Sweets' death.
• Protagonist-Centered Morality: Dr. Temperance "Bones" Brennan has been flanderized into this in later episodes. Where before the characters would call her out when her Jerkass tendencies crossed the line, then they would make excuses for her, now they are telling people they should be honored to be insulted by her. It has reached the point where you can tell the villain or at the very least antagonist of the episode by who she insults.
  • She told one intern she would have no problem with his death while they were pantomiming a car crash, and in a later episode, committed an international crime by smuggling medicine into Cuba for that same intern, acting like nothing she did was wrong at all. To be clear, she stole a box full of medicines and the cash bribes for the Cuban customs officials from her superior's office, gave them to a CIA contact of her FBI agent husband, and thinks she won't suffer any consequences. By law, EVERY case she's ever handled, both at home and abroad, can be called into question now, but nothing will happen because she's the main character.
• Pulled from Your Day Off
  • In "The Boneless Bride in the River" Brennan is temporarily shacking up with Booth's FBI colleague Sully when a call comes in, but the body has no bones: "Dr. Saroyan said, "no bones". So, you know what that means? I'm back on vacation. No bones, no 'Bones'. Uh... I was the second bones." She heads back to the boat Sully has rented, but when a small bone is discovered Booth takes the opportunity to interrupt Brennan again.
  • In order to convince Brennan that the staff has the crime of the week covered they get the various interns to come in & pretend for 10 minutes to work. After she's convinced & leaves, they pack themselves up to go, but Dr. Edison (who is covering for Brennan on her wedding day, though he is getting paid) guilts them into staying and helping for free.
    "Am I the only one here who cares about this [dead] woman?"
• Put on a Bus:
  • Agent Payton Perotta, who shows up for three consecutive Season 4 episodes before disappearing.
  • Brennan's brother, Russ, is a recurring character in the first three seasons, but disappears completely after that, only being mentioned once or twice within the next couple of seasons. He didn't even show up to his sister's wedding to Booth, despite being on good terms with her!
  • Likewise, Booth's brother Jared, who was introduced in Season 4, was recurring in Seasons 4 and 5, and then never showed up again after that. He also didn't show up to the wedding. He finally showed up in the Season 11 premiere as the Victim of the Week.
  • Andrew Hacker, who was recurring in Season 5. He was on the phone with Booth (off-screen) once in Season 6, but other than that, hasn't been mentioned again.
  • At first it seemed Angela and Hodgins were going to move to Paris but they changed their minds. On the other hand a "last minute" decision in the season finale has Booth and Bones moving to Kansas.
• Putting the Band Back Together: The whole purpose of the sixth season opener: Brennan and Daisy went to the Maluku Islands, Booth's in Afghanistan, Hodgins and Angela are in Paris, Cam's still in DC, Sweets is on sabbatical, and the interns have either taken new positions at other places, lost the funding for their scholarship, won the lottery, or in a clinic. But the core team returns (with Caroline's urging) to help save Cam's job.
  • Also the season 11 opener, after Booth and Brennan retire and Jack and Angela try again to move.
• Quiet Cry for Help: Cam thinks an email from Arastoo might be this (paraphrasing: "'I'd like a shower and fresh clothes' means he's been thrown in jail!"); Edison, who's also Arastoo's friend, assures her that's unlikely and because he (Edison) is a Bad Liar he's not hiding anything or pretending so she won't worry. Then again Arastoo's emailing her from Iran and a future episode description says he was kidnapped but not when. Subverted — Arastoo was fine until he was kidnapped which was some time after he emailed Cam, plus he was on the phone with her as it happened.
• Quintessential British Gentleman: The Duke's family in the fourth season opener. Quite posh.

R

• Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: When questioning a drug dealer about one of his "clients", a murdered teenage gymnast, he's horrified at the implication:
  "I never touched her, I'm not evil!"
• Real Life Writes the Plot:
  • Emily Deschanel's pregnancy was written into the first half of the 7th season. It also meant she and Booth started living together and enter a committed relationship.
  • 10th Season: Carla Gallo was pregnant in real life and John Francis Daley was getting ready to write and direct his own projects, so it seemed like a good time to give Daisy a baby and kill off Sweets. Emily Deschanel's second pregnancy was also written into the season.
  • David Boreanaz had some medical issues during the summer of 2015, and had to take a few weeks off of filming the show. As a response to this, the showrunners wrote the two-part Season 11 premiere, in which Booth goes missing. Boreanaz recovered and returned to shoot the scenes he missed later.
  • Zack had to be written out of the show because Eric Milligan was struggling with his mental health at the time. It was also partly due to budget issues.
• Recovered Addict: Seeley Booth is a recovered gambling addict. It rarely comes up except when their investigations take them to a casino or similar place. At least until season 10, when it’s a major plot point.
• Red Right Hand: Pelant becomes Two-Faced after surviving a bullet from Booth.
• Rejected Marriage Proposal:
  • Rebecca rejected Booth in his backstory, after she became pregnant with Parker
  • Angela rejects Jack a few times before finally saying yes in season 2.
  • Booth is forced to reject Brennan's propsal by Pelant, and can't even explain things to her until Pelant is dead.
  • Hannah rejected Booth in season 6, and many fans were happy to see her go.
• Relationship Upgrade: Bones and Booth in season 7. Sweets and Daisy at the beginning of season 10, and then he died. Jack and Angela in season 6. Cam and Arastoo get one, then they break up, then they get back together and marry.
  • Relationship Revolving Door: Sweets and Daisy, who can’t stay apart after either break up. They break up and reunite twice before he dies.
• Remember the New Guy?: "Double Death for the Dearly Departed" opens with a wake for a co-workers at the Jeffersonian, who apparently was very close with most of the cast. Except Brennan.
• Replaced with Replica: Part of the plot of "The Man With The Bone" involves bones being stolen from the lab and replaced with fake ones. Naturally, Brennan isn't fooled.
• Required Spinoff Crossover: Sweets and Hodgins both appeared in episodes of The Finder
• Retired Badass: Max. He doesn’t work much after leaving his temporary gig at the Jeffersonian but he still managed to kill several attackers with his bare hands to save his grandkids.
• Revenge: Zigzagged in the final season Booth killed a war criminal decades ago and now his grown son (and daughter, as it turns out) want revenge so they torture Booth's old squadmates for fun and information. Brennan supports going after the killers to avenge Booth's friends, then the killers go after Booth's family, killing Brennan's father in the process and now it's Booth and Brennan who are out for revenge.
  • Booth wants it in season 10 after he’s framed and Sweets is killed. He breaks out a sniper rifle and Brennan has to talk him into solving the case the lawful way.
• Revenge by Proxy: Kovac wanted to get revenge for Booth killing his father during his sniper days by killing Booth’s family.
• Revenge Is Not Justice: When the woman who stole Cam's identity was caught, she had to decide whether to press additional charges. Arastoo gave her a speech about revenge possibly making her a monster and she ultimately didn?t approve the additional charges.
• Reverse Cerebus Syndrome: From season four onwards, the show noticeably takes a more comedic tone.
• Right for the Wrong Reasons: A meta-example. Viewers believed that the apprentice to the Gormogon shown in the last second of "The Knight on the Grid" was Zach, and that Zach was the Gormogon's apprentice. Turns out it wasn't Zach, but Zach would become the apprentice very soon.
• Ripped from the Headlines
  • More than one plot, but perhaps most obvious in an episode featuring a "pregnancy pact" written around the same time the Massachusetts girls were news.
  • Another episode featured all those feet that washed up in The Other Rain Forest's area.
  • "The Goop on the Girl" has all the earmarks of the 2003 death of Brian Wells, aka "The Pizza Bomber."
  • "Mayhem on a Cross" may have something to do with the murder of Euronymous, guitarist of black metal band Mayhem.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Kovac’s attack on the safe house in retaliation for Booth killing his father during his sniper career.
• Rock–Paper–Scissors: Zack and Hodgins play to determine who has to deal with a bag of unsavory evidence.
• Rogue Juror: Subverted in "The Fury in the Jury" where Brennan's the rogue: she convinces the rest of the jury the defendant has not been conclusively proven guilty by the prosecutions case, but then discovers he not only murdered his wife, but his best friend as well (a witness in the case), and she must then prove him guilty of this new murder along with the rest of the team.
• Romantic False Lead:
  • Sully for Bones before he was Put on a Bus. She was close to leaving with him
  • Hannah for Booth. He even proposed and was turned down.
  • Angela has had a few: her ex-husband, an ex-girlfriend who wound up back in her life because of a case, and Wendell, before she got back with and married Hodgins.
• Running Gag:
  • Brennan, and occasionally Zack, asking Booth for a gun. Which means that any time they do get a gun, it's made by Chekhov Arms. Brennan eventually just got a permit and bought her own gun.
  • Also, Brennan hates psychology. And pie.
  • "I don't know what that means."
  • Vincent's constant churning out of random facts, which usually have little or no relevance to the case at hand.
  • Zack or the intern-of-the-week getting used as a medium to play out the way the murder went.
  • Bones rarely praising her interns for their hard work. When Edison, who's African-American, implies she's a literal slave driver ("What'cha like me to do next, massa?"), it goes over her head. Bones herself thinks she's just being "kind," in a way: since no one can measure up to the high standards she sets for herself, she doesn't bother.
  • Age jokes about Sweets.
  • Smurfs are frequently mentioned.
  • "Buck and Wanda" is starting to get there.^note Booth and Bones have taken on these names when going undercover on multiple occasions. Examples include S6E23 and S8E10.
  • As are their other undercover personas, Tony and Roxie.
  • Booth threatening to shoot someone when that person annoys him. And Caroline actually encouraging him to shoot people on multiple occasions.
  • In "The Nazi in the Honeymoon", people (nearly) immediately recognize Booth as the real Agent Andy from Bones' books.
  • Hodgins walking in on people kissing, flirting, or having otherwise personal relationship moments, and clearly enjoying the interruption.
  • Aubrey constantly eating as well as asking other people for their food.
  • Season 3 has one with Booth not saying Gormogon right. He’d either get it wrong or say something else, such as the times he said “Gorgonzola”.
  • The other interns saying Arastoo wasn’t really invited to Booth and Brennan’s wedding and that he’s really a plus one due to dating Cam in “The Woman in White”.
  • Jack wanting to be King of The Lab. He competed with Zack for it early on, and it occasionally came up even after Zack left. Arastoo said Jack also called himself King of the Parking Lot, King of the Break room and King of Egypt (referring to his trysts with Angela in Cleopatra’s bed.) in the finale, he is officially King of the Lab while Cam is on sabbatical.
  • Jack and Angela sneaking off for sex in Cleopatra’s bed.
  • People frequently get covered in evidence, usually disgusted by it. Especially Booth.
  • Booth and Brennan going to talk to a victim's friends or family, and Brennan tactlessly blurting out that someone close to them is dead, usually with Booth's eyerolling comment to the effect that that lost them a tactical advantage. (If someone already knew, they would not be able to slip up and reveal it now; on the other hand, he gets a good look at their reactions.)
  • Hodgins getting something from one of the historical departments and using it in the lab.
  • After Booth shot at a clown mascot on an ice cream truck, "You shot a clown" and various other gags about Booth's hate for clowns were common for the rest of the season and beyond.

S

• Sadistic Choice:
  • In the episode "The Corpse in the Canopy", Christopher Pelant hacks into a UAV Drone and targets a school for girls in the Middle East while simultaneously hacking into Hodgins' bank account. The only way to save his money was to shut down the system, but if they shut down the system the Drone will destroy the school and kill the young girls and teachers there. Hodgins doesn't hesitate on the choice. In many ways, it is subverted to show that Pelant truly does not understand the team. What was meant to be a Sadistic Choice is actually a very simple, but painful, one for Hodgins who, while happily rich, isn't particularly attached to said money.
  • The Sadistic Choice is becoming Pelant's favorite tactic against Booth's team. After Brennan proposed to Booth in the Season 8 finale, "The Secret In the Siege", he railroaded their happiness, forcing Booth to break it off with Brennan or else he would kill five innocent strangers. At the end of the Season 9 premiere, Brennan assured Booth that she has absolute faith in him (a major step for her given her mistrust of the concept of faith over the years) and will stand by him no matter what, saying only that the next time it will be Booth's turn to propose to her. Which he did at the end of "The Sense in The Sacrifice", after he finally killed Pelant.
• Scenery Censor: In “The Finder”, Walter talks to Brennan while on the toilet with his boxers down. The only reason we don’t see his naughty bits is a strategically placed sink between him and the camera.
• Science Cocktail: Hodgins mixes the drinks at Cam’s wedding reception in beakers. There’s even something that explodes, resulting in him waving at the smoke and saying “my bad...”
• The Schizophrenia Conspiracy: Hodgins’ brother Jeffrey has a schizoaffective disorder that makes him paranoid.
• The Scourge of God: Broadsky, season six's villainous sniper. Booth has to remind people the guy is just a crazy murderer with a severely skewed moral compass.
• Screaming Birth: Lots of yelling in all three main character birth scenes.
  • Angela in "The Change in the Game".
  • Brennan has Booth stop at a hotel because she can’t make it to the hospital and she yells that she’ll give birth on the lawn if they can’t find her a space.
  • Daisy after being taken in by a New Age guru after Sweets' death. After putting up with the candles and crystals she declares she wants science and medicine STAT!
  • Hodgins plays with it screaming a lot when his botfly emerges from his neck
• Screw the Money, I Have Rules!: Angela finds Hodgins' missing money — all four billion of it — and Hodgins doesn't want it back because it's been tainted by Pelant, not to mention the hacker who originally found it was murdered over it and displayed Pelant-style so who knows who else could be after it. He tells Angela to give it to "a hundred charities" instead.
• Season Finale: Let's just say the writers and producers really like making big/special finales, often with a Cliffhanger.
  • Season 1: Brennan finds her mother's remains and receives a message from her long-missing dad.
  • Season 2: Angela and Hodgins leave Booth and Brennan at the altar.
  • Season 3: Zack Addy is revealed to be the Gormogon's apprentice.
  • Seasons 4, 5 & 6: See Dénouement Episode above.
  • Season 7: Brennan goes on the run after Pelant frames her for murder.
  • Season 8: Pelant forces Booth to reject Brennan's marriage proposal.
  • Season 9: Booth is shot by three corrupt Delta Force agents, and is arrested for their killing.
  • Season 10: Booth and Brennan decide to leave their jobs, but not before investigating a possible Pelant copycat. Also see Series Fauxnale below.
  • Season 11: Zack Addy returns while the team investigates the mysterious Puppeteer killer.
• Secret-Keeper: In Murder In the Middle East the victims cousin, a local cop, seems a bit too brusque and secretive while cooperating with Booth. While he turns out to be innocent of the murder, it turns out that he was aware that his cousin was a political activist who violated Islamic Law (something he'd let him get away with either out of family loyalty or due to secretly sharing his views) and has been trying to keep his more conservative uncle from finding this out.
• Secret Relationship: Cam and Arastoo for a while. We don’t know when they became a couple, but probably late season 7 or early season 8. Cam is very private and doesn’t want anyone to know while wanting to tell all at the same time. Hodgins finds out accidentally and then Angela when she and Jack see them kiss. They keep it a secret from anyone else for a few episodes longer.
• Secret Test of Character
  • What Sweets thinks is happening to the team in "Proof in the Pudding".
  • What Cam's daughter thinks is happening when Cam got her into Columbia University behind her back using a spruced-up version of her college essay. She declares that she's not going to cheat and will earn her way into Columbia — because she wants to be as upright and honest as Cam.
  • What Angela’s dad tells Hodgins after they break in to steal back Angela’s dad’s car. He was testing Hodgins to see if he was worthy of marrying Angela.
• Senseless Sacrifice: "The Sense in the Sacrifice" The agent who was seriously wounded in the attempt to catch Pelant helps the team by setting up a fake Pelant-style body dump only to become the body himself after being caught by Pelant. It's not a complete loss, however, when it ultimately leads to Pelant's death.
• Self-Made Man: Franklin Curtis, a.k.a. the victim of the episode "The Secret In The Soil", started a chain of organic products supermarkets.
• Self-Parody - "Bone of Contention" is a movie based on Brennan’s book that also serves as the show parodying itself..
• Self-Surgery: Christopher Pelant is shown sewing up his own face after Booth shoots him. Crosses with No One Should Survive That!.
• Serial-Killer Killer: The sniper Jacob Broadsky who goes after evildoers such as embezzlers and The Gravedigger. Booth loathes being compared to him, which Bones does constantly. Broadsky's claims and beliefs are undermined by the fact that he often kills innocent people because they were in some sense impeding his own efforts.
• Series Fauxnale: The Season 10 finale was written as a possible series ender. The show was still on the bubble at the time of its writing, so the producers made the episode in a way that it could be a finale, while also not making it too hard to come back from if they got renewed at the last minute (which they did).
• "Sesame Street" Cred: In-Universe example with Bones. She was on the Bunsen Jude kids’ science show.
• Sesquipedalian Loquaciousness: Brennan and Zack both use big words all the time.
• Sex Equals Death: The three part arc of the season 9 finale and first two season 10 episodes opens with Sweets and Daisy having sex after things were kind of cool between them for a while. Guess what happens to Sweets in part two of the arc? Yup, dead.
• Sex for Solace: Booth and Brennan's first time together is the night a colleague is murdered. Brennan's staying in Booth's apartment for safety's sake, and during the night, overcome with grief, Brennan comes to Booth's bed. He puts his arms around her as she cries, and you can guess the rest.
• Sex God:
  • Brennan boasts about being very good in bed several times (mostly to Booth) and we get enough glimpses at her love life and the casual way she talks about sex, it's clear she's not just boasting.
  • Angela is also portrayed as a Sex Goddess. Almost every episode has a moment where her sexual expertise comes up in a conversation. She even gives the rest of the team sexual advice and once boasted to Zack to "reap the benefits of my sexual wisdom".
  • Daisy unembarassedly claims to be “a sexual dynamo”. During the On phases of their relationship, she and Sweets are constantly Getting It.
  • Ian Wexler from "Yanks in the U.K." is a womanizer that Really Gets Around and is famous around campus due to be extremely good in bed. Appropriately, he's supposed to be a British Distaff Counterpart of Brennan, and had a similar UST relationship with Booth's British Distaff Counterpart, Inspector Cate Pritchard, who also compliments his sexual prowess.
  Pritchard: See, I rather saw it as climbing Everest. Of course, it's been done before but the experience is still breathtaking.
• Sex Is Interesting: Angela, though it is consistent with the character's general portrayal, especially with her relationship with Roxy and her later decision to be temporarily celibate are introduced. She's able to avoid many of the pitfalls of this trope because she's an Ethical Slut who embraces an alternative lifestyle as opposed to just being into sex for the heck of it.
• Sex with the Ex:
  • Bones and Booth have both indulged in this with past flames, Bones with her old boyfriend (and thesis supervisor!) when he came into town, Booth has had a couple of "one time only" sleepovers with his ex-girlfriend, the mother of his son. He also had sex with Cam a few times after her arrival and having dated her before.
  • Angela and Hodgins after their post-season 2 breakup.
  • Sweets and Daisy couldn’t stay away from each other even when they weren’t dating. The first time led to them getting back together and she got pregnant from this during the second breakup. They married just before his tragic death.
• Sexy Surfacing Shot:
  • In "The Pain in the Heart", Booth is taking a relaxing soak in a bathtub after faking his death when Brennan suddenly busts in on him and is upset because she didn't know he was faking his death. During the ensuing argument he stands up, not noticing he's fully exposing himself to her. When she points it out, he slowly sinks back in the bathtub in shame.
  Brennan: Just so you know, I find your lack of puritan modesty very refreshing.
  • In "The Jewel in the Crown", Aubrey arrives to question a suspect only to find her swimming at a pool, and she exits with by slowly climbing out of the water with plenty of Male Gaze.
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: In "The Bones on the Blue Line," Sweets meets a young man on the Metro who gets an email saying that, after eight years of chemo, he's finally cured and is going to begin living his life to the fullest. Then there's a flash flood and he's killed instantly in front of Sweets' eyes.
• Share the Male Pain: When a severed testicle is recovered from a corpse found in a high-powered washing machine in "The Rocker in the Rinse Cycle", there's a Running Gag about the men in the lab feeling the deceased man's pain. Especially Booth.
• Sherlock Can Read: In one episode, Hodgins identifies the clothes a victim was wearing as having come from a church thrift store. Cam and Zack are dumbfounded that he is able to do that until he rips out a label from the clothing and shows it to them.
• Shipper on Deck:
  • Almost everyone in the cast eventually becomes one for Brennan & Booth:
    • Angela has been on that ship from the Pilot, though most of the time, she is fairly subtle about it.
    • Sweets, on the other hand, is not subtle. He often becomes frustrated in their sessions over their thick-headedness, and has on more than one occasion yelled at them to just admit their mutual love and get together. He even ends up being the one who prompts Booth (with more exasperated yelling) into admitting his feelings to Bones. Sweets even has written a peer-reviewed paper on the subject.
    • Cam, and Clark seemed to have joined in on the Booth/Brennan shipping in season six.
    • Brennan's father Max is definitely a shipper by season six, asking Angela if Brennan and Booth were together, declaring his daughter much prettier and smarter than Hannah Burley, and then buying his daughter a conch shell toothbrush-holder with two holes. Just check the quote at the top of the page; he was disappointed they weren't sleeping together.
    • Booth's grandfather, Hank said a few times that he thought they should be together.
  • Angela also said that Abbie and Ichabod should totally get romantic with each other during 'The Resurrection in the Remains', the Sleepy Hollow Crossover.
• Ship Tease: Every single episode, more or less, but especially the Christmas episode where Booth and Brennan kiss. And that only came about because Caroline was feeling "puckish".
• Shirtless Scene
  • A post-sex scene provides the audience with nice shots of Booth's abs and rear when he's in his underwear before he (unfortunately) dresses himself.
  • Booth gets one in the '09 Christmas episode "The Goop on the Girl". Booth gets caught in the blast of a suicide bomber and his clothes become covered in DNA evidence. So naturally, Brennan strips him to his undies. By the time she's done Booth is being wheeled around on a cart. Also serves as a setup for Not What It Looks Like.
  Angela: Uh, are we doing experiments on Booth? Because if so I’d like to help.
  Booth: Make fun of the naked guy. Knock yourself out.
  • In "The Man in the Fallout Shelter", Hodgins had to hit the showers after a biological accident and for about half the episode appeared in a Modesty Towel and nothing else.
  • Another for Hodgins in the Season 1 gag reel, where he apparently did a scene in boxers and nothing else. With Angela.
  • Sweets in "Mayhem On a Cross". Mostly because his shirt is needed to stop someone’s bleeding. It turns out to give him some new depth as Booth and Brennan see the scars on his back. Oddly, said scars are missing when he gets caught in the bathtub while staying with Booth and Brennan in his second shirtless scene in season 8.
• Shoot Out the Lock: Booth did this a few times. One ricocheted and hit him in the leg unexpectedly. Eventually, the lab's doors were outfitted with bulletproof locks.
• Shout-Out:
  • The idiosyncratic episode naming is in the style of the titles of Agatha Christie novels (i.e. "The X in the Y").
  • A woman named Harriet dies in a chocolate bar. Turns out she's a corporate spy. Harriet the Spy.
  • Sweets' new roommates are named Janet and Chrissy.
  • Investigating the deaths of two conjoined twins that were members of a traveling circus, Booth and Bones went undercover as a Russian knife-throwing act, Boris and Natasha.
  • The Victim of the Week in "The Lady on the List" is the anti-Walter White: He's a teacher with terminal cancer which isn't what killed him who enlists a former student to help him with a money-making plan to provide for his family (plus a bucket list), but instead of meth he sells inspirational videos and everyone loves him, including title lady, whose life he ruined (he caught her stealing but didn't realize that with her previous felonies she'd get her kids taken away) and who will get a portion of the money, much to the displeasure of his partner who did all the shooting and editing without pay. The Heisenberg uncertainty principle is also mentioned, and a profiling algorithm called VAL deduces he had a lot of hidden rage (he didn't but his partner did).
  • In "The New Tricks in the Old Dogs", Jack Hodgins describes his maternal Grandfather as the most selfish billionaire after Montgomery Burns
  • “The Gamer in the Grease” has Sweets waiting with a couple of interns for movie tickets. A comment is made “We’re up against Freaks and Geeks. John Francis Daley was a regular on "Freaks and Geeks" before playing Sweets here.
• The Show Goes Hollywood: In "The Suit on the Set", Bones and Booth visit the set of the film of one of Bones' novels, where they discover an actual dead body.
• Shut Up, Hannibal!:
  • Bones hits a guy with a bedpan rather than hear his psycho-rant about why it's OK to eat people.
  Brennan: Nobody wants to hear that rambling psycho-speech!
  • Pelant had one last message about how he planned far enough ahead to transcend death but Bones shuts it off — he's dead, they're alive, end of (his) story.
• Sibling Team: The final Big Bads turn out to be the children of a war criminal who Booth assassinated who were posing as husband and wife. The "wife" would have gotten away with it if she hadn't molded explosives with her bare hands.
• Sickeningly Sweethearts:
  • Sweets and Daisy quite often. She calls him Lancelot and there are a few instances of sappy talking between them. Cam once says she thinks she’s going to yak.
  • She also threatens Hodgins and Angela with a bucket of cold water in another episode. They did get kissy in several early episodes and had the Running Gag with Cleopatra’s bed but matured a little as time wore on.
• Sleep Cute: Bones and Booth, cuddling in bed, have made it to the opening credits as of the seventh season.
• Sleeping with the Boss: Arastoo is still an intern when he starts dating Cam in season 8. By the time they marry, he’s got his doctorate and they worry less about being called out for it.
• Sleuth Dates Cop: Booth and Bones have this dynamic with the latter as The Protagonist sleuth. She is his partner on cases that require her expertise. They had Unresolved Sexual Tension for a long time but they eventually resolve it.
• Sliding Scale of Continuity: Somewhere between Level 3 and 4. The majority of episodes feature crimes and subplots that are concluded within the same episode, but there are occasional serialized episodes that share the same storyline. There are also many episodes that have a stand-alone crime, but the "B-story" is a continuation of an already-started subplot (like Booth's gambling relapse in Season 10). Also, there's a day-night difference between a Season 1-3 episode and a Season 7-9 episode, as the show has changed the status quo several times over the years, and callbacks are more frequent later on.
• Sliding Scale of Plot Versus Characters: While the show usually balances crime solving and character development quite well, there are some episodes with a bigger focus on the story (basically any serial killer episode), and some episodes more about the characters' interactions (like the wedding in Season 9 and the finale).
• Sliding Scale of Silliness vs. Seriousness: The show has always balanced humor and drama, though around Season 4, non-serialized episodes began becoming Denser and Wackier.
• Slipping into Stink: In one episode, Booth slips, falls down a hill, and lands against the decomposing severed human head that was missing from the crime scene they were at.
• Slow Light: When Zack shows Booth & Brennan a mirror setup that the Gormagon used to watch the vault, he set off a laser beam that worked its way very slowly around the room.
• Smart Ball: How can a show completely populated with geniuses hand one of them a Smart Ball?
  • When you have Raised by Wolves Bones be the one who can navigate Japanese manners with politeness and sensitivity. This is the person who often can't even figure out how to compliment someone in the looser and less formal American society without making it an offhand (or sometimes just outright) insult.
  • Also as noted in "The Maggots in the Meathead", she can quite readily pick up and understand cultures and social groups to the point of appreciating various similarities and differences. Mostly, it's just her tendency to be fairly literal in her own culture that makes her seem socially stunted.
• Smart People Know Latin: In the third episode, Booth, Bones, and Zack go to a very upscale private school with a Pretentious Latin Motto - Omnia Mea Meacum Porto. Catholic Booth doesn't get a word of it, snarking that it must mean, "Normal People Stay Out." Bones and Zack translate it without pause - "I carry with me all my things." In unison.
• Smart People Play Chess: Sweets has two doctorates and is a whiz at the game.
• Sniper Duel: The second half of Season 6 is essentially a long duel of Friendly Sniper Atoner Booth versus his Cold Sniper Mentor Broadsky:
  • Booth foils one of Broadsky's assassination attempts by shooting his rifle, as he couldn't get a clear shot at Broadsky himself.
  • Their final hide and go seek sniper showdown is not only of their skills but their philosophies. Booth has pursued Broadsky to his base of operations, a Container Maze where Broadsky is not only intimately familiar with the territory but armed with a customized precision rifle that insanely outperforms Booth's FBI-approved mass-production longarm. But Booth has Bones and the squints, who figure out that as a result of the previous encounter, Broadsky's right hand is broken, therefore he can only rest the gun barrel on his arm and is incapable of gripping the barrel and aiming downwards. This allows Booth to do the exact same thing to his other hand before he can change cover, taking Broadsky alive.
• Soap Opera Rapid Aging Syndrome: Christine Brennan seems to gain a couple of years between seasons 9 and 10. The crew was having difficulty with the toddler twins playing her before and wanted to cast a slightly older child who was easier to work with. Sunnie Pelant was at least 4 or 5 when she debuted as Christine in the season 10 premiere.
• Someone to Remember Him By: Daisy gives birth to Sweets’ son a couple of months after Sweets’ death.
• Sophisticated as Hell: The only way Sweets knows how to talk.
• Speak Now or Forever Hold Your Peace: Done at Jack and Angela’s first wedding. As it turns out, Angela was already married.
  • Booth and Brennan’s wedding plays with it. Aldo starts the line, then replaces the “speak now” part with “keep it to yourself.”
• Speaks In Shoutouts: Brennan's cousin, who speaks by quoting Benjamin Franklin, and a street performer dressed as William Shakespeare.
• Special Guest
  • Stephen Fry is a recurring character.
  • A more regular example is Family Guy's Stewie Griffin. No, not Seth MacFarlane, Stewart Gilligan Griffin appeared in cartoon form on a television, as part of Booth's anxiety-induced fantasy while donating sperm. And again in the usual episode-ending interrogation sequence, except without the TV. When he starts talking to "Stewie", Bones takes him to the hospital. Booth has a brain tumor. Surprise! It's worth noting that Stewie was one of the few pop-culture references Bones actually "got" instantly.
  • Betty White appeared in Season 11 as an experienced forensic anthropologist, and returned for episode 10 of season 12.
• The Spock: Brennan, who also sometimes is a Straw Vulcan as well. In addition, Zack. They’re both hyper rational people.
• Spock Speak: Brennan, almost to the point of Cringe Comedy. They both tend to say things with big, long scientific words all the time.
• Spontaneous Human Combustion: In the episode "The Foot in the Foreclosure", they find ashes of a pair of lovers; Booth suspects SHC, but Brennan says it's just an urban legend.
• Stab the Salad: Played for laughs several times in "The Death of the Queen Bee" with Mr. Buxley, the creepy janitor at Bones' high school — played by Freddy Krueger, no less.
• Stalker with a Crush: Birimbau kept track of Angela over the years because he hoped she’d come back to him.
• Stalker without a Crush: The season four episode "Man in the Outhouse" has Noel Liftin, a stalker who was previously on the show as a Stalker with a Crush; Booth pays him $50 to "stalk" one of their suspects and get more information. He proves to be frighteningly good at it.
• Stamp of Rejection: One early episode begins with Bones requesting to be issued a sidearm. Booth sits down and patiently walks her through the process and then stamps it with "Denied" right then and there.
• Standard Cop Backstory: Brennan, Booth, and Sweets were all victims of child abuse. Brennan and Sweets spent time in the foster care system, and Brennan and Booth both have a dead parent and a string of failed romances.
• Standard Female Grab Area:
  • Booth pulls Brennan out of a room by her upper arm on the first case they work.
  • Booth also grabs Sweets at the end of the third season to drag him into Bones's office.
• Statuesque Stunner: Both Brennan and Angela are tall Head Turning Beauties. Brennan stands at 5'8"/173 cm while Angela is 5'9"/175 cm. Very noticeable when Angela stands next to Hodgins, her husband who's shorter than her.
  * Status Quo Is God: A form of it with the Sleepy Hollow crossover. It was written in a way that the Bones characters could go to Sleepy Hollow and manage not to see a bunch of things that would change everything they ever believed and permanently alter them and the show as a whole. Brennan wondered why Crane's writing matched a document hundreds of years old, but seemed to accept his explanation of inherited handwriting similarities. Over on the Sleepy Hollow half of the crossover, they didn't see all the supernatural stuff happening (like Pandora raising a dead body) and came back to Bones pretty much unchanged.
• Stealth Pun: When, during an interrogation, Gordon Gordon Wyatt gets thoroughly irritated at being called a fry cook. At that point, he's a chef. Played by Stephen Fry. Could also be a nod to comedian Peter Cook, whom Stephen Fry had worked with several times and was good friends with.
• Stepford Smiler: When Brennan turns out to be the most normal alumnus from her high school, you can sure bet there's some.
• Straight Gay: To the max in "The Dentist in the Ditch." The victim played amateur full contact football, his entire team is gay and his ex is a bow hunter.
• Studio Episode:
  • In "The Suit on Set", Brennan and Booth discover a real body on the set of Bone of Contention, an action film adaptation of Brennan's book, and it turns out the be the head of the studio. Bones and Brennan remain on the set, helped by the actor playing Hodgins' character since he has a science background, while the rest of the team help from the Jeffersonian. The murder turns out to have nothing to do with the film — the studio groundskeeper got fed up with him and the other creatives ruining her topiaries.
  • Downplayed and inverted in "The Body and the Bounty", where Brennan agrees to host an episode of The Science Dude in the Jeffersonian if the host Bunsen Jude proves himself as a squintern on an unrelated case. While he does come through, the filming doesn't take place until the last scene of the episode, with Brennan hilariously dressed in a skeleton costume and tutu.
  • In "The Carrot in the Kudzu", a popular children's show actor, most known for playing Carrot Bill in The Vegetabills, is found dead, so Bones and Brennan investigate the set to see if anyone involved in the show killed him. The murderer instead turns out to be a fan who killed him entirely by accident, not knowing he had a heart condition that made him prone to dying from a sudden scare.
• Stuff Blowing Up:
  • Wait, why is the ship exploding that spectacularly? Oh, because it's cool.
  • Several of Zack and Hodgins experiments.
  • Seen in the movie within a show Bone of Contention, a loose adaptation of one of Bones' novels.
  • Also the entire lab in the series finale.
• Strictly Professional Relationship: Dr. Temperance "Bones" Brennan and her partner FBI Agent Booth, though everyone can see that they should be together. People actually ask them why they aren't having sex. Changes over the course of the show since they do get married.
• Stylistic Suck:
  • The movie version of Brennan's book, The Bone of Contention, from "The Suit on the Set". Even the actress and director and scriptwriter shown on screen are living jokes.
  • Clark's attempt at mystery writing in "The Carrot in the Kudzu". We only hear a little of it, such as a hilariously redundant description of a dead body and an accidental rephrasing of the line "Old MacDonald had a farm", but Hodgins, Angela and Camille all say it's terrible. Shockingly, he manages to get it published.
  • Cam's student film where she starred as a vampire.
• Sub-Par Supremacist: In "The Purging of the Pundit," the Victim of the Week is a right-wing radio presenter. As a shouty, money-grubbing hypocrite he's a solid example himself, as is his producer. But they're only in it for the money, while one of the suspects is a true believer: a white supremacist with a history of assaulting minorities who was building a fertiliser bomb when Booth arrested him. He's also a high-school dropout who seems to think that saying "I do not recognise your authority!" means he can't be arrested.
• Swiss-Cheese Security: Security at the Jeffersonian varies up and down as needed by the plot. Sometimes it's incredibly difficult to get anything in or out. Other times random people show up in high security areas with no warning.
• Synthetic Plague: The modified virus that killed the victim and infected Arastoo in “The Pathos in The Pathogen”.

T

• Take a Third Option: One earlier episode had Zack and Hodgins fighting over who signed for a hot delivery girl's packages. Angela is there to see which one the girl chooses when both men are there. She chooses Angela. Who says that's "sweet", and fans herself.
• Take Five: In an early episode, Booth tells the Jeffersonian technicians that he needs the room for a few minutes, to a room full of blank faces. Hodgins ends up explaining to them that Booth wants them to leave so he can talk with Bones in private.
• Take That!
  • Many, most of which seem to be pointed at Sweets and Psychology as a whole. In the (admittedly odd and written by an "Unreliable Narrator") season finale, Sweets' surrogate declares that psychologists are glorified bartenders. Unknown if this is used for comedic effect, because they do like riling up Sweets.
  • Sweets gets one on Brennan in a season 4 episode, when he is able to pick out a murderer from a crowd of college students. She is "amazed" he was able to do that, and questions him on what he saw. Sweets doesn't answer her, simply saying "You're not gonna believe me anyway," and walks out of the room.
  Brennan: How did you do it?
  Sweets: You're not gonna believe me anyway... You're just gonna say I guessed. So have it your way. I guessed.
  • What actually happened was when Booth fired the weapon used to kill the Victim of the Week in front of the suspects, Sweets picked the one who involuntarily winced, which Brennan probably didn't notice.
  • From "The Salt in the Wounds": "Of course, you aren't a medical doctor, either." Bones had been asking for it. Nullified when it turns out the chiropractor's the killer, but still very sweet.
  • "The Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood": "What are you supposed to do, preach abstinence? It doesn't work in Alaska, why would it work in Verbena Court?"
• Tar and Feathers: Well. Corn syrup and paper feathers. Booth and Brennan get it from a group of protestors outside a chicken processing plant in “The Tough Man in the Tender Chicken”.
• Tarot Troubles: With Special Guest Cyndi Lauper as the fortuneteller.
• A Taste of the Lash: Poor Sweets as a kid, by his own foster parents. He still has scars from it on his back.
• Taxonomic Term Confusion: For Valentine's Day, Hodgins splices rose DNA into a slime mold, creating a sweet-smelling variety he claims will be called Angelicus montenegro. Just adding a bit of extra DNA doesn't change its genus or species, nor does it qualify as a "hybrid" as Hodgins claims. A true hybrid of two species would be called "[Species 1's name] x [Species 2's name]"; at best, Hodgins can add Angela's name to his creation's strain, not its species.
• Teacher/Student Romance
  • Brennan had a relationship with her teacher in college. He defended it by saying she was a very advanced student. Zack seemed rather interested in the idea, commenting "I'm an advanced student" rather indignantly.
  • Brennan while wondering about why the victim was into younger men casually asked her intern whether he would date a woman much older than him. The intern reacted with shock and thought she was flirting with him.
  • University teacher Ian Wexler from "Yanks in the U.K." is The Casanova and is said to have slept around with several of the female students.
• Techno Babble: Most of the scientists.
  • Played rather darkly in "The Girl in the Fridge" where Bones is testifying in court, and her Spock Speak is hindering her testimony, making her appear unsympathetic to the jury. Until the prosecutor, with a little help from Booth, brings up her childhood, which disturbs her enough to start speaking in Layman's Terms.
  • Invoked by Booth in "The Proof in the Pudding" where part of his plan involves Bones burying the Secret Service agent holding the team in lockdown under technical jargon so he will let them perform a questionable experiment. Bones doesn't disappoint.
• 10-Minute Retirement: Booth and Brennan return for season 11 and take back their old jobs, though not without a lot of trauma: Booth's brother dies, Booth is severely injured, and Brennan is horrified to discover that under Aristoo's leadership the Jeffersonian's unsolved cases have piled up.
• Terrifying Pet Store Rat: The case of Why Did It Have to Be Snakes? below is populated exclusively with harmless and rather cute species like ball pythons, but even characters with less serious snake phobia than the kidnap victim act apprehensive around them.
• Thanatos Gambit: Pelant may have had one but Bones doesn't care. He knew about the Ghost Killer and may have tried to use his death to get the team trying to stop her.
• That Came Out Wrong:
  • Pointed out in-show in "The Man in the Outhouse" when Booth and Bones were discussing her sexual relationship with a Deep-Sea welder.
  Bones: He can hold his breath for 3 minutes down there!
  [Beat]
  Booth: ... underwater?
  • The conversation about how Bones' gun is bigger than Booth's.
  • In another episode, Dr. Gordon Gordon Wyatt announces his plans to retire from psychiatry and become a chef:
    "So now I'll be putting good things into people instead of taking bad things out, which I admit sounds dreadfully Freudian, but Sigmund's been largely discredited anyway, so to hell with him."
  • Sweets tells Booth’s trainee that “I don’t measure my manhood the same way you do” then says this, mostly because said trainee is female.
• Therapy Is for the Weak: Definitely. They resist Sweets' much-needed therapy sessions for over a season. Even later, they would cheerfully leap out a window before admitting they're actually coming to Sweets for therapy, rather than profiling and the like. Finally, Sweets gets so fed up with Booth's weak excuses that he threatens to jump out of the car if Booth doesn't admit that he actually wants advice from Sweets. Even then, Booths adds afterward that he didn't really need Sweets' help, he was just making him feel better about himself.
  Sweets: "I'm jumping! I'M JUMPING!"
• Thou Shalt Not Kill: Analyzed carefully in the show. Booth is a former sniper and while he acknowledges the acceptability in dealing with enemy soldiers and criminals, he doesn't take it lightly. When Brennan had to kill someone to protect Booth, she is also noticeably troubled by it, but only the first time. She kills the stalker who shot Booth (who took the bullet for her) with a throat shot and was shown having no problems at all with the killing and declares how she's killed and it wasn't that hard in the 2-parter in England when trying to talk Scotland Yard into giving her a gun like they did Booth.
• A Threesome Is Hot: A guy at the bar tries to get Brennan and Hannah into one at the end of "The Body in the Bag" — they tell him to get lost.
• Tiny Guy, Huge Girl: Angela is noticeably taller than Hodgins. Commented on in "The Man in the Cell." But it's O.K., because apparently "short guys have better leverage."
• Toilet Horror: In one episode, the Victim of the Week turns up when a kid who seems to be in the middle of potty training goes into the bathroom and gets terrified by blood and body parts coming up from the toilet. The team, of course, has to figure out where they came from and find the rest of the body.
• Too Stupid To Live: Several characters early on in the series, have been targeted by serial killers. After being told that they are in danger, they refuse police protection. (The first who is the serial killer's wife, who was in denial that he would kill her. The second was just stubborn) They don't survive the episodes.
• Took a Level in Jerkass: Hodgins in season 11 after he’s left wheelchair-bound by an explosion. He did get better after a while.
• Torture Always Works: A horrifying example in "The Scare in the Score": someone who's after Booth, but doesn't actually know his name, captures one of the men in his old army unit, but after having failed to extract info from another of Booth's comrades (see below), they also abduct an innocent old lady and torture her in front of Booth's friend until he breaks and gives up his name. ...And then, they kill the old lady and move on to torture Booth's friend For the Evulz for one week.
• Torture Is Ineffective:
  • One Body of the Week is a Salary Man paper-pusher at the CIA who investigates a diamond smuggling operation on his own after his superiors didn't think there was anything to it. He is killed by torture but never gives up the info they were after. CIA agents point out that even most well-trained field agents would crack under what he was subjected to. After the crime is solved, he is given a star on the CIA "Killed in Action" wall even though his position didn't qualify for that honor.
  • In season 12, Aldo Clemens was tortured by someone tied to one of Booth's sniper kills using the barbaric technique of making rats burrow into his chest while alive. However, he didn't give up Booth's name and sacrificed himself by breaking his own neck instead.
• Tourism-Derailing Event: The Body of the Week in one episode is connected to a rural town that used to serve tourists on a scenic route until a nearby bridge was condemned as unsafe and the state couldn't or wouldn't come up with the funds to repair it. This forced tourists to detour away, sending the town into an economic tailspin. At the end of the episode, Bones donates the advance from her latest book to pay to replace the bridge.
• Trailers Always Lie:
  • A trailer spoiled that Hodgins and Angela kiss while being trapped in jail. It didn't let on that they then got married when the judge showed up to free them.
  • The trailer for "The Hole in the Heart" cuts to black at end but features a voice-over by Brennan. This gave away that not only was she safe but that whoever did get shot was going to be with her. Which made it extremely obvious Nigel-Murray was going to die when he appeared in the scene with Brennan and Booth.
• Translation Train Wreck:
  • In-universe with the English instructions of the toy Angela is trying to assemble in "The Prince in the Plastic".
  • Hodgins gets one when he tries using an internet translator on Arastoo’s Farsi poetry.
• Trapped in Villainy: In "The Goop on the Girl" the Perp/Victim of the Week was strapped into a bomb vest and forced to rob a bank or else the bomb would be set off.
• Trash the Set:
  • Booth and Brennan's house gets destroyed in the ninth season finale.
  • The Jeffersonian lab is blown up in the final two episodes.
• Trash Talk: Oliver and Hodgins during their video game duel in “The head in the Abutment”. They make science based insults of each other’s face.
• Traveling at the Speed of Plot:
  • Bones and Booth managed to reach Sweets's murder scene before the paramedics, when they were nowhere near it. This is in part because Writers Don't Know Geography.
  • Booth and Cam somehow flew from Washington, D.C. to Tehran, Iran so fast, that Arastoo was just starting with the autopsy of the Iranian victim.
• True Companions: The Jeffersonian-FBI gang. A certain quote that's said multiple times sums it up best:

  There's more than one kind of family.

  • The true companionship kicked in even more in Seasons 4-5, after Goodman and Zack left and Sweets became a fully integrated team member. And it isn't just restricted to the main cast. Many of the rotating interns (more prominently Wendell, Clark, Daisy, and Arastoo) along with Caroline Julian also fit this. By the later seasons, it's clear that all these people would do anything for each other, and don't dare mess with one of them, or the others will find you. The gang is also open to welcoming newer additions such as Aubrey, Rodolfo and Jessica.
  • The Bones set had the reputation of being one of the happiest and most friendly sets in town. Pretty much everyone got along really well, from the actors for the regular and recurring characters, to the writers, producers and directors.
• Tuckerization: A really strange example. The work of Real Life forensic antropologist and author Kathy Reichs and her Temperance Brennan novels inspired the show, in which the main character, Temperance Brennan, is both a forensic anthropologist and an author that writes novels about the adventures of a fictional forensic anthropologist named Kathy Reichs.
• Tuck and Cover: Aubrey throws himself on Hodgins when a bomb hidden in a body explodes in “The Doom in the Boom”.
• Turn in Your Badge: Season 2 episode "Judas on a Pole" offers the most classic example of this, but also toyed with a few times throughout the show, when Booth gets decommissioned or confined to desk duty for needlessly discharging his weapon.
• TV Genius: Brennan,Zack,Wells.
• 21-Gun Salute: Booth takes part in a volley at the funeral for Booth himself, which was staged in order to catch a perp who said that Booth would never see him again except at his (Booth's) funeral. Since Booth had gotten shot by a Stalker with a Crush at the end of the previous episode the FBI decided to use it.
• Twerp Sweating: Booth intimidates Cam's daughter's boyfriend in "The Plain in the Prodigy".
• Two Halves Make a Plot: One episode's Victim of the Week is a man that Cam used to live with. She wants to adopt his now teenage daughter, who was about 10 when Cam left. At the time Cam gave her half of a hugging kitties salt-and-pepper shaker set, keeping the other half and saying that whenever the girl looked at it and thought of Cam, Cam would be looking at hers and thinking of her. In the present day the girl claims not to remember Cam, but when Cam pulls out her half the girl runs upstairs to bring out hers too.
• Two-Timer Date: Brennan. She dated two guys at once, because one was good at sex and one at conversation. It blew up in her face when they both showed up at the lab at once.
• Twofer Token Minority: Arastoo (Iranian Muslim). Angela too as a biracial (half Chinese, half White) bisexual woman.

U-Z

• Uncanny Family Resemblance: Brennan and her cousin, who was played by Emily Deschanel’s sister Zooey.
• Undercover as Lovers
  • In one episode Booth and Brennan go undercover as married circus performers.
  • Booth and Brennan go to Las Vegas and pose as a "loosely committed" couple. (Read: Brennan nixed the idea of marriage because she doesn't believe in it — even when it's supposed to be fake for the investigation.)
  • Season 5 has an episode where they go semi-undercover to Bones' high school reunion, with Booth posing as her husband. Made a thousand times more awkward by the fact that this came right after the episode where he confessed his love for her and she said she didn't want to start a relationship.
  • Done a fourth time in the season 6 finale, with a twist: at the end of the episode, Brennan reveals that she's carrying Booth's baby (the previous episode had implied that they'd slept together), and they actually do become a couple thereafter.
  • In season 11, Booth and Brennan went undercover again as demolition derby drivers who were lovers.
  • One episode has Angela and Sweets going undercover as a couple to nab possible murder weapons.
• The Unfair Sex: While the show is feminist and portrays a wide range of strong female and male characters, it will occasionally veer into this category generalizing men as acceptable targets, Played for Laughs.
  • For example, in "Yanks in the U.K., part 2":
    Hodgins: I thought women loved it when we fought over them
    Cam: "Women" is an unacceptable generalization.
    (10 minutes later)
    Angela: Men are stupid.
  • Or in "The Finger in the Nest"
  Bones: Pitting animals is a common pastime in evolving cultures where violence is more commonplace and animal life has no value.
  Angela: To men.
  Bones: Yes, it's always men.
  • Or the episode involving the MRA group used as a HateSink.
• Ungrateful Bastard: The mother of a young boy who killed his mother's assassin boyfriend (both in a violent gang) because he threatened to kill her if she didn't become more obedient. When she learned the truth (in the interrogation room, in front of Booth) she attacked him and declared she can make another kid.
• Unrequited Love Switcheroo: Arguably what happened between Seasons Five & Six between Bones & Booth.
• Unresolved Sexual Tension: The showrunners say it's the whole point. The writing and long looks show this, but some fans don't feel the chemistry part. It is lampshaded by every guest character, ever. As of "The Doctor in the Photo", she's openly lamenting the fact they never got together. It's pretty sad. After they're trapped in an elevator for a day they make a promise that when Bones is no longer scared and Booth is no longer angry they'll give their relationship another try. As of "The Hole in the Heart", it's heavily implied that they get together.
• Unstoppable Rage: Max Keenan killing several of Kovac’s lackeys with his bare hands when they attack the safe house he and his grandkids are in.
• Unusual Euphemism: In "The Double Death of the Dearly Departed", Booth makes Brennan say "translated" instead of "murdered". Oddly, in Shakespeare's time this would have worked as a metaphor.
• Vigilante Man: The sniper who shot The Gravedigger as she was going into court. Booth loathes being compared to him, which Bones does constantly ("He kills bad people, just like you do!").
  • In "The Nail in the Coffin", one of these goes on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge against The Ghost Killer and her accomplices for giving him a Miscarriage of Justice for her first murder.
• Villainous Crush: Pelant towards Bones in his last(?) episode, because he read Sweets' report and learned that Bones can learn to like (Sweets) or even love (Booth) people she initially disliked, and unlike Booth and Sweets she does like him for his genius; she also said she likes his mind enough that she'd prefer him alive. Unfortunately for Pelant she doesn't like him that much and lets Booth kill him.
• Wainscot Society: In "The Woman in the Tunnel", Booth and Brennan investigate the death of a woman who was investigating the underground denizens of Washington DC, who are depicted as forming something of a distinct society; one of the main guest stars is a vet who suffers from PTSD and who lives down there.
• Waking Up Elsewhere:
  • Brennan and Hodgins in “Aliens In The Spaceship.” Brennan is tazed and Hodgins hit by a car. They wake up in a car buried underground.
  • Hodgins,twice, when Angela’s dad knocks him out and tattoos him. The first time, he wakes up in the desert somewhere, and the next, he’s in a car.
• Wham Episode
  • "The Change in the Game" (S6 finale) ends with Brennan telling Booth she's pregnant with his baby.
  • The previous episode, "The Hole in the Heart," was no slouch either, as the season's main villain kills Mr. Nigel-Murray and Booth finally manages to take him down.
  • "The Pain in the Heart" (S3 finale), where we learn that Zack was the Gormogon's most recent apprentice.
  • "The Conspiracy in the Corpse" (S10 premiere) brutally kills Sweets without warning in the last few minutes.
  • The final episode of Season 11, "The Nightmare in the Nightmare", ends with the revelation that Zack Addy is The Puppeteer, and he's kidnapped Brennan.
• Wham Line:
  • From the Season 6 finale:
  Brennan: I'm pregnant. You're the father.
  • Also Brennan’s “I don’t know what that means” in the series finale after the explosion in the lab leaves her unable to process job related information.
• What the Fu Are You Doing?: Hodgins in "The Devil in the Details". Arastoo shows him how it's done.
• What the Hell, Hero?
  • Booth gets a minor one directed at him when he runs a background check on Jared's latest girlfriend. Sweets, Brennan, and Jared all call him out on it.
  • He pulls one again when he ducks out on Angela and Hodgins' announcement of her pregnancy to have sex with his girlfriend.
  • Everybody calls Cam out on cheating to get her adoptive daughter, Michelle, into Columbia University. Perhaps the most biting comes when she asks Sweets for help on how to tell Michelle about it.
    Sweets: I can't help you.
    Cam: Why not? Some professional code of conduct?
    Sweets: No. My own personal code of conduct. Maybe you should consider putting together one of your own.
  • Caroline gives a spectacular one to the whole team in "The Man In The Mansion" after Hodgins' attempts to remain on a case he's personally involved in nearly get their case kicked out of court.
  • Arastoo to Finn in “The Patriot in Purgatory” when Finn asks about whether the Muslim Arastoo should work the 9/11 case.
  • Finn himself gives one to Hodgins in his first episode when Hodgins keeps teasing him over his Southern accent.
• White Male Lead: Despite having Michaela Conlin and Tamara Taylor as main characters and Eugene Byrd and Pej Vahdat as regular side characters, not to mention other minorities regularly in the show, Booth and Brennan's relationship is the only one in the spotlight, and they're white straight people. Michaela Conlin's character Angela is bisexual but that's never mentioned again after she stops dating Roxie. Even the relationship Tamara and Pej's characters are in are just seen as a side-story even after they're married on the show, though granted, they marry only one episode before the series finale.
• Whodunnit to Me?
  • In "The Graft in the Girl" the team tries to solve a murder where the victim is still alive but almost certain to die after the episode due to having contacted cancer from a transplant that was supplied under false pretenses.
  • Plus, there's when Bones and Hodgins are buried alive in "Aliens in a Spaceship" and have to figure out and tell the others where they are.
  • "The Ghost in the Machine" plays with this. The victim is dead and doesn't play any tangible part in solving his murder, but all of the characters treat him as if his spirit is still with his body and the entire episode is seen "through the victim's eyes", with the victim's skull always immediately Behind the Black.
• Who Shot JFK?: "The Proof In The Pudding" is built around (possibly) answering this question.
• Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: A literal example. A teenaged kidnapping victim in "The Mummy in the Maze" has been frightened of snakes since once crawled out of a faucet in front of her. The kidnapper (a budding Serial Killer) locks her in a room with dozens of snakes in an attepmpt to frighten her to death and the poor girl is pretty hysterical by the time Booth and Brennan come to rescue her.
• Will They or Won't They?: Bones and Booth. They did in season six.
• William Telling: When Bones and Booth were undercover at the circus doing a Knife-Throwing Act, she made him throw a knife at an oversized prop apple on top of her head. She sprang it on him all of a sudden during the show.
• Willing Suspension of Disbelief: The show basically requires you to suspend your disbelief and accept Angela's computer skills at face value. Especially since as anyone versed in crime law will tell you, facial reconstructions (besides not being as easy and instantaneous as the Angelatron makes them seem) are not admissible for identifying a victim or a killer, at least by themselves. They’re subjective, and each artist will make their own interpretation.
• Window Love: Everyone during the Christmas Episode in quarantine. Except Brennan, who was alone then.
• Withholding the Cure: The killer in “The Pathos in The Pathogens” won’t give up the anti-serum at first, even as Cam begs him to save the dying Arastoo. He relents when Brennan grabs a nearby syringe and fakes injecting him with the virus.
• With This Ring:
  • Booth buys an expensive ring to propose to Hannah, then hurls it into the Washington Monument reflecting pool when she rejects him.
  • Hodgins kept the ring he got Angela in his wallet after they broke up, hoping she’d come back to him.
• Workaholic: The whole main cast; the things they've worked through include but are not limited to: Hodgins and Angela's imprisonment/wedding, the birth of Hodgins and Angela's baby, Booth and Brennan's wedding and Booth and Brennan's honeymoon.
• Wouldn't Hurt a Child: Repeatedly invoked by Bones in the seventh episode of season seven. She's in a prison and knows the prisoners wouldn't hurt a pregnant woman. Up to eleven when she walks calmly through the middle of a prison riot, where the prisoners don't just get out of her way, but actively block some people who might get close to her.
• Writer on Board:
  • Season 3 finale for one-Zack being Gormogon’s apprentice created a lot of backlash about him being out of character but the writers needed to write him out so Eric Mulligan could leave.
  • The season three finale was the result of 12,000 Writers On Board.
• Writers Cannot Do Math: In "The Boy in the Time Capsule", the skeletal remains of a teenage boy are found in his high school time capsule after being buried for 20 years. In the subsequent investigation, it's discovered that he has a son, who was explicitly born in January 1988. However, the son is stated to be a senior at the high school despite the fact that at the time of the episode's airing (November 2007), he should've been nearly 20.
  • Maybe he got held back.
• Writing Around Trademarks: "The Gamer in the Grease" featured an arcade game called "Punky Pong".
• Writing Indentation Clue: A high tech version is used to recover the writing from Sweets' blood-soaked notebook.
• You Can Barely Stand: Booth insists on going to save Brennan in “Two Bodies In The Lab” despite being badly hurt by the fridge bomb hours before.
• You Can Leave Your Hat On: In “The Party In The Pants”, where the Victim of the Week was a stripper, Angela tells Hodgins she’d put money in his pants and he launches into a striptease or at least as close to one as can be done at work. One of his thrown clothing items nearly hits an incoming Cam, who just turns and leaves and doesn’t want to deal with it.
• You Keep Using That Word: In "The Twist in the Twister", Sweets takes issue with Booth's choice of words.
  Sweets: Like with any subculture, storm chasing attracts a variety of distinct personality types.
  Booth: Adrenaline junkies.
  Sweets: Yeah, they're the ones most likely to put their lives and the lives of others in danger. There's a name for them. They're called—
  Booth: Insane.
  Sweets: You know, that’s a real word and people just throw it around.
  • Inverted in Aliens in a Spaceship. Bones gets highly annoyed to have her trust, based on personal experience, that Booth will save her and Hodgins from their current predicament called 'faith'. Hodgins laughingly points out that she just gave the dictionary definition of 'faith', apparently only knowing about the religious usage.
• You Killed My Father: The motivation for the Big Bad in the final season, then flipped: The grown children of a war criminal Booth sniped decades ago sends assassins to kill Booth's family. Brennan's dad dies after killing the assassins, prompting Brennan to risk her life to save evidence that will help get revenge on her father's killers.
• Your Approval Fills Me with Shame: Angela is horrified when Brennan praises the way she conducts her love life and compares it to her own.
• Your Head Asplode: Heather Taffet, aka the Gracedigger, when Broadsky obliterates her head with his sniper round.
• Your Princess Is in Another Castle!: The season 8 opener. Pelant is in custody and Brennan has proven her innocence, but then Caroline reveals Pelant changed his identity and they can’t keep him.

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