Bones – The Final Chapter: The Price for the Past

By: Paige Zinaman

The episode starts with a son with arms free demanding his mother, who is carrying a ton of stuff, to hurry up because the party will not set up by itself. When they arrived at the spot the boy gets upset because there is already another party there. The mom tells her son that they won’t be there for long because she reserved the spot and will tell them off. When she walks to the other side of the picnic table, she starts screaming. When her son walks around to see what she is screaming at he too starts screaming – at rats eating away at a corpse. Booth (David Boreanaz) and Brennan (Emily Deschanel) are at home packing up bags to take Christine (Sunnie Pelant) to the waterpark when Brennan tells Booth she’s excited to take Christine because of the fecal matter that is exposed to everyone as they swim increases a better immune system for children. Booth asks her if she’s talking about actual fecal matter she tells him the longer they stay the more they will get exposed to. Booth tries everything to get out of it once she tells him this news.

When Booth and Brennan arrive at the scene Cam (Tamara Taylor) is talking to Aubrey (John Boyd) about how long the body was left there when Aubrey asks about why the balloons are tied to the ankles. Booth tells him it’s so the body will be found faster. Upon further looking, Brennan can tell that the victim was a male in his forties and Cam was able to tell that from his shoes having holes in them that the victim has “fallen through the cracks.” At the Jeffersonian the team works to figure out the cause of death. Angela (Michaela Conlin) takes pictures while Cam and Hodgins (T.J. Thyne) help Brennan look for more clues as to who the man was and how he died when Jessica (Laura Spencer) shows Brennan what she found from the X-Rays. Brennan states she’s seen fracturing like that before. While still looking at the body, Cam pulls out a tiny I.E.D. that Hodgins notes means the man might have been former military. Brennan points out that both the knees are swollen and wonders what could be the cause of it would be. Cam lists off some reasons while also mentioning that some priests could suffer from it. Something dawns on Brennan and she tells Jessica to pull up the X-Ray from the inner ear. She asks Angela to see her reconstruction because Booth has the same things done to his ears. Angela shows her the model and Brennan instructs her how to fill out the rest of the model giving the impression she knows the victim. Soon Brennan and the rest of the team find out that the victim was Aldo Clemens (Mather Zickel) – the one who married Booth and Brennan and the Chaplin for Booth’s Army unit.

Caroline (Patricia Belcher) walks into Booth’s office and notices he’s really upset and offers him her sympathies. She asks him what he knew about Aldo and how he got in the position he was in, which he says that he hadn’t spoken to Aldo in almost a year so he won’t let himself off the hook for this one. Hodgins finds an insect that is only found in carpets and curtains and says he is going to go find out if it can trace back to where Aldo was killed. Jessica tells Cam that Aubrey is afraid of what the death of Aldo will do to Booth, which Cam says she’s worried about him, too. Brennan and Booth talk about how Booth will move forward and she tells him that revenge is what he will do – he will follow the rules of the law and bring the killer to justice. Aubrey meets Caroline at the diner and asks what she needs to talk to him about wondering if it’s about the case. Caroline shows him a picture telling him that the man in the picture used fake IDs at a Miami airport and that it took a while to go through the database. Aubrey tells Caroline that the man has done some stuff slightly to his face, but if she was looking for an idea that it is his dad – Philip Aubrey (Guy Boyd). Caroline tells him that they have been tracking and freezing all his accounts and that he may reach out to him. Aubrey tells her that would be a mistake and that he is Aubrey’s father noting he has already turned him in once.

Jessica and Cam talk about how the bones don’t just reveal the person’s death that they also reveal the person’s life. Cam tells her that the only thing the bones revealed is sadness, pain and decline as the liver revealed that he became a heavy drug user. Cam tells her if they could find Aldo’s dealer than that would give them more to go on. Jessica tells Cam that the marks she found on his toes are consistent to heroin usage through needle injection. Booth and Brennan head to a bar where they talk with Tom Ellis (John Bishop) the bartender/owner. They tell him that he died the night before when Tom remarks he knew it was murder. Booth tells him he didn’t seem too upset and Tom tells him that he liked Aldo and hated to have to fire him. When Booth asks why he was fired, Brennan was able to tell that Tom was the one that got into a fight with Aldo and that it was self-defense as Aldo came at him first. Tom tells them that Aldo was out of control and would do anything to get his next fix. Tom explains to Booth and Brennan that he never saw the dealer nor did he want to, but he heard Aldo call him and beg him that he would do anything and that he just didn’t have the money.

Jessica and Brennan go over the bones again to find impact fractures that are more recent and Jessica shows that the fractures are no more than two weeks old and was caused by a left-handed assailant. Hodgins rolls in and tells them that he ran an analysis on the heroin found in Aldo’s toe that Angela was running a profile on. Cam and Brennan meet with Angela and Hodgins and discover that Aldo’s dealer was very high end and they were able to pull up a Jake Thompkins (Blake Berris). Booth and Aubrey go to Jake’s house who denies ever knowing Aldo. He says he is going to go call his lawyer when Booth and Aubrey tell him that they won’t stop until he talks to them. Jake tells them he might have known the guy and if he did he dropped him as a client when someone started following him and he thought he was a cop. Before Aubrey and Booth left, Booth ripped Jake’s doorbell that had a camera attached to it to confirm Jake’s story. Angela goes to get Hodgins so they can go home for the night when Hodgins finds a form of foam in the Sliver fish. He wants to call Booth to tell him, but Angela tells him that Booth is busy and that it’s very important.

Booth goes to meet up with some of his buddies Mike (Michael James Lazar), Ted (La Monde Byrd) and Dave (Jay Glazer) who served in his unit and knew Aldo. When asked if they had heard anything from Aldo they said he was hard to find and that they hadn’t heard anything. Booth tells them that if they do hear anything to let him know because he’s the one that can handle it. Ted starts picking an argument with Booth about Aldo dying for Booth to show up and how he’s done with Booth.

Brennan finds Booth awake and staring out the window telling him she didn’t hear him come in. They talk about what happened with his buddies and how everything they see how it is still affecting them. He tells her that he got lucky to have a great life and Brennan tells him that he got help and that with Brennan in his corner, but Aldo had no one. The next day, Aubrey goes to talk to Angela after dropping off Jessica and thinks he would check in with what she’s got from the doorbell. Angela was able to show Aubrey a yellow car that was following him. Jessica calls Brennan to show her the fractures to Aldo’s neck that showed that his neck was snapped. Jessica asks Brennan how she felt and how she made a relationship with her father work while Aubrey is dealing with the mess with his father. Aubrey is making a sandwich while Caroline waits for coffee to start when she tells him that there was another sighting of his father. She tells Aubrey where his father is at and that there was a transfer of money. Their conversation is cut short when Angela calls to tell them the yellow car belonged to Ted McKinney, Booth’s friend. When they bring Ted in he tells him that it’s none of their business why he was following Aldo. Eventually, Ted tells Booth that he needed Aldo and he wasn’t there. He tells Booth he didn’t kill Aldo, but did something worse and tells Booth that someone pulled up and jumped Aldo and he froze. He didn’t help and let Aldo be taken.

Cam and Brennan go through unit records and talk about what Ted said and that when Aldo was taken it was clean and precise and quite possibly done by someone who was also in the military. Jessica shows Brennan what she recently found to the bone that showed Aldo was likely alive while the rats were eating the torso. Brennan shows that it was possibly that a cage was placed over Aldo’s torso. Booth, Aubrey and Caroline go over the reports and they find tire tracks of the car that took Aldo. Hodgins tells Cam and Angela that the rats’ teeth never stop growing and that they had lead paint, which helps Angela narrow down a place Aldo was taken.

Booth goes to the industrial park with Brennan and as they look around they find evidence of someone staying there and records of everything relating to Aldo with an X-Ray that showed a gunshot to the head. Booth follows a door that leads them to where someone was held where blood is shown and the cage used. When they find a bomb they get out just as the bomb blows sending them flying. Brennan shows up with a bruise on her head, clearly shook up. Angela and the team go over the pictures she sent. Angela recreates what happened on the table and how the body was in the wrong position, showing that the tape was torn and that Aldo tried to break free. Or, Aldo may have killed himself. Booth tells him that it wasn’t suicide, but a sacrifice and Aldo was trying to protect someone.

Brennan tells Booth that even though it’s difficult she knows he will get through it. He tells her it sounds like something Aldo would say and that he died trying to protect him. He tells Brennan that on the X-Ray they found he was the one who took the shot and that the family is out for revenge – that’s why Aldo killed himself. He tells Brennan to be ready because the people that killed Aldo won’t stop until they get to him.