Season synopsis
Contains spoilers for this season and earlier seasons.
Forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan joins FBI agent Seeley Booth to identify victims and trace the people who killed them. Their first cases establish the working rhythm between Brennan’s careful reading of bones and Booth’s interviews and field instincts, while Zack Addy, Jack Hodgins and Angela Montenegro turn the Jeffersonian’s lab into a close-knit part of each investigation. Cases take them from a military cemetery and a New Orleans morgue to a jet-crash site where unrelated bone fragments point toward another missing person.
The partnership is tested when Brennan is targeted by a killer linked to one of Booth’s old cases, and Booth is hurt by a bomb rigged in her refrigerator. In another investigation, he risks his own standing to keep Brennan from being charged with a murder while she is disoriented after working among Hurricane Katrina victims. The team also uncovers a fraudulent bone-graft network after a child develops a rare illness, and an inquiry into a soldier’s death at Arlington exposes a possible cover-up by men from Booth’s Iraq unit. These cases bring parts of their private histories into the room without turning their partnership into a romance.
The season’s larger question becomes what happened to Brennan’s parents, who vanished when she was a teenager. When her mother’s remains are identified, Booth reopens the disappearance and brings Brennan’s brother Russ back to Washington. The team learns that their mother survived for two years after leaving the children and that Vince McVicar may have been involved in the family’s past. The investigation does not reunite Brennan with her father: after she, Booth and Russ share a drink, an answering-machine message from Max tells her to stop looking for him, leaving his whereabouts unresolved.