Mostly I watch “Bones” for the ongoing, will they or won’t they? romance between Booth and Bones, but last week’s episode was unusually interesting because the murder case took Bones, Booth and the team straight into the middle of a very active Wiccan coven, into interrogations with its various members, and offered a copious amount of lighthearted conversation and banter about witches and wiccans–in both respectful and less so ways.
Booth refused to call the women Wiccans, and would only refer to them as witches, and Bones, as usual, was the voice of reason, but oddly enough highly respectful of Wiccan traditions (she’s usually pretty snide about anything to do with religion and spirituality), emphasizing how nature-affirming Wiccan traditions are, and not at all about dark magic and “voodoo” stuff as Booth referred to it.
Of course, despite Bones’s smart, articulations about what, really, is at the heart of Wiccan traditions and practices, the episode itself was a field day of silly witch stereotypes, including, the murder victim being found wearing bright, sparkly, Wizard of Oz red shoes, bad witches practicing black magic, a tantalizing scene of eavesdropping by Booth and Bones in the woods during the coven’s midnight ritual, where all the women got naked, the requisite witch jokes throughout by the team, and the teeny tiny factor of the entire coven being responsible for the murder because of a midnight ritual gone wrong. Woops. As a show, though, ‘Bones’ is very lighthearted and likes to poke fun, so the back and forth portrayal, always with Bones reminding everyone what Wicca is really about, was pretty harmless if you ask me.
More exciting was Hodgins and Angela spontaneously getting married!