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Reviews
Bones: The Pain in the Heart (2008)
Even Shyamalan Couldn't Have Made it Worse
The first time I saw this episode, I didn't care at all about the reckless discarding of the Zack Addy character. I still don't.
Don't get me wrong, he's a great character and addition to the story, but there's never anything wrong with a plot pulling no punches and never being afraid of doing the unexpected, taking risks, and making bold choices like removing a main character.
However, this episode contains the worst variety of twist. The kind which says, "Hey, look how clever we are for coming up with this." It even comes with a line from a character to point out how clever the writers were for creating the scenario. Seriously, when it's revealed, one of the characters says, "I did not see that coming." Neither did we. Not because it's clever, but because it's ever so much not.
It's a twist for the sake of a twist, for the sake of TV advertisements which scream, "One of them is the killer! Tune in to find out!" and for the sake of trying to squeeze the most drops drama out of every moment, every situation. The twist has zero set-up, zero follow-through, and makes zero sense. The delivery and through-line is sloppy, awkward, and essentially pointless, and it flattens particular characters into a mockery of any depth they've developed up until this point.
Simply put, it's incredibly poorly written.
Okay, so I can respect the difficulty in television production, especially if the oft-mentioned writer's strike is involved. However, there are far too many instances where bad writing and artificial dramatizing for the sake of viewer/ratings boost is the rule and not the exception. I really enjoy Bones, but The Pain in the Heart is one of the worst and most poorly constructed hours of television I've ever seen.