The Change in the Game

First of all, let me get this out of the way. Booth says he has a bowling average in the high 280's. There is no professional bowler on the face of the earth that could do this. It would mean getting ten strikes in a row at the start of each game, game after game. Did he mean to say the high 180's which would make him a very good bowler. That said, we have two focuses. First of all, finally getting that baby born (taking the entire episode after she goes into labor). Then we have the guy who got ground up in a pin setting machine and Brennan and Booth going undercover as a couple of rednecks on a bowling team. Finally, we have a really significant announcement that concludes Season 6. Not another whole season.

Whimsy vies with gory criminality in this oddball episode set in a bowling alley. Certainly the show's Writers Room must have had a ball trying to justify the content of this script, much of it not actually humorous but merely silly.

Balanced against the whodunit aspects of the story (involving a nutty set of quirky suspects) is the fans' involvement with Angela's pregnancy, treated humorously but with some real panache as well. Throw in some campiness as the series' two superstars get to wear bad wigs going undercover in the Woody Harrelson world of bowling. Why Ryan O'Neal (and his distracting face, resulting from Hollywood's love of plastic surgery) is thrown into the show playing Bones' dad is a bit mystifying.

As far as the unusual makeup effects of the deceased's remains spread all over the bowling pins and pin-setter at the alley, I have long wondered about the extreme popularity of "gory" cop shows on tv in recent decades, like this one, NCIS and CSI. In movies, the fnas' fascination with gore is a ridiculous (but lucrative) phenomenon, so is this harmless tv obsession merely a santitized version of the same fetish?