“Well, it’s an interesting thing that is going to happen I think with him,” said Boreanaz. “What I really want to maintain with the arc with him, which we are threading in each episode, is to have the thought that he does have a memory of certain things, but he is not adept to other things that he thought he was.
“An example: in the last episode about plumbing, he is ordering a Plumbing for Dummies book, and he can’t remember how to plumb his own kitchen sink and, in turn, is upset that he has to pay someone 800 dollars for some guy to do it. So Brennan is, like, “Well, why don’t you just do it? You’re so adept.” Oh, yeah, well, that was before the coma, so I have to revisit things that Booth is very good at, and I think that really allows the character to really kind of examine where he’s at, if he likes doing it, and getting his grasp of that material back in his system.
“So we will slowly see that development with his character through the episodes,” promised Boreanaz, “whether it’s, like, putting on the belt buckle again - how does he find that act? - or we have a great part in this first episode, with the socks. He doesn’t remember wearing these socks! They’re all little touching moments.”
“I think it’s a matter of rediscovering your character,” explained Nathan, “and, in that process, rediscovering Brennan. And that’s why that event might have been not technically real was very, very real for them as characters, and it makes them see each other differently. The event
that happened either in the book or in this coma is real for them.”
“And,” continued Boreanaz, “it makes me want to reinvest my time and energy into a relationship with her because I don’t remember certain things that now we are back to ground zero again. We are probably even worse than ground zero.”
We can also expect to see another season’s worth of new assistants for Bones at the Jeffersonian…or, if not a full season’s worth, Hanson says they’re definitely still going to continue with them for awhile, anyway. “This is one of those things when you adapt to what happens organically in a series,” he said. “We thought, ‘We are going to have a bunch of people come in, and we will see how we like them and we will pick someone.’ And then we got these people, and we cast these wonderful people, and they open up stories in the lab. The ones we have now are very, very good, and I worry all the time that we are going to lose them, because we don’t have them on series deals. We have them as guest stars…and they are amazing. So I think we will keep doing that until it starts to feel like we should do something else.”
According to Boreanaz, there’s also talk of doing something similar for Booth within the FBI.
“We have the squints, but we haven’t seen much of the wackies in Booth’s world,” he said. “We just worked with Christopher Duncan. He’s a great actor, and he brought so much to the show and he brought such an identity. What’s great about the experience of working with these guys is that they open up the realm of possibilities. To see how these two characters work off of them, how I would react to Squint, or how (Bones) would react to an FBI guy, it really just opens up the character work.”
Lastly, you may already know this, but “Bones” received one of the highest compliments a series can get: a two-season pick-up. Based on Hanson’s comments, it doesn’t sound like it was a complete surprise, but he’s clearly happy about it.
“To be honest, there was a lot of negotiation about how we were going to proceed into the fifth season, and one reason for the two year pick-up had to do with license fees,” he explained. “Boring stuff…but that being said, it’s great! For us making stories, it gives us a nice timeline, and for them being the actors, it gives them an idea as to how they can settle into it. I felt like it was a great gesture from the network to us. They didn’t have to do that.”
“It really was a vote of confidence, because so many shows get picked up for 13 episodes rather than 22 episodes,” admitted Nathan. “It really made us feel very welcomed on the network. More importantly to me was the Thursday night. It seemed like every year it was announced that we were going to move to Friday nights!”
“We fought it every year, though,” Deschanel reminded him.
“We did fight it every year,” agreed Nathan. “And Thursday at 8:00…it’s not the greatest time slot, but it’s definitely not the worst. If we can just stay there and build up our audience, that would be fabulous.”
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