Bones eps 406, 407, 408, 409, plus trans characters in procedurals
Ever since a comment in callmesandy's lj pointed me to Hulu, I've been watching all sorts of TV, including recent Bones eps. I'd forgotten how much I really like this show, and pretty much every character on it.

I keep misreading one episode title as The Skull in the Scripture (instead of sculpture, ep 407), which is all the more hilarious given the episode. Dude, Best. Episode. Ever! Angela is now canonically bisexual! Makes my Bones/Angela all that much closer to canon. I adore that they made her relationship in art school be a year long, so it wasn't just a bicurious fling, and that there was no Oh yes, I experimented in college but am over that now that I am a real adult nonsense. Someday, I hope to live in a time when I don't celebrate every single queer character on TV because they're commonplace, but for now? Queer woman of color on my TV (well, computer, it's Hulu), I'm dancing with joy. And I loved Booth's story about his aunt.

I'm now watching The Con Man In the Meth Lab (ep 408), and I already love it even before the opening credits. ZOMG, Booth has a brother! Who is also hot! The only thing that could have made his introduction better is if Hodgins had come over and flirted with him too. And the contrast between Jared who is good at politics and Seeley the straight-shooter is an interesting one.

Also interesting that they're not taking it the way I expected, but instead with the whole DUI thing (I guess I should have seen some character flaw for Jared coming, but I was distracted by the blinding hotness of Jared in Navy dress uniform). I do have to admit I'm disappointed to find that Booth's hot Navy brother is an alcoholic - him as a recurring love interest for, well, anyone (other than his brother, which these days in fandom I feel like I need to stipulate) would have worked for me. But the storyline with Bones and the brothers Booth ended up way more interesting than the jealousy angle I expected them to play to death. Though I gotta say, at this point, it's out of character for Bones to think S. Booth is a loser, regardless of what his brother or anyone else said. The scene at the end, where Bones knows to ask if Booth needs space as well as time, that's much more them, and an excellent scene with a lot of body language and not a lot of words.

I do like it when pop culture shows people struggling with being family to addicts, and raises the idea of enabling and how hard it is to stop (and why it's important to). That whole arc is ridiculously accelerated through the magic of TV time, but aside from the speed, I think the storyline was well done - the charismatic, risk-taking brother who fools just about everyone, the older brother who looks out for the younger brother regardless of personal cost (I've certainly been that guy) & who's unwilling to criticize him or let anyone around him do so, how being children of alcoholics affected the two of them. I generally watch Bones because it's more fluffy than a lot of the crime procedurals - the characters in general get along, it's less gratuitously gory (and when it is, it's in a scientific way mostly), murder & so forth are usually not made sexy - but it's nice for it to sometimes have some depth too, and without being too message-y because it comes from character development.

Also, hooray for more Eugene Byrd! I totally love Clark's professional boundaries thing. I especially like that he & Cam are the only ones who talk professional boundaries - I think it's realistic to have POC being more concerned with that, since white people get away with so much more shit and therefore have the privilege to not be so concerned with such things. Of course, a few minutes later, they have Clark oogle Bones's cleavage, followed by Cam giving Bones advice about the brothers Booth in front of Clark, which undercuts that whole idea, but I'll stand by it as they actually raise the concept of appropriate conduct (I suppose Bones does sometimes too, but I think only with her lab assistant, and not consistently).

I feel like I should say something about The He in the She (ep 406, which I watched earlier in the week), and really, I feel mixed about it. I think it's interesting that the whole forensics on TV thing has led to multiple trans eps on various shows. The whole idea that DNA could actually mislead investigators is too good for writers to pass up, and it's given us more trans characters in mainstream TV than anything else I can think of, with varying degrees of sensitivity/offensiveness.

Wandering away from TV for a moment, in this day and age of identifying remains through DNA, it is something I think about - no one's going to find my remains that way, at least not without some inside information. I know, in the grand scheme of things, if I'm killed in a way that only DNA can identify what's left, gender isn't really going to be that important in the grand scheme of things, but still, one more thing for my loved ones to have to negotiate, and if for some reason they're not around either, I could end up "unknown female remains" forever. But I digress.

Unfortunately, the structure of procedurals limits us to transfolk as perps, transfolk as victims, and transfolk as suspects (since of course the moment a character's transness is revealed, they become a suspect for having a "secret worth killing over" - CSI did a nasty bit with this). I think CSI had the first evil tranny (mmm stereotypes), with their recurring FTM villain - at the time I was excited to just see an FTM on TV, and I liked that he outsmarted Grissom of all people. NCIS embraced the idea too with an MTF villain, capped with a joke in the next ep about kissing a man - it was so offensive I almost stopped watching the show.

CSI definitely has embraced the poor pathetic tranny stereotype, with trans characters as victims of crimes, and with MTF witnesses/friends/family in one ep I've tried to block from my memory. And while I thought it was actually pretty well done, there's an ep of The Closer where the FTM manages to fit both stereotypes (and possibly not even be trans but just living as a man to hide from law enforcement, though I'm not sure we know for sure since everything we learn about the trans character was from people who didn't know and from the killer, who was horribly horribly homophobic and transphobic). We have managed to expand to transfolk killed not because they're trans, as in Bones 406 - this victim isn't portrayed as pathetic at all, and I think her transness was irrelevant to her murder, and I do appreciate that.

Thinking about it, I'm not sure I've ever seen an ep where the trans character was presented as being out and totally accepted by their community, and where the community was not mocked for being accepting. And it was so nice to see an MTF on TV who's not a sex worker (I hear that there's another character on Ugly Betty as well, but I don't watch that), and who's not all into the bar scene, drugs, etc. And yet also not portrayed as totally stereotypically Stepford-wife female.

I hated hated hated all the crap that came out of Booth's mouth, but I appreciated that he got called out on it repeatedly, and by so many different people and in different ways. And I thought the religion angle was interesting, that both father and son struggled with being part of a fundamentalist sect and how to reconcile their faith with who they were, and I like that this got expanded to more than just transfolk. I'd have to rewatch, but I think this one was a definite improvement over the last Bones ep with a trans character.

On to The Passenger in the Oven, ep 409. I do love the Bones-Booth interaction at the beginning of the ep, and for all people mock David Boreanaz's acting, he's very good with his enjoyment of the first class seat (and I'm amazed that he could enjoy a massage chair that much without it being explicitly pornographic).

I'm also enjoying the mystery fan, and the portrayal of a fan as intelligent - a nice change from some of the fan mockery on other shows (I'm looking at you, Aaron Sorkin).

Oh man, the naughty librarian thing from Booth - totally awesome. I laughed so hard, bearfairie wanted to know what was going on. And the followup where she experiments with doing what he asked to try and figure out wtf was also good.

And more queer women, yay! I figure, the artist is probably only around for a short run (presumably they're getting Angela & Hodgins back together at some point), so I gotta enjoy it while I can.