| I've been meaning to write about this show Bones for a while but it has been hard to get my head around it. The closest description I can come to is that it basically takes place in a simulated reality much like Time Out of Joint by PKD with the same sort of underlying premise.
So, there's this brain damaged young woman, the titular "Bones," who believes she is a super special bone scientist, world renown crime fiction writer and multi-millionaire. She works at a place that doesn't exist in a reconstructed version of Washington, DC. She works at "The Jeffersonian" and she is surrounded by agents who pretend to be Federal Investigators and Forensic Scientists but since she has the social awareness and intellect of a child the simulation doesn't have to go very far to achieve a level of veracity which completely subsumes her consciousness.
Every week they lay out a kind of murder mystery for her and she parades around in her brain damaged way using her magic-science to divine the perpetrator by examining human bones. Her handlers push her this way and that with their various additional "specialities" like portrait drawing or entomology. Their personalities are constructed so as to keep "Bones" herself limited to a particular set of personality traits which she needs to define and maintain her individuality.
If, for example, she needs a Chronoprint depicted in Interactive Holography she demands it from one of her assistants who specializes in such non-existent technology. In the next scene that exact infantile fantasy of medical analysis has always been invented and everyone stands around it and it gives them some crucial information. If Bones sits in on a police interrogation it plays out like a half-remembered scene from a very early "Law and Order" episode, one with Paul Sorvino in it, something she fell asleep to in the hospital when she was a child and near death with a fever that destroyed most of her brain.
They never reveal what important information they are truly getting out of Bones by trapping her in this simulated reality. I like to imagine that the choices she makes in order to solve the false cases generate numerical coordinates that help monitor the path of a dark matter cloud that is heading towards Earth. Only her savant-driven 7th Sense can see and track it.
For bonus fun I like to imagine that David Boreanaz (he plays the pretend FBI agent) is in reality still Angel (from the eponymous TV show and "Buffy the Vampire Slayer") but no one else knows he's a vampire. He has infiltrated this operation in order to help keep the universe in balance or whatever.
Ultimately the show Bones is about what kind of show I, as a part of a computer simulation, would need to see to keep me from recognizing that I live in a simulated universe while simultaneously giving me the uncanny and uncomfortable feeling that I myself could be living in a simulated universe.
And that's why I watch Bones. |
