Give Me My Remote #1 featured BONES Season 9 Finale Post-Mortem: Stephen Nathan Teases What Comes Next and Why They ‘Have to Right This Wrong’

BONES Season 9 Finale Post-Mortem: Stephen Nathan Teases What Comes Next and Why They ‘Have to Right This Wrong’

[Warning: This post contains spoilers for the BONES season 9 finale. Please do not read this post until you’ve seen “The Recluse in the Recliner.”]

BONES has been known to end its season with a figurative bang — heck, last season had Booth turning down Brennan’s marriage proposal, and the year before, Brennan took Christine and went on the run to avoid being falsely convicted by Pelant — but with “The Recluse in the Recliner,” the show had arguably one of its biggest season finales to date: Booth took on a team of masked men who invaded his home (as a warning for the entire team to back off of investigating the mole in the FBI), but while he escaped with his life, the home he shared with Brennan was destroyed…and Booth essentially lost his job and was placed under arrest while recovering from his gunshot wounds.

“It was our biggest show we’ve ever done,” BONES boss Stephen Nathan shared. “I know last year, we had 400 cars and shut down downtown, but that was a piece of cake next to this [finale].”

So what the heck is going to happen now that Booth is on the other side of the law? Nathan had some really great teases about what’s in store for season 10…

What can you say about what comes next?!

Stephen Nathan: Well, I think they’re going to call a real estate agent!

That poor house did get totally demolished.

SN: I know. It was quite a remarkable thing to do at the end, I have to say. Everyone did an amazing job. I was just thrilled with the way it all came out.

What comes next is — I think what we like to do is pick the situation up in somewhat real time. We’ll be off for three months, so we’ll be picking this up about three months later and trying to unravel this situation that they find themselves in.

We’ve never quite been in a situation that has affected these characters this much by external forces. Here is Booth, a man of honor and a real patriot, who has risked his life for his country, as someone in the military and as a Ranger, and also in the FBI, feeling now completely betrayed by the institution he devoted his life to. We have to right this wrong.

And while it looks extremely bleak for Booth, and Booth and Brennan at the end of the season, there was a big victory in this finale, and a victory that won’t be immediately recognizable, but if you think about it, the person who is orchestrating all of this, the person behind this conspiracy is used to doing their work unimpeded. And Booth did not let that happen. This person, he or she, is smart enough to know that they are now in a vulnerable situation. Booth did not die. Booth did, in one sense, triumph in the finale. And that person knows their vulnerability mandates that they keep a lower profile for a while, which gives our people a chance to find out what’s going on.

So in those three months, we will pick up, Booth will still be in jail — he’ll be waiting trial for the murder of those FBI agents, but Brennan and the other people at the lab will have had these three months to comb through all of the information that they found and put together a scenario that makes sense. A plan, a plot, that makes logical sense. And they will find this goes back far into the past. And it will be a situation that is really a dream come true for Hodgins: all of his conspiracies have not been fantasy; that many of them are in fact true. They may have been based in ephemeral data, but it’s now becoming concrete. And they realize there’s now more to those conspiracy theories than we initially thought.

So we will be coming back with a person who has for the first time realized their vulnerability. Which gives Booth and Brennan a chance to get to the bottom of what’s happening.

They do have their work cut out for them. And also, I have to say, this is not going to be easy for either of them. Both of them have been working, in a very altruistic way, for organizations and institutions they believed in. As I said, Booth is a patriot. They believed in something. And the only way that he can continue — and the Brennan can continue — is to make sense of this, and to get those institutions back on track, as much as they possibly can.

The reality is, they’re also realistic. Just because they solve one murder, it doesn’t mean that all murders have stopped. So just because they solve one part of this case, that doesn’t mean that government corruption or conspiracies inside a government vanish in a day. While we need to resolve one major aspect of the situation, that does not mean the whole situation is necessarily resolved. This might very well be something we revisit in some form throughout season 10. And something that allows them to reevaluate their lives, as you tend to do: they’ve been working at this job together for 10 years. At a certain point you start to reevaluate what you’re doing, you start to reevaluate what your priorities are and how you’re going to live your life. And those will all be issues that will be very, very prominent in season 10. Not only for Booth and Brennan, but for everybody else, too. We have a very tight, secure family on this show. They’re very comfortable. They might not be as comfortable next year.

Just to clarify, is Brennan in any legal trouble?

SN: She was being taken out [at the end] for questioning. As they said, Booth is the warning in this. This is a guy — or woman — who has operated for we don’t actually know how long. Well, we know how long, but you don’t know how long. [Laughs] [They’ve] done it in a way that is self-protective, and a way that has allowed this person to carry out the tasks that they feel he or she felt were necessary to perform while keeping him or her insulated from discovery.

Can you confirm whether or not we’ve seen this mastermind onscreen at any point in the show’s nine seasons?

SN: I can’t confirm that. I really think at the end of season 9, the people who have been with us for this many years, or the new people joining us, should feel as insecure and uncertain as Booth and Brennan do. I think everyone should be cautious. Everyone should be worthy of suspicion.

How will Angela’s data recovery play out next season?

SN: It will be very, very, very important. Because at the end of season 9, while she did find that they got most of the information off that chip, it was still encrypted, and it was ripped off her server so quickly to avoid detection, that rebuilding it is going to be a task. But we will be coming in to season 10 with Angela and our people having three months to rebuild it, and build some sort of Venn Diagram scenario of what this conspiracy is, how deep it goes, and where it might lead. But what they are going to find is its tentacles are spread a bit more widely than they initially thought.

Since you guys have already started mapping out next season, what can you tease about what’s in store aside from this giant conspiracy?

SN: Well, as I said, I think it’s going to be a year of reevaluation for everybody. Booth and Brennan aren’t splitting up, there’s not going to be an affair, this is a great couple. This is a couple who is solid, this is a couple we all want to be. But, that doesn’t mean the challenges they face won’t be stressful, and won’t cause them to reevaluate how they want to live their lives together. And I think that will be felt by the other characters as well. I think it’s not going to be a simple matter of life goes on. It will go on, seemingly, as it has in the past, because BONES is BONES; it’s not going to be a completely different show. I don’t think the audience would like that, and I don’t think we would like that. We know what our job is, what our task is here: it’s righting wrongs, and finding killers, and we don’t want to go on and change that. But they will still be dealing with the trauma of the end of season 9. They will be dealing with issues of trust, issues of belief in a system they devoted their lives to. In an odd way, for Booth, patriotism is almost PTSD in a different form. In a non-warlike form. It will affect them. It will legislate how their lives play out and evolve.

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Are you breathing after the BONES finale?! Are you excited about what’s to come?

Related:

BONES: Emily Deschanel and David Boreanaz Preview the Finale that ‘Changes Everything,’ and More

BONES Season 9 Finale: ‘The Recluse in the Recliner’ Photo Preview

Fox Pushes Back the BONES Season 9 Finale

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