In Which They're Separated

Season 2, Episode 13

The Girl in the Gator

Not all that much with this one, because (GASP!) our beloved Booth and Bones are separated for this episode!

It makes perfect sense, though. With the intensity of the last episode, with Booth feeling so unsettled about Epps' death, had they jumped right into another case together right after that, it would have just been too much for Booth. It would have created an awkwardness between them, because Booth would have been all out of sorts and Brennan wouldn't have the intuitive skills to figure out exactly why, and so she might have assumed it had to do with her, and even he might have started to think it had to do with them, even though he knows what it's really about.

By separating them, Booth can figure out his issue, get himself settled with that, making when he continues work with Brennan a lot smoother than it would have been otherwise.

There is one nice little moment (not a moment, but a moment), though:

Brennan: That's Sully calling right now. We're doing, you know, what we did.

Booth: Hey, you know, I'll be back soon.

Brennan: Okay, I'll talk to you later.

All the pauses in “we're doing... you know... what we did”... she's doing fine without him, obviously, but it's obvious that she wishes he was the one she was solving the murder with. And the way she says “okay” after he reassures her that he'll be back soon, it's not just a blasé “okay”, it's the “okay” someone says after she has been reassured of something. Booth reassures her of things all the time, and most of the time she doesn't really need to be reassured, or she doesn't let herself show that she needed to be reassured, but in this case, the tone, the inflection, everything about that “okay” shows that it's the “okay” of a person who has been reassured and who needed to be reassured. Because she's fine for a case, maybe even a few cases, without him, but more than that... at this point, she would not be “okay”.