BLU-RAY REVIEW: Bones The Complete Sixth Season

**JeffSaylor** · 10-13-2011, 11:31 AM

New Blu-ray of hit show takes you from cradle to grave...

To insure your action figure collection, get in touch with Collectibles Insurance. Say "Figures.com" to get 5% off your first term premiums.

To buy action figures, take a look at BigBadToyStore.com, BriansToys.com, ToyWiz.com, SmallJoes.com, MonkeyDepot.com, and Urban-Collector.com.

For Gears of War and other collectible video game statues and replicas, visit TriForce.

For statues and sculptures, go to CSMooreStudio.com.

On the home video track it’s time to reconnect with everyone’s favorite team of FBI and “squints” on Fox’s Bones! Starring some of TV viewers’ favorite actors, the series has only gotten better over the years. Now season six is available on Blu-ray and DVD everywhere, just in time for you to catch up on last year’s action and drama before the new season starts up on November 3rd! True fans will be looking to pick up the Blu-ray “Cradle to Grave Edition,” which is what we’ll be looking at today.

With six years of history and character development, it’s a testament to the show that Bones is pretty easy to describe. FBI Special Agent Seeley Booth (David Boreanaz) solves murders with help from the Jeffersonian Institute’s expert forensic anthropologist Dr. Temperance Brennan (Emily Deschanel) and her team of “squints” including Angela Montenegro (Michaela Conlin), Dr. Jack Hodgins (T.J. Thyne), Dr. Camille Saroyan (Tamara Taylor), and Dr. Lance Sweets (John Francis Daley). Each week the ensemble tackles bizarre and mysterious crimes that can only be solved by cooperation and their various fields of expertise from Hodgins’ bugs and dirt to Angela’s facial and crime scene reconstructions, etc. Such a group of crime fighters inevitably attracts tenacious opponents who become recurring villains, and the interpersonal relationships between the characters are just as important as the science.

The “Cradle to Grave Edition” Blu-ray of Bones Season Six has a striking cover, putting the viewer in the position of a corpse with Booth and Bones (and a skeleton with a magnifying glass) looking down at you. The back cover has a brief description of the series and season along with another silly image of the leads, a set of stills from season six, and a breakdown of the set’s contents. The interior of the Blu-ray case has an insert that lists the contents of each individual disc (there are four) with a full cast photo. Each disc is also emblazoned with a photo of one or two characters: Booth and Bones on disc 1, Hodgins and Angela on disc 2, Dr. Saroyan on disc 3, and Sweets on disc 4.

Season five of Bones ended with the entire team scattering to the ends of the Earth, literally. Booth was recalled by the Army to train soldiers in Afghanistan, Bones headed to the Maluku Islands for research, and the couple of Hodgins and Angela decided to travel. Whether or not they would all return was seriously in jeopardy... or at least that’s how it seemed. Season six then opens with each one coming back to work at the Jeffersonian on an important case, and just like that the team is back together. The murder cases get weird right off the bat with bodies in caves, Jersey Shore wannabes, a Cougar cruise, and even a very memorable body found inside the world’s largest chocolate bar! This season the team also deals with Booth’s girlfriend Hannah, Angela and Hodgins’ pregnancy, the return of the Gravedigger, Booth’s arch-enemy sniper Jacob Broadsky, the death of a squint, and a shocking revelation in the season finale that’ll definitely bring you back for season seven.

As you can tell, season six had some really strong episodes both in terms of the mysteries and the relationships. “The Bones That Weren’t” forces the team to figure out how the body of a dancer became trapped in solid concrete; all the while Hannah comes to town and gets into dangerous situations for her work. “The Twisted Bones in the Melted Truck” features a bizarre find: a body melted into the dashboard of a truck! Chinese folklore and homeopathic remedies come front and center in “The Body in the Bag,” while human feet wash up on the Canadian border in “The Feet on the Beach” leading to the team visiting a truly creepy university body farm. “The Bullet in the Brain” has the shocking (and abruptly ended) return of the Gravedigger and a focus on the character of Sweets. Cam gets several B stories of her own regarding both her busy OBGYN boyfriend and her high school senior adopted daughter. Returning and recurring characters include Vincent Nigel-Murray (Ryan Cartwright), Colin Fisher (Joel David Moore), Daisy Wick (Carla Gallo), Wendell Bray (Michael Grant Terry), Clark Edison (Eugene Byrd), Hannah (Katheryn Winnick), Max Keenan (Ryan O’Neal), Heather Taffet (Deirdre Lovejoy), and Jacob Broadsky (Arnold Vosloo), while special guest stars include David Alan Grier as “The Science Dude,” Antonio Sabato Jr., Wayne Knight, Enrico Colantoni, Elon Gold, ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons, and Kevin Alejandro. Finally, toward the end of the season there’s an episode that seems a bit out of place because it’s essentially a snuck-in pilot for a spinoff show! “The Finder” centers on the man who can find anything or anyone Walter Sherman (Geoff Stults). His motley team includes Ike Latulippe (Saffron Burrows), Leo Knox (Michael Clarke Duncan), and Bishop Edward Galano (Danny Trejo). Watch for this show to premiere on Fox in mid-2012 without Burrows.

With its 23 episodes, Bones Season Six has plenty of medical mysteries and character stories to go around, and viewers who have been with the show from the beginning will love to have this Blu-ray in their collections. If you’re new to the show it’s actually a really good entry point since the first episode brings the team back from their far-flung adventures. The “Cradle to Grave Edition” is packed with additional special features as well with audio commentaries on two episodes (“The Doctor in the Photo” and “The Blackout in the Blizzard”), two extended episodes with new scenes (“The Bikini in the Soup” and “The Daredevil in the Mold”), a gag reel, two featurettes, and a bonus pilot episode of The Killing. Bones Season Six is available everywhere now!

Review by Scott Rubin

Review Sample Courtesy of 20th Century Fox