Reviews @ PXDCO

Partners The Bs this week are dealing with the partial skeleton of a former marine and how it came to be hanging like so many early Christmas ornaments from a tree in a government protected forest. They're also dealing with daddy issues: Brennan's is actually working at the Jeffersonian, and thus freaking her out, and Booth's feeling insecure about how he's educating Parker.

The bones in the tree are discovered by lumber poachers and, thanks to the military DNA database, identified as those of Calvin Warren. Cal's remains are pretty well charred, though still in tact, and his hyoid's broken, indicating he was strangled. Cal was in special ops for the Marines before he died. Having fractured his back in the months before he died, he was on painkillers prescribed by Gina Torres, who is pretending her name isn't Routinely Awesome and instead going by Dr. Ezralow. She claims not to know Cal, which the team figures means he was stealing his 'scripts. Angela, through Cal's MySpace photo and some computer voodoo, is able to locate Cal's apartment so the Bs can search it. There they find a passport, a ton of foreign cash, a red herring, and a key card that goes to an uber-upper-crust-we-are-too-good-for-your-kid-Booth school, where Booth finds out that Cal was the nanny for the president of the parents' association, Elsbeth King. The school is pretty hardcore, with an ironclad honor code policy that has a strict no tolerance policy. Booth starts to wonder if public school is good enough for Parker, the way it was for him. Brennan assures him that Parker's a bright and engaged kid, he'll probably do fine the way that she did in large classrooms. He reminds her that her dad was a science teacher and enriching her education at home, which she can't dispute.

He's also enriching the education of kids at the Jeffersonian, teaching science classes and doing weird experiments with Jello and light. Cam hired him thinking that it would please Brennan, but moreover because Max is a better teacher than he ever was a criminal. He coaches his kids on the science of refracting light, showing Brennan all that he remembers of her childhood by asking her what her favorite example of refracted light was. Rainbows, she remembers. "She didn't believe light came out the back of a raindrop," he tells his new students. Despite how charming her dad can be, Brennan demands that he be fired because he's a criminal and his proximity to the forensics lab can taint evidence. Sweets thinks she's really pitching a fit because she's having abandonment issues: having her dad so close just makes her remember how it felt when he left her lo these many years past.

Wendell the Grad Assistant has returned, and together he and Hodgins speculate on the temperature at which the bones were burned in order to be as light as they are. Cam tries to tempt Hodgins into doing an experiment with Wendell, but he doesn't take the bait.

The Bs question Mrs. King, Cal's employer, who explains that Cal was more of a bodyguard than nanny. Her husband is a defense contractor and has received threats on the kids' lives, so they hired Cal to look after them. The kids, Royce and Alexa, tell the team about their last few hours with Cal, when he took them both to Royce's lacrosse game. Royce got into a scrape, so Cal took him to a parent of one of the other players, a dermatologist named Dr. Ezralow. Booth pulls her in for questioning, and she lies that she didn't recognize Cal's name when Cam first called her, since she only ever knew Cal as the Kings' manny. She took him up in her plane a few times, since she was a pilot. This rings bells for Hodgins, who's able to do his particulate or whatever magic and determine that Cal was incinerated with aviation gasoline as the accelerant. When Booth hauls Ezralow back in, she admits to having an affair with Cal, with whom she took many, many long flights and weekends. In addition to all the sex, she was also getting stock tips, as Cal told her to invest in a certain stock that boomed well for her. She thinks Richard King has a better motive, since the stock was for his company.

The Bs go back to the King home and question Richard King, who doesn't know much of anything about Cal or the way his household runs, since his wife handles most of that. He tells the Bs to call his lawyer when they figure out what they want to accuse him of. As they leave, Booth notices a fancy Italian car in the drive. He dips his tie in the gas tank to get a sampling of it for Hodgins.

Back at the Jeffersonian, Max, Hodgins, and Wendell do an experiment with a wind tunnel to find out the strength the wind would have had to blow Cal's bones into a tree. Brennan flips, because her dad's interacting with the evidence and using the same kind of wind tunnel that won her the first prize in her school's science fair, so she fires him.

Max tells Booth about it, who feels sort of bad abou tit. Max asks if Booth is sleeping with Brennan. He scoffs that he's not, nor is he gay. Max asks if it's because Brennan is somehow unattractive. Without any hesitation or affectation, Booth tells Max, "Bones is beautiful." Max asks what, then, is it because of him, how he killed a dude? Booth promises to talk to her on his behalf. Max tells Booth he's a good man: "And I want that for her," he adds.

Max is successful, however, in helping the boys figure out what they need to for Angela to pinpoint the location of the initial fire where Cal's bones were burned. The Bs go there and find not only more bones, which are pebbled with buckshot from a 12 guage rifle, but also the King country home, just across the way. Additionally, Wendell figures out, through some circuitous logic involving a clogged keg hose and a tape worm, that the hyoid was broken not through strangulation, but through dragging. This means that the killer was less than 5'5, which indicates Mrs. King herself.

Booth brings Elsbeth in, asking her if she shot Cal, dragged him, and lit him on fire. She says only that she was protecting her family. Sweets doesn't think this is an admission of guilt; she's merely protecting someone. Brennan discovers that the trajectory of the shotgun wounds indicates the killer was significantly shorter than Mrs. King. The team then pulls Royce and Alexa's phone records, and Alexa's texts show that she was abusing Cal to do her homework, and when he refused, paying someone else to do it. He threatened to turn her into the school, since her parents wouldn't discipline her, but the school's zero tolerance policy for breaking the honor code would get her the boot. This did not sit well with her, since all her friends are at the chic school. So she shot Cal. Her mother saw her and disposed of the body. The mom, with a plea, gets herself a minor sentence, while Alexa's earned herself a stay in the institution for a few years. Brennan thinks she should be tried as an adult, and since the kid's clearly a sociopath, maybe she's not wrong, but it's not happening. She'll be out in a few years and returned back to the world of privilege that created her.

Speaking of, Booth's decided not to enroll Parker in the scary-good private school, but he does ask Brennan to let her dad stay. She thinks it's a favor he's asking on pretense, when really it's for her own good, because that's usually how these things go, but really, it's for Parker. They're watching the kid do an experiment with Max, and not only doing well but having a blast. Booth says that he can't provide the same extracurricular enrichment Brennan got with her parents, so it would do Parker a world of good to have Max around at the Jeffersonian to teach him what he might not get to learn at school. And, because those are the things you can't say no to, especially not to your partner and especially when it's what you secretly maybe kind of want but are too afraid to admit it so you blame the integrity of the forensic process for your adamant refusals, Brennan agrees to let her dad stay at the Jeffersonian. Until something catastrophic happens, most likely.