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| Temperance Brennan | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Temperance Brennan | |
| Aliases: | Joy Ruth Keenan [1] Bones [2]; Tempe [3] Sweetie [4] |
| Series: | Bones |
| Gender: | Female |
| Notability: | Main character |
| Occupation: | Template:Forensic Anthropologist |
| Location: | Jeffersonian Institute, Washington, D.C. |
| Relatives: | Christine Brennan (mother, deceased); Matthew Brennan (father); Russ Brennan (brother); Christine Booth (daugther); Hank Booth(son); Seeley Booth (husband) |
| Status: | Alive |
| Born: | 1976 |
| First: | Pilot |
| Final: | The End in the End |
| Actor: | Emily Deschanel |
Temperance "Bones" Brennan is the main character from the FOX Network television series Bones. She is played by actress Emily Deschanel.
Overview[]
Temperance "Bones" Brennan is a board-certified forensic anthropologist who works in the Medico-Legal lab at the fictional Jeffersonian Institute in Washington, D.C. She received her Ph.D. from Northwestern University, as stated in "The Girl in the Fridge". She has three doctorates, as referred to by Dr. Jack Hodgins in the episode "The Parts of the Sum in the Whole", in Anthropology, Forensic anthropology & Kinesiology; it is implied that most of her work at the lab was related to either long-dead bodies or victims of genocide. Her occasional contract work for the FBI shifted the focus of her work. She was paired with FBI Special Agent Seeley Booth, and helped to solve two difficult cases; since then, they have worked together almost exclusively on modern-day murder cases.
Brennan works with a group of other well-qualified colleagues, including the entomologist Jack Hodgins, her boss and forensic pathologist Camille Saroyan, forensic artist Angela Montenegro, and a host of eager graduate students. Booth refers to her crew of colleagues as "squints", because they come to crime scenes and squint at evidence. He is also responsible for her nickname, "Bones". As of season one it can be determined that Brennan is at least 30 years old because in the first season finale she mentioned that her parents went missing over 15 years ago, and states that she was born in 1976, also she has said numerous times that they disappeared when she was 15 years old. In "The Death of the Queen Bee" it is revealed that her then current-age is 33-years-old (based on Brennan's identification of a former high school classmate as the victim and statement that the classmate was 33).
Biography[]
Although Brennan seemed to have a relatively normal childhood, her parents disappeared when she was 15 years old. Her older brother, Russ, was unable to care for her, and she was put in the foster care system. There has been contradictory evidence about her time in the system; in one episode, Brennan stated that her grandfather got her out of the foster system, but in a later episode, she indicates that she never knew her grandparents (possibly the two references are to two separate sets of grandparents, paternal and maternal). Her time in foster care was quite traumatic and abusive; Brennan indicated that she was once locked in the trunk of a car for two days because she broke a plate, and in the episode "The Finger in the Nest", she reveals to Booth that she walked into her elderly neighbor's house to find the woman dead. In the same episode, she also mentions to Booth that her parents were very concerned about her afterwards, because she started faking her own death.
It is later revealed that her parents, who were bank robbers, changed the family's identity after they testified against some other bank robbers; Brennan's birth name was actually Joy Keenan. Her mother (real name Ruth Keenan, known under the assumed identity of Christine Brennan) had hoped to someday return to her children and family, but made a tape for Brennan to watch on her 16th birthday in case that never happened. Brennan later discovered that Ruth/Christine was murdered in 1993, two years after she and her husband went on the run. Her father, Max Keenan, re-entered Brennan's life when she and her brother were being threatened by an old acquaintance, who turned out to be Booth's boss, Deputy Director Kirby. Max evades capture after killing Kirby, and takes Russ into hiding to protect him. Later, Max allows Booth to arrest him in order to improve his relationship with his daughter. At trial, Max is acquitted of murdering Director Kirby (due in large part to a defense Booth indirectly came up with, positing an alternate theory of the crime in which Temperance was the killer instead, creating reasonable doubt), and he begins to rebuild his life. He temporarily works at the Jeffersonian as a guide for children visiting the place and demonstrates his brilliant talent as a former science teacher. However, Brennan is concerned about a convicted felon having access to a lab that investigates crimes underground. It is very mysterious what Brennan first finds in the lab. Max also introduces Brennan to her cousin Margaret Whitesell, portrayed by Deschanel's real-life sister Zooey Deschanel. Brennan is best friends with her coworker Angela, saying in the 6th season premiere she loves Angela "like a sister" and is going to be an aunt to Hodgins and Angela's newborn child.
First mentioned in season 1, Brennan has a love of dolphins, which she shared with her late mother: in the season one finale, "The Woman in Limbo", Brennan examines a custom-made belt with a dolphin on the buckle, which had belonged to her mother, and which she mentions having once borrowed without asking first. Brennan's love of dolphins is highlighted again in season 2 episodes "The Titan on the Tracks", "The Killer in the Concrete" and "Stargazer in a Puddle", when she mentions the constellation Delphinus, (the Dolphin), her and her mother's favorite. In season 6, "The Doctor in the Photo", she is shown to wear a dolphin ring.
In "Mummy in the Maze", Brennan exhibited ophidiophobia when confronted with snakes, but later only shows a moment of fright when confronted with another snake in "The Mastodon in the Room". She takes note of this, voicing her observation that she only seems to lose her head around snakes when Booth is also "there to be jumped upon", and also she mentions that she once had a pet snake during high school. It should also be noted that, in "The Man in the Morgue," Brennan handled a snake without any trace of fear, even while Booth is in the room.
In season one, in "A Man on Death Row", Dr. Brennan expresses her stance on the death penalty; "I believe in the death penalty. There are certain people who shouldn't be in this world. The people who hacked hundreds of innocent children to death in Rwanda; beheaded them at their desks at school! The people who did that, they should be executed." In "The Woman at the Airport", Dr. Brennan is shown to have a strong dislike for plastic surgeons, believing them to be no more than "glorified butchers with medical degrees", and this dislike is voiced again in season 4, in "Cinderella in the Cardboard". In "The Woman in the Car", Dr. Brennan reveals that her third doctorate is in kinesiology, a field that would allow her and Angela to unravel how one of the bodies that had been found had been killed.
In season two, she expressed the desire to get a pet pig, whom she would have named "Jasper". Brennan's expertise in kinesiology would again prove its worth in "The Truth in the Lye" (she could tell that one of the murder suspects was pregnant just from having observed her gait), in "The Girl with the Curl" (she could tell if one of the young beauty pageant contestants was suffering from scoliosis just by watching them perform on stage), and in "The Woman in the Sand" (while undercover with Booth, she was able to tell Booth exactly how to beat his opponent from just having watched his moves). In "Judas on a Pole", she and her brother are identified as having the same blood type, blood type O. In "Glowing Bones in the Old Stone House", she is shown to be a good cook: Booth's comment on her mac and cheese is that he'd "like to be alone with it".
In the season 3 episode, "Mummy in the Maze", it is revealed that Brennan's favorite superhero is Wonder Woman, and that she always goes as Wonder Woman to the Jeffersonian's Halloween party. In "The Baby in the Bough", it is revealed that Brennan is a registered foster parent, at her brother's request, to take in his stepdaughters in case anything should happen to him and his girlfriend. In the season 3 episode, "Intern in the Incinerator", Booth reveals that Brennan's favorite flower is a Daffodil, her second favorite flower is a Daisy, and her favorite planet is Jupiter.
In season 5, in "The Death of the Queen Bee", when asked if she'd had a pet rat, Brennan discloses that she, in fact, had a pet mouse, snake and some spiders. During her time at Burtonsville high school, her only friend was the school custodian, Ray Buxley, with whom she would enjoy long, in-depth conversations on life and death, and who would also provide her with dead animals to dissect (Brennan having set out to become a forensic anthropologist,) and who would later be one of her books' biggest fans (she having named the killer in her first book, Bred in the Bone, after him). According to the Burtonsville high school on-line yearbook entry on Brennan, in her senior year, she was a member of the Chemistry club and Math club, her interests were chemistry and mathematics, and she was a National Merit Scholar and an Academic All Star.
In the season 6 episode, "The Blackout in the Blizzard", Brennan mentions her pet iguana for the first time. This same episode show that one of the number of scientific publications that Brennan reads is Medicinal Physics Quarterly, with one article on electrostatics and triboluminescence proving useful during the lab's power outage. Further concerning her pet iguana in "The Truth in the Myth", as a part of his rehab from alcohol abuse, Vincent Nigel-Murry made apologies for, among other things, having borrowed her iguana one night, wearing him as a hat for a party. She comments that he must have taken good care of her iguana as she has observed nothing wrong with him and further expresses some surprise that Vincent Nigel-Murry was able to get her iguana to stay perched atop his head, to which he replies that he was good with ribbons.
Throughout the course of the series, Brennan is portrayed as a straightforward, brilliant anthropologist, who lacks social skills. Her social ineptitude is especially apparent when it comes to sarcasm, metaphors which she often interprets literally, and pop culture jokes and is often the source of comedy in the show. An example of this is when she mistakes Colin Farrell for Will Ferrell. In earlier seasons, she was characterized as straightforward and unable to detect social cues – she states that Booth once told her that she "stinks at non-verbal communication"– and was well-known within the FBI for being extremely difficult to work with. She began to acknowledge her lack of sensitivity after Booth bluntly told her outright that she was "bad with people" in "A Boy in a Tree". Her lack of "political savvy" and social skills was also a reason why she was passed over for Dr. Camille Saroyan as head of the Jeffersonian in Season 2. Other characters have described her as "no fun" and "a rigid traditionalist".
She had a difficult adolescence, and it is implied, often by Sweets, that her withdrawn social tendencies are a defense mechanism. She also sometimes struggles in identifying and explaining her emotions, and takes comfort in the rationality of her anthropological discipline. Although it has been stated that Brennan was based on a person with Asperger syndrome, this has never been confirmed in the plot of the series. The creator of the series has stated that the character was never labeled as having the syndrome in order to increase the appeal of the show on network television. This influence on her character also helps to explain her extreme rationality in early seasons, as well as some of her social difficulties. Brennan is a self-proclaimed atheist and often points out what she believes to be the irrationality of religious and spiritual beliefs. This has led to more than one argument with Booth, who is a devout Roman Catholic; he becomes particularly irate when she compares less common religions, such as voodoo, to Christianity. During the Sleepy Hollowcrossover episode "Dead Men Tell No Tales", Sleepy Hollow protagonist Ichabod Crane notes that Brennan is so sceptical that she would dismiss the demon Moloch — the primary antagonist in the first two seasons of Sleepy Hollow — as nothing more than a tall man with a skin condition, although this does leave him reassured that she will not realise the nature of the secret tomb they have uncovered underneath the White House.
Brennan is a bestselling author, who has been on the New York Times Best Seller List for 18 weeks. She is trained in three types of martial arts, has hunting licenses in four states, and has a legally registered gun as well as a diving certificate. She promised to consider becoming a vegetarian after seeing how pigs were slaughtered (which was also the way her mother had been killed). However, in "The Tough Man in the Tender Chicken" (season 5, episode 6) Angela cites health reasons for Brennan's vegetarian diet. Brennan is also a trained amateur highwire performer, and speaks at least seven other languages, including Spanish, French, Latin, Chinese, Pashto, Japanese, Norwegian (although she says only "skull" and avers that, as a forensic anthropologist, this is a word she knows "in just about every language"), Farsi, and German. She has also admitted to knowing a bit of Russian. She often says she does not "put much stock in psychology" and makes a point of noting that Dr. Sweets is not a real scientist as he "bases his life on the vagary of psychology and emotions".
Brennan's personality undergoes significant changes throughout the course of the series. Her thinking becomes less rigid in later seasons, something which is observed by Dr. Gordon Wyatt, who notes that she is now able to distinguish the difference between accuracy and truth. In season 4, Booth takes her along to his interrogations and helps her learn how to set aside her scientific perspective and relate with the victim's family and suspects on a more interpersonal level. She is also able to put aside her rationality to support her friends in sometimes irrational pursuits, such as Angela's quest to raise money to save a pig from slaughter, and to comfort Booth, even using science or quoting directly from the Bible to rationalize his religious beliefs. Her sensitivity and empathy towards others are also much improved, seen quite strongly when she comforts his grandfather, and when she attends a funeral so that the victim's single mother won't be alone. She also displays more "typical" human emotions when in extreme stress. One example of this is her fear of snakes in "The Mummy in the Maze," when a girl is in the process of being scared to death in a room, the floor teeming with snakes. This goes against her empirical nature, as, when Booth tells her that the snakes aren't venomous, she states that she is aware, but still refuses to step in the room, causing Booth to carry her on his back.
Brennan begins to feel both dissatisfaction and discomfort with her work toward the end of the fifth season. She also sees some futility in her work, stating that no matter how many killers they catch, there will always be more. To help her gain new perspective, she later decides to head up an anthropological expedition to Indonesia for a year to identify some ancient proto-human remains, after mulling it over during the episode. However, 7 months later, she and everyone else return to D.C. in order to save Cam's job, and they all decide to stay.
As season 6 progresses, Brennan must confront her feelings for Booth, whom she rejected in the 100th episode from the previous season. Having returned from 7 months of introspection, she has come to terms with her romantic affection towards him, even admitting that she regretted not having given them a chance together, midway through the season. However, Booth returns from Afghanistan with a new love interest, war correspondent Hannah Burley, whom Brennan befriends. When Hannah rejects Booth's marriage proposal, Brennan must help him through the emotional fallout.
In the second to last episode of season 6 Booth and Brennan had sex, consummating their relationship, and it is revealed in the last few moments of the season finale that as a result, Brennan has become pregnant, with Booth the father. Throughout the episode ("The Change in the Game") Brennan has been seen asking Angela questions and making comments that make her seem excited and apprehensive; when she sees that Booth is happy with the news, she also seems overjoyed. This reflects her earlier desire to become a mother, circa season 4, as well as her desire that Booth be the father of the baby.
In Season 7, episode 2 "The Hot Dog in the Competition", Brennan and Booth found out they were having a baby girl. Their daughter, Christine Angela Booth (named for Brennan's mother and her best friend), was born in a stable during the episode "The Prisoner in the Pipe". In the Season 7 finale, "The Past in the Present", key evidence in the death of her friend, Ethan Sawyer, is linked to Brennan. Max convinces her to go on the run along with Christine, saying that if she is arrested, even if she is found innocent, she may never see her daughter again.
In Season 8 premiere, it is revealed that while on the run, Brennan was communicating with Angela, via flowers, and eventually used this as a way to communicate with Booth. Despite being on the run, Brennan risks her safety and decides to meet directly with Booth in a hotel room after months of being a single mother. Eventually, they arrest Christopher Pelant, who was the real murderer of Ethan Sawyer, and Brennan is allowed to return to her family. Although Pelant blackmails Booth to prevent him from accepting Brennan's proposal by threatening to kill five innocent people if Booth accepted, also warning Booth not to give a reason for his refusal, this threat is removed when the team manage to kill Pelant, and Booth and Brennan marry in the Season 9 episode 'The Woman in White. In the Season 10 episode, "The Eye in the Sky", Brennan learns that she is pregnant with her and Booth's second child.
In the Season 8 episode "The Shot in the Dark", Brennan is shot while working in the lab late at night. While undergoing emergency surgery, she experiences a vision of meeting with her deceased mother, Christine Brennan. Initially dismissing this as a hallucination, Brennan experiences several more visions throughout the episode. During these discussions, it's revealed that Brennan's hyper rationalization originates from the very last piece of advice her mother gave to her (before going on the run) which was to use her brain instead of her heart. While that advice enabled Brennan to survive all these years, the vision of her mother explains, it's now time for Brennan to do more than just survive.
Since entering a relationship with and marrying Booth and then having children, the character has undergone development personally and is shown to be a caring wife and protective mother. She would often put aside her own atheistic views and uses her hyper-rationality to justify Booth's religious beliefs, as shown in season 8 where she references the Bible in order to persuade Booth to forgive his mother and in the season finale where she agrees to a church wedding, rationalizing that she could appreciate the "beauty" of the ceremony and its significance to Booth.