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.

Are you gonna fine me? The Bs are on their way to China so that Brennan can look at some really, really old bones. Brennan's in first class, Booth in coach. On his way from one to the other, Booth confiscates some booze from a teenager with a vigilant dad and a sick mother. Booth crashes Brennan up in first class, but the flight attendant will have none of that. Booth explains that he's protecting the proprietary American technology Brennan might use while working on the 40,000 year old bones. She tells the flight attendant, apropos of nothing, that the trip brings her back to her real passion: prehistoric anthropological discoveries. The flight attendant is like, how nice, now get back to coach. Booth can't leave without asking Brennan if murder (i.e., BOOTH) isn't her real passion. But he's kicked back to coach and indignity before she can answer.

Partners We're deviating a little from formula this week with the opening, and I like it. Our case this week is this: state troopers in training are given a practical lesson on why we do not shoot tear gas into meth labs: they tend to explode. However, in giving said practical lesson, a body is propelled from the meth lab and discovered to be a murder victim. The remains are originally identified as Jim Stegman, father of inventor Paul Stegman. When Paul was a tot, Jim drove himself and Paul into a tree, breaking both his legs and effectively severing his relationship with his son. A week ago, Jim shows up on Paul's doorstep, claiming to have sobered up and given up his gambling habit. Paul, now a father himself, took his dad in. And that's when things got interesting.

Brennan thinks you're dumb.While the Bs silence their way through another non-therapy session with the under-used-lately Dr. Sweets, two stoners fishing find half a skeleton. Booth stops playing with a slinky long enough to answer his phone, and he and Brennan take off with ten pounds of rude between them. Cam is waiting for them at the crime scene with Brennan’s new grad assistant. She asks Mr. Nigel Murray what he’s doing there; Cam reminds her that they’re bringing her brighter grad students to the sites until they hire another forensic anthropologist to shadow her, but Brennan’s not sure Mr. Nigel Murray qualifies. Booth refuses to call him Mr. Nigel Murray. Mr. Nigel-Murray tells him to call him any nickname variation of Vincent, because he is a babbler, and also because that is his first name, instead of Nigel. It was somehow funnier when I thought she was calling him Mr. His Full Name.

If there was such a thing as king bee...An elevator full of office-workers makes various complaints about various things, until a decomposing leg falls from the ceiling. That’ll teach ‘em. More interesting to us, less interesting to them, the Bs are in therapy being lectured by Sweets about the importance of their subconscious. Booth’s tapping of his foot is irritating Brennan, and it turns out that he’s anxious because another FBI agent died that week. Not one he liked, or anything (Booth thought he was creepy), but the one who had the best desk chair in the building. Booth totally wants it. Brennan reiterates: “You are anxious that you won’t get a dead man’s chair.” Booth asks her to write her a doctor’s note that he needs the chair, something about lumbar support. She turns him down, as does Sweets, who says it’s a status thing. “You want a throne!” Brennan says. Booth just wants back support. Sweets starts to shrink his head about feeling insecure at work, but Booth gets a phone, because, as we saw, we have a murder. They leave Sweets talking to himself, as usual.

Squint Returns! Two teenagers introduce me to the word “micro-bladder,” and, on peeing into a runoff reservoir behind a barn, turn the water purple and raise several decomposing limbs and body-bits to the surface of the water. That’ll teach you to pee wherever you feel like it, I guess.

Sweets meets with Zack at McKinley Psychiatric Hospital. I was not prepared to see Zack and immediately sat up straighter in my seat and had to fan my face. Zack says that he really does feel remorse, just not for killing someone; he’s more regretful that he fell for Gorgomon’s holey logic. Sweets thinks a sane person would feel bad about the killing part, not getting taken in by a line of crap, which he defines at length with synonyms. And then Eric Milligan gives them to us all in a ten second supercalifragilistic word: “Drivel-blarney-nonsense-balderdash-twaddle-bull-bunkum-hooey.” Sweets asks about his hands, and Zack says he has about 60% function. Sweets swipes a card to let himself out, telling Zack that they can’t release him until he’s overcome his delusions. The card doesn’t work, and the guard says it must be expired. Zack insists he wasn’t delusional, just wrong. Sweets asks him to consider that his denial of his delusion is just part of the delusion.

Partners. Okay. So this is more like it. Parker and Booth are on a nature walk and talking about beauty. It is not truth, but a perfect spiral. Male bonding ensues. Parker sees a bird’s nest, and Booth gives him some good lessons: don’t knock it down, because someone lives there, and don’t touch the eggs in case the mama bird comes back. Parker instead pulls out a human finger. I’m pretty sure to a six-year-old boy, that is way more awesome than an egg.

Love is in the air... A trucker in his big rig argues over the phone with his girlfriend, who thinks he’s tomcatting and not on the long haul. He hangs up because he has to pee. I was totally afraid he was going to whip out a Coke bottle and go in the cab, but what happens ends up being grosser for far longer. This is apparently a man who pees and smokes at the same time, though he has trouble with his lighter. Once inside the random outhouse he’s pulled up to, his lighter clicks on. And then he and the outhouse explode upward because while he may not have lit his own fart on fire, he’s certainly lit the remnants of many others’, as well as his own ass. Yes, Bones has given us a trucker with his ass on fire.

Tiny cars are funny, right?For those of you new to Bones, you’re about to get a crash course in this teaser. And yes, this show is exactly the amount of ham and cheese sandwich these two hours are, but usually a little less chewy. We’re at Oxford, in England, where Brennan is lecturing. She explains that she is the scientist, and her partner Booth, the one dozing instead of paying attention, is the humanist, the one who tempers logic and empiricism with intuition. She mentions how her assistant, the most brilliant of brilliant, showed her how destructive pure logic can be. Which Booth affirms with a too-flip for this recapper summation of the last season’s finale: he ended up a sidekick to a cannibalistic serial killer. Booth (and, presumably, Zack’s still rather unbelievable downfall) has shown her that scientists may need to arm themselves against said pure logic. “A quality which deflects us from an irrational admiration for the rational,” suggests Dr. Wexler, Brennan’s Brit counterpart. Brennan likes this. Enough to have the forensic anthropologist equivalent of cheer sex with him.

We'll miss you, little brother.So remember last week when Booth got shot? Well, apparently, he’s dead.

Or so we’re told, as the team, dressed in black, gathers around Brennan and tries to get her to go to the funeral, despite her adamant refusal. Brennan has always thought visiting cemeteries stupid unless there are remains in need of identification, and right now, she’s grieving and hostile. Angela takes her aside and pulls the best friend card: she’s been crying for days, she’s not going to get through this alone, and she needs Brennan.