Hypable got the chance to chat with Bones’ executive producers Hart Hanson and Stephen Nathan about season 9’s upcoming surprises, Pelant’s possible demise, and what they swear will be the wedding of the year. Major spoilers ahead.
After eight seasons of will-they-won’t-they romantic drama and a couple years of living under Pelant’s villainous shadow, it finally feels like things are coming to a head in season 9 for our favorite lovingly-odd odd couple.
Hypable participated in a conference call with Bones’ creator Hart Hanson and fellow Bones writer Stephen Nathan, and interviewed them to get the scoop on what direction season 9 of Bones is headed in. Here’s what they had say:
On how Pelant will affect the team this season:
Hart Hanson: He’s going to be a presence until that storyline is resolved in some way. We’re close to resolving it, but probably not in the way everybody expects.
Stephen Nathan: As one of our characters says, you don’t even know for sure if Pelant is watching, but just the sheer possibility makes you have to be paranoid.
Hart Hanson: We will see (Pelant) again. It’ll be a far more intense episode and it’ll be them confronting him in a way we haven’t seen before.
Stephen Nathan: You know they’re going to get married, and they can’t really get married until the issue of Pelant has been dealt with one way or another. We’re doing all that fairly quickly. We’re not teasing this out through the whole season.
Hart Hanson: We’ve strung along the audience for eight years. Season 9 – we’re starting to resolve things. Not everything, because there will be a season 10 through 14, but at this point, we will be moving things along.
On the next Big Bad:
Hart Hanson: Pelant actually is part of uncovering our next big bad.
Stephen Nathan: There will be someone else who looms over our people in a way we have yet to see on Bones. It’s someone who is far more ephemeral than any of our other big, bad guys. As Hart said, it’s somebody who comes to our attention because of Pelant.
On how Pelant has affected their approach to future Big Bads:
Hart Hanson: I don’t really like serial killers, but we know America does, so we always have these Big Bads that come along: the serial killers. Pelant gave us a great amount of joy to play with. We got something right as far as we’re concerned with Pelant, so we kept him around a long time. He’s kind of set the bar, so when we’re talking about this next Big Bad, it has to be someone who is as interesting to us as Pelant was, and we think we’ve got that. Now we have to find out if our audience agrees.
On Booth and Angela’s deteriorating relationship:
Hart Hanson: They both love Brennan. Don’t step between sisters, which Booth has done, and that’s going to take a while to play out because hurtful things were said and they don’t immediately fix themselves overnight.
Stephen Nathan: Best friends are relentless and they will defend a friend to the death. Booth has to get past that; Angela does, too, she has to understand what’s going on, but she doesn’t have the information yet.
Hart Hanson: Yes, Angela is the ultimate shipper. And you know what? The shippers are mad at Booth and so is Angela.
On what we can expect for the wedding:
Hart Hanson: There will be vows.
Stephen Nathan: We put a lot of effort into giving the audience what they want, which is a wedding in a way they don’t expect it. I hope that we’ve been successful with that. The reason that we didn’t hold it off till the end of the series or something is that Booth and Brennan getting married is just sort of a natural extension of their evolving relationship. Now, they’re not going to be all that much different. They’re still Booth and Brennan. Their differences remain and now they’re just going to settle into one aspect of their life while being tested all the more.
Hart Hanson: Between the two of us, Stephen and I have been married for 50 years, so something we know is that just because you get married doesn’t mean that everything goes simply.
On the wedding guests:
Stephen Nathan: We certainly have assembled quite an extraordinary group of people for the wedding.
Hart Hanson: It’s our biggest cast ever.
Stephen Nathan: Yes, biggest cast ever. I don’t think we’ll miss too many people.
Hart Hanson: You shouldn’t have said that, Stephen.
Stephen Nathan: I said too many. I didn’t say anyone. We’re always going to miss somebody.
On the honeymoon:
Hart Hanson: There’s a honeymoon and of course there is a murder.
Stephen Nathan: They go to Argentina. They go to Buenos Aires on their honeymoon.
Hart Hanson: Also we’ll tease this one little thing that they do go on their honeymoon, and it turns out that the entire country of Argentina is madly in love with Brennan’s books and it takes a turn that even Brennan didn’t see coming.
On Booth’s ex-priest-bartender-therapist:
Hart Hanson: We’re going to have him back a few times, Aldo Clemens. He’s played by Mather Zickel. He’s an appealing guy and he has kind of a vibe that no one else on Bones has, and I think you saw, too, in the first episode, he has pretty good chemistry with both David and Emily. We’ll have him back a few times, which I shouldn’t say, because there’s always a chance that people will be killed by Pelant, so now I kind of let that cat out of the bag. We’re going to have him back. Let me say this: he’s part of the wedding episode.
On those weird, out-of-the-box episodes:
Hart Hanson: We front-loaded the season with, I’m going to call them “obligatory episodes,” things that we’ve set up that we have to do. The weirder episodes are going to happen in the back-end of the season, let’s say after Christmas. It’s one of the great things about a show that’s going into its ninth season: you can do that. People are with you and you can be a little bit weird. We like (the weird episodes) the most and they’re often, I think, our best episodes.
On getting Stephen Fry back as a guest star:
Stephen Nathan: We’ve talked about it, but he’s very, very—
Hart Hanson: He’s very, very busy. He would love to do it, but Stephen Fry is, as you know, busy running Britain and most of France. It’s very tough to get him, but we promise to keep trying and certainly he is more than willing.
On making their characters miserable:
Hart Hanson: We agonize about it. We agonize about the tone and walking that tightrope. It’s fun for us to write a drama that’s a little bit melancholy, but it’s also a lot of fun to bust back out of it into our usual world of the crime-edy. That’s why we moved pretty quickly in the pilot to get out of the melancholy place. It’s kind of sad, those scenes where Brennan and Booth are not connecting. We’re so used to seeing them connect that it’s odd when they don’t.
Stephen Nathan: I think it makes the show more enjoyable to see them go through real situations. We put them in a very difficult position at the end of last season and in dealing with that, they have to work through the misery before they come out the other side. I think that gives the audience something to root for. I think that’s why we care about these characters so much. It’s not easy.
On paying off long-running mysteries:
Hart Hanson: Well, 447, we talk a lot about paying that off and there are two schools of thought and I won’t tell you who’s winning. One is that we finally pay it off in the final episode and the other is that we don’t wait that long. That being said, there are a few things that we are paying off fairly quickly at the beginning of this season. For example: what did Brennan write when she was buried alive with Hodgins? What is Angela’s real name is another hanging chad that we haven’t paid off yet. Then there’s always what is on page 187, which is Hodgins’ miraculous sexual technique. I don’t know if we could pay that off on network TV.
On how disgusting the bodies are this season:
Stephen Nathan: All I can say is that our bar is how contentious our conversations are with standards and practices. If we feel we have a lot of negotiating to do with standards and practices, we’ve done our job. One episode coming up has something, which seems to be one of the most revolting things (and I say that with great delight and pride) that we’ve ever had on Bones, and it has nothing to do with a dead body. I think we’ve outdone ourselves.
Hart Hanson: We think there should be a disclaimer that says do not eat during the first seven and a half minutes of Bones.
On Booth’s offer to join the CIA:
Hart Hanson: That’s a fun dynamic to play out in that he thinks that the CIA is the ultimate organization to belong to. Booth has belonged to the FBI for a long time. Those agencies actually have a bit of a rivalry and so we’d like to play that out a little bit as the season goes on. (Booth is thinking,) ‘Yes, how many times am I going to chase armed people down alleys now that I’m a family man?’ You’ve got to juggle these things. He has to face dangers that make him rethink what his responsibilities are to Christine.
On why Sweets and the team are reexamining their life choices this season:
Stephen Nathan: There are two things, I think. Certainly Pelant has turned all of his research, all of his psychological insights and discoveries in this relationship against (Sweets), that’s probably one of the main things; but also, Sweets is a young man. Everyone in their ’20s reevaluates their life choices that they’ve made and wonders whether or not there are other things out there. I think it’s a natural thing that occurs in a character like his to take some time and look at things before it gets too late.
Hart Hanson: We only have two characters who are doing what they set out to do, and that’s Hodgins and Brennan. Everyone else has been pulled into their orbit and Sweets, here’s a guy whose intention in life as a foster kid is to help people, to help actual human beings and instead he’s in a situation where he’s helping society. Just juggling those two things are tough for him. He has to figure out which direction he wants to go in. Do you help a lot of people a little or a few people very, very much? It’s a good thing for a guy in his ’20s to deal with.
Stephen Nathan: On a very mundane level, these people never take a vacation ever and when you’re 24, 25 years old, you want to take a vacation.
On staying fresh as an episodic show:
Hart Hanson: It’s a nightmare because at our essence we’re a network, 22 episodes a year episodic show where we solve a crime each week. When we go into more serialized stuff, it’s always difficult. You’re always juggling that. It’s a lot of discussion and a lot of input not only from the writers on the show, but from the network and the studio as to how to balance all these things.
Stephen Nathan: It’s much easier on one hand to do a serialized show, because you’re just continuing with one story with the characters; but to do a case that has to resolve every week is very labor intensive. Fortunately we have a great, great writer’s room led by Jon Collier, and they come up with astounding stories, but after almost 200 episodes, it’s very difficult to continue to give the audience murders that are worth their loyalty.
Hart Hanson: (Murders) that they haven’t seen before, and clues that they haven’t seen too many times.
Stephen Nathan: So that’s what is ultimately very, very satisfying to us. Now we’re in season 9, so at that point you are allowed to add a serialized element to the show, so we can have character arcs. We can have things that do sustain us and give a through-line to the series, so it’s not just the case of the week.
Bones airs Monday nights on Fox at 8pm EST.