What Happens To Booth And Brennan?

For 12 seasons, “Bones” was a solid competitor for the title of the most enticing forensic procedural out there — which is saying something, considering how many shows are vying for the title. Emily Deschanel’s Dr. Temperance “Bones” Brennan, David Boreanaz’s FBI Special Agent Seeley Booth, and their respective colleagues that grew into something resembling a family (and, in the case of the two lead characters, quite literally a family) managed to simultaneously tug viewers’ heartstrings while delivering the drama and thrills audiences expect from a crime-solving drama.

All good things come to an end, though, and even “Bones” respected this old adage with its final season (which had the fittingly funny and grim tagline, “Nearly departed”). The show that thrived on crimes and anthropology ultimately — and extremely appropriately — ended by taking a long, hard look at its core aspects and learning from them, delivering a finale for the ages. Let’s take a closer look at the show’s ending, and how its main characters fared throughout it all.

“Bones” focuses on the massively intelligent but socially detached forensic anthropologist Temperance “Bones” Brennan, whose crack squad of researchers ends up regularly consulting the FBI’s Seeley Booth. Over the course of the show’s 12 seasons, Brennan and Booth go from vitriolic coworkers whose expertises and temperaments are nigh-diametrically opposed to a devoted married couple that compliments each other like pieces of a puzzle.

You can definitely condense the general plot of “Bones” to those sentences, but in reality, there’s a whole lot more going on. Both Brennan and Booth are surrounded by a deep roster of memorable characters, all of whom have their own ups and downs during the show. There’s also the matter of the crimes the series deals with, which tend to be a whole lot stranger and darker than most procedural fare likes to depict. Both case of the week episodes and longer arcs like the memorable Gormogon cultist storyline in Season 3 go a long way toward establishing the show’s darker undercurrents as seriously dark. Meanwhile, the workplace dynamics of the show tend to be a major focus point, which juxtaposes the darker subject matter with hilarious moments of levity and plenty of fun in-office and relationship drama.

The end result is a very binge-worthy blend of sweet, sour, and outright acidic that was more than enough for a popular 12-season run and potentially beyond. So, what kind of ending could have concluded this powerhouse show in a satisfactory fashion?

The final episode of “Bones,” titled “The End in the End,” kicks off after the lab explosion cliffhanger in the previous one. Fortunately, most of the damage is material. Unfortunately, the lab is utterly wrecked and Temperance Brennan has received a head injury that is severely — and potentially permanently — affecting her ability to think and perform at the intellectual level she and the others have been accustomed to, leaving it up in the air whether she can aid in solving the case and catching the bomber siblings Mark (Gerardo Gelasco) and Jeannine Kovac (Brit Shaw).

Fortunately, Booth and the others rush in to fill the proverbial brain void. While Brennan deals with — and soon recovers from — her injury situation, they use the methods they have learned from her over the course of the seasons to analyze the available evidence in order to locate and neutralize the villains. After a heroic confrontation where Booth gets to play action hero for one last time, the antagonists are vanquished … and it’s time for a lengthy string of goodbyes.

The lab will be rebuilt and supervised by its new temporary leader, Jack Hodgins (T.J. Thyne). Various key characters get happy, family-themed endings. We find out that the team’s mission to fight crime will continue. Finally, there’s just one — or rather two — things that matter. Seeley Booth and Temperance Brennan are sitting on a park bench near the Jeffersonian, reflecting on their future and past. It’s a quiet, happy open ending that serves as a perfect send-off that also keeps the characters ready for more action, should the situation so require. Nothing’s fully solved here, but everyone’s at peace … for now, at least.

Brennan’s health issues in the “Bones” finale teach her a crash course in relying on others. They also force said others to rise above and beyond to make up for the temporary absence of her skills and the lab’s post-explosion mess. This takes Brennan so far outside her comfort zone that it borders on an existential crisis. Fortunately, Booth is there for her. Apart from the team solving the case in an appropriately nail-biting fashion, the episode rolls out some of the greatest Brennan-Booth interactions in the history of the show, using every second of their shared screen time to remind the viewer how this once dysfunctional duo came to form one of the strongest bonds in procedural drama fiction.

This is a pretty impressive feat to pull off this late in the game, but not as impressive as the way the show organically sets up as many happy endings for its key characters as a single episode can fit. The decision to focus so heavily on the character interaction side of “Bones” is not only fitting considering how prevalent it is on the show, but it also allows the viewer to walk away from the 12-season experience with a smile on their face, in secure knowledge that the characters are all doing as well as they can in a fictional universe that’s teeming with bloodthirsty killers.

In a 2017 interview with Entertainment Weekly, Emily Deschanel described the emotional toll filming the final episode of “Bones.” She named one scene in particular — a touching reunion between her character and all of Brennan’s “squintern” aides. As Deschanel told it, the sheer amount of history they shared on and off the camera caused her to outright break down when they were filming their final scene:

“Carla Gallo [who plays Daisy Wick] started tearing up, and then I started crying … My character is looking back and thanking them for everything all of their characters have done, so that was an emotional thing on camera and off, and it really allowed us to recognize the importance of that time.”

David Boreanaz — who also directed the “Bones” finale — seemed more content to leave the show behind, especially since he already had lengthy stints on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and its spin-off “Angel” under his belt. As such, the comments he gave in his 2017 Entertainment Weekly interview are those of a man who’s ready to move on:

“I feel great. There’s pressure to [being on] a show for 12 years. You get weight off of your shoulders and realize how much it takes to shoot one episode, one day’s work, to create moments. It doesn’t seem possible that it’s been that long, and it goes by so fast. It’s like a tornado, a hurricane. I’ve done three series, it’s 20 years of television work — that’s a lot of hours!”

Ironically enough, Boreanaz never ended up escaping the proverbial TV tornado. He started playing Jason Hayes on the CBS military drama “SEAL Team” the same year “Bones” ended, and was with the show throughout its seven-season duration. 

“Bones” ends happily, but also in an open-ended manner that keeps everyone close to the action in case of a series revival. As such, “Bones” Season 13 could potentially happen with David Boreanaz and Emily Deschanel, should the stars (and schedules) align. As it happens, the people behind the show have been open about the possibility, with co-showrunner Michael Peterson speaking about it to TV Line as early as 2016:

“I absolutely am not considering this the end. I am in full-on denial. I’ve been working on the show for eight-and-a-half years. It is my family. I adore it here. I don’t want to leave. And the idea of having some kind of reunion in a year or two … I would not rule it out.”

Creator and co-showrunner Hart Hanson has given similar comments about his fond memories of making the show, along with a tentative thumbs-up to the possibility of a “Bones” revival. However, he told Variety in 2023 that nothing “Bones”-related is going to happen without the show’s stars being fully on board, so the possible future of “Bones” seems to hinge entirely on Boreanaz’s and Deschanel’s willingness to revisit their roles once more. Per Hanson:

“We have heard that [Deschanel and Boreanaz] would not not be game, which is a step. The actors are going to say the truth, which is it depends on what it is, the scripts, what it looks like, if it feels right. They’re not going to do something just because it’s us.”

Since Boreanaz is open to returning as Booth and Deschanel has also made similar comments in the past, who knows? Perhaps everyone’s calendars will one day clear enough for another season (or 12) at the Jeffersonian.

The creators of “Bones” never considered a darker ending. After all, the show already had darkness aplenty without throwing a downer finale in the mix. There were, however, alternate (though no less positive) ideas on how “Bones” could have ended if it had gotten canceled sooner. Though the show ended up running for a very decent 12 seasons, Hart Hanson was originally quite confident that the series would be canceled at some point down the line … and planned accordingly. In a 2017 interview with Deadline, Hanson shared some details about the backup plan to end “Bones:”

“I thought it was going to end on about Episode 4 in the first season. But when we started realizing that we would be aiming for an end-of-series, you know, two or three seasons in, I wrote down what my idea was for the end of the series, and the first idea was the wedding, [Brennan and Booth] would get married. But then we didn’t get canceled, we kept going, so we burnt that up.”

As Hanson noted, the show eventually chose to use the wedding arc (which culminated in “Bones” Season 9, Episode 6, titled “The Woman in White,” when Booth and Brennan finally say “I do” to each other) before the show’s true end. This wasn’t the only ending idea the makers of the show came up with, either. Hanson revealed in the interview that the series’ creatives toyed with ending the show with pregnancies, births, and other assorted family-themed arcs that also wound up being incorporated in the show as non-finale plot lines. As such, it appears that the ending “Bones” gave us is as official as it gets … that is, unless the show one day returns to “burn up” this finale idea as well.

“Bones” is currently streaming on Hulu.