February 25, 2010

My Sinking Ship: B&B

I've been poking fun at shippers a lot these last couple of weeks thanks to the fact that some of these obsessed fans gave Chuck-sters a bad name by flying off the handle, so I've decided to keep the fun going by sharing my thoughts on some current ships that need to be sunk.  My first Sinking Ship post will focus on B&B, or Bones & Booth to you normal fans, from FOX's cop procedural Bones.


Let me preface this post by saying that I am a fan of Bones, albeit not a die-hard one.  I've only been watching the show since this past summer, and I've only dedicated a few months to it rather than a few years, so I'm not invested in the "will they/won't they (WTWT)" drama that drives the B&B shippers.  The reason I became a fan of the show was because I liked the characters as individuals, not as a potential couple.

Apparently the B&B shippers have been stirred up in to a tizzy mostly due to last year's season finale where they finally got to see Booth and Bones get it on, just to find out that it was a figment of someone's imagination.  They were pissed (which I don't get because that was one of my favorite eps of the series)!  The pot has been stirred over the last couple of weeks when news broke that Booth might be getting a new love interest, and creator Hart Hanson's TwitPic of this season's final episode (which has a very similar title as last year's season finale). Now, all of the shippers are trying to figure out what all of this means, and yadda yadda yadda.

While, I do have to admit that I thought that Booth and Brennan should be a couple early on, I'm so over the idea of putting these two together.  First off, the show has been drawing out this whole WTWT crap for close to five years.  I just don't care anymore. Initially, I wanted B&B together because their attraction to one another felt very organic and subtle. During the first couple of episodes, I never felt like I was being forced to accept these two as a couple. Instead we got to see their relationship progress from partners, to friends, to something a little bit more. I never felt like the showrunners were hitting us over the head with the B&B ship...until recently.

So far, Season 5 feels like Hanson & Co. are trying to make amends with the B&B shippers for the Season 4 swerve because it feels very relationship heavy, and it's starting to drag down the rest of the show. I didn't start watching the show because of the potential romantic pairs, but because it was a fresh approach to a tired genre. Now, Bones has too many soap opera elements, and too many shots of Booth longing over Brennan or vice versa, and it's getting annoying. At this point, they either need to be together or kept apart forever because this junior high stuff is wearing thin. Personally, I'd prefer the latter.

My main reason for keeping B&B apart is because I think Booth could do better than Bones. While I agree that they have chemistry, it's this odd kind of repressed energy that just gets in the way. Booth has had better chemistry with Cam, Agent Perotta, and even his ex-wife than he's had with Brennan. Plus, he has stuff in common with these other characters. I'm not saying that Booth needs to be with a female version of himself, but he and Bones are way too different, so much so that they would not complement each other. I think they would actually bring each other down if they were in a relationship.

While the two of them have grown as characters thanks to their partnership, I still think they need to have some core similarities in order for their coupling to work. Brennan's a woman of science and reason, while Booth is all heart and instinct ( and a good Catholic boy to boot, which doesn't mesh well with her pragmatic sensibilities). On paper, these two are incompatible as a romantic pair. In order for them to work, they'd have to comprise so much of themselves that they'll cease to be the characters we started to care about. I know being a relationship dictates growth and compromise, but not to the extremes that these two would have to do.

In the end, I just don't believe that these two are destined for one another, but of course my opinion doesn't count because the powers that be are going to make it happen unless they want the majority of their fan base to revolt the likes of what Chuck is seeing. At least B&B isn't as annoying as Bones' other WTWT couple, Hodgins and Angela.

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