From: seanc130@hotmail.com   
      
    wrote   
      
   >I tried all of your links, and the only one that I can get is your Live   
   > Journal one. All the other ones go to the Facebook "sign in" page, and   
   > since I do not have an account there I can't sign in to read anything   
   > that you may have posted.   
   > What I meant in my other post was, how about C&P your Bones "article",   
   > and putting it in a post here. Your Facebook links are going nowhere!   
      
   Well, looks like you need to catch up with the times and get on FB like   
   everyone else!! #;^P>   
      
   Okay, I'll go ahead and paste the whole thing here. (I was trying to avoid   
   doing that, because I think I'm gonna have to go back through the whole   
   thing and insert punctuation to indicate where there were italics and bold   
   in the original. I was just too lazy to do it before. If the italics somehow   
   come through anyway, then ... just be happy I wasted all that time special   
   just for you!)   
      
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    [_Bones_ spoilers] Well, then it would be a duck, not a spaceship,   
   so your point escapes me.   
      
      
      
   I've been looking forward to tonight's episode of _Bones_ for weeks.   
   (Friggin' holiday hiatuses. [Hiati?])   
      
   It's so awesome that they did an _X-Files_ themed show, to pay tribute to a   
   creative connection that I think is highly underappreciated by the public. I   
   don't think a lot of people realise just how much XF has been a huge   
   influence on the show, from the beginning. It goes beyond just the obvious   
   conceptual parallels between the Scully/Mulder and Brennan/Booth   
   partnerships. There are similarities in visual style, in the rhythm of the   
   procedural investigative work, in the combination of playful wit and serious   
   scientific ideas. They dig through muck with flashlights to investigate   
   bizarre deaths. Brennan's past family tragedies and her experience in the   
   foster care system have marked her, driven her, influenced who she is very   
   deeply, in a way very much like how Mulder was marked, driven, and   
   influenced by Samantha's abduction. She has had to come to terms over time   
   with the fact that her father was a killer, just as Mulder had to come to   
   terms over the years with his own father's involvement in the Conspiracy. I   
   also sometimes think of her as 'Scully squared' -- she boils down Scully's   
   rational approach to its very essence, to pure, unadulterated empiricism,   
   untempered by the other personality elements that made Scully a subtler and   
   more rounded character. Booth, conversely, shares Mulder's grounding in a   
   fundamentally subjective, psychological point of view. I could probably go   
   on like this a good deal more, but it's probably better if I actually move   
   on to my second point after spending nearly 250 words on the first.   
      
   (BTW, the fact that only 13 of those words focus on Booth's character, while   
   over a hundred focus on Brennan, is not meant to imply there's not much that   
   could be said about him. It merely reflects the fact that, well ... Let's   
   put it this way: I spend unhealthily many hours obsessing about, studying   
   every detail of, and trying to understand *someone* on this show, and ... it   
   ain't Booth, folks.)   
      
      
   ******************************   
      
      
   Anyway, I was excited from the first moment I saw the title 'The X in the   
   File' listed as an upcoming episode online. Given that level of   
   expectations, and that much time for them to feed on themselves, probably   
   nothing could have ever *quite* matched my hopes completely. Nevertheless,   
   for the most part I was pleased with the episode. Not blown away, but not   
   really disappointed, either.   
      
   I love the fact that they not only got Dean Haglund to appear in the   
   episode, but actually made him the killer. Just a yummy little treat for the   
   hardcore X-Philes from back in the day, that the uninitiated would never   
   notice or care about.   
      
   I was also thrilled with Brennan's response in the teaser to all the alien   
   talk. She didn't roll her eyes and go all, 'You people are nuts, grow up,   
   the very idea is ridiculous, I'm not gonna listen to this nonsense.'   
   Instead, she granted the working hypothesis that aliens not only exist, but   
   could come to Earth; it was just that this *particular* body was probably   
   not alien, because an alien who had mastered interstellar space travel would   
   be too smart to end up dead in the middle of the desert. I was like, wow, I   
   would have never thought of it that way. It was so unexpected, yet eminently   
   sensible, that I involuntarily said out loud, 'Hey, that's a good point!'   
      
   Favourite moment: the MRI scene. Even though I'd seen the scream in the   
   trailers about two half-dozen times already, I still loved it. (And still   
   couldn't help but be aroused by it. Something about hearing a new,   
   unprecedented, foreign, high-pitched noise coming out of her mouth just   
   strikes me as so cute. At least it's less perverted than that time I got   
   aroused by Cuddy vomiting in the _House_ episode 'Airborne'.) And that   
   dialogue afterwards -- instantly, eternally classic. 'I won't say anything   
   about the scream if you don't say anything about the gun.' 'Those terms are   
   satisfactory!'   
      
      
   ******************************   
      
      
   A few criticisms, to prove my ability to be objective:   
      
      
   (1) When they all watched that blurry video that they temporarily thought   
   might be the real deal, Brennan's response disappointed me a bit. Not her   
   lack of emotion and goosebumps -- I would expect nothing less from my girl   
   and her level head. It was her flat declaration, 'That is not a spaceship',   
   that grated on me. On what did she think she was basing that conclusion? At   
   that moment there was no obvious evidence that it was anything else. A true   
   empiricist would not leap to *any* conclusion -- either that it *was* a   
   spaceship, *or* that it *wasn't*.   
      
   It's possible she was just rationalising because she was afraid, without   
   realising it, to seriously contemplate the other possibility. But, at least,   
   someone should have called her on the fact that she was doing exactly what   
   she always warns against -- jumping to a conclusion. And not even one that   
   just goes beyond the evidence, but one that is in *active opposition* to the   
   immediate evidence. (To be fair, it's also possible that she subconsciously   
   saw some sort of details in the picture that were inconsistent with the   
   spaceship hypothesis. And then again, it's possible that it was simply a   
   tiny little one-sentence quantum of bad writing.)   
      
      
   (2) One of Hodgins's lines slipped through their vetting process for   
   scientific accuracy. He claims to have found 'gypsum dating back to the   
   Pleistocene and Holocene eras.' One sentence, two errors. First of all, the   
   Pleistocene and Holocene are *epochs*, not eras. An era is a *much* bigger   
   unit of time. The Cenozoic *Era* includes the Pleistocene and Holocene, in   
   addition to five other *epochs*.   
      
   Second, nothing can 'date back to the Holocene'. We are *in* the Holocene,   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)