Bones recap: The Jewel in the Crown

The heist is on. As the clock winds down on season 11, Bones is about to get season-finale serious, but we’ve got time for one last escapade: a deep dive into the world of international jewel thievery, complete with stolen daggers, suspected affairs, and squandered family fortunes. It’s To Catch a Thief with a dash of Pink Panther — and a pinch of Ghostbusters, but that’s another story.

A woman is found dead in a glass recycling plant, a blindingly huge diamond lodged in her mouth. The serial number on the two-carat rock leads Aubrey to Chadwick Grey, a posh representative of the Gemological Society who talks about the “field of gemology and the jewelry arts” with all the seriousness of a man penning an op-ed about why a female James Bond would ruin his childhood. Chadwick recognizes the diamond as part of an exact replica of the Topaki Dagger, which was recently loaned out to a jewelry store for a display. The dagger was stolen from the store almost as soon as it arrived three days ago.

According to the saleswoman, Eve, who witnessed the heist, it might just qualify as the most polite robbery this side of Cary Grant; two masked thieves followed an older gentleman into the store, and one detained her while the other stole the dagger. “Then they thanked us for our patience,” Eve gushes, Stockholm syndrome-ing already. “They really were quite nice.” The case gets even classier when Hodgins finds evidence the victim was strangled with a cord of 17th-century tapestry woven at the court of Louis XIV. Was her last meal cake?

Since American databases can’t get very far with missing French citizens, a French inspector shows up to lend a hand. Inspector Rousseau (he’s aware that it rhymes with “Inspector Clouseau,” thanks very much) has been tracking a pair of jewel thieves for six months, ever since a similar heist in France left one person dead. Rousseau identifies the Jeffersonian’s victim as the Marquise de Chaussin, and he’s sure her husband, Henri — the Marquis — killed her. (Everyone give it up for America’s favorite dancing Frenchman, Gilles Marini, as the Marquis.)

Brennan and Aubrey pay a visit to the Marquis’ tasteful Virginia estate (only one pool! Only four freestanding decorative columns!), where they find him bravely continuing to live the high life even though he wasted his centuries-old inheritance in a matter of years. He’s playing croquet with Blake Masters, the UVA grad student who runs this “small holding.” Before this, Masters was in France with the Marquis on an internship, putting her in the right place for both of the robberies; she insists she isn’t a thief, but she won’t say what she does for Henri or why he’s paying her hundreds of thousands of dollars to do it. All she’ll say is the Marquis suspected his wife of having an affair.

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The truth is more surprising. When Brennan reviews security footage of the jewelry-store theft, she notices one of the robbers would have cut herself breaking the glass case — and the injuries on the Marquise’s bones are a match. The Marquise was in on the heist. But her cut would have bled, and there wasn’t any bloody glass at the scene because the Marquise paid saleswoman Eve to clean up the evidence. The Marquise knew when the dagger was coming to the store even before Eve did, so the robbers must have had an inside track at the Gemological Society. Chadwick Grey, meet the interrogation room.

NEXT: He ain’t afraid of no ghosts

Chadwick’s old job was in Paris at the site of the first robbery, but he tries to throw suspicion back on the Marquis. Chadwick and Henri are the same size — and Chadwick would know; the Marquise offered to let him borrow one of her husband’s tuxedos once — so the evidence could fit either one of them. Meanwhile, Aubrey gets a call that the Marquis is booked on an early flight out of town, so he hightails it back to the Virginia estate in time to hear a window breaking. Booth orders him to wait for backup, but Aubrey charges in anyway, living the dream. (“I’m going to catch a thief!”)

Upstairs, Henri and Rousseau are locked in a showdown; Rousseau broke in and found the dagger under a mattress, and he knows the scandal-averse Marquis won’t be pressing charges. Henri admits Masters is his broker: She did her thesis on French antiquities, so he hired her to sell off the family’s heirlooms as quietly as possible. He had no idea his wife had turned to robbery to recapture their old wealth. That was Chadwick’s territory, and blood left inside the dagger’s sheath proves it. When the Marquise found out he’d killed the scout and threatened to turn him in, he killed her, too — but not before she got in one good stab with the dagger.

The times are also a-changing for Booth and Brennan. Booth’s vision has been blurry lately, and he isn’t coping very well with the idea he might need glasses, which sounds like it was ripped from a page of my third-grade autobiography — until you consider the fact that Booth’s perfect vision helped make him a good sniper. It’s who he is. When denial fails him, Booth takes his wife’s advice and sneaks off to the eye doctor, claiming he just wants to prove Brennan wrong. He comes back with glasses. Brennan loves the glasses. (Same.) In a last-minute twist, Booth’s eyes actually do go back to normal; it looks like he just had some fluid behind the retina. Come back soon, temporary eye condition. We need those glasses.

Now back to Ghostbusters! Miniature earthquakes seem to be following Hodgins, rattling tables and knocking over buckets wherever he goes. Hodgins blames fault lines under the Jeffersonian, but Daisy thinks he might have a poltergeist on his hands. She saw Sweets once, she says, after his death, and it helped her move on; maybe someone is trying to send Hodgins a message. That someone is Hodgins. Daisy does a little investigating and finds traces from the rubber on his shoes on one of the tables that mysteriously rattled — he kicked the table without realizing it. Hodgins still doesn’t have any feeling in his legs, but his muscles, which have been worked to death lately by his new physical therapist, are starting to spasm. Who ya gonna call for your Thursday night pick-me-up? Hodgins’ face right now.

Bits and pieces:

• “I would’ve thought that someone who’s convinced that alien beings built Stonehenge would be more open to the paranormal.”
• “I am not puffy, I’m FINE.”
• “How was your afternoon…at…the…French…Embassy?”
• “Look, I’m tired. My sadistic physical therapist worked me to the bone this morning, and the last thing I want to do right now is think about Patrick Swayze trying to send me a message!”
• “If you’ve been in here playing Ghostbuster, I’m telling you, all it’s going to do is make me want to eat a giant marshmallow.”
• “I still don’t understand why you’re talking like that.”