A Boy in the Tree

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“A Boy in the Tree”
Bones episode
Episode no. Season 1
Episode 3
Written by Hart Hanson
Directed by Patrick Norris
Guest stars Toby Hemingway as Tucker Pattison,
Kayla Mae Maloney as Camden Destry,
Avis Wrentmore as Melodee Destry,
Marlene Forte as Ambassador Olivos,
Tom Dugan as Headmaster Ronson,
Jose Zuniga as Mickey Santana and
Samual Carman as Nestor Olivos
Production no. 1AKY01
Original airdate September 27, 2005
Episode chronology
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"The Man in the S.U.V." "The Man in the Bear"
List of Bones episodes

"A Boy in the Tree" is the third episode of the first season of the television series, Bones. Originally aired on September 27, 2005 on FOX network, the episode is written by Hart Hanson and directed by Patrick Norris. The plot features FBI Special Agent Seeley Booth and Dr. Temperance Brennan's investigation of a teenage boy's remains found inside an exclusive private school.

Contents

[edit] Summary

Special Agent Seeley Booth brings Dr. Temperance Brennan and her assistant Zack Addy to an exclusive preparatory school, where a body has been found hanging from a tree. They retrieve the body and return to their lab at the Jeffersonian Institution in Washington, D.C., where they confirm that the body belongs to a teenage boy. Dr. Jack Hodgins determines that the boy died 10 to 14 days earlier.

As Booth asks for a list of students from the headmaster of the school, Brennan calls to tell him of the cochlear implant she found in the victim's ear. She informs him that they will be able to identify the victim by tracing the serial number on the device. The victim is a student of the school, whose name is Nestor Olivos, and is the only son of the Venezuelan ambassador. The team finds it odd that Nestor's hyoid bone is broken, as the hyoid of an adolescent should be flexible and almost unbreakable.

While the school's headmaster and its head of security are adamant that Nestor had committed suicide, Nestor's mother, the Venezuelan ambassador, urges Dr. Brennan to find the truth and believes that Nestor had been murdered. The central mystery of the case is whether Nestor killed himself or was murdered.

Based on the Tabinid maggots's pupal casing, Hodgins determines that Nestor ingested a heavy dose of ketamine, a dissociative anesthetic, before he died. However, the team cannot be certain if the boy had taken the drug involuntarily but Dr. Brennan is able to give a scenario of Nestor's death involving the ketamine. Combined with the ketamine, the choking would have caused Nestor to regurgitate stomach acids, which would have been trapped in the throat and weakened the hyoid bone. The weight of Nestor's body could then break his hyoid.

In addition to the forensic evidence, Dr. Brennan and Agent Booth find DVD recordings of sexual activities, which they discover had led to blackmail. Nestor's classmates Tucker Pattison and Camden Destry had set up a video camera facing Nestor's bed. After Tucker used a video recording to blackmail Camden's mother, he and Camden decided to blackmail Nestor as well. However, when Nestor decided to inform the headmaster of Tucker and Camden's blackmail attempt, they drugged Nestor and hung him on a tree. Dr. Brennan and Agent Booth are able to prove that Nestor was murdered.

[edit] Music

The episode featured music by the following artists[1]: -

[edit] Production details

 This article or section uses citations that are either broken or outdated.
This article or section uses citations that link to broken or outdated sources, and are deemed unreliable. Please improve the article or discuss this issue on the talk page. Help on using footnotes is available. This article has been tagged since March 2008.

The episode was written and filmed prior to "The Man in the S.U.V", which was aired as the series' second episode.[2][3] The story of "A Boy in the Tree" was conceived to explore the differences between the characters Temperance Brennan and Seeley Booth. Hart Hanson, writer of the episode, describes Brennan as "a product of top-notch private schools" while Booth is "a product of public schools and the down and dirty education of the US Army."[4]

[edit] Response

On its original airdate in the Tuesday 8:00 pm ET timeslot, the episode attracted 7.57 million viewers with 5.8% household rating and 9% household share.[5] Fox ordered a full season of Bones after the airing of the first three episodes had Bones ranked consistently in first place among the key demographics in the Tuesday 8:00 pm ET timeslot.[6]

[edit] References

  1. ^ Bones Season 1 music
  2. ^ Bones' episode list, Official site of Bones.
  3. ^ Production codes for "The Man in the S.U.V." and "A Boy in the Tree" are 1AKY02 and 1AKY01 respectively.
  4. ^ Hanson, Hart, "Writer's Block: A Boy In The Tree", Official site of Bones. Retrieved on July 7, 2007.
  5. ^ Berman, Marc, "Primetime Tuesday Ratings: ABC and NBC Share Dominance; Strong Start for ABC's Commander in Chief", Mediaweek.com, September 28, 2005. Retrieved on July 7, 2007.
  6. ^ Fox Broadcasting Company, "Fox orders full seasons of the hit series 'Bones' and 'The War at Home'", The Futon Critic, October 12, 2005. Retrieved on July 17, 2007.

[edit] External links

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