Temperance "Bones" Brennan - Character History

Character History

Temperance "Bones" Brennan is a forensic anthropologist who works in the Medico-Legal lab at the fictional Jeffersonian Institute in Washington, D.C. She received her Ph.D. from Northwestern University, as stated in "The Girl in the Fridge". She has three doctorates, as referred to by Dr. Jack Hodgins in the episode "The Parts of the Sum in the Whole", in anthropology, forensic anthropology and kinesiology; it is implied that most of her work at the lab was related to either long-dead bodies or victims of genocide.

Her occasional contract work for the FBI shifted the focus of her work. She was paired with FBI Special Agent Seeley Booth, and helped to solve two difficult cases; since then, they have worked together almost exclusively on modern-day murder cases.

Brennan works with a group of other well-qualified colleagues, including the entomologist Jack Hodgins, her boss and forensic pathologist Camille Saroyan, forensic artist Angela Montenegro, and a host of eager graduate students. Booth refers to her crew of colleagues as "squints", because they come to crime scenes and squint at evidence. He is also responsible for her nickname, "Bones". As of season one it can be determined that Brennan is at least 30 years old because in the first season finale she mentioned that her parents went missing over 15 years ago, and states that she was born in 1976, also she has said numerous times that they disappeared when she was 15 years old. In "The Death of the Queen Bee" it is revealed that her then-current age is 33 years.

First mentioned in season 1, Brennan has a love of dolphins, which she shared with her late mother: in the season one finale, "The Woman in Limbo", Brennen examines a custom-made belt with a dolphin on the buckle, which had belonged to her mother, and which she mentions having once borrowed without asking first. Brennan's love of dolphins is highlighted again in season 2 episodes "The Titan on the Tracks", "The Killer in the Concrete" and "Stargazer in a Puddle", when she mentions the constellation Delphinus, (the Dolphin), her and her mother's favorite. In season 6, "The Doctor in the Photo", she is shown to wear a dolphin ring.

In "Mummy in the Maze", Brennan exhibited ophidiophobia when confronted with snakes, but later only shows a moment of fright when confronted with another snake in "The Mastodon in the Room". She takes note of this, voicing her observation that she only seems to lose her head around snakes when Booth is also "there to be jumped upon", and also she mentions that she once had a pet snake during high school.

In season one, in "A Man on Death Row", Dr. Brennan expresses her stance on the death penalty; "I believe in the death penalty. There are certain people who shouldn't be in this world. The people who hacked hundreds of innocent children to death in Rwanda; beheaded them at their desks at school! The people who did that, they should be executed." In "The Woman at the Airport", Dr. Brennan is shown to have a strong dislike for plastic surgeons, believing them to be no more than "glorified butchers with medical degrees", and this dislike is voiced again in season 4, in "Cinderella in the Cardboard". In "The Woman in the Car", Dr. Brennan reveals that her third doctorate is in kinesiology, a field that would allow her and Angela to unravel how one of the bodies that had been found had been killed.

In season two, she expressed the desire to get a pet pig, whom she would have named "Jasper". Brennan's expertise in kinesiology would again prove its worth in "The Truth in the Lye" (she could tell that one of the murder suspects was pregnant just from having observed her gait), in "The Girl with the Curl" (she could tell if one of the young beauty pageant contestants was suffering from scoliosis just by watching them perform on stage), and in "The Woman in the Sand" (while undercover with Booth, she was able to tell Booth exactly how to beat his opponent from just having watched his moves). In "Judas on a Pole", she and her brother are identified as having the same blood type, blood type O. In "Glowing Bones in the Old Stone House", she is shown to be a good cook: Booth's comment on her mac and cheese is that he'd "like to be alone with it."

In the season 3 episode, "Mummy in the Maze", it is revealed that Brennan's favorite superhero is Wonder Woman, and that she always goes as Wonder Woman to the Jeffersonian's Halloween party. In "The Baby in the Bough", it is revealed that Brennan is a registered foster parent, at her brother's request, to take in his stepdaughters in case anything should happen to him and his girlfriend.

In season 5, in "The Death of the Queen Bee", when asked if she'd had a pet rat, Brennan discloses that she, in fact, had a pet mouse, snake and some spiders. During her time at Burtonsville high school, her only friend was the school custodian, Ray Buxley, with whom she would enjoy long, in-depth conversations on life and death, and who would also provide her with dead animals to dissect (Brennan having set out to become a forensic anthropologist,) and who would later be one of her books' biggest fans (she having named the killer in her first book, Bred in the Bone, after him). According to the Burtonsville high school on-line yearbook entry on Brennan, in her senior year, she was a member of the Chemistry club and Math club, her interests were chemistry and mathematics, and she was a National Merit Scholar and an Academic All Star.

In the season 6 episode, "The Blackout in the Blizzard", Brennan mentions her pet iguana for the first time. This same episode show that one of the number of scientific publications that Brennan reads is Medicinal Physics Quarterly, with one article on electrostatics and triboluminescence proving useful during the lab's power outage. Further concerning her pet iguana in "The Truth in the Myth", as a part of his rehab from alcohol abuse, Vincent Nigel-Murry made apologies for, among other things, having borrowed her iguana one night, wearing him as a hat for a party; after his confession, she comments that he must having taken good care of her iguana as she has observed nothing wrong with him (the iguana); she further expresses some surprise that Vincent Nigel-Murry was able to get her iguana to stay perched atop his head.

In season 8, The Tiger in the Tale, Booth mentions to Sweets that Dr. Brennan once took Peyote with Native Americans.