No crime scene this week, no body dump … we begin with biohazard containment.
A blogger has been killed by an unknown pathogen and dumped in a pile of veterinary waste. Her fiance, a source in the pharmaceutical industry, and a drug-developing horse owner, Bryan Fuller, are the links and suspects. After it is determined that the pathogen is not airborne everyone relaxes a bit, but upon moving the body Dr. Arastoo Vaziri is pricked by a hidden needle, infected with the same disease that killed the blogger, and it is a race against time to identify the disease, find the killer, and acquire a cure. All the rest is window-dressing, which is, alas, a problem, even though the episode does successfully tug at our heartstrings to the point of moving us like the empathetic little marionettes we are.
This has me thinking less of Kleist and more of Schiller. My thoughts on ‘Bones’, this episode, and Schiller’s “On the Pathetic” as a lens through which to view such television follow.