#But sometimes I'm like “oof that beat was choppy it reminds me of my four year old fanfics”

[irenespring]

Rewatching Bones and the season 1 writing is sure something. There are a lot of scenes where I notice writing...areas for improvement...similar to the ones I find in my own writing, which is weird to see in a professional show.

And s1e21 is so interesting to me. At first I thought it was actually very brave/progressive to have the plot twist be that the tragically suffering Brave Soldier Team assassinated a family of civilians. It was especially surprising because after most of the dialogue around the war could have been pulled by from a DoD press release. Hodgins, a conspiracy theorist, is the only firm anti-war perspective. He states his straw-man arguments and his big Character Building Moment is when he "finally" shuts up about the injustices of the war. So having Hodgins validated by the soldier team's big hero action being a war crime seemed very brave.

But then as the episode went on I got the impression that using the war crime plot twist actually made the episode an especially clever piece of propaganda. By including the war crime, the show can't be accused of ignoring civilian casualties. They get points from the liberals in the audience, while still using every trick they have to exonerate the soldier who killed the civilians and the US military as a whole.

Charlie, the young soldier who killed the family and was later killed by friendly fire is portrayed as: young, inexperienced, panicky, undertrained, and arrogant. His actions are waved away as just a mistake by a freaked out kid. Surely, a proper soldier who received complete military training and knew not to charge forward and instead wait for a command from his superior would never have killed those civilians, right? So in that way, the civilian deaths were not the military's fault. The military's image takes a hit for not properly training the kid, but they couldn't have been expected to correct his temperament, of course. War is war, it isn't the US' fault. It's frankly an extraordinary writing feat given that Charlie was literally wearing a uniform, killing the family with his government-assigned weapon, and acting in a United States military operation. Just in case you weren't convinced, the writing moves on VERY quickly from the deaths of the family. They have like five minutes of mention, tops. After that the show goes back to the REAL problem here, who is killing Americans to cover up this unfortunate accident.

Additionally, the military is seen as a wonderful force for justice. An ally to those looking to expose its dirty secrets. You know---the opposite of what would actually happen. Based on real events, the United States would classify any information the Jeffersonian team reveal and demand their secrecy. But when Booth shows up to arrest a high-ranking officer in a civilian court, the central military authority figure says "we are cooperating fully with Agent Booth, [the officer] will not disgrace us." It's a line so stilted and unrealistic that I almost laughed. The line gets a lot of emphasis in the scene, for good reason. It's the big propaganda message distilled: the United States military is an ethical force that makes mistakes but is always acting in the service of truth and justice (as they say in Chernobyl: "our goal is the happiness of all mankind"....in that show it's meant to be an ironic statement about government failure and cover-up, but in this episode I could imagine it being said earnestly, word-for-word). Thus, people who go against Truth and Justice---by killing civilians or covering up those civilian murders---are either outliers or traitors.

It creates a separation between the tragedies of war and the US government. The final theme is what I imagine the US military desperately wanted liberals to pivot to: war bad, US military good. As long as you don't think too hard about why the war started and was happening, you too can oppose the war but still fall in line and stay the fuck out of our way! Therefore the seemingly subversive plot-line ends up fusing nicely with the earlier rhetoric about the Iraq war being justified and any protest against it being disrespectful to the troops.

So in the end, s1e21 pulls of a very impressive stunt: they use a fictional war crime committed by the US military as a propaganda tool for the US military. It works because the whole episode is built to divide the reality of an action from the perpetrators of said action. Really a shining example of taking the concept of passive voice and running with it. Kudos to the writing team, a very interesting example of poli sci cognitive dissonance in the early-mid 2000s.