First of all, I must say that I hate Bones far more than it probably deserves. To me it’s like watching high school kids pretending to be grownups with jobs. I hate the info-dumpy way the characters talk, and I especially hate the title character, who would be more believable if she were a human-like android than she is as an actual human being. So watching the Bones half of the proceedings did not exactly thrill me. And maybe it was just me, but Tom Mison (whose performances are already veering dangerously close to camp) seemed unusually over the top, which made the style-clash between the two shows more obvious. Abbie at least kept things grounded; cheers to Nicole Beharie.
The Sleepy Hollow half was marginally better, I think because SH can tolerate an injection of skepticism better than Bones can tolerate an infusion of the supernatural. General Howe once reconstituted was a pretty cool baddie. We got some nice Ichabod comedy in his outrage that no one realized he was dressed as John Adams. (“The waistcoat? It’s his signature!”) And it looks like the subplot with Jenny is finally going to get interesting.
Anyone else find it jarring that Booth and Mills turned out to have the same mentor?
Does anyone have an example of Emily Deschanel acting or sounding any different than what she does in Bones? I have seen her in Spider Man 2 as the receptionist that gets Petey fired, in award shows as a presenter, and five years of watching Bones. She should be cast whenever they need a creepy android.
Is Angela a witch? Because she took a headless corpse and somehow managed to extrapolate what his face looked like. I know she’s had some doozies before, but that’s gotta take the cake. Angelatron nothing, she’s got some sort of unholy relic hidden in her office, right?
Of the two shows Bones has more of a gross-out factor. That’s why I stopped watching it.
Things picked up when the army of the dead appeared.
Seems like the dead med student should be part of a vast conspiracy to bring on the end of days.
I figure in one draft of the script they found the head earlier. :smack:
The use of technology on Bones seems more impossible then the magic on Sleepy Hollow.
yes, very jarring that Booth and Abbie had the same mentor. Seemed forced and artificial.
yes, Angela is a witch because that was some outrageous bullshit right there. There is no way she could generate a face and THEN magically match to the portrait (WTF) database.
what about the “genetic” handwriting that Ichabod sold to Bones? Really?! He couldn’t have said he learned handwriting for the “historical society” by copying his ancestor’s works? As if Angela could actually have run that analysis anyway (see point 2, and insert the Monty Python joke of your preference)
At the very end of the episode Bones jolts awake in bed and says “I’m never eating space cakes again” or something similar.
Edit: Ah, I didn’t check the thread dates and didn’t realise the episode had already aired. I haven’t seen it yet, but I’m guessing from some of the above comments that they didn’t do any of those things?
I have never seen Sleepy Hollow, but I’ve seen every episode of Bones, and here’s my take;
It was disjointed and reeked of crossover - and I’ve never been a fan of specials like this, but it was decent enough to pass the time.
Bones itself is a silly show - and it’s not meant to be taken as a factual representation of how these people work. Angela’s skills are ridiculous, but I also feel they’re a shortcut to stuff that does occur in real life - albeit via several methods/people and takes considerably longer.
Emily’s tone and delivery is wooden as her character lacks social skills. She wasn’t as robotic as this in the early episodes - so it’s not her default acting chops. It’s probably the way she’s been told to act.
I won’t watch Sleepy Hollow - the main character annoyed me.
Bones annoys me, but I like the characters far more than the plots.
Finally watched it. It made me remember why I don’t watch Bones - the Bones part was really dull. Let’s science the shit out of the mystery - maybe that works for some, but I was really bored. It became interesting when it moved to Sleepy Hollow land and the corpse of General Howe got animated by Pandora. On a side note, it seems Season 3 has really shaken off the doldrums of Season 2. It’s approaching Season 1 quality these days, for which I am eternally grateful.
I’m a lapsed Sleepy Hollow fan and gave up on Bones a while ago. I think I’ll start watching SH again, that was a fun episode and reminded me why I picked it up in the first place. It was nice getting to visit Bones again, but I don’t think I’ll stay. That show needs to just wrap up. Didn’t they resolve the whole deal with Bones’ father like 2 or 3 seasons ago? And they had a big bad that was defeated? And I see they got another shrink to replace Sweets, but there’s too many unfamiliar faces and I don’t even remember what people’s names are any more.
Bumping this because I finally saw both parts of this (I watch on Hulu).
I found it interesting how the writers handled the clash between “cultures.” I thought that they would basically hit Brennan with the supernatural in a way that would be very hard if not impossible for even her to deny. But they didn’t. (Disclosure: I had never seen an episode of Sleepy Hollow before this. I thought about watching the pilot episode–also available on Hulu–but decided not to, so that I would receive the same introduction to the story that the Bones people did.)
Part 1 was largely science, not much else. You could tell that Mr. Crane had some sort of backstory, but Brennan wouldn’t have been able to tell that, since she’s bad at reading people. The only tricky part was when she discovered that his handwriting was identical to the historical document, but he was able to gloss that by providing an explanation just barely plausible enough to be accepted in the lack of anything better. In retrospect, Part 1 was pretty much what you would expect from the Bones universe.
Part 2 was very interesting, partly because of how the “culture clash” was handled. It was evident that Ichabod and his FBI partner didn’t want to take the time and trouble necessary to convince the Jeffersonian team of the existence of the supernatural. This turned out to be pretty easy, because the events relating directly to Gen. Howe unfolded in such a way that they never actually touched the Jeffersonian team. The only truly remarkable thing that Booth and Brennan actually saw was the discovery in the Capitol. And to Brennan, that was simply an astonishing historical and technological find, nothing more. I don’t believe that even Booth realized that the Sleepy Hollow team dealt with the supernatural–and he would have been far easier to convince. He understood that there was something going on, but all he knew was that for some reason, Abby didn’t want an official investigation. And since they both had had the same mentor, he was willing to go along with that.
There was never any need to convince Brennan of the supernatural, because she never saw or heard anything that needed to be explained that way.
It wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to turn out to be, but that’s not saying a whole heck of a lot because I thought it was going to be wretched. I thought the way the Bones characters were wedged into Sleepy Hollow was awkward. It would have been a lot more natural if, at the end of the first part, Booth and Brennan were riding back with Crane and Mills, but instead they did a weird kind of “maybe we’ll see you one of these days / hey, remember us from, like, five minutes ago?” thing. I hope they don’t do it again. Of course, one or both of these shows might bite the dust before they have the chance.
I caught a repeat of this at some point. I figured it might be like the old Pretender/Profiler crossovers.
Bones is still a mess, I see: Angela Montenegro did a facial reconstruction without a skull, early in the show, and they gave the corpse a name due to that. Then they spend much of the rest of the show looking for the skull while using the corpse’s name. That’s a whopper of a continuity error.
I’ve never really gotten into Sleepy Hollow and I guess I’m not going to. Another show trying to bluff its way through with zombies and silly characters, apparently.