A Boy in a Bush

A Boy in a Bush is the fifth episode of the first season of Bones.
==Summary==
Looking for missing six year-old Charles Gregory Sanders, Zach's equipment finds in a suburban youth party field the badly degraded corpse of the barely four days dead boy. Meanwhile Dr. Goodman forces the team to attend a formal donors banquet, nightmarish torture for recluse Hodgins, who hides his industrialist family's immense wealth.
==Synopsis==
Special Agent Seeley Booth shows up at Dr. Temperance Brennan's lecture at American University. He tells her someone has found human remains in an adjacent field of a local mall, where six-year-old Charlie Sanders was believed to have gone missing. Booth needs Brennan's help to locate the remains and then determine if they are in fact those of their missing six-year-old.
Brennan, Booth, and Zack head to the field, where they find a small, decomposed body. Back in the lab at the Jeffersonian, Brennan, Zack, Angela Montenegro and Dr. Jack Hodgins determine that the body does belong to Charlie Sanders and they are probably looking for a pedophile.
Booth visits Charlie's mother, Margaret Sanders, and learns that Margaret has two other foster sons, Shawn and David Cook, but Charlie was her only biological child. As he leaves, Booth finds out that Charlie disappeared from the local mall and not the nearby park.
Brennan confronts Angela and asks her if she is considering leaving the Jeffersonian. Angela confides to her that this job is difficult for her and she is not sure what she is going to do. Zack is also having trouble working on such "small" remains so Brennan advises him to pull back emotionally from the case. When Brennan finds a hereditary genetic defect on Charlie's bones, Booth and Brennan confront Margaret with this information and learn that she is not Charlie's biological mother as she claimed.
Margaret tells them she took Charlie to save him from the foster care system after his mother died of a drug overdose, but did not have anything to do with his abduction and death. Brennan becomes angry at Booth when she learns he arrested Margaret for kidnapping, but Booth claims he had no choice. She wants Booth to let Margaret go so she, Shawn, and David can continue to be a family, but Booth remains resistant.
As Angela works on isolating the image of Charlie's abductor in the surveillance footage, she learns from Zack that Hodgins is extremely wealthy; his family runs the organization that is the single biggest donor to the Jeffersonian. Hodgins pleads to Booth and Angela to keep his family background a secret. He explains that he does not want to go to the banquet the team has been invited to because he will be outed by his family's rich friends and his life at the Jeffersonian will be forever changed.
Angela's isolated reflection of Charlie's abductor turns out to be his foster brother, Shawn. However, he was not the killer. By drawing upon her own experience as a child in the foster system, Brennan convinces Shawn to tell her the name of Charlie's killer. It was Edward Nelson, their neighbor. Booth arrests him for Charlie's sexual assault and murder, and arranges for Margaret to return to Shawn and David.
As the others are getting ready to go to the banquet, Booth comes in with work for Hodgins to do; saving him from having to go to the banquet.
==Cast==
===Main Cast===
*Temperance Brennan - Emily Deschanel
*Seeley Booth - David Boreanaz
*Jack Hodgins - T.J Thyne
*Angela Montenegro - Michaela Conlin
*Zack Addy - Eric Millegan
*Daniel Goodman - Jonathan Adams
===Guest Cast===
*Shawn Cook - Paul Butcher
*David Cook - Evan Ellingson
*Margaret Sanders - Natacha Roi
*Skyler Nelson - Maximillian Roeg
*Ellie Nelson - Kathleen M. Darcy
*Edward Nelson - Greg Raffelson
*Sara Johnston - Michelle Anne Johnson
*Capt. Kyle Henning - Paul Parducci
*Student #1 - Tiffany O'Hara
*Student #2 - Ryan Churchill
*Lab Worker - Kirsten Severson 
*Advocate - John Sanchez
*Arthur - Max Freeman
==Featured Music==
* "Some of Us" - Starsailor.
==Notes==
*This is the first time both Booth and viewers learn of Bones' history in foster care.
*This episode is the first mention of Booth's brother, Jared. He does not actually appear on the show until episode "The Con Man in the Meth Lab".
*The writers of Bones try to keep the murder of minors to a minimum and the sexual assault of minors nearly non-existent but in this episode, both apply.
*At the beginning of the episode, Booth talks about the FBI agent in Bones' book who is named 'Andy Lister'; in Kathy Reichs' books the homicide detective is called Andrew Ryan.
*Brennan tells Booth that after her parents' disappearance, she was in foster care until her grandfather got her out. Throughout the rest of the series, it is established that she stayed in foster care until she was of age, because she had no family besides her brother. Her brother was too old for foster care and chose to leave rather than take on the responsibility of becoming Brennan's legal guardian.
*When Zack tells Brennan that the remains of the young boy were the smallest he'd ever worked on, she tells him that she identifies bodies after the Waco Massacre, which happened in 1993. In The Woman in Limbo, Brennan mentions that she was born in 1976, which would have made her 17 in 1993. She couldn't have been identifying victims as a senior in high school.
*This case bears striking similarities to the horrific murder of James Bulger in Merseyside, UK in 1993.
*Angela, talking to Hodgins, mentions that he's annoyed by the government, "a conspiracy of dunces". She may be referring to 'A Confederacy of Dunces', a novel by John Kennedy Toole, published in 1980.
*When Booth fixes the video game controller, the system appears to be a Sega Genesis, and while the controllers aren't completely identifiable, they clearly have 2 joysticks, resembling a Playstation 2 controller.
==I don't know what that means==
*Zack says the thermal imager makes him look like the Great Gazoo. The Great Gazoo was a small green extraterrestrial on The Flintstones that only Fred Flintstone could see to help him and give him advice.
*Booth: "Angela didn’t get the same training that the rest of you got on, uh, planet Vulcan". The remark refers to the high intelligence and lack of emotions of Vulcans, such as Mr. Spock (Leonard Nimoy), on Star Trek.
==External Links==
Category:Episodes
Category:Season 1