The Bones Episode That Seemed To Eerily Predict A Real-Life Tragedy
Whenever a television series passes that fifth season threshold, it becomes vital for producers to keep things fresh without veering away from what viewers love about this particular show. This is especially true for law enforcement procedurals. You think there are only so many ways people can be killed, and a finite number of methods to solve said murders? Think again. And if you're a writer on one of these shows, you better think extra hard.
Over the 34-and-counting years of its existence, the "Law & Order" franchise (read our season ranking here) has addressed this issue by building episodes around actual, ripped-from-the-headlines crimes. It's gotten to the point that when a murder becomes national news, you immediately wonder how "Law & Order" will adapt it.
"Bones" used this model quite a bit during its 12-season run (which, per star David Boreanaz, had its share of clunkers), but also went in the exact opposite direction. Created by Hart Hanson in 2005, the punchy one-hour drama (much like "CSI") often came up with stranger-than-fiction, yet still relatively plausible mysteries and worked backwards. It was a how-dunnit, and the more elaborate the crime, the better. Alas, keep a show running long enough and you're bound to accidentally think up a corker of a murder that does, in some form or fashion, wind up happening in real life.
And there's at least one utterly grisly instance where the "Bones" team, much to their dismay, did precisely this. At least, that's what they thought.
Death served out of a can
During a press event in 2015, executive producer Michael Peterson revealed that the premise of the season 9 episode "The Mystery in the Meat," in which a murdered food scientist's body gets mutilated and canned for service in a school cafeteria, wasn't as outlandish as the writers initially thought. As Peterson told the media:
"We ... have the bad habit that when we write something, then it actually does happen in real life. There's one episode where a person was canned, and then shortly after writing it somebody died — I think it was at the Bumble Bee tuna factory — and was canned."
So Peterson was right and wrong. A worker at Bumble Bee Foods' Santa Fe Springs, California plant did indeed die after getting accidentally cooked in an industrial oven with six tons of canned tuna. That this is not a particularly speedy process made the death all the more gruesome (and cost Bumble Bee $6 million in a 2015 settlement).
What Peterson apparently didn't realize was that this incident occurred on October 12, 2012, a full year before "The Mystery in the Meat" aired on Fox. So, at least in this instance, his conscience may be scrubbed clean. If it wasn't his idea, it's highly likely someone in the writers' room read about the Bumble Bee death, and pitched it as a premise. Or maybe they were just unhealthily obsessed with conceiving of ways in which a human body could get canned. It's the kind of icky business that could make even Christopher Pelant blanch.