Why Bones Has No Ghosts Despite Featuring Supernatural Elements

Logic and the supernatural constantly find themselves at odds in our world. People don't like to have the two streams cross, and honestly, the franchise I borrowed that saying from strains under that weight sometimes. It's a delicate dance to try and bring together a grounded, real-feeling world, and acknowledge that there are going to be things we just don't know at every turn. That's a struggle the people who make "Bones" are all too aware of, and they've had a lot of time to think about it, even executive producer Michael Peterson talked about grappling with the "supernatural" side of "Bones," and whether they ever considered making "Ghost Sweets" a thing in the final epsiode.

"Bones" fans are a dedicated lot, and the procedural format could have forced the show into the crowded ranks of shows about solving a case of the week. While every episode can be a lot of science, there are some times when the logic can overlap with truly fantastic elements that make the viewer question which side has more to do with the case at hand. Many fans used that occasional supernatural tilt to make sense of a creative decision the "Bones" team made in killing off John Francis Daley's Lance Sweets during the series' run. Michael Peterson thought long and hard about the decision, even mentioning the possibility to TV Line in an interview, and concluded that having a medium play such a big role in the series finale was enough spooky time for them.

"The ghost thing is kind of confusing in the 'Bones' world where we are so much about logic and science and reality, but we do have these moments of the supernatural," the producer explained. "And we felt like we had already played that card for this episode with everything that happened with Avalon. So to go any further than that made it feel like more of a ghost show than our show actually is."

As we mentioned before, there's already a clairvoyant character running around this world, and a host of other strange occurrences that can't be hand-waved away by science. Ghosts though? It's a little past the point of no return for the creative team behind "Bones," so they chose to forego something that fans would have absolutely eaten up with a spoon. John Francis Daley's departure from the show is something that caught most viewers completely off guard, so much so that they crafted these elaborate fan theories to explain his absence or to make sense of it in the world of the show.

It's not the first time the internet banded together behind an enticing fan theory, and it won't be the last by a long shot. There's just something appealing about the viewers of a show latching onto some small detail that completely reframes everything that comes before it and might even add some rewatch value to a fan-favorite. (To be fair to the people who crafted the idea of "Ghost Sweets," well played because I stared out my window for about eight minutes upon doing some digging on the subject, it's the best kind of fan speculation!) But, that's just it, it's all of us at home trying to grapple with a decision that we either do not agree with or makes us sad, and expecting him to show up like the Ghost of Mysteries Past might have been a losing proposition from the word go. We're always going to grapple with how to explain the world around us, in this case, it extends to the world inside our TV screens.