(Spoiler alerts re: last season’s ending)

As a longtime Bones fan, I was livid at last season’s cliffhanger. It felt like crass manipulation, a way to keep viewers hooked throughout the summer. Initial online reactions echoed my fury: Booth acted in a way that was completely uncharacteristic; he would never hurt Bones that way. We’ve spent eight seasons watching him love her and coax her out of her shell and help her acknowledge that she actually has emotions. For him to then allow a serial killer to extort him into devastating her seemed completely inconsistent with the Booth fans know and love.

And then, of course, there’s the issue of Pelant, the aforementioned serial killer, a man so diabolically brilliant that he apparently has cameras and microphones at every single location anyone from the Jeffersonian might possibly visit, and somehow monitors all these camers in real time. A man so diabolically brilliant that he can pick out five random people in a park and somehow find out who they are and where they live, so he can kill them at some future date if Booth doesn’t give in to his demands.

Sorry, Bones writers: You jumped the shark (a phrase I had to look up, even though I had an idea what it meant) with the introduction of Pelant back in season 7. You took a flying nosedive into the beast’s maw with the season 7 ending, and I don’t even know how to describe what you did throughout season 8. The only reason I kept watching was because of the Booth-Bones relationship (and the fact that The Following came on right after Bones, so I had an incentive to turn the television on); the cases got increasingly silly, even for a show that’s had some bizarre premises for murder all along. (I think most murder-solving shows do, though; back when I watched the CSI franchises, I felt the same way. I remember being irritated with a difficult coworker one day and realizing that if life were a television show, this person would end up dead and everyone in the department would be a suspect. I think I freaked some people out when I voiced this, but I meant it not as any kind of expression of murderous intentions. Rather I meant to criticize how cheap life is on these shows, how much they sometimes trivialize the severity of murder.)

Over the summer, the ire of many fans seems to have weakened, at least judging by the tenor of posts on the Bones Facebook page: people are thrilled, can’t wait to see what will happen, are eagerly and anxiously awaiting tonight’s episode.

Well, not this Bones fan. I’m not going to watch. I’ll read the recaps online afterward, and based on those, I’ll decide whether I want to bother with this season or write off a show that I used to love. Maybe I’m overreacting. I’d keep this to myself (or a Facebook status gripe), except for the following:

As a fiction writer, I’m very interested in watching the interplay between fan expectations and the show’s writers. I’ve stopped reading certain book series for the same reasons I’m ready to bail on Bones. Does that mean the author has failed me? Not necessarily…the author has his or her own vision to which s/he needs to stay true. Is it different for a television show, though? Who “owns” the characters? Should fans have a say in what happens? What if fans are more invested in the characters than the writers are (as seems to me the case with Bones)? Should the writers consider what fans want? And do they have a responsibility to their viewers to deliver, if not what we want, at least what seems consistent with and faithful to the characters in which both writers and fans have invested eight seasons?

I don’t think there are necessarily answers, but these questions have been interesting for me to contemplate.