To the surprise of no one, this season finale sees the return of insufferable super hacker Christopher Pelant. Pelant, who originally appeared in season 7 (really? Has it only been that long?) and then just kind of...stayed, has since become the series' resident Boring Invincible Villain. With each appearance his impossible deeds grow more absurd and the writers test the patience of their audience a little further.
The episode plot is whatever. Bodies of FBI agents show up. Turns out it's Pelant. He's using papers that Sweets wrote to plan the crime scenes. The FBI guys worked with Booth at some point. It's all very implausible and all very cliché and it works out about how you'd expect (people die, Pelant wins, audience asks why they still bother to watch the show, etc).
The problem, in a nutshell, is Pelant. He is no longer a character. He is merely a plot device that allows the writers to do whatever they like and explain it away with "Pelant did it". Want Hodgins to lose his fortune? Pelant can do that. Want to have Booth and Brennan get engaged then immediately have it called off to build drama? Don't bother writing something plausible, Pelant can do it! And my God, the ways he does those things are getting more ridiculous by the episode.
The most egregious example of Pelant's absurd magical tech power in this episode, and ever, is when he rigs up an impossible combination of nonexistent technology to create fake videos of a long dead FBI agent (meant as instructions to said dead agent's mentally unstable daughter). Pelant talks into a camera, and then his computer produces a video of the dead FBI agent replicating his speech. Face, voice and all. The actual actor, just right there, saying the stuff that Pelant says into his camera. What's that, you say? That's really dumb? Yes, yes it is. We are ostensibly meant to believe that Pelant whipped this perfect dead guy simulator together with his stunning genius, but it is simply not something that can be done. Pelant single handedly shatters the uncanny valley in creating these videos and no matter how smart he is or how much money he has, it's just not believable that anyone could create something like this (they really could have used it in Tron: Legacy, though).
Complaints have been made about Pelant's secret evil tech bunker in general, and I can't say I'm a fan either. I'll give the writers the benefit of the doubt as far as funding is concerned. He did steal an entire fortune from Hodgins the last time he showed up, after all. The internal logic of the secret tech lair isn't so much the problem though, it's more the fact that the writers thought it needed to happen at all. And it isn't just the stupid ideas. Pelant himself has far, far overstayed his welcome. He's a bad joke that never ends. As a character and as a villain he never was at the same level as previous big bads. Gormogon, in particular, was a high point that the series never managed to return to. The Grave Digger and others, while not quite as engaging, at least had something to offer. Pelant has nothing going for him. He's just an omniscient, omnipotent convenience. He lets the writers shuffle characters around, change relationships, and kill off whoever without actually having to write a reasonable sequence of events to lead to these moments. It's lazy and insulting.
I'd like to think it's no coincidence that the ratings and the reviews for this series have suffered since Pelant's appearance (though the awful ghost episodes and other season 8 mishaps can't have helped either). The Gormogon plot kept people interested. It was a mystery that the audience was actually intrigued by. Pelant is not a mystery, or even a real character, he's an annoying plot device. Let's move on already.
The episode plot is whatever. Bodies of FBI agents show up. Turns out it's Pelant. He's using papers that Sweets wrote to plan the crime scenes. The FBI guys worked with Booth at some point. It's all very implausible and all very cliché and it works out about how you'd expect (people die, Pelant wins, audience asks why they still bother to watch the show, etc).
The problem, in a nutshell, is Pelant. He is no longer a character. He is merely a plot device that allows the writers to do whatever they like and explain it away with "Pelant did it". Want Hodgins to lose his fortune? Pelant can do that. Want to have Booth and Brennan get engaged then immediately have it called off to build drama? Don't bother writing something plausible, Pelant can do it! And my God, the ways he does those things are getting more ridiculous by the episode.
The most egregious example of Pelant's absurd magical tech power in this episode, and ever, is when he rigs up an impossible combination of nonexistent technology to create fake videos of a long dead FBI agent (meant as instructions to said dead agent's mentally unstable daughter). Pelant talks into a camera, and then his computer produces a video of the dead FBI agent replicating his speech. Face, voice and all. The actual actor, just right there, saying the stuff that Pelant says into his camera. What's that, you say? That's really dumb? Yes, yes it is. We are ostensibly meant to believe that Pelant whipped this perfect dead guy simulator together with his stunning genius, but it is simply not something that can be done. Pelant single handedly shatters the uncanny valley in creating these videos and no matter how smart he is or how much money he has, it's just not believable that anyone could create something like this (they really could have used it in Tron: Legacy, though).
Complaints have been made about Pelant's secret evil tech bunker in general, and I can't say I'm a fan either. I'll give the writers the benefit of the doubt as far as funding is concerned. He did steal an entire fortune from Hodgins the last time he showed up, after all. The internal logic of the secret tech lair isn't so much the problem though, it's more the fact that the writers thought it needed to happen at all. And it isn't just the stupid ideas. Pelant himself has far, far overstayed his welcome. He's a bad joke that never ends. As a character and as a villain he never was at the same level as previous big bads. Gormogon, in particular, was a high point that the series never managed to return to. The Grave Digger and others, while not quite as engaging, at least had something to offer. Pelant has nothing going for him. He's just an omniscient, omnipotent convenience. He lets the writers shuffle characters around, change relationships, and kill off whoever without actually having to write a reasonable sequence of events to lead to these moments. It's lazy and insulting.
I'd like to think it's no coincidence that the ratings and the reviews for this series have suffered since Pelant's appearance (though the awful ghost episodes and other season 8 mishaps can't have helped either). The Gormogon plot kept people interested. It was a mystery that the audience was actually intrigued by. Pelant is not a mystery, or even a real character, he's an annoying plot device. Let's move on already.