Seven months after having last seen each other, the team reassembles to assist Cam in a controversial case that could make or break her career.
Tropes
- Beware the Silly Ones: Brennan kicks the ass of several armed rebels using nothing but a shovel and a mean right hook.
- Convicted by Public Opinion: Cam is in danger of her career imploding because she can't positively identify the remains of a child skeleton as that of a young boy who was kidnapped several years earlier.
- Call-Back: Booth says he has reflexes like a jungle cat. Brennan replies that he should go with "like a flea" because they have incredibly fast reflexes. At the end of the episode, he says he hopes the kidnapper dad will run so he can hit him "like a flea".
- Double-Meaning Title: The episode deals with the team getting back together and examining the motivations that had split them up and the problems this had caused. Unlike most episodes however, the case has nothing to do with mastodons. It instead involves the body of a young boy, and as the episode is entering its last few minutes with not even a mention of mastodons you find yourself thinking "Aren't they ignoring the Mastodon in the Room?". Then in one of the final shots, the team returns to their old lab — which in their absence has been turned into an exhibit room for the Jeffersonian — which features an actual mastodon.
- The Elevator from Ipanema: Lampshaded. Sweets is playing "The Girl from Ipanema" on the piano when Caroline calls him to persuade him to give up his 10-Minute Retirement:Sweets: I'm on sabbatical.
Caroline: Doing what, installing elevators? Because I can hear the music. - Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Caroline, as lampshaded by Booth.Booth: She's a nice person, y'know, underneath all the... not nice.
- Missing Child: The case that kicks off the events of the episode concern a two year-old boy named Logan who went missing months beforehand and the discovery of a body the media believes is him. It's actually the body of a Chinese boy and it turns out Logan was alive the whole time after being kidnapped by his father.
- Missing White Woman Syndrome: Part of the tragedy regarding the Victim of the Week: a Chinese immigrant who died yet went unnoticed because it wasn't newsworthy. In contrast, the Caucasian Logan Bartlett received huge media coverage and public outcry over Cam being unable to confirm the body's identity or not.
- Police Are Useless: How else do you justify Putting the Band Back Together? Apparently Logan's father was capable of hiding his son from law enforcement for months...despite literally being Booth's first suspect simply by looking over the Missing Child file and statistics (generally kidnappings are committed by someone the victim knows unless its otherwise random).
- Putting the Band Back Together: The whole purpose of the episode: Brennan and Daisy went to the Maluku Islands, Booth's in Afghanistan, Hodgins and Angela are in Paris, Cam's still in DC, Sweets is on sabbatical, and the interns have either taken new positions at other places, lost the funding for their scholarship, won the lottery, or in a clinic. But the core team returns (with Caroline's urging) to help save Cam's job.
- Seeking the Missing, Finding the Dead: Inverted. Initially its believed the body of a child found is a missing boy named Logan until proven otherwise. At the end of the episode Booth Lampshades how they always wait until they find the body and opts to look for Logan. Which he ends up doing by figuring out it was the boys own father who took him from his ex-wife.
- Team Mom: As will be made clear by the end of the episode, Caroline is the one who gets everyone back together to save Cam's careers and all their relationships. She's the lynchpin, though everyone else thinks they're the lynchpin.
- What the Hell, Hero?: Cam gives a brief one to Bones for her decision to go to the Maluku Islands with Daisy for the being the catalyst for the team falling apart. Somewhat a case of Misblamed as Booth was already on the fence about going to Afghanistan and it there was no real reason for Hodgins and Angela to leave beyond not wanting to "break in" a new anthropologist and FBI agent.
