The fresh (by Brennan's standards) remains of a female underground boxer are discovered in the Mojave desert. It turns out to have been a mob hit over her wanting to get out, clearing her last opponent of potential manslaughter charges.
Tropes
- Actor Allusion: The episode combines David Boreanaz's role of Angel (who also spent time in Vegas) with a role Angel himself played as a vampire stuck in the fifties, rat-pack style. Booth spikes his hair up, dons greaser clothes and suspenders, faking a Bronx accent outta Guys and Dolls. He even briefly sports a Guys & Dolls t-shirt before taking up the role.
- Awesomeness by Analysis: Booth ends up forced into a bare knuckle boxing match with a man six inches taller and fifty pounds heavier than him. In boxing terms, this is a Kobayashi Maru. Bones gets him out of it by detailing all of the man's weaknesses, visible to her thanks to reverse engineering her forensic anthropology. Injuries would make a person do X, so doing X means a person has this injury.
- Blood Sport: This isn't just a boxing episode, this is an underground, illegal, bare knuckle boxing episode. The blood flies as Booth fights a man twice his size.
- The Boxing Episode: Booth (Under the alias Tony Scallion) participates and wins in an illegal fight club.
- Continuity Nod: Booth was previously established as having a past gambling problem in The Soldier on the Grave... and now he's investigating a pair of murders in Vegas.
- Fanservice: The episode puts Bones in a Little Black Dress, and Booth in a wife beater posing as a boxer.
- Ham-to-Ham Combat: Boreanaz and Deschanel both have the time of their lives chewing the scenery pretending to pretend to be newly engaged gambling fight fans out of Joisey.
- Metaphorgotten: Hodgins says underground boxing is the modern-day panem et circenses, except they don't give you free bread.
- Undercover as Lovers: Booth and Brennan go to Las Vegas and pose as a "loosely committed" couple. (Read: Brennan nixed the idea of marriage because she doesn't believe in it — even when it's supposed to be fake for the investigation.)
- Used to Be a Sweet Kid: "Sloppy" Joe Nolan was an honest boxer, welterweight champion, but he got offered money, too much money, to throw a fight. Then he was muscle for a crime ring in Vegas, and hated himself.
- Viva Las Vegas!: The episode takes place in Vegas, although due to Booth's past the characters avoid casinos. Well, they try.
