Bones Season 4's Most Controversial Scene Has Somehow Gotten Worse With Age

During its run "Bones" was beloved by fans for its off-kilter mix of humor, crime, and horror. Typically, leads Emily Deschanel and David Boreanaz would engage in some witty banter immediately before the show unleashed some sort of upsettingly realistic cadaver, which made "Bones" a truly unique experience. The show's graphic corpses were the work of fake body specialists and brothers Kevin and Chris Yagher, who provided bodies, body parts, and all manner of viscera across 12 seasons of "Bones," and at times, they simply went too far.

There was the fresh body on "Bones" that grossed out producer Stephen Nathan, who removed a shot of a detached skull and spine from the season 7 episode "The Crack in the Code," for being "too horrible." Evidently, this particular body was a tad too fresh to be showcased extensively, and if you're not all that familiar with "Bones," that should tell you a lot about the show. This was a series where the freshness of an expired body was one of the main production considerations. Elsewhere, unbearable imaginary details led to a gross bathtub scene being cut and one body grossed out Zack Addy actor Eric Millegan.

But bodies weren't the only things that could push a "Bones" episode past the point of acceptability. The show ran for 12 seasons from 2005 to 2017, and as you might expect, there are aspects of the series that just haven't aged well. Specifically, an episode in season 4 featured a recurring debate that made light of a character's appearance on the show, and it's not great.

In season 4, episode 23 of "Bones," entitled "The Girl in the Mask," Temperance Brennan (Emily Deschanel) and her team of squinterns — an idea conceived by a real-life detective – analyze the head of a woman named Sachi which was discovered beneath a mask in a marsh. They're aided in their grizzly investigation by Japanese Doctor Haru Tanaka (Ally Maki). After meeting Haru for the first time, forensic specialist Angela Montenegro-Hodgins (Michaela Conlin) comments that she's unsure as to whether the doctor is a man or woman due to their androgynous appearance.

As the episode goes on, this becomes a point of debate among the team, with squint Jack Hodgins (T.J. Thyne) maintaining that the doctor is a woman while Angela claims the opposite. FBI psychologist Lance Sweets (John Francis Daley), meanwhile, urges that it doesn't matter either way. If only the writers had listened to the guy...

At various points, Haru is treated like some sort of curio, with pathologist Camille Saroyan (Tamara Taylor) staring at the doctor before being caught. But the ending really pushes the episode beyond the bounds of acceptability. After the central mystery is solved, the Jeffersonian team watches Haru pack up while continuing to speculate about the doctor's gender, seemingly conflating the concept with biological sex. Angela then decides to go in for a goodbye hug, reporting back to the team that "it" moved, presumably referring to the doctor's penis in a moment that was, I'm assuming, supposed to be funny but ended up being one of the most unfunny moments in the entire series — especially when viewed today.

"Bones" managed to upset fans with a controversial Zack Addy storyline, but "The Girl in the Mask" was offensive for entirely different reasons. 2009 might seem fairly recent, but in the nearly two decades since, there has been a lot of gender discourse. As unfortunate as it may be, the concept of being nonbinary or agender in 2009 just wasn't a mainstream idea, and "Bones" was very much reflecting that state of affairs in "The Girl in the Mask," an episode which continues to get worse with age.

Season 4 already pit the "Bones" showrunner against some angry fans, but"The Girl in the Mask" has proven controversial in a different way. In 2022, viewers took to Reddit to register their surprise and offense after rewatching the episode, asking questions such as, "Why are they being so insensitive about [Dr. Haru Tanaka's] gender?" Even those who noted that "we have come a long way in the last 10 years" and that they "wouldn't have known how to properly talk about or to address someone non-binary" at the time, also acknowledged that "even at that time, the team trying to 'guess' stuck out as gross."

It is worth noting that Lance Sweets mentions that Dr. Tanaka's visual style comes from the kei subculture, which is known for being theatrical and androgynous but also has multiple sub-genres within it. As such, it's not entirely clear whether the doctor would have been concerned with pronouns or even gender itself, instead simply preferring a certain aesthetic style. That certainly doesn't make the squints' obsession with anatomy any more palatable, though.

In an interview that occurred after the episode aired (via Looper), Japanese-American actor Ally Maki, who portrayed Haru, claimed that the "Bones" production team actually lowered her voice register in post-production. She added, "I thought it was hilarious that the three [characters] wanted to know, 'Man or woman, man or woman.' It was so important to them." The actor went on to say that, in Japan, "no one would really care" if they were to encounter someone with Haru's appearance, stating that it just "wouldn't even be an issue." Ultimately, Maki thought that "The Girl in the Mask" highlighted how Americans were more concerned with binary gender than the Japanese but stopped short of outright criticizing the show for its representation of Dr. Tanaka.

One thing that's clear is that if "Bones" was trying to make the Jeffersonian team look silly for their focus on Dr. Tanaka, it didn't work. The ongoing "joke" is clearly at the expense of the character and not the team, and it remains a low point in "Bones" history.