The Bones Episode That Got Pulled After A Real School Shooting

Throughout its 12-season run, Hart Hanson's "Bones" acquired a reputation for basing its bizarre plot lines on astonishingly real events. For the investigative crew at the Jeffersonian Institution, the stranger (and, quite often, the grislier) the better.

"Bones" did, however, have a threshold. Obviously, being a network series, it could only go push so far with the blood and guts (though, to be fair, it pushed about as far and as hard as any network show of its era). Also holding Hanson and his writers back just a tad was the audience's goodwill. Though people loved "Bones" for its gallows sense of humor and gory spectacle, they were just as enamored of the characters. From the central relationship between Emily Deschanel's Bones and David Boreanaz's Seely Booth to the camaraderie and romances shared by their deep bench of subordinates, the show treated its dedicated fan base as part of an endearingly twisted family. So, while viewers were always on guard (if not positively giddy) for stomach-turning crime scenes, they weren't necessarily looking for the ripped-from-the-headlines sensationalism of "Law & Order" and its ilk.

Hence, if real life threatened to sour viewers' enjoyment of the latest "Bones" episode, Hanson and the network weren't opposed to shuffling the order around to keep from troubling fans. Because some tragedies are simply too excruciating to bear in the moment.

And this is how a season 2 episode got delayed until season 3.

Hardcore Boners undoubtedly noticed something was up late in the show's second season when, during the "Bones" episode "Spaceman in a Crater," entomologist Jack Hodgins (T.J. Thyne) mentions that his colleague and lover, forensic artist Angela Montenegro (Michaela Conlin), previously rejected his proposal of marriage. This came as news to viewers. But what might've seemed like indifferent storytelling at the time was actually the result of an episode getting yanked from broadcast earlier in the season.

"Player Under Pressure," in which an Atlantic State University basketball player is discovered crushed to death in an arena grandstand, got pulled in response to the Virginia Tech shooting in 2007. Though the situations are obviously very different, the awful scale of the attack (32 people were killed) and the fact that it happened on a college campus carried the potential to jar viewers from what was meant to be a one-hour escape from their workaday lives. No one, particularly people who lived close to Virginia Tech or perhaps knew someone even tangentially affected by this tragedy, wanted this awfulness on their mind.

Hanson eventually found a home for "Player Under Pressure" in the middle of the series' third season. To ensure it fit as seamlessly as possible, the writers added a scene in which coroner Camile "Cam" Saroyan (Tamara Taylor) busts Angela and Hodgins for having sex in a Jeffersonian storage room.

For "Bones" completists, the original and updated versions of the episode are included on the season 3 DVD set. They're reminders of how the show balanced its wildest grand guignol impulses with a grounded sense of humanity.