The Bones Season 1 Opening Credits Had Viewers Mixing Up Two Cast Members

A Reddit thread revealed that some "Bones" fans were a little confused by the season 1 credit sequence — and as a result, they mixed up two of the actors.

During the season 1 credits, for whatever reason, actor T.J. Thyne's name runs under an image of Emily Deschanel — who plays the show's lead character, Temperance "Bones" Brennan" — and these Redditors admitted that this was seriously baffling at the time. As the original poster u/camdoodlebop titled the thread (complete with a screenshot), "did anyone else as a kid used to think her name was TJ Thyne?" (To be fair, it's a pretty gender-neutral name.)

u/Chilly_0556 agreed and said they had that exact same issue: "YES lmao. I first watched Bones with my brother when I was like 10, he was 14 hahaha, we'd watch episodes together sometimes. It was funny when I actually started watching it again, and realised that wasn't her name." At least the people on the thread got an explanation; as fellow Redditor u/julientk1 pointed out, "In the season 1 commentaries, they address that people were so annoyed that the names didn't match up. That's why it was changed for season 2 on."

In case your "Bones" lore is a bit rusty, here's a refresher: Emily Deschanel and T.J. Thyne play very different characters on "Bones." As the show's namesake, Deschanel is one of the two leads (alongside David Boreanaz, who plays Temperance's professional partner and eventual husband, Agent Seeley Booth) and heads up the fictional Jeffersonian Institute, which studies forensic science in Washington D.C. to help solve particularly tricky cases alongside the FBI. Temperance is a bit humorless — whenever anyone on the show makes a pop culture reference, it sails directly over her head — but she's brilliant, and works directly with Booth and her Jeffersonian colleagues to solve both cold cases and recent crimes. 

As for T.J. Thyne, he plays Jack Hodgins, an entomologist (a bug scientist, basically) at the Jeffersonian who uses things like spores and mold to make forensic discoveries (and he's also able to give Booth estimated times of death for victims). Hodgins, who is secretly quite wealthy and an investor in the institute itself, is a funny, socially adept guy who's constantly making the aforementioned pop culture references that Temperance doesn't get. He ends up marrying Temperance's best friend Angela Montenegro (Michaela Conlin), who also works at the Jeffersonian and uses 3D technology to recreate victims' faces.

Here's a funny thing about people confusing Emily Deschanel and T.J. Thyne: The two of them are at the center of the "Bones" episode that IMDb says is the series' very best installment. In the ninth episode of season 2, titled "Aliens on a Spaceship," the Jeffersonian is hunting a serial killer known as "the Gravedigger," and the episode opens with a huge shock: Temperance and Hodgins are trapped inside a buried car with limited oxygen. To make matters worse, Hodgins is seriously injured.

As it turns out, the Gravedigger kidnapped Temperance — Hodgins was trying to tell Temperance something about the case and ended up getting hit by the car they're now buried in — and so Temperance comes to the rescue. Using her forensic expertise, she performs makeshift surgery on Hodgins' leg and somehow manages to hotwire the car in order to send a distress signal to Booth; luckily, the team is able to come and rescue both of them (though Hodgins is, understandably, traumatized by the experience and is afraid to even go to sleep for fear that he'll wake up in the car again). It's a truly terrifying episode, and thanks to the season 2 change to the credits, audiences definitely know who was playing who in it.

"Bones" is streaming on Hulu now.