000 - application

[centermusthold]

Name: Dr. Temperance Brennan
Series: Bones
Age: 29
From When?: Season 1, episode 19: “The Man in the Morgue.” As with inmates who don’t actually die in their canon, I’m going to change things up a bit and say Brennan was killed by Benoit instead of escaping. Also she was really really drugged and has no idea what deal she might have made prior to waking up in her room on the barge. After extensive thought on the subject and being told that she's dead, she’ll figure that she’s having some kind of bizarre coma dream and should go along with it until she wakes up.

Inmate/Warden: Warden. Brennan’s a good person who is passionate about the truth and putting badguys behind bars.
Item: a PDA

Abilities/Powers: Brennan has no supernatural abilities. But she does have an incredibly wide range of human abilities:

- Ridiculous I.Q. From a few numbers dropped on the show, I'd guesstimate that she's roughly in the 180-185 range.
- Ridiculous overeducation. Which, like her I.Q., she likes to wave in people's faces. She’s the most renowned forensics and anthropological expert on the East Coast, and one of only 52 certified forensic anthropologists in the country. She can tell age, gender, race, occupation, hobbies, cause of death, and many other things often with a cursory examination of a skeleton. Even when a person is still alive, she can see underlying injuries (even old ones), illnesses that affect physical deportment, and anthropological markers that even highly trained specialists like Booth miss. She can also analyze a room and its contents to understand the inhabitant from an anthropological standpoint.
- Ridiculous polylingualism (including Spanish, Portuguese, French, Latin, German, Arabic, and Mandarin, probably amongst others including Russian) and ability to tell the difference between regional accents (ie. Saudi v. Jordanian).
- Expert on various cultures, and though she herself is an atheist, she understands religious ritual and knows a lot about Christian, Muslim, traditional Chinese, Amish, and ancient pagan burial rites (almost certainly amongst others).
- Kickass martial arts skills. Good with a gun.
- Ability to go undercover (admittedly for ten minutes at a time with Booth to help her).
- Accomplished sailor, scuba diver, and writer. Decent singer. Amateur tightrope walker for some silly reason.


Personality: Brennan believes in truth. And that, in every way, defines her. She doesn’t believe in God, or the inherent goodness of mankind, or philosophy, and she absolutely hates psychology. But she believes deeply and passionately that the truth can be found; that it MUST be found, and only through truth can we build trust, relationships, and lives. She does not tolerate being lied to, and she does not tolerate people asking her to lie or pressuring her to skew her findings in a case.

And of course, she is completely honest. To the point where she’s off-putting and even offensive. She is incapable of sugarcoating anything. For instance, when they are questioning the wife of a suspected terrorist, Booth parrots the official line that it is not the FBI’s policy to target anyone based on race, but Brennan stridently interjects to say that the man was an Arabic Muslim – of course race plays a factor and it would be disingenuous to say it didn’t. She can also be quite condescending about her superior intelligence; though she hardly ever means to come off that way, her very frank way of putting things can make her seem incredibly arrogant. But as Booth says, what you see with Brennan is what you get, and that’s a rare quality and something in her that he admires.

She is also rational in every way. Her FBI-assigned therapist, Dr. Sweets, describes her as the perfectly logical being: capable even of committing murder if it could be rationalized to her. It is true that she coldly shoots a woman through the neck after that woman had shot Booth, and shoots and kills a man who is threatening Booth. But in the absence of immediate threat to herself or a loved one it’s hard to imagine Brennan committing even a very rational murder.

It’s closer to the truth that she is driven by emotions she doesn’t understand and maybe even fears, so she uses logic and technical jargon to keep people at bay, to prevent herself having to show those emotions. Being abandoned, outcast, and abused in her teenage years taught her that people cannot be relied upon, that everyone lies, and that when you open yourself up emotionally to someone, you usually wind up getting hurt. So she keeps all her emotions carefully guarded, and after years of doing this she has grown to fear the emotions themselves and to misunderstand them in others. Living people are a mystery to her, whereas the dead speak to her in ways that the living never do; she can look at a skeleton and know what type of person they were and how they lived their life. While it’s strongly hinted that she wants to form emotional connections, she excels at reducing everything to an equation, even romantic love. When Booth tells her that sex is about two people trying to occupy the same space at the same time, all Brennan can say is that the laws of physics preclude such a thing.

But as she repeatedly insists, she is not a sociopath, despite the fact that she can, at times, come across as one. She shows very little remorse when she wounds or kills someone that she feels deserves it, and even says that killing somebody wasn’t as bad as she thought it would be. When pursuing a suspect, she often gets more violent than necessary. She also has an almost scary ability to compartmentalize, and she says that after years and years of looking at corpses, she no longer sees the people they once were. Her way of dealing with the death she sees on a daily basis is to distance herself from it as much as possible – though she shows respect for the dead, she tries to show as little empathy as possible for them and their loved ones.

However, despite all her efforts, she often finds herself connecting deeply with the victims, and her obsession with the truth stems partially from her firm belief that everyone deserves to have their story told. So no matter what the consequences are to herself, she will always keep going until she has, as she says, put a face to every skull. Her job is her whole life, to the point where her idea of a vacation is going to Guatemala to identify victims of genocide. But she never puts herself ahead of the victims – she believes that people hearing their stories is far more important than people praising her for her work.

She has a habit of running into danger without backup. She will often wander into a suspect’s home or office with little to no regard for her personal safety, even when it’s completely unnecessary. She also spends many of the early episodes convincing Booth that he needs to bring her out into the field with him instead of keeping her in the lab. And she is constantly nagging him to give her a gun. In part, all this probably stems from her obsessive need to have the truth, but to a certain extent she may also enjoy the excitement that comes with the danger of being a field agent. Having been hunted by the Chinese army and taken prisoner by Death Squads, hanging out in a lab all day probably seems annoyingly tame and like she’s not doing enough. Furthermore, after she beats up a gang lord and is told by Angela that she ‘needs therapy,’ Brennan explains that she enjoys hurting people who intimidate others and derive power from fear, as a way of getting revenge on the soldiers who imprisoned and psychologically tortured her. Her desire for danger and violence may partially stem from that desire for vengeance.

Due to Brennan’s obsessive work ethic, she is almost entirely cut off from popular culture. Every pop culture reference – even to such well-known things as The X-Files or The Silence of the Lambs gets a confused, “I don’t know that means.” She constantly messes up famous catchphrases, slang terms, cop terms, etc. She is socially awkward and often takes things a bit too literally.

Politically, Brennan is fairly conservative, and believes very firmly in the death penalty. She has gone toe-to-toe with some of the most horrible people on the planet, and honestly believes that many of them do not deserve to be in the world. She also tends to have a very black-and-white view of things, and draws no moral distinctions between killers. Whether it’s premeditated or a crime of passion doesn’t matter to her. The only types of killing she seems to see differently are soldiers killing each other in battle and murder committed in self-defense.

She is also very competitive, especially with Cam, and has been known to, on occasion, start arguments over whether you can get more information from flesh (Cam’s specialty) or bone (Brennan’s specialty). And she can sometimes be a bit snooty when she says something in technical sciency-speak and Booth fails to understand her.

There’s a playful side to her, which Booth usually bears the brunt of. She often whispers sarcastic things to him at inappropriate moments, smacks him (affectionately) with evidence, and in one instance even makes spooky noises while they’re trekking through a Halloween haunted house trying to find a corpse in the dark. Her sense of humor runs towards the morbid and deeply weird, but she definitely has one (even if she doesn’t understand most jokes that people make around her).

She can be cocky and aggressive, and is very, very stubborn. When out of her depth, she usually graciously admits to being in the wrong and lets people are more suited take the lead. But when it comes to her area of expertise, she is the best, she knows it, and she is not afraid to bully, beat up, or even blackmail people to get her way.


History: Brennan was born Joy Keenan, the daughter of Ruth and Max Keenan. Ruth and Max were career bank robbers, con artists who excelled at breaking into vaults and stealing the contents with no violence and no way to be sure how much they’d stolen. One particular job, however, got them more than they bargained for. In 1978, Max and Ruth joined forces with a strongarm crew led by a man called Vince McVicar. On Independence Day, they hit the Dayton National Bank, but the robbery went sour and two people were killed. Max and Ruth escaped with the loot, while McVicar was captured. McVicar agreed to testify against the rest of the crew, and in return for sending them all to prison he was placed in witness protection.

Max and Ruth made a shocking discovery when they examined their take from the Dayton robbery: evidence that the FBI had murdered a young agent named Gus Harper and framed then-famous civil rights activist Marvin Beckett. Harper’s true killer was Robert Kirby, a decorated marine. The Keenans struggled with whether or not to turn the evidence over, but Ruth knew that if they did so, the FBI would have them and their children, Kyle and Joy, killed.

So the Keenans went into hiding. They moved to Woodville, Ohio, and settled down as a high school science teacher and a bookkeeper, changing their names to Matthew and Christine Brennan. Their children became Russell and Temperance. Temperance was only two at the time, and had no memory of her parents’ secret life.

When Brennan was five, she went to visit her neighbor, but found the old lady dead at her kitchen table. She claims to have suffered very little psychological trauma from this event, but she did go through a phase where she faked her death several times, once pretending to hang herself and sending her terrified brother into therapy.

Thirteen years after the Dayton robbery, McVicar finally tracked the family down. It’s implied that, by this point, he was in the employ of corrupt FBI agents hoping to cover up the murder of Gus Harper by murdering the Keenans. One morning, two weeks before Christmas, Ruth and Max got in the car, waved their children goodbye, and never returned. They knew McVicar was only after them – their children would be in no danger from him. Neither Russ nor Brennan understood where their parents had gone or why they left.

It’s implied that Brennan was very artistic as a child and that she turned more towards science after her parents disappeared: she wanted to be a singer, and was interested in dancing but was apparently very clumsy and gawky in adolescence. She later admits that one of the main reasons she went into forensic anthropology was because she believes that if someone like her (the fully grown-up Dr. Brennan) had been there, she could have found out what happened to her parents.

Russ, who was nineteen, dropped out of school to become his sister’s legal guardian. But when he snuck downstairs early on Christmas morning and wrapped all the presents their parents had left behind, fifteen-year-old Brennan thought this meant that her mom and dad had come home. Russ explained that they hadn’t – he had done it himself. But that wasn’t good enough for her. This drove Russ away. He left for California, and Brennan was put into foster care. It’s implied that she was moved from house to house at least a few times, and that some of her foster parents were incredibly abusive. On the one occasion she does mention, she was washing dishes and accidentally broke one of them. She was locked in the trunk of a car for two days as punishment. Eventually, her grandfather tracked her down and took her out of the system.

In high school, Brennan was socially awkward and outcast, not only because she was a foster kid but also because she had an abnormally high I.Q. and social ineptitude bordering on Asperger’s Syndrome. After graduating high school, she pursued a degree in forensic anthropology. It’s implied that she sped through the educational process and was well underway with her doctorate by the time she was twenty-three. At Northwestern University, she became the student of a young professor named Michael Stires, with whom she traveled the world identifying victims of genocide. From him she learned the value that she still holds most dear: truth above all else.

Brennan arrived at the Jeffersonian Institute in Washington, D.C. in 1998. It’s unclear in what capacity Brennan’s original work was with the Jeffersonian from 1998 to 2003, but in 2003 she was hired by Dr. Daniel Goodman as a full-time forensic anthropologist.

But she wasn’t tied down by her job at the Jeffersonian: she continued traveling, crossing the globe and often putting herself in great physical danger to identify the bones of genocide and Death Squad victims. She spent time in various Middle Eastern and South American countries, including Venezuela, the Sudan, Iraq, El Salvador, and Rwanda, amongst many (many) others. At one point she was forced to trek through mountains in Tibet to avoid the Chinese army. All these countries were politically unstable with corrupt governments who did not want their secrets known. But Brennan pursued the truth doggedly, and was often imprisoned, beaten, and even tortured for her trouble. In El Salvador, she was kidnapped by a Death Squad who locked her in a dark room for days with no food or water. Every morning, the leader of the Squad would try to convince her he was going to kill her. She escaped after three days, but when she recounts the story later she says it felt like weeks.

Eventually, Brennan was assigned an FBI partner, Agent Seeley Booth, and given the mandate to help him solve murders. She and Booth were called in when the murder victim was too badly decayed to identify by the usual methods. She was also ordered to hire a graduate student as an intern. After interviewing hundreds of applicants, she finally chose Zachary Addy, a social maladjust and the only candidate with an I.Q. rivaling Brennan’s own. She settled down to a basic routine, drawn further out of her shell with every passing month by her best friend, flighty artist and facial reconstruction expert Angela Montenegro. She even began dating a guy named Pete, with whom she moved in. To top it all off, Brennan wrote a murder mystery based roughly on her own life, called Bred in the Bone, which sold phenomenally well, earning her a place on the New York Times Bestseller List, a movie deal, and more money than she knew what to do with.

Unfortunately, Brennan and Pete broke up and she handled it by going to Guatemala and almost literally burying herself in her work: she spent two weeks digging through mass graves identifying Death Squad victims. Upon her return, she got in a fight with Booth because she wanted to participate more fully in their cases. He didn’t want to allow a “squint” (his word for scientist) into the field, but she informed him if he didn’t allow her out of the lab, he could go find himself another forensic anthropologist. In Montreal. He agreed.

Booth and Brennan became closer as they worked on emotionally messy cases, both of them learning to share things they didn’t with other people. Booth told Brennan about his time as a sniper with the Rangers, and Brennan in turn told him about her parents’ disappearance. Booth became determined to help her find out what happened, but was unable to open an official case file without any evidence of foul play.

After Hurricane Katrina hit, Brennan took a “vacation” to New Orleans to help identify the bodies packing morgues and warehouses. She was working to identify John Doe 361 when her colleague, Dr. Graham Leger, asked her out to dinner. She remembers agreeing, she remembers Graham knocking over a tray of surgical equipment, and the rest is a blank.

What actually happened is that when Brennan and Graham got back to Graham’s house, they were ambushed by Richard Benoit, a voodoo sorcerer who had murdered John Doe 361, fka Rene Mouton, and didn’t want the body identified. Graham was crucified to the wall and Brennan was drugged and killed. She woke up on the barge and while totally drugged and disoriented possibly made some kind of deal that she’s not exactly 100% aware of.