Mess with our heads

What is it with Fox and the season finale sexual psych-outs? First we discover that the consummation of the House/Cuddy relationship, so vividly if briefly portrayed in last week’s episode, was not just a figment of House’s Vicodin-addled imagination but a symptom of Actual Mental Illness. (Loved the brooding Thornfield-esque mental institution into which House disappears during the finale’s final moments -- I did not know they had moors in New Jersey.)

Now, after months of flirtatious magazine covers and Internet teasers about “Bones,� we find out that the big “Bones and Booth Hit the Sheets� episode was similarly rigged.

After 40 or so minutes of a more-gray-than-noir story line that had Bones (Emily Deschanel) and Booth (David Boreanaz) happily married and owners of a nightclub where a murder has been committed, it all turned out to be either a Booth coma-dream or a Bones novel-outline. The season ended with Booth, having survived his brain-tumor removal, looking at Bones and asking “Who are you?�

So instead of sex, amnesia; that’s . . . unexpected. (Although it actually makes more sense than sex in the days after brain surgery.)

But if the episode itself was not the season’s best, it should become required viewing for all those TV fans who just can’t stand it if their favorite couples don’t hook up and soon. This “Bones� had a very clear lesson for us all: Romantic drama is nine-tenths anticipation.

You’d think we would have learned this from “Moonlighting,� which fizzled pretty much the moment David (Bruce Willis) and Maddie (Cybill Shepherd) decided to lip-lock the clever banter. If Bones and Booth get together and break up, that’s tragic and sad. If they get together and stay together, well . . . let’s review Thursday’s season finale for a moment. Gone was the snappy dialogue, the fond but mutually mystified glances Deschanel and Boreanaz have perfected over the years. Gone was Bones’ Spockian charm and Booth’s sheepish machismo, leaving instead a man who wore a black fisherman’s cap and a woman who flinched when she saw a fairly ordinary corpse.

We all know the dirty little secret about happily ever after is that it’s boring to watch, which may explain the high rates of adultery and divorce in this country and certainly explains why “Bones� Rachel and Ross of “Friends� kept hooking up and breaking up, even when she was pregnant. “Bones�Which is why, as a critic, I call on television writers and producers to hold the line. Yes, the Internet has given the “citizen producer� that lurks within us all not just a stronger sense of entitlement -- look, we forced the show runner to blog -- but participation, and I know we’re all panicking in this sped-up, instant feedback producing new media, but you just have to stand firm. Ignore the websites and comment pages, appreciate all the direct questions to stars and columnists and letters to TV Guide and then simply turn back to your laptops as if they never happened.

Yes, we may whine that it’s time for Cuddy and House to fall into each others arms, that everyone knows Bones and Booth are in love, and when will “The Mentalist’s� Patrick Jane (Simon Baker) get over the dead-wife thing and realize that Teresa Lisbon (Robin Tunney) is right in front of him? But whining is bad behavior and it does not pay to reward bad behavior. Don’t pander with promises of hot kisses and rumpled sheets that you know will ruin your show and then offer some soap-operatic fake-out that will only make everyone angrier. (Imagine how much better this season of “Grey’s Anatomy� would have been if Denny had actually been a ghost?) Stand tall in the writerly knowledge that no pain is more exquisitely delicious than that caused by tenterhooks.

But pencils down on the lame hallucination/coma dream/brain cancer sequences and I do mean that. Psych us once, shame on you. Psych us twice, permanent DVR deletion is just a click away.

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