While Hanson and company did get to wrap things up in season 12, there were plenty of other endings considered along the way. From David Boreanaz and Emily Deschanel starting an on-screen family to making career changes for the sake of that family, Hanson had options in his back pocket at various points that he could have relied on to bring it in for a landing.
“We thought that the next thing was, well, we’ll have them pregnant, start a family, and we burned by that. So I kept coming up with new endings. Then it was maybe when they have their second child they will decide that they need to make some changes in their lives, they can’t be running around after murderers, and we kind of burned by that. So, although it wasn’t the ending I first had in my mind when we started the show, the endings that I had in mind in one guise or another came and went.”
Fortunately, the show never had to contend with an abrupt ending, in no small part because “Bones” had a big champion at Fox. In the end, Hanson was happy with how things ended, even if he wasn’t the one who actually wrote the finale.
“I’m good with that. Stephen [Nathan] and Michael [Peterson] and John [Collier] and Karine [Rosenthal] wrote it, and I thought they did a great job. I thought their decisions were all very solid, especially given that they had a sure hand on the tiller for two years. They knew exactly what they were doing.”
“Bones” is currently streaming on Hulu and Amazon Prime Video.