Richard Crouse

Perhaps, kinda, well, maybe.

Okay, in the interest of full disclosure, Hart Hanson did not casually take us aside during Monday’s Canadian Film Centre Test Pattern Series to give a fellow Canadian TV Addict the scoop of the century! That said, what he did do was offer up a tantalizing clue — that if one were to read between the lines — may have inadvertently revealed a time frame for Booth and Brennan’s inevitable coupling.

Allow us to explain.

During the question and answer period that followed Hanson’s interview with moderator Richard Crouse, we took it upon ourselves to ask the BONES showrunner to elaborate on his plan to replace the unrequited sexual tension between Booth and Brennan with something of equal power should he ever decide to go there.

“I know what my theory is, what it will be, I have for about 2 years, and I still think that’s the thing should that day ever arrive,” explained Hanson. “Or I’m completely lying and I’m never going to do it and I have no plan! It’s one of those two things.”

Fortunately for us, moderator Richard Crouse wasn’t about to let Hanson off the hook that easy, following up our question with an equally probing one, “If the ratings fell off, is that when you make a change like that?” And while Hanson was characteristically cagey as to the exact date, his answer did infer that “a change like that” would only arrive during the final season, as the story of BONES comes to a close.

“I’m really hoping that I have an inkling of when we will be done. You know, any number of things can happen. You have actors on contract for seven years when they come in to do a network test, so if David [Boreanaz] or Emily [Deschanel] all of sudden said, ‘I want a million dollars an episode,’ that could kill the show. Actors are just the most high profile, but the business stuff keeps changing and it changes every few years and it can become not as an attractive business proposition for News Corp. to do BONES,” said Hanson. “Or creatively, we could stagnate or start dropping. You know, you drop 20% in the ratings, the writing may be on the wall depending what else is in the shoot. Say everything that FOX put on the air this season had done better than BONES, that puts us in a weaker position and I would be thinking that maybe this is our last season.”