David Boreanaz, How's Your Brain?

The Bones star says his character will need to relearn a thing or two next season

We're all past the Booth/Bones season finale hookup debacle, right? Great. Let's move onto the next important Bones question at hand: So, uh, David, how's your brain?

Such was the question asked at the Bones set visit during the Television Critics Association press tour today, to which David Boreanaz replied with some revealing information about next season?

"My brain is fine," he deadpanned. "Actually, as far as the character is concerned? It's an interesting thing that is going to happen, I think, with him. What I really want to maintain with the arc with him, which we are threading in each episode is to have the thought that he does have a memory of certain things but he is not adept to other things that he thought he was."

For example? "In the last episode about plumbing, he is ordering a plumbing for dummies book and he can't remember how to plumb his own kitchen sink. So I have to revisit things that Booth is very good at and I think that really allows the character to really kind of examine where he's at, if he likes doing it, and getting his grasp of that material back in his system. So we will slowly see that development with his character through the episodes."

This relearning of things that Booth knew pre-coma will run throughout the season, and it "might spill over into the job" as well, he said.

Stephen Nathan (executive producer) added, "I think it's a matter of rediscovering your character and in that process rediscovering Brennan [Emily Deschanel]. And that's why that event [i.e., the finale], while it might have been not technically real, was very, very real to them. And they see each other differently. And that event, either in the book or in his coma, is real to them. "

"And," chimed in David, "it makes me want to reinvest my time and energy into a relationship with her because I don't remember certain things and now we're back to ground zero again. We are probably even worse than ground zero."

They also spilled that there will be another new assistant (or two) next season. Hart Hanson (executive producer) said, "I know we'll bring in at least one more. And we have ideas for two?Possibly two, if we lose one of our regulars."

Before you freak out, Hart didn't mean that a regular castmember is leaving. He meant a regular squint (er, that would mean colleague).