Hot Take: Hannah Burley Was Not Only a Good Character, She Was Necessary

Another hot-button topic I hear a lot about in the Bones fandom is Hannah...

For those of you not in the know, Hannah was a journalist that Agent Booth met while on assignment in Afghanistan, and they began a relation ship. This was at the beginning of Season 6. The wild thing I found out when I joined a Bones fans Facebook group is how much people hate Hannah.

What???

That's what I thought the first time I heard it. I will preface this by saying that I first started watching the show at the end of season 6, so I didn't really see a lot of the build up to Booth and Brennan's relationship until later. Even then, I didn't really get invested in it (Hodgela for the win!). My first guess was that people hate her simply for getting in the way of Booth and Brennan getting together, but sometimes it goes beyond that in ways that confuse me. People cite Hannah doing Booth wrong, or that Hannah just wasn't a nice person. Neither of these make any sense to me to be honest, but I'll get to that in a moment.

First I'm going to address hating her for getting in the way. While I understand it, I still am not sure why it goes all the way to hate. I'm a big fan of the show Psych, and I very much did get invested in whether Shawn and Juliet would get together. So at the end of Season 3 when Shaw starts dating Abigail, it was frustrating. But I never hated Abigail. It's not her fault. She didn't do anything wrong. Was it annoying as a viewer that Juliet missed her moment, yes. Abigail is great character, though, and it did make the show interesting. In season 5, when Juliet starts dating Declan... well, you do kind of hate him, but the show kind of points you in that direction. He is a bit of snob. But the point is, you don't dislike Declan because he's dating Juliet. Again, I understand, I just don't know why it has to rise to hate.

As for her not being a nice person, I seriously don't get where this is coming from. She was a really nice person. She was great with Parker, even though she was nervous about it, and she made friends with Brennan. Do you know how easily they could've turned that into a story where Hannah was threatened by Brennan and had to be mean to her? Instead, even though she knew Brennan was in love with Booth, she continued to be friends with her and even supported her. That's an unbelievably good friend, and shows how much she cares about Booth that she knows his partnership with Brennan is important.

Now as for her doing Booth wrong, this refers to when Hannah rejected Booth's marriage proposal, and Booth then proceeded to ignore her. I'm pretty sure, unless I made something up, that Hannah told Booth a while before that she wasn't the marrying type. She told him that. "Then she shouldn't have been with him"- well, that would have been up to Booth as soon as she said that. If Booth knew he wanted to get married and she didn't, he should've put an end to it then because they were incompatible. It's not her fault that he didn't. Besides, just because she didn't want to get married doesn't mean she didn't want to be in a committed relationship. She just rejects the idea of marriage. The fact that Booth eventually proposed to her anyway is his own lack of listening or remembering.

Ultimately, as angry as she made people, Hannah's presence in the story was necessary. Booth and Brennan had a push to be together in season 5, and Brennan rejected it. Booth thought he had to move on, and the only way Brennan was going to realize what she really wanted was to see Booth be in a loving, long term relationship with somebody else. She needed it to hurt, so she could get clarity on how she really felt. Booth needed it to gain a better understanding of what he wanted as well (interestingly, though, Brennan always insisted she wasn't the marrying type either. Booth seems to have a type). Hannah was the catalyst to Booth and Brennan finally getting together. Whatever you think of her, she was absolutely necessary to the story.

As always, I do not own any of the pictures. Credit to the owners.