Lance Sweets
Dr. Lance Sweets, Ph.D., Psy.D., is a fictional character in the American television series Bones. He was portrayed by John Francis Daley.
Daley first made three guest appearances as Sweets during the first eight episodes of Season 3, first appearing in "The Secret in the Soil". He was promoted to a series regular and appeared in the opening credits beginning with the episode "The Santa in the Slush". He also guest-starred on the spin-off The Finder. The character is killed off in the first episode of the show's tenth season, "The Conspiracy in the Corpse", making him the first and only main character of Bones to die.
Early life
Little is revealed about Sweets' birth parents. In "Double Trouble In The Panhandle", Sweets reveals that his birth mother was a psychic working in a circus in South Florida; upon reaching the age of majority he attempted to track her down, but could gain no information from the insular circus community. Before being adopted he was in foster care. He lived in four foster homes by the time he was adopted at age six by the Finleys. He mentioned that he was beaten by a foster dad "for sport" and the whip scars are still visible on his back. His loving, but elderly, adoptive parents died shortly before Dr. Sweets began working with Booth and Brennan, leaving him without a family. Sweets' relationship with his adoptive parents, however, left him with the belief that broken people can be saved by people with good hearts, inspiring him to become a psychologist. Most of this was uncovered by Dr. Gordon Wyatt in reading Sweets' manuscript on Booth and Brennan's working relationship, stating that works like his often reveal more about the writer than the subject matter. He correctly deduces that Sweets was adopted as a child and suffered some sort of abuse. Details about his life as a teenager are few; but the episode "Mayhem on a Cross" reveals that he had been a fan of death metal as a teenager, which he still listens to after a bad day.Sweets is highly educated and intelligent despite his youth, holding two doctorates despite only being 22 years old when he made his first appearance in the show. He completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Toronto and has a master's degree in Abnormal Psychology from Temple University and two doctorates from Columbia University and the University of Pennsylvania. To have reached this level of education, Sweets must have begun college at age 14 or 15, attending for three years before obtaining his master's degree in and then his doctorates within three years. This has led some members of the team to doubt his degrees' validity, and Sweets has admitted to Brennan that he earned money for graduate school by teaching psychological techniques to car salesmen — a fact that he is not proud of.
Work
It is not known when Sweets officially joined the FBI or what his previous occupation, if any, was prior to joining the Bureau. He did mention that he was an intern at a mental health facility in Philadelphia, possibly coinciding with his time as a graduate student at Temple University or the University of Pennsylvania. Like his colleague FBI agent Seeley Booth, he is based at the J. Edgar Hoover Building and can be usually found in his consultation room. He occasionally accompanies Booth to interview victims' family members or analyze a crime scene for insight into a suspect.Sweets' young age and youthful appearance has posed a problem for him at work as other agents sometimes do not take him seriously. When they first met each other Booth conjectured that the worst thing that had ever happened to Sweets was that he "lost at Mortal Kombat". He is usually known to other agents, including Booth, as "the shrink". When he and Booth first worked together, Booth often treated him in a condescending manner and would refer to or address him as "The Shrink", amongst other humorous variations, instead of his actual name. Likewise, Agent Olivia Sparling, a rookie agent he was paired with when Booth was unavailable, viewed him with disdain upon their first meeting but was also won over by his skill. On occasion Booth will pull rank and trick Sweets into doing an interrogation or unwanted tasks for him, much to Sweets' chagrin. After Sweets received his badge in season 7, Booth still introduced him as "Dr. Sweets" so that the latter would be taken seriously.
Sweets appears to be formally trained as a psychoanalytic psychologist, often referencing Freudian theories and approaches, even describing the psychosexual stages of childhood development to Booth. Ironically, Dr. Wyatt notes that "Freud has been largely discredited" in "Mayhem on a Cross", but still shows a great amount of respect and support towards Sweets. Despite his age, Sweets' expertise is recognized and, often grudgingly, appreciated by Booth and the team. In more complicated cases or when dealing with difficult suspects he has been the only one able to offer any insight or get through to the suspect. He was also the first to correctly deduce murderer Christopher Pelant's real motives after the Jeffersonian team kept hitting dead ends with the physical evidence.
Sweets began seeing Brennan and Booth in "The Secret in the Soil". Through Fox Online Special Features, it is implied Booth and Brennan continue to see Dr. Wyatt through "The Soccer Mom and the Mini-Van" before seeing Sweets solely. Initially, the pair do not regard Sweets seriously, Booth for his youth and Brennan for his profession. Over time, however, they recognize his skill in profiling and even develop a friendship with him, comforting him after his girlfriend April breaks up with him and later recognizing that Sweets wishes to continue studying them because he likes them. The relationship of Booth and Bones with Sweets continued to grow, and he developed a father/son relationship with Booth. He becomes closer to Booth and Brennan after a moment during "Mayhem on a Cross" when they share their traumatic pasts, eventually becoming a surrogate family and hiding their emotional bond with banter. Sweets has also started appearing more frequently in the field; notably, undercover as Angela's aspiring-fireman-husband-with-a-bad-back, to gain information on a suspect without a warrant.
During his study of Booth and Brennan, Sweets began to write a book about them. In the episode "Mayhem on a Cross", Dr. Sweets received a review by Dr. Gordon Wyatt of his book on the relationship between Booth and Brennan. Dr. Wyatt explained that he felt Sweets had misinterpreted the relationship between Booth and Brennan by looking on a somewhat superficial level. The work primarily focused how Booth and Brennan are opposites and that their sexual attraction is limited because their primary responsibility is to their careers. Dr. Wyatt explains he feels Booth and Brennan are much more similar than Sweets understands and that one of the two is, in fact, aware of the underlying sexual tension between them and struggles with it daily. After learning about Booth and Brennan's backgrounds, he concludes that Sweets' "near obsession" with them and writing the book was a way of finding his place in the world and that he has created his emotional connection with them as a way of finding a family, something Brennan compares to "imprinting" like a baby duck. It is revealed in "The Dwarf in the Dirt" that Sweets has not published his book, because he fears how Booth and Brennan would respond to the book's conclusion that they are in love with each other. He asks Wyatt, now a chef, if he has the right to publish his book when Booth and Brennan cannot even admit to themselves that they are in love, but Wyatt tells him he left psychiatry so he would not have to deal with a dilemma like this.
During the time frame between Seasons 5 and 6 Sweets takes a sabbatical from the FBI while Dr. Brennan and Daisy went to the Maluku Islands, Booth was deployed to Afghanistan and Angela and Hodgins traveled to Paris. He was reluctant to return after calling off his engagement with Daisy but prosecutor Caroline Julian tricked him into returning by calling him up saying that Booth had returned with "posttraumatic stress syndrome" and needed psychological help.
In Season 9 he takes a brief sabbatical but returns in several episodes to assist with Booth's cases. After Booth kills Pelant, Sweets returns permanently, only to find that the department has acquired a new computerized profiling system called VAL and linked it to Dr. Camille Saroyan's office at the Jeffersonian. Throughout the episode "The Lady on the List", he makes his displeasure known to Booth and Cam, who comments to Sweets that he "may as well hate a transistor radio". Booth eventually shuts his VAL down when physical evidence disproved its analysis, stating that he still prefers Sweets to a computer.
In Season 7, Sweets decided to earn his firearms qualifications, which likely meant that he was not a sworn special agent as FBI regulations require special agents to be armed. He stated that he wanted to back Booth up in light of the number of violent suspects Booth has to deal with on a regular basis and the fact that he also regularly accompanies Booth out into the field. At first Booth was skeptical and told Bones, "it's crazy for to own a gun". Unable to dissuade him, Booth "called in a favor" to take over as range master for Sweets' test stating that since Sweets wants to back him up, he needed to see for himself that he could trust Sweets with his back. Sweets was grazed by a bullet during the test but passed. In Season 9 he makes his first arrest, indicating that he has special agent status even though he is never addressed as such.