One of the best things Fox’s procedural crime dramaBonesdid following the departure ofEric Millegan’s intern Zack Addy was replacing him with not one, not two, buta revolving door of ten new interns, who would take turns assisting the Jeffersonian team in solvingincreasingly gruesome murder cases. While each was unique in their way,it was the inclusion of intern Arastoo Vaziri (Pej Vahdat) that brought something special to the long-running series. In what he represented for the characters on screen, but also what he represented to audiences as an Iranian-American — with both halves of that hyphen holding equal importance — and a Muslim man in the late aughts,Arastoo Vaziri was truly a character ahead of his time.
F.B.I. Special Agent Seeley Booth teams up with the Jeffersonian’s top anthropologist, Dr. Temperance Brennan, to investigate cases where all that’s left of the victims are their bones.
‘Bones’ Is a Breath of Fresh Air Amid Middle Eastern Stereotypes on TV
The past few decades have not yielded many positive portrayals of Middle Eastern people in media. Admittedly,this is getting much better now, but from the early aughts to roughly the mid-2010s, audience members of Middle Eastern heritage would tune into primetime TV and not know when (there was no if about it) a stereotypical depiction would pop up.NCIS,JAG, a throwaway comment about the benefits of racially profiling Muslim men onER, you name it.Hawaii 5-0featured a stunning number of terrorists deciding to target the Aloha State (and notably in an early season, showed the Arabic-speaking terrorists writing out all their plans in Farsi, a completely different language, for some reason).Homeland, which followed CIA counterterrorism agent Carrie Mattheson (Claire Danes), was similarly rife with stereotypes, reducing an entire subcontinent to an unwashed mass howling for American bloodwith the occasional exception who was only too willing to serve American interests. Famously, this era also brought us24, which each season saw Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) and his Counterterrorism Unit chasing down the who’s-who of working Middle Eastern actors (including Academy Award nomineeShohreh Aghdashloo!).
None of this is to begrudge or criticize the Middle Eastern actors who found work on these shows. It’s a tricky industry, work is work, and who wouldn’t want the opportunities afforded by being on some of the biggest shows of their day? Besides, you’re either playing a terrorist or a different ethnicity entirely. Rather, this is acritique of creatives who were otherwise likely open-minded and liberally inclined, but who so wholly bought into the narratives of the time, and lacked the creativity to conceive of Middle Eastern characters outside the narrow scope granted to them at the time. This iswhereBonesdeviated in creating the character of Arastoo Vaziri, and why Vahdat’s performance remains so meaningful today.
When he is first introduced, Arastoo Vaziri is met with a degree of skepticism born of the same mentalities that gave rise to the depictions listed above. He is a practicing Muslim, and, by the sound of his English, recently arrived from the Middle East. Hodgins (T.J. Thyne) doesn’t trust him on that basis alone, assuming the worst at first, and then later making the kinds of jokes that keep the HR department up at night. Everyone else — that is to say,Brennan (Emily Deschanel), Booth (David Boreanaz), Angela (Michaela Conlin), and even Cam (Tamara Taylor),don’t even really know what to make of him, wavering between ignorant at best and suspicious at worst.Perhaps this was frustrating in the moment for audiences watching week to week, but the creative team wisely chose to use this instead as a basis to both challenge assumptions and offer some surprisingly meaningful representation in the process.
Arastoo’s Heritage and Faith Are Both Treated With Respect on ‘Bones’
The biggest early “twist” fans of the series will likely remember is the reveal that Arastoo’s heavy Iranian accent was entirely affected,a choice he made to avoid questions about why such a staunch scientist would also be deeply religious. This might seem misguided, but given how everyone reacted when they realized how religious he actually is, it was probably a wise choice. To have done otherwise would probably have meant being met with accusations of being a sleeper agent for Al-Qaeda, or something along those lines. But on the meta side of things, the decision also forced the non-Middle Eastern, non-Muslim audience to consider their stance. Had they felt the same as the Jeffersonian team? If so, why?
ToBones' credit as well, they didn’t make this his defining characteristic but, like Booth’s Catholicism, kept it in the background unless it became relevant. A good example of this, and probably one of his better-known scenes, is in Season 8, Episode 6, “The Patriot in Purgatory,” which sawthe team of internsworking together to solve a cold case, gradually realizingthe bones they’re studyingbelonged to a man killed on September 11. It’sthe most directly the show ever addressed the other characters' early attitudes towards Arastooand his faith, particularly when fellow intern Finn Abernathy (Luke Kleintank) wonders whether the case might hit too close to home for all the wrong reasons. Arastoo — and by extension the series — uses the opportunity to politely butextremelyfirmly put misconceptions like that in their place, with a clarity that would have served almost every other series that touched on the issue at the time extremely well.
This was also an instance of casting an Iranian-American actor to actually play an Iranian-American character. The trickiest thing in depicting any character of a minority background, particularly one whose background hasn’t hit the cultural mainstream, isfinding ways to walk the line between representing their heritage without having it be their sole character trait.Arastoo speaks Farsi, but only to other Farsi speakers, like his parents. No random exclamations or phrases in an otherwise English sentence here. He both writes and publishes Persian poetry and plays in a recreational baseball league. In short, like so many diaspora kids, he walks a line between “here” and “there,” and is just allowed to exist to do so.
Bonestakes this ahead-of-its-time approach even further in Season 10 when Arastoo decides to head back to Iran, despite being a political exile, to visit his sick brother. He explicitly reminds a very worried Cam, who by this point he is dating (more on that in a second), that the country isa beautiful place with a culture that vastly predates the current regime. And later in the season, when Episode 19, “Murder in the Middle East,” brings Cam and Booth to Tehran, it’s not dirt roads and stone huts with a loose goat running around (looking at you,Homeland), but an actual city with young people, and music, and flavored ice cream. Almost like Iranians are people too.
Cam and Arastoo’s Romance on ‘Bones’ Is What Good Representation Is Made Of
Cam and Arastoo’s romance onBonesis actually relevant to why he was so ahead of his timeas a character. He is sweet, tender, and ever-so-slightly dorky. He writes Cam love poetry in Farsi that is so intense she catches the meaning without understanding the actual words. He causes a scene in a Persian restaurant when he suspects his parents are disrespecting Cam. Yelling at your Iranian parentsin public, where people they know might see you? Braver than the Marines. This is what romance novel heroes are made of. Could any other man on this show have been proposed to by their girlfriendon televisionwithout developing a complex about it — except maybe Sweets (John Francis Daley)? All Arastoo does is smile and say yes (after his brain briefly triggers a 404 error).
In an era that overwhelmingly painted Middle Eastern men and Muslim men as violent, dangerous, and misogynistic,Boneselected to make one a romantic lead instead.And what a romantic lead he is. It is frankly astounding to me that they gave Vahdat a romantic arc like this without making him a series regular, or a recurring star at the very least. Vahdat and Taylor had incredible chemistry. The way Arastoo looks at Cam brings to mindthe way George (Corey Mylchreest) looks at Charlotte (India Amarteifio) inQueen Charlotte: A Bridgerton Story. But ultimately, their romance is only a piece of whyBonessucceeded where so many other television shows failed in terms of Middle Eastern representation — and why, to this day, Arastoo remains a squintern truly ahead of his time.
