The good news is that, despite its ominously macabre title, "Bones" ends up being one of the happier TAC installments. That says little, and indeed it shouldn't, but still, the victim actually survives in this scenario. That has to count for something, right?
Debuting in 1992, "Bones" adheres closely to the formula set out previously in "Darren", with us once again finding ourselves inside a car with a bunch of kids with a frightfully low sense of self-preservation. Our protagonist, backseat passenger Katie, unbuckles her seatbelt and leans forward to whisper something in the ear of the driver Chris, causing him to giggle. The front seat passenger, who goes unnamed, attempts to get in on the private joke, but is rebuffed. Chris, like Darren before him, makes a perfunctory effort to be the mature one in the equation, by telling Katie to sit back and put her seatbelt on again, but in the process takes his eyes off the road - which is hugely unfortunate, as it's right at that moment that a pedestrian steps out into their path. Chris's reflexes are thankfully still on point enough that he's able to swerve and avoid the pedestrian, but this causes him to rear-end a van parked at the side of the street. They would have been looking at a mercifully minor collision, but for the fact that Katie hadn't had time to re-buckle - and since there's nothing to restrain her, she goes face first through the windshield and smacks into the van on the other side. This being TAC at their most brutally immersive, we get to experience that short but horrifying trip right along with her, via a POV shot that has us sailing over the dashboard and winding up with a load of broken glass in our face.
It seems fair to say that the pedestrian likely didn't possess a significant sense of self-preservation either, as from the looks of it he'd already stepped out in front of a hulking great lorry, although it's hard to tell exactly what was happening at his end, and that's by design. Our perception of what lies up ahead is as limited as it is for the occupants of Chris's car. What "Bones" gets across particularly deftly is the importance of expecting the unexpected, and being prepared for the fact that what's on the horizon could change in the blink of an eye. The ad opens with a subconscious hint of what could potentially go wrong - the first thing we see, even before our main characters have pulled into view, is that formidable lorry trundling along beside them. Even if no threat is visible, its looming presence has us immediately alerted to how vulnerable and out of their depth this snickering lot are (in contrast to "Darren', where the road appeared open and free, and the perfect playground for these puckish young day trippers, until it wasn't). Our instinct proves entirely astute, for the lorry does indeed play a critical role in their downfall, by obscuring what's incoming. It represents that overhanging element of uncertainty, the doings on the road that are intrinsically beyond their control and perception, making it especially lethal when the pedestrian - the element of unforeseeable chaos - leaps into the mix and throws everything into disarray. There were a few different factors at play here. The pedestrian doesn't appear to have made the most sensible choices, and that much was obviously out of Katie's hands. Distracted driving also played a part in the accident (if Chris had seen the pedestrian sooner, he might have been able to brake then and there, as the lorry did), and to a degree that was Katie's fault, since she was the one interfering with Chris's concentration, though the onus was ultimately on Chris to not take his eyes off the road. The fundamental point, however, is that if Katie had been wearing her seatbelt, she would have been safely protected in the event of the unexpected. By figuring she could let her guard down for just a brief moment, she left herself too heavily exposed to the fickleness of chance.
On the upside, Katie has survived her little misadventure, although the price she now has to pay is a heavy one for such an easily preventable mistake. The epilogue of "Bones" closely recalls the "Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives" entry "Recovery", in which we witnessed a man undergoing physiotherapy after losing his ability to walk in an accident. The emphasis in "Bones" is likewise on the harrowing fragility of the human form (hence the title) and what a long and arduous road it can be to get back to normally when physical trauma has stripped you of your everyday functioning. The processes both of standing up and sitting back down in her wheelchair have her in a wad of acutely discernible discomfort, and there is an additional shock, when we get sight of Katie's face (obscured at the start of the epilogue, as she's being wheeled into the rehabilitation centre), and see how heavily scarred it is. The physiotherapist offers her words of support, assuring her that tomorrow will be better and that moving about will get easier every day, but her optimism is undercut by Katie's tearful response: "I'm just so sick of this." She echoes the protagonist of "Recovery", who similarly asserted that he couldn't keep going, no matter how much encouragement was thrown his way, although the implications of "Bones' are potentially even grimmer, suggesting that Katie has been in rehabilitation for long enough already, that she's heard it all before, and all that tomorrow really has to offer is the prospect of having to come back and repeat the agonising ritual all over again. The short ends hauntingly, with a sobbing Katie holding her arm across her wounded face in a diagonal position that evokes the protective embrace of a seatbelt.
"Bones" received a new lease of life in 2019, when it returned to the airwaves, this time in an edited version that was cut down from a minute to 30 seconds, and accompanied by a revised tagline: "This ad made people buckle up 30 years ago. Shame we have to play it again." The maths was a little off, but the point was sill effectively made.
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