“The Woman at the Airport” is episode 10 of “Bones” season 1. As such, it was the first time Booth and Bones had traveled outside of D.C., which as it happens was a particularly important aspect of the episode. Prior to this installment, the show had been set entirely in the protagonists’ home town, making their excursion to the west coast a fairly big change for the burgeoning series. But travel would quickly become a recurring theme in “Bones,” and it seems the writers were set on that aspect of the show long before they sent Bones and Booth out west.

According to executive producer Barry Josephson, who’s quoted in the book “Bones: The Official Companion,” the writers always planned to take their protagonists out of their comfort zone by having them travel to new locations. As Josephson put it:

“I think it’s very important for [Temperance Brennan] to travel all over the United States because that’s what forensic anthropologists actually do. People wait for the expert to come to them, and the expert comes…. I think that getting her out in the field was very, very important.”

While “Bones” certainly does its best at times to adhere to the reality of forensics, I wouldn’t necessarily put realism at the top of the writers’ concerns when it came to crafting their long-running dramedy.