Hodgins comes from an especially wealthy family and is the sole heir to the fictional private corporation known as the Cantilever Group, although he hid his wealth from his coworkers for a long time.
[6] In season 8, after serial killer and cyberterrorist Christopher Pelant (Andrew Leeds (actor)) hacks into Hodgins' savings and drains his bank accounts and the accounts of the entire Cantilever Group, he and Angela are forced to scrimp; yet, in season 9, he tells Dr. Lance Sweets (John Francis Daley) that he is content, as he still has his work at the Jeffersonian and family—the two things which he values the most.
[8] Hodgins owns an original Mini, which FBI Agent Seeley Booth (David Boreanaz) jokingly calls a "toy car",[9][10] although in later seasons he is seen driving a Toyota Prius as well.
[11] Although a noted conspiracy theorist, Hodgins temporarily abandons his paranoid thoughts and beliefs after it is revealed that Addy has become the most recent apprentice to a cannibalistic serial killer known as "Gormogon".
Devastated by his friend's poor judgment, as well as his recent break-up with Angela, Hodgins finds his beliefs and feelings of paranoia turning into misanthropy.
Sweets determines that Hodgins' misanthropy is a way to cope with the overwhelming stresses in his life, and assures him that it will turn into something more pleasant in time.
In "The Maiden in the Mushrooms", after using the last of intern Finn Abernathy's (Luke Kleintank) late grandmother's hot sauce, Hodgins deduces the ingredients and opens a side business called "Opie and Thurston's" to market a re-creation of the concoction.
In season 10, in "The Eye in the Sky", Hodgins invents a packaging material and receives an advance of $2 million, restoring a portion of his wealth.
He experiences a few moments of movement, such as an involuntary muscle spasm in his leg, but the series ends with him still in his wheelchair, now acting as interim head of the lab.
In episode 10 of season 4, "The Bones That Blew", Hodgins stated that his passion to "figure stuff out in amusing ways" was why he chose a career in science.
[17] Hodgins is one of the more socially adept "squints" and uses pop-culture references and jokes that Dr. Temperance "Bones" Brennan (Emily Deschanel) and Zack Addy often fail to grasp.
At the end of the episode when government agents come to take Hodgins away for questioning in relation to the hoax call, Booth declines to intervene telling Brennan that being taken away by "Men in Black" would be his dream come true.
[22] Their wedding is cut short in the season two finale when a State Department official interrupts the ceremony because routine federal-employee background investigations have revealed that Angela is technically married to a Fijian man named Grayson Barasa (Sean Blakemore).
In the episode "The Blackout in the Blizzard" Angela and Hodgins find out they are both carriers of Leber's Congenital Amaurosis, giving their baby a 25 percent chance of blindness.
He was close to Zack Addy (who lived with Hodgins, renting the apartment above his garage) and would advise him on how to behave in a social setting, sometimes with humorously awkward results.
Despite their opposing views, they are on friendly terms, with Hodgins expressing genuine regret when a current investigation exposed a military cover-up as he recognized what their discoveries meant for Booth.
Most notably, when Agent Payton Perotta (Marisa Coughlan) — who was officially working with the Jeffersonian on a case where Booth was a prime suspect and thus unable to serve as the lead investigator — commented that 'her' people had found some recent evidence in the case, Hodgins, along with intern Wendell automatically corrected her statement by saying that the squints were Booth's people.