Review: "Bionic Woman" = Hot Chicks Fighting In The Rain

Scifi/action fans have three great new choices this season, with the hilarious "Reaper," the upcoming "Sarah Connor Chronicles," and "Bionic Woman," debuting tonight on NBC. Michelle Ryan (right) stars as Jamie Sommers. This is moody, broody stuff, and I don't just mean because Isaiah Washington begins a multi-episode appearance next week. (We kid because we love! But not in a homosexual way!)

"Bionic Woman" is scifi noir, part of a modern tradition that dates back at least to "Blade Runner," with chilly blue-white lighting and lots of cyberiffic people making difficult existential choices while wearing frowny faces.

That doesn't mean I didn't like it. Actually, this is one new show that really knows what it's doing. For example:

1) They cast Katee Sackhoff (left), "Battlestar Galactica's" Starbuck, as Jamie Sommers' nemesis, Sarah Corvis, her predecessor in bionic hotness, now gone very, very bad.
2) They end the pilot episode with a big fight scene for Jamie and Sarah. On a rooftop. At night. In the rain.

A gazillion pages of XXX fanfic will no doubt be spun off from this drenchingly sexy battle royale. (And this time we do mean in a homosexual way. Or technically, a Sapphic/bionic way.)

Since, alas, this isn't "Torchwood," we probably won't get to see their smoldering stares turn to anything more, except in fanboy web animations. But aside from an annoying subplot about Jamie caring for her teenaged sister (Lucy Hale) - I mean seriously, do we care? - this show gets most everything else right. It has none of the sunny camp of the 1970s series with Lindsay Wagner as Jamie. True, she was a bionic babe, but all that slow motion has been replaced here with a slick, "Matrix-y" vibe and backstory that will appeal to everyone from hardcore gamers to reasonably cool grandmas. (Especially if the grandmas are into Sapphic/bionic subtext.)

So let's see. Jamie's an underachieving 20something, a bartender dating Will (Chris Bowers), a handsome scientist. In fact, she just found out she's carrying his baby and they've talking all lovey dovey when HOLY SHIT THERE'S A GIANT TRACTOR TRAILER SMASHING INTO THEIR CAR. (With a hot, kinda butch blond at the wheel. You know who.)

Turns out Will  is actually working on a secret government bionics project involving a lot of nanotech gibberish. Desperate to save his badly injured lovely lady, he commandeers the operating table. When Jamie wakes up, she finds herself a quasi prisoner in a secret underground lair. And before long, she realizes that something feels different....

She's freaked out and royally pissed. Also irate is Jonas (the reliable Miguel Ferrer), leader of this covert operation. He's not happy that Will has gone and made a superwoman out of his girlfriend without first going through channels or whatever. But um, now that she's here, Jamie is going to have to learn to fight evil as a way of paying back the government for being alive and all. And if she balks, well, she might just disappear.

She's about to balk when Will helps her escape and tells her to go back to her life. Yeah, like that's gonna happen. Homegirl is having a hard time adjusting to all her new parts, suffering from extrasensory overload. It's really weighing on her mind. She stands on a ledge. Thinking about jumping? Oh yeah! To the building across the street! And when she finally meets the bionic bad girl everyone at the bunker has been whispering about, she's all Game on, beyotch!

Good times.

Comments

[Aaron]

Which is hotter: Summer Glau beating people up, or Katee Sackhoff beating people up?

Obviously they need to star in the same movie together some time in 2009.

[Brenda]

Hello

I'm a big fan of the sci fi channel. I look forward to watching the Bionic Woman Show this fall.

[Evan Matthews]

I want to love this show, but the writers and directors are making it very hard for me not to end up so annoyed that I turn it off completely.

As someone near 40 that fondly remembers both of the old shows (my prize possesion was my Six Millon Dollar Man lunchbox), I had high hopes for what they could do with a reinvention of Bionic Woman. Even though some of the Battlestar Galactica people were involved with the show's creation, I wasn't expecting a carbon copy of BSG's atmosphere, but I was expecting them to do something new with the material, while at the same time retaining the same "wow" factor that made fans of the old show. For those of you to young to remember the old Battlestar, it was a show with a great premise, fairly good but often overused special effects (especially for it's time), great characters with often cheesy dialogue, great villains with often cheesy dialogue, very often kitschy and melodramatic storylines, but there was always a sense of moving forward. When BSG was reimagined, they retained kept the good things about the old show and improved or tossed out the bad things (great premise, great special effects never over or underused, great characters, dialogue, storyline, etc), and always kept things moving forward.

It is just me, or do you get the sense from Bionic Woman with each episode that the writers are casting around, trying to figure out what the show is about. The pacing of each episode is uneven, it's peppered with characters that seem unnecessay mainly because they're either given little to do or terrible dialogue, and some of the plots are incredibly underwhelming (I'm thinking of the "climactic" showdown with Jamie and the soldiers in the store at the end of Episode 2 - very ho hum).

It's like the writers can't decide who they are trying to appeal to, or they are trying so hard to appeal to everyone that they're failing miserably across the board. At the end of each episode I'm always left with a terrible feeling that they ....just.... missed.... the.... mark.

I read a fan comment that really struck me when the person said that this show makes great "background noise," that it's great for half-way paying attention when you're working around the house. I have to say that I absolutely hate to agree. I hate it because I don't want background noise, I want to be riveted.

So far, here are some of the things I feel are causing problems with the show (I welcome ANY comments you may have):

1. I believe Michelle Ryan is a good actress and has the right stuff for the role, but the story creators are really making it hard for the fans to like her. She's the "good guy, " the central character, so she has to have a certain softness, a moral center, to be that character. But for god's sake, don't make her a saint, and stop giving her terrible dialogue. Instead, give her some truly intense scenes, put her in jeopardy, put her in real danger and make her use her bionics not just in brute force ways, but in ways that are both intelligent and cool (another fan comment I read illustrated this well: it would have been so much cooler if she had bent the fan blade back into place, saw the soldiers about to fire, looking at the fan motor and seeing it smoking and ruined, and then with all her strength and a scream spinning the fan incredibly fast to deflect the bullets. It also wouldn't hurt to get Ms. Ryan a personal trainer and tone her up for the role. While she's got a great figure, in many scenes she doesn't appear athletic when compared to the ripped Katee Sackhoff, which makes her come off as unbelievable (bionics notwithstanding) in many of the action scenes.

2. "Wanted: More Cool Bionic Stuff" - After all, what's the title of the show again? Is anyone else getting a little tired of the fight scenes where Jamie gets in a few hits, gets smacked around a bit, and then finishes off someone with a bionic kick or knocks them into a wall (as opposed to through a wall). Granted, the old show was often over the top, but one thing they got right was when a bionic person pushed someone or hit someone, they weren't getting back up. The old Steve Austin and Jamie Sommers would regulary throw someone dozens of a feet away when fighting them (and instead of slowly bending a padlock open, why not rip the whole lock and door knob assembly clean from the door, let's see the door splinter and hear the metal squeal as it pulls free). And what was with the whole toe repair scene last night. I found it extremely frustrating that they would show us a laser beam somehow shocking her toe "into submission" but they wouldn't actually show her jacked up bionic toe, but rather the camera did the incredibly annoying "object in the foreground blocking the view" trick. I for one would much rather have seen an up close view of it smashed all to hell and then have them work some technical magic so the anthrocites would begin repairing it. It's also very disconcerting to me when bionic woman uses her super strength bionic power to.....push down a car window. Who else would like to see cars getting their roofs and door ripped off, super fast running, and maybe, just maybe, cool bionic jumping scenes that don't look like the guys working the digitally removed wires drank too much on their break.

3. Katee Sackhoff. Whether by her own acting chops, writing for her scenes, good direction for her scenes (maybe she's boning someone to get the choicest ones) or all of the above, she is absolutely stealing the show out from under everyone else. This would be great if she were surrounded by everyone else turning out great performances with great dialogue, every great show has one great character that fans love for their scene stealing ability, but this is not the case. Her scenes and screen presence are always compelling, and her very greatness on the show makes it very uneven. I hate to say it, but she may end up killing the show if a) the producers and writers don't start massively amping up everyone else's dialogue and performance, or b) retool the show to bring her in as the main character (seriously, as much as I would miss the idea of Jamie, you could kill her off in a tragic episode that somehow redeems Sarah's humanity and goodness, and even maybe make the sister character interesting by having Sarah take her in/watch over her in an effort to make up for the sister she had that was killed in the car accident). Pretty much anything else is a lose-lose situation. If the show keeps going the way it is, Katee's scene stealing is going to make everyone else look awful, which will drive viewers away. Or if they write her out of the show and make no other changes, the show will seem incredibly bland and will die a slow death.

4. This will seem trite, but, by the Lords of Kobol, don't end an episode with Jamie standing at a window with some soft pop/rock song playing looking all pensive. Give us some kick ass cliff hangers, or take a few notes from the Law & Order class of ending some episodes with a twist, or on a thought provoking or even sometimes downbeat note, please don't end them like an episode of "Felicity."

Please remember everyone, I WANT to love this show. And like any good masochist worth their salt, I'm going to hang in there until it either gets great or until the bitter, embarrassing end (think the last two seasons of the "X-files"). It's got great potential, I've just got the sinking feeling that it's all being pissed away.