The 21st century Bionic Woman

I'm Jaime Summers, and don't make me angry. You wouldn't like me when I'm angry. (Okay, that's the Hulk's signature line, but it fits.)

[This is a more general summary of The Bionic Woman that I posted at The Blue Voice.]

Network news sucks these days. But even the old dinosaur networks do come up with some good English-language shows now and then. Telemundo's novela Zorro: la espada y la rosa was the best thing I've seen in years - the tribe of Amazons living in the jungle outside colonial Los Angeles put that one up there into the true Quality Television bracket.

Now, Spanish-language telenovelas are kind of a different dimension than English-language network programming. But still, The Bionic Woman is definitely several cuts above the dorky game-shows and mindless comedies the networks crank out these days.

This one is named after an ancient series from a century or so ago (well, the 1970s), that was a spin-off from The Bionic Man. About the only thing that's the same is the idea of a woman getting super-powers by having artificial parts added and her name, Jaime Summers. But this is a post-Buffy bionic woman, with a plot structure more resembling Alias or La Femme Nikita than dorky 70s sci-fi with paleolithic special effects.

The basic set-up is this. Girl meets boy. Girl tells boy she's pregnant. Big semi rams car with girl and boy inside. Boy replaces girl's legs, one arm, an eye and an ear with bionic stuff that gives her superpowers. Boy turns out to be part of some secret CIA or scientists' cult or something. Boy helps girl escape secret lab. Girl fights nasty bionic blond girl. Boy's father escapes maximum security prison 1000 feet below the earth. Girl agrees to work with secret scientists' cult.

But it's not special-effects driven. Jaime's powers are mostly karate and high jumps, and we get the occasional Jaime-eye view from her bionic eye with labels on stuff she's seeing. For a show like this to be worth following, it has to have a sympathetic and credible star, credibility meaning in particular grounding the character who has powers that require a big leap of imagination to begin with. And Michelle Ryan is really pulling it off so far.

Bionic bonding: Jaime (r.) hit it off at first with Bionic Sarah - ever since they have karate fights between sisterly chats

And there's more mysteries in this show than cobwebs in an abandoned house. Her boyfriend Dr. Will supposedly dies by the second episode, but it's one of those shows where you can't count anybody out too quickly. Shoot, in the opening episode, we saw Bionic Sarah (the nasty blond bionic woman) get shot in the head by her boyfriend after killing 12 members of the Scientists Cult. And she's been one of the main characters in all four episodes. Dr. Will brought her back to life somehow, unknownst apparently to the other members of the Cult, including her boyfriend who killed her and who she was seducing again by the second episode. Like I said, this is post-Buffy and also post-Twin Peaks, so this kind of stuff should seem routine these days.

Still, poor Jaime thinks Dr. Will's dead. She gets drunk and confides in her bartender, "Here's the thing, you never really know anybody. You think you know them. You think you want to marry 'em and spend the rest of your life with them. And then they turn out to be a creep with a weird dossier on you." It turns out that Dr. Will had been stalking her Jaime at least two years before they met and he got her pregnant and did his "honey, I cut off your legs" routine on her. She lost the baby in the crash, by the way. Or so we've been told.

Gruff and grumpy cult leader Jonas likes Jaime in spite of her chronic cheekiness

So far, Jaime has investigated a bioweapons attack by a rogue Army unit, beat the beejesus out of a bunch of Muslim terrorists in Paraguay then beat her supervisor unconscious because she didn't approve of his assassination plans, and baby-sat the spoiled daughter of a war profiteer while she and Bionic Sarah bonded. Bionic Sarah (Katee Sackhoff) makes a good semi-psycho superwoman.

Crusty old Jonas Bledsoe (Miguel Ferrer) is the head of the scientists' cult, so far as we know. They act as kind of an off-the-books anti-terrorism agency. But apparently they have good benefits, because Jaime makes the health plan part of her salary negotiation.

The most important supporting character is Jaime's 15-year-old sister, the bratty but needy Becca, who Jaime is raising. Mom is dead (they say), Dad is some kind of diehard lefty radical (we haven't met him yet) and Dad, Jaime and Becca all have a juvenile delinquent streak. Dad's was SDS protest back in the day. We don't know what Jaime's was yet but she has a sealed juvenile court record. Becca is under a court order not to have a computer plugged into a phone line, but we don't know exactly what she did. Except her high school caught her smoking pot the other day. And Jaime used her bionic powers to track Becca down making out in a car with an 18-year-old guy.

This is a kind of show I really enjoy. It has an imaginative premise, a good touch of science fiction, action, intrigue and mysteries within mysteries inside mysteries. And so far it has a "noir" feel like the 1980s series Wiseguy. The acting to date is achieving the right mix of seriousness, melodrama and humor to carry the show's basic concept.

And, no, I don't just like it because the two bionic women are beautiful. Gee, what kind of shallow TV viewer do you think I am? Anyway, if that were my goal, I would just watch telenovelas. Which I only watch for their complex plots and nuanced acting, but that's another story...

I reviewed the first four episodes in more detail here and here.

Web site: The Bionic Woman NBC

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