“Is this an example of your bedside manner, doctor?” - Becky, Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Review by Melissa Voelker
For those tuning in to the new Bionic Woman series looking for some relief from Katee Sackoff withdrawal until the new season of Battlestar Galactica starts up, you will be happy to learn her first appearance happens within about a minute and a half. The show opens on a group of armed men running down shadowy (probably underground � buildings like this are always underground) hallways littered with lab-coat clad bodies. Looks like someone threw a bit of a temper tantrum, and it was guess who! The armed men come upon crazy Katee crouched over a body, blood dripping off her face and hands. This is certainly an ominous beginning, especially when crazy Katee displays some more than human abilities after asking the leader of the armed men, “Do you love me?” Is this just a random crazy question, or does this mean something that will come back to bite characters in the ass later? Cue the mental ‘Dun Dun Duuuuuuun’ and open the pilot episode for the new Bionic Woman.

We join Jamie Summers’ life already in progress three years after the happenings at the super secret underground death lab. She is working as a bartender to support her younger deaf sister (a plot point that was changed according to recent NBC news; now her sister is played by a newer, hotter actress and the deafness has been discarded) while dating Will, a professor of bionics. Oh, and it also turns out she is pregnant with Professor Boyfriend’s love child. Just after revealing this last fact to him and having him state that this is wonderfully wonderful news, they get into a horrendous car accident and Jamie’s chances of survival look slim. Suddenly the fact that Professor Boyfriend is really part of a secret government organization that rebuilds people from spare robot parts will come in handy as he puts her back together with nifty new bits and pieces. Jamie freaks out more than a little when she regains consciousness, though you can tell this was not exactly the response ol’ Willy was hoping for.

The hush-hush organization Professor Boyfriend works for has a meeting concerning what to do with Jamie now that they’ve put millions of dollars worth of toys in her body. Some want to let her continue on with her normal life (na�ve, Will, very na�ve) while others want to make a weapon out of her, and still others refer to her as a wild animal that should be put down before it realizes just how wild it really is. Eventually Will tries to grow a spine and helps Jamie escape, but I’m not sure what good it does when the agency knows every last little detail about her, including her full name, address, phone number, employer, and shoe size.

For a good 2/3s of the show it feels like the #1 thing working against this whole bionics program is weak men who can’t keep their feelings in their pants. Crazy Katee is supposed to be dead but because of her ex’s feelings (or some other mysterious guy’s feelings) for her she is off on her rampage of nuttiness. And Jamie wouldn’t be a secret government agency pawn if her meddling professor/surgeon/government patsy boyfriend had just left her to heal or not with old school treatment methods.

Anyway, Jamie goes back to her previously interrupted life, tries to make up with her sister who felt a little abandoned when Jamie ran off on a “sudden vacation,” and even returns to work like nothing has happened. But of course things have happened, and it’s starting to show. Her bionic implants are wreaking havoc on her senses, and a familiar looking blonde psycho shows up at the bar where she works to have some bionic girl-talk. (By the way, crazy Katee’s character name is Sarah Corvus. It just isn’t sticking in my head very well.) This meeting between Jamie and Sarah is cute in that creepy “Get away from her, I know what she wants and it isn’t good!” kinda way.

Eventually Jamie ends up at Professor Boyfriend’s apartment for some screaming, accusing and, of course, sexiness (what all fights lead to in the wonderful world of TV reality.) Then just when it looks like the happy couple might ride off into the proverbial sunset together, Will is shot through his window by - you guessed it! - crazy Katee. Jamie takes off after the would-be assassin, in the rain, over rooftops, and it is, I’ll admit, very cool. Katee reveals herself to be the first bionic woman (in this bionic reality which does not include Lindsey Wagner’s bionic reality), gives a list of her new and improved parts, and then the real ass kicking begins. That too is very cool. And it ends as you would expect it to end the first time these two girlies exchange fisticuffs, with no real winner or loser.

Afterward Jamie remembers that she has a possibly mortally wounded boyfriend who she had just decided to still be in love with and runs off to see what has become of him. She meets up with the bionics program crew loading Will into an ambulance. She and Jonas Bledsoe - aka Miguel Ferrer, who I have been enamored with ever since he did Shan-Yu’s voice in Mulan - have a heart-to-heart and Jamie decides to join the super secret underground bionics fun team GO! But she’ll only do it her way and if Jonas and his flunkies don’t like it they can kiss her bionic ass (okay, she doesn’t have a bionic ass, I just thought that would be funny.)

For diehard Starbuck fans there is certainly plenty of Katee running around. She starts the show off on a bloody note, pops up to cause the accident that brings on Michelle Ryan’s - aka Jamie Summers - own bionic evolution, then is seen again in a hotel room for a clandestine meeting with a possibly bad news kinda guy (which brings about another of her random spoutings of “Do you love me?” I’m thinking she has some serious insecurity issues.) This is a lot more of Katee Sackoff than I expected, knowing that Starbuck will be in the BSG mini-series, plus the last season of the show, so this is only a part-time gig. Or is it? Does her constant appearance in Bionic Woman mean she is the main baddy of the series? I’d hate to get attached to her only to have her disappear within a couple of weeks, especially when so far is she is the most well defined character we’ve been presented with. But there is such a fine line with villains. Sarah Corvus could easily become overdone � with the constant bad girl dialogues and spouting of “Do you love me?” to every mildly hot guy that comes along - so that after a couple more episodes I may be wishing her batteries would just die already.

It doesn’t take an elite Six-Degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon player to see the touch of a Battlestar Galactica producer all over Bionic Woman. The list of appearances by BSG actors keeps growing and growing. It’s nice to know they all found something to do job wise during the off-season, but it might get confusing after a while if they all keep popping up. Eventually viewers will be wondering if they are watching Bionic Woman or BSG: Alternate Universe.

This wasn’t the worst pilot I’ve ever seen, though I can totally understand why a lot of times viewers never even see the pilot episodes of shows. In the beginning it couldn’t seem to get its flow down, jumping from scene to scene without any kind of attempt at a smooth transition. The writers wanted you to know all the important facts right away and who cares if it made you kind of sick how they were force-feeding it to you! Michelle Ryan as Jamie Summers isn’t terrible, though she is no Lindsey Wagner, and I love Miguel Ferrer so I have no problem with him having a semi-important role. Seeing crazy Katee play another delightfully fractured female character is always fun, as she does it so very well, but I’m not sure I care much for the way they are doing her hair and make-up. Oh well, that is just nit picking and I know it.

All in all I found the dialogue and interactions between Jamie and her sister to be the most realistic and believable. Their chemistry as sisters worked well, the way they argued and made up, it all reminded me of how I interact with my own sisters. (Of course taking out this sister is one of the big changes the grand high poobaas of the show made, which I think is a faux pas on their part.) Crazy Katee does okay, and that’s good since there is so much of her, but everything with Professor Boyfriend seems empty and lacking. Either the dialogue between he and Jamie is badly written or these two actors just have no chemistry between them at all. I wonder if it is too late for them to recast Professor Boyfriend as well as Sister Who is No Longer Deaf . . .

Never miss an update. Subscribe to Pink Raygun by Email or subscribe via RSS