OK,
it’s like this – although we have to jump in our
time machine to zoom back to the 1970s to make sense of it all.
First there was The Six Million Dollar Man, starring
Lee Majors, who was famous for dating Farrah Fawcett and not
much else. Then that show had a spin-off titled (you guessed
it) The Bionic Woman, starring Lindsay Wagner (again,
if you haven’t heard of her, you’re not Robinson
Crusoe). Now, nearly 30 years after the original series disappeared,
the NBC network (US) has decided to “re-imagine”
it.
Now, the mere use of the word “re-imagine” sends
shudders down the spine, evoking as it does countless insipid
remakes of classic movies. In TV world however, “re-imaginings”
are a relatively new phenomena, but hey, when you run out of
ideas, why not resurrect some smelly corpse of a series for
a rehash.
In the case of The Bionic Woman, the reworking involves replacing
the skydiving accident of the original series with a car crash,
robotics with nano-technology and the US Government with some
kind of shadowy quasi-governmental covert agency.
Basically, our heroine Jaime Sommers (Michelle Ryan) is a bartender
who’s involved in a horrific road smash. As luck would
have it, her boyfriend is a professor specialising in nano-technology.
He naturally can’t let his ladylove cark it, so “invests”
many millions of dollars of money not his own into saving her.
There’s a catch to this of course – the money involves
means that Jaime is beholden to the shadowy Jonas Bledsoe (Miguel
Ferrer) and his organization, who are there to take on the “bad
guys”. But Jaime is a bit reluctant to commit to Jonas
and his crew, especially as she’s the carer for her younger
sister Becca (Lucy Hale).
Of course, we all know that Jaime will eventually embrace Jonas
(although her turnaround seems to be based more on faith than
on logic) and start kicking butt amongst the myriad bad guys
who dare to show their faces. Complicating the picture however
is the presence of another bionic woman, Sarah Corvus (Katee
Sackhoff), who’s “off the reservation” as
it were.
The
real problem with this series, as with the 1970s model, is that
the idea behind it is pretty silly. All the psuedo-science in
the world can't make the premise of an aritifically engineered
super-human seem anything more than the hooey it is. Other shows
of this ilk (Heroes, say) accept their own internal reality
and get on with exploring more interesting things. The Bionic
Woman however wants to have it both ways – to have outlandish
science and still have its plot happening in the “real”
world.
The other thing that really grates on me about this show is
its rampant macho-ness. I know that sounds a bit silly since
the central character is, after all, a woman. But the scriptwriters
have made poor old Jamie a woman in name only. She's a butt-kicking
bully who'll do anything the “get the job done”.
Her relationship with her sister isn't exactly warm and caring
(she's normally dumping the teenager to deal with some threat);
and she's pathologically conflicted about her place in the world.
British-born actress Michelle Ryan does a mostly flawless American
accent for the part of Jamie, but seems to have some trouble
with the more emotional moments in the series. Miguel Ferrer
is all nasty secrets and black dossiers as her handler, and
doesn't get to do much except bark orders. “Special guest
star” Isiah Washington (who disappears from the show soon),
cuts a fine figure as Antonio Pope; while Katee Sackhoff is
positively zany as the wigged-out Sarah.
To be fair, The Bionic Woman isn't all bad. It has a kind of
Alias-lite feel about it, and some of its situations are midly
interesting. But it's let down by some clumsy plot and character
developments, and a distinct lack of credibility.
