Review of Bionic Woman (2007) Premier
An odd mishmash of other TV series with only a weak link to the wonderful 1970's original. When will I overcome my Zoe Slater bias?
I heard a lot about the new series of The Bionic Woman over the summer. Initially I was very excited since the original was one of my favourite programs as a kid (along with the awesome Six Million Dollar Man). However, when I heard they were using an actress from the UK Soap Opera, Eastenders, I was troubled.
I watched the premier last Thursday with as open a mind as I could. What I found was an OK program with plenty of potential but which really didn't get me excited.
First off, apart from the name Jamie Sommers and the fact that she has bionic implants, there appears to be zero similarity between this and the original. I think that is a big mistake. I know they are trying to get a young audience but they shouldn't just discard the older viewers.
The plot this time round is that Jamie is dating a professor and they are in a horrible car crash which was not an accident. He actually works for a secretive organisation which does research on enhancing soldiers. He isn't badly hurt but she is, so he ignores protocol and rebuilds her two legs, right arm/eye/ear using nano technology.
This is the weakest part of the whole idea and smacks of money saving. What was wonderful about the 70's originals and movies like Terminator was seeing the mechanical parts under the "skin". It was proper cyborg stuff. These nanobots or nanophages just made her skin shimmer initially and are now indistinguishable from her normal limbs.
She wakes up, obviously freaked and distraught and it looks like she may be terminated. However, boyfriend helps her escape and she runs into the forest whilst being followed. This leads to the next huge disappointment, the running. I always considered it a stroke of genius in the original Six Million Dollar Man that they actually slowed down the footage to indicate that he was running quickly. We all bought into it 100%. Sadly the new producers have no balls at all and just use bog-standard speeding-up. Guess what? It looks ridiculous, like something out of a bad cartoon.
Of course there has to be a twist. It transpires that she is not the first bionic woman, there already is one, who was supposed to have been terminated as she was crazy. But she has actually escaped too and was the one who caused the car crash. The original had Jamie going nuts which has more potential for depth.
I guess she needs a nemesis for those weeks when they can't think of a decent plot-line. So the two Bionicles meet and fight and leap and do the usual martial arts (amazing that the nanobots were trained in Karate). Amazingly, Jamie survives.
The series it most reminds me of is Alias but with a sprinkling of RoboCop, Battlestar Galactica (Bad Blonde Bionicle) and Buffy. It really isn't as good as any of them right now. However, I'll give it more time since there are some nuggets of good ideas in there.
Rated /5 on Oct 01 2007 by TV Treats
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