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Bionic Woman: Bionically Bad
By RickMeasham | July 13, 2008
A few weeks back I noticed that Foxtel were showing the new “Bionic Woman” series on their SciFi channel. Finally, as a SciFi fan, I might find something worth watching on the channel. The pilot was great: The cinematography, the direction, the casting and the plot all worked well enough to get me back for Ep2. But that’s when it started to lose me. Fatima and I have just watched Ep3 and we struggled to watch to the end.
Once it ended, in typical Rick-and-Fatima style, we “postmortemed” the series up to ep3. We’re armchair experts after all.
So what do we think went wrong? The pilot had great cinematography, direction and casting. So did the following eps. What’s missing? The writing. Whoever is in charge of these writers needs to seriously get off this show and let some real talent get in there.
Warning: Spoilers follow
In the pilot (ep1) we meet Jaime Sommers, a bar-tender who’s gotten herself pregnant to her apparently lovely boyfriend. They’re in a road accident and it turns out he’s a bionic engineer. To save her life, he takes her back to the lab and turns her into the BW. She wakes up, gets pissed at him, walks out of the ‘top secret lab’ and goes home to her sister. Really nice introduction to the main characters.
But then it starts to fall apart. See there used to be another BW: Sarah Corvus. They killed her, but she’s somehow back from the dead and somehow she’s stolen the entire plot and beaten it to a pulp.
TV shows fall into three main groups: Episodic programs have no relationship to each other. For example: The Simpsons. Serial programs continue a single plot point through the entire series (Heroes), or even the lifetime of the show (Lost). The third group sits nicely in the middle: Each episode contains a single, resolved plotline but also has a sub-plot that winds its way into each episode (Boston Legal).
Bionic Woman tries to be the third. Each episode contains a resolved plotline: In ep2 it’s the town in Utah and in ep3 it’s the bitchy daughter of a weapons manufacturer. And then there’s the continuing sub-plot: Sarah Corvus.
The writers have made the fatal mistake of trying to make Sarah Corvus’ (incredibly boring) sub-plot into the main plot of each episode to the point that the resolved plotlines are dealt with in such a superficial manner that they’re laughable: In ep3, a couple of hours with the company shrink and witnessing a BW fight turns bitchy-daughter into a quivering sniveling mess.
OK, in case it isn’t clear yet: WE DO NOT CARE ABOUT SARAH CORVUS. AT ALL.
Writers: it is your job to make us care about her. You have failed. She’s hanging around with BW’s BF’s Father who we don’t know if he’s a ‘goody’ or a ‘baddy’ (Fatima, a media teacher, is always telling her students how important it is to be clear about who is the protagonist and who is the antagonist). She’s shaking like she’s coming off a heroin addiction and she keeps trying to claim that Jaime ‘needs her’. WE DO NOT CARE.
Please fix this balance before making any more episodes (though rumor says it’s done and dusted). If you’re going to talk about Sarah Corvus, you can have 10 minutes per 42 minute episode as the recurring plotline. Then you can have a few minutes to show Jaime interacting with her sister and a few to have her interacting with the other people at the company (Fatima says: “Enough of the fight-training already!”). The rest of the show should be the resolved plotline. It should be treated with respect rather than just an annoying thing you need to do each week. We want to see the BW kicking some baddie’s butt. We want her solving crimes and keeping the planet safe.
Topics: Television | 1 Comment »
July 27th, 2008 at 5:19 pm
Hi Rick,
Bionic woman did go a bit up and down – and yes I think that it has now been axed. From memory the timing may have intersecting with the screen writers guild strike though – this may have been partly to blame.
Anyway – stay well. Chat soon.
Cheers,
–Andrew.