“Bionic Woman” — Pilot
Domo arigato, Mrs. Roboto
The episode’s single greatest moment comes from the crippling car crash that sends our heroine to the robo-surgeon. It’s unexpected (even on the second viewing), loud, violent, and incredibly quick. There’s no slow-mo, no prolonging the damage. It just happens. It’s brutal and kind of cool. It also comes nine minutes into the series, leaving a lot of room to go down hill, which the series does. Much more after the jump…
Since the original version of the pilot I saw earlier in the summer we dumped Egg, I mean Anne, I mean Mae Whitman, I mean… her? for this new version of the sister who is no longer deaf and now a government monitored computer hacker. Either way the character is completely worthless and wholly annoying. I’ve reached capacity in my life with bratty teenager characters and know-it-all computer hackers. This girl is both. Yikes. She’s also the biggest liability on a series that is walking a very fine line from kinda interesting to kinda awful.
The bionic-villain (aka Bionic Woman 1.0) is a good one. So much of modern television is filled with post-modern emotionally conflicted bad guys – thanks Alan Moore. Hell, starting this Sunday, Showtime is asking us to once again root for a serial killer (and we will, because he’s interesting). The problem is this trend has made the classic super-villain a thing of the past. If we can thank Bionic Woman for anything, it’s returning us a couple of classic archetypes: the hero and the villain. Each knows their place in the fabric of the universe and is motivated by the other. Sarah Corvis is a fantastic bad-guy—er, bad-person. Plus she’s a smoker, and the best villains are always smokers (because smoking makes you look way cool).
Unfortunately, I’d much rather watch the villain than the hero (though I want to listen to neither, as the dialogue is just awful). Michelle Ryan doesn’t really do it for me as the Bionic Woman. She lacks the look of potential menace. Not that she should be menacing, just suggest the character could produce spontaneous, uncontrollable danger. Perhaps that’s a trait one can learn. I honestly don’t know.
Effects wise, the show is hit and miss. The crash, as mentioned before, was fantastic. The super-strength though, looks kind of off. Too Crouching-Tiger-wire-works, if you know what I mean — the movements too fluid. There should be more snap. How does one do this week after week one a television budget? Well, that’s a problem for NBC, not for us. The hand-to-robot-hand fighting is sufficiently exciting, but that isn’t anything too surprising. We’ve come quite a way since Adam West’s Batman-slow-punch of yesteryear. If Hollywood is good at anything these days its making it look like someone just took a fist to the face.
The pilot is certainly an improvement over the version I saw earlier in the summer. It’s not a great show by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s better than expected, and certainly made me want to tune in for another week (well, at least I was inclined to tune in whenever the characters weren’t speaking – god the dialogue is lousy). I’ll probably stick with it for the foreseeable future, or at least until I decide that my Wednesday are better spent not watching seven hours of television (like that would happen, bwah-ha –ha-ha!…).
How about everyone else? Did the show make an impression on you one way or the other, or came off as just another forgettable hour?
October 2nd, 2007 at 12:39 pm
[...] As I mentioned in my write-up of Bionic Woman last week, I feel television is in need of some classic bad guys. In that show we were given a straight-up evil character with whom our hero could fight. Here, the villains are more comical, coming from the school or Bond or Maxwell Smart more than comic-book super-villianry. Gadgets, weapons, speeches, these are the traits of a solid bad guy — well, at least they used to be. I support it. [...]