Bionic Woman (Ha! I've seen the premiere already!)

[aelfgyfu_mead]

As geeks, we seem to have hit the big time. Amazon Unbox selected us to receive free four premieres of new shows! All we had to do was say yes! And we had downloaded three of them before our router went kaput. (We have a new router and hope to get Journeyman soon.) Maybe it's because we rushed to buy A Dog's Breakfast on Unbox. (Digression: A Dog's Breakfast comes out on DVD Sept. 18! Order now! We have! There are extras on the DVD that don't come with Unbox.)

So what follows is my review of Bionic Woman. I'm trying to avoid spoilers, but I'll put most of it below the cut for length. By the way: if you don't want spoilers, avoid the five-minute preview that's all over the Internet. You can figure out almost the whole darned plot from those five minutes. I watched weeks ago. I wish I hadn't.

Here's my quick summary: if you think the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica is good, you'll probably like the re-imagined Bionic Woman. David Eick was involved in both, and they have similar sensibilities. Everything is darker, gritter (nastier, bloodier). Some of it is thought-provoking, and some just seems overdone (like the product of three am dorm discussions of philosophy). I'm always of two minds about new BSG, and I feel similarly about Bionic Woman (hereafter BW).

I don't remember the 70s BW, which might be an advantage (I do remember the original BSG and made the mistake of trying to rewatch on cable a couple of years ago; I found it unwatchable. I know some of you are fans, so please pardon me. I still like Dirk Benedict, but the guest stars on the ep I turned off would have been an embarrassment at a high school production, and the production values were--well, better than contemporary Doctor Who, but not by much). I'm darned sure the original BW was a whole lot less violent than the new one.

The violence was a turn-off for me. It wasn't awfully graphic by today's standards, but I watch tv to escape. If I wanted to see people, I'd watch the news. (I don't usually watch the news. I listen to NPR and try to read the newspaper.) The dark characters were also a turn-off, and most of them are dark.

I can't fault Michelle Ryan as Jamie Sommers. She's beautiful, she's convincing--and she's playing by far the most sympathetic character. I can mostly like her. Katee Sackhoff does an amazing job; she's tremendously talented. (But I have to snipe: is her hair bionic? There are scenes where it's gelled just ridiculously. Not her fault, but Makeup & Hair.) Mark Sheppard (Romo Lambkin on BSG) has a brief guest appearance. He's very good. He can almost do the American accent they decided he needed, but there are a couple of give-aways on the vowels. (Hey, I'm fascinated by dialects, even though I'm not very good at discerning them.)

Even though I knew the overall plot from the excessively long preview I'd seen, I jumped. More than that, Brilliant Husband jumped, twice, and he's far less affected by tv than I am. Even things we knew were coming startled us. The episode is well-directed. There are surprises.

I will continue to watch, at least for now. I do prefer shows with a slightly softer edge, though. I don't watch 24 (usually). I like SG-1 and SGA! (although I have major complaints about two recent developments on SGA; they're character-related, and if you've seen the end of s3, you know exactly what I mean). I like shows that have sympathetic characters! They don't have to be perfect (goodness knows none of the Doctors or Companions are), but I want to connect with them emotionally. I'm still waiting to see if certain characters prove to have more redeeming qualities.

I have read too much press on the show, and something significant I read about one of the characters is not true, so now I'm wondering if it's going to happen later in the show. If you want a possible spoiler, read below; if not, stop at the end of this paragraph. I did hear they recast the role, so they might have reconceived it as well.


SPOILER SPACE


YOU'VE BEEN WARNED


THERE BE (POSSIBLE) SPOILERS HERE

Earlier reports (and I'm not even talking that long ago!) had Jamie caring for her younger, deaf sister. Her sister is obviously not deaf (though both my husband and I thought she was because of the press, causing initial confusion as we watched). So now I'm wondering if her sister will be injured in an upcoming episode, causing deafness and giving Jamie more guilt (as if she needs anything else to deal with right now). I will be very annoyed if they have given away a development that's not even in the first episode in press that started months before the show aired. If she never becomes deaf, I will complain less.

Comments

[delphia2000.livejournal.com]

JMHO, you could have been a whole lot more spoilery with me. All you have to do is warn people and then let them choose to read or not. If it's as dark and gritty as you say, I'll probably not watch this one. I watched the original mostly because it was fun. And the UST between Jamie and Steve was amazing. You really were rooting for them to get back together. I know the younger gens like the dark stuff, but I've had quite enough.

[aelfgyfu_mead]

I figure better too cautious on spoilers than not cautious enough (I'm still ticked about how much people let out about "The Shroud" on SG-1)!

There is, at least so far, so Bionic Man, and there doesn't seem ever to have been one. Jamie has a boyfriend, and I can't decide how much I like and dislike him yet. (Or--WARNING! SPOILERS!--I'm not sure at the end of the ep if she still has a boyfriend at all!)

Yes, it's pretty dark.

[gatechic.livejournal.com]

I'll probably give it a try and see.

[tipper-green.livejournal.com]

See, dark doesn't bother me. Dark and gritty doesn't bother me. Dark and gritty and *angsty* without letting up once, however, bothers me. There could have been some serious joy in the pilot that they didn't bring--moments of humor, moments of the sublime--but all we got was darkness, rain, and, yeah, hair gel. The more I think about it, the more disappointed I feel about it. I almost wish they had stolen a page from Sam Raimi's Spiderman movie--just had Jaime take a second to marvel after, say, that run, at what she had just done. Once you got away, even if you were pissed off, wouldn't you stop, even if only briefly, and think, "okay, that was *seriously* cool."

Still, I'm going to watch again, hoping that it might lighten up a little. And maybe slow down. And maybe, and this is a forlorn hope I realize, send the sister far, far away (and get Jaime some friends).