By Brandon Nolta
Damn, you’d think the writers of this show have bionic word processors or something. The way they tend to leap into stuff, in medias res must be tattooed on their foreheads. Within a minute of show’s start, Jaime Sommers (Michelle Ryan) has gone from having a nice lunch with her sister to having to detain a bad guy on orders from her boss Jonas (Miguel Ferrer). Give the woman credit, she takes the smart approach at first, but bad guys aren’t usually receptive to that. As it turns out, bouncing his skull off the steering wheel is also persuasive.
What a great metaphor for the episode, as it turns out, because Sarah Corvus (Katee Sackhoff) is still on the loose, and that’s her favorite method of persuasion. Now that Daddy Anthros (Mark Sheppard) is loose and capable of helping Sarah with her bionic issues—tremors, neural feedback, the occasional homicidal urge—he’s given bionic woman 1.0 a mission: snag the latest version and run a diagnostic or three for a baseline. Sarah claims there’s an unconscious, near-psychic connection between the bionic babes, and she might be right, because she also takes the smart approach in asking for Jaime’s help. While all this drama is going on, Jaime is also tasked with playing watchdog over the daughter of a Canadian arms merchant, who makes Paris Hilton look demure and well-behaved.
The writers are still punching through the narrative a little quicker than they should, but the show is starting to take shape and gain a little traction. Why they even bothered with the Canadian subplot is beyond me; the Corvus-Sommers plotline is so good and rife with narrative tension, anything else is just a distraction. Ryan is growing into her character slowly, but she has a tough role to play in that she’s balancing the growing mechanistic tendencies with her humanity. Sackhoff, on the other hand, gets to rip into being the bad girl, and brings that ol’ Starbuck intensity to the role. As a result, when she shows the flashes of the real person buried beneath the bleeding-edge tech, it makes more of an impression.
Ferrer’s still the man, though I have to wonder about how easily he lets a $50 million investment override his SOP. I mean, shouldn’t they have gotten this down already? Then again, even if the Berkut Group isn’t a government agency, it was almost certainly founded by people who worked at one, so that mindset probably can’t help but seep in now and again. Washington and Yun Lee get a little less time this go-round, but they’re hanging in there like old pros.
Slowly but surely, BIONIC WOMAN’s getting better as a series. NBC isn’t nearly as bad at whacking series before their time as other networks (cough, cough *Fox*), so there’s a good chance this one will get its legs before the plug is pulled. Whether Eick and his crew can reinvent this traveler from the 1970s in the same way that BATTLESTAR GALACTICA was, only NBC and time will tell, but here’s hoping that the ratings are there so the show gets its chance.