Bionic Woman

I really liked The List, Bionic Woman’s sixth episode … until the final scene.  But we will get to that.

The premise of the episode is that Jaime must go to Paris to retrieve a list that reveals the identity of various CIA and Berkut Group operatives.  For her partner, she picks Tom (the handsome fellow she was last seen making out with at the end of episode five).  While we still don’t know the details of how far their make out session went that night, we learn pretty early in this episode that Tom did not call Jaime afterwards and Jaime is not all that happy about it.  Yet she plays it very cool when she meets Tom, convinced that "The Rules" will keep him interested.

The plot is simple: Jaime and Tom go to Paris and pretend to be a married couple.  They play it cool and faux bicker.  They agree to be just friends before dressing up to crash a party.  They drink wine, they get in trouble, they almost catch the bad guy before Tom is captured and Jaime convinces the Berkut Group to defy the CIA to get him back.  Inexplicably, Jonas agrees and sends Jaime in with eight million dollars and orders to recover the list.  She finds Tom calm and cute, they bicker some more before professing their attraction, and then Jaime manages to capture the bad guy and diffuse the bomb around Tom’s body before the end of the episode (well, she had a little help from Nathan on the bomb).  She lost about $4 million in the process, but that seems to be the price of doing business around here. 

And then Jaime inexplicably leaves Tom, full of longing, and heads back to Becca at home instead of staying one more night with him in Paris.  The end of the episode is very frustrating, because everyone hates build up without payoff and there was a lot of sexual tension in this episode that went … nowhere.  It is especially frustrating because we are not sure what Tom’s situation is at this point.  Is he even with the CIA anymore?  Is he unemployed?  Sure the boy can take care of himself, but if she is his pseudo-girlfriend she could have at least asked him if he was okay.  But who knows, maybe that is against "The Rules."  Or maybe the producers did not think about that.

But even though I hated the ending, I still liked the episode.  The subtle themes of the episode veered away from the series-long theme of trust and went to a softer and more fun theme of longing and withholding.  What is stronger, your duty to your cause or your longing for this other person?  When push comes to shove which one will win out?  By the end of the episode we still don’t know Jaime’s answer, but as the episode goes along we see Tom slowly but surely shifting from the side of loyalty to an ideal to loyalty to lust for the Bionic Woman.  And that sets up some awfully fun potential for the episodes yet to come.