Bionic Woman

Lucy Hale recast as Becca Sommers - Photo via NBC

We mentioned earlier that the folks at NBC, Amazon and Tivo were kind smart to make the September 26, 2007 premiere available for download this week, and without commercials too. Previously, I reviewed the un-aired pilot and found it to have flaws. Here are my quick thoughts after watching official pilot from the Tivo download.

Fixing something that wasn’t broken, the producers recast the role of Jaime Sommer’s sister, Becca, from Mae Whitman, as a deaf teenager, to Lucy Hale as a wise cracking computer hacker too smart for her own good.

Honestly, I’m not sure it was necessary to replace Mae Whitman with Lucy Hale. However, keeping the deaf sister would have been better for several reasons. The first is that the deaf community is poorly represented on TV and choosing to make her deaf while her older sister has bionic implants would have made a nice juxtaposition. Second, the dramatic conflict would have fit in nicely with the darker direction of the remake.

Other than the recasting, the only other noticeable difference was post work titles alerting us to how much time had passed and the location of the characters when beginning a new scene.

Overall, the pilot is not too bad, but it could/should have been much better. It is too rushed. More time should have been given to the development of the characters and their back story. We aren’t given enough time to like Michelle Ryan’s Jaime Sommers. And I believe the bionics should have come in episode two or even three. However, the redone Bionic Woman does show great promise and I am looking forward to watching it each week. I say this with one caveat, they must keep Katee Sackhoff’s Sarah Corvus always in the background. Sackhoff steals every scene. She is obviously having fun with her character and every scene with her is better than the one before. Sarah Corvus is the most interesting one we meet in the pilot and honestly, I was rooting for her as much as I was for Michelle Ryan’s Jaime Sommers. Probably not what the producers intended.

The episode is worth watching if for no other reason than the final rooftop fight between Ryan as Sommers and Sackhoff as Corvus. Sackhoff taking a timeout during the battle is classic TV. Although I do have a problem with Sackhoff smoking in this scene.

Two huge annoyances that should have been fixed but weren’t:

1. Michelle Ryan screaming her head off when Sommers first learns what has happened to her and that bionics have been attached and inserted without her permission. Margie and I panned this when it was released and I thought, surely they will re-edit this scene and take out so much screaming. Nope. I swear, the screaming gets longer with each viewing. The scene is so bad that it almost killed my enthusiasm for the remake when NBC included it as part of the extended preview this summer.

2. The very brief scene where the little girl alerts her mother that a woman is running as fast as their car. The mother tells the girl to stop making stuff up and the little girl, as the camera closes in on her face says, "I just thought it was cool that a girl could do that." Uhhhgg. This is so cheesy and certainly doesn’t work with the scene (Jaime has just escaped the government compound where she was being held captive). Not to mention it’s cliched as hell.

Overall episode rating: 6.5 out of 10.

Bionic Woman, NBC, BW, Season 1 Pilot, Katee Sackhoff, Michelle Ryan, Mae Whitman, Lucy Hale, Jaime Sommers, Sarah Corvus, Amazon, Tivo