Bionic Woman

Rounding out the third Jaime and Nathan scene from, episode 1.05, “The Education of Jaime Sommers,” this clip is fun because it shows Jaime figuring out how to break into the office of the professor she has gone undercover to investigate.  Her goal is to break in the place and scan his computer to get proof he is selling his mind controlling computer chip to terrorists.

Jaime and Nathan’s scenes are some of my favorites because Kevin Rankin has turned out to be a fun, likeable character.  Unfortunately, we don’t know too much about his character Nathan, other than he is the go to guy for Jaime all things bionic.  He mends her when something breaks, watches her while she is undercover and here, assists as she figures out how to get in the office.

Also, note Michelle Ryan uses her British accent and she does sound, as Nathan says, “It is literally the hottest thing ever.”

I hope there is more of Nathan as the season goes on and we finally get to see more of him.

Favorite Line:

Nathan:  So typical of this place, they spend $50 million dollars on you and won’t spring for Bluetooth.

Continuing the highlights of Jaime and Nathan scenes from Bionic Woman, episode 1.05, “The Education of Jaime Sommers,” this scene finds Jaime already on assignment undercover as a British transfer student working to find out if a world renewed professor in Parkinson’s research is selling his research to terrorists.  The professor has a teaching assistant, this week’s extra special guest star, Jordan Bridges.  Turns out, Bridges plays “Tom” the CIA agent, also on assignment to learn who is selling the professor’s mind controlling chips.

Jaime has become quite enamored with the teacher’s assistant.    Unbeknownst that the other is a spy, Jaime and Tom hit it off and start to become more than “student” and “teacher”.

Poor Nathan, he has to sit back at Berkut HQ and watch through Jaime’s ocular camera as Tom smoothly seduces Jaime.  It’s fun watching Nathan get jealous as Tom’s smooth style obviously has a romantic effect on Jaime.

Favorite Line: 

Nathan:  Chatty Kathy, cut the cord.

It’s no secret around these parts that I really like the interaction and chemistry Michelle Ryan as Jaime Sommers and Kevin Rankin as Nathan have each episode.  In fact, I think these actors have the best chemistry on the show, and the producers haven’t even bothered to give Nathan a last name!

Here’s one of three, count ‘em three clips of Jaime and Nathan from episode 1.05, “The Education of Jaime Sommers”.

The set up:

Jaime is going undercover as college student transferring in for the semester to study neurobiology under a world renewed professor suspected of selling his brain chip research to the highest bidder. 

Jaime feels completely overwhelmed because a) she didn’t actually go to Harvard and b) had she gone, her major was going to be Irish literature.

Poor Nathan, the more time he spends with Jaime, the more he realizes they aren’t such a perfect match.

Favorite line:

Nathan:  Wow, we have very little in common.

Bionic Woman episode 1.05, “The Education of Jaime Sommers,” really only had one fight scene.  There was one brief scuffle with a guy trying to attack Jaime, but it hardly counts and I’m not even going to bother posting it.

The set up:

Jaime has been sent undercover as a college student to investigate the black market sale of advanced microchips that once implanted in a person, can actually be used to turn them into killing “Manchurian Candidates”.  The chips were created by a world renewed expert in Parkinson’s Disease.

The fight scene erupts while Jaime and crew move in to stop the bad guys from getting away with the microchip.  Jaime, CIA agent Tom and Antonio Pope all work to take the bad guys down.

Bionic Woman episode 1.04, “Face Off” was a bit disjointed, but it did give us this fun scene and line of the week.

The setup:

Michelle Ryan’s Jaime Sommers has broken one of her bionic toes while spying on her sister, Becca.  Jaime heads to the Wolfe Creek facility to have Nathan fix her toe.  Nathan flirts with Jaime each week and while he is working on her toe, she accuses him of being more than a little interested in her feet.  Nathan’s reply is classic.

Sommers:  Do you have a foot fetish?

Nathan:  Actually, no, Jaime, I do not, I’m pretty much just a simple boob man.”

Usually people think of David Eick’s other show, Battlestar Galactica, when they talk about timely topics on television. But Paul Krugman of the New York Times thinks Bionic Woman is also a reflection of modern times, based on his recent comments:

Bionic Blackwater

After a hard day’s teaching, a guy’s gotta flake out a little. So I watched Bionic Woman last night — and found myself thinking about, yes, privatization.

I’m pretty sure the original, 1970s Bionic Woman worked for a government agency. But this version works for a private contractor - she even gets assigned to protect the daughter of a tycoon who gives the company a lot of business. Yet this private company seems to be empowered to go around killing people. And nobody seems to consider this at all unusual, or legally dubious.

I guess TV writers just pick up on the Zeitgeist.

A lot of people are hollering doom and gloom about Bionic Woman’s ratings right now, but it is still one of the top twenty-five shows on television and the top new show on NBC. According to a list up on Televisionista.com, Bionic Woman’s ratings are better than The Office, My Name is Earl, Deal or No Deal, Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, Law & Order: SVU and a host of other television staples.

Roco at Bionic-Blog articulates many fans fantasies about the palpable sexual tension between Jaime Sommers and Sarah Corvus playing out on screen … perhaps as a ratings boosting kiss for sweeps week?

Remote Access describes what a lot of fans are feeling after the first month of Bionic Woman: they are not giving up yet, but they have not gotten addicted yet either. Ryan McGee agrees that it is too soon to give up, and continues to be optimistic abut the show’s future in spite of three out of four sub-par set up episodes.

Head over to Pink Raygun to check out their Battle of the Bionic Women, a series that pits the classic show against the modern version point by point.

And last but not least, Entertainment Weekly ranked Michelle Ryan’s Jaime Sommers number 12 on their list of 22 Butt Kicking Babes. Jaime’s in good company with spygirl Sarah Walker from Chuck, modern day thrill seekers Charlie’s Angels, River Tam from Firefly & Serenity, Trinity from The Matrix, and Sarah Connor from The Terminator. Interestingly enough, Katee Sackhoff’s Kara “Starbuck” Thrace from Battlestar Galactica apparently kicks more butt than Jaime because she makes the list at Number Four. Number One on the Butt Kicking Babes list is the ferocious Ellen Ripley, played by Sigourney Weaver in the Alien movies. You’d better get away from her, you bitches!

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Did anyone catch the magazine Sarah Corvus was reading just before a cool fight scene broke out?

It looks like Bio Magazine.  Any guesses?

Michelle Ryan as Jaime Sommers/ Via NBC

We started this blog by jumping right into commentary on the new show, so as we ramp up to the premiere of Bionic Woman let’s take a step back and get to know the character’s backstories.

Via the official BW site.

Jaime Sommers was born on February 23, 1983 in Van Horne, Iowa, to Ethan and Madeline Jo Sommers. Ethan and Madeline were political activists, for which Ethan received some public notoriety. Both parents traveled a lot for their causes, and could be away for days or weeks at a time. When he would return home, Ethan always brought back photographs of his travels for Jaime, and, even at a young age, influenced Jaime’s love for photography. In 1992, Jaime’s sister, Becca Sommers, was born.

Jaime attended the local public school, Meskwaki High School, in Van Horne. She was a very active student; she was the forward on the school’s field hockey team, contributed to and edited the school literary magazine, was a success on debate squad, and participated in the photography club. She was popular among the students and a favorite of her professors.

With neither of her parents in lucrative professions, Jaime helped contribute to the family by getting jobs around the neighborhood. She baby-sat, delivered newspapers, and was hired as a hostess and waitress at a family-style restaurant called Jelly’s Eatery.

A year before Jaime was to graduate high school, Madeline was diagnosed with malignant stage II breast cancer. Jaime, who always believed her parents’ busy life on the road prevented Madeline from getting an earlier diagnosis, quit most of her extracurricular activities to help care for her mom. Her grades slowly began to suffer, but she managed to graduate in the top 7% of her class in 2001. When Madeline’s condition worsened, Jaime threw aside her plans for college to stay close to her mother. She continued to work, but became more and more involved as a caretaker for her mother.

In 2004, after a lengthy battle with cancer, Madeline Jo Sommers died. Immediately after the funeral, Jaime left for the west coast, leaving Becca behind. Upon her arrival on the west coast, Jaime quickly found herself a cramped apartment in a college town and a job working at a local bar. She enrolled in the psychology program at the nearby college and was able to afford tuition since she had saved up a little bit of money while taking care of her mother. In a bioethics class she took as an elective a few semesters later, she met a highly regarded professor, Dr. Will Anthros, whom she eventually started dating.

Tracking Jaime down, Becca showed up on her doorstep in 2006 with a duffel bag of a few belongings asking to stay with her. Jaime allowed Becca to move in, but again the need to provide for her family, this time her sister, forced Jaime to drop out of college.

Bionic Woman producer David Eick gave a recent interview where he shed some light on his views about the “woman” part of Bionic Woman.

“In the old days, it was about ‘women can do everything men can do.’ That doesn’t seem to be as much of an issue now,” says executive producer David Eick. Today, “it’s more about if we can accept that women can do what men can do, do we judge it differently? Backing that is what I call the Peter Parker ethos: someone who is not sure of him or herself as a person, let alone a hero. And I’m just applying that to a female perspective.”

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Lost in the controversy over the recasting of Jamie Sommers’ sister is the news that when NBC jettisoned the deaf character on Bionic Woman, they also ditched the monkeys.

Apparently the new Jamie was originally going to be a lab worker, not a bartender. And her unusually strong connection with the monkeys in the lab was going to be explained by her deaf sister. Jamie’s familiarity with sign language helped her communicate with the monkeys, bringing a whole new depth to her character. The character of Jamie’s sister would add additional darkness and internal conflict to Jamie, and the concept would add a whole plethora of potential monkey moments into the show as well.

And then NBC ditched both the depth of character and the monkeys. As you can see from the above photo of a monkey with Natalie Portman, this was truly a great loss for the show. BuddyTV explains why the decision to recast Jamie’s sister will hurt the show and the characters, noting that “Jamie’s deaf sister would have symbolized the unfairness of the bionic technology being used for warfare, all the while providing the new Bionic Woman with a secret self-loathing that would play out at the very sight of her sister’s struggles to fit into the world.” And we could have had monkeys!

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