Bionic Woman

The modern Jaime Sommers will not be back … not for a while anyway.  For all of her potential, for all of her strength, she could not survive the tough challenges of the modern television industry.

Much like in the show, what got the modern Jaime into the most trouble was listening to too many people.  The new Jaime did not know who she was, and was more than willing to listen to people tell her who she needed to be … for all her defiant slouching in the tunnels of the Burket Group, the modern Jaime was absorbing everyone’s expectations for what kind of Bionic Woman she should become. 

And that turned out to be the disease that finally killed the modern Bionic Woman, that desperate need to change to please everybody.  Because everybody thought they knew what she needed to do to succeed. 

As a result the modern Bionic Woman was a constantly changing mess.  People were always opening her up, rearranging her bionic parts, removing characters, adding plotlines, and then removing them again just as quickly.  If the machine is nothing without the woman, then the Woman needed some spine and some structure … but just like no one at the Berkut Group thought to give Jaime a good cell phone, no one recognized the obvious until it was too late to save her modern life. 

From the very first reviews of the pilot to things still being written today, the majority of people who saw the show thought they could make Bionic Woman better, faster, stronger than what they were seeing on screen.  

From NBC Entertainment President Ben Silverman to fans of the original series, from actual bionic scientists to television bloggers … pretty much every person who saw the show had the same thought as Bionic Woman scholar Herbie J. Pilato:   “David Eick needs to call me.”

“I mean, I know what went wrong,” Bionic star Katee Sackhoff said in a recent interview.  “Had they given me the show, I could have figured it out. I could have told them exactly what to do. But then everyone would have put their hands in, and the same thing would have happened … that’s just how it goes.”

By trying to please everyone, the Bionic Woman ended up pleasing no one at all.  By allowing everyone to mess with her, she gave away everything she was and became nothing.