Bryan over at 411mania.com believes that the pilot episode of Bionic Woman was good, but asks why the show didn’t start differently, with Jaime Sommers already a Bionic Woman:
I finally got a chance to watch the first episode of the new “Bionic Woman” series, and the biggest question I have is why did they start this show at the beginning? Why was it absolutely necessary to start out the series with Jaime Summers not already a bionic woman? Now, I’ve always been a proponent of starting out at the beginning, starting simple, and then building up from there to more complexity. To me anyway, that’s when drama is most successful. But, much like the “it’s always scarier and more artistic not to show the monster” is a bunch of hooey, always starting out at the beginning is not always the best way to go. Or, origin stories are not all they’re cracked up to be.What exactly would have been the harm in starting out the new “Bionic Woman” with Michelle Ryan’s Jaime Summers already activated or whatever the heck the evil government group run by the always great Miguel Ferrer calls it? Nothing. Granted, there wasn’t much in the way of needless exposition in the “BW” pilot (which is why it’s one of the better pilots I think I’ve ever seen in that regard), but then, too, not much else happened. We saw the wicked nasty car crash that “allowed” Summers to become the BW, that blonde chick was walking around like she was a Eurotrash scumbag in a vampire movie (yeah, that smoking stuff was reallycool. Way to stick it to the smoking Nazis there), and after Summers was transformed there were some fast running stunts and an anti-climactic fight in the rain on top of a building between Summers and the blonde woman.Yeah. So why should I watch again? Because Michelle Ryan is hot? Because Miguel Ferrer gets to be a bad guy again? Because of that awful techno theme music (although I will say it’s cool to hear an actual sort of theme music as opposed to some lame alternative whine song as the show’s music)? I’m sort of intrigued to find out what exactly the BW is going to be called upon to do, but beyond the fighting and fast running skills we’ve already seen, I have no idea what any of these people do beyond going up and down on that elevator. And I’m not sure why I should care.Which is why this show should have started in a different fashion.
And then there’s the whole “If I do this I do this on my terms” line that Summers gave at the end of the episode. Please. That’s something she would have said after a mission or two and would have told Ferrer in his office or over a radio, not right after finding out that she can climb walls and use chain linked fence as a catapault. And since this whole “Berkut” group is so black ops and secret and all that, why wouldn’t they go into extreme crisis mode as soon as they found out that the blonde woman, the first BW, wasn’t dead? Why wouldn’t the whole show then be about that, the government and or Berkut going after her? Maybe that’s too “A-Team.”
It’s an interesting thought, I guess they could haveused Lost-style flashbacks to fill in the ‘origins’ of the BW story, but using the current storyline as an example, I think witnessing Jaime’s evolution in contrast to Sarah’s devolution (if you will), could prove to be fascinating. Also I think seeing a glimpse of Jaime’s life before she was made bionic has opened up many powerful themes..and anyway, what Bryan is perhaps unwittingly suggesting is that we start with twoSarah Corvus stories! From the outset Sarah Corvus was representative of the already ‘bionic’ protagonist, she serves as a cautionary tale and so we needed to see Jaime pre-installation, in my view.
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