The Bionic Woman

SF elements

• season 1

2007

Review

Jaime Sommers [Michelle Ryan] suffers a car crash, gets artificial limbs, eye and ear parts, and gets recruited into a spooky black ops organisation to hunt down bad guys, whilst raising her teenage sister.

Oh dear. Look, it's perfectly possible to do great reimaginings (witness Battlestar Galactica , resurrected from dire 70s kitsch to something very dark and edgy), and even take a great couple of films and spin off a good TV series . It's even possible to take a mediocre film , and turn it into a fantastic long running TV series . That is not the case here. The plotting is stodgy and unconvincing, the effects not much better than the original, the underlying premise mostly wasted ( why didn't they install a mobile phone along with all the rest of the kit?), and there is precious little plot arc -- the bits with Katee Sackhoff as a bad bionic woman is by far the best bit (painfully demonstrating how wooden everyone else is), but she soon vanishes.

The series was truncated by the writers' strike. Definitely a mercy killing.

Rating: 5