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