Episode Report Card Miss Alli: B- | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Second Chances
By Miss Alli | Season 1 | Episode 1 | Aired on 09.25.2007
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.So, as you know if you read any magazines or watch any television, and as you certainly know if you've been in an elevator in Rockefeller Center this week, this is the premiere of Bionic Woman. Typically pilot-y, crowded exposition reveals that sulk/dullard/bartender Jaime Sommers is dating a professor/surgeon/dork who secretly works for the government making, it would seem, robot soldiers constructed from former humans. The last one they made out of Starbuck didn't work out so well, since she went crazy, got shot a couple of times, and somehow was not properly disposed of at the electronics recycling center along with the rest of her brooder/trainer/boyfriend's old laptops (hotcha!).
Anyway, Jaime and Professor Dorkus get in a giant car crash apparently perpetrated by Starbot, and rather than simply take her to the hospital, where they could presumably give her some regular prosthetics, Professor Dorkus takes her to the robot factory (as you do), where he replaces an eye, an ear, an arm, and both legs with circuit boards and other binary doodads. So Jaime wakes up and is kind of unhappy with everyone for filling her with robot parts and plot-device-ocytes that allow her to magically heal extra-fast so we don't have to watch her lie in the hospital actually recovering from the kind of surgery it would require to actually turn you into Inspector Gadget. And also so she doesn't look ugly, despite having an eyeball and an ear torn off.
Various government semi-baddies, led by Miguel Ferrer in this fall's installment of Are You Smarter Than This Person's Agent?, monitor Jaime's progress and eventually let her go, where she returns to bartending only to run into Starbot, who acts kind of like a cross between Linda Hamilton in The Terminator and Jennifer Tilly in Bound. Later, after some bionic sex with Professor Dorkus that involves a very uncomfortable apparent reference to the fact that he's humping her robot leg, Jaime watches the Professor get shot and then engages in a martial-artsy-fartsy fight with Starbot that features so many extreme close-ups and fast cuts that they could be taking the footage from Floyd Mayweather's cha-cha and you wouldn't be able to tell. In the end, nobody wins (?), and Jaime's last piece of business is to try to make like a bad girl in a discussion with Miguel Ferrer in which she uses the nonsensical phrase "I'll bury one guy after the next," which is so distractingly ungrammatical that I almost don't mind the fact that aside from the robot surgery, nothing really happened.
To sum up: it's not terrible. It might be entertainingly goofy. But much will depend on whether they stop relying quite so heavily on Michelle Ryan attempting to look steely, which she cannot do, no matter how many artificial eyes they give her. Want more? The full recap starts right below!
An ominous, airy growl greets us as we fade up on a tracking shot following the fluorescent-bedecked ceiling of a dank hallway. As we trip the catacomb fantastic, a caption informs us that it is 4:28 AM, and then that it we are at the Wolf Creek Biotech Research Facility, where we slide down to observe that an attractive young gentleman wearing his Shadowy And Vaguely Threatening Members Only black leather jacket has frozen his face in an intense, action-movie look of concern while hustling down the corridor with some SWATty-looking helmets. The lights are flickering on and off, as they always do when something bad is happening, and indeed, we see that on the floor of the corridor, there are about five white-jacketed bodies surrounded by garish pooling and spattering of blood. One of the dead people appears to have dragged herself in a suspiciously perfect straight line across the floor while dying. A little too neat, I think, that particular work by the blood placement specialists on the art direction team. Shadowy Member looks even more unhappy once he sees these five dead people lying on the ground. I feel you, Shadowy. Mass murder always bums me out, too. A nice, bloody close-up reveals that one of the dead is a nerdy-looking dude with glasses. Nothing like a slaughter of the socially awkward to build tension early. What did Poindexter ever do to anyone? What? Shadowy and the SWATs burst into a grimy-looking room full of what would appear to be small-animal cages, none of which seem to have small animals in them, and several of which have open doors.
Before you conclude that this is a PETA stunt gone awry, observe that at the far end of the room, coincidentally bathed in the room's one lonely shaft of intense glow (coming from the catacomb's...skylight?), is a blonde in a hospital gown, who's crouching over yet another body, her back to Shadowy. We swing around to look her in the face, seeing that she is none other than Battlestar Galactica's Katee Sackhoff, sporting some blood smudges (as you can imagine) as she miserably whimpers, "I didn't want to." See, this is where you feel sympathy with her, because of all the times you've killed a bunch of people even though all you were trying to do was eat lunch and maybe rescue a few kittens. Her feet and legs covered with blood, she slowly turns around, still in a crouch, to face Shadowy and the SWATs. "I'm not in control," she says through uneven breaths. Shadowy looks at her sadly and says, "I know." He knows! They look at each other, and she chokes out, "Tell me you love me." Hey, don't beg! When you have to ask for it, it doesn't mean anything! She and Shadowy stare at each other. His jaw quivers, because he is the sensitive kind of shadowy. Without getting an answer, she pounces (okay, she clearly has not read The Rules) and flies through the air in the direction of Shadowy and the SWATs. With her still airborne, Shadowy drops her with one shot from his big gun (heh), and she hits the ground hard, face-first. Believe it or not, that's not the most painful end of a relationship I've ever heard of. She looks up as Shadowy steps closer to her. Now she's dripping blood on the floor. I hope this doesn't represent the show's typical pace of bloodletting, because I do get woozy. "I love you," Shadowy says. You always brutally attack the one you love. He adds insult to injury by shooting her in the face. Or...injury to injury, I guess.