Pilot Review: Bionic Woman

Bionic Woman.
NBC. Wednesdays at 9.
Cast: Michelle Ryan, Miguel Ferrer, Katee Sackhoff, Will Yun Lee, Chris Bowers, Molly Price, and Lucy Hale.

For the first 30ish minutes of the pilot for the new Bionic Woman, I was sitting there wondering if maybe I had mistaken it with another show. I remembered reading only gushingly good things about the pilot. But boy, I thought, these first 30 minutes blow. Because they do. But, now having seen the whole thing, I get why everyone was gushing about this. Because those last 10-15 minutes, well, they make you forget all about that clunky first half hour.

For anyone who doesn’t know, Bionic Woman is about, well, a bionic woman. Jamie Sommers was in a car crash, and her scientist boyfriend/soon-to-be baby daddy decides that, since the choice is to either let her die or make her half-woman half-machine, to make her all bionic and what not. Oh, and there’s an evil first bionic woman out there running amok. This, my friends, is the clunky part. The show, well, it kind of blows up until Jamie actually starts BEING the bionic woman. Once she starts using her new technology, the show picks up dramatically and actually becomes really entertaining, including one hell of a catfight (In heels, no less).

But yeah, those last 15 minutes really rock. I mean, Jamie starts kicking ass and taking names and it makes you forget all about her badly acted freak out upon finding her machine legs (When I say badly acted, what I mean is just that she kind of screams emotionlessly. So not really bad acting, so much as bad screaming) and the really bad writing up to that point and the somewhat incoherent and incomprehensible plot developments involving a supermax prison and a mysterious short, squat, creepy looking man. I mean, you get reminded of most of those things again at the end, when the action calms down, but for a good few minutes there, I really got where all the love for this show was coming from.

This is not to say that I’m completely endorsing this show. While it’s good for those 10ish minutes, it still is pretty bad for the rest of the episode. And the writing is just not good enough to sustain the show currently during the non-action sequences. Maybe this is why some of the performances don’t seem natural, but that also could be the actors’ fault. I’m not gonna single anyone out here because no one really stepped their game above or below the rest, they were all just kind of mediocre. Oh, and I hope they improve the effects for the show in the long run, because some of it looked really campy and cartoonish, which doesn’t work with the rest of the darker tone of the series. One blatant example is when Jamie is running in the woods and she kind of looks like Wile. E. Coyote. Unintentionally comical, but still doesn’t work with rest of the show. But, overall, I hope those were just kinks with the pilot having to build the backstory up and such, so I’m gonna give this one:

Rating: Definitely Worth Another Viewing