Mean GirlWatch Bionic Woman for the best villain on television.

Remarks from the Fray:

That was one of the scarrier reviews I've ever read. It was like a note from an alternative reality; from a strange land where everything that flashes by on a television screen is deserving of praise.

The Bionic Woman pilot has been available for free download on Amazon's Unbox video service for more than a week now and the results aren't all glorious. In fact, a lot of it fails to be interesting to someone who has read a book, or anyone who has watched a thousand or so hours of television.

The reviewer's description of the plot and his character sketches are accurate—provided you cut the caressing adjectives ("simultaneously a babe in peril and a woman in charge")—but the meat of the matter demonstrates the sort of real critical facility that a hungry poodle shows to a bowl of Alpo.

In terms of its writing, the main problems with The Bionic Woman can be summed up by Gertrude Stein: "There's no there, there." From beginning to end, the writing is a gazpacho of threadbare clichés and eye-rolling coincidences from the giant blender of television writing that assumes the watcher's drooling stupidity—the sort of writing that requires a deep breath before you talk about it:

A heroine with an emotionally overwrought, teenaged, computer-wiz, sister, just happens to be pregnant with the love-child of her brilliant scientist boyfriend, who, unbeknownst to her, works for a shadowy government agency that employs lots and lots of skinny guys in non-regulation military uniforms.

The whacked-out killer bionic woman prototype with attachment issues works for her own shadowy organization of people with foreign accents. She has instructions to kill the scientist and just happens to find the scientist and the heroine-in-the-making while driving a semi so that she can make the scientist's murder look like an accident. The murder attempt just manages to crush and mangle everything that will need replacing for there to be a bionic woman II, but leaves the brilliant scientist with only a few scratches and the wind knocked out of him so he can perform emergency neurosurgery.

Later, the first bionic woman again tries to kill the brilliant scientist, this time with a rifle-shot through a plate-glass window: the woman with built-in targeting equipment does not aim for the head. Super-powered combat between the two women follows with predictable results

And later, at the end, when confronted with her choices, the new, improved, and not insane bionic woman is given the choice of playing ball with the morally ambiguous, shadowy forces of the good guys and she tells them that she knows what she can do now. The choice to do whatever they want her to do will be hers: She'll bury anyone they send after her.

And in that moment, as the heroine stands tall before the man who would control her life and her destiny, she is hurt but not scarred, unbeaten and unbowed, and the audience is given to understand that they have witnessed a moment of transformation: the Bionic Woman has grown up and become a bionic man.

News from home for the reviewer: you don't have to like everything.

--sorkahdeen

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Revamping Bionic Woman with a more grim 21st century spin, unless Joss Whedon is the writer, isn't going to impress me. Because with few exceptions, what passes for sci-fi these days is tailored for general consumption. The really deep stuff, the science fiction that has something to say for itself (as opposed to space opera like Star Wars) gets knocked off the air. The original Star Trek, or Firefly. Loved Firefly, loved Serenity. Excellent cast, crisp writing, believable stories, no fake technobabble, and at least some attention to elementary physics. Fox executives didn't get it.

Chick whose part robot. Ok, thats something the masses can latch onto. Weird biotech company and jerk boyfriend. Also understandable to the 'Murican Idol crowd. Evil crazy part-robot chick. I've dated her. But I honestly can't see how this show can rise above its gimmick. The '70s version didn't, but didn't try - it wasn't serious. Even the original tagline is goofy "We can rebuild him. Better, faster, stronger. We have the technology."

What the executives at Fox failed to understand is that we don't care about gimmicks. We want character, we want plot, we want change. Action, drama, pathos, comedy. Keep your gimmicks and your computer animation.

--Sword_of_Light

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Enough with the dark, adult revisionings of bygone fantasy series. Wishes for superpowers and supernatural solutions to problems are juvenile fantasies. Once upon a time, the TV shows and comic books that catered to such whims, accordingly, were aimed at kids. Now all those kids have grown up and, perhaps embarrassed to admit to the childishness of their first loves, they expect their fantasies to be tarted up with moral ambiguities, horror imagery, and explicit sexual themes.

I love "Watchmen," "The Dark Knight Returns," "Buffy," and "Angel." But I also mourn the fact that kids today have no "Six Million Dollar Man" or "Bionic Woman," no "Lost in Space" or "Land of the Giants" or "The Adventures of Superman," no dumb, cheesy, wholesome prime-time fun. We've taken away all their action figures so we can pose them in kama sutra positions. The meretricious "maturity" of today's prime-time fantasies and graphic novels isn't bold anymore--it's a pretentious cliche.

--Kovacs

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