What show was this guy watching?
by
sorokahdeen
09/26/2007, 5:04 PM #
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 depends on 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.
