The Bionic Review 10.12.07: "Sisterhood"
Posted by Brendan Newton on 10.12.2007
Both Kate Sackhoff and this series as a whole experience a severe downward spiral...
So in the past week I've actually done some research on what others are saying about Bionic Woman in preparation for this week's review, and what I've heard hasn't been too positive, in contrast to my opinion last week that the series was improving. Reportedly, while I felt last week's episode was superior to the pilot, ratings didn't bear that out, as they dropped by about 2 million viewers or so. More disappointing for me, former X-Files writer and producer Glen Morgan left the project after the fourth episode, citing the suitably vague “creative differences.” There was a report that his brother Darin, who as I mentioned previously is one of my favourite TV writers, would be writing an upcoming episode, but with Glen's departure I would imagine that's out too, which is a huge disappointment, as it would have been the sort of subversive shot in the arm that Bionic Woman's ho-hum writing needs. Also, the two episodes that we've seen thus far were reportedly re-shot (the pilot was apparently edited down from a two-hour script) and subject to a lot of post-production fiddling, never a good sign. This would explain the oddly rushed, sometimes clunky feel of the episodes to date, although I have felt that both episodes have benefited at times from being compact and not drawing out some scenes and storylines as much as I thought they might have been. Maybe sometimes a little upheaval can be a good thing. It's also not clear when the decision was made to kill off Will Anthros, with some suggesting that it was due to lack of chemistry between Michelle Ryan and Chris Bowers. Again, I didn't feel their chemistry and relationship was that bad, I certainly didn't think it justified removing the character entirely, but it would explain why the scene in the pilot where he was shot really didn't seem like a death scene at the time. Perhaps killing Will was a desperation move to change up the trajectory of the troubled series, but at this point, there's talk that Bionic Woman will only last until February, at which point NBC will have a new show ready to cancel it in favour of. The show's decent, but at this point I frankly wouldn't be too bothered to see it die as it just hasn't engaged me enough to care all that much about its' survival. Wednesday night's episode, “Sisterhood”, didn't do a whole lot to change that. Here are some of my observations (notice I didn't say “here are the highlights, as there weren't many):
-I found this episode's title to be disappointingly misleading. For the past two weeks, I've been saying that the most underdeveloped and most interesting relationship on this show was Jaime's relationship with Becca, and I assumed that the episode 's title meant that we'd finally be getting an episode that focused on Becca. No such luck, though, as she appeared in the first scene and was then pretty much forgotten until show's end. In the meantime, Jaime gets stuck with yet another surrogate younger sister after the young sole survivor of the gas attack last week, this time in the form of a Canadian heiress, leading to the show's best line from Jonas (Miguel Ferrer doing his best with what he's given as always) about how failure to protect the heiress could result in war with Canada. Hey, considering how our dollar's outperforming the US's... Anyways, the heiress in question is a spoiled brat named Heaven, which I believe is short for “Heaven Only Knows Why She's in This Episode as Her Storyline Goes Nowhere and Does Nothing.” When you have such an interesting relationship to develop between Jaime and her real sister, what's the point of giving her all these surrogate charges, who typically appear for twenty minutes and are then done with her? Unless maybe the point is that Jaime's ironically connecting with all these other younger girls, while drifting further apart from her real-life sister, or it's some sort of feminist thing where she's inspiring young girls one at a time by showing them what a (Bionic) woman is capable of, but given Bionic Woman's capacity for subtlety thus far, I'd say that's a stretch. What we did get of Becca was one clunky scene and one great scene at the beginning and end of the episode respectively. The opening scene was a great idea in theory; Jaime and Becca doing regular teenager-guardian stuff when business calls. In practice, though, it was really clunky; Jaime and Becca's stuff was good, but once Jonas called and alerted Jaime to the emergency, things got goofy as we got a painfully awkward scene with Jaime discussing sensitive business in front of Becca. Forget teaching Jaime how to use her Bionic bodyware, someone really should explain to Jaime that the whole point of cell phones is that you can walk around while talking on them, and so if she doesn't want her sister to know about the project, she could just excuse herself and go somewhere else to discuss it. But then we wouldn't get this week's Strained Attempt at Humour, as Jaime sits there and gives Becca lame explanations as to what she's talking about, trying to turn the discussion of a terrorist into ho-hum office politics. (“Yes, he's very bad...some guy at work's been sleeping with someone”). I'll give Bionic Woman's writers points for versatility; not only can they write medicore action drama, they can also write mediocre comedy. And if Becca doesn't know something's going on by this point she's a complete doorknob. And what happened to her computer proficiency? It was presented as an important part of the character in the pilot, the one thing that really distinguished her from the typical bratty teenager, and now it doesn't even get a mention. Becca's character is so diminished that I was half-expecting Sarah to kill her at episode's end in order to further build her character as a villain, since the focus really seems to be on Sarah it would have made some sense. Now that final scene was a good, intense scene, probably because the emphasis was on action rather than words. When these actors aren't weighed down by weak dialogue, they can all speak volumes and tell a good story. Katee Sackhoff especially managed to get across Sarah's instability and disdain for human life, looking at Becca with a deadly curiosity as though she was a cat playing with a mouse; it seemed as though she really wanted to see what would happen if she snapped that neck! Michelle Ryan, meanwhile, got across the intensity of her protective love for her sister, as well as the difficulty of her decision to betray Sarah once and for all by reactivating her GPS and bringing the Bionics company down on Sarah. She left no doubt in my mind that she understood the finality of that betrayal, and that it would end whatever congeniality that Sarah had shown towards her thus far.
-Speaking of Sarah, we got an awful lot of her this week; there were moments when it felt like I was watching the Sarah Corvuss Variety Hour or something (although of course the show's actual title could refer to her; as a friend of mine suggested the other week, perhaps it should be Bionic Women?). Now, don't get me wrong, I'll watch Katee Sackhoff in quite literally anything, but the creators seem to expect audience sympathy to remain with Jaime despite the show being focused on Sarah half of the time, and this just doesn't work. Either explicitly split the show between the two characters, or keep the focus solely on Jaime and have Sarah as an occasional antagonist. In fact, the scenes with Jaime training for a showdown with Sarah with Kim and Antonio would have been much more effective if, after discussion of how powerful Sarah is and how difficult she's going to be to defeat, Sarah didn't appear for a few episodes, thus building up to a big confrontation at some point down the road. Instead, we get Sarah and Jaime chit-chatting a couple of scenes later, thus completely killing any suspense that the training scenes might have built up. Every time this show does something right, it trips itself up in a few minutes. The training scenes themselves are good, and I especially like Kim's calm sensei role, but his character seems all over the place too this week, as his affair with Sarah from last week is completely forgotten and not brought up while he's discussing Sarah with Jaime. The great thing about the character was how conflicted he was between the Bionics program and his love for Sarah, but this week he seems completely in control and committed to helping Jaime defeat Sarah. Some slim acknowledgment of his inability to completely get over his feelings for Sarah would have been a great character touch. Mark Sheppard's return as Anthony Anthros was welcome, although he really didn't figure much and his dialogue was so flat that he might as well as not been there. And why did we never see him actually escape from jail, and why did it take them so long to tell Jaime about it? And what the hell happened to that brother of his from the pilot? Not even a throwaway line about how he died or moved to Peru or something, which is just weak. As with anything on this show, Anthony's silent scenes with Sarah were the best. Katee Sackhoff can always be relied upon to play a character experiencing a complete breakdown, and her montage as her instability comes to the surface and her Bionics threaten to betray her was brilliant stuff. We also got some good character development as we find out that she too had a younger sister who was a victim of Sarah's self-destructiveness, dying in a car crash that closely resembled Jaime's accident in the pilot. The idea that Sarah was willing to recreate that traumatic accident with herself in the truck this time is supremely disturbing. Katee Sackhoff is brilliant whenever she's called upon to show how disturbed, destructive, and vulnerable Sarah is.
-It's a shame, then, that we got Sarah Corvus overkill this week, as in addition to her ongoing breakdown plot with Anthony, she intrudes into Jaime's plotline looking much more in control and stable than she is in the breakdown scenes. Sure, there's a throwaway line in there about how her Bionics' self-destruction comes and goes, but my guess is that the two storylines weren't originally meant to take place in the same episode, they seem so incongruous. This episode would have been so much better if they'd have kept Sarah' s self-destruction scenes (although they could really stand to be spread out over a few episodes; there's such a thing as a slow build, guys, TV's perfect for it) and not involved her in Jaime's life otherwise; that way, the whole storyline with Heaven the heiress could have gone somewhere. Heaven's sweet moment when Jaime returned her to her father about how cool she thought Jaime was and how she wanted to learn Karate or something might have had some impact if Jaime and Heaven had had some time to bond without Sarah sticking her nose in and making Heaven into a comedy prop. And don't even get me started on the high school-quality dialogue between Jaime and Sarah, with Jaime telling Sarah “don't be so dramatic” as though they were discussing which boys were going to ask them to the Prom instead of Sarah's impending breakdown and demise from her Bionics falling apart on her. Are we forgetting that Sarah, you know, shot and killed Jaime's lover two episodes previous? At least the fact that Sarah's actions led to the loss of Jaime's unborn child got a mention after not having been mentioned last week, leading me to wonder why exactly they ever made Jaime pregnant in the first place. Honestly, if I had been one of the terrorists that were after Heaven, I would have shot myself with my own gun as soon as the Bionic Women started talking. Who on Earth writes this stuff, and have they ever spoken to an actual human being before? The scenes between these two that focus on action rather than words are very effective, so the problem's obviously not the chemistry between the actresses but rather the abysmal dialogue.
-Just one small observation about the enemies that Jaime finds herself fighting, and I hope I don't offend anyone here, but they all tend to be distinctly Caucasian, with Serbian being the ethnicity of choice. Ah, good old Serbs. Foreign and prone to irrational sectarian violence in the not so distant past, yet nice and white so we won't get accused of racism and not liable to get us hit with a fatwa or anything. I'm not saying I want to see evil cackling Arab terrorists or devious Chinese/North Korean spies (two other favourite ethnic targets), but it's just such a blatantly P.C. maneuver to avoid offending the wrong targets (at the cost of offending other, less vocal targets) by depicting these terrorists the way most Westerners imagine terrorists these days (ie, as Middle Eastern) that it sticks out and just seems artificial.
-If I didn't believe that there was turmoil behind the scenes of Bionic Woman before I watched this episode, I do now. The whole thing just had a confused, rushed, made-by-committee feel to it; I don't know if I've watched an hour of TV this jumbled, contradictory, and devoid of narrative flow since the last days of The X-Files, or perhaps WCW Nitro. The episode tried to be about Becca and Jaime's relationship, Sarah's backstory and breakdown, Sarah and Jaime's tumultuous relationship, and about Jaime's weekly assignment. These would all have made good episodes on their own; the beauty of TV is that you can slowly build these things, week-by-week, and give everything the time that it deserves. At times during this episode I felt like I was watching a two-hour movie where everything had to be crammed in, rather than an ongoing series with room to build. Perhaps fear of early cancellation led the creators to throw everything out there, but this week's confused jumble just made things worse and brought them a step closer to the ax. The only good news is that the episode's best scene was the final one, and it leads into next week's episode, so hopefully they'll be able to deliver something coherent next week.
The 411: Sarah's breakdown scenes are great, the final scene's really supenseful and intense, the rest is a confused jumble of good ideas not being given the time they deserve along with some truly bad dialogue. I can't see the show lasting at this rate unless the writing really picks up in terms of both dialogue quality and coherant plotlines.
