The Bionic Review: 1.7 - Trust Issues
Posted by Brendan Newton on 11.16.2007
Some good style, no substance this week. And they pointlessly kill off one of their most interesting characters.
Whew. Feels like it's been almost a month since I did one of these Bionic Reviews. Oh wait...screwy work schedule plus various other distractions, it has been a month. Right. Well, let's see if the show's improved in the time I've been away:
-We finally get some good Becca stuff this week, as she makes dinner for Jaime and her new boyfriend CIA operative Tom, only to have the new couple's top secret jobs drag them away from the date. As always, the Becca scenes in this episode were the best written ones of the entire episode, flowing much more naturally than the clunky spy stuff. Shame they were so few and far between, although Becca's culinary prowess is an interesting character development to hopefully separate her from her “standard whiny/rebellious teen” character, I still don't know why they dropped the computer geek aspect of her character, hopefully it'll be resurrected at some stage, perhaps when she inevitably finds out about Jaime's bionic secret life. She better find out, because the whole “secret life” storyline is the sort of thing that can get old fast if they don't move forward on it. Next week's episode apparently features more Becca, with she and Jaime on vacation together, so huzzah.
-As always, the action's the best thing about this show; the scene where Jaime saved the foreign President from from assassination at the horse track was a truly suspenseful scene, with Jaime having to cover a seemingly endless distance in seconds. And doing it. Love those super-speed effects and that sort of semi-flying jump she did. Great moment with glass shattering and gunplay, the action scenes always go a long way towards making up for this show's shoddy acting, dialogue, and...well, damned near everything else.
-Interesting background on Antonio this week, as we find out much about what he did before working for Berkut and about how he developed his sense of cynical worldliness. As usual, there was a woman involved, as well as a murderous dictator who killed hundreds of his own people. This is a man who knows what goes on in the world, as well as the extremely hard choices that supposedly “good” people have to make sometimes, and Isaiah Washington plays that extremely well. His confrontation with the dictator's Head of Security was especially interesting and intelligent, as Antonio could barely conceal his contempt and hatred for the dictator, but knew what his job was and that protecting the president was for the greater good. For this show's usual weak writing, the Head of Security's comeback-citing the hard choices African leaders are faced with in the wake of years of colonial exploitation of their nations-was amazingly sharp and insightful. I didn't buy the fake-out suggesting that Antonio might be the assassin, so I thought that was a bit lame, but the revelation as to why he had been keeping the killer's identity secret-he was correctly assuming that it was his former lover, who shared his hatred of the dictator-made up for it, Isaiah Washington played his love, frustration, and willingness to hold his nose and complete the mission of protecting the President to perfection. His character really developed in this one, with more layers being revealed and a great, uneasily trusting partnership with Jaime developing. Which really makes me wonder who felt the need to kill him off.
-Yep, this is a “Tonight Someone Dies” episode, as for some reason Antonio's number comes up. Seriously, that's how it seems, as though they just decided to shake things up and he was the one they chose. I can only assume Isaiah Washington wanted out, or his time was somehow up on the show, because he was one of the best things about this show and it seems a really random, wasteful move to kill him off. I really hate it when shows do this, kill off a character after spending an episode telling you more about them and making them that bit more interesting. It never made much sense to me from a storytelling perspective. If they wanted to shake things up and induce angst in Jaime (which really doesn't strike me as necessary considering they killed her boyfriend in the pilot, this show's really going in circles), why didn't they kill off Bland Tom the CIA Agent? Since he really doesn't do a whole hell of a lot besides stand around looking pretty and being her boyfriend, he's basically a walking, talking prop, so why not just go ahead and kill him? Antonio's death came way too soon after Will's death in the Pilot, and it was just as underwhelming. It's just way too soon considering how much the character could have developed. I don't really know what to say about the death scene otherwise, because I was literally staring at the TV going “They're not going to kill him off, they have no reason to kill him, what the hell?.” We already saw Jaime dealing with Will's death and being all angsty, there was no need to cut off this character to do more recycled Jaime-angst. Sure, there was a good Jonas moment (Miguel Ferrer continues to bring it) when he told Jaime that in this world, losing people gets easier over time (Ferrer makes it clear that Jonas is speaking from experience), but again considering that she just lost her boyfriend it doesn't make a lot of sense for him to be acting as though grief is a new thing for her. Do the writers bother to watch their own show? This show's story and its' arc really resemble one of those big hamster wheels, they just keep coming around to the same situation without going anywhere or developing the characters. If it was just a fun action show, I wouldn't mind, but this series also takes itself way too seriously and tries to be dark somehow. It doesn't work. They looked to be building up the uneasy partnership between Antonio and Jaime, and the “triangle” that was created when Tom was thrown into the mix, but they've inexplicably shot that down (literally). And not in the good “kill the uninteresting Tom” way either.
-In yet another example of this show stumbling around in circles, we get Jaime's therapy session with Dr. Ruth (hurr, I just noticed that, clever I guess) after which Ruth takes Jaime's suggestion and gets a new plant to pretty up Berkut's sterile offices. Molly Price is still great, and by itself this interaction would have been a nice development. But when they've been stumbling around each other supposedly bonding for as long as they have, it just seems clunky to have these little bonding moments now. What about the trip they took to the town with the poison gas in the second episode? They seemed to work well together and be becoming closer then, but now we have them acting distantly towards each other and only just beginning to warm up. Nothing ever seems to move forward on this show, which lends credence to the reports that the first few episodes were heavily butchered and reshot. At least Sara Corvus wasn't around to needlessly complicate things as she is so often on this show, but no Sara Corvus means no Anthony Anthros, who they really need to bring back in this show's “Big Bad.”
-As I've said previously, there is some good acting on this show. Michelle Ryan, Katee Sackhoff, Miguel Ferrer, Molly Price, and the dearly departed Isaiah Washington. As far as I'm concerned though, this show has one standout performer week after week; my home city of Vancouver, BC, where Bionic Woman is filmed. From the opening scene on the steps of Vancouver's Art Gallery to the finale at the Hastings Park Horse Racing Track, this episode was no exception. Great scenery and cinematography; I know I rag on this show week after week, but stylistically it's excellent and at least as good as its' sister show of sorts Galactica. Vancouver's abundance of glass-based architecture makes it the ideal city of the near-future, with lots of action and intrigue and assassinations. Not that anything anywhere nearly that exciting happens to me, mind you, but never mind. This show's scenery damned near makes up in style for what it lacks in substance.
In the end, though, this episode-and thus far this show in general-is a picture-perfect example of a triumph of style over substance. The action this week was great, especially the climatic racetrack scene, and Vancouver's beautiful as always. There was some good Becca stuff, and generally good acting and some really intelligent bits of dialogue surrounding the African dictatorship although the assassination plot itself was decent yet unremarkable. The revelation of the assassin was great, but the death of Antonio after giving him such an interesting backstory and developing the character's uneasy trust with Jaime seems a huge misstep. This show just keeps spinning its' wheels, killing off characters, introducing dull new ones and not going forwards with any of the interesting character relationships, and it's difficult to see it lasting long-term as a result.
The 411: Some good action and scenery this week are hampered by this series' standard spinning of its' wheels character-wise, not to mention the killing off of the character who had the best chemistry and most interesting relationship with the title character. This just seems so wasteful and leaves such a bad taste in the mouth that it's difficult to get excited about this episode's good points, which it did have.
