Bionic Woman – Season 1, Episode 3 – “Sisterhood”

We are officially cookin’.  Last night’s episode of Bionic Woman proved that this show is heading in the right direction and that it has the narrative tools to sustain itself over a full season.  Let’s take a quick looksie:

1. Episodic/Serialized – Don’t know if this is going to be the ratio for every episode, but I loved the balance episodic/serialzed narrative in last night’s ep.   It was the perfect 30/70 ratio– little bits of episodic stuff to showcase some Bionic ass-whupping and to continue Jamie’s immersion into her new job.  But mostly, the focus was on the serialized story arc of Starbuck a.k.a. Sarah Corvis, and her worsening condition.  If they can maintain this balance, the show is guaranteed to be an intriguing watch every week.

2. Starbuck — So I’m sure NBC wasn’t going for this, but Starbuck is about a million times better and more interesting than leading lady Michelle Ryan.  I can’t peel my eyes away from the screen when this firecracker is on it.  She just might be the best female action actress ever.  Imagine her in remake Alien or something like that– it would be off the chain!  Katee Sackhoff is just so damn explosive that by comparison, Michelle Ryan is a bit too vanilla.  You have to wonder if they ever considered casting Starbuck as Jaime Sommers before they cast the 23-year-old Brit.  I know it’s early, but its hard to see this show succeeding in the long run if they can’t get more charisma out of Jaime, especially if they ever lose the Sarah Corvis character.  She’s going to have to go much deeper and become a more 3-d character if I’m ever going to truly care about her.  The fact that the entire Friday Night Lights writing team is moonlighting over at Bionic Woman should help in this department, but if FNL keeps up its decent numbers (it was #1 in the key 18-49 demo last Friday), the writers will need to head back to the old office.  Will Jamie’s humanity and personality go with them?

3. For a smart ass robot chick, Starbuck seems to be missing one key point (at least her writers are): Jaime doesn’t need her at all.  Why would she trust someone who threatens her sisters life, killed her boyfriend and unborn child, appears unexpectedly in her home, and doesn’t have much to offer her?  I think the writers need to stress a bit more what Starbuck has to offer– her help in turning off Jaime’s internal camera was a great little window into her talents, but is that it?  In order for us to believe that Jaime would ever help Sarah, Sarah needs to put more out on the table and demonstrate why she is an asset to Jamie and why she can be trusted.

Not much else to say.  Some nice fighting, not much going on here besides the Starbuck/Sommers duo, but it was enough for me.  Bionic Woman is NBC’s best rated new show, and is one of the top three best rated new shows on network tv (ABC’s Private Practice and Pushing Daisies are the other 2), so it’s not going anywhere.  Bionic Woman is here to stay, at least for this season.  So to pull away from the rest of the pack, the show needs: a) Michelle Ryan to sparkle more, to pull us in, to make us root for her  b) a nice, twisty serialized plot  c) some more supporting characters.  I like Dr. Burke, but he’s outta here soon.  All we have are Jonas, Ruth, Jay and Little Sis?  If that’s all we’ve got, they need to start coloring those characters in more fully as well, if we’re going to connect to any of them.

Grade: B