Bionic Woman :
Season 1

Title / Air Date: Paradise Lost / 3rd october 2007
Writer: Laeta Kalogridis & David Eick
Director: Tim Matheson

Summary:After Jaime experiences another devastating loss, she encounters a stranger who befriends her. Later, she discovers the stranger is Antonio Pope (guest star Isaiah Washington), who works for the Berkut Group and the meeting was deliberate. As Jamie struggles to balance her secret new life while trying to maintain some normalcy at home with her sister, Becca, Jaime finds herself in harms way on her first mission.

Guest stars: Tyler Boissonnault - Geek #3; Erin Borgfjord - Murphy's wife; Chelah Horsdal - Suicidal Woman; Tyler McClendon - N D Agent; Kevin Rankin - Nathan; Wesley Salter - Guy #2 at Bar

Re-occurring characters/plot points:We are introduced to Berkut Bionic tech Nathan, first apperance of Antonio Pope, Jaime starts officially training with Jae. Sarah Corvus leaves a message for Jae to meet her at the Yellow Rose hotel.

Best Quotes..... Jae: The machine is nothing without the woman. Jonas: Those legs, that arm, that ear and that eye belong to me. They cost $50 million. Jaime: What if I pay you $20 a month?

Misc facts: The car-crash with Sarah and her sister appears to contain stock footage from the Pilot. The guy Jaime meets in the bra is called Steve - Jaime's finace in the original series was called Steve, Steve Austin [The Six Million Dollar Man].

Reviews:

By SEAN ELLIOTT, Senior Editor / IFMagazine.com
Published 10/4/2007

NBC’s new drama THE BIONIC WOMAN is off and running after last week’s great ratings. Actress Michelle Ryan plays the title role of Jamie Sommers, in lieu of say Lindsay Wagner, and is a whole new batch of bionic.

This week dealt with Jamie coming to grips with her new powers, the death of her fiancé and deciding to be part of the government super team while still maintaining some kind of normal life with her sister. And that is about it.

The great beginning that this series was off to, petered out in this second episode, which is not a good sign for a new series. This was a significantly washed out episode with Jamie doing little or no BIONIC awesomeness. The only nifty thing she really did in this episode was to save a woman who was trying to kill herself. Next week looks like another slam-bang throw down with Katee Sackhoff so hopefully the pacing will pick up. My only concern is that series can have dud episodes, but usually if they happen, they are somewhere past the mid-season mark. I mean even HEROES had some not so stellar episodes last season, but they were much later on.

Michelle Ryan is good as the new BIONIC, but she’s just kind of there. I really want to like her and to get involved in the show, but she just seems like everything we are seeing is just on the surface level. Of course, to be completely fair I don’t think this series is giving her a HUGE chance at character development; it seems torn between telling exciting dynamic stories and still trying to be a touching drama. This is a tough mix to make right.

This episode introduced everyone’s favorite homophobe Isaiah Washington, who I am pleased to say, brings absolutely NOTHING to the series. He’s as flat and dull as the gray concrete walls of the government compound around him, and he has seriously poisoned my enjoyment of this show. Should someone be ousted from work for being an ass? Yeah … should they be given a leading role the next season? Nope. The guy needs to stay out of the spotlight. The mess from last year is way too fresh and it’s going to be tough for audiences to separate that situation from this brand new show. Bad casting move, kiddies.

So like I said, Sackhoff is back to being an ass kicker next week and it looks like we might be getting a BIONIC team up with both beautiful ladies. I’m hanging in there, valiantly staying true to the talents of David Eick and I know that this series will get better; it’s just having a bit of a rocky patch at the moment.

Grade: C

FAN REVIEW

'Paradise Lost' opens with the funeral of Will Anthros, which I have to admit, caught me off guard, as I had assumed Chris Bowers would be a series regular. Just as I was beginning to warm to him as well.. Still this is probably for the best as it frees Jaime up to start new relationships, both inside and outside the organisation, plus it disposes of the weakest member of the cast.

After the funeral Jaime visits Will's apartment and makes an interesting discovery. Hidden under a loose floorboard is a file on Jaime - a file which, as she later tells Jonas, was apparently started two years before she and Will even met. This is an intriguing and exciting twist and backs up my suspicions that there may have been more to Jaime's 'accident' than we were led to believe.

The episode can be divided in three acts, the first of which focuses on the agency's attempts to bring Jaime into the fold. Firstly Jonas confronts her in the toilets of a bar, interrupting her drunken attempts at having sex with a total stranger, it's an electric, humorous scene with Ryan and Ferrer once again showing how well they work together.

However it is neither this encounter nor her accidental meeting with Antonio Pope, another agency employee, which brings her into the fold. Rather it is when she chances upon and saves a suicidal woman that Jaime realises just how much good she can do.

Act two is all about Jaime and how she fits in with her new employers, it's clear from the start that she's a square peg in a round hole (or should that be the other way round?) refusing to conform to the strict military regime that the organisation has been built on. She trains with Pope and Jae Kim and also gets to meet Nathan the technical Guy. Nathan's a welcome touch of light relief during these otherwise quite sombre scenes and is nicely underplayed by veteran bit player Kevin Rankin (the way he fixes a defect in Jaime's Bionic ear is a perfectly pitched comic moment), personally I'm hoping we see a lot more of Nathan in future episodes.

Overhearing a conversation between Jonas and Ruth Treadwell (Molly Price) Jaime volunteers for her first assignment, taking us into our third and final act as Jaime and Ruth are sent to the town of Paradise, Idaho to find out what killed the entire population seemingly overnight.

While the idea of a town being wiped out by a mystery plague isn't exactly new it's a concept that's arguably taken on a renewed resonance with the perceived threat of global terrorism, and is used to stark effect here with bodies lying in the street.
It soon becomes clear just how inexperienced Jaime really is, as despite her training she struggles to hold her own against an enemy who have their own reason to clean up the town.

The episode isn't without its flaws, most notably in the scene where Jaime rushes to save a suicidal woman there's a close up of her running feet which just looks cartoonish and silly. In fact it reminded me of nothing so much as Fred Flintstone starting his car.

Also the subplot exploring Jaime's relationship with her sister Becca is underwritten, I'm prepared to overlook the fact Becca is threatening to move back in with her father despite the fact that last episode neither sister even knew where he was but I'm not so convinced by how easily this fight is resolved at the end of the episode. Still it's early days yet and there's plenty of room for this relationship to be better developed.

There is also a secondary sub-plot in which Jae and Sarah are reunited in a clandestine meeting in a hotel room. While this allows Will Yun Lee and Katee Sachoff to flex their acting muscles and round out their charectors a little it's relevance to the main story isn't immediately obvious, and it does feel a bit like it was put there just to pad out the episode. Curious too that, after the shoehorning in of the prison break in episode one, neither Anthony Anthros nor his mysterious benefactor are anywhere to be seen this week.

Having said all that, this is a strong episode with Ryan and the rest of the cast coming across well. As a template for the series as a whole this is much better than the pilot, although the producers would do well to rethink that title sequence, which is at best forgettable, and at worst highly grating.

4/5