Bionic Woman :
Season 1

Title / Air Date: The Education of Jaime Sommers / 24th October 2007
Writer:Elizabeth Heldens
Director: Jonas Pate

Summary:After several US soldiers go on an apparent killing spree, Jaime finally gets to experience college when she goes undercover as a British transfer student to investigate a professor who is possibly selling neural implants to terrorists. However, her assignment becomes complicated when she unexpectedly falls for Tom, the teacher's assistant, who has been flagged as a suspect.

Guest stars: Kenneth Welsh - Professor Howard Samuels ; Jordan Bridges - Tom

Re-occurring characters/plot points:None.

Best Quotes..... Antonio: Ruth, this is racial profiling. Ruth: Or brilliant detective work. Jaime: Everytime you crumple that paper, it makes me want to kill myself. Eriki: That's what my last roomate did. Jaime: I don't beleive it, my gut tells me he has nothing to do with this. Antonio: The last time you listened to your gut about a guy, he had your limbs replaced. When jaime says to Tom she is working for the Berkut group: The insidous, arrogant, always getting in our way, oh did I mention arrogant, Berkut group?

Misc facts: Michlle Ryan gets to drop her American accent for this episode, as she poses as a British transfer student.

Reviews:

By SEAN ELLIOTT, Senior Editor IFMagazine

‘The Education of Jaime Sommers’ pushes THE BIONIC WOMAN into yet another level of likability and introduces more entertaining characters to make you enjoy the series to a new degree.

This episode found Jaime going back to school posing as a student in order to discover who is providing terrorists with chips that can control a person effectively turning them into robots that do whatever the operator tells them to do. Of course Jaime falls for the TA of the class she is supposed to infiltrate. He turns out to be a CIA agent, and the bad guy who is really selling the ships and the secrets gets hit in the noggin with a bionic aimed melon.

This episode allowed Michelle Ryan to speak in her normal British accent. I actually really love her normal speaking accent, and kind of think that she should’ve been allowed to use it for her character. There is something even more fun about a British BIONIC WOMAN, but hopefully they’ll at least find new ways for her to use it in upcoming episodes.

Two gentlemen in this episode get special notice. First up is Kevin Rankin who plays Nathan, Jaime’s operator (think THE MATRIX). He’s the guy who sits and monitors all of the input from Jaime’s bionic implants. He’s an interesting character who is fun to watch, he has a good sense of humor, and he’s got a monster crush on Jaime.

The second gentleman is newcomer Jordan Bridges who plays Teaching Assistant Tom, who is really an undercover CIA agent. I figured since he was good looking that he would turn out to be a bad guy or get killed, but he survived and it looks like he’ll be back in the next episode as well. He’s a good match for Ryan’s youth and beauty and the two have great on-screen chemistry.

This was one of the best episodes of BIONIC so far. It managed to combine all of the elements of the different characters and plots to make the entire thing engaging and to clip along at a really decent pace.

A-

FAN REVIEW

Jaime is sent to college on an undercover mission to investigate a science professor with suspected terrorist links.

While the dialogue is an improvement on recent weeks the problem lies with the storyline which proved fairly routine, even predictable, with Jaime getting close to a teaching assistant, Tom Gilchrist, who may or may not be the one selling microchips to the terrorists. As a mid season filler in a more confident series they might have gotten away with it, but this early in the freshman year of a series which is still struggling to find it's feet it shows a disappointing lack of imagination or originality
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The effects still lack consistency, while Jaime's rooftop break-in at the professor's lab is nicely played I find the idea she can leap such a tall building from a standing start a little too far-fetched. Also there's an attempted mugging which is nothing more than a rehashing of an idea that was carried off much more effectively in the first episode.

The fight scenes however are well choreographed and the effects that accompany Jaime's use of her bionic hearing work really well.

This is the first episode not to feature Sarah Corvus and fans of Katee Sachoff will no doubt claim it is her absence that leaves this episode lacking, but it's more than that. There is no real threat or danger in this episode; it's all just a little bit too mundane. Jaime is undercover in a perfectly safe environment and when she does finally get to square up to the bad guys Pope dives in and steals the glory. There's very little about this story that requires a Bionic protagonist, everything Jaime does could have been tackled just as easily by Buffy Summers or Sydney Bristow, in fact it feels more like a cross between Alias and 21 Jump Street than Bionic Woman.
Given that this episode is about technology that can control the human brain the least I would have expected is for Jaime to face off against a micro-chipped adversary.

It's not all bad, posing as Oxford exchange student Clarissa allows Michelle Ryan to use her natural British accent, leading to a much more relaxed, carefree performance than usual. There's also a lovely rapport building between Ryan and Kevin Rankin. The pair of them work well together, and there's a real (non-sexual) chemistry between them, as if they've been best friends for years. Alas the same cannot be said for Jordan Bridges who fails to make an impact as Tom

2.5/5