This weeks Throwback-Thursday brings us to The Bionic Woman. This series spunoff from The Six Million Dollar Man, where Astronaut/Pilot Steve Austin (Lee Majors) was fitted with bionics that saved his life. Well, The Bionic Woman was a 2-part episode that centered on a top tennis player named Jaime Sommers (Lindsay Wagner), who also happened to be an old girlfriend of Steves. During an outing, Steve and Jaime went for a little skydiving...Jaimes parachute malfunctioned, and she suffered serious injuries...her life was hanging in the balance. With his connections, Steve got Jaime fitted with bionics, also with magic legs, a right arm, and a right ear, where her hearing gets amplified. Like Steve, Jaime was also asked to work for Oscar Goldman (Richard Anderson) and the OSI and she accepted, despite Steves objections. However, it was also revealed during her OSI mission that Jaimes body was rejecting her bionic implants...she had an aneurysm and seemingly died at the end of the episode. I say seemingly because in another episode, Steve finds out that Jaime had survived thanks to cryogenic freeze or something...and lo and behold, Jaime gets her own series called The Bionic Woman, no longer a tennis pro, but now a schoolteacher, living a seemingly simple life with a bionic dog named Max, and still working for the OSI. The Bionic Woman ran for 3 seasons...the 1st season on ABC started as a mid-season replacement, and it ran from January 1976-May 1976, which seems like the norm these days with all the 13-or-so episode series weve been getting lately, like Fringes last season, Chucks last season, Sleepy Hollow, Dracula, but I digress...the 2nd season on ABC ran from Sept 1976-May 1977, and the 3rd season, now on NBC, ran from Sept 1977-May 1978. Notable episodes include crossovers with The Six Million Dollar Man, like the shows with bigfoot and aliens...there were crossovers involving the fembots, where Jaime, as she was escaping from the fembots, jumped from a very high place, beyond the bionic limitations, and her magic legs exploded on her, which is why they called in Steve to lend a hand...there were some episodes involving a Jaime Sommers doppelganger named Lisa Galloway, and she was a shady character, too. Not as memorable for me were the made-for-TV reunion movies: The Return Of The Six Million Dollar Man And The Bionic Woman (1987), Bionic Showdown: The Six Million Dollar Man And The Bionic Woman (1989), and Bionic Ever After? (1994). There are a couple of important producers attached to The Bionic Woman: Kenneth Johnson and Harve Bennett. Besides working on The Six Million Dollar Man and creating The Bionic Woman, Johnson went on to create The Incredible Hulk...he also wrote and directed the 80s original miniseries V. Like Johnson, Bennett also worked on both The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman, but he is best known for resurrecting the Star Trek movie franchise...he developed and produced what would eventually become Star Trek II-The Wrath Of Khan (1982), and he stayed on as producer until Star Trek V-The Final Frontier (1989). There was a new reimagined series called The Bionic Woman, created by David Eick (who, along with Ronald D. Moore, worked on the new reimagined series Battlestar: Galactica, and Caprica), released during Fall 2007. This Jaime Sommers, played by Michelle Ryan (Lady Christina de Souza in the Doctor Who episode Planet Of The Dead with David Tennant as the 10th Doctor), is a bartender and surrogate mom to her teenage sister. Nearly killed in a car accident, Jaime was saved by bionics...her improvements include bionic legs, a bionic right arm, a bionic right ear, a bionic eye, and some nano technology that allows her body to heal at an accelerated rate. With newfound strength, speed, and other enhanced abilities, Jaime begins working for the Berkut Group, the organization responsible for her operation (the new version of the OSI). The Berkut Group boss is Jonas Bledsoe (the new version of Oscar Goldman), played by Miguel Ferrer (helmsman of the USS Excelsior in 1984s Star Trek III-The Search For Spock, and OCP Executive Bob Morton in 1987s original RoboCop)...also with the Berkut Group is Jae Kim, played by Will Yun Lee (Det. Danny Woo on the series Witchblade, and Col. Moon in 2002s Die Another Day)...squaring off as Jaimes foe and 1st Bionic Woman is Sarah Corvus, played on a recurring basis by Katee Sackhoff (Starbuck on the new Battlestar: Galactica). This new version of The Bionic Woman showed promise, but due to the strike by the Writers Guild Of America, production of the series halted, and never continued. Getting back to the original 70s series, The Bionic Woman was one of the better prime time series of that era, and a scifi one that inspired a new, although short-lived, reimagined series, 30-some-odd years later...great memories... youtube/watch?v=4Wd6IuVya4M
Posted on: Thu, 06 Mar 2014 14:16:28 +0000
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