TV review: Teens too smart for sci-fi lite

MULTI-TASKING: Jaime, as the bionic woman, is no longer free to live her life and must periodically drop everything and kung fu baddies.

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Bionic Woman is supposed to be an action thriller, but so far the only matter of suspense has been why TV3 would screen a series designed to appeal to young teenage girls at a time when they will be unable to see it.

Times have changed since the original Bionic Woman in the 1970s. Then, audiences were easily impressed and people of all ages watched fare like this, Charlie's Angels and Knight Rider with happily suspended disbelief.

Now, audiences are somewhat more sophisticated.

The story of a young girl barely out of her teens being surgically engineered after a horrific car accident into a superhero does fall squarely into the teenybopper category. You could be awfully kind and call it sci-fi lite.

But no self-respecting sci-fi buff would tolerate the fact that the surgery, first, does not change the young woman's personality one iota and, second, leaves her flawlessly beautiful.

Today's young teenage girls are too smart to swallow this, but they may be happy enough to watch for the undeniable pleasure of seeing a guileless young woman whup the bejesus out of a series of bad guys single-handedly.

Or, rather, single bionic- handedly, for she has one bionic arm.

For grown-up viewers, Bionic Woman (TV3, 9.30pm, Sunday) is possible to tolerate if treated like a parody. There are some amusing lines. Jaime, our bionic gal, complains when her boss interrupts an outing with her sister with a phone call instructing her to waylay a nearby terrorist.

"Do you want to have lunch with your sister or save the free world?" he remonstrates. She manages to do both. As someone else in the show notes, being bionic means you can do some serious multi-tasking.

Jaime is outraged to discover that the state - or whatever unspecified agency is now controlling her - has fitted her with tracking devices so that her handlers can not only find her anywhere, but can see whatever she can see with her bionic eye.

"I'll go to the Justice Department," she rages. "I'll go to Hillary Clinton. She'll get to the bottom of it."

She is told that none of her body's new mod cons can be removed without leaving various bits of her paralysed. And, really, she does want to do the right thing and foil the baddies, doesn't she?

But this brings us to the oddly disturbing aspect of this version of Bionic Woman. Jaime is represented as an unassuming superhero, suddenly thrust into the battle between good and evil. But actually she is a slave.

The state has, admittedly, saved her life by androidising large chunks of her anatomy. But in return, she is no longer free to live her life. She must periodically drop everything and, as happened this week, kung fu a squad of mean Slavic kidnappers.

The state doesn't even pay her a decent whack. Presumably, having spent billions rebuilding her, it takes the view that she is indebted for life. This really takes the ethos of public service to a sinister new level, and we must hope it doesn't catch on.

Imagine if the state decided to make all hip replacement patients do six months' community service as a penance?

Anyway, Jaime has an assortment of nemeses, the predominant one right now being Sarah, the prototype for her bionics. Sarah got her mega-makeover before the technology was perfected, and she is now in a bit of a state.

She has trouble doing so much as eating a tin of baked beans and spends a lot of time shaking and moping. Yet strangely, she has a nice manicure, with elegantly painted red nails. Perhaps her nail boutique has fitted a vice for her hands?

Luckily for Sarah and unluckily for Jaime, Sarah's weakness comes and goes, and much of the time she goes about karate-chopping people and getting in Jaime's face.

Her scheme is to make Jaime come back with her to a laboratory where an evil genius scientist can copy Jaime's improved bionics and save Sarah from fatal obsolescence.

In furtherance of this aim, she has just drugged and abducted Jaime's little sister. This will strike most young teenage girls as counterproductive, as the little sister is very annoying - as so many little sisters are. If Jaime wants her back, a spot of bionic organ donation is in order.

"I know what it's like to have a little sister," Sarah says, adding sinisterly, "Ooops! That's right. I killed mine."

One of the oddest things about Bionic Woman is that it stars Michelle Ryan, last seen here in the BBC's EastEnders. To go from being a pasty Pom in a dingy pub to leaping tall buildings in a single bound is really quite something.

But you still half expect Dot Cotton to bustle in with a basket of laundry.

- © Fairfax NZ News