Bionic Pilot: Spoilerific Commentary
Miscellany first:
The blog Hello, Hedonism* has quite the famous fictional character commenting on one of their entries! In the entry "Kids can be hot, too," which reports on how a 12-year-old girl is the "official ambassador" of a fashion week in Australia and observes that that says some really messed-up things about the current beauty ideal, check out Comment #3: "Humbert says, '12 is perfect.' " I think that sums it up nicely.
ETA: Oh yeah! plasticinecupid posted the most adorable picture of the actors who play Vorenus and Antony in their roles as lovers in another movie. They're so cuddly!
Moving on to the main point, I watched the pilot of Bionic Woman tonight. I almost turned it off after the first few minutes of totally sappy, totally fake-and-scripted conversation between Jamie and Boyfriend (Will? Was that his name?) Fortunately, just then Katee Sackhoff ran into them with a truck. Now we know what Starbuck got up to while on Earth!
I can prove that this is actually a Battlestar Galactica crossover, because Chief Tyrol was on the show too. Or rather, one copy of that model XD It turns out that after her Viper exploded, Kara got rebuilt into the first bionic woman by some handwavy method involving nanotechnology. Now she's escaped and hooked up with some guy who wants her to kill the doctor who did that to her (though she certainly seems to want him dead too): Jamie's boyfriend, who's secretly a surgeon for some super-secret bionic soldier research program. She meant to kill Boyfriend, but managed to nearly kill Jamie instead while leaving him in good enough shape to amputate her limbs and replace them with bionic ones. Whoops.
The rest of the show was pretty much like this:
JAMIE: EEK, what's happening to me? How could you do this to me?
BOYFRIEND: I didn't want you to die! (Also, my dad invented this stuff. But I won't mention that he's locked up somewhere. Or why.)
SECRET RESEARCH PEOPLE: She might be a good candidate. Let's keep her!
CHIEF TYROL: Just here guarding a super-secret prison, not mentioning that I AM A CYLON MWAHAHA!
StarbuckSARAH CORVIN OR CORVIS OR WHATEVER: Hahaha, research people, I am alive!
SECRET RESEARCH PEOPLE: Oh shit. How is this possible?
JAMIE: I can jump buildings! Whee! Okay, you creepy people can train me, but on my terms. Whatever that means.
Fun, but not remarkable. Except for the parts where Jamie and Sarah Starbuck interact, because those were great. Sarah approaches Jamie at the bar where Jamie works, apparently just to let the Creepy Researchers know she's alive, and I guess coming to get them or something. She holds Jamie's hair back when Jamie is heaving into the sink after her ear and eye implants come online and hit her with wicked sensory overload, and explains a little bit of what's happening to Jamie. After she shoots Boyfriend and Jamie chases her down, Jamie asks what Sarah wants from her. "I really don't know," she says. "Jogging partner maybe?" I think she's telling the truth there - she really does seem interested in Jamie, and maybe a bit wistful, like she really is lonely for someone like her to talk to. (She also says that she's been slowly making herself even more bionic by cutting off parts of herself and letting her body replace them (I think that's how it works), which is just whoa. She says that she's cutting away all the weak parts of herself.)
Then they fight, of course, because of the whole Boyfriend thing. Which is a shame, because Jamie was pretty freaked out by the secret research program, and might have found some common ground with Sarah otherwise. They will make neat antagonists because of that common ground - it would be boring if it were just "good bionic woman, bad bionic woman" - but I really hope that eventually, Jamie will turn on the Creepy Researchers and find herself working with Sarah agains them. They would be awesome as antagonists stuck in a partnership, with Sarah as an almost-buddy, almost-mentor except slightly scary and not quite trustworthy. And it's an interesting concept in general, these women getting rebuilt into something different and "better" against their wills (in at least one case "for her own good") and then using their new abilities to fight back against the ones who rebuilt them. I hope it's carried out well.
The previews for next week show Jamie working with the Creepy Researchers to go on world-saving missions or something. I don't know if I'd trust them to pick missions that would actually save the world rather than further their Creepy Researcher agenda, but maybe they'll address that trust issue. I just hope they don't get turned into Edgy Heroes Who Do What's Necessary in one episode, because that would be stupid. They've got to earn that if that's where they're going.
*I'm not linking because the most recent entry is about a bestiality restaurant in Japan (no, really). It's not graphic, and the blogger doesn't support it at all, but who knows whether the overworked LJ employees would have time to notice the difference if they found me linking to that?
The blog Hello, Hedonism* has quite the famous fictional character commenting on one of their entries! In the entry "Kids can be hot, too," which reports on how a 12-year-old girl is the "official ambassador" of a fashion week in Australia and observes that that says some really messed-up things about the current beauty ideal, check out Comment #3: "Humbert says, '12 is perfect.' " I think that sums it up nicely.
ETA: Oh yeah! plasticinecupid posted the most adorable picture of the actors who play Vorenus and Antony in their roles as lovers in another movie. They're so cuddly!
Moving on to the main point, I watched the pilot of Bionic Woman tonight. I almost turned it off after the first few minutes of totally sappy, totally fake-and-scripted conversation between Jamie and Boyfriend (Will? Was that his name?) Fortunately, just then Katee Sackhoff ran into them with a truck. Now we know what Starbuck got up to while on Earth!
I can prove that this is actually a Battlestar Galactica crossover, because Chief Tyrol was on the show too. Or rather, one copy of that model XD It turns out that after her Viper exploded, Kara got rebuilt into the first bionic woman by some handwavy method involving nanotechnology. Now she's escaped and hooked up with some guy who wants her to kill the doctor who did that to her (though she certainly seems to want him dead too): Jamie's boyfriend, who's secretly a surgeon for some super-secret bionic soldier research program. She meant to kill Boyfriend, but managed to nearly kill Jamie instead while leaving him in good enough shape to amputate her limbs and replace them with bionic ones. Whoops.
The rest of the show was pretty much like this:
JAMIE: EEK, what's happening to me? How could you do this to me?
BOYFRIEND: I didn't want you to die! (Also, my dad invented this stuff. But I won't mention that he's locked up somewhere. Or why.)
SECRET RESEARCH PEOPLE: She might be a good candidate. Let's keep her!
CHIEF TYROL: Just here guarding a super-secret prison, not mentioning that I AM A CYLON MWAHAHA!
StarbuckSARAH CORVIN OR CORVIS OR WHATEVER: Hahaha, research people, I am alive!
SECRET RESEARCH PEOPLE: Oh shit. How is this possible?
JAMIE: I can jump buildings! Whee! Okay, you creepy people can train me, but on my terms. Whatever that means.
Fun, but not remarkable. Except for the parts where Jamie and Sarah Starbuck interact, because those were great. Sarah approaches Jamie at the bar where Jamie works, apparently just to let the Creepy Researchers know she's alive, and I guess coming to get them or something. She holds Jamie's hair back when Jamie is heaving into the sink after her ear and eye implants come online and hit her with wicked sensory overload, and explains a little bit of what's happening to Jamie. After she shoots Boyfriend and Jamie chases her down, Jamie asks what Sarah wants from her. "I really don't know," she says. "Jogging partner maybe?" I think she's telling the truth there - she really does seem interested in Jamie, and maybe a bit wistful, like she really is lonely for someone like her to talk to. (She also says that she's been slowly making herself even more bionic by cutting off parts of herself and letting her body replace them (I think that's how it works), which is just whoa. She says that she's cutting away all the weak parts of herself.)
Then they fight, of course, because of the whole Boyfriend thing. Which is a shame, because Jamie was pretty freaked out by the secret research program, and might have found some common ground with Sarah otherwise. They will make neat antagonists because of that common ground - it would be boring if it were just "good bionic woman, bad bionic woman" - but I really hope that eventually, Jamie will turn on the Creepy Researchers and find herself working with Sarah agains them. They would be awesome as antagonists stuck in a partnership, with Sarah as an almost-buddy, almost-mentor except slightly scary and not quite trustworthy. And it's an interesting concept in general, these women getting rebuilt into something different and "better" against their wills (in at least one case "for her own good") and then using their new abilities to fight back against the ones who rebuilt them. I hope it's carried out well.
The previews for next week show Jamie working with the Creepy Researchers to go on world-saving missions or something. I don't know if I'd trust them to pick missions that would actually save the world rather than further their Creepy Researcher agenda, but maybe they'll address that trust issue. I just hope they don't get turned into Edgy Heroes Who Do What's Necessary in one episode, because that would be stupid. They've got to earn that if that's where they're going.
*I'm not linking because the most recent entry is about a bestiality restaurant in Japan (no, really). It's not graphic, and the blogger doesn't support it at all, but who knows whether the overworked LJ employees would have time to notice the difference if they found me linking to that?