Bionic Woman was my first big disappointment of this fall season. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t have high expectations. I just couldn’t see how the show could get screwed up. It’s a simple premise, a woman with super powers doing awesome stuff. In a world of Heroes, Alias, and the like, it should be TV equivalent of a box cake: easy to bake but delicious none the less. Yet, through a series of bad decisions resulting with the show being taken way too seriously, they manage to screw up a good premise so bad that it’s not really watchable.

Super Strength Sucks

Early on, when the heroine has her bionic powers thrust on her without her consent, it’s pretty obvious what the writers are setting up, a bad rationale for heroine angst. If you told me that loosing my arm meant I could get a super bionic one, I’d be hard pressed not to grab the electric chainsaw sitting in the garage. If I awoke from a car crash to have super strength, I would be ready to take up extreme sports and be thankful that I’m not a triple amputee. The writers of this show decided to skip the exuberance of a new found super power and instead focus on moral lessons like how unfair it is to have all that thrust upon you. The result is no less boring than the college course on bioethicity in the opening scene of the show.

Emotional Detachment

If the moral lessons on body modifications weren’t bad enough, the acting and writing manage to be so bad that they suck all emotional attachment from the characters. For instance when the boyfriend/secret-genius-doctor is shot, our super-angst super-heroine forgoes helping him to run off and fight the rogue bionic woman that shot him.That’s only slightly unfair considering that when she lost both legs in a car crash, he jeopardized his top secret program to replace them.

The unfairness really begins when after the fight, she neglects to ask after his condition as the paramedics (who got there without any help from her) drive away. Not even a simple, “Will he make it?” The emotional detachment must have worked, because I found myself not caring at all whether he survived to the next episode. Or if anyone else did for that matter.