It’s with some interest that I’ve clocked the juxtaposition between the pseudo-feminism of Jaime’s go-getting, kick-arse bravery and her interactions with men.
These two episodes have seen her kissed, pawed and at times downright patronised by a series of men ranging from Oscar and Steve to her old tennis sponsor and various nasties.
To be expected, perhaps. But it’s easy to imagine feminist hackles rising as Jaime’s reactions are frequently somewhere between tolerance and enjoyment. What’s more, as Oscar arrives to plant a big smacker on Jaime’s face, she’s using her bionic arm to aid in whipping up a lemon meringue pie, which is perhaps a delicately ladylike demonstration of pocket bionics in the series.
These are also two consecutive episodes in which Jaime has been drugged. Not only do we see her chloroformed and then injected with sedative by the beauty pageant crooks (the latter of which was unsuccessful due to being administered to Jaime’s bionic arm), she was also given a Mickey Finn by her old friend and sponsor, J.T. Connors, who stood over her as she drank it while on her bed.
Connors proved to be a very watchable character. A powerful Texan who Jaime is persuaded to check out when missiles are thought to have launched from his expansive estate. He seems like someone with very dark secrets, as shown by the secret base he refuses to let Jaime see, in which she later finds jamming technology.
Forrest Tucker makes J.T. an imposing presence, and also - against the odds - a charismatic and likeable one. He’s like the Bioniverse’s very own Paul Galveston, complete with his own Empire Valley.
J.T.’s son is said to have been killed a year earlier in an accident in an aviation accident about which J.T. is clearly furious. Could this be his motive?
It’s also worth noting that J.T.’s political leanings are made explicit - Jaime comments that he’s “about this far to the right of Attila the Hun”, and J.T. agrees, responding that he doesn’t even put out his arm to signal a left turn. And he makes a comment about the current (Republican) government being too left wing. All of which serves to make him seem more threatening. Almost universally, “far right” is code for “dangerous”. And perhaps nowhere more than in Hollywood. Can Jaime save the world from such a threat?
Well, no, as it turns out. She doesn’t need to. Because J.T. isn’t the threat. His second-in-command is ole Walt Driscoll from Dallas. Ben Piazza’s fairly low key presence was a bit of a red flag to me, and rightly so since he ended up putting not only J.T.’s and Jaime’s lives in jeopardy, but also Steve’s. Threatening the whole bionic franchise this way is the only thing that could possibly be more terrifying than a right wing Texan.
It’s to the series’ credit that neither J.T.’s son’s death nor his political leanings are Chekhov’s gun elements. I was awaiting the revelation that J.T.’s son wasn’t dead after all, but simply dead in the same way as Jaime. By episode’s end, I expected him to appear, having been missing or hidden somewhere on J.T.’s estate or on a secret mission somewhere. But no. The story would work fine without these two elements. They add substance and flesh out the character. They tell us a little about his motives. And then they play against expectations.
I know Lindsay Wagner can sing in real life ans she sings indeed on the show of The Bionic Woman but somehow it looks unreal. But to me this is one of my favorite episodes from The Bionic Woman, and Jaime joints a beauty contest and she sings the song "Feeling" and she sings it very nicely.
Let’s see: the blonde heroine is kidnapped and replaced by a Southern woman who’s had plastic surgery to become an exact double. It’s your basic precursor to Krystle in the attic.
Except Jaime isn’t locked in an attic. She’s drugged, put into a large wooden crate attached to an anchor and thrown into the Atlantic. These guys don’t mess around.
The Frankenstein who created Jaime II is Dr Courtney, AKA Dallas's Matt Devlin. There’s something about Don Porter that I find unsettling in a way I can't quite pinpoint. But then I always feel bad for feeling that way as he (Don) seems so nice. All of which means I’m conflicted. It’s ideal casting, really.
A blessing of this story is that it moves quickly. It could have been padded out to two or even three stories. Instead it’s condensed goodness as the conventions of the doppelgänger story are quickly ticked off one by one: the unravelling of the bandages from the face; the reveal in the hand held mirror; the dialect coaching… and so on.
I’d assumed most of the episode would be Lisa impersonating Jaime at OSI but was pleasantly surprised when she was caught out quite early on in the piece and the story became about the turnaround, with Jaime pretending to be Lisa in order to smoke out her contacts. Only for another twist on the story to come when Lisa escapes and two identically-dressed Jaimes are running round the same building, eventually coming face-to-face.
As Lisa, Lindsay’s Georgia accent sounds delightfully iffy, but at least it makes sense when Jaime attempts the accent and it’s even more iffy, but nobody notices.
Lindsay does nice work though. Her frosty smirks and overconfidence as Lisa-doing-Jaime are subtle, but just enough to create a different energy. There are times when some of her little mannerisms could have been more different - some of the small moments of Lisa-doing-Jaime were a bit too natural and accurate, especially the interactions with Oscar.
The real fun came for me in the Jaime-doing-Lisa scenes. Smoking cigarettes badly; being shocked when Lisa’s boyfriend passionately kissed her; trying to work out what Lisa’s natural accent was; bluffing her way round a strange building with which she was supposed to be familiar. There’s something about them that helped me appreciate Jaime - and Lindsay - even more. The writing was good, and these moments ticked all the boxes of enjoyment that a doppelgänger story should tick.
It’s a nice touch that Lisa Galloway smokes, even if it partially spoilt Lindsay’s wholesome image for me (I assume she smoked in real life to be able to smoke naturally on-screen). It’s also a pretty bold move considering how verboten it seemed to be during this era, and I suppose the series got to have its cake and smoke it by associating nicotine use with villainy.
That’s far from the most boldest aspect here though. There’s a scene in a bar where Jaime is approached by a patron who buys her a drink and asks if she’s in business, to which she naïvely answers in the affirmative, not quite getting the implication at first, only for him to become handsy, and then annoyed when she bionically rebuffs him. I’ve long thought of the series as one aimed at children, so having the lead mistaken for a sex worker seems that much more edgy.
The devil’s in the detail, as always, and I loved the little touch of Jaime sunbathing on holiday only to discover that her bionic skin doesn’t tan.
Another great episode of The Bionic Woman, i remember Lisa was playing more then one episode of The Bionic Woman, and you;re right it give me a Krystle and a Rita vibes all over again but then without the attic.
The Fembots’ return was great fun. It helped that I hadn’t expected to see them this early in the season. It lacked the impact of their original story, mostly because much of it had already been done, so it was a case of necessarily hitting some of the same notes - and even changing continuity. How did the Callahan-bot end up at O.S.I., for example? Shouldn’t it be Lynda-bot? Lynda herself was missed this time round, but it was great to see Callahan back.
Rod Kyler’s mysterious ailment felt decidedly timely. He was trapped in isolation. Then he got fed up and left the safety of his confinement, only to get panicky when he met someone who was sneezing. And sure enough he ended up becoming seriously ill and needing to be hospitalised while experimental cures were tried. In these Covid-stricken times, I couldn’t help relating to the situation.
It’s fun to look for parallels with Jaime’s superheroine peer, Wonder Woman. Both had their series unceremoniously dropped by ABC by the end of the 76/77 season. Both were picked up by new networks (BW by NBC; WW by CBS). And both debuted in their new homes within a week of one another in September 1977.
It’s also worth noting that both series aired a very similar scene one day apart: the heroine in question dangling from a helicopter high in the air. Wonder Woman’s take on the scene became legendary for Lynda Carter gamely doing some of her own stunt work for close-up shots under the chopper and apparently sending execs into panic when they heard about it afterwards (not that it stopped them incorporating those very scenes into the opening titles very soon after).
I don’t know if there was any such behind-the-scenes drama over the helicopter scenes in The Bionic Woman, though there are indeed some close-up shots where Lindsay can be seen beneath a helicopter, just as Lynda was. Whatever the case, it has to be said that the long shots of the BW version look far more impressive than the WW long shots. Not only is the helicopter flying over the breathtaking Las Vegas cityscape, but the stunt double can be seen way above the tower blocks wriggling around and at times clearly holding on with just one hand.
With the opening scenes of this episode my biggest outstanding quibble at the end of the last episode has been addressed. We’ve returned to Ventura Air Force Base School and Jaime has been seen teaching. It seems she’s got a completely different class of students, which rings true since this is presumably a different school year from Season One.
The scenes set at Buck’s home with its recording studio in the ground felt eerily familiar to me. I have no idea why, since I last watched it along with the rest of the first two seasons a decade or so ago, and (apart from my oft-watched-when-younger Bionic Woman two-parter from Season Two of SMDM) all the other episodes up to this point have felt brand new to me.
The guest-stars seemed very impressive. The only one I knew of beforehand was Hoyt Axton, and even then I must confess I mostly know him as the dad in Gremlins, and knew little to nothing of his extensive folk music background.
Another “Lindsay sings” episode, though I can find no comments indicating how many tens of takes it took this time to cobble together an acceptable vocal.
The writing and performances elevated this from the simple “lead goes undercover as a singer to investigate” plot device it appears on the surface. I found myself particularly struck with the sadness that hung in the air on the day of Tammy’s hearing with its looming inevitable prison sentence. Even though we didn’t attend the hearing (nor did Jaime and Oscar) or have its outcome confirmed, Jaime’s melancholy brought out the greys in what could have been something very black and white, and made it a very human story.
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