“Aim high and serve nothing but aces”: (Re)-watching The Bionic Woman

[J. R.'s Piece]

... although Martin E. Brooks says he did 7 years on Dallas and he mentions Knots Landing right afterwards, as examples of his body of tv work that has been eclipsed by playing Rudy Wells. He says Lindsay was like a daughter and they would talk a lot between scenes. He also says he spent his spare time watching the shots and was looking forward to be able to direct an episode.

 

[Mel O'Drama]

Assault On The Princess

​

Jaime does The Love Boat before there even was The Love Boat. These Angels On A Cruise episodes are usually fun to watch for the combination of the exotic on a budget. Sometimes it’s good to have that sense of confinement and isolation. Especially when Jaime’s trying to track down an explosive.

Once again, there’s microtechnology involved. This time the dangerous energy cell is described by Oscar as being about “the size of a flashlight battery”. It all seems very ahead of its time in terms of the quest for tech to become smaller and smaller.

There’s some past-and-future soap pedigree on board. Ship captain, Lucky Harrison is Peyton Place’s Dr Rossi, while Ray Krebbs from Dallas is steering the boat. In fact, I’m fairly certain the photo of Harrison Oscar show’s Jaime is actually Ed Nelson in character as Rossi in a Peyton Place publicity still.

At this point in his career Ed Nelson seemed to appear on pretty much every episodic series specialising in overconfident, slightly sleazy smoothies with a roguish twinkle and a chequered past. Both Lucky and Steve Kanaly’s Tanner are somewhat dodgy. Tanner is shown to be deliberately taking the boat off course for an assignation. But both develop an attraction towards Jaime. And both turn out to be reasonably decent guys. There’s a nice moment in the last half where, after helping Jaime, Lucky abandons her to make a break for it on realising the boat is going down. But even that has a twist.

Best of all is the surprise return of Vito Scotti as Romero - the lusty-but-bumbling old Italian from Fly Jaime. Wisely, on seeing him, Jaime flashes back to my favourite line from that episode (“get your hands off my ham and cheese”). It’s great to see this bit of continuity, with Romero surprised to find that air steward Jaime Winters is now blackjack dealer Jaime Windsor. Naturally, Jaime pretends she’s never seen him before, causing him to pop up at inopportune moments trying to jog her memory by calling out random plane-related lines (“fasten your seatbelts” and whatnot) and generally sabotaging her investigation.

More than once I’ve complained that nobody ever seems to recognise Jaime when she’s undercover, despite her high profile tennis career. Romero returning as this blast from the past covers some of this ground and I really enjoyed having this aspect explored. Since it was done in a lighthearted way, it also keeps to door open for a similar scenario with a more serious tone in future episodes. We can hope.

It’s a nice episode. All the same, I was left with many questions: Why all the spectacle of “Jaime Windsor” being on the run from the police? Surely there’d be a more low-profile way to get her aboard. Why, after finding the device she’s there to retrieve, give it to Romero? Apart from the huge risk to his life, wouldn’t it be wiser to take it to the freezer herself to ensure it’s done properly? Why the tearful breakdown at the end of the mission? Jaime’s experienced more challenging situations than this.

The biggest question of all is: what’s happened to Jaime’s teaching career. She’d have been on board for some days, yet no mention was made of how this fitted into her schedule. Apart from the text in the opening credits, I don’t believe even a token mention has been made of Jaime’s career or students for half a dozen episodes or so.

 

[Mel O'Drama]

Martin E. Brooks says he did 7 years on Dallas and he mentions Knots Landing right afterwards, as examples of his body of tv work that has been eclipsed by playing Rudy Wells.

He's certainly right about Knots Landing. Until I read your post I hadn't even clocked that he was in it. Even now I can't think who Vernon "Ted" Bunton was.

He says Lindsay was like a daughter and they would talk a lot between scenes.

Oh, lovely. It's a little boost to my enjoyment of the series to know he remembers it fondly.

He also says he spent his spare time watching the shots and was looking forward to be able to direct an episode.

Ooh - did he direct some episodes as well?

 

[J. R.'s Piece]

He's certainly right about Knots Landing. Until I read your post I hadn't even clocked that he was in it. Even now I can't think who Vernon "Ted" Bunton was.





Oh, lovely. It's a little boost to my enjoyment of the series to know he remembers it fondly.






Ooh - did he direct some episodes as well?

No, he didn’t get to direct. The shows got cancelled. He did talk about working on both shows at the same time. He said that they would try to schedule it so that he would do a few hours on one and then have to walk to or be driven to the other show. Sometimes, he said, that would throw him a bit. And he would have to be reminded of what scene he was doing or just his first line. Then he would be okay.

Oh, they considered Monte Markham for the role of Steve Austin. Martin Caidin wanted him. Of course he later did two episodes as The Seven Million Dollar Man.

I’m currently watching the 89-minute interview on the Six Million Dollar Man season 3 with Kenneth Johnson, talking about working on both shows. He was just pointing out flaws in that updated Bionic Woman series. He says he used to perform the scripts with Lindsay Wagner in her trailer, where she would be Jaime and he played everyone else.

Oh, look out for a Digger Barnes in a future episode!

 

[Mel O'Drama]

No, he didn’t get to direct. The shows got cancelled.

I see. IMDb doesn't seem to have any directing credits for him, so I suppose he never got to do it outside of the series either.

He said that they would try to schedule it so that he would do a few hours on one and then have to walk to or be driven to the other show. Sometimes, he said, that would throw him a bit. And he would have to be reminded of what scene he was doing or just his first line. Then he would be okay.

That's not surprising at all. Especially since each series had completely different stories going on. I'd imagine the crossovers made life a bit easier for Martin. And Richard Anderson.

He was just pointing out flaws in that updated Bionic Woman series.

Is this the one with the Kat Slater's sister-daughter? I've had the DVD on my shelf for over a decade, but somehow can't muster up any interest in watching it.

He says he used to perform the scripts with Lindsay Wagner in her trailer, where she would be Jaime and he played everyone else.

Oh fun. This would have made a nice bonus feature if they'd had a camera running.

Oh, look out for a Digger Barnes in a future episode!

I will.

 

[Mel O'Drama]

Road To Nashville

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.

 

[Mel O'Drama]

Kill Oscar (Part I)

​

Now this is a crossover I can really enjoy. I knew going in that Kill Oscar was a three-parter that bounced from one series to another and back. But inexplicably (especially since I have the soundtrack CD which mentions them many times), I’d completely forgotten that this story is the introduction of the mighty Fembots.

Imagine, then, my delight at seeing the cold opening. It feels very much like camp - but in the best possible way. As former O.S.I. agent turned mad professor Dr Franklin, John Houseman (who is most familiar to me from my soundtrack to John Carpenter’s The Fog, where he speaks the Prologue) sweats and does something akin to low-level hamming over his creations. While McGee from The Incredible Hulk sweats even more and does so with a heavy Russian accent. Adding to the surrealism, when Jack Colvin first arrived as Baron Constantine I thought for a few moments it was Michael Crawford, and was half expecting him to speak in a silly voice and say the cat had done a whoopsie somewhere awkward.

The tone is perfect. Sinister but inviting. Wth the Fembots no doubt taking some inspiration from Ira Levin’s The Stepford Wives, Franklin has some delightfully politically incorrect dialogue as he introduces them to Constantine:

I call them Fembots.The perfect women. Programmable and obedient.

Building on this, he saves my favourite line of the episode for later in the episode:

Since when is thinking for herself an asset in a woman?

The reveal of Katy as a Fembot was wonderful. Shocking and funny in equal measures. I love the look of the face-off Fembots so much. It’s the eyeballs. They just give it a creepiness of Doctor Who proportions which overcomes any shortcomings in the special effect department (though, indeed, the shortcomings add to their endearment).

And this is all before the opening credits.

What’s going on with the music in these episodes? It feels like there’s a lot of tweaking and experimenting going on. First Joe Harnell’s end title version arrived. That was tweaked further with Road To Nashville. Now with this episode, we get Joe Harnell’s Main Title, which kind of, sort of works, but also feels strange. I understand this is a one-off, and is actually the syndicated version.

The expanded cast here is terrific. There’s Steve, of course. Always a welcome guest (is "handball" a thing? It looked like they were playing squash without raquets).

Not having watched SMDM this time round, this is my introduction to Callaghan and Lynda, both of whom have now been replaced by Fembots. They have good energy with Jaime and work well on the series. I’m looking forward to seeing more of them.

The Jaime vs. Fembot Callaghan and Katy was a hoot. Such great fun. It’s good to see the limitations of bionics once again with Jaime’s legs failing after a jump from a great height to escape them. Not only does it add to the realism, it gives more storyline potential, which is used to great effect here.

As the first of three acts, this episode is really well-structured and sets up the threat well. Jaime in hospital and dazed from an injury, not quite able to convince people of what she knows is a frightening situation. Especially since a Fembot is holding her hand.

The “To be continued… on The Six Million Dollar Man” text at the end feels very exciting. The icing on a very tasty cake, with another two still waiting to be devoured. I confess: I'm invested.

 

[J. R.'s Piece]

Callahan was introduced in season 2 of The Six Million Dollar Man. It was very strange when Steve sent her to get parts from a store owner played by Lee Majors in a beard and spectacles, who thought the parts were for some robot. Lee Majors got an extra credit as L. Majors on the closing credits of that episode.

Lynda only ever appeared in the first two parts of this story. Actually, it was initially established on The Six Million Dollar Man that Oscar changed his secretaries frequently for security purposes. Though they dropped that idea.

Am watching a 53 minute interview with Richard Anderson later. Kenneth Johnson said that people from the two shows used to have to get together to schedule Richard Anderson’s availability and sometimes he would be on both shows in the same day.

Yes. Kenneth Johnson was talking about the Michelle Ryan version.

 

[Mel O'Drama]

It was very strange when Steve sent her to get parts from a store owner played by Lee Majors in a beard and spectacles, who thought the parts were for some robot. Lee Majors got an extra credit as L. Majors on the closing credits of that episode.

Wow. That's bizarre. I don't remember it at all.

Was there a plot reason behind the store owner looking like Steve, or was it just a random bit of business?

Lynda only ever appeared in the first two parts of this story.

Interesting, thanks. I got the impression she'd been around for yonks since Jaime seemed to know her so well.

I really like Corinne Michaels' presence. She's got a graceful elegance. And something about her feels quite British as well... like a brunette Shirley Eaton.

 

[J. R.'s Piece]

I think Lee Majors just wanted a bit of fun. He is heavily made up as an elderly gentleman. He used to like pranks, like pouring water over people and slipping diuretics into drinks.

Oh, I’ve met Shirley Eaton! Peter Davison, Peter Wyngarde (about whom Peter Davison had written about not entirely favourably in his autobiography ), Carol Cleveland (who had also written about Peter Wyngarde in her autobiography , Jane Merrow and Valerie Leon were there too.

The packaging for SMDM season four. Nine discs on top of each other. They do fall off a bit easily. Two double length episodes, including The Bionic Boy with Joan Van Ark as Val, having her brother attended to by the future Scott Easton. Plus three episodes of The Bionic Woman. And by way of a link, Jane Merrow appeared in both Man of the World and The Six Million Dollar Man season four two-part story, Death Probe. She previously appeared in the show, alongside William Smithers.

 

[Mel O'Drama]

I think Lee Majors just wanted a bit of fun. He is heavily made up as an elderly gentleman. He used to like pranks, like pouring water over people and slipping diuretics into drinks.

Thanks for this. I wouldn't have had Lee down as a practical joker, so this is news to me.

The packaging for SMDM season four. Nine discs on top of each other.

Oh dear. That'd a pain to handle, and quite difficult to keep the discs unscratched.

Plus three episodes of The Bionic Woman.

Which I now can guess with some confidence will be The Return Of Bigfoot Part I and Kill Oscar Parts I and III.

 

[DallasFanForever]

I gotta go back and watch this now. I vaguely remember the scene with the older gentleman but had no idea it was Lee Majors.

 

[johnnybear]

Return of Bigfoot part two! Part one was the fourth season opener on The Six Million Dollar Man!
JB

 

[johnnybear]

I wonder why they make it so hard for us to get at the DVDs in the sets we buy? The Police Woman sets are easy to release, so why can't everything be like that? I've had splits in the spindles, cracks and striations along the edges due to this incomprehensible marketing!!! Is it that they want us to keep buying the same sets over and over until we die??
JB

 

[Mel O'Drama]

Kill Oscar (Parts II and III) / Black Magic

​

A three-part story running for some two and a half hours in total is a very ambitious project for this franchise.

While it’s mostly successful, by the third episode I did start to feel that it might have benefited from being a two-parter. Some scenes plodded and - unusually for this series - scenes that featured dialogue frequently lacked energy and sparkle. There were very few scenes that explicitly screamed “filler”, but a general feeling that the story was stretched just a little too thin hung over the second and third episodes.

I did appreciate that each of the episodes had slightly different tones. As expected, Jaime did most of the work in her initial instalment, while Steve was the key player on his show. Part III seemed the most bionically balanced and felt like a true team-up. Which is appropriate since this is the final crossover between the two series.

Part I remains the most fun and exciting instalment for me, in large part because it introduced some great characters and the existence of the Fembots was still concealed from the main characters, giving us some fun interactions. Parts II and III didn’t quite hit the same highs, but were great fun all the same. Evil Oscar battling Steve alone was worth the ticket.




Then there's the curate’s egg that is Black Magic. Going heavily in its favour is the guest-cast: Julie Newmar; William Wyndom; Hermione Baddeley; and Vincent Price, no less, in a dual role.

The premise - part Cluedo; part And Then There Were None; part Carry On Screaming, part Scooby Doo - is a fun-but-hackneyed one.

Unfortunately, the execution is more hackneyed than fun, and feels blandly generic. There’s little that’s uniquely Bionic Woman, and one can’t help feeling it was a script lying round from some other episodic show lazily re-written to include Jaime.

None of which is necessarily that bad. I have a soft spot for haunted house films. And feuding relatives battling over a will. And the isolation of being surrounded by water with no escape. This episode has all three.

Dragging the entire episode down into puerility is the plot of a werewolf-like creature roaming the island, and abducting relatives from the household which is just incredibly tedious. I don’t know whether it was intended to be funny or scary, but it’s neither. And it tested my tolerance. In the last act there was even a Scooby Doo style unmasking.

In many ways it’s an unmissable episode due to the cast. It’s just a shame there are elements which feel unworthy of the cast and this series. The actors look like they’re having great fun with it, but I suspect it was more fun to film than to watch.

 

[Mel O'Drama]

Return of Bigfoot part two! Part one was the fourth season opener on The Six Million Dollar Man!

Oh yes. My mistype.

 

[James from London]

He's certainly right about Knots Landing. Until I read your post I hadn't even clocked that he was in it. Even now I can't think who Vernon "Ted" Bunton was.

He was a prickly, no-nonsense businessman whose company the Sumner Group were after. Greg, Paige and Claudia were all obliged to be nice to him.

 

[Mel O'Drama]

Sister Jaime

​

After the massive crossover event, we’ve now well and truly settled back in the cycle of themed episodes reminiscent of the wrestling/cruising/singing cycle from earlier in the season.

If that sounds like a complaint, it really isn’t. Sister Jaime is a solid episode, and a hugely enjoyable one. There’s lots to love about it.

Let’s start with Joe Harnell’s score, which grabbed me from the opening scenes where a walk along a city street was accompanied by lots of chookah-chookah wah-wah. It’s pure 1976, and all the better for it. This episode, in fact, features perhaps my favourite score so far. In a touch that’s both lighthearted and witty, Harnell interpolates melodies from various hymns into the score. It’s not as showy as it sounds, and it’s done in a way that feels complementary to the rest of the soundtrack and non-intrusive, so that some of these little pastiches may go unnoticed. It’s just a nice little addition that helps give this episode its own special tone.

There are also more pop culture references. The Snow White code names continue, with Jaime being Bashful in this instalment. And after Jaime discovers the heroin by rubbing it on her gums(!), she makes a quip about The Flying Nun.

For all its episodic box-ticking, Sister Jaime - unlike Black Magic - feels very much like an authentic episode of The Bionic Woman, and not like a generic script with Jaime’s name added. There are plenty of moments that are unique to Jaime, and plenty of uses for her bionics. Once again, she has to hide her abilities. As seems to be usual, she does so badly and is witnessed by a key player or two (the civilians who are in on this Level Six Top Secret must number in the dozens by now. But what the heck. It’s only national security).

Enjoyable as the guests in Black Magic were, the supporting cast in Sister Jaime is far less recognisable. Indeed, I didn’t really recognise anyone at all, which helped keep the focus on the story, and made Jaime seem less like a bit player in a big name ensemble. The name Kathleen Nolan jumped out at me. I’ve seen it before when looking for information on Knots’s Kathleen Noone. For a milisecond, I actually thought the credit read Noone and then felt slight disappointment. Turns out she was great in the role as Mother Superior, though during one of her final scenes where she was encouraging Jaime to climb ev’ry mountain it became glaringly apparent she was wearing some kind of rubber wrinkles (Nolan would be in her early forties here, playing an older woman). Up to this point it had been fine, but in the cold light of day of these on-location close-ups, the prosthetic skin looked fake to the point of distraction.

Jaime and the sisters’ plot to outmanoeuvre not just the crooks but also the O.S.I. seemed ridiculously convoluted. Not to mention it jeopardised the O.S.I.’s mission and their chances of making charges stick, what with the small matter of Jaime planting heroin in the criminals’ car. This aspect was a fail for me. Was it really necessary to create such an elaborate deception when she had a radio and could have let Oscar in on the plan? That’s a resounding “no”. It almost felt like the episode ran five minutes short, so an additional bit of material was tacked on. And everything running perfectly to plan is more the stuff of The A-Team. Still, the execution - with various stages of the plan carried out under a voiceover of Jaime talking through it - was watchable enough. I didn’t fully buy it, but The A-Team is far preferable to Scooby Doo.

He was a prickly, no-nonsense businessman whose company the Sumner Group were after. Greg, Paige and Claudia were all obliged to be nice to him.

Ah. Thanks. And I've just realised I only had to look at the Alphabetical Ewingverse thread to refresh myself:

Edgar Randolph shows up on KNOTS as the owner of a tech company obliged to do with business with the Sumner Group. He has the same righteous intensity that he brought to his role on DALLAS, but here it makes him uptight and angry and utterly immune to Greg’s charms, whereas he initially fell for JR’s.

 

[J. R.'s Piece]

I wonder why they make it so hard for us to get at the DVDs in the sets we buy? The Police Woman sets are easy to release, so why can't everything be like that? I've had splits in the spindles, cracks and striations along the edges due to this incomprehensible marketing!!! Is it that they want us to keep buying the same sets over and over until we die??
JB

It can be a bit tricky to get the discs out of this set below. To get to The Bionic Woman Season 1 disc 4, I have to remove discs 1-3.
Although I have had worse. But season 3 is packaged as just 1 disc in each place. The worse packaging so far I’ve had is for The Avengers 50th anniversary collection, where I don’t dare put the discs back in the album for fear of damaging them.

On the other hand, The Persuaders! has a nice release. I have a personally signed letter from Lord Sinclair about that.

 

[johnnybear]

I have had a lot of trouble with discs lately. Putting them back and taking out and quite a few getting splits or worse cracks in the spindle! Luckily I've never had any not work but you have to be so delicate with them it's insane!!!
JB