Synopsis- Jaime Summers is a bartender who is involved in a near-fatal car crash with her scientist boyfriend. She wakes up in his lab, with three of her limbs, and eye and an ear replaced with bionic technology, to the news that she’s destined to become a secret super-soldier.
Medium- TV show, DVD
Entirety or episode?- Entirety
Overall verdict- I actually really like this, so naturally it was stalled by a Writer’s Guild strike and then eventually pulled after only eight episodes were made. Total BS. It’s good though, well worth watching. It has a lot of very decent female characters who have complex and interesting relationships that only rarely involve men. I found Jaime’s relationships with Sarah and with her sisters particularly engaging. The acting is good – I mean, I properly love Katee Sackhof and Michelle Ryan is a delight. I also love how Jaime and Becca actually look like sisters. There are lots of interesting points raised about male control of women, the notions of ownership and integrity and privacy. (I gotta say though, re the ‘spying through the eye camera’ I was immediately like – just wear a patch over that one eye? But maybe I’m just oversimplifying it.) Also, there are TONS of really badass fight scenes and it has a nice sci-fi-noir feel to it, like The Matrix or The Crow. It feels pretty dated, but in a good way because 2007 was a much nicer place than 2018.
Screen time- Brief
Accent- American
Mark’s character- Anthony is only in two episodes. He was supposed to be a recurring character, but the show was pulled before his story arc got time to even get going. I am so irritated by this. He had such potential.
Anthony is the father of Will, Jaime’s secretly-controlling, now-dead fiancé. He’s a super smart scientist-surgeon who founded the bionics company and then got thrown into jail for a very long time on charges of treason for trying to sell bionics to the highest bidder.
My first thought was ‘Will’s meant to be 39 – no way is Anthony old enough to be his dad’ but in the initial prison scenes at least they aged Mark S up a bit... Like, he has grey in his hair throughout which I’m not gonna lie, is totally working for him. There’s also a lot of husky whispering going on, which isn’t unpleasant.
It’s hard to really get a handle on where Anthony A stands in the whole morality of this show. He’s controlling, mean, manipulative, a bit creepy and a bit scary. But also very charming and very smart (y’know, basically the Mark Sheppard archetype) but I have a feeling he might have ended up not being a straightforward villain if he’d been developed a bit.
Highlight- The crash and the operation are actually pretty harrowing, but very well done (CW for loss of an unborn baby.)
“A wolf only makes a good pet if it thinks it’s a dog” SHUDDER
Everything about Sarah Corvis. She did her own bionic eye herself! “I’m cutting away all the parts of me that are weak.” GOALS.
One of Sarah’s main concerns being that she can now smoke with not harm to her body #priorities
“Not that I can feel anything, but I can intellectually imagine that that feels pretty dramatic” – that line looks kinda clunky written down, but the way Katee S delivers it is pure gold.
Anthony’s creepy purring manipulation of Sarah to get her to get close to Jaime.
