Bionic Woman revisited: the actual pilot

Now that I've seen the actual pilot of Bionic Woman, I can compare it to the early cut I reviewed last month and offer some final-er thoughts on it.

So. Like I said, the deaf sister originally played by Ann from Arrested Development was 86'ed in favor of the fresh-faced, flyover-state-friendly, could-easily-be-in-High-School-Musical Lucy Hale, who with her non-deafness and generic movie kid looks imbues the character with about 42 percent of the original pathos. We still get introduced to her as she's blasting rock music in the early morning, but when not-yet-bionic Jamie comes in to turn it down, instead of the original dripping-with-sad-irony line "Afraid I'll go deaf?", she just says something like "Bloody well right I'm playing loud music! What of it?", or perhaps a sentence that sounds less like a British teenager circa 1962. The point being: sister character = no longer interesting... for the time being, anyway. Maybe later in the season she'll reveal an even more shocking impediment, like a lack of proper thumb dexterity that greatly reduces her texting speed.

Other changes. The Jamie-waking-up-in-the-hospital-bed scene is half as good now, since they completely neutered the surprise shot of her not-yet-finished bionic legs. In the rough cut they were pretty freaky looking, all neon-y and mechanical, but now they basically look like normal legs except a little more translucent than yours or mine. Doesn't quite make sense that she still screams the same amount when she sees them.

They even screwed the babysitter scene! There's this part where Jamie has to go away and leave her sister with a babysitter, and in the rough cut the babysitter was this gruff Russian lady who got the best line in the entire show: "I am not babysitter. Think of me as prison guard. (Pause) I brought Parcheesi." But no, now when the sister-care help shows up it's in the form of two of Jamie's friends, both of whom looked like they just ducked out of line at Ritual. What a gyp.

And let's talk about the music. In the rough cut, it was good. On air, it sucked. It would have been better if they'd just had an announcer come on the soundtrack with a recorded message about which demographics the network was hoping to snag. "Breathe Me"? During a roof-jumping scene? To quote Ari Gold, "Really? REALLY?!"

Anyhoo, the net result is that I'm much more sure that this is definitively not a good pilot, and I also have even less faith that the show will be good in the long term. I still reserve the right to have my mind changed by future episodes, but I don't think that's likely.