WARNING: This posting contains spoilers!

The new Bionic Woman series (with Michelle Ryan in the lead role) was recently leaked onto the Net so I, ahem, got to see it probably at least 6 months before the UK airs it. It got me thinking that really this show is just far too long coming to make much of an impact nowadays.

I recently bought the first season of the original "The Bionic Woman" on DVD (only 6 pounds!) because I loved that 70's show. OK, it wasn't groundbreaking in the way "The Six Million Dollar Man" was (it's just a female spin-off), but the fact that a woman took on the lead role of a major 1970's US TV series - and in a strong role at that - was something to shout about back then.

Between the old and new series, we've had a constant stream of equally strong female "kick-ass" leading roles - "Buffy The Vampire Slayer", "Dark Angel" and "Alias" perhaps being the three most obvious - so some of the original's impact has been lessened some 30 years on.

So how did the first episode of Bionic Woman fare? "So-so" is probably my initial verdict - they crammed in too much into the first episode in my opinion. I'm actually quite pleased that the stroppy deaf sister of Jaime is being recast - hopefully she'll be less stroppy which annoyed me (she'll not be deaf, though that wasn't annoying). Spoliers coming....

Jaime is now the *2nd* bionic woman (first one is another female kick-ass refugee: Katie Sackhoff...ironically the female version of Starbuck in the excellent Battlestar Galactica remake), she sleeps with her boyfriend only minutes after recovering from her bionic implants (Lindsay Wagner was *never* in bed with a lover as far as I can remember!), nothing happens with her bionic ear in the entire episode and her bionic eye is way too much like Arnie's visual display in Terminator 2.

Plus points include some quite good action sequences - though having a hand-to-hand fight with Katie Sackhoff in the very first episode was surely far too early in the season? - and daring to show Jaime running at full speed (though it was in a forest and she was strangely warped by CGI meddling, don't ask me!), which is something the original bionic shows hardly ever did. I miss the classic da-da-da-da-da bionic sound effects from the old shows though - it's all completely silent this time (and no slow motion either, which was a cheap effect anyway).

I guess it'll all boil down to the writing - Battlestar Galactica showed that if you get decent scripts, you can make "seriously good sci-fi", even when the original was quite cartoonish (hey, I bought the original series on DVD!). Time will tell if "Bionic Woman" can pull off the same trick or not - I'm not so convinced about it myself. At least Michelle got to act a bit more than than her current stint in BBC 1's "Jekyll", but at this point, I still prefer Lindsay Wagner's version of the character...