Plastic Appendages

Last night was a chance to catch the second episodes of NBC's The Bionic Woman and Life.

I was willing to give Bionic Woman the benefit of the doubt and thought my good friend the Admiral was being a little harsh in his review of the pilot episode last week.

I hoped that the second episode would improve as much of the exposition had been done with.

The following contains spoilers.

What a crock of dross.

The episode opens with the funeral of the ex-Eastender's boyfriend, which is kind of out of the blue in some ways but either a) this is a nice turn from the usual injury that is easily survived or b) a painfully uninteresting surprise to be revealed later in the series.

Jaime Sommers (Michelle Ryan) has responded by getting hammered at a bar (apparently the nanotech doesn't cure poisons) and dives on the nearest bloke that smiles on her and breaks his rib amidst some clumsy fumbling in the bathroom. The tryst is interrupted by Jonas Bledsoe (the woefully wasted and patently bored senseless Miguel Ferrer) her shadowy benefactor who explains to her what his company does.

"We're a private clandestine group dedicated to stopping rogue organisations from ending civilisation as we know it, to put it simply we save the world."

Did Miguel Ferrer read that line and think "Hmm do I play it with a rushed "Someone Shoot Me Now" glance or a "Just think about the money" sneer?

This episode strives so hard to be cool and smart and does it through so many cliches it is staggering. Anyone can write better lines than some of those perpetrated in here, and I'm including those advertising hacks who write for local second hand car dealerships.

Our Bionic Lass discovers that her supposedly dead boyfriend had a dossier on her stretching back 2 years before they met. She finds it not by use of her Bionic Bits (tm) but by noticing a loose floorboard that she'd somehow managed to always miss before, even though it is an obvious health and safety hazard and would normally have one of those bright yellow plastic signs sitting next to it.

The Bionic Cockney (c) has to go into school as her little sister has been smoking the reefer but she manages to talk her out of trouble so she can still do the talent show that week.

I thank watching Moonlight last week that I didn't black out halfway through this subplot, it girded my brain for such zombifying mediocrity.

Jaime meets up with never before seen friends so they can congratulate themselves on being successful and thereby making our hero question whether she should be doing more with her life.

Jaime tries to figure out where she's going with her life by reading a self-help book in a bookstore and it just so happens bigot-of-the-month Isaiah Washington arrives and offers such philosophical gems as:

"Whatever doesn't kill you, makes you stronger," and "Maybe you just need to find out uh what Jaime Sommers has to offer the world, that's all."

Dr. Phil take notes as this fellow is out to save the world, one badly conceived character at a time. As he walked into shot I thought about how he got another job since his escapades in Grey's Anatomy and also if we weren't intentionally supposed to automatically assume we would be seeing him as part of the shadowy organisation very quickly. They couldn't have seriously thought this was a set up to a twist could they?

Jaime walks out of a coffee house and spots a woman about to jump off a roof next door and saves her. That may seem like a random event mainly due to it being ridiculous.

The main plot is introduced after an apparent biological weapon has been used in a small town, killing a number of people and Manly Woman (played by Molly Price who surprisingly wasn't in Spandau Ballet) thinks she should investigate as it may be a test run for something bigger.

The Bookstore Homophobe shockingly turns out to be working for Jaime's new company as she signs up to save the world and heads out with Manly Woman (a butch Eddie Izzard) to solve the mystery.

Thanks to the power of her bionic ear, Jaime hears a survivor noone found for some unexplained reason and who is immune to the toxin for another unexplained reason and is important for another unexplained reason. She does however explain that it was odd that a gas truck spent all morning driving around town in a circle. Elementary my dear Watson!

Then the evil mercenaries appear in the middle of their own biological hotzone for some other unexplained reason except that it is time for our pasty-faced heroine to bionically kick some arse!

She goes toe to toe with a Blackwater reject and basically gets smacked around and squeals until she lands a bionic right hand on his chin. And then he gets back up, which kind of undermines her status as a devastating powerhouse. Fortunately the fight is therefore prolongued so a stunt double can round house kick a tin of paint into the mercenary's head.

They then run away (without the diabolical special effect) and Bigot's Eye for the Queer Guy turns up all dressed in black with some friends (who wear balaclavas so they can deny working with Isiaiah Washington) and saves Manly Woman and Bionic Woman.

It turns out Manly Woman was right and this is just a test run (because you only really know if a lethal airborn toxin works for sure when it has been tried in a suburb) and the bad guys want to ship over 20 trucks to cities across the country that night.

Shipping them at the same time as the test run to make it more difficult to stop them would have just used up too many quarters on toll roads. Or something.

Miguel Ferrer turns up dressed in black and yawning like he is wearing pajamas with other ninja soldiers who then stop the bad guys with one flashbang and stern voices.

Jaime stands around pondering her new life while doing nothing (maybe her batteries were low) but is sure she has done the right thing and goes off to see her equally pale sister at the talent contest where warm smiles and a sudden realisation that I had lost an hour of my life occur.

Why on this increasingly polluted Earth would you get past the pilot episode and then spend most of the next episode adding more exposition? Did blurry running really cost that much to do in the pilot?

Plot twists are signposted with the cunning subtlety of a nuclear explosion, actors get to sound like they want their Mommy now when delivering utterly shocking dialogue and Michelle Ryan might be getting a hankering for jellied eels about now.

A scrotum-shrivellingly bad episode.

But worry not, Life is here and after getting the exposition-fest over in the pilot episode we get to see Damian Lewis acting up a storm and the best procedural police drama in years.

Or we get to see Damian Lewis hoping the writing gets as good as the pitch meeting and yet another bloody Scooby Doo mystery.

A bride is murdered on her wedding day, the groom is outside the hotel near the pool drinking tequila and mumbling incoherently covered in blood.

So I guess it'll be the deputy from Veronica Mars who walks in and out of shot in the first 10 minutes who murdered the bride for very little reason then.

50 minutes of supposed misdirection later and Old Man Guy From Veronica Mars pulls off his mask and states "I would've gotten away with it too if it wasn't for you pesky-ginger-Zen-Detective-types".

Life is an example of a good idea that falls apart when written by lazy hacks who stick to regurgitated scripts while praying to whatever God despises them that the audience is too stupid to notice.

Then I slept fitfully and had nightmares about Lost being this bad when it returns.

On the bright side Smallville is on tonight and Moonlight tomorrow.

I swear it is all a conspiracy to make Heroes seem watchable.