Forgotten Heroes: Sandra Bullock as The Bionic Woman

By Owen Quinn author of The Time Warriors and Zombie Blues

Photos copyright Universal

I’m betting you all think that the ladies that have played the Bionic Woman consists of Lindsey Wagner and EastEnder’s Zoe Slater herself, Michelle Ryan. But did you know that there was another Bionic Woman in the eighties that lasted one episode and went on to movie super stardom?

And if things had gone a little differently then there would have been a brand new Bionic Woman series complete with several of the old cast returning. And the new Bionic Woman’s name would have been Kate Mason played by the one and only Sandra Bullock.

As a premise this wasn’t bad and given it was the eighties and Star Trek had successfully rebooted, why not the bionic family?

The old crew were back like it was a crossover episode from the old days. Jaime was the one to prepare the wheelchair-bound Kate for the surgery. Steve Austin was there as was Oscar Goldman and Rudy Wells, the genius behind the invention of bionics. but sadly there was no Max the bionic dog but Lee Majors real life son as Jim Castillian. Of course nobody ever remarked how much Jim and Steve looked alike. Anything to tell us Steve? That’s okay because Jim doesn’t look like you when he stands beside you or talk like you at all….Thank God Jeremy Kyle is no longer running his show.

Added to the cast was Jim Goldman (Oscar’s nephew) played by V’s and Star Trek Voyager’s Jeff Yagher, Kate’s love interest.

Kate’s bionics were very different from Steve and Jaime’s. She was not an amputee and thanks to the constant evolution of technology, these bionics were implants placed into the paralysed muscles through the body. Jaime, now a therapist, has been guiding Kate every step of the way. We get to see family home movies showing Kate and her family in Kate’s first scene.

Now remember that this was not only Sandra Bulloch’s very first television appearance but her first leading role. Now the writing is okay for the time but writers then seemed to think it was important to show disabled as hating themselves and in a constant cloud of dejection. This was so the audience would identify with Kate on an emotional level because better her than them, right?

Jaime finds her siting in the dark watching these movies and refers to herself as the gimp. Now that would come to mean something else in years to come so best we skip that. But it does show that Kate sees herself as a burden. Kate has a congenital disease and muscular degeneration and has been in a wheelchair since she was six years old. She is terrified that she will not be the same person if the bionics work so Jaime tells her what happened to her.

I have to say I quite like the new theme music and titles, updated as it could be for the eighties.

Her bionics work thanks to a mini-computer in her brain stem which controls all the others throughout her body. We discover that Jim Goldman is in love with Kate long before she became the new bionic woman. He even persuades her to let him go undercover with her as her trainer. But he has a rival in the form of OSI agent Alan Devlin, who is very protective of Kate.

My question would be how is she going top explain this to her friends and family? Well, her family would have been told which was also explored in the Six Million Dollar Man two part episode, The Bionic Boy to great effect.

Kate is plunged into her first mission amid a background of Oscar going off the rails, a traitor at the OS, another bad guy bionic person on the loose and an international threat to the Unity Games. Kate joins the track team but must control her speed for fear of her cover being blown. It is also very sexualised as her costume is skimpy to say the least much in the way Wonder Woman’s was.

You can see through her performance that those little Sandra traits we will come to the fore when she goes global starting with Speed. She does have an arc, no longer seeing herself as the gimp when she beats the bad guys. Kate learns that not everyone around her is as they seem when Alan is revealed to be not only the traitor but bionic as well. Not only that he is super bionic meaning Rudy’s work has already been taken and expanded on. Kate is not invulnerable as their enemies have developed a bionic disruptor which if fired will drop her on the spot as it will attack her brain implant controlling her body. Her limbs are as invulnerable as Jaime and Steve but the bionic moves have had a terrible update.

While Jaime and Steve still have the old go-slow effects with the classic sound effects, Kate and Alan blur from view in a kind of rainbow effect and whooshing sound effects which don’t do it for me. You want to see our bionic heroes in full flow not obscured behind a rainbow.

I remember this coming out on video and hoping there would be a full series as they really try to honour the originals to their fullest and bring them up to date in a decent manner. But it is so eighties in his presentation with its synthesizer soundtrack mixed with hard rock. But the bionic Showdown does what it set out to do. It presents a potential new Bionic Woman ready for the new era and with Kate Mason they certainly deliver. Sandra is a great actor, versatile and the audience falls in love with her. But I for one would love to have seen Kate Mason in full bionic flow.