The Salt Lake Tribune suggest that instead of being “better, faster, stronger”, they made the show ”stiffer, weaker and more deadly dull”.

SignonSanDiego reckon that the show has potential but ultimately needs some work.

Slate predicts that Sarah Corvus will be this years best TV villain:

So, she’s needy, which is understandable and even a bit attractive. She’s got vulnerability to go with her invincibility and, as we see later, a stiletto-sharp wit to go with the blunt instruments of her bare hands. In the episode’s juiciest scene, Sarah, her mouth as red as a stop sign and almost as wide, slinks into Jaime’s bar to size up the new girl. The two are warmly flirting when Jaime’s zillion-dollar hearing and vision kick in for the first time—a nauseating experience. The good bionic woman dashes into the ladies’ room to be sick, and the bad one follows. At the sink, Jaime splashes her face with water, and Sarah, in a gesture more exciting than her later karate chops and roundhouse kicks, pulls the poor girl’s hair back from the washbasin with exquisite tenderness. Sarah Corvus has arrived to haunt and to taunt, to give our plucky heroine a sinister contrast that the show can’t do without.

Alternet have a fantastic article on Bionic Woman, Feminism and Fembots. Here’s a snippet:

The original Bionic Woman premiered on ABC in 1976, one year after The Stepford Wives. America was in the midst of the Equal Rights Amendment debate, and networks contributed to the national reconsideration of women’s roles with a wave of prime time superheroines like Wonder Woman and Charlie’s Angels. Jaime Sommers was first played by Lindsay Wagner as a two-episode love interest in The Six Million Dollar Man. Her portrayal of a professional tennis player — Billie Jean King had won her Battle of the Sexes a few years prior — bionically rebuilt after a skydiving accident proved so popular she was resurrected from her written death and given a spinoff.

Seen today, the original Bionic Woman’spolitics are dwarfed by the cartoon sound effects and campy action scenes. Sommers’ sex appeal is unsubtle. With her feathered hair and flirty laugh, she seems as feminist as a short-shorted Jessica Simpson singing, “These Boots Are Made for Walking.” Some theorists have suggested this was intentional, that the hypersexuality of these uber-chicks made women’s social progress cartoonish and thus culturally digestible. Others have argued that, as comic book porn-esque as they were, characters like Bionic Womanpaved the way not only for the slew of Xenas and Buffys and Tomb Raiders of recent years, but also for the more realistic and culturally complicated Cagneys, Laceys and Murphy Browns of prime time television.

The new Bionic Woman, then, certainly looks like progress. Gone is the Wagner blond. In is Ryan’s brooding brunette. The lighting is dark and a category 2 hurricane seems to be in some kind of holding pattern over the set. One of the first shots has her slamming a man into a window. In another scene, a little girl in the back seat of a car tells her mom about a running woman outpacing them in the woods: “I just thought it was cool that a girl could do that.” Later, we see the young newly bionic bartender unintimidated by her new spy boss: “If we do this, whatever it is ‘this’ is, we do it on my terms.”

I find the following particularly interesting when considering Sarah Corvus’ desire to strip herself of her weak (human) parts:

Donna Haraway, academic and author of The Cyborg Manifestohas long argued that rather than subjugating women, technology can be their liberator. We no longer live in a society or economy dictated by biological discrepancies. She suggests machines and cybertechnology allow us to dismantle “natural” limitations and reconstruct our bodies and identity to our liking.

Read the rest of this article here.