The Bionic Woman

The Bionic Woman was a television series which spun off from The Six Million Dollar Man. It starred Lindsay Wagner as Jaime Sommers, a tennis professional who was nearly killed in a sky diving accident, and was rebuilt by Oscar Goldman (Richard Anderson) and Dr. Rudy Wells (Martin E. Brooks), who had also rebuilt The Six Million Dollar Man. As the result of her surgical implantation, Jaime Sommers had amplified hearing, a greatly strengthened right arm, and enhanced legs, enabling her to run faster than a speeding car.

The series ran on the American Broadcasting Company from 1976 to 1977 and on NBC from 1977 to 1978.

Jaime first appears in a two-part episode of The Six Million Dollar Man in 1975 entitled "The Bionic Woman." In this episode, Austin travels to his old hometown of Ojai, California to visit with his mother and step-father and take a vacation from his work. During his visit, he rekindles his old relationship with Jaime Sommers, now one of America's top tennis players. Their relationship progresses rapidly to the point where Austin proposes marriage.

During an outing, Steve and Jaime take part in some skydiving. Jaime's parachute malfunctions and she plummets through a clump of trees and hits the ground, suffering traumatic injuries to her legs, right arm, and head. Austin makes an emotional plea to his boss, Oscar Goldman, even going so far as to commit Jaime to become an OSI operative. Goldman agrees to assign Dr. Rudy Wells and the bionics team to rebuild her.

Jaime's body is reconstructed with parts similar to Austin's, but smaller. The actual cost of rebuilding her is not revealed but is said to be less than the $6 million it cost to rebuild Austin. (The German dub of the show changes this - the show is called The 7 Million Dollar Woman, breaking down to $2 million for each leg and her arm, and the ear at $1 million). Jaime is given two bionic legs and her right arm is also replaced. In addition, her right ear is augmented by a bionic device that gives her the ability to hear a whisper a mile away. Jaime recovers well from her operation and even threatens to upstage Steve in some areas. Over Austin's initial objections, Jaime agrees to go on a mission for Oscar Goldman. During the mission, her bionics malfunction and she begins experiencing mental instability and blinding headaches.

Dr. Wells determines that Jaime's body is rejecting her bionic implants, a massive cerebral clot apparently causing her headaches and malfunctions. Soon after, she goes berserk and crashes her way out of the hospital. Steve takes pursuit and eventually catches up with her, where she collapses in his arms. Soon after, Jaime appears to die on the operating table, her body shutting down. The downbeat episode ends with Austin weeping at her memory.

The character was so popular that ABC asked the writers to find a way to bring her back. In the first episode of the next season it is revealed that Jaime hadn't died after all, although Steve Austin was not informed of this fact. He discovers it when he is hospitalized at Dr. Wells' bionic clinic after a mission goes bad and he suffers severe damage to his bionic legs; he sees Jaime as he is being rolled into the operating room for repair, just before slipping into a coma.

As Austin later learns, Wells' assistant, Dr. Michael Marcetti, had urged Rudy to try his newly developed cryogenic techniques to keep Jaime in suspended animation until the cerebral clot could be safely removed, after which she was successfully revived.

A side-effect of the procedure causes Jaime to develop amnesia and forget her relationship with Austin; any attempt to make her remember her life with Steve causes her headaches and pain. Steve reluctantly lets her go on to live her own life, as an agent for the OSI.

Jaime, now retired as a tennis player, takes a job as a schoolteacher in Ojai. She lives in a converted farmhouse rented from Austin's mother and stepfather, who were aware of her and Steve's bionic nature and their double lives as secret agents. In later episodes, Jaime adopts Maximillion, a german shepherd that had been given bionic legs and jaw. He was an experiment to see if trained animals could benefit from bionics. She also worked frequently with Austin on missions and the two reestablished their friendship, although no romance resulted initially.

Her most noted enemies were the Fembots, a line of powerful androids that Jaime fought twice in the series. Arguably her most vital mission was the thwarting of an insane billionaire's plan to destroy the Earth using a doomsday device. Jamie's mission's frequently involved undercover work in which she takes on a number of roles. In the past she has been a nun, a police officer, a college student, an air-steward and most memorably a professional wrestler.

As with many spy films at the time, Jamie was freqently kidnapped (more often than not with the use of chloroform or a drugged drink) and placed in dangerous situation in which she would need her bionic abilities to escape. Typically the unconsious agent would be bound or handcuffed to a bomb which she could escape with ease once she woke up. However on one interesting occassion, she was handcuffed to her friend so she could not use her bionic strength to escape as this would pull the friend's hand off.

While many of the episodes dealt with somewhat mundane double agents and technology thefts, several episode veered from the extraordainary to the down right strange. For example Jamie, dealt with a villain who operates a hair salon using a "truth serum" shampoo to extract information from OSI agents.

Jaime's bionic abilities were depicted as being similar to Austin's. She could run in excess of 60 mph, could bend steel bars with her right arm and could jump great heights with her new legs. In one episode, "Kill Oscar" (Part 1), we see illustrated the limits of her abilities. After jumping out of a particularly tall building to escape the Fembots, Jaime's legs explode upon impact when her legs' shock absorption function is overwhelmed. Instead of an artificial eye, her right ear is an extremely sensitive implant that can detect most sounds regardless of volume or frequency. As it is encased in her body, it is also typically not subject to the negative effects extreme cold has on bionic implants.

In later years, the love between Jaime and Steve rekindled and this was further explored in three made-for-TV reunion movies in the late 1980s and early 1990s (see the article for The Six Million Dollar Man for more information).

In the first reunion, The Return of the Six Million Dollar Man and the Bionic Woman, Jaime Sommers and Steve Austin are reunited after nearly ten years of living separate lives. Jaime's memory is now fully restored and she tries to reconcile her feelings for Steve.

In the final reunion film, Bionic Ever After?, a computer virus corrupts Jaime's bionic systems. Dr. Wells informs Steve that "she may never be bionic again," which suits Steve just fine only in that he wants her alive above all else. She undergoes a major upgrade, which not only increases the power of her bionics but gives her night vision. Finally, after so many years of waiting around, the bionic couple say their I Do's.