SYNOPSIS
The Bionic Woman
was one of a wave of comic-book-style superheroes brought to TV in the wake of
the enormous success of
The Six Million Dollar Man.
The Bionic Woman
was in fact a spin-off from, and closely linked to, that program.
Jaime
Sommers was originally introduced on The Six Million Dollar Man
as Steve Austin's one-time fiancée. The couple had drifted apart when Steve
became an astronaut, while Jaime went to college and then became a successful tennis
pro. Then Jaime was nearly killed in a sky-diving accident, and the doctors who
had reconstructed Steve bionically after his accident decided to try again with Jaime.
Steve and Jaime renewed their romance, but too late it seemed, for when the
four-part story ended in early 1975 Jamie was in a coma and apparently near
death.
Unbeknownst to Steve, Jaime
recovered and began a new life as a schoolteacher on an army base near
her hometown of Ojai, California. Her bionic operation had given her superhuman
abilities - two legs for
great speed, a right arm of great strength, and an ear for acute, long-distance hearing.
Grateful for having been saved, she, like Steve, undertook dangerous underground missions
for the government's Office of Scientific Information (OSI), fighting
international spies, smugglers, kidnappers, and an occasional extraterrestrial
being. Among her disguises were those of a nun, a roller-derby queen, and a lady
wrestler.
When
Steve Austin learned of all this he rushed to her, but Jaime's problems had left
her with
a partial memory loss, and she had forgotten her love for Steve. So for the time
being there was no bionic marriage. They sometimes
were seen jointly on missions, however, and Jaime for a time lived in an apartment over the
coach house at the farm of Steve's mother and stepfather, the Elgins, in Ojai.
Other
regulars in the cast were Oscar Goldman, Jaime's supervisor at OSI, and Dr.
Rudy Wells, who had devised the bionic operations, both of whom also appeared
on The Six Million Dollar Man. Peggy Callahan
(played by Jennifer Darling) was seen occasionally
as Oscar's secretary on both series.
When
The Bionic Woman
moved to NBC another regular character was
added to the cast in the person of Max, the bionic dog, a German Shepherd that became Jaime's loyal
pet. Toward the end of that NBC season, with the popularity of science fiction
movies on theater screens, more and more episodes of
The Bionic Woman
found Jaime encountering visitors from other planets.
The series was based on the
novel Cyborg, by Martin Caidin.
