The Bionic Woman Classic Season 2 Episode 16

When this episode aired I was a nine-year-old boy playing stick hockey and kick the can with the kids down the street. I was a bad player, since I've had a visual handicap since birth, so five minutes before my favorite show came on, I always bugged out. My buds teased me mercilessly about being in love with a girl on TV, but I didn't care, and this episode is the perfect example of why. Its issues are still timely, both the big (the nuclear arms race) and the little (boys and our obsession with winning at any cost, as against girls' more caring, relationship-oriented stance toward life. Its plotting manages both realism and idealism as Jamie is interrupted cooking along with their hilarious take-off on Julia Child, and has to save the world from a mad scientist for whom she alone never wavers in her tenderness and respect. Twenty-nine years after this episode left its inspiring mark on my soul, Lindsay returned as the spokesperson for the Sleep Number bed, rekindling the classic images of Jamie gently sitting Elijah down as his heart gives out, the ALEX 7000 trying to kill her every five minutes, and of course the ominious "404 GO code" staying up on the bomber's screen until Jamie does ALEX in, saving the world from a doomsday only a computer would think was an appropriate way to show he'd won. It's largely this BW episode with its moral told in such fun, soft terms which has shaped my own approach to life and others. If I had to pick a fictional role model, I'd pick Jamie without a second thought even though she's the "wrong" gender exactly because Lindsay and crew did such a superb job of imagining a senario in which someone who meant well (Dr. Cooper) could inadvertently visit such a horror on the entire world, and more importantly, how a caring, down-to-earth woman who just happened to have the exact combination of super powers needed to save the world could redeem him -- and us -- through her brave and decisive action. If you see no other Bionic Woman episode, watch this one. A++