The bionic woman: Machine or human?

Abstract

The bionic woman character Jaime Sommers, portrayed by actress Lind-say Wagner, first appeared as a female counterpart for bionic man Steve Austin in a 1975 two-part episode of The Six Million Dollar Man, a series based on the Martin Caidin novel Cyborg published in 1972. In The Six Million Dollar Man crossover “The Bionic Woman," Air Force colonel Steve Austin’s love, Jaime Sommers, suffers a life-threatening skydiving accident. Steve, played by Lee Majors, begs his boss for the government agency OSI (Office of Scientific Intelligence) to authorize a surgery for Jaime that would replace her damaged body parts with bionic versions and save her life, much as the agency had done when he suffered a near-fatal airplane crash. Although Jaime supposedly dies at the end of the two-part episode, the female character proved so popular that she was brought back to life in her own spin-off: The Bionic Woman (1976-78). Although the remarkable technology of bionics (a merge of biology and electronics) saves Jaime’s life, it also forces her to come to grips with exactly whom, or what, she has become. As she questions her own humanity, she must also face objectification by the government agency that funds her expensive surgeries and the treatment for the severe health issues caused by her bionic transformation. Ultimately, Jaime must find and assert her own identity by discovering what the blurring of technology and humanity she experiences means to her. In doing so, Jaime’s journey of self-discovery shows that technology merged with biology in a human being creates new challenges but also new possibilities for the user.