Atomic-powered jetpacks and a tribal burial ground feature in The Bionic Woman episode 10, with Jaime again entangled in homegrown troubles.
Creator: Kenneth Johnson
Genre: Adventure, Superhero
Number of seasons: 3
Episode Release Date: April 14, 1976
Where to watch: on digital & VOD
The Bionic Woman episode 10 (“Canyon of Death”) opens with a young, native American lad called Paco (Guillermo San Juan) visiting a tribal burial ground, to pay respects to his grandfather. And in the background is a silver fellow without a face, wearing a jetpack. A silver fellow who looks much like how you might expect a ‘70s television silver fellow to look, like the costume’s been put together with tin foil and masking tape.
A bit Super Sentai, a bit Star Trek. You know what I’m on about. Unaware of this silver fellow, however, Paco then goes on to the nearby Ventura Air Force Base, where Jaime Sommers (Lindsay Wagner) is a teacher, for, as it turns out, he is today starting in her class.
Reliably making an entrance, Oscar (Richard Anderson) soon arrives thereafter in a ridiculously big plane. That Oscar Goldman. What’s he like? Between this show and The Six Million Dollar Man (1974) he must be one of the busiest, best-travelled spymasters the world of fiction has ever known. You turn the channel on a Sunday afternoon and a James Bond is playing, what’s M up to? Oh, just sitting in a fancy room in London somewhere. Not Oscar Goldman.
This time, Oscar’s all gassed up about giving soldiers jetpacks. Atomic-powered jetpacks that come fit with a silver jumpsuit and a shiny helmet (is that what that was?). And you won’t believe this, but some of the prototypes are already missing. Now, you wouldn’t want atomic-powered jetpacks slipping into the wrong hands, would you? Oscar asks Jaime to stick around, provide some extra security for the upcoming jetpack demo, and admits he’s worried that some baddies have got their hands on the missing practice suits. Perhaps the man’s a psychic.
All of this being, however, not really the main focus of The Bionic Woman episode 10, for that instead falls on the shoulders of dear Paco. It starts off when we find out that the tribal burial ground is an area of the air base forbidden to civilians, reserved for military training, and Paco declares it his right to visit there.
You might think the rights of native Americans as something bigger than The Bionic Woman ought to tackle, but this thread runs throughout episode 10, and, heck, media representations can’t all be Killers of the Flower Moon, you know – the fifty years spanning this and that being a little something to demonstrate the period in which movies and television have been trying to familiarise a wider audience with the topic. And if “Canyon of Death” can be cited even briefly in the history of native American representation, the telly enthusiast in me reckons that’s a pretty good use of the format.
And episode 10 continues to raise points on the subject throughout, with a primary one concerning a book that Paco has been regularly referring to in his cultural auto-didactism, revealed to be a false history written by a white New Yorker. A call-out that, if the book wasn’t only a prop, I think would have deserved some real praise.
Still, I don’t know if undermining Paco’s conceptions about what it means to be ‘a real Indian’ for the sake of the “ah, the kid’s just searching for an identity”-plotline is particularly encouraging, and I don’t know if portraying Paco as trying to rediscover his ancestor’s culture was intended as a good example, but it does feel to me that this week’s episode writer (Stephen Kandel, himself a white New Yorker, just so you know) is doing his best to at least humanise Paco – notable, in a show populated with one-dimensional characters.
Plus, as an uneducated Brit, although it’s very easy for me to blame the conservative school curriculum for all I don’t know about history and culture, it’s the ‘little things’, like The Bionic Woman episode 10, that go some way to filling in my blanks and encouraging further reading – something the show was perhaps trying to achieve with its audience way back in ‘76.
However, Paco inevitably runs into trouble with the jetpack thieves, then witnesses Jaime’s bionic powers when she saves them from an incited landslide meant to kill them both, and in that, “Canyon of Death” remains an episode from the same old telly show. They might be temporarily utilising the formula to highlight pressing issues, and good on them, but the formula goes unchanged all the same. If a cooking show records an episode in a warzone it’s still a cooking show, and The Bionic Woman might suddenly be trying to educate its audience here, but it’s still The Bionic Woman.
There’s also the fact that back in episode 4, when the show attempted something similar with girls playing baseball, my familiarity with female sports meant I knew it was doing a pretty shoddy job. And so it’s possible the show is doing a pretty shoddy job here too, only this time I’m not familiar enough to know it. I’m sure any good Californian could set me right on all of that, but I don’t even know anyone from Manchester, yet alone anyone from the Wild West.
Episode 10 of The Bionic Woman is now available to watch on digital and on demand.
