Adrianne Palicki as Wonder Woman. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)As Wonder Woman/Diana Themyscira/Diana Prince, Adrianne Palicki was a revelation. I was already a big fan of hers from Friday Night Lights but here she takes center stage and pulls off what is an extremely difficult role. She’s tough, she’s charming, she’s sexy, she’s vulnerable, and she’s got a little bit of an angry edge to her when she’s Wonder Woman that adds just a dash of exciting unpredictability. This could have been a star making turn for Padlicki who certainly deserves one.
The Wonder Woman on this show is a badass who is not above choking dudes with her lasso (her favorite move) or throwing a piece of pipe through your throat if you won’t stop shooting at her. For a weekly television show, the action scenes were fairly well executed and at times quite thrilling. The whole final sequence where she storms Veronica Cale’s compound and decimates her ‘roided out super-soldier army is really fun to watch.
The first time we see Wonder Woman she is wearing the version of the costume that we’ve seen with the blue pants. The biggest surprise in the entire pilot? When she shows up to take on Veronica Cale’s goons for the final big action scene, she’s in the classic pants-less comic book costume. That costume only appeared briefly in the script where it hung in the back of her closet. There is a mention of a designer coming in to discuss a new costume so it would appear that this Wonder Woman has different costumes for different occasions. Whichever costume she's wearing they all really work on-screen.
A lot of time was spent in the script on Steve Trevor and the effect that their break-up had on Diana. That’s toned way, way down in the pilot. In fact, the famous sequence where she has a sleepover with her best friend and eats ice cream and talks about their breakup and then cries because she misses Steve is nowhere to be found. Yes, there are a few flashbacks to their break-up, and yes, Diana misses Steve, and yes, it has affected her, but how she deals with it is handled in a much more realistic way. Diana is obviously lonely and does not have any kind of personal life and that was clearly being set up as a subplot to run through the series.
The streamlining of the script really worked in the pilot’s favor. The story moved much quicker than it read. For example, in the script, Diana spent a long sequence testifying before the United States Congress about her vigilante activities, which allowed for long and droning speechifying on both sides. That would have been really boring on screen. In the pilot, that sequence is swapped out for a scene in which she has dinner with one sleazy congressman. The same information about the government being uneasy with Wonder Woman’s activities was conveyed in a much quicker, and more compelling, way.
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