Carla Peterson
From The Bionic Wiki
| Played by Maggie Sullivan | ||
|---|---|---|
| ||
| Carla Peterson | ||
| Job/Title | Nurse, bionics team member | |
| Appearances | ||
| SMDM | The Seven Million Dollar Man The Bionic Criminal | |
| BW | none | |
| Reunion | none | |
Carla Peterson was the head nurse working for Rudy Wells in the OSI's bionics program. She fell in love with Barney Hiller, and was temporarily dismissed from the OSI when she gave Hiller tapes of a routine psychological evaluation of Steve Austin. She had hoped that by showing Hiller proof that a man could become normally adjusted following bionic replacement surgery, that he, too, would be able to make the transition. She was re-employed by the OSI when Austin pressed Oscar Goldman to re-instate her. She later married Hiller.
[edit] Deconstructed
- Rudy Wells says that Steve was "playing patty cake" with Carla following his bionic replacement surgery, implying that she is meant to be the same nurse that cared for Steve following his accident in the original telemovie. In fact, the plot of "The Seven Million Dollar Man" rather depends on the audience believing that Steve and she have a relationship that dates back to Rudy's original bionic replacement procedure. However, the nurse in that movie, and its re-edited episode, "The Moon and the Desert", is Jean Manners, played by Barbara Anderson.
- The syndicated version of The Solid Gold Kidnapping attempts to redress the issue by injecting Peterson into the earlier story. Though not present in the original telemovie, Maggie Sullivan is seen in the episodic version of "Kidnapping", through the integration of material from "Seven Million". Thus, if one counts the episodic, and not the film, version of "Kidnapping" as canon, it's just possible to believe that Peterson was present for some of the early psychological evaluations of Steve. Nevertheless, Steve's description of Carla being there for "all those days and nights that I spent staring up at the hospital ceiling" is still difficult to reconcile against known facts — syndicated or otherwise. One possibility is that, for reasons left unrevealed, Jean Manners changed her name to Carla Peterson (not an impossible consideration for someone working for a top-secret organization).
