I’m late in learning this, but a story posted last month on zap2it.com reported that actress Mae Whitman has been jettisoned from the cast after originating the role of Becca Sommers, the Bionic Woman’s younger sister. For those curious, Whitman can be spotted portraying the sister as deaf and more than a little bit resentful in NBC’s Extended Preview of the unaired pilot episode — which can be seen here.

The upcoming show has undergone some extensive changes in anticipation of its fall premiere that necessitated the casting change, as executive producer Jason Smilovic explains:

Jaime was originally working in a lab. She was going to be assigned to these chimpanzees . . . And we were looking for a — an organic way for her to be talking to the chimpanzees in sign language.

And so the role of Jaime’s sister now rests with Lucy Hale (top left), who performed a previous kid sister role on How I Met Your Mother last season.

No longer deaf, Hale’s character, who I suspect is taking career advice from Michael Bay films about giant robots, now aspires to be (wait for it) a computer hacker. I’m not sure what this means for the Bionic Woman series, but I’m guessing the younger Sommers will no doubt prove useful anytime the plot requires her big sis to crack through some ultra-secret government agency’s thoroughly impenetrable, ludicrously protected firewall.

This post was authored by Jim Titus, a man worth significantly less than Six Million Dollars