Dollhouse finale

You have to be cynical about the chances of a show like this, so I imagine that this was the last episode of “Dollhouse” that will ever air on TV. You have to keep this context in mind when considering the implications of the finale, and the creators’ intentions for this episode.

My lasting impression was simply that they tried to do too much in too short a time. And you can understand why. They wanted to bring the story to the kind of point you’d like to leave it at for the end of a season. The story needed two episodes to cover that distance; FOX wanted one.

It does seem unfair. While it lasted, “Dollhouse” developed enough of a world, raised enough questions and provoked enough thought that it deserved a proper ending, even after such a short run. I don’t mind the fact that the story was left completely open — they had to allow for the possibility of more “Dollhouse”, however remote it is — but I do mind the fact that whatever led up to this point in the plot was not adequately explained.

As I’ve mentioned several times before, Ballard tends to serve as the audience’s representative because he seems to be the only good guy. And at the end of this episode, now he’s working for the Dollhouse? I feel like something must have happened between him catching the hard drive with Caroline’s brain on it and him agreeing to work for the Dollhouse and all of a sudden wanting to free November instead of Echo. (This is one of the more obvious casualties of the time constraints: Sierra and November get imprinted, and then what? Sierra is never seen again and November is suddenly being freed. Buh?) And what about Echo? What made her decide to just remain a Doll? I’m sure with her multiple-personality badass powers she could have escaped.

On the plus side, if the show does return, this gives us the dynamic duo of Boyd and Ballard, who for some reason I really enjoy seeing working together. I get the feeling that neither really understands the other, but they have a quiet confidence in each other nonetheless. And now they’re both centers of considerable moral ambiguity, which is always interesting. Boyd’s motivations have never been explained (and he dodges Ballard’s question on the subject). Ballard’s moral compass has obviously shifted somewhat; my best guess is that he’s working for the Dollhouse so he can have a role in protecting the Dolls from Alpha, figuring that if he can’t bring down the Dollhouse he might as well protect its victims as best he can. But it’s far from certain that that’s what he’s really up to. Hell, as far as we know that’s what Boyd is up to as well.

Alpha is this episode’s strong point. The actor, Alan Tudyk, was brilliant, the only downside to his performance being the way it exposed Eliza Dushku’s performance as mediocre (par for the course there). He made Alpha a genuinely frightening villain. He stole the most graphically disturbing scene I’ve ever seen on a TV channel that isn’t HBO: him slashing Whiskey and then gouging out his handler’s eyes. He convincingly conveyed a person with tons of personalities struggling for control and ending up a wildly, dangerously unstable psycho. I haven’t seen an insane villain played so well since “The Dark Knight”.

Obviously, there’s an awful lot more of this story to be told. Unfortunately, it looks doubtful that any of it ever will be. So in the end, am I satisfied with what’s been told so far?

My relationship with “Dollhouse” has been strange. There were only a few episodes that actually held my attention closely. Yet I kept watching because despite everything I was curious to see what was going to happen next. Watching “Dollhouse” didn’t give me as much pure enjoyment as, say, “Chuck”, but I did want to find out more about its world every week. So in that sense, yes, it was a good show. At least it didn’t completely lose my interest like, for example, “Lie to Me”, which I stopped watching after the second episode.

“Dollhouse” was built upon a very deep premise and had the potential to be a show truly out of the ordinary. It was out of the ordinary, to be sure, but it did not astound. It really did come quite close at times to being excellent, particularly during those moments when my head hurt trying to think through the tangle of deception that the audience was allowed glimpses of, and those moments where they took the lid off the more disturbing parts of the world. The show’s premise is inherently disturbing, and to the show’s credit it never held that back. Much like the beach landing sequence in “Saving Private Ryan”, that’s the only way it could have been done right.

So what killed “Dollhouse”? I can identify several reasons. Let’s look back at my midseason review and look at the four points at the top. In my mind, the first three of them have either cleared up or the show works in spite of them (with the possible exception of the sympathetic-character one; I’ll get to that later). The fourth is still a problem, and it’s gotten to be a bigger problem as the show goes on. Eliza Dushku just does not have the kind of versatility and talent the role requires. Though most of the other Doll actors are relative unknowns, they all manage the shifting-persona thing better than Dushku does. The non-Doll actors do fairly well for the most part. Tahmoh Penikett as Ballard occasionally starts acting a little too much like Keanu Reeves at critical moments. It conflicts with the establishment of the character’s obsession with bringing down the Dollhouse, to the detriment of his own life. Olivia Williams and Fran Kranz are probably the show’s acting-quality strong points. It may be because they play largely one-dimensional characters (evil and obnoxious, respectively) but they each do so quite well.

The reason I brought up the sympathetic-character beef again was that in the later part of the season, we mostly lost him. Around mid-season, I latched onto Ballard as a guy you could root for and sympathize with, because he showed up a lot and did good things. Then he mostly disappeared from the show, appearing in occasional scenes to stick out his manly jaw as he angsted about how his girlfriend’s a Doll. Then he went into the Dollhouse, and without too much fuss started helping them eliminate their biggest threat. Well, so much for the good-guy thing, then.

I can’t say I’m heartbroken that “Dollhouse” is probably toast, but I do have to admit I watched it with some interest and would almost certainly watch it again if the planets aligned and it were renewed. But I’m not holding my breath.

Scrubs episode 817

This is just a quick post before tonight’s finale. And I swear I’m working on a “Chuck” post; it’s just really long. And sometime in the next week there’s going to be an immensely long post covering all the Scrubs that has ever been.

While this episode’s Janitor subplot didn’t involve the Janitor actually doing anything, it did give us one of the more fantastic Janitor moments of all time: when he answers “Yes?” to Jordan in that insane tone of voice with a Sun Chip in his eye. Of course there was also his rant to the kid at the beginning. “Would you be willing to change the location of your eyes…to here?” I just don’t understand how one person is capable of making this kind of stuff up on the spot. At least Neil Flynn has a bright future in improv comedy after Scrubs is over.

There was another fart joke: “Dr. Mantoots”. I don’t know why the writers’ brains have regressed to seventh-grade level, but I am certainly not one to complain. There were more JD/Turk gay jokes. Although that storyline took a turn for the serious at the end, they kept it immature by having JD’s pants around his ankles the entire time.

Gooch and her extremely oddly-proportioned head were back. So was Denise, who was great as usual. “I just wanted to do something I know I could do right, like bangin’ a dude.” No random guest stars from the past this episode, but the finale should be loaded with them, from what I hear.

This episode’s primary dramatic concerns reflect the theme of season 8 as a whole. The characters’ lives as they know them are coming to an end. Certainly the future holds tons of possibilities for all of them, but they are a story for another time, another place. “Scrubs” has followed these people from the beginning of the beginning of their careers to the end of the beginning. The rest will be interesting, but “Scrubs” has told its part, and we’re watching the characters make the transition into the next part. There could have been more of this theme in the rest of the season, but I guess they didn’t want to beat it into the ground. You can bet the finale will beat it into the ground, though. But that’s OK. It’s the series finale; that’s what it’s supposed to do.

42 total minutes of Scrubs remain. I hope they’re good ones. So far this last season has done the rest of the show justice, but it all comes down to tonight.

On California High-Speed Rail

I’m skeptical about this proposal for a high-speed rail system in California. The proposal’s cheerleaders point to the success of high-speed rail systems in other countries, most notably Japan, France and Germany. I think there are fundamental differences between the two areas that will mean a HSR system in California won’t be as successful.

The reason ultimately stems from the fact that the distributions of population in these areas are fundamentally different. Let me elaborate.

• First, it’s pretty clear that high speed trains need to travel long distances between stops in order to be effective, otherwise they never get a chance to attain high speeds, thus defeating the whole purpose. So stations need to be pretty far apart.
• Given that stations need to be far apart, it’s likely that, in order for a given person to get to a station, they’ll need to use some other form of transport, such as other public transport, or a car.
• In California, especially in the corridor where the HSR system is proposed, the population tends to be concentrated in a few dense urban centers, with some gaps filled by vast uniform areas of suburbs, and other gaps filled with unbuildable nothingness. For example, the path between San Francisco and San Jose is a big strip of relatively high-density suburb, and the path between Santa Ana (part of the Los Angeles conurbation) and San Diego is very sparsely inhabited. So how will HSR riders get to the train station? The public transport in suburban areas of California tends to be so sparse as to practically be nonexistent, leaving driving to the station as the most attractive option. Then this leaves the traffic congestion problem.
• In Japan, HSR stations are located in the ludicrously dense urban centers, which are linked by swaths of merely extremely dense “suburb”. So there are huge numbers of people who would have to travel fairly far to get to an HSR station. It works out because Japan has such fantastic auxiliary public transport. Most people live within a short distance (or at most a short bus ride) of a (conventional, low-speed) train station, and the quality of Japan’s train system is unparalleled in all the world.
• In France and Germany, HSR stations are located in the dense urban centers, which are linked by swaths of very sparsely populated countryside. Suburbs as they exist in the US mostly don’t appear in Europe. Any non-urban area that is dense enough to have a significant population and doesn’t have a HSR station is generally well enough served by the nearest city’s public transport that getting to the HSR station via public transport is viable.

Imagine me, for instance. I’m going to be living in Palo Alto pretty soon. Suppose this Californian HSR system exists, and I want to go to Irvine. How am I going to do that? First of all, here’s the map. Apparently there’s a Redwood City/Palo Alto station, so I could hopefully get there by bus (crap though the VTA bus system is). So that’s good. But then the problem arises at the other end of the trip: the only reason I’m going to Irvine is to visit somebody who lives in one of those heinous, abominable suburban subdivisions where the nearest public transport stop is in a different zip code. (This is potentially a real scenario, since I do know someone there, and he lives in a subdivision whose name is, no joke, “Meadowood”. When I think about it I throw up in my mouth a little.) He lives so far out into the suburban sprawl that there’s no hope of getting there other than by car. If this were pretty much any of the world’s other major HSR systems, I could take public transport end-to-end.

So we’ve encountered a failure of the sort that happens with far lower probability in the European systems (needing to get somewhere beyond the reach of public transport). At the beginning of that hypothetical journey, suppose the Palo Alto station doesn’t exist and the nearest HSR station is San Jose. Then we have a failure of the sort that couldn’t happen in Japan: I’d have to take public transport to the San Jose station, and the public transport would suck. The most reasonable way would be the laughable Caltrain.

In sum: much of the population area served by the HSR system has either poor or nonexistent public transport coverage, leaving driving as either the preferable or only option for getting to an HSR station. If the HSR system is as heavily used as people expect it to be, this could actually end up increasing traffic congestion in the areas around HSR stations, as people drive to the station to board. If they were driving to their actual destination instead of taking the train, they’d be getting on the nearest highway, which would at least keep traffic more even.

The ultimate cause of California population centers’ poor or nonexistent public transport coverage is the fact that a good deal of it is suburban sprawl. I can’t think of any successful high-speed rail system in existence which operates in an area with similar population distribution. Even the US’s existing high-speed rail system, Acela, operates in the Northeast, along a route which is a series of dense urban centers. There is some sprawl with poor public transport coverage, to be sure, but not to the degree there is in California. Besides, it’s very debatable whether or not Acela is successful in the first place; the unfavorable population density and poor public transport might be why it’s not doing so well (and why intercity rail in general doesn’t work well in the US).

So it’s a problem to which there’s no good solution. California has suburban sprawl, and that’s neither going to go away nor get decent, viable public transport coverage anytime soon. Even if good public transport could magically be willed into existence in the suburbs, I highly doubt it would see much ridership, since car culture is basically one of the pillars of suburbia.

What the hell

ABC in talks to renew Scrubs

Guys, seriously. I love Scrubs, but its time has come. Just let it go out with a good last season, and then leave it alone.

Bones episode 423

Oh boy oh boy. An episode focused on Japanese people? Yay for me.

OK, let’s just start with a list of things. I have to whine about all of these, and it’s best to get it all over with now.

• The guy who played Ken Nakamura: he looks Japanese, but his accent is messed up and when he actually speaks Japanese, it sounds a bit off. Also, he introduced himself in Japanese to the restaurant guy as “Ken Nakamura” which is wrong; you introduce yourself family name first, like the restaurant guy did (”Takedo Bruce”). My guess is (a) bad writing and (b) the actor is a Nissei who isn’t a native Japanese speaker but knows a bit.
• The guy who played Bruce Takedo: looks and sounds genuinely Japanese.
• The, uh, person who played Haru Tanaka looks and sounds genuinely Japanese. Interesting point: “Haru” is a nickname for both masculine and feminine Japanese names, like “Pat” in English.
• The girl who played Nozomi Sato: if she’s Japanese, I’ll eat my hat. But come on, writers, come up with a more original name than “Sato”, please. (”Sachi” was a good choice of original name, though; I had to look it up to verify that it’s real. I’ve never heard of anyone named Sachi before.)
• The guy who played the sleazy pimp: he could have Japanese blood.
• Back to the question of Tanaka’s gender. (Also, seriously: “Tanaka”? I get the feeling that one of the writers took a Japanese class once and they just lifted the names of the fictitious characters in the class textbook.) Angela apparently looked him/her up on the Internet, and found most of the results in Japanese, “with no personal pronouns”. Now hold on just a darned minute. Where in the hell ass are you going to find gender in a Japanese personal pronoun? Huh? SOMEBODY CALL ME WHEN THEY FIND GENDER IN A JAPANESE PERSONAL PRONOUN

  *calm down*

  Whoooo. Good God. No, OK? Japanese personal pronouns are not gendered. Japanese doesn’t have grammatical gender even for people. It barely even has grammatical number. The only way you can infer anyone’s gender from a personal pronoun is from first-person ones: some are only used by men, some only by women. But if Tanaka is a member of some subculture that glorifies androgyny (I’ve never heard of this; there are way too many of these subcultures for me to keep track) he/she (see? the hell with grammatical gender) would not be using a gendered personal pronoun. And there’s absolutely no way to infer gender from second- or third-person pronouns. So shut the hell up, partly Chinese woman.

• They can identify that the victim was a native Japanese speaker from a feature of the palate? Color me highly skeptical. I doubt that any language causes permanent changes to the physiology of the mouth. Even if they did, there’s no reason for Japanese to affect the hard palate. Japanese doesn’t have any purely palatal consonants other than /j/ (transliterated as “y” in English). In fact, the consonant inventory of Japanese is almost a subset of English’s consonant inventory; the exception is /ɕ/. It’s an alveolo-palatal consonant, but it’s not an obstruent, so I don’t see how it could affect the physiology of the palate at all.
• Ironically, I have no objections about what little actual Japanese dialogue there was. It’s correct. Obviously Emily Deschanel sucks at speaking Japanese, but that’s excusable.

So they’re looking to hire one of the interns permanently? I really hope it’s Vincent. Clark is hilarious, but not as much as Vincent. Wendell is just boring, although a perfectly likeable guy. I’m not sure how they’re going to resolve it. They all have desirable characteristics (to Brennan) but I can see them going with Wendell because Booth prefers him. And it was interesting that they brought in a random guest character to serve as a pseudo-intern for this episode, to avoid having to make a decision just yet.

Other than all the Japan-related stuff, not much to say. Last episode was a hard act to follow, but this one wasn’t too bad.

Scrubs episode 816

I really like Scott Foley, I have to admit. I haven’t been pleased with any of Elliot’s boyfriends since Sean. He’s just such a perfect mix of random quirks and oddities, especially as Elliot’s significant other. He and JD have always had good comic rapport as two mildly insane competitors for Elliot’s affections.

I suppose it makes sense that a show in its last season would bring back some favorite guest stars from the past, and Scott Foley is pretty much the best possible choice, other than, of course, Tom Cavanagh as Dan Dorian. I think I remember reading some rumors of a Tom Cavanagh appearance on the interwebs, but of course you shouldn’t believe things you read on the interwebs. I do have to take this moment to say: both of these guest stars, as excellent as they are, do not hold a candle to the best Scrubs guest star of all time: Brendan Fraser. Unfortunately, his character’s dead so a return isn’t really an option other than in flashbacks (or possibly “Sixth Sense”-style dead-man-walking à la “My Screw Up”). Foley and Cavanagh are more than good enough for me.

You know what? I really miss season 3 right now. In fact:

Just a small town girl
Living in a lonely world
She took a midnight train goin’ anywhere

Just a city boy
Born and raised in south Detroit
He took a midnight train goin’ anywhere

…

STREET LIGHT
PEOPLE
WO OH OHHHHHHHHH

I suppose I should explain myself. Here’s my explanation: Journey is the shit.

Seriously now, I thought this episode was great. Full of comic moments, one excellent guest star and one pretty good one (Elizabeth Banks, who for whatever reason has been appearing in a lot of dumb comedy movies these past few years), and an interesting plot twist at the end. Sean and JD still had their rapport, with their disputes over saying “good” and yogurt. Their conversations could have come straight out of season 3. The ongoing “wiener cuz” joke was pretty good too.

Despite the fact that it was entirely later-seasons-style, I laughed uproariously at Elliot and Kim’s conversation on the ramp. “Who’s In There?” “What’s In There?” “Mister Peep Tries On Hats”?? Where in the hell did they come up with things like that? “Mister Peep Tries On Hats”?? Seriously??

No JD/Turk gay jokes this week, unfortunately, but just a bit of JD thinking Sean is beautiful. I kind of wish they’d brought up the “full-lipped” joke from season 3 episode 20. And yes, I did know that without looking it up, although I did go back to confirm.

Leaving aside the implausibility of Turk being named chief of surgery at the hospital (he’s only been an attending for three years, for Christ’s sake; where did all the other surgeons older than him go?), I liked that subplot because it continued Cox’s evolution into a kinder, gentler person. It also gave Carla a bit of a role to play (remember how I said she doesn’t get much to do anymore? Yeah, this is about the extent of it).

Kelso also had some great moments treating himself and browbeating interns. (Although, where’s Denise? I think she and Kelso could make some great comedy.) And it was nice to have Kelso in the hospital (and very strange to see him as a patient) instead of just being Norm from “Cheers” in the coffee shop. For some reason, his walk through the ICU with the back of his gown open has taken on a “legendary Scrubs moment” status in my mind even though it really wasn’t. It was hilarious of course (including Mickhead taking a picture on his cellphone in the background — subtle background antics are a sign of Scrubs in its better days), but not legendary.

I think there’s like an hour total of Scrubs left. I’m honestly going to be sad when it’s over.

Bones episode 422

I didn’t write about 420 and 421 because they weren’t particularly fascinating, but 422 was one of the best episodes in a long time.

My rule for determining the killer didn’t apply. The mystery wasn’t gripping but definitely interesting, not giving anything away till the end (with a clever reveal) and faking me out several times (and Brennan made the final leap this time!). No intern this week, but we didn’t need one (the undertaker took on that duty to some extent). Above all else, though, this episode was hilarious beyond measure.

Unlike every other episode this season, this one was basically a comedy of errors, with the added constraint that the team had to steal the body from the dead guy’s wake. There were tons of subtle, tiny moments of comedy, which is exactly what makes this show great. It’s like they saved up these moments all season long and used them all now. The codeword “translation” for murder. Hodgins giving the dead guy 20 bucks and Booth taking it. Booth showing Brennan how to make a sad face. The undertaker getting it on in the bathroom. Brennan’s hand gesture for getting it on. Hodgins’ toast coming unhinged as he saw the body being stolen. The body being stolen, rather incompetently. Hodgins, Angela and the dead guy’s assistant having their three-way awkward moment. Angela’s awful excuses for not being able to look at the body (”his hair like Hitler”). The undertaker repeatedly losing it as he was put under stress (”I did acid in high school, it’s probably why I’m not a doctor”). “We’re encountering some fluid seepage”. Sweets’ oblivious conversation with the undertaker (who loses it again). The list goes on and on, but the last thing I have to mention is Cam fretting about whether the dead guy is smiling too much and then putting her sunglasses on him in a panic.

I don’t have much more to say about this episode. I just had to write something, since it was such a fantastic episode and maybe a sign that things are looking up at the end of a lackluster season (which should be ending any time now; I think either episode 23 or 24 will be the last of season 4).

PS: I know there was a super-good “Chuck” on Monday, and I want to write about it; I just haven’t gotten around to it yet.

Apparently Japanese really is weird

We now interrupt our regularly scheduled TV posts for a return to roots: linguistics nerdery!

Studying linguistics, I’ve internalized the idea that all languages are created equal and that one can’t really call any language “weird”, no matter how exotic it seems. It’s exotic only in relation to your native language, which to a native speaker of some other language surely seems as weird as theirs does to you. (Example from English: the pronunciations of words of the form “[consonant]ow” — learners hate these.)

Linguistics textbooks and scholars can say that all they want, but I’m going to have to say that there are some things about some languages that are pretty darn wild. One of these is Japanese and its possession of closed lexical word classes. “Word classes” is the syntactician’s term for what elementary school teachers call “parts of speech”: a class of words characterized by their interactions with words of other classes (if this definition sounds circular, don’t worry about it; syntacticians don’t). Lexical word classes are, informally, those that BLAH. Japanese verbs and adjectives are closed classes. That is, Japanese doesn’t get new verbs or adjectives, or at least words that are “pure” verbs and adjectives, strictly speaking. It does get these things through periphrastic constructions (new verbs come from putting the verb “to do” with what is essentially a gerund, and new adjectives are not really adjectives but things that act almost like verbs). As you might imagine, I am very glad that I don’t have to learn Japanese grammar through stuff like this. I still possess a few of the more crucial native-speaker instincts for Japanese, among which is an ability to guess what an onomatopoeia means. (Japanese people love onomatopoeia. A lot.)

Another thing that I have to point out as weird: the sound ع in Arabic, technically the voiced pharyngeal fricative, but in my head the gargle. Apparently almost no other language has it. I am bitter towards this sound because I was trying to learn how to pronounce it while I had a cold, and it actually made my sore throat worse. Also you have to say it if you want to say “Arabic” in Arabic. I can deal with all of Arabic’s other throaty sounds, even ح, the voiceless version of the above, but the gargle I cannot.

Scrubs episode 815

Good episode.

Thankfully, Bill Lawrence did not ruin everything. In fact, he was pretty darn good. The setting really helped — it wouldn’t have worked nearly as well if he’d been in a Sacred Heart episode. The fact that they’re in the Bahamas for a mostly-ridiculous wedding fits a lot better with his character.

They have not laid off the Turk/JD gay jokes, which I of course appreciate to no end. “Elliot, I love you more than Turk.” They played that one perfectly.

All in all, this episode reminded me a lot of those episodes in seasons 2 and 3, where everyone’s having some kind of problem and they’re all oddly parallel and tied together by JD’s narration, right down to the acoustic guitar music at the end. (I particularly remember this kind of thing happening in season 3 because there were two episodes that concluded with music by Tammany Hall NYC, who I suddenly started liking a lot recently.)

Carla was a lot better in this episode. (Except: where did her pregnancy go? Obviously you can’t fake being pregnant in a bikini, but it was kind of jarring.) Unfortunately Elliot didn’t do so well, probably in part because she was supposed to be annoying the whole time. She was good in the final scene, though, recognizing the significance of JD loving her more than he loves Turk.

One surprise standout in this episode was Lady. She’s been head and shoulders above most of the random guests on Scrubs, and is an especially good foil for the Janitor (who had more of a dramatic role in this episode than comedic, if that’s even conceivable).

They managed to stretch out the mermaid joke (which has been around since season 3 episode 22) in hilarious fashion, culminating in Turk attempting to speak in mermaid language. Usually this kind of joke-stretching falls flat, but I’m glad this one didn’t since it’s an extension of what was a really good throwaway gag from an early season.

I’m still not convinced that Everybody Goes On Vacation episodes are a good idea, but at least this one was a step in the right direction from last week.

A look at the Internet reveals that the season will conclude with an hour-long two-episode finale: episodes 18 and 19. This means: 80 total minutes of Scrubs remain. I really hope they’re mostly good ones.

Chuck episode 220

Gosh darn it all if “Chuck” isn’t the show I look forward to most during the week, sometimes even more than Gossip Girl. Episodes like this one are part of the reason why.

First let’s look at the title, “Chuck vs. the First Kill”. You’d think that gives the whole thing away, but this show always has a trick up its sleeve. That Chuck’s go-to move is basically a standing fetal position named after Morgan’s defense maneuver against getting beat up by girls is so incredibly appropriate that it’s a wonder I ever suspected anything else. I was just worried that they would have Chuck shooting someone and either becoming a blubbering wreck, thus rendering the show uncomfortable to watch, or becoming a cold-hearted bastard, thus destroying the innocence and sheer good-personness that makes Chuck such a likable character. If there’s anything I’ve learned while watching the second season of Chuck, it’s to never underestimate the cleverness of the writers.

The Chuck plot and the Buy More subplot didn’t merge in this one, unfortunately, but the oddly parallel situations are the next best thing. I’m sure they’ll get a lot of comedy mileage out of Big Mike as a greenshirt (I assume that’s the situation; I can’t see them getting rid of a character who’s now in the main title sequence) and Emmett as store manager. Methinks for the rest of the season, with such big stuff happening in Chuck-world, the Buy More will be sidelined. I do hope that in the finale they bring the two worlds together in a massive spectacular earth-shaking catastro-fuck, and I think there’s a good chance that will happen. That’ll be a good night of television. (Also, there will be a Gossip Girl that same night. I don’t know if my brain will be able to handle it.)

What can one say about Adam Baldwin, and the delightfully Adam Baldwin-like character he plays? He was great in this episode, including the brilliant moment where he came busting in through an eighth-floor window with a shotgun. His perfectly timed grunts of amusement and grunts of just grunting are great. His extreme impatience for social situations is great. Basically all of it is great, but there’s one thing in this episode that worries me. Numerous times in the past (like the season 1 finale) he’s been okay with bending rules or disobeying orders to protect Chuck. This time he’s apparently not.

The reason the second season of the show has been so good is that it’s dense with big moments for all the characters. This one had big moments for Chuck and Sarah. Chuck’s was when he demonstrated his continuing belief in the essential goodness of Jill. Who knows if he’s right, but reasons to empathize with a character don’t come much better than that. He’s trusting in a world full of betrayal, courageous in a world full of danger, and no matter how bad things get, he is not letting the world drag him down. Who could ask for a better main character?

Sarah’s was at the end, obviously, and the most interesting thing is that this is a huge moment regardless of the true nature of the situation. There’s no reason why she couldn’t be feinting: pretending to let Chuck in on the big nasty plan when in fact she’s transporting him to a holding facility or something. Whether she is or not, whatever she’s really doing is a clear indication of where her loyalties lie. I’m almost certain she’s really helping Chuck escape, just because based on what we’ve seen of her so far, she wouldn’t pull a move that shitty. This is her most direct disobedience of orders so far, and combined with the fact that we’re closing in on the end of a season makes me think this is a turning point in the show.

There’s a bit of a plot hole through which Jill escapes having to tell her family that she’s in jail for being an agent of a clandestine malefic CIA splinter group, and how she’s going to explain showing up with Chuck to celebrate their “engagement” and then abruptly disappear again. Also, what kind of government-issue tracking anklet can be cut through with a miniature Leatherman? Whatever, the rest of the show was good enough that I don’t care.

The part of the episode I liked second best (first being the game-changing moments at the end) was seeing Chuck and Jill pretend to be engaged. They were both obviously intensely uncomfortable with it but you could also see how much they almost wished it were true. The fact that Chuck and Sarah also have this problem just underscores how much Chuck’s life is being ruined by this thing. It also shows what a tragic character Jill is. She’s unfailingly sympathetic to Chuck, even when she’s holding a gun to his head. She has put herself in danger and overcome the fact that he tricked her into captivity to protect him. But she’s another person for whom all hope of a normal life has gone out the window at the hands of spy world. The fact that she and Chuck share this deadly predicament makes them seem all the more suited for each other, and makes it all the more tragic that it can’t happen.

God this show is great. Two weeks and the season’s over. What will I ever do?