Unforeseen Consequences

So tonight was only half a regular Josh Schwartz Night (since there was no new Gossip Girl), which makes me a little sad because Josh Schwartz Night is one of my favorite events of the week. But that’s OK, because tonight’s episode of “Chuck” almost made up for the lack of Gossip Girl.

OK, no it didn’t. Nothing can make up for the lack of Gossip Girl. Seriously though, it was a darn good episode.

“Chuck” has noticeably hit its stride in season 2. In the first season, its future was in doubt partly because it was a new show with not-so-great ratings, and partly because of the strike (the season was cut short at 13 episodes because of that). So now, with space to work in a full season, it’s advancing the plot and developing characters like nobody’s business.

I have to be careful not to ruminate too much on the show as a whole; for that I should wait till the season’s over. (With all these seasons ending soon, it looks like I’ll be in for a big pile of writing.) So I’ll try to keep my thoughts focused on this episode but that’s rather tough since this episode is so crucial to the plot.

If I didn’t see the “Chuck’s dad is Orion” twist coming before this episode, I certainly saw it coming once they did the “here’s some things you might need to know” montage at the beginning. They did a rather poor job of explaining everything about Stephen’s absence and hiding of information from Chuck, but whatever.

There were the usual plausibility issues, but the one that hit me hardest was the fact that a random (first-day) employee of a Roark-type company wouldn’t be allowed anywhere near the stage at an expo that the company puts on (I should know, I work at Apple). And speaking of Apple, it seemed to me like Ted Roark and Stephen Bartowski had a sort of Jobs/Wozniak rivalry about them. (“Bartowski” and “Wozniak” are both Polish names, even.) Roark’s presentation at NextExpo has to have been modeled on Jobs’ Macworld and WWDC keynotes; there’s just no other way.

This episode was one of the more hilarious in recent memory. Remember what I said about farting and me being mentally still in seventh grade? Well, they did a farting gag, and as a bonus it was combined with an exercise ball gag. I can testify that certain major software companies do in fact have lots of exercise balls scattered around their offices. Zachary Levi pulled off the physical comedy with aplomb, as usual, and that combined with the farting noises had me absolutely helpless for the better part of a minute. And it wasn’t just that. There was Casey’s horselike resistance to tranquilizer darts (and his reaction right before he succumbs). There was Morgan’s reaction to the news that Chuck took a job at Roark. And a bunch of other stuff. I was laughing almost the entire time. (I missed this on my first watching: Roark says “in-a-gadda-da-vida” to a Japanese-looking dude before his presentation.)

What made this episode, though, was Chuck’s character growth (not development). He has indisputably grown some balls. Of his own initiative he geared up and went on a mission to break into a corporate office. He threatened, and shot, his own handler with a tranq dart gun. He took down a squadron of agents. He was able to flash at will, which seems like a new and interesting ability for future use. Basically, in this episode he turned into a badass, and the fact that it was motivated by both his father and his desire to get the Intersect out of his head seemed especially appropriate.

There was also the satisfying realization that Chuck is capable of getting the kind of job he wants on his own merit. It raises the question for me: why doesn’t he just get a job like that instead of staying at the damn Buy More? There are two reasons I can see: (a) being at the Buy More makes it easier for Sarah and Casey to keep an eye on him and (b) being a Nerd Herder gives him very handy excuses for disappearing from the workplace for long stretches. It seems like there must be some way to give him a job he enjoys more that accommodates his spy work-related needs, so maybe the writers will figure something out (and it’s a mark of how much I like this show that this concerns me). Also, I assume that the negative fallout of running onstage and disrupting a major product launch from a major software company is just going to conveniently go away, although I’d expect at least that Chuck will never work at Roark again.

This episode was also had some of those cringe-inducing moments where Chuck’s two lives are in danger of colliding. It’s good when this happens, though — if it doesn’t, it feels like watching two separate shows with their scenes interleaved. Having the two plotlines involved with each other makes it all neater.

Random note: I am nerdy enough, and attentive enough to this kind of detail, that I’m sure they copied some text out of a Mac OS X terminal to put on the screens of the new Intersect device. How? If you look closely at the screen in front of Chuck, you can see the text CoreServices.framework/Versions/A/.

One of “Chuck”‘s strengths is in its stunt casting. Whereas stunt casting has been a bad idea on some shows (Scrubs, ahem), “Chuck” does it pretty darn well. The one exception was Jerome Bettis (I wept). Scott Bakula was a good one. He played both of his personas very well and the fact that he was both was believable despite the inadequate explanation of the whole situation. His personalities worked well with Chuck, Ellie and Awesome. He performed the show’s particular brand of subtle comedy perfectly (like handing his bag to Captain Awesome in lieu of a handshake). It’s like he was cast in the show from the beginning.

Most importantly, of course, the story is moving forward. The best episodes are invariably the ones where the story moves forward in a nontrivial way. The Chuck-Sarah relationship is on hold for now and we’re back to Chuck being on the verge of getting the Intersect out of his head. Unfortunately this is a TV show nearing the end of a season when it hasn’t been renewed for another one, so I have to wonder if the plot is going to get mostly resolved at the end. It’s hard to figure the optimal strategy: if you don’t resolve all the ongoing conflicts, you leave it all hanging if the show doesn’t get renewed, but if you do resolve everything and then get renewed, you have to somehow blow everything up in order to get another season out of it. It wouldn’t be hard to blow everything up, but it would be tremendously unsatisfying. Ah, the trials and tribulations of writing for network TV.