Great Minds Think Different

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?

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.

I’ve watched all 9 episodes of “Chuck” that have aired, and somehow I’ve come to like it. This goes against all reason. It involves inaccurate nerd stereotypes, egregious abuse of computer jargon, and is basically just a montage of nerd fantasies. Beneath it all, though, it’s kind of sort of hell of entertaining. It has a mildly complicated plot but I don’t need to think hard at all while watching. And it makes me laugh.

It is kind of sort of formulaic, though. Here’s the basic formula behind every episode:

1. Chuck is going about his business as usual. His socially-challenged friends rib him about whatever hot girl is hanging around him this episode.
2. Chuck sees some innocuous little thing while going about his business as usual, and flashes on it. He flips out and goes running to Sarah or Casey.
3. Optionally, Sarah appears scantily clad for absolutely no reason.
4. Chuck goes with Sarah and Casey on a mission resulting from his flash, which is supposed to be simple. That is, what is supposed to happen is: Sarah and/or Casey go do stuff, and Chuck stays in the car.
5. Shit starts to go down, and Chuck gets out of the car.
6. Chuck gets himself in shit.
7. Sarah and/or Casey rescue him. In the process, it transpires that Chuck has borked the mission.
8. Nobody gets mad at him.
9. Gift Shop Girl and/or Morgan gets upset at Chuck for mysteriously disappearing all the time.
10. Chuck is back to his normal life for a little while. Jokes are made about how his job sucks. Also, wieners.
11. Chuck goes with Sarah and Casey on a mission to clean up whatever Chuck borked.
12. Right about now is a good time for some sexual tension, and/or a new twist in the Chuck/Bryce/Sarah backstory.
13. Some reason crops up for Sarah to do high kicks while wearing a skirt. She does so several times, with strategic camera angles, preferably with another chick wearing similarly revealing attire.
14. Back at the store, Chuck’s friends are doing something relatively trivial yet amusing. Usually this involves Morgan being an idiot.
15. Chuck once again fails at staying in the car. Chuck once again gets himself in shit.
16. Just as all hope seems lost, Chuck flashes on something that solves the entire pickle. Sarah and Casey shoot/beat people up until they win the episode.
17. Chuck is praised for saving the day, despite the fact that he fucked shit up multiple times.
18. If, miraculously, no girl’s underwear has been shown in the episode yet, an excuse is found to do so.
19. Sexual tension. Chuck is confused.

I think I recommend it. For serious.