Copyright © 2011 by Sarah Stegall
Chuck
“Chuck vs. the A-Team”
Mondays, NBC, 8/7c PM
Written by Phil Klemmer
Directed by Kevin Mock
Warning: this review contains some spoilers. If you’d rather not know what the episode is going to include, bookmark this page and read it after viewing.
“Chuck, are you about to defuse a nuclear bomb using fruit juice?” —Sarah
It was long overdue. Sooner or later, Chuck would have to face off against an antagonist who also had the Intersect in his head. I’m actually surprised we haven’t seen this before; there have been episodes, even whole story arcs, about evil geniuses trying to develop an army of Intersects (Roark). None of those plans came to fruition; how deliciously ironic, then, that the Intersect that Chuck finally goes up against is nominally on the same side, if not on the same team, that he is.
“They are like a pair of evil robots.” —The Turk
Sarah is going stir crazy, since the team has not had a mission in weeks. Meanwhile, Casey is always busy, coming and going, checking weapons in and out of the armory. Target practice? Not much. Sarah and Chuck follow Casey, find him in a tight spot, and “rescue him”—only to find that Casey was on a mission, backed up by two more or less team members. The new guys are the “Gretas”, the astonishingly competent new BuyMorons Ricky (Isaiah Mustafa, Hot in Cleveland) and Vicky (Stacy Keibler, Psych). They are cold-blooded, steely-eyed, and ruthlessly efficient—sorta like John Casey, and they get the job done. Sarah realizes that she and Chuck have been relegated to the junior varsity, and she is pissed.
“I see you picked your new team for their sparkling personalities.” —Sarah
Casey, uncharacteristically, is apologetic. Or maybe it’s not so out of character—Casey has always valued loyalty very highly. Faced with Sarah’s sense of betrayal, he goes out of his way several times to explain himself, but an infuriated Sarah cuts him off. Chuck’s okay with the situation, and even tries to make friends with the cold-blooded A-team members, to no avail. They brush him off contemptuously, and their boss, Director Bentley (Robin Givens, Nikita) openly sneers at him and Sarah. This is intolerable, and Sarah demands a mission from Beckman. Beckman gives her one—escorting home to the United States someone named “Jana”, who is a beloved family member of an asset currently in custody, Necati Acar aka The Turk (Timur Kocak, The Egoists). Jana, however, turns out to be a bitch—the genuine, four-legged kind, complete with fluffy bow and continence issues. This is the last straw, and Sarah convinces Chuck to go spying on the new Castle annex. They are stunned to find something Chuck had lost a while back: his father’s last laptop.
“Whatever happened to my dad’s laptop?” —Ellie
This was a fine moment, because it brought together two apparently diverging stories: Sarah and Chuck, and Ellie and Awesome. Devon has been having a rough time since Ellie became a stay-at-home mom. Deprived of adult company during the day, Ellie is behaving like a sheep dog bereft of her herd—she invents jobs for herself. Among other things, she is charting, analyzing, and logging every baby burp; for this she needs a more powerful computer. Devon knows that her father’s laptop is too dangerous to use, so he tells her (on Chuck’s advice) that he left it at the BuyMore. Which gives us a delicious scene in which Ellie unabashedly uses her feminine wiles on Lester and Jeff, who are trying to develop Jeff’s psychic abilities. What none of these folks knows is that the CIA has the laptop, and Chuck is furious to see that Bentley has been using it.
“Sarah, they’re Intersects!” —Chuck
All too quickly, it becomes clear what Bentley has been doing: attempting to replicate Chuck. She has imprinted both her assets with the Intersect; when Chuck goes mano-a-mano with them, they mirror one another’s moves because they are all running off the same program. When a bomb scare interrupts the pissing match, however, only Chuck is able to defuse it. He succeeds not because he has a better Intersect, but because he’s a geek. As he tells Casey, “Feels like old times, doesn’t it?” Indeed it does; those of us who were here for the pilot remember Chuck the Geek Squad hotshot defusing a bomb with a computer virus. This is the old Chuck I loved; nice to see him again. Having failed in their mission, the Gretas are demoted and the Intersect is wiped from their minds. I found this moment very interesting, given that during all of Season One it was Chuck’s sole mission in life to erase the Intersect in his head. Now he does not appear interested in that option at all. What a long way he has come. Or fallen, I can’t decide which.
“What a relief to have that out of my head.” —Ricky
Bentley may be demoted and out of the Intersect development business, but that’s not the end of the government’s attempts to make Chuck obsolete, or at least redundant. Beckman puts Chuck in charge of ongoing Intersect development, and orders him to start recruiting candidates. I don’t know why Sarah would welcome this, since as soon as Chuck develops a replacement for himself, his career as a spy will be over. That would leave Sarah as a professional spy married to a non-spy, which is the very position she didn’t want to be in. Complications both emotional and professional appear imminent. I welcome these complications, since it is becoming increasingly clear that Chuck needs a challenge. And the best challenge for any hero is a villain who matches or exceeds his capabilities. So far, Chuck has mostly gone up against villains cast in the old, pre-Intersect mode: Snidely Whiplash knock-offs who may as well have “bad guy” tattooed on their foreheads. If Chuck, who detested the Intersect, now faces the challenge of creating clones of himself, or fighting someone as well equipped as he is, we may actually see some of the action come back into this action comedy.
“What the hell kind of name is ‘Cia’?” —Lester
What I’d really love to see come back is the comedy. There were hints of it last night. When Jeff uses his “telepathy” to deduce, surprisingly, that the CIA has Steven Bartowski’s laptop, Lester misinterprets the initials as a name. Chuck and Sarah playing Operation was cute. Chuck lifting Casey’s handprint from his portrait of Reagan was deliciously ironic. Other than those few moments, however, there wasn’t much to giggle at in this alleged comedy. Morgan was completely wasted (in more than one sense) in his storyline, and Ellie was sandbagged by Bentley. Not funny. Nor am I anticipating next week’s episode, which looks like a bloodbath. The “cartoon violence” in this show sometimes is more than cartoonish; it’s a difficult line to tread and sometimes the writers overstep. Finally, I have to say I was less than thrilled at Chuck’s little product-placement moment in the surveillance vehicle. Not cool.
“You and Bartowski were the team; I was just the backup.” —Casey
Chuck fell a tenth of a point from its last new episode two weeks ago, finishing with a 1.6 rating among adults 18-49. Wouldn’t it be nice to blame the switch to Daylight Saving Time? But I won’t. Thanks to its low ratings, NBC finished in fourth place for the time slot, with only 5.2 million viewers. It could not even beat a rerun of How I Met Your Mother. Chuck is on the cancellation bubble right now; the next couple of weeks could be critical for this show’s continued life.