Chuck Vs The Cliffhanger

Girlfriend in a coma, I know, I know - it's serious.

Photo Credit: Mike Ansell/NBC

Last night saw the season finale of Chuck and just like the seasons before, it shook things up, or to use the traditional Chuck finale phrase, it was a game changer. Although the season has had patchy moments, it’s fair to say that these last couple of episodes have been strong.

Despite the fact that I knew they would never kill off Sarah, it had me gripped. What made it such an involving episode were the reactions of everyone else to the threat of her death and the drama that resulted from that.

It was such a compelling episode that I forgot to check in my viewership via the GetGlue app for the first half hour!

With Sarah at death’s door, Chuck was willing to risk everything to save her, with or without the Intersect. This was Chuck’s ‘Phase Three’, going all out, no matter what the cost, to save the woman he loves.

Although he’s been without the Intersect before, he was driven to embrace being a normal spy. Charles Carmichael might be a super-spy with all the powers of the Intersect, but we all know that Chuck Bartowski is more than that. It was a real moment for him when he realised that he could save the day using the skill set that he developed before he opened that email and all he has learned during his time as a spy.

The whole deal with Vivian Volkoff never really struck a chord with me. I’ve said in previous posts that she never seemed like a competent villain, especially following on from Timothy Dalton’s turn as Alexei. In truth, she never seemed like a fully enough realised character for anyone to love or hate. Even in this episode I felt rather indifferent about her, but I was happy that Hartley was reunited with her and that they were both given a second chance.

During the standoff in front of the hospital where all of the Russians parachute in, I was half expecting a Red Dawn reference. Wolverines!

I had discussed on Twitter, knowing the shows love of twists at the end, and the fact that they’d want to keep something back for a possible fifth season, that the wedding may not actually take place and that it was all in Sarah’s fevered mind. Guess I was wrong about that!

For the past couple of seasons, as Chuck has immersed himself further into the spy world, the torch was passed to Morgan. He became the kind of character that Chuck was when the show started, an extension of the viewer, thrown into this crazy world of espionage.

Now, with Morgan being Intersected, the metaphor is complete. Morgan IS the new Chuck.

*Although I thought you had to have a certain kind of ‘special’ brain to handle the Intersect. Obviously they’re more common than we were led to believe!

Of course, there is the possibility that Chuck could regain the Intersect at some point during the next season. Decker stated that the retrofitted sunglasses were a “suppression device”, so it’s not been removed, more locked away. It would certainly make for a great scene having both Chuck and Morgan using Intersect skills to take out an army of bad guys.

This episode could have made a splendid series finale with a lot of things coming pretty much full circle. It was a fairy tale ending; the bad guy was defeated, Flynn Rider Chuck marries his princess and the kingdom Buy More was saved.

But of course, there’s the classic Chuck twist, which leaves the whole thing open to more adventures.

Everything that has happened to Chuck and his family and friends since that fateful day Bryce Larkin sent him the email has been part of a big plan. Someone has been controlling the fates of Team Bartowski and those around them.

*Could the big bad for season 5 be a shady duo collectively known as Schwedak? Well, they have been controlling the lives of Team B from the start!

Now the stage is set for the fifth and final season of Chuck. Knowing it’s the last will allow some form of closure for a TV show that’s been a significant part of our lives for the past few years.

The campaigning will not let up; we have been issued a challenge to get 10 million viewers for Chuck to secure more than the 13 ordered episodes. If there’s anything Chuck fans know how to do, it’s to put everything behind our favourite show and push to get it noticed.

Hopefully the move to Fridays will help and not hinder that movement, despite it being the traditional day to put shows out to pasture.

What would you like to see happen in Season 5? How would you wrap up the characters stories?

Leave your thoughts in the comments section.

Chuck Vs The Last Details

They've got the week off, what could possibly go wrong?

Move it along, Chewie.                         Photo Credit: NBC

I think that this episode is one of my favourites of not just the season, but of the series. References and callbacks were flying in places and the humour and tension were ramped up in all the right places.

Chuck certainly needs to nerd-ucate Sarah after she failed to get any of the Star Wars references, both asking why Chuck called Casey ‘Chewie’ and looking wonderfully bemused as Chuck and Morgan hummed the Imperial March to get the latter into a villainous mindset.

The plan to get into the mine was taken directly from Star Wars, even Casey knew that, as were a couple of lines of dialogue. The scene where we see Mary on the security camera was, I think, very much a reference to Terminator, with her doing Sarah Connor style pull ups in her cell.

It’s very convenient that the Norseman can kill a specific target, even if that target is apparently ‘half way around the world’. I can buy into a lot of things in the context of the show, but I’m not sure I can fully embrace this small but very important detail.

In order to make sure that this super weapon doesn’t fall into the hands of the bad guys, they have to infiltrate a group of buyers. Cue Morgan who is not only the only member of the team that Vivian and Riley don’t know, but he also looks like a recently detained Italian arms dealer. Well, not so much looks like, but has a beard like the guy, so that’s convincing enough!
Bringing Morgan onto the team has allowed for some great storylines, and pairing him up with Casey, his possible future father-in-law, has given us some great moments. This was shown in this episode by the fact that Casey wants to keep Morgan safe because he made a promise to Alex. I think it goes a little deeper than that, but I doubt that Casey would ever admit to caring about Morgan.

Jeff finally had a dream come true; thanks to his Chuck/Sarah montage video, he got a smacker from Ellie. It seems that despite the creepy drug-addled stalker exterior, he’s a romantic at heart, who knew?

It was also a good episode for using the entire cast in a way that made sense, with Jeff, Lester and Big Mike having a role to play in the rehearsal dinner sub-plot. It provided some laughs and, as you’d expect from Jeff and Lester, some slightly disturbing imagery. Strangely enough, despite Jeff’s ‘nips slips… of Chuck’ thing, Lester managed to come out in the lead on the freakiness stakes with his bizarre montage.

Things to be learned from this episode: Casey can snipe using a video feed to target, never ask Lester to make you a video, and never order the house special from a grubby Colombian cafe. 


*Final ratings are in, with Chuck scoring a 1.4. NBC seems to be under-performing in the ratings compared to the other big networks, certainly on a Monday, so it seems a 1.4 is pretty good.

We find out the fate of Chuck with the NBC upfronts on Mon 16^th, the same day as the finale. Fingers crossed people; it’s a big day for both Chuck and the fans.
With the last two season finales being possible series, we’ve grown used to them being big, bold and with a twist at the end setting up a possible next season. Even if next episode does turn out to be the last of the series, it’s still been a helluva ride.


Next episode: Chuck Vs The Cliffhanger – Before he can kiss the bride, Chuck must enlist his wedding party to take down Vivian Volkoff and stop her from destroying the big day. When he turns to Alexei Volkoff for help, the CIA sends its toughest agent, Clyde Decker, to stop them.

Take a look:

Chuck Vs Agent X

There go my primroses! Eat lead ya bastards!

Photo credit: Chris Haston/NBC

I just had to use that line as a topper. I think it was my favourite of the episode!

Anyway, the episode....


The bachelor and bachelorette parties for Chuck and Sarah provided the backdrop to some of this episode, but as it is with the life of spies, work got in the way of both.
Ellie was finally let in on the secret that Chuck is not only still a spy, but also has the Intersect in his head.
The third element was that of the title - finding this mysterious Agent X. I have to say, I had an idea who it might be, but I was still a little surprised when their identity was revealed.

Each of these plots wouldn’t have been enough to fill an entire episode, so they were all mixed together, but Ellie finding out about Chuck and his special abilities felt a little rushed. As much as I like Big Mike and Jeffster, I feel that they were extraneous to the plot. Aside from the comedy montage/product placement, they lent very little to the overall episode.

Whilst Chuck had Casey, Morgan, Awesome, Big Mike and Jeffster to go along to a bachelor party, Sarah is largely friendless. Ellie’s explanation as to where all the people at her party came from was a bit odd to me though. Somehow, as well as women from the hospital, she managed to get ‘a few of the Wienerlicious girls’ along. Now considering that the Wienerlicious hasn’t been in the show since the first season ended, and that the only people we ever saw were Sarah and her boss, it was a bit of a stretch. Maybe she rounded them up from the rest of the franchise outlets?

Things ran less smoothly at the event organised by Awesome in the wonderful Las Vecas (don’t bother – it’s not real!) where Vivian Volkoff’s team tracked down the Orion laptop and tried to extract information from the stoned Jeff.

One question that I had from the start is why the CIA would have something that could track the laptop bundled away in storage in the first place. If, and this is just speculation, they had installed a tracker in it after they’d appropriated it from Ellie, wouldn’t they keep the tracker monitored?

And who can deny the wonderful irony that Casey had Osama bin Laden targets for the party and the episode was broadcast the day after that very man was killed.

With the laptop still in the hands of the good guys, although not quite in working order, it was time to let Ellie in on the secret, which involved taking her into Castle, dishonouring Morgan’s shirt and speaking Japanese. She handled it pretty well, considering.
This led them to the mission to uncover the identity of Agent X, which took them to Somerset, England. Given that we had a spoiler saying that Agent X was someone we had already met, it was a matter of putting 2 and 2 together. It ended up meaning that the connection between the Volkoff and the Bartowski clans is a lot more complicated than I would ever have thought.

I have to say that the idea of an Intersect implanting a cover identity is quite a leap, unless the implantation was done differently, but I’ll go with it, as it’s entirely fictional anyway, so it can be whatever it needs to be!

No doubt Mrs Winterbottom will be high on the list of many peoples favourite one-off characters. She certainly struck a chord with Casey! If it were up to me, being the mother of Alexei Volkoff, she’d make another appearance, even if only to reconnect with her errant son.

It’s nice to see that Alexei will be as important to the end of the season as Vivian. As I said in a recent post, I had feared we’d seen the last of him. With only two more episodes to go, it’s all to play for now.

*Overnight ratings came in as I was writing this, with Chuck rising from a dismal 1.3 to a not so dismal 1.4. We should still be getting better ratings, but a gain is not something to be sniffed at.


Next episode: Chuck Vs The Last Details - Chuck and Sarah’s wedding prep includes one final detail: ensuring that the mother-of-the-groom makes it to the ceremony alive. Meanwhile, Morgan’s responsibilities as Best Man include his most dangerous mission yet, as he faces Vivian Volkoff. Elsewhere, Ellie tends to the last details of the rehearsal dinner and seeks help from an unlikely source.

Take a look: