Chuck Versus Sarah/Chuck Versus the Goodbye

Thanks for the memories. We wish a fond goodbye.

Photo Credit: NBC/TVFanatic.com

Well folks, that’s it. Last night saw the two-hour series finale of Chuck and it was everything we’d been promised. It was full of callbacks and emotion. Even a cold-hearted b*****d like me got a bit teary at times.

Even although it was the final two episodes, they functioned as one, to the point where they, again, dropped the opening credits for the second hour.

It was a trip down memory lane for both Sarah and us fans. From the assault on the D.A.R.P.A. lab, an homage to the very first scene of the pilot where Bryce Larkin steals the Intersect, right through to Chuck and Sarah’s dream house, it encapsulated the five amazing years we’ve had, without the need for flashbacks every few minutes.

The great thing about the finale is that it wasn’t just trying to remind Sarah why she fell in love with Chuck, it also served to remind us why we fell in love with the show.

It was funny, dramatic and touching in all the right quantities. What other spy drama wears its heart on its sleeve so openly?

The first hour, Chuck Versus Sarah, was certainly the darker of the two episodes, with Sarah manipulating those closest to her on Quinn’s orders and a lot of emotional pain for Chuck. At first we’re lead to believe that Sarah has killed Quinn, escaped, and still has enough of her memory to get home to those she loves.

Of course, she didn’t kill Quinn, but came pretty close to it, now he’s calling the shots pretending to be her handler. It’s quite amusing that Bizarro Sarah mistakes Chuck’s goofy good nature for a trap – one of the lighter moments of the episode.

Maybe it was just me, but Sarah seemed to soften slightly in deciding not to blow up the D.A.R.P.A. Intersect room. Could it have been that she didn’t see a need to kill Chuck, or perhaps it was just a disinclination to blow up a government facility.

Some of Sarah’s memory starts to come back once Chuck takes her to their dream home, although it’s not the house, or Chuck’s recounting of the dreams they had for the house, but the names she and he carved into a door frame.

Of course, once Quinn gets the Intersect glasses, Sarah is of no use to him, so he verifies Chuck’s story, that he’s been deceiving her and shoots at her. I think it was another step along the road that she was concerned about Chuck after he took the bullet for her.

Casey showed his gentler side by turning up at Sarah’s old room, telling her a bit about how they’d changed over the years and leaving the DVD of her mission logs. It was nice to see Sarah falling in love with Chuck via a series of small video diary entries.

Even although this all verified Chuck’s version of events, Sarah still didn’t feel that connection as she couldn’t remember going through all the things that made her fall in love with him.

The second episode saw Sarah back on the side of the good guys and gunning for Quinn. This allowed for more nostalgia and allowed this to be lighter as Chuck, and fate apparently, tried to take Sarah on a trip down memory lane.

The episode gave some of the usually mute Buy Morons a line or two of dialogue as Jeff and Lester were employed to help track down Sarah, using their network of contacts, or as Lester put it; “Unleash the perverts!”

We had references to Fulcrum, The Ring and Ted Roarke within the first few minutes of the episode, and the hits just kept on coming as Sarah, Chuck and Morgan went on a mission to find Renny Deutch in Berlin. First port of call was a restaurant that looked exactly like “El Compadre” in LA where Chuck and Sarah had their first cover date.

Next was a Russian consulate where we got a chance to see the pair dancing in eveningwear. This was followed by a trip to a Wienerlicious where it seemed that Sarah remembered a little more of her missing 5 years.

In an act that mirrored parts of “Chuck Versus the Ring” and his first mission in the pilot, Chuck once again put his personal desires aside in order to do what was right and took on the responsibility of the Intersect.

Thanks to Sarah, Chuck used the ‘Irene Demova’ virus from the pilot to defuse the bomb and save General Beckman, and likely a large part of the audience from being blown up.

However, the day could not have been saved by Chuck were it not for the intervention of a certain duo. One word: Jeffster!

Whereas in the season 2 finale, Jeffster played an unwitting part in helping, in this episode they were very much in on the plan. Despite turning up on their own initiative, they managed to save the day with a performance of A-ha’s ‘Take On Me’, earning them a standing ovation and the interest of a record producer from Germany.

In uploading the Intersect one last time, he was denied the opportunity to use the glasses to restore Sarah’s memory. As the team disbanded, with Casey leaving to go after Gertrude Verbanski, Sarah needed to take some time to find herself.

More pieces of her memory must have been resurfacing as she went to the beach where she had first told Chuck that he could trust her.

Taking advice from Morgan and following his heart, Chuck found her there and they started to reconnect. We got a montage of the couples important moments as Sarah asked Chuck to tell her their story and we fade to black as they share another first kiss.

 

Whilst Chuck and Sarah may have had a slightly ambiguous ending, others got their own happy endings. Alex and Morgan moved in together, Casey off to find Verbanski, Ellie and Awesome moving out to Chicago, Jeff and Lester getting a record contract. Even Big Mike got a happy ending, with Subway moving in to the Buy More!

Photo Credit: ZacharyLeviFan.com

“If you ever want to save the world again…. You know where I am.” – Gen. Beckman.

It’s been a fun ride.

Josh Schwartz, Chris Fedak, Zachary Levi, Yvonne Strahovski, Adam Baldwin, Joshua Gomez, Sarah Lancaster, Ryan McPartlin, Scott Krinsky, Vik Sahay, Mark Christopher Lawrence, Bonita Friedericy, Julia Ling, a whole host of guest stars, all the writers, directors, producers and the rest of the crew. All of you are responsible for a show that captured the hearts and minds of people the world over, and for that we thank you from the bottom of our nerdy little hearts.

 

*fade to black*

Chuck Vs The Push Mix

I’m at my peak, mentally and physically. I’ve been doing yoga. Bring on the lasers!

Photo Credit: Jordin Althaus/NBC

When NBC originally commissioned the fourth season, this episode was meant to be the season finale, if not series finale. However, with the addition of a further 11 episodes, this just became number 13 of 24.

 It had all the feel of a finale; the plot points we’ve been building to were resolved and each of our protagonists got a happy ending. Volkoff was taken down, ending not only his evil empire, but also the separation of the Bartowski family as Mama B finally came home after two decades; Ellie and Awesome now have their own little Awesome, and Chuck finally managed to propose to Sarah.

 However, unlike other season finales, no other elements were brought in. At the end of Season 2 in ‘Chuck vs The Ring’ we had the introduction of The Ring and the cliffhanger of “guys, I know kung-fu!” In ‘Chuck vs The Ring Part II’ we had Orion’s secret base uncovered and the mission to find Mama B was introduced.

As a spy, Chuck has never been more competent or devious than in this episode. Fans will note that the Intersect was barely used the whole time, and when it was used, Chuck was flashing on intel rather than an ability; something we’ve not seen for a while.

In the execution of the plan to bring down Volkoff and rescue his mother, Chuck showed that he was an equal to Sarah. Not only did he do the mission without relying on the Intersect, but also, despite the danger, he was willing to risk everything for the people he loved.

 As Alexei Volkoff, Timothy Dalton has proved himself as the best ‘big bad’ of the series. Fulcrum were a little sporadic, The Ring were a little weak at times, Shaw was ….. well, best not to go there, but Volkoff was both menacing and fun, evil yet entertaining.

 The writers did a spectacular job in creating this character, and Dalton absolutely nailed the performance every single time. Sure, the show is genre spanning, but the scenes between Dalton and Linda Hamilton showed that, when they want it to be, ‘Chuck’ can be a brilliantly compelling a spy drama.

As mentioned at the start, Chuck managed to propose to Sarah. Taking Casey’s advice, he didn’t need a romantic setting, so he proposed to her in that hospital corridor. We didn’t need any dialogue to know how he asked, or what the answer was, as the body language in that scene said it all. Cleverly, the floor buffing machine served two purposes in the scene; firstly to show how unromantic the setting was, and secondly to understate the scene – there was no dialogue, no music, just the sound of the buffer and a slow fade to black as Sarah gives the answer we’ve all been waiting for.

Whoever decided to have the proposal in the background with the buffer drowing out the dialogue is a genius. After having the whole big romantic gesture going on in ‘Chuck vs The Balcony’, the subdued nature of the scene just made it that more powerful for me.

Finally, we got another performance from Jeffster! which recalled classic Jeff and Lester; entirely inappropriate and almost cringe worthy at times. I liked how it seemed to split the ‘audience’ in the hospital, we had those who were shocked and appalled, and those who were actually enjoying the performance and even dancing with the boys! Ellie’s face when she heard them over the intercom was priceless. As well as the choice of song and her general dislike of them, she was no doubt recalling their impromptu performance that ended up ruining her first attempt at a wedding.
Speaking of the creepy duo, I’m hoping that they were out of earshot when Chuck was discussing the CIA undercover protection team for Ellie and Awesome. He wasn’t really speaking in hushed tones and neither Jeff nor Lester seemed to be that far away from the Nerd Herd station!

Hopefully, now that we’ve zipped through 13 episodes, the final 11 will have a bit more breathing space. With a story that most shows would take 2 seasons to tell, everything was building to last night in a very short time. Now they have room to play about a bit, Josh Schwartz said that the next episode will be a “launching pad” for a new story-arc, although where it will go from there is anyone’s guess.

Next episode: Chuck Vs The Seduction Impossible – Team Bartowski travel to Morocco to rescue suave spy Roan Montgomery and Sarah dresses as a belly dancer. Miss it at your peril!
 
 

Chuck Vs The Balcony

I’ll have a bottle of the one with the stork on the cork and the stable on the label, please.

Credit: NBC

 Chuck returned triumphantly last night after what seemed like an age, well, it was several weeks anyway. For me it was a strong episode; just the right amount of funny, goofy, action-packed, heart-warming and heart breaking that is sure to make this one of the season favourites for most.

 Chuck was back to being far more like the Chuck we grew to love in the first couple of seasons. Of course, he was still able to kick ass with style, especially when fighting whilst holding the wine glass.

 Chuck aiming for the perfect proposal was the main plot of this episode and even Casey got to put in his two cents on proposing, words which cut right to the heart of it and put into perspective all of Chuck’s obsessing over the mythical ‘perfect proposal’.

Morgan played quite a big role in this episode, co-ordinating the sub-mission(s) with some amount of efficiency. He has morphed into quite the go-to guy, having had his skills as ‘The Magnet’ used in Phase Three, and now his planning and strategizing (undoubtedly gleaned from his hours of Call of Duty experience) put to use.

 If I were going on a mission, I’d want Morgan to be involved. When he plans for everything, he really does plan for Everything! – Tide to Go sticks?

 I loved the fact that Casey had as much investment in the proposal as Morgan did. Put those two together and fun always happens.

 Actually, it seems you can put Morgan with pretty much any character and it will be a great scene.

 The pace really picked up when Sarah took control of the proposal sub-mission. She knew how important it was to Chuck, and it being important to him, made it important to her. I doubt that she knew, when she said that she would do anything to bring down Volkoff, how quickly General Beckman would put the ‘double agent’ plan into motion.

 I can imagine there were a few moist eyes at the end of the episode when Sarah revealed that she was following in Mama B’s footsteps and had to leave to take down Volkoff from inside his organization. That makes, by my count, 4 attempts that Chuck made to propose, and a grand total of zero actual proposals made.

 Rewinding a bit from that, Sarah used her ingenuity to play the role of ‘silly drunk blonde’ in order to help Casey out of a fix in the wine cellar. It’s nice to see that the writers are more open to giving Yvonne more humourous scenes now that Sarah has grown as a character and let her hair down, so to speak.

 Another highlight of the episode was the first Jeffster performance of the season. After initially not wanting to meet his arranged bride, he quickly changed his tune and tried to impress her with his ‘Saskatchewan Hinjew’ parlour, hastily rigged up in the HTR. When that backfired he had a moment with Ginsana (sp?) that came across as quite sweet and told her he would reveal his true self. Alas, his at times manic and wild eyed, rendition of ‘Is This Love’ by Whitesnake inevitably scared her off. Can we blame her?

Next episode: Chuck Vs The Gobbler – Sarah gets a new look as she infiltrates Volkoff Industries and Ellie and Awesome talk baby names!

Chuck Vs The Subway / Chuck Vs The Ring Part II

Bye Bye, Buy More!

I’m writing this intro just minutes after watching the jaw-dropping, quite literally explosive two-hour finale of Chuck Season 3. To be honest, I think I’m still in shock – OMG does not cover it, no matter how many exclamation marks you put after it!

We’d been told that this was going to be game changing; I feel that was an understatement. It would be like saying that the Sun is quite hot.

I think most people predicted, having been told that one major character would die, Papa Bartowski would be the unlucky candidate. If it couldn’t be any more obvious, he used the line  “This is the last time I’m gonna walk away from you, I promise”, which is equivalent to the clichéd horror movie line “I’ll be right back” – you just know they’re going to die.

There is still the question of what happened to his body, but more importantly, his Governor. Of course, I’m assuming that one of The Ring agents took it, because even though it may be damaged, they could still use it to make their own

Ellie finally found out that Chuck is a spy and discovered that her father is as well, or was. Not only that, but after Stephen was killed, she stepped up to the plate and helped to rescue Team Bartowski by using the B Team of Devon and Morgan. Somehow, despite their bungling, they managed to come through and get our heroes out of trouble.

Morgan managed to get in and out of trouble, especially with Casey after the latter discovered that Morgan had his daughter’s phone number. It might be interesting to see a Morgan-Alex-Casey dynamic next season.

Despite that incident, he did earn some respect from Casey by doing something that Chuck was never willing to do. That’s right – he broke his thumbs to escape the restraints, despite it proving amusingly unnecessary.

During most of this season I know a number of people, myself included, have thought that The Ring was a sub-par Fulcrum, but boy were we proved wrong. Whilst Fulcrum were very visible in their evil doing, The Ring were extremely insidious, playing a long game for much higher stakes.

Shaw has been taken into custody and The Ring is in disarray, but have we seen the last of either?

Talking about seeing the last of someone, how about Jeffster? Now that Jeff and Lester are fugitives, suspected of blowing up the Buy More, how can they go on to do the stadium tours?

Mind you, Jeff managed a whole new level of worrying in just one comment – “It’s my dream come true. Ellie is exactly like Chuck, but with lady parts.” Devon decided to leave at that moment, and even Lester looked worried. How much more can be done with the two characters without integrating them into the spy world, which would be interesting, but most likely a huge mistake.

We got a glimpse into the Bartowski family history, and it seems that Chuck has always been special, after downloading the proto-Intersect at a young age. I’m assuming that he got de-Intersected at some point, cos otherwise it would just be weird!

The references during the finale were grand in scope, ranging from pop culture – General Beckman and the Star Wars ref, Big Mike and the Planet of The Apes ref, to meta, to call-backs – the Mexican Hat ringtone from Vs. The Undercover Lover; all juicy titbits that’ll keep you watching and re-watching.

I’ve seen a few people comment that the Intersect vs. Intersect fight was a little disappointing. I think that it was played to the abilities of the actors so that there was as much face time for them during the fight sequence, just to show what they were capable of, with as little need for stunt doubles as possible.

So, for Season 4 we have a new threat, a probable lack of Buy More, Mama Bartowski, the possibility of Casey becoming a family man and so many more things.

As I usually recommend, check out the latest ChuckYouTuesday podcast – just click the link to the Chuckgasmic blog in the side bar, but remember, it contains strong language.

Until next season, Semper Fidizzle, Chuck fans.

Chuck Vs The Living Dead

Oh, boy – Chuck is Shaw-ly in danger now!

Chuck Vs The Living Dead marked the return of Papa Bartowski, played by guest star Scott Bakula. By that very fact you knew it was going to be an intense episode, and boy, was it ever!

Things are moving quickly towards their thrilling and terrifying conclusion. Nefarious Ring agent Justin, using her to track down her father, has drawn Ellie further into the spy world than she’s comfortable with. Orion has a fix for the Intersect 2.0 that will help regulate it so that Chuck won’t go crazy. Oh, and Shaw isn’t dead, apparently.

We had a good mix of the slow paced plot and the action scenes that were being built up to. There were touching moments between Chuck and both Sarah and his father.

The way that it initially pained Stephen to find out that Chuck had downloaded 2.0, was brilliantly played. It was lovely how quickly, either before or during his short conversation with Ellie, Stephen decided that he was going to help Chuck by building a fix for Intersect 2.0 rather than force chuck to get de-Intersected again. The resolution nearer the end of the episode was a lovely family moment, a little father and son bonding and support of Chuck’s career choice.

It seems that Stephen Bartowski’s oddball act might not be so much of an act after all. If Chuck is going a little crazy because of Intersect2.0, then it’s more than likely that until starting work on ‘The Governor’, Papa B was having similar issues with the prototype Intersect in his head.

With all the drama coming up, will he get to finish his work before it’s too late?

We saw Morgan having several beers and pretty much swooning over Awesome and his awesome romanticism.  Morgan also had that neat little scene in Castle looking for the bulletproof pants, the hiding behind the riot shield when Sarah started to interrogate him!

Then we also had nail-biting moments of tension; I was on the edge of my seat at times, there were the set-ups and feints, and then there were the set-ups and the OMG moments.

Jeffster split, but got back together again – as if it was ever in doubt. Our favourite ‘Indian lesbian’ frontman quit the band in a scene reminiscent of one from Hook – saying, “Don’t try and stop me” a few times to intimate that he wanted to be stopped.

The now solo Jeff, or rather Jeff?, was cringingly bad, cementing his ‘creepy’ reputation by hitting on women using a keyboard, a vocoder and disturbing pickup lines.

Justin has gained Ellie’s trust even further by fuelling her paranoia with regards to Casey. Of course, how could she know that she’s chosen the wrong side to ally with; Justin is convincing, after all, he does work for the CIA, so he’s a good guy, right? Ellie is unaware of the spy world that has been going on around her for the past few years, although she appears to be one of about four major characters left who isn’t aware of Operation Bartowski.

As I usually recommend, check out the latest ChuckYouTuesday podcast – just click the link to the Chuckgasmic blog in the side bar, but remember, it contains strong language.

Next week, the 2-hour season finale – Chuck Vs The Subway followed by Vs The Ring, Part 2.

If you’ve managed not to watch the promo for this, then well done. I won’t spoil it for you, but as Josh Schwartz himself said – it’s like nothing they’ve ever done before.