So Chuck got a new episode yesterday but the whole thing just seemed kind of odd.
Anyway, I’m running on little sleep and feel like rambling so I’ll string some random sentences together.
Sarah was looking great, as usual!
Chuck seemed overly confident throughout the episode and the fight scenes he got ended were too easy and ended too quickly. His flashes were super effective! And there was never really a big threat or sense of danger anyway.
Chuck and Morgan seemed fairly competent in their “sub mission”.
That French wine snob was funny.
They really telegraphed that holding a wine glass while fighting thing though. I knew it was going to happen before he even flashed.
Casey is still a badass. His proposal speech was awesome.
The plot twist involving Sarah’s arrest was completely unexpected.
Sarah is dumb. I’m not really sure what the logic was behind her leaving. And even though I watched the scene with her and Chuck talking in the jail cell 5 times, I still have no idea what she said.
What are they going to do with the show now that they’ve separated Chuck and Sarah? Their interaction and chemistry is what I love about the show. Hopefully, next episode is a few months from now in the Chuckiverse.
Also Jeffster was back! Probably their weakest performance but still awesome.
Also, 12’s don’t exist. 10 is max. The way I see it, three 4s are a combined six. I’m taking the average then adding 1 point for each girl on top of 1.
That’s the point. Better than the best, going to 11, A + + + + +, etc.
I frankly expected Chuck would wind up drinking the wine, and somehow the chip would interact with the Intersect, rather than the fighting while holding the glass thing.
If you mean Volkoff, that’s a good point. Here’s a loyal CIA agent who’s suddenly arrested by the CIA for betraying the CIA, presumably about to escape from CIA custody and join forces with Volkoff. Yeah… no way he’d be suspicious about that.
I liked Casey getting on board with the proposal sub-mission and his advice to Chuck. He’s the best character on the show.
I loved Sarah’s black dress!
I kind of enjoyed the whole Chuck/Morgan proposal sub-mission plotline, but felt it was subverted by the fact that Chuck is planning to propose to Sarah while bad guys are trying to kill both of them! Really?
The Lester story was kind of meh. Her rejection of him at the end was predictable and unsatisfying. There could be an interesting story arc here if she’d stuck around and we could see how Lester deals with the prospect of an actual real relationship.
I don’t like that the intersect now seems to be nothing more than fighting instructions. It was much better when he was an asset because he had all this information, but a complicated asset because he couldn’t fight his way out of tough situations.
Also - No Mr. and Mrs. Awesome? Boo!
Glad Chuck’s back, though. It’s still more pure fun than almost anything on TV right now.
Love it, absolutely loved it. I expected them to play with it even more.
The Jeff subplot was only good where Big Mike was involved.
The new twist does seem weak but this is hardly the best plotted show anyway. They’re on a roll, don’t try to stop them and just enjoy the ride, even when it is goofy.
Casey is still the best part of the show. He needs more air time and not less.
It was … OK. It made me laugh in several places, but it had lost something somehow. Maybe Sarah and Chuck being apart will improve the show.
The ‘fork on the cork’ bit reminded me a lot of Allo Allo, which was also set in France and had lots of similar wordplay - the ‘gateaux in the chateaux’ stuff.
Well as a small defense, Chuck has been on the bubble now for two years and Subway is a large part of the reason we still have Chuck. So I don’t begrudge them their heavy handed and blatant product placement.
I, too, would rather have the show around even if it means some product placements rather than not have the show at all. But while some of the placements have been reasonably painless and even perhaps amusing, there were a couple of shows where I started saying, “Damn, is THIS what we signed up for?” We all have our limits.
Speaking of adverts, Chuck seemed to have misplaced his iPhone ™.
Given the uncertainty whether the show was going to be canceled, this episode was probably written with a ‘Happily Married’ ending in mind that could easily be changed at short notice.
I agree with everything here, except Sarah is my favorite character, not Casey. I especially agree with your point about the Intersect. Instead of using his tracing device he could have just flashed on which bottle had the chip. When was the last time Chuck flashed on anything besides kung fu?
Maybe I’m misunderstanding your statement here, but there’s no way he could have flashed on which bottle had the chip. The spy that injected the chip into the bottle at the beginning did so as an unplanned last resort before being caught, so even the fact that it was in a bottle at all was unknown to anyone until they were on the scene. The information part of the intersect is a database of previously known intelligence and it sometimes allows Chuck to make deductions from different bits of info, but it’s not magic. It wouldn’t allow him to suddenly know where the chip is.
Yeah, the kung fu flash is overused and, as you point out, it is almost exclusively used. Chuck very rarely flashes on someone’s face, or on a top secret code name, or something like that anymore.
I still enjoy the show a lot, but honestly I think it was a big mistake for them to give Chuck the kung fu powers at all. I think the team dynamic worked much better when Chuck was the bumbling fish-out-of-water civilian with the invaluable intel in his head, while Sarah and Casey were the espionage experts and Chuck’s protectors. Trying to turn Chuck into the bad-ass ultimate spy kinda ruined all that. It made Chuck less of a stand-in for the viewer, and that’s a subtle–but important–change in the appeal of the show. They’ve now got Morgan in that bumbling role that Chuck once filled–and I love Morgan–but it’s not the same. Chuck’s kung fu abilities also devalue the Sarah and Casey characters. With Chuck becoming practically unbeatable when he flashes on kung fu, he doesn’t need Sarah or Casey for anything. There’s no suspense for the viewer, no fear for Chuck’s safety when you know he can just flash and start kicking butt. To counter that, the writers have to keep coming up with lame reasons for the intersect to malfunction. Seasons 3 and 4 have still been fun, but it feels like they lost some of the “mojo” the show had in seasons 1 and 2.
I’m torn on the kung fu angle, really. They should go back to more of the informational flashes, I agree; but sometimes I think that if Chuck still couldn’t defend himself after all this time, we’d all be complaining about how hopeless he is. It’s got to be hard to keep the characters consistent, yet not boring and stagnant, and overall I think the writers are doing a decent job. They’re certainly doing an excellent job with Casey on that.
I would love to see him getting better at non-flashed spy stuff and to some degree he is. It was also kind of nice to see them on a mission that wasn’t really that hard for them to handle.
Maybe I’m misunderstanding your statement here, but there’s no way he could have flashed on which bottle had the chip. The spy that injected the chip into the bottle at the beginning did so as an unplanned last resort before being caught, so even the fact that it was in a bottle at all was unknown to anyone until they were on the scene. The information part of the intersect is a database of previously known intelligence and it sometimes allows Chuck to make deductions from different bits of info, but it’s not magic. It wouldn’t allow him to suddenly know where the chip is.