This week’s Chuck faces the unenviable task of following my favorite two episode period of the series, and continues the adjustment period of Chuck and Sarah being officially together and Morgan’s training process with Casey. It’s a pretty exciting time for Chuck as we’re getting more into the character centric episodes that made it such a well loved show in the past. How did it stack up against the highs of the past two episodes? Will it do enough to #SaveChuck? That’s right…I hash tagged a blog post.
Find out after the jump.
Synopsis: Chuck and Sarah train under the tutelage of a married CIA team (Fred Willard and Swoosie Kurtz, who have a glowing record together but despise one another. In another training mission, Casey must show the spy ropes to an unlikely student — Morgan.
What Was Good: I have to start with the opener, which had to be one of the most awesome things Chuck had ever done. It was the intro to a 70’s style spy TV show about Chuck and Sarah, except it was a dream Morgan was having and narrating over. It was hilarious, and it led into him waking up and then walking out to the kitchen to discover Sarah in only a skimpy nightgown. What transpired was uncomfortable and hilarious, which is really what moments like that should be.
The central plot of this episode was about Chuck and Sarah working through their relationship and Chuck’s desire to have Sarah move in while they observed the super spy couple of the Turners (played by Fred Willard and Swoosie Kurtz). This led to a lot of very good moments and some strangely out-of-characters moments. The good moments amounted to most every time it was just Chuck and Sarah dealing with the ramifications of the Turners actions…such as when they went and had their showdown with a tiger while finalizing the mission objective. Chuck and Sarah’s chemistry remains better than ever as they grow better as a spy couple, and the moment when Sarah tells Chuck that she’ll move in with him was a beautiful one – I LOVE this couple.
One great moment was the parallel of Chuck trying to decollar the sleeping tiger and Morgan attempting to take a sleeping Big Mike’s key card. It was a hilarious and perfect combination, as it highlighted how both of them are sort of amateur night at the Apollo when you get down to it, and it was quite funny.
Morgan and Casey’s relationship continues to entertain and to be oddly touching – when Casey almost calls them friends, we’re kind of like Morgan in that we take a lot of glee out of that tiny moment. Two of the funniest moments of the episode were where Morgan has to hit on a (incredibly) hot girl and get her number and to go shooting as part of his spy training. It’s hard to tell which goes worse (“You disgust me!” on his business card vs. the gun flying out of his hands while he says it’s “just like Call of Duty”), but both entertain me to no end. When he finally proves his worth by neutralizing the tiger in an oddly Sandlot like moment, you can’t help but grin.
The third plot thread going through this episode was a check-in with Ellie and Awesome in Congo on their Doctors Without Borders jaunt, and it worked well at parts and didn’t at others. I thought it was interesting that Fedak and Schwartz seemed to take this opportunity to use variations on their camera work here as there was a lot of in shot zooming and zoom outs in the scenes set here. It was very cool. This bit also gave us a possible move back towards a central plot thread after a two episode burst of fun (if you can’t figure out who ties it in early on in the episode, you haven’t been watching Chuck very well) as well as the supremely hilarious Bantu name for Captain Awesome…which translates to “Doctor Super Fantastic White Person”. Now THAT is awesome.
Continued belowMusic was featured well as per usual, especially the usage of Miike Snow’s “Sans Soleil” in a bit of a montage towards the end of the episode.
What Was Bad: I had a kind of hard time with the Turners. I love Fred Willard and tolerate Swoosie Kurtz, but I never bought them as this super couple. We weren’t supposed to, but it just came across as weird that Chuck did. I know he wanted to learn from them, but it just seemed super odd to me that he saw something in them for pretty much the first half of the episode while Sarah was not biting at all. It all wrapped up a bit tidy too considering all of the double crossing going on.
I do have to say, after the last episode everything seemed a little bit less joyous. I’m not sure what it was, but it was like the honeymoon was over for Chuck and Sarah to a degree. Which I guess it was when you think about it.
The Doctors Across Borders bit seemed to wrap up too fast perhaps, as it looks like Ellie and Awesome will be back to Burbank next episode.
Overall: This was more of a slightly better than average one-shot episode, but something that does a lot in terms of improving the chemistry of the new and improved Team Bartowski. The budding relationships between the actual couple of Chuck and Sarah and the odd couple of Casey and Morgan continue to be the highlights that carry the events around them to higher highs than they’d likely reach otherwise. All in all, it was another enjoyable episode, but a definite step down from last week.
