This is it – what was supposed to be season finale, what is the conclusion of the Volkoff storyline, and the episode showrunners Chris Fedak and Josh Schwartz claimed features the ten best minutes of the series. Big words…does the episode live up to them?
Find out after the jump.
Synopsis: The operation to vanquish supreme evildoer Volkoff reaches dangerous new heights, as Sarah focuses on freeing Chuck’s mother and Chuck teams up with Morgan for a mission. Meanwhile, Casey connects with his daughter.
How Was It?: The first thing I want to say about this episode is it is bittersweet in a way. That way? The fact that the resolution of the season-long storyline comes with one of my favorite villains ever – Timothy Dalton’s Alexei Volkoff – leaving the show. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, because this guy is a hopeless romantic who has a battleship named “The Contessa” with an onboard ice cream parlor. He is pure awesome in human form, and Dalton made him come to life in each and every episode.
A bravura performance that I hope will get some love come Emmy time (but probably won’t).
Besides that though, I really enjoyed this episode. In particular, it was great to see Chuck really take hold of the situation and use his intelligence to take care of business. The whole plan to take out Volkoff was wonderful, and really worked in a clever way to tie every season of this show together. That it all culminated in a lovely sequence that left all of our favorites with happiness and a new status quo.
If I didn’t love this show so much and have so much faith in those who run it, I would have been perfectly happy for this show to end right there.
The deadly duo of Zachary Levi and Joshua Gomez were the leaders in the “holy crap, this ensemble is awesome” brigade this week, as Levi was given an opportunity to be the cunning leader of his own spy team – complete with a plan he hatched himself – and Gomez continues to be the glue of the show. While Chuck is the central point of the whole family, Morgan is in a lot of ways the one who brings their energy. Whether he’s helping Casey come to terms with liking Burbank and the idea of having a daughter or entertaining us with his yoga-infused laser dodging, Gomez has evolved this role into something that is far greater than the original iteration.
I think the only thing about the episode that really bothered me was the frenetic, poor man’s Passion Pit jam that played during the closing of this episode. While the moments themselves were great (particularly Chuck’s proposal and the execution on-screen), having this grating synth blast play over these emotional touchstones felt out-of-place.
Thankfully, we did get Jeffster! playing Salt n Pepa’s “Push It” to ramp up the musical awesome in the show (and it was even a surprisingly good rendition).
All in all, this was a really nice episode, and one that continues the quality this show pushes episode in and episode out. I’m very interested to see where the show goes from here, as everything seems right in the world for now. Thankfully, the previews look hilariously self-referential (“we need a bad guy!”), so it looks like the good will just continue on.
