Chuck – Now with “Awesome” spywork

Man, it feels like the new season of Chuck just started yesterday! Three hours of Chuck in two days is a lot. What’s even better is that yesterday’s Sunday night airing of Chuck earned the best ratings the show has seen since the 3-D episode that aired the day after the Super Bowl. With NBC dumping The Jay Leno Show, they’ve got five hours of scheduling back, so maybe NBC will reconsider the way they’ve been treating Chuck and give it an early fourth season nod. Maybe even realize the 8 PM ET Mondays time slot is a lot to blame for its ratings woes.

But enough about wild fantasies of a fourth season based on one night’s performance. Let’s talk about Captain Awesome, and how he both was and wasn’t in this episode.

When a TV series has to cut its budget to keep itself alive, you can often tell by a reduced number of sets and the fact that not all of the actors appear in all of the episodes. Chuck pulled a little of this by giving us an episode with no Buy More at all. Even Morgan, who’s now Chuck’s roommate, was nowhere to be seen.

Surprisingly, or maybe not, the show was still just as great without the Buy More influence. In fact, as Chuck goes more toward being a real spy, this blend might be a better fit for it. Certainly there were no dull spots. And with the humor focused entirely on the spywork, the show felt completely focused.

Of course, they’ve accomplished the same thing in other episodes with incorporating the Buy More gang, but that usually left Ellie and Awesome in the dark. Which means that either Chuck is trying to juggle too many things, or we should be grateful to have a show with so many storytelling avenues.

I love the idea of Devon/Awesome being so jealous of Chuck as a spy. He now has to lie to his wife about what Chuck does, which would appear to be difficult to him, but the fact that he so badly wants in on the action makes perfect sense with the arc of his character so far.

Tonight, he impressed everyone with his physical abilities, intelligence and even foreign language speaking skills, I have a feeling he might just get to do some more of this spy stuff. It never hurts to have a doctor on standby. Poor Ellie, though, if he does. As if she’s not confused enough already.

He did pull what I’m going to dub a “Chuck” tonight when he tackled Casey rather than the real assassin. Call it a rookie mistake. Maybe as Chuck becomes more capable, the idea is to have Captain Awesome take over the bungling role, though more from eagerness than Chuck’s general clumsiness.

There was an interesting political debate bubbling under the surface with Premier Goya’s arrival in the US to announce his country’s first open democratic elections. The US government had been trying to kill him for years due to his horrific dictatorship, but now they are trying to support his move toward democracy, so the gang is set to protect him.

This proves problematic for Casey, who was so effective a soldier and would-be assassin (save for getting the actual target) that he was dubbed the “Angel of Death” by Goya. Sometimes I can’t tell if Adam Baldwin isn’t giving us his best acting performance with this role, but other times I think he’s just playing blinding rage very, very well.

Everything Casey did from the moment Chuck began the operation to remove the bullet from his leg to his sucking on a vintage cigar he’d received from the Premier as a thank you for the blood transfusion was so stilted and staccato, but it could have just as easily been the rage that fuels him on a daily basis reaching a boiling point. Kind of like the rage my old English professors would have on looking at that last sentence, but I thought it was fun.

Even more fun is seeing the old gang back together. I like this new upgraded Chuck on the missions, as well. After two seasons of him bumbling along and barely staying alive week after week, it’s good to see him contributing to the mission in a productive way, while still maintaining the goofy naivete that makes the show work. Finally, a character progression that actually improves the show.

Another thing that’s working is the increased sense of danger. The Ring is a formidable foe, with a mysterious motive, and the threat to those around Chuck continues to rise. Emmett bit the dust last week, and as we saw this week, now Devon is in the line of fire.

The real question is how long they’re going to drag out the love/not-love thing between Sarah and Chuck. Carina saw it last night, and Ellie saw tonight that Sarah clearly still loves Chuck. I know she’s keeping it as “friends” for the sake of the Intersect 2.0, but that can’t last forever.

I guess I’m one of those people who don’t need seven years of unrequited sexual tension between the two leads in a television show to make me think it’s great. I like change and chaos and complications, and won’t things get complicated once these two kids start canoodling again.

Man, I can’t believe we’re already three episodes into the new season.  That means there’s only 16 episodes left! Will Devon survive? Can Chuck and Sarah stop the Ring? Tune in next week — same Chuck-time, same Chuck-channel!

Clacked by Jason Hughes
on Jan 11, 2010 @ 23:18 EST5EDT