Monday, March 14, 2011

Chuck: "Chuck Versus The A-Team"

Once I protest the fact that 100 mg doesn’t really make anything salty enough to be a substitute for sea water, I’ll offer up a review of tonight’s episode, after the jump…

Much like with my most recent Fringe review, I would like to start this one off with an apology of sorts: due to a hectic schedule the past few weeks, I have been unable to write up reviews for the past two episodes of Chuck.

Yet I must admit this wasn’t the only reason. I also wasn’t too wild about the past two episodes; while I liked the idea of Chuck being in some way responsible for a new villain (and I liked that the show seemed to be giving us a new big bad), the execution was off, and I felt Vivian’s transition to villain was far too easy. Admittedly, the show has struggled after “Chuck Vs. The Push Mix” to find its groove; given how great the show can be when it pushes all of its serialized elements to the breaking point, it’s not much of a surprise that the more standalone episodes tend to stall.

But tonight’s episodes seemed to provide a way forward, a model for how Chuck can work on a standalone basis. I’m not saying that the show should give up on its serialized elements – they are, for all intensive purposes, the best part of the show – but much like the seventh season of Buffy and the fourth season of Angel taught us, you can’t suddenly have all of your episodes deal with the larger story arc without consequences. And although season one worked on a fairly standalone basis, there was still the ongoing (at a times, annoying) possibility of a Chuck/Sarah romance, and coupled with tired spy plots, it lead to a fairly boring batch of episodes. But now that the show is sure of itself – in both its characters and its plots – it can finally return to these plots with superior results.

Over the past four-ish seasons, we have seen Chuck grow from a comedy with spy elements to spy show with comedy elements. And while this has been a welcome improvement, sometimes this move into seriousness has yielded negative results. When the show becomes too self-serious, or poorly executes a serious story – like it did in the past two episodes – then it just becomes laughable. So what is the show to do?

Well, let’s look at tonight’s case – that of the two new intersects, in both a male and female Greta (Isaiah Mustafah and Stacy Keibler) that we met earlier this season. While I wouldn’t call the idea of Chuck being replaced all that original – we’ve seen better spies take Chuck’s place before, and we’ve seen other people with the intersect in their head – but that’s what made this hour work. Without a serious case to steal all of the attention, the show was able to integrate its signature humor without becoming distracting. In short, this was the best mix of comedy and spy elements that the show has given in a long time. And the ending, while a bit too easy, it at least allowed the show to do one more thing – it showed once again that Chuck is special apart from the Intersect. Sure, this instance was perhaps too similar to the pilot, where Chuck took down a bomb via porn, I prefer this to any sort of implication that Chuck by himself is worthless.

Yet this also played in nicely with the ongoing narrative, surprising enough through the Ellie “subplot.” Though the introduction of Papa Bartowski’s secret laptop felt like a hackneyed plot device to get Ellie back into the action (and on some level it still is), by taking the laptop away from Ellie and then having it returned to her, the show has both heightened the tension – what is on that computer that makes it so valuable to the CIA, and so dangerous to Ellie – and it turns the laptop away from a plot device to an object of destiny.

Yet some of the attempts to tie all of this back in to the ongoing plot were a bit strained. First off, the idea that the Buy More was a training area for new Intersect agents and that Chuck somehow “helped” by highlighting the original program’s flaws reeks to high hell of ret-conning. And though I liked the idea of Ellie becoming involved in the spy world (because how often have you rolled your eyes at yet another highly irrelevant subplot), it was treated by perhaps a bit too much gravity, an amount that was a bit disjointed from the fairly lighthearted tone of the episode.

While I will never say this was a great episode of Chuck, for the first time a good while, an episode as slight as this didn’t feel like a waste. And while such as statement isn’t exactly high praise, when we realize that realistically not every episode can be great, we have to hope that at least all of them keep us entertained. And tonight’s episode did just that.

What did everybody else think?


Additional Thoughts:
How long has Chuck had that cigar store Indian in his apartment?

Christ, that Sienna plug was awful.

“Or we chop off Casey’s hand.” “Let’s keep that as out back-up plan.”

“Ugh. Sound like a CBS show.”

“I wonder if they have that fancy Greek yogurt in their kitchen.”

“What kind of name is Cia?”

“I saw the hurt locker, okay Casey? I know what happened to Guy Pierce.”

“Not to be crude, but you were talking about sex, right?”

Ellie has both a PHD and a MD? Why?

No comments:

Post a Comment