Chuck - "Chuck Vs. the Hack-Off"

Season 5, Episode 5

Really? It’s only been five episodes so far? With three weeks off, it feel like it been a lot longer since Chuck premiered back in October, and that we should be further along in the season. Part of that is of course the show’s quickly approaching end date on January 27^th with a 2-hour finale, but I think a larger part of that is that the show packed so much plot into the first four episodes trying to reset the status quo from the season four finale that it initially seemed to be squandering the potential of the season five premiere. However, now that the show is done with the ridiculous “Morgan as the Intersect” arc, it finally seems to be settling into a much more enjoyable groove, and if the rest of the episodes can work like this, well then Chuck just might be able to go out strong after all.

I don’t want to give the illusion that this episode was perfect, or even a “classic”, by any means. At this point in the show’s run, Chuck has accumulated some flaws that just won’t seem to go away, and we just have to accept that. Perhaps the biggest flaw is that show’s inability to separate the missions from the emo moment, as over the years it’s become increasingly common for the show to this connection as a narrative crutch, as a way to make every minute of screen time appear narratively valuable.

And as much as this development bugs me, I have to admit that it’s one that sometimes works well. (Actually, I think it bugs me so much because it doesn’t work more often than it does.) And tonight it actually worked fairly well, once everything was all said and done. It helped that even though the show went to might least favorite place – Chuck and/or Sarah need to talk through their feelings on the mission because someone that they’ve run across has caused them to reexamine their current lot in life – this time it was building off of what has come before. There has been a strong (and important) recurring theme this season as to whether or not Chuck and Sarah are still meant for the spy life, and that has motivated a lot of their actions so far this season, so it makes sense for it to interfere on their mission (well, insomuch as it makes sense popping up during a mission at all.)

But what really made it work was Carrie-Anne Moss. Now, I had seen Moss in exactly two things prior to her appearance on this show – The Matrix Trilogy and Memento – so seeing her stretch her comedy muscles is a real treat. But I like that the show is using Verbanski not only as way to give Casey some lasting happiness finally (okay, happiness outside of his daughter), and how their using her to comment on Sarah’s relationship with Chuck. Verbanski is like a pre-Chuck Sarah on steroids, all badass and awesome, but incapable of confronting her actual feelings. Given that Moss is going away for a few episodes (or possibly all of them; I’m not certain of how many episodes she signed on for), I can’t pretend that the conversation between the two she-spies will mean all that much in long haul, but it worked here.

Unfortunately, I’m not entirely sure how I feel about Verbanski’s last essential action – blowing up Decker. Now, in the abstract sense, I like this. It not only expands this season’s mythology/Big Bad beyond Decker and onto the shadowy council that we saw on the premiere, but that closing show where Chuck and Sarah realize that they have to stay in the spy business in order to stop them was a nice gut-punch, and a solid payoff to all the emo conversations that had weaved throughout the hour. It both served to forward the story and raised the stakes in a believable way, so that now that the show has (hopefully) finally locked itself into the end game, we can get proper amounts of tension.

Or at least it would have. I started this review discussing how I found the first four episodes of the season to be giant misstep full of unnecessary plot machinations, and I think that busy nature robbed Decker’s of some of the oomph that I’m sure the show was going for. Was it a dark moment that shoed the dangers (both moral and physical) of Chuck and Sarah becoming involved with this conspiracy? Yes, but I think it would have made more of an impact if we had seen more of Decker and what he was capable of. It would have more of a “and you thought this guy was bad, well you ain’t seen nothin’ yet” kind of vibe. Yet we didn’t – and I don’t even think Decker appeared in all five of the episodes that comprised his “arc” – so it fell a bit flat for me.

But even despite all of these broader story strokes – which I mostly liked, despite some noticeable flaws – this episode was really helped out that a lot of what we saw was just plain fun, the likes of which this show sometimes forgets to do week-in and week-out. We got to see Lester become a shot-caller inside prison by hooking up all the inmates with cable and internet connections. Casey got to have a conjugal visits with Gertrude. Morgan and Jeff trick Lester into recanting his ways by hiring an actor (Danny Pudi!) to act as his exact replacement, and Morgan got to help Casey get out of prison as a way of apologizing for being such a douche under the intersect.

But most importantly, we got to see Chuck be effective at something again. Sure, seeing him get drunk off of wine in order to increase his hacking skills was fun in and of itself, but the real fact was that we got to see this previously unexplored skill that actually makes sense with the character. The show has waffled back and forth about exactly how effective Chuck is besides/without the intersect, and while that alone has often been cause for frustration, the fact that he’s always “effective” in the same ways – using porn to shut down a bomb in the pilot, doing the same thing with apple juice last season – makes for a pretty boring hero. (It’s actually because of the show’s waffling that I didn’t notice how similar his “big moments” were until this episode, so I don’t know if I should thank the show for that or not.)

But, despite all of these problems, I’m just glad to see that Chuck is on a straight and narrow path again, one that will seem to work in bringing the season to a close. Though considering I also said something similar about the last episode, maybe we should all just keep our fingers crossed, hmmm?

Quotes and Other Thoughts:

Seeing Danny Pudi was pretty awesome, but even better was the follow up appearance of Yvette Nicole Brown as another Buy More employee who may or may not have been attracted to his character. I’m glad the show was able to keep that one under wraps.

So, I’m pretty indifferent to “blurred out nudity” humor, but I did enjoy how the episode used it as a punchline when they were dragging Davis away and his robe falls down. And at this point, I have to ask: How much of that extreme pixilation was just the show being purposely cheesy, and how much of that was network mandated. I only ask because I know that Arrested Development’s use of the “whiting out” of body parts (as well as the hiding of swearing mouths with other body parts and background objects) was mandated by FOX, even as it felt like a natural outcrop of the show itself.

“We use to call this routine…’The Routine’.”

 “I’m in position to shoot any and all of these filthy hippies.” “It’s almost as if Casey never left.”

“Look at my face. You can’t tell I’m from Montreal, like all real Hinjews?”