Chuck, "Chuck vs. the Role Models": Lady or the tiger?

A review of tonight's "Chuck" coming up just as soon as I loosely translate your nickname from Bantu...

"Dear God, it's us 30 years ago." -Turner
"Sarah, that's us in 30 years!" -Chuck

In recent years, cable dramas like "The Shield" and "Breaking Bad" have suggested that the 13-episode model of a cable season makes better creative sense than the traditional 22-episode broadcast model. When you have only 13 hours to play with, the argument goes, everything is plotted more tightly, there's no filler, and the cast and crew don't burn themselves out two-thirds of the way through each season.

The odd construction of this season of "Chuck," though, is suggesting that tighter isn't always better.

Going into the year, Schwartz, Fedak and company thought they only had 13 episodes to work with, and nearly all of that was devoted to telling the story of Chuck becoming a real spy, the arrival of Shaw and the war with The Ring. There simply wasn't room for goofy, largely standalone episodes like last season's "Chuck vs. Tom Sawyer" or "Chuck vs. the Best Friend." So if you were on board with the Shaw/Ring story, you were okay, but if you weren't, it was largely that week after week. Now, I liked the Shaw stuff a lot more than some of you, but I was worried about the lack of one-offs even before the season began, and there absence was noticeable as the original 13 went along.

With this bonus mini-season, we're sort of getting those little palate cleansers we otherwise might have gotten earlier in a regularly-planned season, just at the end. Until Ellie's friendly Doctors Without Borders pal was revealed to be a Ring operative in the episode's closing moments, this was the second "Chuck" in a row whose only ongoing elements were largely internal (Chuck and Sarah's relationship, Morgan's assimilation into Team Bartowski).

That's been a nice change of pace, as has the lighter tone of these two, and I suspect the creative team recognized how much better the show is when there's more balance between silly and serious, and between arcs and episodics. And if the show comes back next season, for however many installments, I would hope we see more of that give and take, because I have been having a lot of fun watching these last two.

As I had suspected, Sarah and Chuck as a couple have so far provided plenty of story fodder, as well as plenty of humor. I had long ago accepted that Yvonne Strahovski brought so much else to the table that it didn't matter that Sarah rarely seemed to be funny, but for the second week in a row, Strahovski was bringing the laughs. Sometimes, it was more about the characters around Sarah (Morgan and Sarah living under the same roof already is and should continue to be splendid), but other moments like her withering delivery of "You're not asking me to move in with you again, are you?" were all her.

Beyond Sarah being funny - and in a less blissful situation than we got last week on the train - the episode also gave us a tiger (which Chuck refused to kill because "They are endangered, and majestic!"), plus Casey reluctantly teaching spycraft to Morgan, plus Fred Willard(*) and Swoosie Kurtz as the bickering Turners.

(*) I watched a screener of this episode back-to-back with last week's "Modern Family," also guest-starring Fred Willard. The man is everywhere, and his ubiquity gives me an excuse to once again link to "Wha happen?"

Sometimes, "Chuck" casts guest stars for the iconography of them. Sometimes, with John Larroquette last season and Willard and Kurtz here, it casts them because they're funny. I don't know that I look at those two and automatically think Levi+Strahovski+(30 years x 2), but the two old pros played off each other, and off our regulars, quite nicely. And whether writer Phil Klemmer intended it or not, I like how the Turners' staged bickering tied into the fear some had that Chuck and Sarah together would eventually become a bickering couple with no obvious chemistry. Assuming "Chuck" is still somehow on the air 30 years from now (and we'd have to get some really big flash mobs today for that long an extension, methinks), we can worry about them down the road. Right now, they're doing fine, and "Chuck" is doing fine with them together.

For the second week in a row, we got a lot of Chuck and Sarah in one group of scenes and a lot of Morgan and Casey in another. I don't want this to be a permanent state of affairs - Casey needs to be more present in future missions to show his disgust with Chuck and Sarah's new schmoopiness, and, again, Morgan and Sarah look like a comic combo with a lot of possibilities - but right now it's entertaining to see them have to work together. In the silly world of "Chuck," the idea that neither Chuck nor Morgan would ever have to undergo any kind of real spy/combat training is about middle of the pack on the implausibility meter. But in watching the scenes with General Beckman, I get the sense that she has no expectations of Morgan ever amounting to anything; she's just making Casey suffer for forcing her to ever have to deal with the little bearded one. And that's amusing to me - as is Casey's attempt to balance his growing respect for Morgan ("Semper Fi-Dizzle!") with his public persona and usual hatred of nerds, dorks and geeks.

With Awesome again crossing paths with someone from The Ring (is this the third time this season? fifth?), it looks like we're heading back to both more serialized and more serious storytelling in the weeks to come. And that's okay, as I've loved a lot of the darker moments of seasons two and three. I just want there to be a balance, which we're finally getting during this little victory lap of season three.

Some other thoughts:

• This week in "Chuck" pop culture references: Morgan's dream sequence at the beginning was a riff on the opening credits to "Hart to Hart," a late '70s/early '80s detective show about a super-suave married couple who were still sexy and sleuthy in middle age. (Chuck should aspire to be more like Robert Wagner and less like Fred Willard.) Morgan once again talks about learning about guns through "Call of Duty" (then turns out to be inept with the real thing), and I suppose you could call the bad guy (played by Hey, It's That Creep! Udo Kier) keeping a tiger with a fancy collar a riff on Blofeld (who had a much smaller cat) from the James Bond movies.

• This week in "Chuck" music: songs tonight included Mel Torme's "Comin' Home Baby," Barry White's "I'm Gonna Love You Just a Little More Baby" and Miike Snow's "Sans Soleil."

• Unexpected quasi-trend: last week's "Cougar Town" had a running gag about Courteney Cox and her friends gathering to watch her son sleep, and here Big Mike complains to Morgan that he doesn't like anyone watching him sleep. We need one more for a full trend, people!

• With Morgan essentially filling the role Chuck had two seasons ago, I liked seeing Morgan and Chuck's collar-stealing attempts intercut with one another.

• Awesome and Ellie's story in the Congo was largely about setting up whatever's coming next with The Ring, but I thought Ryan McPartlin did a great job of showing Devon being so charming and reassuring with Ellie as he promised her a date night under the stars. Truly, he is Dr. Super Fantastic White Person.

Finally, as mentioned several times (including this morning), this is the last review that's going to be posted to this site before I move to HitFix.com tomorrow. I'll be blogging about the rest of season 3, and a lot of other shows, and hopefully "Chuck" season 4, so please come early and come often. Though the timing was largely accidental, it feels kind of right to say goodbye to this home with "Chuck," doesn't it?

What did everybody else think?

Chuck, "Chuck vs. the Honeymooners": Sarah smile

"Chuck" is back after a couple of weeks off, and I have a review coming up just as soon as I pretend to be Canadian to be well-liked...

"But off the record, it's about damn time." -General Beckman

What she said.

I wrote a bit about this episode in today's column - specifically, about how happy I was to see the show not only not miss a beat with Chuck and Sarah together, but be even more fun in a number of ways.

So rather than rehash that point - or note, as Fienberg talked about on last week's podcast, what a refreshing change it was to have an entire episode with Sarah looking happy - I'll try to go a little more in-depth about why "Chuck vs. the Honeymooners" worked so well.

After so much darkness earlier in Season 3.0 (much of it effective, some of it not), it was a welcome change of pace to have a straight-up romp(*) with the two crazy kids enjoying the hell out of each other's company, being turned on by the idea of fighting evil together, trying on ridiculous cover identities (and Yvonne Strahovski adding another convincing, albeit exaggerated, accent to her repertoire with her Texas gal character), lying to each other for a good reason (and with relatively low stakes, since everyone watching knew they'd wind up staying in the spy game, and together) and kicking very much butt together.

(*) One false note, which we get in lieu of the "Chuck" Plot Hole of the Week: the (offscreen) murder of the two Interpol agents who were sent to clean up Chuck and Sarah's mess. Death isn't normally out of place on "Chuck," but it felt that way in the midst of a very light episode - particularly since it was Chuck and Sarah's foolhardy actions that led to those two deaths. I wouldn't have wanted to stop the hijinx for some "Oh my god, we got those two men killed!" angst but I'd rather the two characters (whom we never met, anyway) had just been taken out of the picture in a different way. A nice beating would have sufficed.

Between the introduction of Chuck Fu and the arrival of Shaw, Sarah was unfortunately on the sideline for a lot of this season, so it was a pleasure to see her as an active, super-capable spy and kung fu fighter, and then to see Chuck fighting right alongside her, with the two even punching in unison when the handcuffs got involved. As the two fought one-armed, back-to-back in the final fight in the cafe, I made a note that it reminded me of season one's "Chuck vs. the Undercover Lover," where Casey beat up the bad guys with Chuck strapped to his back, even using Chuck against his will to knock a few of their opponents out. "Only here," I noted, "Chuck can fight, too."

And then, of course, moments later, we got a more direct recreation of that fight, only with Morgan taking the place of Chuck as the hapless nerd strapped to Casey. And that scene capped a wonderful episode for the unlikely new Casey/Morgan partnership, and lived up to the promise of Morgan joining Team Bartowski. I'm 100% on board with the producers' desire to have Chuck get better at the spy game (in part on his own, in part with the new Intersect), because if the character didn't grow, the same jokes would get lame and repetitive. But by throwing Morgan - whose own brand of nerditry is a bit different and more aggressively ignorant of spy stuff than Chuck's - into the mix, those jokes get a fresh new life. (Along with hilarious new jokes like Morgan's sub-eating ID photo or his super-secret crotch money pouch.) And it's also interesting to see Casey showing more respect for Morgan's contributions upfront than he was giving Chuck at this stage of Chuck's spy career. I suppose the writers have to do some more finessing to justify Morgan's gig since he doesn't have an Intersect in his head (and since being "the Intersect of Chuck" is only useful on occasion), but the idea that the little bearded dude's outsider perspective has value in spy world is a promising one.

And after Ellie and Awesome didn't get a farewell in what was originally going to be the end of the season, the characters get a better send-off - for now, as I suspect Chuck and Sarah will wind up on a spy mission to Africa within an episode or two - and even get serenaded by Jeffster! (Unplugged!) Any episode with a drunken Ellie being flanked by Jeff and Lester in turtlenecks and wire-rim glasses singing "Leaving on a Jet Plane" is overflowing with goodness, is it not?

Some other thoughts:

• This week in "Chuck" pop culture references, so many memorable thrillers have taken place on trains that I'm not even sure what to list first: "North by Northwest"? "Strangers on a Train"? "Murder on the Orient Express"? "Silver Streak"? Regardless, lots of great movies (or occasionally great, like "Silver Streak") take place on trains - including John Frankenheimer's great, simply-titled "The Train," which Matt Seitz has often argued was "Die Hard on a Train" 25 years early - and any or all should be in your Netflix queue (start with "North by Northwest," then "The Train"). Meanwhile, Jeffster!'s folkie look resembled early Simon and Garfunkel (even as they sang John Denver by way of Peter, Paul & Mary).

• This week in "Chuck" music: "Holiday" by Vampire Weekend plays over the opening montage of Chuck and Sarah spending an awful lot of time in their passenger compartment, Polyphonic Spree's "Light & Day/Reach for the Sun" plays as Chuck and Sarah resolve to not quit the spy game together, and Chuck puts on the seminal Nina Simone version of "Feeling Good" as his choice for what will become Sarah's favorite song.

• In addition to CIA's hysterical photo collage of Morgan, I loved the stern caller ID picture of General Beckman that Chuck had on his iPhone. In general, the show has a lot of fun with those pictures (I recall Devon's was one of him kissing his biceps, right?), and this was no exception.

• Speaking of phones, Sarah's sure got a thing against iPhones, doesn't she? She threw hers into the pool in the season premiere, then threw Chuck's out of the train here.

• And speaking of Devon's biceps, loved his explanation for why he would pack dumbbells on a trip to Africa: pointing to his splendid torso and explaining, "This didn't happen by accident."

Finally, in case you didn't see the news this afternoon, this blog will be relocating in a little over a week to HitFix.com. Assuming I get next week's "Chuck vs. the Role Models" in advance, that will be, somewhat appropriately, the subject of the last review on this version of the blog, and my write-ups of the season's final episodes will be over at HitFix.

What did everybody else think?

'Chuck' finds love, and is better for it: Sepinwall on TV

Haven't written about "Chuck" in the newspaper in a while, so I devoted today's column to previewing tonight's episode, in which Chuck and Sarah are finally together, and all remains awesome with the world.

Back tonight with a spoiler-y review covering some specifics of this one.

Chuck, "Chuck vs. the Other Guy": We'll always have Paris

A review of tonight's "Chuck" coming up just as soon as I mix gaming with whiskey...

"You're still Chuck. You're still my Chuck." -Sarah

And after tonight, "Chuck" is very much still my "Chuck," too.

As mentioned many times before, originally "Chuck vs. the Other Guy" was going to be the end of a 13-episode third season - and, depending on how things broke, could well have been the very last episode of the series. We now know that there are six more episodes to go this year, and that a fourth season is still quite possible (the ratings ticked up a couple of points last week, and I still believe NBC has too many holes to not renew, even if it's just for another abbreviated season), but if "Chuck vs. the Other Guy" had been the series finale? Well... I'd have been sad the show was over but pleased that it went out on such a strong note, with easily the best hour of the season, and one that's in my handful of favorites from the entire run to date.

Chris Fedak, Josh Schwartz and company set themselves quite a task in trying to make Chuck a more grown-up spy, and "Chuck" a slightly more grown-up show. There have been episodes this season that were full of fun ("Chuck vs. First Class," "Chuck vs. the Beard"), and episodes that were dark and emotional ("Chuck vs. the Nacho Sampler," "Chuck vs. the Tic Tac"), but the Fedak-scripted "Other Guy" was the first to successfully balance both tones throughout, leading to an hour that made me laugh as much as any this season, but that also made me very pleased about the character growth.

So we got the hilarious cut from Chuck having a kung fu flash to Chuck playing Guitar Hero in his underwear while Morgan lay on the floor, bound by electronics cords, but we also got Sarah dealing with the knowledge that she killed Shaw's wife. We got Jeff and Lester inviting Casey to join their crew (if not to join Jeffster! itself) and Big Mike asking Morgan if he'd be selling his body in his new job, but we also got Chuck finally, definitively getting his first intentional kill. We got that amusingly awkward confrontation with the Ring Director in the overcrowded elevator, but we also got Sarah finally expressing her love for Chuck - and, even better, got them finally, definitively, without any kind of outside complication, becoming a couple(*). And the hour moved fluidly between the fun and serious sides; a show shouldn't be able to work in jokes about The Clapper and Chuck ordering too much back-up while also putting its heroine through an emotional wringer and putting its goofy hero in a position to shoot a man to death and not have the shifts feel jarring, but "Other Guy" did exactly that.

(*) And in Paris, no less - which, since they were both there because of Shaw, became a nice payoff for Shaw making Chuck immediately fly home without seeing the city at the end of "First Class."

I said last week of "Chuck vs. the American Hero," that "This is the show I fought to save last spring," and that sentiment applies even more strongly to "Other Guy," which had everything I ask for in an episode from "Chuck," other than Captain Awesome (along with Ellie, a budget casualty this week) and a performance by Jeffster! (And if they don't rock out again in the back 6, someone's gonna have some 'splaining to do.)

In particular, I'm so glad we got the Chuck and Sarah scene on the floor of his apartment midway through the episode. Not only was it a moment the 'shippers had been waiting three years for (and, based on Sarah's comments on the timing of when she fell for Chuck - i.e., before the end of the pilot - she'd been waiting just as long), but I'm glad Sarah's feelings were addressed before the action on the streets of Paris. We knew from the end of last week's episode that Sarah chose Chuck over Shaw, and that was a big enough moment for the series that it deserved a spotlight separate from the later shenanigans with Shaw. If Sarah were to seemingly choose Chuck just because he saved her life, that would be lame (particularly since he's done it several times before). Sarah, and the show, needed to make it clear that she loved Chuck for being himself, so the final scene in the hotel room wouldn't be Sarah declaring that love for the first time, but letting Chuck know that she could ultimately accept a world in which he kills people on occasion. By letting Sarah choose Chuck in a calm moment, and not in the flush of being rescued from a classic damsel-in-distress situation, it gave Sarah back a lot of the agency she lost this season, even amidst an episode where she was completely helpless for the climax.(**)

(**) And I hope that, in addition to saying goodbye to Shaw and cementing Sarah and Chuck as a couple, this episode allows the writers to turn Sarah back into the assertive, ass-kicking woman we fell for right along with Chuck.

And I liked how the scene with Casey and Chuck on the airplane nicely paralleled the earlier Chuck/Sarah moment. Sarah admits that she liked Chuck way back when he was still a hapless, non-Chuck-Fu-enabled dweeb, and Casey gives Chuck a pep talk by noting that before he had either Intersect in his head, or three years of haphazard spy training, he was someone who was very smart, someone who could foil the bad guys with his lightning-fast label-making skills, who could save the world because he's very good at Missile Command, and here who could track down Shaw because he knew how to read expense reports and vacation requests. (And, since the Intersect 2.0 was on the fritz again due to Chuck's emotions, that perfect double-tap to Shaw's chest was all Chuck the gamer, not Chuck the cyborg.)

We can argue whether or not it was right for the show to go so far in the direction of trying to make Chuck into a "real" (as in traditional) spy, just as we can debate whether the Shaw story worked, and whether Chuck and Sarah's will-they-or-won't-they situation was dragged out too long. (Well, maybe not the last one; I think we're all in agreement that it should've been sooner.) But in the end, the show comes down on the idea of letting Chuck be Chuck, with the resurrection of the original Team Bartowski and the very promising addition of Morgan to the gang in some kind of capacity to be explained later. (And here filling the role Chuck did very early on, as the normal guy applying geek knowledge to spy world.)

Chuck and Sarah are finally together, Casey has his wings back, Morgan's (kind of) a spy and "Chuck" is again 100% fun. That would have been a damn fine note to close the series on. Instead, we get at least 6 more episodes, and maybe another season beyond that, and I hope whatever's coming next can build on the sheer entertainment value of these last two, and learn from some of the stumbles of Season 3.0.

Now excuse me while I hit the local Subway for a tunaroni, just in case.

Some other thoughts:

• Great work from all available castmembers this week, doing what they do best: Yvonne Strahovski playing the tragedy of Sarah (both in the warehouse and then at realizing Shaw wants to kill her in Paris) and the depth of her love for Chuck ("You saved me"), Adam Baldwin seething (and also showing Casey's realization that he likes not only Chuck, but Morgan), Joshua Gomez being over-eager but believable whenever Morgan turns out to be smarter than anyone assumes, Vik Sahay and Scott Krinsky being creepy, and Mark Christopher Lawrence being overly emotional and fatherly. And, of course, Zachary Levi managing to do a little bit of everything, and guiding the show through all the tonal shifts.

• This week in "Chuck" music: "Kettering" by The Antlers plays both as Shaw confronts Sarah in the warehouse and then again as Shaw dies on the bridge, and "Bye Bye Bye" by Plants and Animals plays over Chuck and Sarah's kiss in the hotel, and OMD's "If You Leave" is heard briefly during Chuck's long dark John Hughes night of the soul. And speaking of which...

• This week in "Chuck" pop culture references: Oh, a whole bunch. Chuck of course drowns his sorrows by listening to the music of and quoting from various John Hughes movies like "Breakfast Club," "Pretty in Pink," etc. (The correct version of the "Pink" quote, according to IMDb, is "You said you couldn't be with someone who didn't believe in you. Well I believed in you. I just didn't believe in me.") The business with Chuck demanding the Director produce his Ring Phone felt like a hat-tip to the "I have no gate key" scene from "The Princess Bride." Morgan can spot a fake fight scene due to his love (shared by Quentin Tarantino) of the works of Sonny Chiba. Morgan quotes Yoda in "Empire Strikes Back" when he tells Chuck, "No! There is another!" And the moment when Sarah and Chuck turn the Beckman laptop around so they can have an uninterrupted Parisian romp was reminiscent of how most of the Bond films with Roger Moore ended (case in in point: the final moments of "Moonraker").

• Also, in identifying the songs used every week, I don't want to give short shrift to the work of Tim Jones in composing the weekly score - which, like the rest of the show, does a nice job of balancing tones and paying homage to all the movies and shows that influence "Chuck." I particularly liked the music used as Shaw seemingly kills all the people on the elevator to save Sarah and Chuck.

• Bonita Friedericy has one of the most thankless jobs on the show, as she's there most weeks to give exposition and sign off abruptly. Perhaps as a reward for three seasons of this, Fedak gave her a lot of funny bits to play here, whether it was Beckman admitting an unsurprising fondness for Ayn Rand, Beckman waking up and using The Clapper to turn on her bedroom lights, or Beckman's complete misery at having to deal with the likes of Morgan Guillermo Grimes.

• I'll be curious to see if, having let Chuck kill (albeit under extraordinary circumstances), and having shown Sarah to be okay with it, the writers will let him do it more casually going forward. As some commenters have noted, Chuck's attitude towards killing hasn't quite been the Superman/Captain America approach of "killing is wrong, and if I or my allies have to kill to win the day, we've failed," but rather "killing makes me squeamish, but I'm perfectly fine letting my partner John Casey and the woman I love kill on my behalf." See, for example, Chuck and Sarah's exchange before they go down the elevator shaft. And much as I want to let Chuck be Chuck, that attitude seems more than a bit hypocritical and weak.

• I got a kick out of Casey kicking much Ring butt off-screen while Chuck faced down Shaw, but I wonder if this is it for this particular group. The Director has been captured, Casey reclaimed the Intersect plans (which were the whole point of the elaborate ruse with Shaw taking Sarah to the warehouse, and then pretending to kill the Director and steal the Cipher), and it's still not clear what the group was up to other than trying to build a new Intersect, which Fulcrum was already working on last year.

• Given what we know about the rules of pop culture and the "Chuck" writers' devotion to those rules, was there any way Sarah's hotel room wasn't going to have an Eiffel Tower view?

• Why does Casey need a new Crown Victoria? Did I miss it getting damaged in "Tic Tac"? Or is he just taking advantage of his bargaining power to get a more pimped-out model?

Remember: we get two weeks of repeats (I believe next week's is "Chuck vs. First Class") after this, and then Season 3.1 runs for 5 weeks straight beginning April 26, with the last two episodes airing back-to-back on May 24 - which will be a week after NBC announces its schedule for next season. So unlike last year, we'll go into a "Chuck" finale knowing for sure if it's the end of the line or just a pause for a few months.

What did everybody else think?

Chuck, "Chuck vs. the American Hero": Love is a battlefield

A review of tonight's "Chuck" coming up just as soon as I fill out a pair of slacks...

"What are you even doing here?" -Sarah
"I'm here for you." -Chuck

"Chuck vs. the American Hero" was designed to be the penultimate episode of "Chuck" season three, before NBC ordered six more episodes. And as such, comparisons will be inevitable to season two's next-to-last installment, "Chuck vs. the Colonel." "American Hero" actually holds up better to the comparison than I would have thought - it's one of the strongest episodes of this season, up there with "Chuck vs. the Beard" and "Chuck vs. the Tic Tac" - but it does illustrate some of the larger flaws that have kept season three as a whole a notch or two below last year.

Some of the problems couldn't be helped, like the reduced budget. It's kept the supporting characters shuttling in and out (which becomes particularly noticeable in contrast to an episode like this that features everyone but Big Mike and uses all the characters well), and it's reduced both the scope of the story and the coolness of some of the action. "Colonel" climaxed with a bunch of planes bombing the hell out of Ted Roark's would-be Intersect army at the drive-in; here, we get a lone stealth bomber dropping a single bomb on a small warehouse, creating an explosion so small that Sarah, Chuck and Shaw are unharmed standing only a few feet away.(*) Meanwhile, Chuck's commando assault on the Ring base went fairly quick and easy (even if it was supposed to be a temporary place set up to mess with Shaw, you still would have seen more bad guys and/or a longer fight scene a year ago). I appreciate that they don't have the money to work with that they had last season, but it's been unfortunate and noticeable.

(*) That lack of scale, coupled with the fact that until this week the group never seemed to do anything but try to kill Shaw, has led to The Ring thus far seeming less imposing than Fulcrum, even though we keep being told it's the much bigger, more dangerous threat.

But I also think there have been a few miscalculations on the part of Schwartz, Fedak and company. Shaw has been a misfire, less because he's been an obstacle to Chuck and Sarah getting together than that he's been an obstacle to Team Bartowski working well together. It's not a coincidence that two of the season's stronger outings ("Nacho Sampler" and "Tic Tac") both had Shaw absent so we could watch our three leads interact. Even if they weren't all getting along splendidly (Sarah didn't approve of Chuck's handling of Manoosh in "Nacho Sampler," and Casey was rogue for much of "Tic Tac") the three actors/characters have such chemistry and such history together that Shaw often seemed like a buzzkill.

I had begun to hope, like some of you, that Shaw was going to be revealed as a Ring mole, and/or that Sarah - whose character arc this season has at times been compelling, and at others felt like it was serving the whims of the plot - was playing him to find out. Instead, it turns out that what we saw with Shaw was what we got, but also that Shaw's obsession with avenging his wife's death was so great that he's now looking to do something very bad to Sarah, who doesn't realize that Shaw's wife was the victim in her own "red test."

But if the way things ultimately played out don't give Sarah back some of the agency her character has lost this season, it at least sets us up for what I hope will be a very strong close to Season 3.0, with Chuck having to save Sarah from Shaw - and, maybe, get his first kill for real in the process?

What was so satisfying about "American Hero," though, is that Chuck has already defeated Shaw in one way: he got Sarah back.

Sure, there's still the matter of rescuing her from Shaw's insane clutches, blah blah blah, but the woman made her choice. She was packing a bag, and I feel confident her destination was going to be Union Station even before Casey stopped by to confess to killing Hunter. Chuck (sometimes with the aid of the Bizarro Team Bartowski of Casey, Morgan and Awesome, sometimes by himself) put on such a charm offensive with Sarah and got to be a more overt hero in carrying Shaw out of the exploding building (remember, Sarah has a type) and laid his heart bare for her about the train station(**) and their future together that she had to have thrown in her lot with our man. The smile on Yvonne Strahovski's face when Casey told Sarah the truth didn't so much read as "Yay, now I get to change my mind," but "Yay, I made the right call."

(**) In a bit of symmetry from the season premiere conversation in Castle about meeting at a train station.

So, in effect, Chuck and Sarah have finally chosen each other at the same time, and all that's holding it up is a temporary plot complication (Shaw's desire to kill Sarah) rather than a character one. Whatever missteps the creative team may have made, they're not stupid enough to end what was supposed to be the whole season with Chuck and Sarah still not together. I don't know everything in life, but I feel very confident in this.

And we can argue not only about whether this took too long, but about whether the characterizations were consistent (I, frankly, would have liked some clarification on whether Sarah was simply turned off by Chuck-as-killer, or if she felt guilty that she had helped make him into one), about whether there's been too much focus on the relationship, not enough, whether the darker tone worked, whether the government would really risk the Intersect as a run-of-the-mill spy, etc., etc., etc.

But here's the thing: when "Chuck" is good - and budget issues aside, "Chuck vs. the American Hero" was very good - all the questions and complaints have a way of not mattering as much. I don't mind the plot holes (though I will still list some of them below), nor the idea that certain character or story arcs haven't played out as smoothly as anyone might have liked. When I watch a sequence like Chuck making his move at the restaurant while Bizarro Team Bartowski attempts to back his play from the van - with Morgan and Awesome(***) both accidentally saving Shaw from being kidnapped - or when I watch Jeff and Lester prove their epic stalking powers to Chuck, or when Chuck keeps saying "I love you" to Sarah just because it feels nice to say, everything else goes out the window. This is the show I fought to save last spring, and even if parts of this season have been bumpy, I can deal with those bumps when we get to moments like the ones that we got in abundance in "American Hero."

(***) I thought it was a very nice touch to have Devon once again mistakenly tackle the good guy, just like he did to Casey in "Chuck vs. the Angel De La Muerte" - only for it to mostly work out here.

One episode to go of this original batch of 13, then two weeks off for repeats (which should coincide with some time off I'm supposed to take in early April), then Season 3.1 starts. I'm assuming next week's semi-finale will clear the decks of a lot of elements from 3.0, and I can't wait to see what the team has in store for the final push. And I'll sweat renewal later.

Some other thoughts:

• I always enjoy those rare instances of General Beckman interacting with Chuck one-on-one, in person, because she has much less patience for his "process" than Casey or Sarah do. I still have a hard time believing that, even with the Intersect 2.0, anyone considers Chuck qualified to be a spy, but it was at least smart to suggest he'd have his own team around him (even if said team almost certainly wouldn't include either Morgan or Casey).

• Also, I kind of wish that Morgan didn't have a selfish reason for wanting to help Chuck. I know it created a thematic symmetry with Casey and Awesome, and I also get that Morgan's life would be extremely empty without Chuck in it, but at the same time, I like those moments where Morgan just has Chuck's back because that's what best friends do.

• This week in "Chuck" plot holes: a bunch to choose from, but primarily that Beckman would be willing to send a bomber into a civilian neighborhood with no more intel than that Shaw's tracker had stopped moving for a while and gone underground. That's more a hole in Shaw's plan than in Beckman's reasoning, I suppose, but either way, the idea seemed awfully thin. Anything could have been happening at that bunker. (And what, for that matter, would have happened if Chuck hadn't picked up the tracker and it had remained under the overpass? Would the military have blown up a bridge by mistake?) Also, what happened to the fellowship Ellie got that was going to force Devon to abandon his Doctors Without Borders scheme? And while I understand Devon spending the night in jail, what exactly were Morgan and Casey charged with? And why does the Castle electrical grid somehow affect one of the displays at the Buy More? And how does Casey get back into Castle so easily, when presumably the access codes got changed after Beckman gave him his burn notice? And if Shaw's wife was killed five years ago, are we supposed to believe Sarah had only been an agent for two years when she met Chuck?

• This week in "Chuck" music: only one song (bizarre for a Josh Schwartz show, I know), with The Temper Trap's "Down River" playing both as Chuck invites Sarah to meet him at Union Station, and again as Casey tells Sarah the truth about who really shot Hunter.

• This week in "Chuck" pop culture references: Morgan's "Love is a battlefield" line is, of course, a reference to the iconic early '80s Pat Benatar song and video, and the "Dr. Jibb" soda machine as entrance to the Ring underground HQ could be read as yet another "Spies Like Us" homage, as the military guys accessed their own base via the Pepsi machine at an abandoned drive-in.

• This week in recognizable "Chuck" guest stars: sci-fi/action-caper show Hey It's That Guy! Mark Sheppard played the mysterious Ring director, while Roger Cross (one of Jack Bauer's longer-serving sidekicks on "24") was Sheppard's henchman.

• Ellie hasn't been a particularly well-serviced character this year, and at times comes across as way too controlling about Chuck's life, but her speech to Chuck about getting Sarah back - "You're a Bartowski, Chuck. Start acting like one." - was a very nice moment for Sarah Lancaster.

• Ultimately, Casey's refusal to let Chuck tell Sarah what happened at the train station wasn't that satisfyingly resolved. They needed to show some kind of Chuck/Casey interaction later in the episode where we saw Casey change his mind, and/or his conversation with Sarah needed to come across like a much bigger gamble than it ultimately became. Casey knows Sarah well enough to know she would never tell anybody else, so his earlier reluctance just became another plot device - albeit one that put Casey in a van with Devon and Morgan, so I'm okay with it.

• My head scratched when I saw the subtitle pointing out "DNI" headquarters, until I noticed a comment in last week's discussion that referred to Beckman working for the "Department of National Intelligence." Have we ever heard this name/acronym before? When the series started, Casey and Beckman were NSA, Sarah and Graham (Tony Todd) were CIA, and Operation Bartowski was a joint agency task force. Did I miss some administrative change after Graham blew up in the season 2 premiere?

• I pointed to the flash-grenade scene from "Chuck vs. the Beard" as an example of rookie director Zachary Levi showing off a bit too much, but veteran director Jeremiah Chechik largely went with the same style for the flash-grenade scene here, so either that was something other forces (maybe the DP?) cooked up in "Beard," or else Chechik liked it enough to make it part of the series' house style.

• Interesting: Chuck can shoot someone (with a tranq gun) without having to flash. Is the "Duck Hunt" really paying off, or are some of the Intersect skills starting to become part of Chuck's muscle memory?

• If Jeff is, indeed, the Picasso of creepiness, and this is his blue period, would you pay to own any of his work?

Finally, everybody did a great job of staying civil and rational in discussing the episodes after the Chuck-pocalypse that was "Chuck vs. the Mask," but last week we got into the crazy/obnoxious territory again, and I had to delete some comments. Let me remind you one more time of the single most important part of the commenting rules: Be nice. TALK ABOUT THE SHOW, NOT EACH OTHER. If you can't find a way to disagree without attacking the people who disagree with you, DO NOT COMMENT.

This shouldn't be hard, and I appreciate that for most of you, it's not. But for the small handful of you who are having trouble here, please relax, or else find some other place to discuss the show.

What did everybody else think?

Chuck, "Chuck vs. the Final Exam": The Kobayashi Maru

A review of tonight's "Chuck" coming up just as soon as I put some new feathers on you...

"It looks like you're going to get everything that you always wanted." -Sarah

"Chuck vs. the Final Exam" was written back at a point when it would be the 11th out of 13 hours this season, not 11th out of 19. Schwartz and Fedak have said the original 13 episodes more or less continued to be produced as an intact unit, so this is the point when the original season arcs really start kicking into gear, as Operation Bartowski appears to come to an end: Chuck passes his final spy test (albeit with secret, illegal help from Casey), Sarah prepares to move to Washington with Shaw (definitely as colleagues, and possibly as more), and Casey has to mostly embrace civilian life (even as he makes time for a bit of freelance killin' on Chuck's behalf). And after a few months of hemming and hawing, Chuck and Sarah finally have a moment where both are interested in discussing their feelings at the same time, and preparing to kiss each other, when work again gets in the way, first with Shaw's radio call(*), then with Sarah's mistaken belief that Chuck has become a killer - and become it for her.

(*) At least this interruption felt natural and part of the plot, as opposed to Sarah arbitrarily changing the subject on Chuck last week.

In order to get the characters to these big crossroads, Zev Borow's script has to throw in more than your usual fair share of "Chuck" plot contrivances. Chuck, for instance, gets placed in a no-win scenario: either he passes the test and is assigned away from Sarah (and, whether he's entirely aware of it or not, completes his transformation into someone Sarah feels she can't love anymore), or he fails and... what? Becomes a civilian with no government oversight, in spite of having a souped-up Intersect in his head? (Whatever happened to the days when Beckman was ready to have Casey put a bullet between Chuck's eyes rather than let him "retire"? And this was back when Chuck wasn't half as dangerous as he is now.) Wouldn't there be talk about the team reverting back to its old configuration, with Sarah and a killer-to-be-named-later as handlers and Chuck waiting in the car?

And, of course, you have to swallow a lot to believe Casey would just let his cover job at the Buy More become his new career, as opposed to becoming a mercenary or security specialist or some other far more lucrative and exciting profession that takes advantage of his propensity for a bit of the old ultra-violence. That he follows Chuck on his final exam and kills the bad guy for him suggests that he really does care about Chuck and can't quite bring himself to leave, but all his earlier scenes at the Buy More are written (and played by Adam Baldwin) as if Casey has no idea what he's supposed to do next with his life.

(A few readers last week wondered if perhaps Casey's situation was like Michael Westen's on "Burn Notice," where he's basically cut off from the military-intelligence community. If so, I would absolutely watch a Baldwin-centric spin-off with Casey stuck at the Buy More while being a vigilante-for-hire and trying to find a way back in from the cold. And in lieu of Michael's voiceover narration, each episode could be liberally sprinkled with Casey Facts.)

But if I had to suspend my disbelief more than usual, it was worth it. "Chuck vs. the Final Exam" continued this terrific post-Olympics run, providing suspense (will/did Chuck kill Hunter?), romance (Chuck treating Sarah to the world's most romantic stakeout, with plenty of callbacks to season one's "Chuck vs. the Sizzling Shrimp"), and comedy (Big Mike mentors Casey the interim Ass Man).

After Sarah has been frosty towards Chuck for so much of the season, a scene like the stakeout-cum-date was a very potent reminder of Zachary Levi and Yvonne Strahovski's chemistry, and why so many fans are pulling for these crazy kids to make it work. Ditto the scene at Union Station, where Chuck is all psyched up for a romantic night with the woman of his dreams, only for Sarah to crush those dreams (and in turn to be crushed when Chuck appears to go through with the assignment). Some really high-caliber work done by both leads in both those scenes.

And if the two seem further away than ever at episode's end, I've got faith that these last two episodes of season 3.0 are going to finally bring these two crazy kids together for more than interrupted make-out sessions so shippers and non-shippers alike can live in peace and harmony and the show can move on to its next great dilemma: like how to get Team Bartowski back together, and specifically how to get John Casey his colonel's eagles back.

Casey's interruption during Chuck's red test complicates matters for both him and Chuck. Casey, of course, has now committed murder without any kind of government-issued license to kill to cover him, but I'm also not sure what kind of favor he did Chuck - at least, assuming Beckman wasn't going to order Chuck's death again. If the job Chuck is training for requires the ability to kill from time to time, and Chuck still can't bring himself to do it (both of his "kills" from season two were accidents)... well, isn't Casey just setting Chuck up to fail - or, worse, get himself killed because his opponents will have no such compunction?

But I'm sure the writers thought that problem through, even if Casey didn't, and Chuck's continued skittishness about homicide will play an important role in these next two episodes. And I'm hopeful that the spy stuff will be as much fun as it was here, with Chuck busting out the kung fu in a steam bath, and winding up nude on a hotel balcony to get a good look at the bad guy. ("I am a naked spy!")

Again, the idea of Casey choosing continued employment at the Buy More is pretty goofy, even by "Chuck" standards, but as we saw with the Casey/Morgan team-up in "Chuck vs. First Class," Casey having to carry out actual Buy More duties is a comedy goldmine. And the stakes are even higher here because, at the moment, Casey doesn't seem to have a real job to fall back on if he can't stop himself from punching Lester.

Where Jeff and Lester were mostly harmless in the first two seasons (give or take Lester's brief turn as Ass Man, and various scams), the duo have become much more antagonistic towards our heroes (Morgan included) this season, and it's been a very smart use of Vik Sahay and Scott Krinsky. Their sheer delight at forcing Casey to eat Jeff's sandwich while Lester lists all the places Jeff's mouth could have been ("fire hydrants!") was hilarious, as was Baldwin playing Casey's struggle to follow Big Mike's teaching.

Two more episodes from what was the original season 3 run, then two weeks off for reruns, then Season 3.1 kicks off in late April. Based on how the show's been bringing it lately, I'm very excited.

Some other thoughts on "Chuck vs. the Final Exam":

• This week in "Chuck" music: Hall & Oates' "Private Eyes" (Chuck puts it on the iPod during the stakeout, just as he used it in a stakeout mix in "Sizzling Shrimp"), "Permalight" by Rogue Wave (Sarah invites Chuck to dinner at Union Station) and "In My Sleep" by Austin Hartley-Leonard (Sarah tells him that he has to kill Perry).

• This week in "Chuck" pop culture references: Anatoly's cover name is Ivan Drago, who was, of course, the steroid-abusing, Apollo Creed-killing commie bastard villain of "Rocky IV." Two Drago clips for ya: his catchphrase and Rocky and Drago's training montage, scored to the not-at-all-dated-no-matter-what-you-say sounds of John Cafferty & the Beaver Brown Band.

• The supporting cast availability is flip-flopped from last week, with Morgan, Ellie and Awesome absent, and Big Mike and Jeffster! back in the fold.

• Two weeks ago, we got our first Subway sandwich sighting of the season, and here, we go whole-hog, with a long scene set at the mall's Subway shop, complete with Jeff ordering his own creation (the Tunaroni), and Big Mike uttering what should be the chain's new slogan: "Subway can soothe the tummy and the soul."

And speaking of one-time "Chuck" savior Subway, many people (including Josh Schwartz) were very concerned when the show's ratings last week dropped 17% from the week before, even though the CBS comedies were in repeats and ABC was in between "The Bachelor" and "Dancing with the Stars." You can pin most of the blame on Daylight Savings Time, since it's been a trend in recent seasons that nearly every show (particularly shows in the 8 o'clock hour) suffers when DST begins, because people are staying out longer and watching less TV. On the same night, "House" was down a similar amount.

The difference, of course, is that "House" can stand to lose 17% of its audience a lot more easily than "Chuck" can. I still believe NBC's problems are too big and widespread for "Chuck" to not come back next year, even if it's just as cannon fodder until other parts of the schedule can stabilize. (If they try to come back in the fall with a schedule that's primarily composed of new shows, they're gonna get killed.) But I could certainly say that with more confidence based on the ratings circa "Chuck vs. the Beard" than I could after last week's numbers. A fan campaign like last year's isn't going to work again. All that matters at this point are two numbers: the ratings the show pulls over the rest of the season, and the license fee Warner Bros. is willing to agree to for a fourth season. All we can do is watch (and encourage anyone we might know with a Nielsen box to watch), wait and hope.

What did everybody else think?

Chuck, "Chuck vs. the Tic Tac": Hard Casey

A review of tonight's "Chuck" coming up just as soon as you forgive the intrusion and condescending tone...

"Sometimes, your dream job isn't always what you expect it to be." -Chuck

After the romp that was last week's "Chuck vs. the Beard," the series is back in darker territory this week. And that seems appropriate, for our first real spotlight of the season on Colonel John Casey. Or should we call him Lieutenant Alexander Coburn? Or, since he ends the episode stripped of his rank and government job, just John Casey?

Whatever you call him, John Casey is both a stone killer and a man not comfortable dealing with his own feelings. So an episode in which he was forced to confront some old feelings for the woman he left behind to become that killer was a great showcase for both the character and Adam Baldwin. In many ways, in fact, I found "Chuck vs. the Tic Tac" even more satisfying than the hijinx and revelations of "Beard."

For one thing, we got our first really kick-ass action sequences of the season. It's not that the fights in past episodes (many of them involving Chuck rather than Sarah or Casey) have been bad, but they've lacked the spark that we saw in some of season two's best fights, like Sarah fighting Nicole Richie in the showers or Sarah in the car.

Here, we got a couple of cool action sequences: first Sarah dropping down from under Casey's car to whup some ass while Casey tossed Robert Patrick's Keller around (and snapped his neck one-handed), and then Chuck finally harnessing all the combat potential of the Chuck Fu, mastering several disciplines at once and even dodging bullets at close range like Chun in "Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins."

But cool action alone does not a cool "Chuck" episode make. It needs comedy, and drama, and a focus on the characters, and "Chuck vs. the Tic Tac" had all of that.

We seem to get one Casey spotlight a season, with "Chuck vs. the Undercover Lover" in season one, "Chuck vs. the Sensei" last year. The previous two gave us small pieces of the puzzle that is John Casey, but "Tic Tac" gave us a very good view of the picture, as we learn that Sarah isn't the only member of Team Bartowski to be using a fake name, nor the only one who was forced to choose between love and country and chose country.

Seeing Casey hold a gun on Chuck in the middle of a mission is a darker place than the show usually goes, but Baldwin and Zachary Levi sold it, as did Yvonne Strahovski in the scene where Chuck (mistakenly believing the whole thing was another test) blurted out Casey's secret and Sarah realized she was going to have to place her partner under arrest (or worse).

And as often happens in some of the show's strongest episodes (see also "Chuck vs. the Colonel"), the members of Team Bartowski go off the reservation to help one another. Because of the iciness between Chuck and Sarah, the complications of the Intersect 2.0 and the presence of Shaw (conveniently absent this week, since his presence would probably have made it much harder for Sarah and Chuck to help Casey), our heroic trio haven't had quite the chemistry they had in previous seasons, so it was nice to see them all (eventually) working together towards a common purpose - even if the episode ends with Casey being removed from the team.

(And Casey as a reluctant civilian is an idea with a lot of potential, I think, whether or not he can work up the nerve to go see his fiance and the daughter he never knew he had and tell them who he really is.)

And while Casey's story was fairly dark, "Tic Tac" wisely got its comic relief by following up on Morgan's discovery of Chuck's secret identity - and then of Morgan and Awesome each realizing the other is now in the circle of trust. The degrees of involvement are slightly different - Devon's been on missions, while Morgan knows about the Intersect(*) - and Morgan is so far handling it much better than Devon, but each has plenty of potential to cause problems (and then solve some of them) for the real spies. Devon mistakenly tackled Casey during the Costa Gravas embassy party, and here Morgan helps out Casey on what he thinks is official business, but he also gives Chuck several crucial pieces of information (plus the pill itself).

(*) And I hope like heck that Chuck told Morgan this important distinction. Plenty of civilians and bad guys have learned about Chuck being Agent Charles Carmichael, but Morgan's the only outsider to know about the Intersect. Him slipping on that could be catastrophic.

There were a few eye-roller moments in this one, to be fair. All of Sarah's fear about what the emotion-dampening pill will do to Chuck never amounts to anything, as the thing's effects wear off before he can kill one of the bad guys, Casey-style(**). (And if the pill really is just temporary, it's therefore the kind of thing Chuck needs to keep a bottle of on his person at all times). Devon flip-flops on wanting to get the hell away from Chuck with no real chance for us to see him make that decision; I get that he loves Ellie, but his love (and fear) for her was one of the reasons he wanted to leave in the first place. And the moment in Castle where Sarah quickly changed the subject when Chuck tried to tell her about his feelings was a definite groaner (again, not because I need them to be together, but because moments like that, like certain moments on "Lost," just scream that the writers are stalling a bit because they need to).

(**) UPDATE: Several commenters have convincingly argued that it wasn't that the pill wore off so much as it was Chuck's love for Sarah pulling him back from the precipice. In which case, nice moment, show.

Overall, though, "Chuck vs. the Tic Tac" was another really strong episode of this post-Olympics run. Should there be a fourth season (and right now, the ratings have been steady enough, and NBC's problems elsewhere big enough, that I feel pretty good about that), I'd like to see Casey get more than his one token episode a year. Baldwin's too good, and the character's too rich, to just be the guy who grunts and says kiss-off lines as he beats people up.

Some other thoughts on "Chuck vs. the Tic Tac":

• This week in "Chuck" music: "You Know You Want It" by Green Go (Chuck sees Casey steal the pill), The Maids of Honor's "Black and Blue" (Chuck takes the pill as Keller's agents pour into the house), and "Swim Until You Can't See Land" by "Chuck" favorite Frightened Rabbit (the final montage).

• This week in "Chuck" pop culture references: whether or not Chuck's bullet-dodging was a "Remo Williams" homage, I have to believe that ending an Adam Baldwin spotlight episode with Sarah taking a cab in Washington, DC was a reference to one of the stranger movies in the Baldwin filmography: "DC Cab" - the only film in which you can expect to find Mr. T, Irene Cara, Gary Busey and a young Bill Maher. Here's a clip. He looks so young and innocent, doesn't he?

• Does the timing of Alex Coburn becoming John Casey in 1989 contradict the bits of Casey backstory we got in "Chuck vs. the Angel De La Muerte"? Back then, I read the comments as Casey having tried to kill Goya throughout the '80s; could we read it as the Angel De La Muerte thing having originated in his Coburn days? Then again, the actor playing Coburn looked younger in '89 than even Baldwin looks in that "DC Cab" clip (from '83), so... ?

• Robert Patrick didn't get a ton to do as Keller, and with Casey wisely offing the guy, we're not going to see him again. But this is a good example of the show's guest star philosophy (adopted after Kevin Weisman played the poisoner in season one) in action: because it's Patrick, who can play this kind of role in his sleep (and who spent four years playing a version of it on "The Unit"), Keller didn't need much sketching in. You see Robert Patrick, you go, "Oh, got it," and the show moves on and spends more time on material with the long-term characters.

• Nice touch of making security designer Fitzroy a Charles Carmichael fanboy - and smart that they didn't push the joke too far. Too much meta humor can be a dangerous thing.

• This was the first episode written by new writing team additions Lauren LeFranc & Rafe Judkins (who, as I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, was both a "Survivor: Guatemala" contestant and the name inspiration for "Chuck vs. the Fake Name" assassin Rafe Gruber).

• After last week's episode had the full cast for the first time all season, we're back to a partial complement, with Big Mike, Jeff and Lester absent. Schwartz and Fedak said they tried to distribute the appearances so they'd have more people available later in the season. So I'm hopeful that we'll have the whole ensemble (or close to it) in most of the remaining episodes.

What did everybody else think?

Chuck, "Chuck vs. the Beard": Do you hear the people sing?

A review of tonight's "Chuck" coming up just as soon as I hear the sound of liberty...

"My best friend is a spy? This is unbelievable. This is the best news I've ever heard!" -Morgan

I'm absolutely on-board with the darker direction "Chuck" has taken this season. If the characters don't grow and the stakes don't get raised, then we might as well be watching repeats from season two.

But for one week, "Chuck" was back to being 100% fun - even in the midst of an episode with a huge status quo change and a chilling cliffhanger - and it was a pleasure to watch.

Because Morgan is Chuck's best friend, he seemed like an obvious choice to be the first civilian to find out about Chuck's secret identity. Instead, the show zig-zagged and let Captain Awesome in on the truth, and got some very good comic and dramatic mileage out of Devon struggling to reclaim his awesomeness in the face of entering this dangerous new world. And once Awesome found out, it seemed like we had missed our window for the little bearded one to also join in.

Instead, Morgan Guillermo Grimes became an unofficial member of Operation Bartowski in the most raucous way possible, helping Chuck foil the siege of Castle and giving his best friend back his mojo by providing him a sympathetic ear to listen to. Awesome's no good because he's too busy freaking out, Casey's not exactly empathetic, and Sarah and Shaw are useless because they're causing so much of Chuck's emotional turmoil. So bringing Morgan into the circle of trust, and that in turn leading the Intersect 2.0 to come back on-line (and finally help Chuck use the bo staff that caused him so many difficulties back in "Chuck vs. the Three Words") felt perfect, as did Morgan's ecstatic reaction to greeting Sarah and company outside the Orange-Orange freezer. I had a smile roughly the size of Morgan's for the entire second half of "Beard," going back to when Morgan first followed the bad guys into the Castle tunnels.

And I loved how, even within the revelation, the show again zigged where I expected a zag. We were being set up for Morgan to feel hurt and betrayed at the news that Chuck kept this enormous secret from him, but instead was both relieved to get a good explanation for all of Chuck's shadiness, and happy for his friend that Chuck is doing something, well, awesome.

It's hard to remember now, but at the start of the series, Morgan was easily the least-popular regular character, always getting in the way of Chuck's missions and generally being mopey and weird. When the show came back for season 2, Schwartz, Fedak and company figured out that the character worked much better when he was supporting Chuck (even when he didn't realize he was). Letting him in on Chuck's secret, and making him excited about it - accepting that, while he's never destined for greatness, he can assist in Chuck's greatness - was a wonderful continuation of that trend, and an outstanding showcase for Josh Gomez.

I particularly liked that period in between when Morgan discovered Castle and when he learned about Charles Carmichael. It would have been really easy to play it as Morgan acting smug and superior to what he thought was his cowardly pal Chuck, but Gomez low-keyed it. You can't say he reacted the way a real person would in that situation, because "Chuck" is frankly so ridiculous - and the Buy More corner of "Chuck" even more ridiculous - that reality doesn't really figure into it, but within the show's universe, I believed that this is how Morgan would react, and that he'd try to help Chuck get through this ordeal while he played hero.

"Beard" was the last "Chuck" episode written by Scott Rosenbaum (who's now hopefully salvaging "V"), and very much in the vein of the Rosenbaum-scripted "Chuck vs. the Santa Claus" from season two, with bad guys again infiltrating the Buy More because it's so obvious there's a spy base of some kind hidden there(*).

(*) Which brings us to our "Chuck" Plot Hole of the Week, if not of the series: now that two different evil spy organizations have twigged to the place's existence, what exactly is the point of Chuck still working there as a cover identity? Other than, of course, nobody on the show rightly wanting to say goodbye to Morgan, Big Mike and Jeffster?

It was also the first episode of anything directed by Zachary Levi. That's a big risk to hand such a crucial, mythology-altering episode to a rookie, but I thought Levi acquitted himself really well, even if there were some inevitable growing pains from a first-timer. The scene where Casey throws the flash-bang grenade into the Ring agent's hotel room was shot in an impressionistic, Hey, look at how much I'm directing! style, and the montage of Buy More employees cocking their toy guns in the midst of their revolt also called attention to itself. But I thought Levi nailed most of the humor (loved the way the camera initially drifted past Jeff shoving the apple into his mouth, as if this lunacy is so typical of the Buy More that it's not worth dwelling on) as well as the more human stuff involving Chuck and Morgan. Give him another turn or three behind the camera and I suspect the self-consciously showy stuff will go away and Levi will give us an episode that feels entirely on-format. And I can never complain about a Jeffster! performance being filmed like a rock concert, now can I?

And in the meantime, Morgan knowing Chuck's secret opens up a world of fun possibilities for the show, just as the cliffhanger with Casey getting a call on the Ring communicator opens up a host of scary ones.

Terrific episode (and next week's is even better).

Some other thoughts:

• Fienberg was much less happy with the episode than I was, taking more of an issue with the direction and tone than I did. He does raise one point with which I wholly agree, and that's that it felt redundant to have two episodes in a row climax with Chuck realizing he still loves Sarah. That's why I feel like "Chuck vs. the Fake Name" would have been better off playing up the Peter Parker/Mary Jane scenario with Chuck's reasons for dumping Hannah, and/or why I think this episode's climax could have worked just as well if Chuck got his mojo back simply from being able to unburden himself to Morgan, having already recognized his Sarah-love.

• Interesting that Casey and company are all so convinced that Awesome can handle Chuck's secret better than Morgan, when so far all the evidence points to the contrary. Looks can be deceiving. I'm still as confused about what The Ring does and doesn't know about Awesome, Chuck, etc. as I was back in "Chuck vs. Operation Awesome", though.

• This week in "Chuck" music: Jesus Alejandro El Nino's "Bululu" (Chuck calls Awesome during his vacation), the Billy Idol & Generation X version of "Dancing with Myself" (Chuck bored in Castle), Dawes' "Bedside Manner" (the final montage), Martin Padilla's "Arroz Con Pollo" (Shaw and Sarah locked out of Castle), and, of course, Jeffster! covering Credence Clearwater Revival's "Fortunate Son."

• This week in "Chuck" pop culture references: pick an iconic revolutionary or counter-culture movie moment, and the Buy More revolution had it, but most notably Big Mike paraphrasing the "they will never take... our FREEDOM!" speech from "Braveheart." The Buy More staffers all take a blood oath, which itself is an idea from countless movies and shows, but which I always attach to this scene from "The Untouchables." The staff also raises a Buy Moria flag like the Marines raising the flag at Iwo Jima, and two Buy More staffers recreate the iconic Times Square kiss from the end of World War II.

• Between the Buy Moria flag and the mace collection, it's nice to see that Millbarge is dead but not forgotten at the Buy More.

• The revolution was fairly silly, but at least it gave us Casey convincingly talking his way into it by telling Big Mike and company, "The only thing I hate more than hippy, neo-liberal fascist anarchists are the hypocrite fat cat suits they eventually grow up to become."

• With Hannah having quit (not surprising, since she only took the job to be around Chuck) and Anna Wu still in Hawaii with Morgan's Benihana rival, the Buy More could use a little estrogen. If there's a fourth season, and if Chuck is somehow still working there, I'd love to see even a recurring female Nerd Herd'er - or, failing that, to have General Beckman decide to have Sarah and Casey swap jobs. (That's a win-win, come to think of it: Casey would grunt even more about having to push yogurt instead of Beastmasters, and Sarah would get to dust off her old Nerd Herd uniform from "Chuck vs. Tom Sawyer.")

• I remember Brandon Routh having a few funny moments in "Zack and Miri Make a Porno," but it was still a little startling to see Shaw being so goofy while posing as the Buy More CEO to calm down Big Mike's revolutionaries.

• Has someone been keeping a running tally of the number of times characters have had to don or remove rings this season? Here, it's Shaw and Sarah briefly posing as newlyweds while off on the decoy mission.

• Another, more minor plot hole about the Castle siege: how did the bad guys not find the hatch in the floor of the Buy More's AV room? That's way more obvious than the secret passage behind Casey's locker.

• First Subway product integration of the season, with Chuck and Morgan scarfing down meatball marinara subs while playing a little Duck Hunt. Mmm... meatball marinara...

Finally, I want to thank everybody for, as of this writing, keeping such a clear head in the discussion of "Chuck vs. the Fake Name." Some liked it more than others, but everyone was able to disagree without attacking each other or going crazy, and that's much appreciated.

Given the Casey cliffhanger, let me remind you of another of the commenting rules: the No Spoiler policy, which extends to discussing the previews for upcoming episodes. Please refrain, and don't even allude to the contents of it, okay?

What did everybody else think?

Chuck, "Chuck vs. the Fake Name": Would you like green eggs and ham?

"Chuck" is back post-Olympics, and I have a review of tonight's episode coming up just as soon as my tastebuds fist-bump each other...

"I hate those will-they-or-won't-they things. Just do it already!" -Paulie Walnuts
"If you and this girl love each other so much, what's keeping you apart?" -Skip
"It's complicated." -Chuck

When last we saw an original episode of this show, "Chuck" Nation was in the midst of a civil war, with fans hotly divided between those outraged by the Chuck/Shaw/Sarah/Hannah quadrangle and those outraged by the outrage(*). Things got so ugly in the comments to the "Chuck vs. the Mask" review, and then the follow-up post where I asked Josh Schwartz and Chris Fedak to weigh in on things, that I eventually had to shut down comments on both.

(*) And, yes, I will acknowledge that there are many gradations among the two groups, including those who haven't been happy with the season independent with what's happening with the romance arcs, but the two loudest and most visible groups were the ones who fell on either side of the 'shipper line.

"Chuck vs. the Mask" wasn't designed to be the last episode to air for three weeks, but that's how the schedule played out. The hope would be that "Chuck" would return from Olympics hiatus with an episode to allay the fears of the 'shippers and other doomsayers and bring "Chuck" fandom back together in the kind of peace and harmony that led to the show being saved from cancellation in the first place.

"Chuck vs. the Fake Name" was not that kind of episode.

Which isn't to say it wasn't a good episode. It was, I thought - one of the best of the season, in fact. It had a lot of humor, Chuck being a good spy, Casey being even more bad-ass than usual, the darker edge that's been an increasing part of this season, and some great pathos from Yvonne Strahovski and Zachary Levi in the scene where Sarah tells Shaw that her real name is Sam. Other than some of the usual "Chuck" stuff you just have to roll your eyes at or shrug off (like the wiseguys smashing Chuck's communicator watch for the sake of the plot), it was packed with the sort of material that makes me love this show.

But even though it had those things, and Chuck breaking up with Hannah because Sarah's near-death made him realize how much he still loves her, it also had Sarah moving more deeply into a romance with Shaw - going so far as to tell him a secret about herself that she never dared tell Chuck - as well as the conversation quoted above between Chuck and the two wiseguys(*) about how annoying all this Unresolved Sexual Tension stuff can get. And my worry is that those of you who were pissed off three weeks ago will feel just as unhappy, if not more, about that.

(*) Their actual character names are Matty and Scotty, but come on. You hire Tony Sirico to play a wiseguy, and we're gonna call him Paulie Walnuts. OH!

I will say this, before moving on to discuss the many things I enjoyed about "Fake Name": generally, when shows that play with UST start having other characters make meta references to how the two characters in question should get together already, then it's time for those characters to get together already. My enjoyment of "Chuck" doesn't hinge on seeing Chuck and Sarah together, but my patience does wear thin when we reach a point where the couple is clearly apart only because the creative team is reluctant to end the will-they-or-won't-they dance already.

Now, I don't think that's exactly what Schwartz, Fedak and company (here with Ali Adler on script) are doing. I think this recent arc (going back at least to "Chuck vs. the Nacho Sampler") about Chuck turning himself into the man he thinks Sarah wants - when in fact Sarah wanted the old Chuck and is alarmed by what he's becoming - is pretty smart, and has been very well-played by Strahovski. I totally bought that she would be so confused and troubled by Chuck's growing ability to lie that she might feel compelled to blurt out her true name to someone else - and that hearing her do that would hurt Chuck deeply. But I do wonder if Shaw isn't one complication too many. There could well be more to this story as we go along (either Shaw secretly working for The Ring, even though they keep trying to kill him, or Sarah pretending to fall for him because she doesn't trust him, or what have you), but as things stand now, I think the writers could have maintained Chuck and Sarah's distance without having to bring in a couple of outside obstacles.

(Though doing that would have deprived them of the opportunity to give the fangirls and fanboys an episode that featured both Superman and Lana Lang in towels. And I hear some people enjoy that sort of thing.)

Anyway, moving on from 'Ship-ocalypse Now, "Chuck vs. the Fake Name" actually featured several pseudonyms. Not only does Sarah briefly slip out from under her own, but Chuck (who already has a cover identity as Charles Carmichael) spends a good chunk of the episode posing as gifted assassin Rafe Gruber.

Chuck turns out to be surprisingly adept at playing Rafe, and the joke was written, directed (by Jeremiah Chechik), and played by Levi on just the right level: funny to those of us who know how un-Chuck-like the role is, but just believable enough to the likes of Paulie Walnuts. The comments about the cupcake store were a great punchline leading into the opening credits, and I loved Chuck-as-Rafe's desire for sterile dental instruments ("I want to kill him - not some secondary infection!")

Though the Intersect 2.0 goes on the fritz when Chuck is afraid for Sarah's life in the hotel room, for the most part he acquits himself very well on the mission, even earning a healthy dose of respect from Casey. (And Casey gets to be awfully impressive himself, not only letting Chuck pull his tooth for the good of the mission, but making the one-in-a-billion shot with the sniper rifle to kill Rafe and save the day.)

We also get to see how Devon is struggling with his spy knowledge, even without the burden of a fake name, and once again how hard it is for Chuck to let someone from the real world into his life, with all the attendant dangers it now includes. He mainly dumps Hannah because, as Ellie intuits, he realized he still cares for Sarah, but there was also a "Peter Parker dumps Mary Jane for her own good" quality to the way things went down, and I would hope that this is the last time the writers tell a story about Chuck trying to date a civilian - and not just because I'm hoping, for all our sakes, that he and Sarah get together soon, for good.

And on that score, I'm not too worried. If Paulie and Skip can see it, and if Jeff (while discussing Chuck's amazing luck with the ladies with Lester and Big Mike) can be lucid enough to see that those other women don't matter because, "When he's with Sarah, the light in his eyes shine brightly" - well, then I think we're heading towards a destination that everyone will be happy with, even if the journey there is longer (and bumpier) than many would like.

Some other thoughts:

• This week in "Chuck" music: "Faces in the Dark" by The Generationals (Ellie talks to Awesome as he exercises), "A Sleep Be Told" by The Traditionalist (Chuck tells Awesome he didn't cook this meal), "Living a Lie" by Daniel Zott (the whole Chuck/Hannah split sequence) and "Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion" by the great Italian composer Ennio Morricone, from the Italian film of the same name (Chuck, posing as Rafe, meets the two wiseguys).

• This week in "Chuck" pop culture references: well, pretty much every second that Tony Sirico (aka Paulie Walnuts) and Louis Lombardi (aka Big Pussy's FBI handler, Skip Lipari) were on screen together was an extended "Sopranos" joke (and, at times, a pretty broad one, but no moreso than much of Sirico's time on the real show). Meanwhile, Ellie talks about Chuck's childhood crush on Mrs. Seaver from "Growing Pains," and Chuck explains that he once played Perchik in a school production of "Fiddler on the Roof" (the revolutionary played by Paul Michael Glaser in the '71 "Fiddler" movie). Rafe's last name Gruber is almost certainly another "Die Hard" shout-out (Alan Rickman was Hans Gruber), and all dental torture scenes in movies and television implicitly hearken back to the "Is it safe?" scene from "Marathon Man."

• Rafe was played by Johnny Messner, who did a stint on "The O.C." as Julie Cooper's con man ex, and was also named in tribute to new "Chuck" writer (and "Survivor: Guatemala" second-runner-up) Rafe Judkins.

• So we found out early in season one that Sarah's real middle name is Lisa, and now we know her first name is Sam (short for "Samantha," or do you reckon Gary Cole just gave her a boy's name to be distinctive?). Anyone want to set an over/under on finding out her last name?

• Speaking of aliases, what do you figure was up with Casey's extreme discomfort when Paulie Walnuts recognized him as someone he knew as Alex Coburn? Chuck did flash on the name, which is never good.

• This is our farewell to Kristin Kreuk as Hannah, but Schwartz and "Chuck" producer Matthew Miller understandably moved to quickly work with her again on "Hitched," the sitcom pilot they're developing for CBS.

• "Hannah, don't you think this chicken is moist?" is just a funny phrase. It just is.

Finally, I want to make it abundantly clear that what happened with the comments last time will not be tolerated in any way, shape or form from now on. I have commenting rules for a reason, and it's because up until "Chuck vs. the Mask" aired, I was able to keep this blog as one of the few places on the 'net where people can talk about TV in a mature, level-headed respectful manner. Here are the two relevant sections I need people to keep in mind here:

Rule #1: Be nice. This is an opinion blog, and a place where people can and should argue passionately for their point of view. But there's a difference between arguing with passion and arguing with hostility. If you can't find a way to express your viewpoint without insulting other commenters, or getting strident and self-righteous -- say, equating your opinion with fact, and deriding other people for not seeing the truth of your words -- then either tone down your words until they're more respectful to other people, or don't comment.

Rule #6. What did I say about being nice? Given that most of the recent violations have been about Rule #1, it bears repeating. This shouldn't be that hard, but sometimes, it is. Talk about the shows, not each other. Period.

I'm going to be very quick on the trigger to delete comments this week if you all can't behave, and if things edge into calamity like last time, I'm just going to switch the entire site over to comment moderation until things calm the hell down.

Disagreement is fine. Hysterics and name-calling are not. Are we clear?

And having said all that... what did everybody else think?