Chuck vs. The Cougars

This is by far the worst episode of Chuck yet, featuring a broadly contrived and completely ridiculous storyline.  I knew it was trouble when the episode opened with a flashback of Sarah as a gawky, metal-mouth teenager listening to insipid 90s music while driving home, only to find ATF agents raiding her house.  Yes, this is the Sarah Walker origin story-an idea that potentially could have proved illuminating and worthwhile had the Chuck team not chosen to execute it in such a lamely cartoonish way.

Sarah notices a suspicious woman at the Buy More and tries to hide Chuck and evade.  But the woman follows her across the street to the yogurt stand and lo and behold, it turns out that her name is Heather and she remembers Sarah-a.k.a. Jenny Burton-from high school!  OMG!  LOL!  LMFAO!  Chuck observes all this from his hi-tech hiding spot and sees it as the perfect opportunity to learn more about Sarah, so he obeys his order to stay put and comes out to introduce himself to Heather and her recently-arrived boyfriend Mark.

But that’s not all!  Not only did Heather recognize Sarah from high school but Chuck flashes on Mark!  Mark must be mixed up with something nefarious!  Chuck suggests all four of them go out to dinner-invoking Sarah’s seething rage-so that he can both find out about Sarah’s past as Jenny Burton and learn more about what Mark is mixed up in.

The secret spy operation depends on Sarah using her own previous life as her cover, which I suppose is a novel idea, kind of creative, but the whole thing just felt really artificial to me in a way which distracted from my getting emotionally involved in the characters and the proceedings.  And of course, the spy operation would have to culminate at Sarah/Jenny’s high school reunion!

The B storyline is also especially weak this time, involving Lester and the Buy More crew running the store while manager Big Mike is away.  Lester comes up with the bright idea of selling more merchandise by negotiating prices with customers, and everyone follows his lead.  But soon it becomes apparent that even though the crew is selling so much merchandise, they’re losing money for the store.  Could people really be this stupid?  Frantically they decide to reverse the deficit by throwing a big party in the store and charging people to get in, but that doesn’t go as planned either.

The performances remain strong across the board; the cast isn’t the issue here.  But this really felt like a filler episode, cranked out just so NBC could get their 22-episode full season order, and being that several recurring characters from the show like Anna, Ellie, and the stupid boyfriend were MIA, I’m pretty sure I’m right.

I think Chuck has begun to lose its way creatively because the writers keep exaggerating the tone of the show to become even more comical.  But they’ve really just made the show seem unbelievable, which undermines the drama of the emotional interactions between the characters.  The comedy should come from Chuck being the quintessential fish-out-of-water, with the rest of the show grounded in at least some semblance of reality to make the proceedings seem plausible.  If the show continues the way it is going, it’s going to lose me, though a lot of people still seem to enjoy it.  All I can say is that if NBC keeps Chuck and scraps Life, it will be a monumental injustice.

Season 2, Episode 4: Chuck vs. the Cougars (originally aired October 20, 2008)

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Mondays at 8/7C on NBC

Photographs courtesy of NBC