Chuck vs. The Delorean

Always dependable to play a sleezeball, Gary Cole guest stars this week on Chuck playing exactly that.  Turns out he’s Sarah’s father Jack, and he’s a lifelong matchstick man.  Am I wrong or wasn’t it established earlier in the season that Sarah’s father was locked up in prison by the CIA and thus scarred Sarah for life?  Either I’m smoking something or the writers are, because daddy is back this weekend as if he’s been coasting as a free spirit his whole life.  Tonally, all this seems totally opposed to what was established in Sarah’s origin story several episodes back.

The episode opens with a flashback showing Sarah as a little girl pulling a scam with her father.  She pretends to get hit by an armored car on her bike and her father comes to her rescue claiming to be a doctor.  They escape with a load of cash.  Chuck is jealous and suspicious when Sarah tells him she can’t meet him and his sister for dinner because she has personal plans.  Chuck follows Sarah and spies on her having dinner with an older gentleman-her dad-but his cover is blown when Sarah catches him. (It wasn’t really Chuck’s fault…he has a GPS tracker on his watch).  Chuck flashes on her father…because it’s convenient for the plot.

Chuck and Sarah are co-opted into saving Jack from himself (somehow with CIA-approval), as he has gotten in over his head conning a Saudi sheik suspected of funding terrorist groups out of a large sum of cash.  Jack sold the sheik the luxury hotel he is staying in, taking a $700,000 finder’s fee for putting the sheik in contact with the building’s fictitious owner Hans Lichtenstein.  The CIA wants intel on the sheik’s holdings and order Sarah and Intersect Chuck to work the scam with Jack.  Jack plans to be long gone before the sheik figures out that he has been scammed, but then again, if that happened, there would be no show.

The sheik enters the hotel ready to kill Jack, but Sarah jumps in posing as Lichtenstein’s assistant and tries to set up an appointment between Lichtenstein and the sheik for the next day.  The sheik doesn’t buy it, and Chuck has to step in and pretend to be the fictitious German entrepreneur.  The spy duo thus buys themselves some time, and the general advises them to sell the building to the sheik for $10 million so that the CIA can freeze his international accounts.  Through an elaborate series of proceedings, the team gets the job done and the sheik gives them his bank access codes.

They begin to celebrate a job well done only to realize that Jack never transferred the sheik’s money and has disappeared with the laptop that has the bank codes.  Sarah takes her father’s latest betrayal hard (though she sure does try to hide it), providing a moment for Chuck to share some of the daddy issues he and Ellie faced growing up that was intimated last episode.

Meanwhile Casey tracks down Jack and goes to his hotel to take him out only to find it ransacked.  Turns out the sheik wasn’t as stupid as he looked and is holding Jack hostage until he gets his money back.

The B storyline is especially weak, involving Morgan scamming money from Awesome (I have new respect for Morgan now) to buy a Delorean like the one from Back To The Future and avoiding the prospect of moving in with Anna.  All in all it’s another mildly diverting, forgettable episode partially redeemed by the solid work of Yvonne Strahovski, Adam Baldwin, and guest star Gary Cole.

Season 2, Episode 10: Chuck vs. The Delorean (originally aired December 8, 2008)

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Photographs courtesy of NBC