Chuck Versus The Angel De La Muerte (And A Weak Script)

I knew I was in trouble when the episode opened with the meet-cute I never wanted to see: How Ellie and Captain Awesome (a.k.a. Useless Side Character 1 and Useless Side Character 2) met at UCLA medical school and fell in love. Boy you should have seen me giggling with glee and making that “awwwwww!” sound. And by that I mean cursing profusely and shooting the television screen with my rotating-barrel Nerf gun.

It got worse: the opening was the setup to a Captain Awesome/Ellie centric episode. The Buy More cast was entirely absent from the episode (the only one I missed was Morgan, who I like quite a bit and wish the writers would have brought him into the spy fold instead of Awesome), so it was just Chuck and Sarah and Casey on a mission…with Captain Awesome and Ellie along for the ride.

You see, the team was charged with protecting a South American dictator trying to turn over a new leaf and embrace democracy from an upcoming assassination attempt. The dictator was played by Armand Assante, who seems really hard up for work. I have a soft spot for Armand. Besides being a scenery-chewing and rather delicious villain in Stallone’s disastrous foray into sci-fi Judge Dredd, I spent a fair amount of my youth entertaining myself effortlessly by pronouncing his name as intensely as I could…Armand Assante!! Maybe you had to be there (and be me). Anyway, his country is the fictional Costa Garvas, which I’m guessing is a riff on Costa-Gavras, the Greek-born political filmmaker. I don’t see the connection but maybe I’m missing something.

True to Chuck fashion, we never get a real sense why bad guys want to assassinate the guy. Actually, there’s even a scene where Casey asks the would-be assassin—who works for The Ring—why he wants to kill him and the would-be assassin smirks and tells Casey it would tax Casey’s brain if he learned the motive. That may be true. It also may be true that the writers have no idea why anyone wants this dictator dead because they pulled the scenario out of a hat and wrote the script in an hour.

The complication with Awesome arises when good old Armand Assante is poisoned and hospitalized. Awesome saves his life, Armand feels indebted to him and invites him to some big gala soiree…the same soiree that Chuck and Casey and Sarah are attending because they believe that is where the assassination attempt will take place. Looking for some excitement in his life in the wake of being married to Ellie, Awesome eagerly joins the team as a temporary point man. I can’t say that I blame him; if I were married to Ellie (or married period) I’d probably strap myself to a Harley Davidson and ride it over the edge of the Grand Canyon a la Thelma and Louise, just for the excitement.

You get everything you would expect at this soiree. Dancing, bad guys, assassin-scouting…but I have to say, for a plot centered around an assassination attempt, there is very little action in this episode. There is a great highlight though: seeing Yvonne Strahovski kick the living bejesus out of some armed military thugs while wearing glasses and decked out in a nurse costume (though it looks more like the costume a stripper pretending to be a nurse would wear…I wonder why?). Casey also beats a guy with a chair, but that’s about it. There is also very little in the Sarah/Chuck emotional fallout will they/won’t they arena, especially compared to last night’s premiere.

The most traumatic part of the episode for me occurred at the end. That’s when the writers toyed with my emotions. They got my hopes up ridiculously high and then they crushed my dreams. You see, it seemed for a moment…just a brief, shining moment…that Captain Awesome had been murdered. I know, it sounds unlikely, but I wanted to believe. And I did…until it was revealed that he had only been kidnapped. Maybe the team will botch the rescue operation next week. The day I stop hoping is the day I die…

Season 3, Episode 3: Chuck vs. The Angel De La Muerte (originally aired January 11, 2010)

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Photographs courtesy of NBC Universal, Greg Gayne.