Chuck: Losers, Nachos and Orgiastic Trigger-happy Tranq Gun Glee

Good news: Wooden Slog Spy Shaw is conspicuously absent this week (for no real reason but who cares?). Bad news: Ellie and Awesome are back. Chuck may have completed his first solo spy mission last week, but he still has a long way to go before becoming a bona fide agent. The next step is crucial: learn how to turn an asset. In Chuck’s case, there is a little bit of irony involved: he has to turn a nerd, just as Sarah did to him three years ago. This notion is not lost on the writers, who open the episode with a flashback to when Sarah first walked into the Buy More and went to work on Chuck.

Chuck has to turn a guy named Manoosh, an even nerdier nerd than Chuck, who dropped out of M.I.T. but has received funds from The Ring. The Ring. The Ring. The Ring. Maybe if viewers keep repeating the name of the organization over and over again, they’ll forget that the writers have no idea who the bad guys are and no concept of what they want. It could work. Chuck thinks he’s on a roll from last week and underestimates how tricky it is to turn an asset. He blows his first chance at the Buy More by coming off as a creepy and an over-eager I-want-to-be-your-best-friend-and-boil-your-rabbit type of guy. I have known way too many people in real life that are just like that.

He tries again at a bar—with considerable help from Sarah—and closes the deal…so to speak. Turns out this guy is building some kind of special weapon for The Ring. We’re supposed to feel sorry for Manoosh under the pretext that he doesn’t know he’s making the weapon for bad people. But honestly, does he just assume that his mystery buyer is really the Easter Bunny? The most interesting part of this plotline is how it stirs up stuff between Chuck and Sarah. She keeps telling Chuck exactly what he has to do in order to turn Manoosh, and since Manoosh is very much like Chuck, Sarah is basically telling Chuck how she turned him. And Chuck has to think about (in the brief quiet moments when he’s not dealing with issues of national security) to what extent Sarah was doing her job and playing a role and to what extent she actually liked (and supposedly fell in love with) him. Sarah has to think about it too.

That stuff is interesting, and Yvonne Strahovski continues to inject little bits of pathos into Sarah. We’re really getting the sense now of how being an agent has damaged her. Strahovski does as much as she can to make the character real and interesting within the very light and broad, MTV-saturated, sketch parameters of the show. As Chuck starts to get better at lying to people like Manoosh and his sister Ellie, Casey starts to approve of Chuck more while Sarah is bothered by it. Yes, Chuck is becoming a better spy, but Sarah doesn’t want that for him. She doesn’t want him to become like her, because Chuck–the way he is now–is the only link she has to a life still touched with a vestige of hope and optimism. Those are qualities you can’t really maintain as a true spy (I’m speaking from personal experience, of course).

The B storyline involves last week’s new arrival Hannah (she’s too nice, I’m already sick of her) and how she is adjusting to working at the Buy More. Jeff and Lester do their usual creepy stalker thing, which is still mildly amusing. Morgan actually seems quite smitten by her -especially since his previous girlfriend was written out of the show to bring the price tag down–and recruits Jeff and Lester to do recon for him. He also starts to realize that Chuck is keeping big secrets from him. He doesn’t know Chuck is a spy (although Morgan is the guy the writers should have picked to become privy to Chuck’s secret instead of Awesome), but if he starts trying to discover Chuck’s other secrets, maybe he’ll learn the big one. That would open up a lot of story possibilities and could add some needed drama and tension to the proceedings.

Highlights include: seeing Casey get wonderfully excited by all of the lethal toys at a big weapons show the gang has to go to and watching him shoot Manoosh an excessive amount of times in a very short period; a nifty laser pen handcuff escape scene involving Chuck and Casey being tied to chairs that recalls similar scenes from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (the Indy movie they should have stopped with instead of releasing that amazingly inane, bloated turd two years ago) and Die Hard with a Vengeance; and seeing Yvonne Strahovski half-naked. Yes, that last one is yet another completely overused plot device in the show but oddly enough I’m not complaining…

Season 3, Episode 6: Chuck v. Nacho Sampler (originally aired February 1, 2010)

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Photographs courtesy of NBC Universal.