Chuck Versus the American Hero

There’s a lot going on this week, and most of it is pretty damn good. The principal characters are all facing major transitions, and the cliffhanger is so bold that I’m wondering how the writers have filled the remaining episodes.

Chuck heads to the nation’s capital to meet with Beckman, and discovers while in the waiting room that carrying a gun is very uncomfortable. Beckman tells Chuck more about his upcoming assignment in Rome, revealing it to be a more permanent engagement than Chuck might have anticipated. He starts getting cold feet, although nowhere near as cold as the feet in the building’s morgue. Some baddie walks in there, headshots the lab attendant, and forces yet another McGuffin out of the corpse of Agent Perry, the dude Chuck supposedly killed last week on the train tracks.

Beckman tells Chuck that he can pick his own team in Rome and gives him a week to get ready for the mission, so Chuck flies back to Burbank to try to make things right with Sarah. Morgan and now-civilian Casey—both itching to leave the Buy More and commit fully to the espionage world—jump into Chuck’s corner and encourage him to go for it. Chuck buys the old standbys—candy and flowers—finds Sarah, and makes one of those nice, sweeping TV speeches. But she gives him the complete cold shoulder, as she is convinced that he killed that Perry guy and now wants nothing to do with him.

Okay, number one: Chuck didn’t kill him. Number two: Sarah has killed and beaten the piss out of scores of people, so how exactly can she fault Chuck for killing one? When did she become all anti-violence? When did Chuck try to become Unforgiven? And three: the guy that Chuck didn’t actually kill was trying to kill him, so if he had killed him, it would have been in self-defense. The guy was a bad guy…would Sarah prefer Chuck to be the one who was killed? It’s really hard to like Sarah in this episode, especially after she tells Chuck that she is going to Washington with Shaw, permanently.

Of course, Casey could clear Chuck’s record at any time by admitting to the events of last week, but he doesn’t. Dejected, Chuck leaves to figure out how to tell Beckman that he’s packing it in…before he even began. If this happens, Morgan and Casey will be stuck at the Buy More forever. You can bet your ass that they’re more motivated than ever to save Chuck from himself and therefore, save themselves. Desperate times call for desperate measures, so they enlist the inimitable aid of Jeff and Lester. Jeff and Lester (or, more specifically, their van) are charged with tailing Shaw, while Casey, Morgan and Awesome (who also wants to get Chuck and Sarah back together hoping that will somehow encourage Ellie to do Doctors Without Borders in Africa for the next year) team up to kidnap Chuck and put him back in the playing field.

Chuck & Co. arrive at a fussy restaurant where Sarah and Shaw are having dinner. The plan is to get Shaw out of the picture long enough for Chuck to make another embattled speech and win Sarah over. Complications arise when the baddie who stole files from Perry’s corpse arrives.

Highlights include watching Morgan pretend to be a terrorist on the phone, Chuck preparing to make the ultimate sacrifice, meeting the Ring ringleader, and a doozy of a twist involving Shaw and Sarah that promises high stakes in the coming weeks. All around (except for Brandon Routh of course), the cast does a really solid job.

Season 3, Episode 12: Chuck Versus the American Hero (originally aired March 22, 2010)

For more on Chuck, click here.

Mondays at 8/7C on NBC

Photographs courtesy of NBC Universal and Trae Patton.