The Wife:
This was a great episode that featured all of the things I like about Chuck: solid geek humor, good action sequences and great character/story development. In an interesting twist that I hope is replicated with other characters throughout the season, we learn exactly how Sarah Walker got to be so fucking badass.
As it happens, Sarah was a geeky (and super Australian outback-looking) teenager in San Diego, California going by the name of Jenny Burton. Her father was a world-class con artist who trained his daughter to be tough and have cat-like fighting reflexes, demonstrated in a flashback when little Jenny digs up Daddy’s emergency money box (emergency in this case meaning “Daddy just got arrested”) and she nearly throws a dagger right into the heart of the approaching CIA agent who locked up her dad. The CIA man tells young Jenny that Daddy trained her well but that she has a choice with her life: she can continue the con artist’s life of her father and face his jailbird fate or she can put the skills Daddy taught her to good use and join the CIA.
Sarah’s past is compromised when guest star Nicole Richie shows up at the Buy More and recognizes her former classmate. Richie, playing a character named Heather Chandler in an homage to one of my favorite 80s teen movies (Heathers), did not annoy the hell out of me in this episode as she does in real life, so props to decent stunt casting. (Infinitely better than Britney Spears on How I Met Your Mother last season.) Heather, by divulging details about Sarah’s past such as her name, hometown and her father’s jail record, compromises Sarah’s cover and makes our cool-as-a-cucumber agent incredibly nervous. Chuck, on the other hand, is delighted to meet someone who knows Sarah outside of her agent life and wants to get to know Heather and her rocket-scientist husband, Mark Ritter (Ben Savage! It’s like my TV is having a Boy Meets World fest this week!), to find out more about the girl he pretends is his girlfriend. He escapes from the basement headquarters, filled with computers that he is so enraptured by that he’s practically about to hump them, to come up and grab a yogurt snack in order to meet Sarah’s new-old friends. Then, Chuck flashes on Mark. He and Sarah report this to the General, who assigns them to go to dinner with the Ritters to find out when Mark will be making a drop of classified information to the Russians, despite Sarah’s protestations that this act would compromise her cover.
In preparation for their double date, Chuck grills Sarah about who she was in high school, but Sarah will have none of it, snapping:
“All Jenny’s boyfriend needs to know is that Jenny really hates questions about her past.”
At their very awkward dinner with the Ritters, where mean girl Heather intentionally tries to get information out of her formerly geeky classmate to determine exactly what she does other than work at the yogurt shop, Mark excuses himself from the table and Sarah spills wine on an over-eager Chuck to get him to follow their target. (An awkward dinner comment from Chuck? “Cilantro. Very controversial. You either love it or you hate it. Me? I love it.”) Chuck arrives in the men’s room to “do his little boy business” just in time to save Mark from the Russian baddies who want to kill him for the plans for his super bomber. It is actually Casey who busts in to save Chuck from the Russians, but Mark, hiding in a bathroom stall, doesn’t notice Casey’s presence and thinks that Secret Agent Charles Carmichael saved him. Chuck insists that Sarah doesn’t know what he really does for a living, effectively taking the heat off his partner and getting Ritter to worship the ground he walks on, even to the point where, when Casey and Chuck question Ritter about his involvement in this scheme, Ritter refuses to talk to anyone but Carmichael. Casey plays along, but insists that Chuck is called “Mad Dog” for a reason and scares Ritter into giving him the information directly. For the record, the face Zachary Levi makes when he’s “Mad Dog” Carmichael is even funnier than the cross-eyed stare he puts on when he flashes on someone.
Oh, 1998. I think we all miss 'Mmmbop' just a little bit inside.
Ritter, Chuck and Casey negotiate the drop with the Russians to take place at — where else? – Heather and Jenny’s Class of 1998 High School Reunion down in sunny San Diego. Sarah is reluctant to go, as it means exposing her cover to hundreds of other people, but Chuck and Casey make her go anyway. At the reunion, she runs into Dick Duffy, a bad boy she knew from high school played by Michael Weaver (who was on last week’s The Ex List playing a slightly-reformed high school bad boy, which I guess is just his thing), who hits on her and simultaneously outs her father’s jail sentence in front of Chuck. Chuck flashes on Dick’s tattoo and thinks that he’s the person Mark is supposed to make the exchange with.
“Of course! The guy who terrorized me in high school is now going to terrorize the whole world with my super bomber!” – Mark Ritter
Mark sets this up, and Sarah goes out to take down the deal. Instead, she beats the crap out of Duffy and discovers that he’s just a small time drug and weapons dealer who, despite whatever minor affiliations he may have with the Russians, is not the guy. Nonetheless, kicking him in the teeth definitely seemed satisfactory.
Some sweet girl-on-girl action.
Heather Chandler-Ritter, seeing her husband doting on Chuck, alerts her associates – the real Russians with whom Mark was supposed to exchange information – that her husband had spilled the beans to the Feds. Eyeing this, Chuck gets up on the DJ platform to cause a diversion that allows Casey and Sarah to identify the culprits, all the while adding to the fantastic I Heart 1998 mix contained in this episode while he deejayed. Heather Chandler sneaks away and Sarah follows her into the ladies’ locker room, where the two girls have an amazingly choreographed karate-infused girlfight culminating in a brass cougar head beaning Nicole Richie in the head. I can die a happy woman now that I have seen such harm come to Nicole Richie.
I hope we one day get to see Casey’s backstory in a similar fashion, but I somehow doubt that it will involve a girlfight.
The Husband:
This is definitely the best of this still very young second season and in the top five of the series, a highly goofy take-off on both Heathers and Grosse Point Blank that seems to continue explain why I like Josh Schwartz and a show creator so much.
While his shows can fall into very well-defined pre-existing categories – The O.C. and Gossip Girl are both female-driven primetime soaps while Chuck is basically just a spy thriller – they like to break out of their categories as often as they can. I read from a link at my Hotmail account (yes, I still use Hotmail sometimes) that there is a large migration of guys that are starting to get into Gossip Girl more. Why? Because of all the female-focused shows on the market, its male characters are so finely written and complex that the majority of men don’t mind. Unlike the pretty boys one may find on something like One Tree Hill or something of that ilk, these people have personalities. It was that kind of material, as well as all three shows’ ability to be drop-down funny when they want to be, that made The O.C. such a cultural phenomenon for a few years. (I mean really, when had you seen someone like Seth Cohen on TV that wasn’t played as a Screech-level joke?)
Nicole Richie is on a mission to kill those who don't find her hot.
Chuck, which by description would seem to very much be a guy-show (think anything that has the name Knight Rider attached to it) does play to both genders. Sure, it gives men a whole lot of gunplay as well as some wonderful eye candy – I think we’re all very happy that a portion of the Sarah-Heather fight took place in a flooding high school shower room that made even the usually dumpy Nicole Richie look fairly appealing to this gentlemen – but the romantic plots are treated with grace and wit and the female characters perhaps even more hardcore than the men. (Think Ripley or Sarah Connor.) It’s quite a tightrope to be walking, but it has given Schwartz a good reason to boast about his rising starpower.
