The Wife:

I’ve been putting off writing about Chuck this week because, for some reason I can’t adequately explain, I just wasn’t feeling this episode this week until the end bits, which were indeed stellar. I just don’t know how to reconcile my boredom with 60% of this episode.

Just . . . hang out for a second . . . we've gotta do some stuff with guns.

Just . . . hang out for a second . . . we've gotta do some stuff with guns.

So Sarah’s living with Chuck until they can get an apartment, but then Cole somehow busts out of captivity and breaks into the Castle, where the General sets the whole gang on a mission to track down a doctor at a Swiss embassy thingy. (I don’t know. That wasn’t very clear.) The Doctor, whose name I never quite caught, may have something to do with someone called Perseus, the code name of a person who created the Intersect. And really, it’s just as well that I refer to him only as The Doctor, because that was Robert Picardo’s character on Star Trek: Voyager. Cole and Chuck have to stay behind and run surveillance, which goes well, until Cole recognizes his torturer and sees him jam their signal, allowing him to capture Casey, Sarah and The Doctor.

Cole, newly in love with Sarah, decides to drag Chuck along with him to save her in some heroic fashion. Chuck sneaks in through the window, but unheroically crushes his ankle, which causes him to drop his gun and shoot The Doctor in the leg. This creates enough of a distraction for Casey and Sarah to fight their way out, but Cole still gets to save the day when Sarah gets ambushed in the hallway and he takes a bullet for her. Chuck limps home, having lost the girl again, and Ellie forces him to go to the hospital to get his foot checked out, where he runs into The Doctor in the ER and decides to follow him all the way back to his lab. There, caught being not so stealthy, Chuck finds out that The Doctor is Perseus, and he flashes on some papers labeled Orion. Here, The Doctor recognizes that his work has come to fruition in Chuck – a human Intersect exists. Chuck demands answers. He wants to know if the Intersect can be removed, but The Doctor tells him only Orion knows the answer to that. As Chuck pleads to know Orion’s identity, The Doctor gets shot, and just as it seems Chuck is about to die, as well, Cole swoops in and saves the day by telling Chuck to kick his would-be assassin with his cast. Then Cole’s life is threatened and Sarah swoops in to save him.

While all this is going down, Chuck doesn’t tell Morgan that he’s moving in with Sarah, but Anna sees the lease papers on the Buy More fax machine and she thinks Morgan got the apartment for them. And Morgan doesn’t have the heart to tell her that the apartment is for him and Chuck! Oh, comic misunderstandings! Jeff and Lester suggest that, rather than tell her the truth, Morgan engineer a series of obstacles that will make Anna not want to live with him, such as suddenly being unavailable for couples time due to a newfound interest in recreating famous tennis matches on the Wii, or producing a detailed, alphabetized set of rules for living together called a Morganuptual – the best of which we caught on the DVR was a rule stating that no one shall ever discuss Barcelona in his presence. I wonder why that is. Eventually, Morgan decides to just move in with Anna anyway, and grow up, while Chuck decides that he can’t move in with Sarah at all because his feelings just get in the way.

I think my issue with this episode was that while it was one of the more Bondian ones (complete with Cole making a Bond joke while being tortured), it lacked a little bit of the usual humor and sweetness, save for the opening shot of Chuck unable to sleep with Sarah next to him in a mixture of fear and excitement, and the final shot of Sarah, looking like she’s on the verge of tears herself when Chuck tells her they can’t live together without him wanting her. And while I’m interested in finding this Orion person – who I’m willing to bet will either be upcoming guest star Chevy Chase or, perhaps, even Chuck’s own missing father whom I’ve always suspected was a spy – the set-up for this was very action-heavy and story-light. I need a better balance of the two to not be bored.

Nice, though, to see Robert Picardo. I had trouble remembering the actor’s name and went looking around on the IMDB page for Voyager in order to remember. There, I discovered something amazing. I’d noticed the name Robert Duncan McNeill pop up on Chuck sometimes, but I couldn’t remember in what capacity. Then I remembered that he played Tom Paris on Voyager, on whom I had a giant crush as a geeky tween, and I thought, “Hmm. I’ve not seen Tom Paris on Chuck.” And then I scrolled down further and saw that McNeill has been directing a few episodes of Chuck and that he’s also a supervising producer on the show. It’s super cool that he hired his friend Picardo. Now I want to see more Voyager alums on Chuck. Robert Beltran is hanging out over on Big Love these days – maybe Chuck could have an adventure at an Indian casino just to get Beltran a guest spot. And if McNeill could get Jeri Ryan to show up, geeks across America would not be able to contain themselves. That’d be hella tight.