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Freaked out over Chuck's disappearance, Sarah goes into an ethical downward spiral that ends in the kidnapping of a Thai national from his embassy and some pretty scary torture. Turns out a Chuckless Sarah has something of the Jack Bauer about her; even Casey was apparently creeped out by the "wildcard enforcer" Sarah once was. Love it. After Morgan admits that (MIA, possibly dead) Chuck was going to propose, Sarah goes apeshit, crosses ethical lines like she's jaywalking, and eventually locks Casey up before heading for the Myanmar border.
Morgan show up immediately, and makes Casey take him to Thailand. By the time they arrive, Sarah has become a local legend -- a "giant blonde she-male" that roams the hills -- and, through many awesome fight scenes, earned it. After making a deal to fight in a crimelord's arena, blinded and betrayed by little people, Sarah's pretty happy to see Casey disobeyed her and followed.
Chuck's cycling through all this Belgian mad scientist mumbo-jumbo where they use names from his cell phone to induce the Intersect through paranoid hypnotic visions. As expected, the first major scenario is an erectile dysfunction metaphor: No flash. Then another round with Ellie and Awesome, and later the Buy Moreans, about how without it he's useless and, eventually, all alone: No flash. (Short, disturbing escape from the facility itself: No flash.) Finally, there's Phase III, basically a reboot of Chuck's entire lobotomized brain: No psychology, no psychological blocks.
Back at the ranch, Ellie finds a mysterious laptop in the car Bakula craigslist-bequeathed her a few weeks ago. It looks sort of like if a Decepticon ended up in Tron and took the form of a laptop, but that doesn't stop the Awesomes! While Ellie's on a long shift at the hospital, Devon gets in way over his head offering the Buy More staff free medical work to get it up and running. And when they do? I'd love to say Ellie and Awesome are staring at the Intersect, but: Cliffhanger! Whatever it turns out to be will, I'm sure, be fantastic.
So having come to terms with the fact that Chuck humanizes her -- and that inhuman Sarah is way too bad-ass -- Sarah locates the prince, kisses him, and makes sure he knows damn well she'd love him whether he were a spy, the Intersect, or a college-dropout Nerd Herder. Despite being mostly lobotomized, this wakes Chuck up and they head home damage-free. The General offers Chuck a spy job with the Agency (without regard to the Intersect), and since Sarah doesn't care one way or the other, we're left with the feeling that Chuck will be having his Intersectless cake and eating it, too. I give that a week, but it's a nice little place to rest.
week: Zachary Levi directs, Linda Hamilton and Timothy Dalton show up for Thanksgiving dinner drama, and Jeffster make some Black Friday messes.
Watch the episode below, then discuss it in our forum. Then see some of our favorite Chuck guest-stars.
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Want more? The full recap starts right below!Very groany session with Sarah Walker interrupted by various sexy ideas that turn out to be not-so-sexy ideas: Mostly, that Agent Carmichael needs to flash on the Intersect. She's kind of obsessed with it. But given that the last we saw Chuck he'd been kidnapped from Der Bösewicht Berghütte by Mr. Thorn Bird himself, I don't think that's really Sarah. So this is two things: First, the baddies using sex as a motivator, and second, the whole thing we talked about last week with the Intersect, and thus being an illegitimate legit Spy, as sexual failure. It goes on for a while, with the requisite subtlety -- "We could do other stuff! You know, we could kiss more, or talk!" -- but Sarah scoots away. On the other side of Chuck in bed is suddenly Lester, joking around about brain-Viagra and how Chuck could never keep a girl like that without the Intersect, etc.
Of course, Lester showing up means something is dreadfully, awfully, annoyingly wrong, so Chuck backflips out of the mental Slapchop the bad guys have him in, and outside of his mind they are so very irritated. The other mad scientist guy is or is not the doctor that Adam Sandler made fun of during one of the many movies comprised by Funny People. They realize that Lester was the wrong choice -- Lester is always the wrong choice -- and it turns out that they are using names from Chuck's phone, along with whispery suggestions, to make the brain machine chair make him dream things. So... Sure, whatever. That seems feasible. This is a TV show about downloading the internet into your head.
They think about using "Ellie," and there's a nod here to the fact that it can't be old home week -- no dad, none of my Bryce or Routh -- because they're just using names out of his phone according to the number of times he's called them. We run through expo about how the whole diamond thing was or was not actually a scheme to get Chuck's brain, which is like a diamond with many microdots inside it, and how this all will work.
"It was clear from his interrogation that anxiety is his strongest motivating emotion," they say. "God knows he is a neurotic man." Then they describe what this episode would be about, if it were about that: "When we find the right mix of people from his life to pressure him, he will become so anxious about not having the Intersect that his brain will be forced to flash. But this woman... Nothing makes him more anxious than this Sarah Walker."
Sounds fun! Not actually what this episode is about.
Sarah, having had it, is very angry because it's been three days and they've been to five countries and every Castle agent is looking for Chuck and still nothing. The General gots nothing: "The Berlin team had an address for one of the Belgian's lieutenants, but by the time we got a search warrant, he was onto us and had disappeared. The same thing happened yesterday in Caracas. And our target dropped behind North Korean lines where we couldn't follow."
Sarah's like, "Fuck you and your teams." The General reminds her that there are these things called "laws" and "allies" of the government and all that, and Sarah invites her to fuck the laws also. The General tells Sarah to get some sleep; sleep can fuck itself. The General uses language as a weapon to remind Sarah that this isn't a TV show about her boyfriend but an international spymergency: "Be assured that the Intersect is a huge priority to the US, as is finding the Belgian before he sells our secrets." Fuck your secrets!
Casey does a neat calming move, putting his hand perpendicular across Sarah's forearm as lightly as possible, and they sign off. He reminds Walker to act like an adult and she's like, "Fuck your adult!" There's an exchange pointing back to last week about how she can be Girlfriend Sarah XOR Spy Sarah, and Casey reminds her that Spy Sarah has a much better shot of getting things done. "Fuck things!"
Morgan shows up and refers to himself as "daddy" a few times, with the news that "our Swiss operative" has figured out that there's an aide in the Thai Embassy in LA who works with the Belgian, specifically extorting and kidnapping and other things you might do on your off time as an ambassador's aide, named Chanarong. Casey points out that the embassy is Thai soil and Sarah yells, "Fuck your jurisdiction! Be Spy Casey, not Rational Casey!"
Before you know it, Sarah and Casey have brought a hideous cheap rug to the aide's office while wearing rug-installer outfits, and then it turns out that the rug is magic and somehow rolls itself up around the aide guy in some bizarre stop-motion action reminiscent of the magic of Elizabeth Montgomery. They dump him out on American soil -- an interrogation room in Castle -- and shit gets real.
Sarah gets all wrong on Chanarong, eventually scaring the pee out of Casey and Morgan. "Sarah's about to go all Kill Bill on this dude!" Um, and also you totally stormed an embassy and stole a national, which is kind of the headline, but don't worry, there are no consequences for that at any time."Walker knows what lines not to cross," Casey says, and even though she's in another room she's like, "Fuck your lines!" You know she's going to be evil in this episode because she has that pony-coif thing Rachel Bilson and Pink! used to wear, a.k.a. the most hateful hairdo of the last ten years. Nobody looks good with that shit going on.
Also, meaning in addition to being a crazy person, Sarah is pissed because Chanarong is "a smirker." And he really is, he's totally a jerk. You can tell right away. Casey reminds her not to take any photos of him tied up with a cigarette in her mouth, and she's like, "Fuck your Geneva Conventions!" Casey gets scared. "I was wrong about you. You're not acting like a worried girlfriend. No, you're acting like a spy I used to know, before Chuck: Langston Graham's wild card enforcer. I didn't like that Sarah Walker. You know why? Because she was unpredictable."
Interesting, because the whole thing about this storyline is that, in order to keep the integrity of the show going, you have to keep finding compelling reasons for their relationship to be equal. And while it's been made clear before, this is a sally toward the idea that never gets fully expressed here but has always been pretty much explicit: Chuck is the humanity in Sarah. Which is not that exciting of a concept because it's the point of the show, but gets interesting real fast when you take it to the gender place, which is what this Belgian storyline -- and this episode, and outrageously so -- are about.
So it's like for the sake of argument, in this storyline only, we're going to substitute "woman" for "soft/passive/good" and "man" for "hard/active/scary," and afterward we're going to leave that well alone for a long, long time, because essentialism without context is just basically hate. But for the moment, we're getting a bookend to last week's erection anxiety, where it's all about Sarah's relationship to her femininity.
Or would be, if even this episode were allowed to actually be about Sarah, but since she's still an object in a lot of ways -- and thank God for Yvonne Strahovski, if we haven't said that in the last five minutes -- it's just mostly about that. And I'm tempted to say that it's actually a pretty sophisticated joke about that concept, given that this show has always tried to have its cake while simultaneously keeping its cake in a perpetual wet t-shirt contest.
I don't actually think it's a two-parter -- I think week will be a synthesis of some kind, because Ellie/Awesome and Hamilton/Dalton are great foils for this relationship, not to mention the Casey/Alex/Morgan thing, and Thanksgiving is when all secrets come out, usually -- but in terms of getting both Chuck and Sarah to the exact same place for that, it does a great job: "I have been keeping my thing in you instead of developing it in me, which is either very romantic of us or very two-half-people-don't-actually-make-a-person of us."
Casey insists that Walker go home, and she offers to fuck his face up for him, and then Morgan -- visually, actually, metaphorically -- steps between them. He's never looked so sweet and little and they've never looked so big and scary, it's great. He actually gets smooshed-faced. So while they growl at each other, Morgan tells everybody to get some sleep because they are acting insane, which is nothing new for Casey but very startling in Sarah, and that they will take a two-hour break. Aftermathically, Casey pretends Sarah didn't just scare the shit out of him, and it's cute.
Somehow, even though they are under the Buy More, Morgan mentioning "winks" makes Ellie, just leaving home on a 36-hour shift, also talk about "winks." One of the many pratfalls in this script we're going to be ignoring, because the episode is light and awesome and fun, and also because I refuse to complain about Ellie and Awesome, ever. Massive winking product placement for some kind of car, and then Ellie -- even though she's had this car from their dad for over a month and has been driving it around, searching it for reasons it was encodedly passed on to her -- suddenly finds a laptop hidden under the driver's seat. Where I guess they didn't look before.
It's wicked crazy-looking, with Tron lines that sparkle and shift around: Clearly Orion-made, clearly spy stuff. They worry about it and decide to turn it on, but they can't, but Ellie doesn't want Awesome to call Chuck to fix it, because he will get sucked back into spying. Oh, Ellie. So she heads off to work all "This is going to drive me crazy!" And Awesome, because he is awesome, promises to figure it out by the time she gets home.
Mad Science whispers to Chuck about how he can forget about Sarah, Ellie, Morgan and Awesome: They will all stop loving him without the Intersect, and he will be nothing, and he will lose them all. You'd think that would do it, right? Not a terribly evil plan. Poor villainous mad scientist. I guess when your supervillain technology consists entirely of saying Mean Girl shit, you get used to getting whatever you want. On the other hand, disappointing Captain Awesome would kill me because not only is he great -- sucks for me -- but he would be sad -- sucks for the world.
Sarah's girling out back home, crying on the bed without fucking up her makeup and rolling around on the bed and Brokebacking Chuck's clothes and smelling his smell and suddenly she's found a folded-up weird map in his Nerd Herd pocket protector, while this very Josh Schwartz song plays that will play again at the end. Morgan shows up to check on her, and says he's had an awful taste in his mouth that -- "strange twin thing" -- makes him think Chuck's been eating "something icky," and even though that's great, Sarah doesn't have time to worry about it.
Five seconds later for no real reason, Morgan freaks out -- "I fold!" -- and admits that the weird map is one iteration of Chuck's proposal plan. I don't remember if we knew about this because on TV, straight people are constantly pulling out rings and gazing at them like Gollum and thinking about proposing to each other. Maybe in real life also they do this. Sometimes they end up going through with it, sometimes they don't, but I rarely commit it to memory.
Anyway, it's a combination of things that are important to both of them, but mostly things that were important to Chuck when he was (more of) a dorky teenager (than he is now): DeLoreans, a Wyld Stallyn, a Lamborghini. Sarah is blamflasted because she totally wants to marry Chuck the day he grows into asking her, and Morgan -- this whole episode is really subtle -- goes, "Ever since he lost the Intersect, the proposal plan got put on hold. Chuck knows that you love him, Sarah, okay, it's just you're kind of a big fish, you know, and to a regular guy with no supercomputer in his brain, I've got to think that that's pretty intimidating."
Sarah protests, and this is more important for her to hear than anybody else including Chuck, that she just loves Chuck and wants to spend her life with him without regard to the Intersect. Morgan, with some interesting acting choices I think I really love, is all, "That's fantastic! That's great, yeah! And he knows this? Because you told him that?" Well, not exactly, because in fact the last thing she said was something on the level of "Stop playing spy games because you're just a little boy." Or at least that's how it sounded to him then, and her now.
The General, increasingly opaque in her professional motivations, seems to clearly understand that Sarah has kidnapped a dangerous Thai aide and is provoking a war, but all she tells Casey is to keep an eye on her crazy ass because she seems to be, quote, "on the edge," as in, I think, remember that time she was a crazy merc enforcer. Sarah slides past Casey with some very scariness -- "Surveillance camera in Chanarong's cell is still out?" -- and she tells him to get lost because she doesn't want Casey here for whatever horrible shit she's about to do, and it's pretty intimidating, and then she just sort of beats the shit out of Casey and locks him up in a containment cell.
Sarah stomps into Chanarong's cell and she's like, "Check out my awful hairdo: That's how far I'm willing to go. Here's a thing full of ammonia jammed into your neck. I am not fucking around. I am bad news." They get into an on-the-nose convo about how the man she's looking for loves her, and wants to marry her, and isn't that just like bitches: They will totally violate the Geneva Conventions to put a ring on it. They are blitz-crazy about marriage and getting married and wearing that dress and community property. Sarah's like, "Maybe women are like that and maybe I'm like that and maybe essentialism and biological determinism have their place in this conversation despite my powerful feminine persona, but either way I'mma kill you."
The Belgian has a hideout in the jungles of northern Thailand, near the Burmese border. (Myanmar! I did not spend two weeks in college refusing to drink Dr. Pepper or eat Taco Bell so that you could take it all back again! I do not have a framed picture of Jonny and Luther with the Black-Tongued King on my bedroom wall so you could ignore what I have done!) Anyway, Casey is still locked up in Castle and worrying about how the jungle is full of murderers and murder and he really wants to come. "You're not going where I'm going," Sarah metaphors.
"I'll do anything to get him back, and I'm not going to take you down with me. You were right: I'm different without Chuck. And I don't like it." He shouts You need me! and she goes, "No, I need Chuck," which somehow is the scariest part. It's very obvious that he is her Intersect of peopledom, right, but the way they're playing with it in this story is so smart.
Like, we're so plugged into the "boy earns girl" narrative due to how it's everywhere all the time that it qualifies as exciting to even consider the other thing: She won't be Chuck's equal until she finds her heart, but she can't find her heart until she's Chuck's equal. Which again would be weird if it weren't presented in such straight-up gendered terms: He's the woman inside her, she's the man inside him, and it all works out in the end. But right now, her humanity-intersect is glitching because they took the one thing that can still trip it up. Walker destroys so Chuck doesn't have to, and without him she's looking to destroy everything.
Um, Jeffster comes over to help Awesome with the Decepticon laptop, which is apparently a "Roark 7" which sounds familiar from this show but I forgot to check up on that part. (Also, this whole episode is full of war movie references I barely get, because I only figured out I love war movies like two years ago. Just warning you.) Anyway, they're gross. [BTW, Ted Roark was Papa Bartowski's old colleague, who stole all of his ideas and founded a tech empire. - Zach]
Morgan appears ready to get Casey out of the Castle cell, admits that he "threw gas on the fire" with his proposal overshare, and explains that he only did it to connect with Sarah, because she was hurting, which is very insightful of him. Anyway, he changes his mind about letting Casey out and starts demanding to go to the jungle full of killers, and while the old Casey would have promised anything and then knocked Morgan out, the new Casey promises to take Morgan to Thailand and then takes Morgan to Thailand.
Sarah beats up everybody in Thailand and finally shows up in a bar that is 90% hunky white-trash bounty hunters, like that place Indiana Jones reunited with the Starman lady. [Except that place was full of Tibetan mountain people. - Z] This one guy is immediately sexist toward her, immediately in turn earning his just reward of being beat to hell. "Anyone else want to be my boyfriend?" she screams, and everybody watching, even pets and little babies, raises their hands, some for the first time.
Imaginary Sarah leaves imaginary Chuck due to his loserness, but he still can't flash. This time -- a neat thing about this episode is the why he never falls for their Inception thing -- he doesn't flash because he knows that Sarah would never leave him. Outside of his brain they're frustrated to the point of Phase III: "We wipe out everything in his head but the Intersect. We lobotomize him. No personality, no memories, no thoughts in the way of the Intersect."
A very bad crime boss type in the corner of the bar goes, "The people have been talking much about the giant blonde she-male." Which is a joke they keep doing in this episode, which is either troubling, or plugged into the whole boy/girl thing of this story, or both and in fact also implies that the big bad guys all over Thailand have been making up stories to explain why beautiful, adorable Sarah Walker has managed to take them all out. Evidence for: This entire show. Evidence against: There is a crazy giggling little person on the guy's shoulder like Jabba the Hutt.
This Santogold song the LA Times once described as an "urban safari of warped electronic noises" but which I always associate with Blair finding out her boyfriend, a famous prostitute, is prostituting himself to her other boyfriend's mother, who is also sleeping with the other boyfriend who is her son, and who is also a Countess -- plays, and Sarah gets into the ring with the guy, and they do awesome fighting I don't know words of. Which is funny because now it's not really an episode of Sarah doing much forward movement, either. So you have Chuck in a holding pattern of brainwashing that they honestly don't do a whole lot with, you have Sarah fighting for what seems like a lot of the episode to prove her motivations, and then C stories about Casey/Morgan and Ellie/Awesome advancing the plot, for what it is.
I mean, there's no such thing as a filler episode of this show, and it makes its point, but since thematically it's literally just about covering the same ground as last week -- just from Sarah's perspective -- it does seem somewhat sound-and-furyish: She fought, she fought, she won, it's over. Which normally when you do that you have a big spy story to distract everybody, but since all the spies of the show are engaged in this one... I don't know.
Did you feel like the pacing was off? I feel like there are a lot of cool ideas that don't actually get to breathe in this, like, the whole Chuck Mental Landscape thing doesn't really go anywhere, Chamberlain never does anything, the well-worn Cagefighter story is just kinda... there.
And instead you get the third act, which is just hideous, and mainly because it explains the shit out of itself, out loud, that the rest of the episode could have been used to set up. Or like this part of the story was supposed to be longer but they smooshed it because of not knowing about the fate of the back 13 or whatever it was, and these were two episodes that became one episode that is barely an episode, and then razzle-dazzled it up with some super-long action sequences and emotionally tone-deaf explications at the end.
Morgan and Casey show up at the most convenient time, because Sarah has just been blinded by a handful of sand. Also, there is a king cobra roaming the arena, and the little person keeps tossing the guy's main gladiator things like knives and rustic furniture. Casey gives another speech about how this is a club for "nothing but scoundrels, assassins and warlords, the scum of the Earth," which is the cue for a waitress to approach with his "usual," of course, and then just because they need to fill out this part of the script Sarah throws down and she's like, "I want to finish the fight so you can tell me where the Belgian is!" instead of shooting everybody in the face and finding the Belgian, now that Jabba has proven to be one of your less trustworthy crimelords.
While Casey makes fun of Morgan and Morgan pisses himself about snakes, the entire staff of the Buy More has been brought, one by one, to work on Ellie's laptop in exchange for medical care from Awesome. Turns out they're all gross, I don't know if you got that memo; on the other hand this episode has 100% more Awesome than last week and even a little Ellie at the beginning and the end. Plus Nando, the most amazing Buy Moron of all, who kinda makes everybody else a little more acceptable.
Chuck escapes from the Belgian and runs out into the jungle, immediately calling Ellie on his cell phone so that she can yell at him about how he needs to flash, and I don't know about you but they kinda got me that time, because you know that Sarah is close by but he doesn't know that so it almost seems plausible. Except for that it's totally not plausible, and he figures that out a second after I did and probably weeks after you did, because you understand that TV is not real and sometimes they mess with you a little bit. Plus it's sad because it's Ellie and she's the best part of this entire show and she will always fix it, whatever it is, unless of course she is imaginary, in which case the world is a heartless place.
While Sarah defeats the guy through more music and bad-ass moves, earning Chuck's location, the bad man appears in Chuck's bizarre dream and this is literally what he says: "My name is Dr. Mueller. I'm the one doing this to you. If you don't access the Intersect, I will be erasing everything that is you: Your thoughts, your memories, your life. I'm very real. Now, Chuck, do you want to disappear or do you want to give me the Intersect?"
Sarah apologizes to Casey about beating his ass, but Casey has taken the interesting turn of blaming Morgan for telling her about the proposal and thus activating her Women Are All Crazy chip that all women have because they are crazy. Casey gives Sarah a bunch of AK in support of her mission and then some very odd thing I don't even have a word for happens, where Morgan goes like this: "It's like your gun is your soul. Your metaphorical yes to a question she couldn't possibly bring herself to ask!"
What? Possibly this is a reference to something I'm never going to get, maybe related to the line -- "Rear with the gear," Casey Full Metal Jackets at him -- but it seems more likely that this is just the show thinking it's smarter than it really is. Or maybe Morgan doing a weird Adam Brody-type line-reading that throws it all off, making it seem both more and less comprehensible. I don't imagine anybody heard that line and a light bulb went off, I guess I'm saying. More likely it sounded garbled and crazy and you let it slide without really caring what he said.
Initiating Phase III, which will take approximately as long as it takes for Sarah to find Chuck, presumably. Chuck wakes up on the floor of the Buy More surrounded by those guys, and still knows that something's up: "Like The Manchurian Candidate, or that episode of either Family Ties or Hogan's Family." It's funny he mentions Manchurian Candidate because this show has always reminded me of my very favorite part of that movie, or most movies: When they show the guy all the cards at once and he sees God. I love that shit so bad. Anyway, he's dreaming, but this time he doesn't wake up because they are erasing his mind.
Approaching the Belgian's camp, Morgan lobbies against guns until Sarah decides he'll work as the Magnet, again, at which point he changes his mind. In the end they will do both. I think we are in the jungle because of the Apocalypse Now thing Sarah is obliquely, almost-ly going through, which is why a lot of these things have to play out the way that they do. Although it's a stretch because we know Chuck is fine and there's only one nod in the whole episode to any other idea.
What do you think it feels like to watch your life disappear? asks the German guy, and apparently it feels like Jeffster on a TV screen being awful while everybody from the show attacks you with cardboard character motivations. "Remember when Sarah left you?" and Riggle's "You wanna be a nerd or you wanna be a spy?" and the General going "Flash or become expendable, Agent Bartowski" and all that. "Don't you love your country?" Read enough comics and your brain looks like comics.
The insanity gets so intense and Chuck's got to keep amping up his own level to stay with it to the point that finally, Chuck screaming I can't! starts sounding like he's terrified by the very possibility of flashing, rather than the opposite, which I would say is the secret-secret point of all of this, buried under the secret point that has become the actual point: Not fear of irrelevance, but fear of the responsibility of full adulthood. I mean, "fear of success" has been trampled into the ground since the '80s and it doesn't really mean anything, but in this case "I can't flash!" does double duty as, "If I flash the world will end," because of course, that's also true; it's also a too-hard concept to get your head around a lot of the time. Fear of success isn't about feeling sorry for yourself, it's about not knowing what you'll look like.
Morgan wanders into the danger camp wearing Jayne's hat -- covered in knitted peace signs -- and smelling of patchouli and pot, and bothers them and eventually annoys them into grabbing him so he can bitch about his civil rights and offer them friendship bracelets, and the whole time Sarah's coming out of the water like Jennifer's Body referencing Apocalypse Now and Chuck Norris while a song from earlier, a bad-ass, Zep-sounding Wolfmother song that goes "Woman! Woman! Woman!" plays. All about how she's going to set you free if you can get to what she actually means.
So you know, it's all kinda there. And if it weren't there -- I give the show tons of credit for this -- if it weren't all there it wouldn't balance out; it would just seem very anti-lady. Between the pushmi-pullyu of Sarah's sexy death-dealing stuff, which is nothing new, and the "giant blonde she-male" they keep talking about, it could seem very fucked-up. But add the fact that it's Sarah Fucking Walker, and the annoying balls-out Wolfmother song, and they're just openly saying, "Yes, we know what we're doing." And that is immensely comforting. As is the sight of Sarah beating the hell out of the bad guys and freeing Chuck from the brain chair.
But then it all gets really dumb for a bit. Which, any way you get out of the story is fine by me -- it's already done what it needs to do, which is demonstrate Scary Sarah and make us believe that she's still stuck between Girl Sarah and Spy Sarah to Chuck's same degree. And it does. But then, like a jerk, it tells us exactly that: "Tell him what you told me before, okay? He'll hear that, I know it. This is your chance. Don't... Don't be Sarah Walker the spy, be Sarah Walker the girlfriend."
So inside his brain he thinks it's a trick and outside his brain she thinks she's talking to brain Swiss cheese, but she says about the whole proposal plan -- "You were gonna do it on the beach in Malibu. Where we watched the sun rise after our first date. There were several race cars involved" -- and eventually whatever, Trinity kisses Neo back to life and Morgan yells "He's okay! He's okay!" and... Whatever. It's fine. They're fine. She loves him either way, and again: She needed to say that more than he needed to hear it, because I don't think she actually believed it until she realized that she did, if you see what I'm saying. It was Sarah that flashed.
The Buy Morons finally get the laptop working and it pops up a message: "Knock Knock." Awesome sets to work on figuring out the password and kicks those nasty motherfuckers out of his house, happy to have fixed Ellie's problem before she got home from work and, no doubt, pretty excited about the idea of more magic spy stuff regardless of how Ellie feels about that.
The General congratulates everybody on saving Chuck and his brain secrets, and then -- presuming suddenly that the Intersect is "buried for good" -- offers him a job with the Agency anyway, temporarily resolving the whole Spy Chuck/Boy Chuck thing (and, interestingly, knocking him down to Morgan's level): "You're an asset with or without it." General shines another flashlight on the concept that they totally kidnapped a diplomat and how she doesn't really care, and there's a lot of winky-winky-coinkidinky and whatever.
Chuck performs for Sarah the concept of his cuteness -- "Don't think you know all the surprises that I got hidden up my sleeves, because my sleeves are chock-full of surprises. You know, I'm surprised I could even get in here with all the surprises that are in my sleeves. I got magic coming your way, baby. Okay? Magic. Magic!" -- but for once it's just forced and not magical or adorable at all. Which, how awkward does your dialogue have to be to offset Chuck's dreaminess? Ugh. Out in the store, he bitches at Morgan about how he has no magic at all, and they promise to plan an even better proposal and how much they love each other and then just one more time, for a really long time, Morgan underscores the point of this episode like a hundred times until his pencil actually rips a hole in the paper: Sarah loooooves Chuck. To the point of violating international law, yes, but also whether or not he ever flashes again.
From bad to great: The Awesomes kiss, and are sweet and wonderful, and sit down at the laptop, and Ellie knows it immediately: "When I was a little girl, I would always mess up the Knock Knock routine. My dad would say Knock Knock and I would say I'm here! It made him laugh so hard I never wanted to do it right..." So she breathes and she types it and there's a particularly distinctive vrooooooom sound as the Awesomes stare and the pictures start flipping past, and she goes "Oh my God."
Which, that's one way to deal with power-creep: If Superman gets too strong, you could always just give everybody powers. I think that is a brilliant idea somebody should try. And I love also the idea of Chuck having to deal with everybody having the Intersect. Or even everybody except him having it, which would be amazing. But I don't really think that's what's going on. Doesn't it have to be specially calibrated to your biology or some crap? I mean, I guess you could just set it to "physically perfect" for Awesome's biology. And if it were really that easy, how long before Jeffster got it, just to give them something to do besides suck? If I were in charge, the only gift I would give them would be the gift of murder.
See you week, for Thanksgiving and hopefully an end to the sex war.
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