For those who don’t know, Chuck is pretty much a television series focused around a computer technician at a local store chain who has accidently downloaded the ultimate Intel database called the intersect, giving him knowledge of various criminal organisations and the several useful abilities such as the knowledge to diffuse a bomb. Because of that, he has to be protected by a CIA agent who pretends to be her girlfriend and an NSA agent who has a penchant for overkill. That is pretty much the initial premise. The following will be full of spoilers and may only be understood by those who have followed the series.
I originally liked Chuck. I thought that it was an interesting concept and liked most of the characters. Casey, the NSA agent was a hilariously violence-loving gun nut. Morgan was an amusing, yet compelling support character, Chuck was a realistic take on the nerdy guy who despite being smart, drifted through life because he was fairly unfortunate. Sarah, I originally disliked her and still do for she always felt relatively bland to me. This has nothing to do with the acting more so that she was solely portrayed as a tough and cold woman who actually had a hint of warmth in her heart. However, that shell already seemed rather thin from the get-go and she seemed more like a sensitive, emotionally fragile girl trying to act tough than a strong woman slowly warming up to the main character. Still, as a whole, the premise was original and the concept of the intersect was interesting. However, the show started to slowly fall apart over time when the spy element started to take a backseat.
The obsessive relationship:
A large portion of the dialogue focuses on the relationship between Chuck and Sarah as they progressively develop feelings for each other. At the beginning of the series, Chuck is uncertain about her feelings for him because she is only dating him as a cover but deep inside him, he loves her and he thinks it could be mutual. He wants it to happen but Sarah wants their relationship to remain professional.
What makes in unbearable in the end is the fact that it never stopped and even intensified throughout the later seasons. Chuck received some training as a spy and eventually stopped being confined to the van and joined Sarah and Casey on the field. However, while they were on missions, even when they sometimes had weapons pointed at them, Chuck would go on and on pestering Sarah to get an update on their relationship status. He would repeatedly lecture her about trust, ask her why he doesn’t love her, and when they finally got married; if they should quit the spy work and have a baby. Had these discussions been kept out of the missions and not been continuously repeated, it could have been acceptable and a normal reaction for a human being. However, if you’re infiltrating a terrorist base or tailing an illegal arms dealer, it is not the time to talk about such things. This makes Chuck sound like a whiny, obsessive boyfriend who is constantly in need of attention. This is not love, this is a mental disorder.
It gets worse when they are married because despite her having stated her love for him and her desire to live together with him as well as showing her love for him by disobeying direct commands and risking a court martial to save his life, he is still constantly unsure of their relationship status. She makes the reasonable demand to take things slowly so that she can adapt to this new lifestyle, but he never stops harassing her about moving things on. It’s always all about him and does not respect the wishes of his wife. Of course, she’s fine with it in the end. After the wedding, there really was nothing left to explore and they should have focused more on making compelling spy stories.
Jefster, the terrible duo:
Jeff and Lester are the idiot duo in Chuck. They work at the Buymore and throughout almost the entire series, they are oblivious of the spy business transpiring around them. They serve the same purpose as Bulk and Skull from the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers but instead of being funny in their idiocy, they are pretty much an insulting parody of the geek culture that will sometimes make you crack a laugh, but most of the time, will just make you shout “WHY!?”.
This duo made regular appearances throughout the series, but eventually took more space and started getting their own story arcs, sometimes taking almost if not half of an episode. Mild annoyance at higher frequency can turn into severe annoyance. You could compare that with bugs in a video game. Gamers will overlook small, even moderately large glitches in a video game so long as they occur infrequently. However, once a game has too many bugs, it can become frustrating, unplayable, even. Jefster is comparable to a glitch.
Casey turning into a teddy bear:
The later episodes focused heavily on Chuck and Sarah, Casey generally taking a backseat. He stopped being a badass and became grumpy smurf. He would complain that they are making things harder for themselves and ask things like if he could just shoot the villain in the face and get it over with. He would get subdued and look like a complete fool frequently. His focus seemed to have turned to his relationship with his daughter and his platonic love/hate relationship with Morgan who was dating her. This can be in large part blamed by fact that action scenes became infrequent.
Where is the action?:
This was tackled above, but what made this show enjoyable for me was the spy bits and the sci-fi elements tied to the intersect. There were mysteries to unravel, fight scenes, explosions, shootouts, intellectual gambits. The later episodes focused more on the drama aspect and I have never been a big fan of drama myself. Still, Chuck was a healthy hybrid of both and it is sad that in the end, the concept crashed.
Subway, eat fresh, stales plots:
Subway sandwiches may have some fresh ingredients, but its presence can turn a show stale. Product placement isn’t a new thing. Tons of shows arbitrarily show a bottle of coke in the background, or a car of a certain brand doing crazy tricks. The companies provide money, the show shows the product. The problem in Chuck is that is not subtle at all.
They had a character, Big Mike whose sole purpose in this show was to fill plot holes and to describe how delicious a Subway sandwich was, reciting every ingredient and making sure to mention how fresh it was. The more it went on, the more obvious the product placement was. It interrupted the flow of the show and ultimately reminded us that we were watching actors perform, not actual characters.
Yeah, it's about your heart... Do a barrel roll!:
Chuck’s sister Ellie and to a lesser extent, Captain Awesome are characters whose sole purpose is to encourage Chuck in his relationship with Sarah and to help him achieve his potential. However, they always gave the same mindless advice “follow your heart and everything will go fine”. The fact that this overused line is being used as a model for a helpful listener archetype really gets on my nerves. Sometimes, you do have to go with your intuitions because there really isn’t anything your mind can do to help you. Some problems don’t have a ready solution at hand, and sometimes, the fragments of knowledge you need to make an informed decisions are out of your reach, thus you must take a leap of faith into the unknown. However, most of the time, your emotions cloud your judgement and will make you behave in a way that will compromise the results you seek to achieve... for example, trying to solve relationship issues while disposing a bomb.
Following one’s gut reaction does not necessarily lead to a good ending and I dislike shows that always show reward following such an assertion. This is not quite realistic and I believe that it would be quite an interesting twist to see a character actually take this approach and end up disappointed, living with failure despite his best effort to step into the unknown. By constantly repeating this “follow your heart” advice repeatedly, these characters started to sound like mindless drones with only one goal in life; tell you to act like a libertarian fool.
Stand back! I’m going to try science!:
This is my personal gripe as one trained in human sciences, but I would like to make one thing clear. Brain science is hardcore stuff. I have studied the brain in specialized classes and still do not comprehend a modicum of what this wondrous structure is able to accomplish. Being a surgeon is pretty impressive and it requires incredible talents. However, a common surgeon who specializes with common ills does not have what it takes to decipher the effect on the brain that a program that even the greatest CIA and NSA specialists cannot fully comprehend. Having taken a single university class on how the brain works will not turn you into a brain researcher.
It is also evident that autobiographical memories are not things that you can lose and get back. There is a large amount of research showing that Freud theorycrafted without actually doing any research and that he was an incompetent fool... an influential, but still incompetent scientist by today’s standards. An autobiographical memory that is gone is gone forever. Procedural memory on the other hand tends to stick around. If you’re really good at a video game a tone point, you will go back to your previous skill level relatively quickly even if you spend years not practicing at all.
The accounts of patients remembering things that happened in their childhood that they had once locked inside their hearts are really just people being made to make up false memories to please the therapist. There is no intent at foolery; they don’t realize themselves that they are creating these false memories. Memories can be altered after an event like for example, make someone believe that it rained during the attack on the world trade center. Giving new information after an event causes people to add this new information, true or false to their memory, alters it. This is why members of a court jury are not allowed to see any source of media about the case they are hearing in court or why we have people claiming that they suddenly remember being sexually abuse at a month old out of the blue despite the fact that their brain has not matured enough for them to have an autobiographical memory at that age and thus cannot conceivably have this memory. Before this fact has been discovered, innocents have been jailed. Memory can be altered after the fact. New, false memories can be made and believed to be true by an individual. However, lost memory is lost forever and can never be retrieved. Being unable to remember something at a given moment is more attributable to interference in retrieval.
Nevertheless in the end, they had Morgan lose a part of his autobiographical memory by momentarily getting a hold of a glitch intersect, and then Sarah lose a large part of it through the same means, while keeping her skills and reflexes she has had in the past, which is actually logical. However, it all fell apart when they said that they could eventually reverse-engineer what caused her memory loss and put the memories back in her. Sorry Ellie, but that’s a one way. The act of downloading information to one’s mind, fine, I can get behind. However, downloading memories to me was pushing it. Honestly, had they stated that the intersect was interfering her ability to retrieve memories, I could have bought the whole thing.
This scientific formation is what makes some media less enjoyable for me at times. I heavily disliked the movie Inception because the movie was based on something that science has proven to be wrong for years. We dream in real time. That’s right; the entire premise of the movie is destroyed by one bit of knowledge alone. That’s kind of where I’m getting at with Chuck. If you’re going to use science as a means to tell a story, check your facts; ask a professional
Conclusion:
Really, I can only come to the conclusion that this series went on for too long. The series should have ended when they had figured out the intersect and Chuck and Sarah got married. The fourth season was not necessary, nor most of the third season. The story had been told and all that was left was pretty much showing the cast doing everyday things and random missions with no connection to the main plot whatsoever.
Mind you, I am not saying that this is a bad show. I thoroughly enjoyed it. The first two seasons were quite fun to me and some of the third season had interesting moments, especially with Morgan joining the team. Still, sometimes, you just got to let a series die when it’s still good.