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- TV Series: Chuck
- Episode: Chuck Versus the First Kill
- Starring: Zachary Levi, Sarah Lancaster, Adam Baldwin, Yvonne Strahovski, Joshua Gomez, Julia Ling
- Written By: Scott Rosenbaum
- Directed By: Norman Buckley
- Network: NBC
- Series:
Chuck: Chuck Versus the First Kill
Chuck Gets his First Kill. By
Stephen Lackey
April 14, 2009
Zachary Levi in CHUCK: Chuck Versus the First Kill(2009).
© Mania.com/Robert Trate
I’ve been complaining for weeks that Chuck has been losing its funny and this season and that trend unfortunately continues this week. Chuck doesn’t work as a straight drama. It has to be funny along with the drama. Here’s another thing that’s becoming an irritation on this series: Chuck has become the barking dog with no bite. For weeks, he’s been standing up to the General but when his complaints go unanswered, he doesn’t follow through, well other than to try and do things covertly on his own. I’d like to see Chuck start refusing to flash on things and people. Sure, he can’t truly stop the flashes but he can refuse to share the information he retrieves from the flashes. By the end of this episode, most of these elements don’t matter, if this new development lasts more than half an episode. We’ve seen Sarah driving down the road with the wind in her hair before but it barely lasted half an episode before she was right back in the thick of things.
Chuck wants the intersect out of his head and his father seems to be the only person in the world that can make that happen. So, it’s a logical step for him to believe that his handlers are in no rush to find his father because they want the intersect to stay in Chuck’s head. The current exchanges between Sarah and Chuck, at least up to the end of this episode, are frustrating because Sarah expects Chuck to continue to trust her while she just tows the company line with him. It would be one thing if she says what she has to when she and Chuck are being monitored and she tells him more of her true feelings and plans in private, but that’s just not happening. Sarah doesn’t seem to be getting the hints in Chuck’s reactions and body language that he does just not trust her anymore. It couldn’t be more obvious but she appears to be oblivious to it.
Chuck’s old girlfriend returns to the series this week because Chuck believes he can convince her to help discover the location of his father. No one else believes it but Chuck oddly is a trusting guy or maybe he’s just desperate and grasping at straws. Isn’t it funny that an episode of Chuck featuring Jordana Brewster airs just as the new Fast and Furious film featuring Jordana Brewster hits theaters? So, she and Chuck end up pretending to be married in order to bring her “Uncle”, a Fulcrum agent, out of hiding to congratulate the happy couple. Once they see him they’ll get the location out of him. Did anyone recognize Jill’s uncle? If you’ve seen Borat, you’ve seen way more of him than you probably should have. They fail to get the information out of her “uncle” and Chuck’s use of an old “Morgan move” ends up being way more dangerous than he could have predicted.
Thematically, this entire episode is about trust and in the world of Chuck, the folly of trusting. Most of the people in Chuck’s life he doesn’t trust for good reason. At one point, he tells Sarah that he trusts no one other than her and later he even has to admit to her that he was starting to have trouble trusting her. I wonder where Chuck’s sister and Awesome and his best friend Morgan fall in those statements. In the Buy More, Emmett seeks to make a deal with Morgan to get the rest of the Buy More staff to fall in line when an executive from the home office comes to the store to evaluate Emmett. At first, Morgan and the crew decide to cause total chaos and sadly none of the things they do are very funny. Eventually, Morgan decides to trust Emmett in order to make things better for his buddies and for Emmett too. In the end, trusting Emmett is like trusting a Fulcrum agent. This leads to the only funny scene in the entire episode. Big Mike places the “Godfather style” kiss of death on Morgan but he tells everyone else that nothing is to happen to Morgan as long As Big Mike is still with Morgan’s mother.
While it is extremely disappointing that so much of the humor of the series is missing this week, the use of trust as a theme and a connecting element between the Buy More and Chuck’s life as a secret agent is handled quite well. At one point, Chuck gives Morgan a bit of advice that he himself intends to follow. Following that advice ends up being a massive mistake for Morgan but the right thing to do for Chuck. It wouldn’t be much of a stretch to believe that following the advice will inevitably be a mistake for Chuck too. Does anyone else believe that Chuck’s basically a remake of the classic Peter Parker story? The intersect makes Chuck super powered and because of this power, he can’t be with the girl he loves and his life is generally in a constant state of chaos. If that’s the case, then eventually Chuck and Sarah will find a way to be together while Chuck continues to fight crime only to have a creator come along and want the old Chuck back and find a way to completely reboot the series. Sorry, just a little Spider-Man comic book rant there.
The ending of this episode seems to set a new path for the series but based on past experience with the show, I’d say this new direction won’t last long. It may not even last for next week’s entire episode! The new situation in the Buy More could lead to some great comedy moments. Hopefully, the funny will find its way back into the Buy More because that’s half of the show. Also, there weren’t nearly as many geek references this week, or in the past few weeks actually, as the show typically features. This wasn’t a bad episode but it just seems off the track that originally made the series so much fun. Yes, the show has to grow and change to stay fresh but this is just season two after all. Let’s have some more fun before things get dark.
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I never thought of the Parker parallels. Funny.
While I agree that the show needs to keep humor in the balance, I thought this episode did that pretty well. I cracked up at the "Morgan." Also, the second the man came charging at Chuck in the Fulcrum building, I knew he would be going out the window and Chuck would have his 2nd confirmed kill. I thought both kills were a hilarious way of having Chuck get those kills without having to have him shoot somebody. I agreed with Jill that Chuck has to make sure he stays true to himself. He can't become too comfortable going undercover or deliberately causing harm to people, or he will not longer be Chuck.
As far as trusting Ellie/Awesome/Morgan, I think Chuck knows he can trust them to a degree, but he can't tell any of them the truth. So in that sense, he can't trust them. Sarah knows his secret, knows his feelings, and has shown a willingness to disregard protocol and skirt orders to protect Chuck and his family/friends. Even her cold-blooded murder was done to protect him. so in that sense, she is the only one he can truly trust (since he knows Casey would drop-kick his ass to Gitmo on a moment's notice if he was ordered).
Finally, it looks like all the haters out there complaining that they are tired of the Chuck/Sarah relationship is going nowhere might just get their wish next week. Woo hoo! Chuck's gonna git some! (I hope!)