CHUCK: ‘Chuck vs. The Gobbler’

Hey Nerdherders!  Kath is traveling, so I’ll be covering Team Bartowski in her place this week.  When we left off, Chuck had spent the hour trying repeatedly to propose to Sarah in front of some very unrealistic-looking green screens.  Alas, as Kath put it last week, he was rock-blocked at every turn, even when everyone including his intended bride was trying to help things along.

But despite all of their efforts, Sarah was swept away at the last second for a secret mission to infiltrate Volkoff’s inner circle, take him down and get Mama Bartowski back with her family.  Last night picked up a few weeks later with the bizarre scene of Sarah, in a black wig, kicking the living crap out of Casey.  In order to find out how things got to that point, we were taken back two days to retrace the steps.

Mission-wise, Sarah had to bust Volkoff’s most trusted bodyguard Uri out of prison (in California, natch).  Mama B put the plan in motion because she knows he’s connected to a database containing all of Volkoff’s secrets, just what she needs to finally take the company down and return home.  The real meat of the episode though wasn’t the mission, since everything went off without a hitch.  The bigger concern, voiced often by Mary and Chuck, was that pretending to work for Volkoff would somehow change Sarah in a way that would be irreversible. Given everything Sarah’s had to do for her job in the past, it was hard to imagine something so significant that could fundamentally change who she was as a person in a matter of a few weeks.

Even when Volkoff told Sarah that she had to prove her loyalty by killing Casey, I wasn’t too worried.  Of course she would never actually do it, and of course he would go along with her plan to make it look like she did.  I was all ready for a nice, celebratory moment when the plan came together: Chuck grabbed Casey from the platform and Sarah managed to keep her cover.  I was NOT prepared to watch the platform collapse and see Casey fall nine stories, possibly to his death (okay, we know Casey isn’t getting killed off anytime soon, but still – that was terrible to watch).

And because Chuck can never stay in the figurative car, he saw it all too, but without the benefit of knowing Sarah and Casey’s plan.  He watched horrified as the love of his life threw their partner through a 9^th floor window, and then left with the bad guy, seemingly unfazed.

I had mixed feelings about this development, from the Chuck and Sarah perspective.  First, the emotional rollercoaster was pretty great.  I was horrified for Sarah that she saw what happened to Casey and yet had to remain stone-faced and leave town before she knew the fate of her friend.  She also saw Chuck’s look of horror at her actions and had to leave him too without explanation.

On the other hand, this storyline feels a little too reminiscent of Sarah’s fears a while back of Chuck becoming a different person after he became a full-fledged spy.  It’s kind of hard to believe that Chuck would be so easily convinced that the same was happening to her in such a short span of time, but it’s hard to argue with what he witnessed.  Chuck, Morgan and Alex were left with an unconscious Casey hooked up to a respirator in a hospital bed, so things got very real, very fast for Team Bartowski.

So real that Sarah wouldn’t even take Chuck’s call from the hospital because she needed to give herself some distance and get the job done.  Sarah’s a professional above all else and what’s done is done, as harsh as that is to say.  She’ll just have to deal with it when she gets home. Let’s not forget that Casey is a world-class spy too and he would absolutely approve of Sarah’s handling of the situation. The problem is not that Sarah has changed; it’s that Chuck thinks she has.

On the plus side, Sarah managed to pass along the chip containing Volkoff’s database to Casey before his fall, so if and when he wakes up (come on guys, you know it’s when, not if), they’ll really be able to do some damage and take Volkoff down.

The episode wasn’t all heartbreak, thankfully – there were a few really funny moments thrown in, mostly courtesy of The Bearded One. Morgan came to the realization that he’s in love with Alex – he knows this because he barely blinked when she put on his never-worn Robert Zemekis-issued Back to the Future t-shirt and proceeded to slosh orange juice and pizza sauce millimeters away from the fabric. Personally, I’d be more concerned that the girl eats with all the precision of a toddler, but you don’t think about these things when you’re in love.

Across the courtyard, Ellie and Awesome were having a tough time coming up with a name for Baby Awesome. Ellie finally got frustrated and decided to just pick something, so she went with…Grünka.  It was a pretty ingenious plan, picking something terrible (it was the name of the spoons she bought at Ikea!) to force him into making a decision, and in the end, they went with Clara.  If you read GMMR’s interview with Chris Fedak, you know that he chose to name Baby Awesome after his own daughter, which is so sweet.

So that’s it for this week – personally I’m going to be sweating it out until next week because seeing Casey all vulnerable and hooked up to medical equipment is highly unsettling.  Until then, here are a few random observations/favorite quotes from last night:

• MORGAN: Are you putting Kahlua in your cereal again?
• It was so lucky that Uri the Gobbler was in a room full of hundreds of prisoners and zero guards – made it nice and easy for Chuck and Sarah to knock him out and haul him into their van.
• MORGAN: We wear lots of shirts.  It’s like a shirt party.
• Yvonne continues to put the “hot” in StraHOTski.  Is there any look that girl can’t work?
• LESTER: I lost my virginity to a girl named Grünka.  Filthy, filthy lady – hard to believe she was a grandmother.

Were your nerves as frayed as mine in the second half of the episode?  What was your take on the “Sarah becoming a different person” angle?  Let’s keep the discussion going in the comments!

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