I’m all for TV show sponsorship, as Chuck’s very existence is probably due to its relationship with Subway. But the tenuous insertion of this particular minty confection into the plot of this Chuck made me wonder quite where this strategy might ultimately take us. It was like none of the magic transferred, as, for starters this story was almost entirely BuyMore-free. With the exception of Morgan, all those characters didn’t get to appear at all, annoyingly. That reduced the amount of humour drastically, and it was left to Joshua Gomez to almost entirely carry that side of the show. What we got left with was a curious attempt by Chuck to become Alias for a week, but without Jennifer Garner’s iconic Sydney Bristow. What Robert Patrick is doing in here, I’ve no idea, because he hardly appears at all. He has one scene when he recruits ‘Alex’ (Casey) that links to a modern meeting, then another when he turns up to jailbreak Casey, and then a final one where he gets his ass-whooped. Okay, he then turns up in a final extended scene going back to the initial recruitment, but it’s all about Casey and not his character. He never turns into liquid metal, or provides any real reason for being specifically him. Yawn. The writers here are engaging in another sand-piling exercise, where they break things down so they can later rebuild them for our enjoyment. Although each time they do it the threat that they’ll make real changes seems less believable, I feel. If this show had any upsides, one was the entire omission of Brandon Routh’s character, although I don’t think we’ve seen the last of him, unfortunately. And, there were some nice fight sequences, especially the one where Chuck took the pill that removed his fear, allowing the intersect to work as intended. After the soaring heights of last week’s Chuck, perhaps my expectations were too high here, but the show certainly came to earth with a thud. I’m hoping that the next one, where Chuck goes on his first solo mission, can stabilise these rather wild oscillations in quality the show is experiencing. Check out our review of episode 9 here.
