Okay, I admit it, I might have teared up a little bit.
I have long maintained that Chuck’s series premiere is my One Perfect Pilot. It defies my theory about pilots, that most of them completely miss the mark. A good many of them are just plain boring. I try not to judge a new series until the second or third episode because a pilot has one function: to introduce you to a group of characters that you are supposed to care about. And let’s face it, introductions are always awkward and you can’t just hit the care button on command.
But Chuck managed to avoid all of that. The pilot moved quickly, but still delivered all of the important exposition. The tagline on my first season DVD cover says, “He’s the secret. She’s the agent,” and that right there is the message of the pilot. That’s all you really need to know. And at it’s core, that’s the primary focus of the series.
Over the last five seasons, Chuck certainly strayed from that focal point, sometimes to mixed reactions. Personally, I wasn’t wild about the Mary Bartowski storyline in Season Four, even though Linda Hamilton brought the awesome. But when Chuck strayed, it inevitably came back to itself, and that was always worth persevering through everything else. That’s what makes this finale so appropriate, so perfect.
I see what you did there, Chuck. I see what you did there and I approve.
In “Chuck Versus Sarah,” the Sarah that we have come to know in the past five years is seemingly wiped from her own mind via the Intersect virus. Utilizing her own old Operation Bartowski mission log, Quinn convinces Sarah that her time with Chuck has been one long, elaborate mission. And it has cost her dearly: old flame Bryce Larkin, memories, and freedom. The time has come to end Operation Bartowski.
Of course, that’s spy talk for “kill Chuck.”
Sarah tries, oh how she tries, her attempts culminating in an emotional confrontation in the little white house with the red door that she and Chuck previously fantasized about owning. She lays the mother of all smackdowns on a Chuck who refuses to throw a single punch and it’s brutal, you guys. It seems that Zachary Levi has been doing quite a bit of voice acting lately and it’s great, don’t get me wrong, the number of times Tangled shows up in my Netflix queue is disgusting, but the man’s facial expressions manage to communicate so much during his scenes and it would be a shame to squander that.
By the time Sarah realizes that Quinn has been manipulating her all along, he’s gotten away with the Intersect. And perhaps more devastating for Team Bartowski, accepting facts as truth is one thing, but Sarah still doesn’t remember her time with Chuck. She believes that they are married and that at one time, she loved him…but she doesn’t feel that love now. She apologizes to Chuck and leaves to exact revenge on Quinn for destroying her life.
“Chuck Versus the Goodbye” picks up two weeks later. Quinn has yet to upload the Intersect to his brain because he needs a key to unlock it and get rid of that nasty brain damaging virus. The key is in three pieces and he’s been tracking the pieces down one by one. Sometimes Sarah tries to kill him, but he always gets away. Mark Pellegrino makes a quick cameo that makes me wonder two things: does the man ever take a vacation and why is he always popping up in shows that I like? Clearly, he’s stalking my brain.
After weeks of failed assassination attempts, Sarah returns to Burbank to utilize Castle’s espionage resources, meeting Chuck at the Buy More’s Nerd Herd desk in the first of many many scenes that tip a hat toward the One Perfect Pilot.
And thus begins the meat of this epic love letter. At Morgan’s urging, Chuck convinces Sarah to let him come with her, hoping to somehow jog her memory. Morgan even floats the idea of the “magical kiss,” like in fairy tales. Remember this one because it’ll be on the final exam.
They track Quinn to Berlin and take a romp down memory lane with a Mexican restaurant that looks suspiciously like the one where they had their first date, a tango amid Russian spies, and a showdown with the bad guy at the local Weinerlicious, where Sarah dons her old uniform and subconsciously remembers the proper way to stack the cups.
Meanwhile, Casey has been enlisted by the government to take Quinn out at all costs. He’s in full ruthless colonel mode, complete with sniper rifle and helicopter in another reference to Chuck and Sarah’s first date.
Quinn manages to escape again and Team Bartowski ultimately takes him out on home turf back in Burbank with some hilariously unintentional help from Jeffster (because to end this series without one final terrible concert from the village idiots would be unacceptable).
Chuck has always been the oddly lighthearted fare in my pantheon of “favorite television shows” to the extent that it’s always jarred me when the writers go for the emotional wallop or the oddly mature conclusions. I never thought that they’d actually kill Stephen Bartowski or Bryce Larkin and even after those untimely demises, I had a hard time finding the ability to actually worry when any of the main cast appeared to be in mortal danger, when it looked like life might be irreparably altered for Chuck, Casey, Sarah, Morgan or the Awesomes.
But they went there, here, in our final hour with Chuck and Sarah. Midway through the episode, Ellie Bartowski-Awesome postulates that if Sarah’s memories were uploaded to the Intersect glasses (such as their wedding video, photographs, stories), then they could be uploaded to Sarah’s brain, potentially undoing the damage caused by the Intersect. It sounded questionable at best, but frankly, none of the Intersect mythology has made sense this season, so I assumed that was the foot we would ultimately land on when the final credits ran.
Unfortunately, Chuck is forced to upload the Intersect to his own brain during the final showdown with Quinn, frying the glasses, and destroying any chance of just POOFing Sarah’s memories back in place. When the dust settles, she apologizes again for just not feeling the love and leaves. Chuck tracks her down to “their spot” on the beach and tells her “their story” (because this episodes ends in five minutes and we haven’t had our montage yet) and… Sarah still doesn’t remember.
Grasping at straws, Chuck remembers Morgan’s magical kiss idea and at this point, with nothing left to lose, asks Sarah if she’ll humor him.
They kiss.
Credits roll.
During the course of “Chuck Versus the Goodbye,” everyone’s stories are wrapped up in neat little packages: Ellie and Awesome move to Chicago to take well-paying jobs, Morgan and Alex move in together as Casey leaves to find Gertrude Verbanski, Jeffster signs a recording contract with a German music executive, and the Buy More opens up a Subway in a disused corner, much to Big Mike’s delight. On the surface, it’s easy to cry foul that our two heroes don’t get the picket fence in suburbia, that they are somehow cheated in the end, forced to start over when they worked so hard to reach where they were before. But Chuck and Sarah have grown up quite a bit during the course of this series, proven time and again that they excel at overcoming unfavorable odds.
Chuck has come full circle, but circles, by their definition, have no beginning and they have no end.
Some stats and info about Chuck, “Chuck Versus Sarah” and “Chuck Versus the Goodbye”
TV SHOW – Chuck
SEASON/EPISODE – Season 5, Episode 12 & 13
AIRED ON – January 27th, 2012
NETWORK/STREAMING SERVICE – NBC/Peacock
GENRE – Comedy, Spy Shows, Office Culture
CREATED BY – Chris Fedak, Josh Schwartz
CAST – Zachary Levi, Yvonne Strahovski, Joshua Gomez, Vik Sahay, Scott Krinsky, Sarah Lancaster, Adam Baldwin, Ryan McPartin, Mark Christopher Lawrence, Bonita Friedericy
This review originally appeared on TV Geek Army.