Morgan is de-intersected. Sarah just wants to be a real girl.
It’s like a sandwich: one slice of bread is the opening, picking up where last week left off, with Morgan walking straight into potential death by car bomb. The other slice is the ending, with Casey getting himself arrested for real after taking out determined assassin, Viper. Now, generally, the middle of a sandwich is the good stuff and in this case, I’m going to call it a marshmallow fluff and Nutella sandwich because sometimes, it’s just too sweet and definitely a little bit awkward.
One of the apparent staples of Season Five, so far, appears to be Chuck and Sarah’s longing for normalcy. Sarah, in particular, is starting to come off as a sort of Feminine Mystique reject with her constant monologuing about wanting the house with the picket fence and real friends and quiet nights in front of the television. We’ve seen her be nothing less than the quintessential ass-kicker for the past four season, and now all of a sudden, she’s Mrs. Bartowski and that means she needs to learn how to bake a pie or something.
It just feels like a step backward for both Sarah and Chuck to be written as these reluctant heroes suddenly pining for the quiet life. Chuck’s entire series-long journey has seen him come from being that normal guy, to wanting that normalcy back, to finally accepting what his role in life is and totally embracing it. It doesn’t make sense for him to regress because he knows that when he was there, he wasn’t as happy as he is now.
With Sarah, I can understand her stance a tiny bit, since she has always been living on the run, lying to someone, whether that be running childhood cons with her father or working with the CIA, but I thought we got this whole domesticity storyline out of the way last season when she panicked over marrying Chuck and settling down.
It feels like the entire want vs. need conflict is being hammered into every episode purely for the sake of creating some kind of conflict. Chuck and Sarah can’t be content yet! We haven’t reached the series finale!
I’m holding out hope that went when show returns in December (not cool, NBC, not cool) we’ll find that Chuck and Sarah’s adventures in the mundane this week will have taught them a solid lesson. It seems like it did, when Sarah realizes that her eagerness to make a “normal” friend blinds her to what her shiny new friend really is (an assassin, surprise!) and I awwww-ed at her little speech about friends at the end. Sarah sums up what I was thinking through most of her angsting, that she does have a close circle of friends that she can be normal around. Ellie and Awesome, Casey and Morgan, Chuck, of course, know exactly who she is and more often than not, look past all the spy stuff to care about the Sarah who doesn’t pack heat in her thong.
Other thoughts:
* Morgan has forgotten all of his nerdiness and spends the majority of the episode hiding from Viper in Castle, catching up on Indiana Jones and Star Wars. Casey tells him to watch The Phantom Menace first because “everyone loves Phantom Menace.” CRUEL, Casey. That was just cruel.
* David Koechner of Anchorman and Thank You for Smoking fame has a hilarious cameo, though I was slightly disappointed that he wasn’t the assassin. It would have been mind blowing.
* I was absolutely tickled that Functional Jeff was reading Flowers for Algernon at the Buy More. I smell foreshadowing.
Some stats and info about Chuck, “Chuck Versus the Business Trip”
TV SHOW – Chuck
SEASON/EPISODE – Season 5, Episode 4
AIRED ON – November 18th, 2011
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.