“Chuck” — Chuck Versus the Helicopter
Hello, is this the CW’s Reaper? Yeah, I think I accidentally took your slacks.
It’s a good thing I’m really digging both Chuck and Reaper because otherwise the fact that the two shows are exactly the same might really get to me. Well, of course they aren’t exactly the same, but “Deep Impact” and “Armageddon” were technically two different movies about asteroids, but that didn’t seem to make much of a difference. Between the two, I think I’d like to hang out with Reaper’s Sam more, though I’d probably prefer to work at Chuck’s Buy More. As far as super powers are concerned, government secrets are pretty cool, but being in the service of the devil would probably get me more chicks. Kind of a toss-up, I suppose. More after the jump…
Early in this week’s episode of Chuck we get our first real look at how his new brain works. When encountering a situation that demands knowledge of some of our government’s most classified secrets the information automatically dials itself up and comes spilling out of his mouth. When the two agents bring in “the doctor” and stage an interesting twist on A Clockwork Orange’s brainwashing sequence (here it’s in a posh, home theater demo at a big box store), images are flashed in front of Chuck and he quickly responds to them. Somewhere in the middle of all of this he blurts out “Oceanic flight 815 was show down by…” So if you weren’t sure up to this point, yes, it’s that kind of show.
A week removed from the pilot episode which spent a good deal of its time establishing the characters and the universe we’re given a better look as to what the series will be like on a week-to-week basis. Here, it was spy versus spy as both John and Sarah tried to convince him the other was plotting his demise, only to discover the good doctor was the one pulling the strings.
As I mentioned in my write-up of Bionic Woman last week, I feel television is in need of some classic bad guys. In that show we were given a straight-up evil character with whom our hero could fight. Here, the villains are more comical, coming from the school or Bond or Maxwell Smart more than comic-book super-villianry. Gadgets, weapons, speeches, these are the traits of a solid bad guy — well, at least they used to be. I support it.
Plus, you have to love a spy show where tracking devices are placed inside micro-quiches, right?
It’ll be interesting to see if the long-term existence of both Chuck and Reaper will ultimately be a good thing for the individual shows or if the two will start to dovetail a bit (well, a bit more than they already do).
