Chuck 3.06: "Chuck Versus the Nacho Sampler"

“Classic geek tragedy. Sound familiar?”

-Casey

“Chuck Versus the Nacho Sampler” was yet another very high quality episode of “Chuck.” It wasn’t bright and shiny like “Chuck Versus First Class,” but there was a lot of good stuff going on from a storytelling standpoint. We see just how much Chuck has changed since Bryce first sent him the Intersect, and we see what effect that change has on Sarah. We also see Chuck’s divide between spy world and “real life” come closer to unraveling than it ever has before. The episode sets up some very intriguing character-based conflicts that will likely continue throughout the rest of the season.

It’s Hannah’s first day of work as a Nerd Herder, and it’s going to cause more problems for Chuck than he could possibly imagine. Chuck is happy to have Hannah around, and he’s eager to show her the Buy More ropes. He doesn’t really have time for that, though, as the spy business calls. Every time he’s about to give Hanna the “Buy More Tutorial,” it ends up being “yogurt time” aka time to run over to Castle, hidden under the Orange Orange yogurt shop, for a briefing with Sarah and Casey. Chuck isn’t the only person who has taken an interest in Hannah. Many of the Buy More employees are like vultures circling around her, but Morgan is especially smitten. He enlists Jeff and Lester to stalk Hannah and find out her interests so Morgan can have a better shot with her.

After getting a taste of the spy life last week on his mission to Paris, Chuck is eager for more. General Beckman isn’t really impressed by Chuck’s bragging about the “mish,” though. Casey is kind of disgusted that Chuck used the word “mish,” which I found pretty hilarious. Chuck has a different type of assignment this go round. His job is to develop a potential asset, a computer genius named Manoosh who dropped out of MIT and is now doing some work for the Ring. Chuck needs to figure out just what it is that Manoosh is working on.

Chuck’s first attempt at befriending Manoosh fails pretty miserably. Manoosh has been lured to the Buy More by CIA/NSA machinations, and Chuck tries way too hard to make an impression on him right then and there. Hanna is in the middle of trying to sell something to Manoosh, and Chuck butts right in and takes over. He gives Manoosh his card, and he comes on so strong that it’s kind of creepy (but funny, too). Casey and Sarah think a new plan is in order. They set Chuck up at a bar that Manoosh frequents, and they make sure that Chuck lets Manoosh share in the last of the bar’s nacho sampler, Manoosh’s favorite meal. The Ring is closing in, though, and they have to take care of Manoosh quickly. Sarah goes in, wearing a “Frak Off” shirt (because all good nerds love Battlestar Galactica), and distracts Manoosh long enough that he can be tranqued and taken away just in time.

Manoosh wakes up in what he thinks is Sarah’s bedroom. Just as he tries to get a little too close to Sarah, a tiny door opens, and a tranq gun fires. And I laughed hysterically. In the next room, Chuck reminds me of the movie Men in Black when he asks Casey if tranquing a guy so many times is really safe. Manoosh calls Chuck asking if Chuck picked up his brief case from the bar after he left with Sarah, and Chuck arranges for Manoosh to meet him at the Buy More to return the brief case. Meanwhile, Casey and Chuck are going to be hard at work going through the contents of that brief case trying to find the weapon Manoosh was working on.

Chuck is working with what he thinks is the weapon, but when it shoots out shaving cream, he realizes he’s mistaken. The situation overall is pretty dicey. Chuck is worried that if the Ring finds Manoosh, and the weapon isn’t in Manoosh’s suit case, they will kill Manoosh. Chuck needn’t have worried, though. He looks on in shock as Manoosh dons some souped up sunglasses and promptly subdues all of the Ring agents who are after him. Manoosh has invented another Intersect. He himself is the weapon. Manoosh doesn’t want to just turn over his new tech to the Ring. He wants to sell it on the open market.

Casey instantly knows where Manoosh will be going to sell the new Intersect. He’ll be going to Dubai for “Weap Con.” Casey, a frequent attendee, finds Weap Con “relaxing,” and I find that hilarious. Soon enough, the gang is all on their way to Dubai. There’s a big showdown there involving Manoosh and the Ring operatives, and Chuck ends up having to reveal to Manoosh that he’s actually a spy. Sarah and Casey think that Manoosh now knows way too much. He’s going to have to be brought into protective custody. Chuck does the job himself, grabbing a state-of-the-art tranq gun from a vendor’s booth and shooting Manoosh with it. Chuck follows through with burning his asset, telling Manoosh that he’ll be spending the foreseeable future in a bunker.

What I enjoyed most about the main plot of this episode was the opportunity for character development it provided both Chuck and Sarah. Chuck is confronted with someone who is a lot like himself, and Chuck has to betray that person. Chuck was confronted with a similar situation back in season 1, and he kept trying to help the asset escape at every opportunity, even at the risk of his own safety. Now, he does what he has to do. It’s obvious that Sarah is wary of how Chuck has changed. She mentioned how when she first walked into the Buy More on that fateful day feigning cell phone problems, she liked Chuck because he seemed innocent. He certainly isn’t innocent anymore.

Other people in Chuck’s life are starting to notice the change as well, and that is why his cover is starting to unravel. Ellie found a baggage claim check from Chuck’s trip to Paris, and she’s upset that Chuck didn’t tell her about his travel plans. Awesome does a poor job covering for Chuck, but Chuck smoothes it all over easily. Awesome is kind of disgusted that Chuck is able to lie so easily to his sister. Morgan also starts to get suspicious when Hannah innocently mentions Chuck’s trip to Paris. Hannah figured that since Morgan is the assistant manager, he would know about Chuck’s Parisian install job. Morgan and Ellie decide to team up to figure out what’s going on, and they’re going to employ the exemplary stalking skills of Jeff and Lester. I am most definitely anxious to see how this is all going to play out.

HIMYM 5.14: "The Perfect Week"

“I had lunch at a Staten Island Chili’s and banged a drunk hairdresser. Are you happy, Truthy McGee?”

-Barney

Although it had some good laughs, I found “The Perfect Week” overall to be a pretty frustrating episode of HIMYM. The complete character regression of Barney makes me sad, and almost angry (it would be silly to be completely angry over a TV show, and a sitcom at that). I don’t love the turn the writers have taken with Robin, either. And it’s not just because Barney and Robin aren’t together anymore. It’s because both have turned into rather hollow joke vehicles, and considering they used to be entertaining, compelling, well-developed characters, that’s just a shame. I honestly wish I liked this episode more, considering it was fairly Barney-centric and was jam packed full of baseball references (even if it did reference the Yankees too much for my taste…bitter Phillies fan here). If it wasn’t Lost premiere week, which means Lost has been taking up much of my non-blog related TV watching time, I would totally break out a few of my favorite HIMYM episodes to remind myself why I loved this show so much, because I’m really starting to forget.

One somewhat interesting thing about this episode was its rather unique framing device. Throughout the episode, Barney was imagining a conversation between himself and sportscaster Jim Nantz. Apparently this is something Barney does whenever he’s nervous, and he most definitely had reason to be nervous. A big merger fell through at work, and Barney is in danger of being fired from GNB. While he’s waiting to be told his boss’ decision about whether or not he gets to keep his job, he “talks to Jim Nantz” about his sexual exploits from the past week. It turns out Barney was on track to have a “Perfect Week” where he slept with a different woman each night.

I really feel like concepts such as the “Perfect Week” and “The Playbook” do a major disservice to the character of Barney. Sure, he’s a kind of disgusting womanizer, but over the past few years, we’ve been shown a different side of him on many occasions. He didn’t have the greatest childhood, he was devastated when his college sweetheart dumped him, the list goes on. We got to see more of his vulnerability through his pursuit of and eventual relationship with Robin. After Robin and Barney broke up, everything about Barney other than the often funny womanizer has been erased. Sure, in this episode there’s the extra layer that he’s trying to keep his mind off of his job troubles, but the episode doesn’t really spend much time exploring that.

Instead, the episode seems to focus more on how Barney’s exploits help his friends keep their minds off of their own troubles, which are really incredibly trivial compared to what Barney is probably going through. In a plot that I found more offensive than actually funny (yeah, I’m super politically correct…deal with it), Ted doesn’t react well to a student with an unusual (and unfortunate) name. He’s convinced that his new class added “Cook Pu” to the sign-in sheet to mess with him, and by the time he figures out that she’s real, she’s horribly upset and drops the class. Instead of thinking about how terrible Cook must feel, Ted just wallows in “I just had my first student drop my class” self-pity. Marshall and Lily are upset that a couple they had a double date with it freaked out over the fact that Marshall and Lily use the same tooth brush. Robin is upset that a nerd she was going to dump never called her after their first date.

Out of the two plots that I really haven’t addressed yet, I found the Marshall and Lily plot to be occasionally mildly amusing and the Robin plot to be downright rage-inducing. I liked how it turned out that four of the five main HIMYM characters had all shared the same toothbrush at one point. Since this is a television show and not real life, it was good, silly fun. What I didn’t like about Robin’s plot was that it continued the extreme self-centeredness kick she’s been on for the past few episodes in a row. What happened to the embarrassed about her past, kind of quirky Robin we’ve gotten to know over the past few years? The character has been very one-note lately, always whining about certain people not noticing her or paying enough attention to her. It is not entertaining to watch at all.

The only thing that made yet another “isn’t Barney so funny because he sleeps with tons of women” plot at all palatable was that some of the baseball shout-outs the writers threw in were actually kind of funny. The one that made me laugh was when Ted gives Barney advice on which MacLaren’s woman to pursue like a manager or pitching coach would for a pitcher in a baseball game. He gave each of the women nicknames that corresponded to pitches like “High and Outside” and “The Slider.” Each name corresponded to something literal about the woman. “High and Outside” was actually outside the bar and high as a kite, and “The Slider” was eating a slider. It was also funny when Lily tried to explain to Robin why women were so drawn to players for the New York Yankees by asking Robin what her reaction would be if a Vancouver Canuck walked into the bar.

The culmination of the episode was a group effort to help Barney complete his Perfect Week. New York Yankee Nick Swisher walks into MacLaren’s, and Barney is in danger of losing the woman he’s chatting up to the inexplicable Yanke magnetism. One of my good friends is an employee of the Yankees, and they have been good to him, so I’ll refrain from disparaging the organization here, even though the Phillies fan in me desperately wants to. It was cool to see the gang all work together, even if I kind of hated what they were working together to accomplish. Oh, and Barney didn’t get fired from GNB. I think it might have been more interesting if he had been. Every character but Barney has faced employment troubles throughout the series, and Barney is usually the one to come to the rescue. I’d be interested to see how Barney would deal with such a problem happening to himself instead of one of his friends.

Dollhouse 2.13: "Epitaph Two: Return"

“I think you’ve got a hundred people living inside your head. And you’re the loneliest person I know.”

-Paul

So, for the second year in a row, my favorite show meets an untimely end. “Dollhouse” certainly went out in style. I still consider “Epitaph One” to be the best episode of the series, but “Epitaph Two: Return” was most definitely a worthy send-off. Despite the fact that I’m still recovering emotionally from re-watching the episode (yeah, it’s just THAT good), I’ve collected some thoughts on “Epitaph Two” and how it relates to the series overall.

First and foremost, I believe that “Epitaph Two” showed just how much storytelling potential was left in the Dollhouse ‘verse. By 2020, when the episode took place, new subcultures had sprung up. I could see a whole television series just about the group of survivors at Safe Haven or Tony/Victor and his band of “tech heads.” I could even see a series about the survivors re-building the world a year after Topher’s magnetic pulse reset the personalities of everyone still above ground. There were just so, so many possibilities. It’s sad to see those doors closed for good.

What I especially loved about Safe Haven in particular was how reminiscent it was of another short-lived Joss Whedon series, “Firefly.” The scene of the survivors all gathered around the table at the house reminded me of Serenity’s crew all gathered around her dining room table. Both have a feel of people working hard to survive and relishing the small things that they have. The camera work even felt similar. My favorite moment at the Safe Haven dining room table was when Paul tells Zone “World still needs heroes, kid” and everybody promptly bursts out laughing at the cheesiness.

By far, the star of the episode was Topher. Topher’s journey throughout “Dollhouse” has really been incredible. For much of the first season, he was the amoral, juvenile annoyance who said things like “man friend” that were so quirky they bordered on ridiculous. We started to see another layer of Topher in “Haunted,” where we learn that his birthday present to himself every year is that he imprints a Doll to be his friend. The tide really began to turn for me personally in “Epitaph One” where we see him completely broken, unable to deal with the consequences of the technology he has created. In season 2, we saw Topher struggle with his first true moral dilemma in “Belonging” and deal with the loss of Bennett, someone he cared for deeply, in “Getting Closer.”

Topher really completes his redemption arc in “Epitaph Two.” Rossum has been holding him captive, forcing him to develop technology that would imprint the entire world all at once. It’s hard to fathom the trauma Topher has gone through. Already twitchy around guns following what happened to Bennett, Rossum keeps Topher working by shooting someone in front of him every day that he doesn’t finish his work. Topher somehow is still determined to undo the damage he caused. He’s working on a device that will reset everyone’s minds, not wipe them. Unable to continue living with all the pain he has caused, Topher ultimately sacrifices himself to save the world. His reset device is started by an explosion, and the explosion must be started manually. Topher’s sacrifice is a truly beautiful scene. He pulls himself back together just long enough to notice the remembrance wall in Adelle’s old office and remark “Huh” before the explosion happens.

On the subject of character death, which is inevitable in the finale of a Joss Whedon series, I overall found Topher’s death to be much more satisfying from a storytelling perspective than the other major death in the episode, that of Paul Ballard. My initial reaction to Paul’s death was pretty much “eh.” It was sudden, like Bennett’s was in “Getting Closer,” but since the crew was still in danger from the advancing Butchers, nobody stopped to mourn. When Echo tells Tony that everybody is under cover, and Tony starts to ask where Paul is, it’s kind of reminiscent of how Zoe reacts to Wash’s death in “Serenity,” but for some reason, the “Dollhouse” version doesn’t have quite the same impact. It’s not that I’m a Paul hater. I liked when he finally got to kick ass in the interrogation room in “Belle Chose,” and I definitely felt it when he “died” in “A Love Supreme,” but his ultimate death just felt shoehorned in.

When Echo did finally have an opportunity to mourn Paul, it was rather spectacular. She gets frustrated with Priya complaining about Tony’s tech use, because Tony is still very much alive and in love with Priya. Clearly, Echo is projecting. Anybody who still complains that Eliza Dushku can’t act seriously needs to watch this scene. My feelings are still conflicted about the ultimate resolution to Echo and Paul’s relationship. Alpha, who has somehow managed to suppress his darker personalities and befriend the Dollhouse crew, leaves Echo a wedge with Paul’s personality, and Echo imprints herself with it. I’m torn between thinking it’s sweet and thinking it’s creepy. Either way, it seems like having your late soulmate kicking around in your head could be awkward.

I was absolutely astounded that several of the characters got a genuine happy ending. Those characters would be Tony, Priya, and their son “T.” Tony and Priya had been estranged for several years at least, mostly due to Tony’s increasing love for tech. He and his band of “tech heads” swap skills in and out of their brains using what looks like a bunch of USB flash drives. By the end of the episode, though, Tony had given up the tech, and Priya had tearfully introduced “T” to his father. It’s a rare occasion that a couple ends up in tact in a Whedon production, so I was very, very pleasantly surprised to see Tony and Priya happy when the episode ended.

As Echo took her final walk from the imprint room down to her sleeping pod, where she’ll wait for at least a year until she can go outside without Topher’s pulse causing her to reset, I have to admit I got a little teary. I’ll miss visiting with these characters on a semi-regular basis. It’s also sad to think that the absolutely gorgeous Dollhouse set is no more. I eagerly await whatever project Whedon has in mind to tackle next. Be it television, internet (come on, Dr. Horrible 2!) or film, I’m fairly certain already that I’ll love it.

Fringe 2.14: "The Bishop Revival"

“Nonsense! Purple never goes out of style!”

-Walter

“The Bishop Revival,” while certainly providing some tasty Bishop family backstory, wasn’t as emotionally affecting as last week’s episode, “What Lies Below.” I think it’s another example of how when Walter is personally in peril, it’s not as big a deal as when Peter is in peril, because how Walter reacts to Peter in peril isn’t exactly reciprocated when Walter is in peril. That’s for good reason, really. Walter went through the unthinkable losing this universe’s Peter when Peter was just a small boy, and Walter found a way to bring some form of Peter back at great personal stake. Peter, on the other hand, spent most of his life resenting his father and has only just started to develop a healthy relationship with him. There’s a reason Peter still calls him “Walter” and not “Dad.”

The case of the week begins at a Jewish wedding, which is an important detail considering the history of the horrible things that happen and the person making them happen. The atmosphere is normal enough pre-wedding buzz, and then things start to go wrong. First, the groom starts getting a little antsy. He has trouble breathing, and he rushes for his inhaler. In the room where the ceremony is to take place, the guests have gathered. The groom’s grandmother starts to appear agitated. She sees a strange man standing in the back of the room. He has blond hair and appears to have stepped out of another time. She steps out into the aisle, starts to yell at him, and collapses. A number of other wedding guests begin to collapse soon after.

Peter and Walter’s arrival on the scene amused me greatly. Walter’s enthusiastic about going to a wedding, and he’s gleefully recalling his own wedding many years ago. He mentions that he saved his wedding suit, and he hopes Peter wears it one day…when he marries Olivia. I must say that I love the fact that Walter is a Peter/Olivia shipper. He adorably nudges Peter into complimenting Olivia’s outfit, and then it’s on with the case.

We learn some interesting things in the early investigation. Everyone who died of asphyxiation was related to the freaked-out grandmother, who just happens to have been a holocaust survivor. The team also discovers one well-used cinnamon scented candle among the many jasmine scented candles the bride chose for the wedding. Finally, the groom comes stumbling out of a back room. His inhaler had been keeping him alive, but it’s empty now, and he collapses to the floor just like the rest of his family.

Everything about this case seems to evoke a Nazi connection. The grandmother being a holocaust survivor, Walter blabbering on about the types of experiments the Nazi’s conducted- all of it. Specifically, Walter has a hunch that what was going on at the wedding was an experiment. The mix of people who attend a typical wedding makes it the perfect environment for such an endeavor. Leave it to Walter to think of a wedding as the perfect place to find scientific test subjects! Walter ominously states that scientists always conduct their experiments multiple times to confirm the results.

Walter’s hunch is quite right. The strange man next shows up at a coffee shop, requesting a cup of hot tea with the water very, very hot. The toxin he brews needs a heat source to disperse and wreak its havoc. He makes some ominous comments to a mother and daughter, then he sets off the toxin. When the Fringe team arrives on the scene, Walter figures out that this iteration of the toxin was programmed to kill everyone with brown eyes. The strange man looks on as the FBI conducts the investigation. He asks a police officer on crowd control if the man he sees is Dr. Bishop, and the police officer confirms it. The man replies, “He looks just like his father.”

Thanks to a mass spectrometer, Walter now has a pretty good computer model of what the toxin looks like. In addition to the poisonous stuff and the part of the molecule that is programmed to target specific traits, there’s also a “signature”- the inert call sign of the chemist who developed it. Walter thinks the signature looks like a stylized “s,” but Olivia and Peter think it looks like a seahorse. This immediately sets off a light bulb for Walter. His own father, another scientific genius, was nicknamed “The Seahorse” for his swimming ability. Walter reveals that his father was actually a Nazi scientist, albeit one who smuggled German scientific secrets to the United States when he could. The elder Dr. Bishop smuggled his secrets by writing them on the pages of German novels. These novels were among Walter’s prized possessions, and Walter hopes the contents could help fight the toxin. There’s just one little problem. Peter, in the throes of financial crisis and a fit of rage at his father, sold all the books ten years ago.

In a much different emotional place than he was in ten years ago, Peter tries to track down his father’s books. He and Olivia start their search at the used bookstore where Peter sold them. The shopkeeper, after giving Olivia some good-natured grief for hanging around Peter, says that he sold the books about a year ago, and he supplies a name. This lead is sort of a dead-end. Peter and Olivia do indeed find the books, but not in the possession of a racist mad scientist. The man who bought the books is a very odd artist who bases all his art around Nazi imagery. One of Walter’s books has been turned into a collage portrait of Hitler. Some of the books are still intact.

The most fascinating thing about this detour about the books, beyond the rather shocking reveal of Bishop family history, is Walter’s reaction. He is irate, which is fairly unusual for post-St. Claire’s Walter. I think most of his anger comes from feeling like he’s been betrayed by Peter, a person for whom he has given up quite a lot. Although his time at St. Claire’s certainly softened him, Walter still seems unable to understand why people might have found him difficult to get along with.

The team has more luck with the investigation when they trace buyers of a rare chemical used in the toxin. One of the recent local buyers has a residential address- a red flag for nefarious purposes in the world of Fringe. This residence is indeed the right place. Olivia discovers a mad scientist’s lab to rival Walter’s in the basement. Unfortunately for Walter, the strange man left a brew of toxin on the burner, and it’s specifically programmed to affect Walter. The man broke into the Bishop house and stole Walter’s sweater to create it. Luckily, Olivia realizes quickly what’s going on, and Walter is hauled out of the basement just in time.

After a little more snooping around the lab, the team figures out the man’s next target- the annual conference of the World Tolerance Initiative. The man is indeed already at the conference, dressed as a cater waiter and carrying toxin hidden inside those Sterno containers that are used to heat up chafing dishes. Peter, Olivia, and a team of agents are quickly on the scene. Peter and Olivia scour the venue, looking for anything that could be used to heat up the toxin. Peter figures it out just as a cater waiter is about to light the chafing dishes. Meanwhile, Walter had been working on his own plan to avenge the perversion of his father’s work. He brewed up a toxin specifically designed for the man who has been behind all this mess. He and Astrid rush to the convention center. Right after Peter discovers the source of the toxin, the crowd hears pained gasps. The mysterious man has collapsed. With a scream of “BISHOP!” he asphyxiates.

There are a ton of moral questions that are raised by Walter’s actions, but the show, unfortunately, doesn’t really dwell on them. Broyles decides not to press charges against Walter due to the unique situation. The team still wonders how, if he didn’t purchase the novels with the elder Dr. Bishop’s notes, the mysterious man cooked up the toxin. The answer is revealed when Peter returns Walter’s books and Walter show’s him a photograph that was tucked in-between some of the pages. Standing behind Walter’s father in the photo is the mysterious man. Which really just raises even more questions than it answers, but such is television.