"Chuck" Season 3 - Page 3

 

Exactly.  Numb3rs has been doing this for years now, where various members of the FBI team are "on days off" in a rotating fashion.  It also allows for some interesting pairings (like Awesome and Chuck) other than the standard "team" and "pairings."

I liked the first three episodes, but agree that the opener was pretty disorienting at first. New Chuck has a lot of potential, though I hope they don't get too carried away. I also hope they don't just drop Chuck and Sarah's relationship that had developed by the end of S2, there is still room to complicate it further. Like others the Buy More works better to me if it isn't being shoehorned into the episode.

I did NOT want to see that preview either. :)

Canucks got 3.04 one night early.

Boom. Boom. Pow!  Jack Bauer eat your heart out!    Ryan, Angie, and Brandon all rocked this episode.  Episode ruled. 
  out of 

More tomorrow after it airs in the US.

Edited by Lou Sytsma - 1/19/10 at 5:03am

Another good episode, managed to avoid the spoilers for next week.

Great episode.  Though, it seems that after Jay moves back to his old timeslot, the Canadian channels will stop airing Chuck 1-day early.  Oh well, it was nice while it lasted.  http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/hr/content_display/television/news/e3ieea0d35bc59ea6b95fe1b4a1896f0720

Good episode.  Classic Chuck family ending.  Almost made it feel like a Thanksgiving episode, but in January.

Sadly true Josh. After the Olympics we will lose Sunday night Chuck. 

Daniel Shaw's intro was the best one yet for a character on Chuck.   His presence on the team will shake things up and push them out of their comfort zone.  Sarah defending Chuck's stance on family was merely the first but a big one for her character to make.

Devon's inability to lie was used for great laughs, though my favorite moment was a freaked and shocked Devon yelling to Chuck, 'Chuck you killed Julius!'  lol  Nice role switching too as Devon channeled first season Chuck and Chuck channeled Sarah.

Props to Angie Harmon who was deliciously evil as a Ring Agent and composer Tim Jones for the cool spy action scoring.

I actually think that Brandon Routh was better suited for this role than he was for Superman. Shaw is a strange mix of Clark Kent and Superman attributes. Instead of arguing with Chuck, he engages Chuck and tries to redirect him toward what the C.I.A. needs doing.

Warning: Spoiler! (Click to show)

Edited by Lou Sytsma - 1/25/10 at 7:26am

Please use spoiler tags until its airs on at least the east coast in the US in the future.

Done - though general impressions hardly seem spoilery.

Thank you. It's not a huge deal, I just get paranoid that something big is going to get spoiled whenever there's a time mismatch between the Canadian broadcast and the US broadcast.

Understood - I fear that too - hence my modus operandi is not to go into plots points until after the US airing.

Lana is still wicked hot.  I'm sorry, just stating facts.

Let's just hope she gets better material, rather than the wide-eyed soap-opera-ish gaze she used to give Smallville viewers week after week, stopping each episode in its track with such a lovely gaze.

Well she's still a show stopper but in a very good way so far.

Great episode - the PLIs are much more layered and interesting. Much more than vanilla extract employed this season!

Chuck is still Chuck - his reaction to a first class ticket was perfect.

With the BuyMore storylines tooled to get Casey into the store as opposed to getting Chuck out - these sequences are a treat to watch.

What are PLIs?

On Smallville, it had gotten to the point where I cringed every time she popped up on screen because I knew the show was grinding to a halt.

Tonight's "Chuck" was a reminder than, yes, Kristin Kreuk can be an engaging screen presence. It helps that her scenes with Chuck was written a 100 times better than any of the Clark/Lana scenes since season two (if ever). Lana and Clark stared longingly toward each other, forlorn about how things could never be. Chuck and Hannah actually had a conversation about things.

Warning: Spoiler! (Click to show)
I agree. The biggest stumbling block to having Chuck go on missions by himself and be more generally self-reliant is that it raises the question of what you do with Casey and Sarah in the mean time. This episode proved they could have effective storylines largely independent of Chuck, which is important to the show's growth and continued viability.

In a weird way, Casey fits in as just another one of the social misfits that populate the Buy More. Instead of being a geek or an alcoholic, though, he appears to the rest of the world as that stone cold vet that returned from war damaged in the head and now marks time at a dead-end job scaring the shit out of everybody else. Adam Baldwin is such a terrific actor that he completely sells it. At the Buy More, all of Casey's aggression comes through with none of Casey's acute intelligence.

The Casey Buy More scenes were great.  All in all I am very happy with the season so far.  It will be interesting to see what Sarah thinks/reacts to Hannah.

PLIs - potential love interests.

Adam - if there is a next one it would have to be a palindrome like Anna or Hannah - like say Eve.  ;)

Ouch!  :)

Kristin is so very beautiful.  I was shocked to see Josie Davis, though.  I probably haven't seen her in 20 years (not counting reruns of Charles in Charge, which is where I know her from).

I don't know if we'll get more Chuck beyond this season, but I like the idea that he is growing towards being a competent spy.  I think we thought he might be at that level after the season finale and the start of the season premiere, but having him actually get there without merely being a consequence of the new Intersect is a good thing.

Something I've been meaning to ask: how should the Crosstour ads be handled on DVD/Blu-Ray?  Should they be handled?  I know they're ads, but I'd kind of like to have them preserved since the trio are in character.

Did anyone else notice the quote from The Manchurian Candidate at the end of the episode?

Another fun episode. I wasn't sold on Shaw at first, but they are doing a good job of establishing his character.  Chuck's ability to control the intersect a bit better is also a good move, and opens up a lot of potential, especially if it doesn't always work. I hope the NLI doesn't turn out to be another spy, it would be nice to have just a regular person in Chuck's life for a change, someone to create a dilemma about his career path again. Casey and Morgan make a great pair. About the only thing I'm not crazy about is Chuck's new hairdoo.

I don't know what the ratings are like, but they had better renew Chuck for another full season.

The ratings are quite good, considering the network and the timeslot--around a 2.5/6, with 7 million viewers in the all-important 18-49 demographic.

My guess, and it's only a guess, is that Hannah has been added in so that she can be killed after Chuck falls for her.

"Chuck" is NBC's third highest rated scripted series right now behind "The Office" and "30 Rock". This says more about the dismal state of NBC than it does about the success of "Chuck" but it still bodes well for a fourth season. The only thing that it has working against it is that it's considerably more expensive than most of NBC's other scripted programming, even after the production budget was slashed for this season.

Are people skipping the first hour on Thursday?  I thought maybe Community would be getting pretty good numbers.

They're all pretty much in the toilet. Right now, NBC only has two shows that can be called hits: "The Biggest Loser" and "The Office". Everything else, including "30 Rock" and "Chuck", ranges from mediocre to terrible. "30 Rock" does marginally better than the 8:00 hour comedies because it has NBC's second strongest lead-in.

When it comes to "Chuck", though, the biggest thing in its favor for renewal is the cancellation of the Jay Leno Show. That freed up five hours of schedule, which gives the show a lot more margin than it had this past year when it struggled with renewal.

What Adam said.  Sure would like to see how the show would fare on a less competitive night.