Monsters of Television

“Of course he’s still alive. Haven’t you ever seen a John Carpenter movie?”

They can see you. And they’re totally grossed out.

So on Tuesday I watched the penultimate episode of Lost, a show with so many plot points and mysteries and characters and secret organizations/alliances/double-crosses/betrayals/dimensions/timelines that no one is certain how they can contain it all in a single series, let alone how to hit on everything from episode to episode. So many loose ends to attack and so many characters to mug. And yet, their episodes never feel like they’re short-changing anyone. Chuck, while having a moderately-sized cast and a certain level of mystery, does not have the ever-expanding intrigue Lost has built in six years but failed tonight with an overpacked episode before the finale.

Now, it’s a little unfair to compare Chuck to Lost since the latter is one of the most narratively complex series since Grey’s Anatomy (I still don’t get that show) and Chuck leans barely enough into drama that it doesn’t have a laugh track. But they are both serialized dramas and Chuck allowed itself to drain the emotion out of an episode to make room for more story, more setup, more threads to continue into the end of this mini-season. And I get that these last few episodes are, in fact, a mini-season, extras tagged onto the end of what the producers felt would be the end of Season 3. But too much was stuffed in here, to the detriment of what could have been.

How many stories were there? Let’s count:

• Chuck dreams/flashes that Shaw is still alive
• Steven (Chuck’s dad) comes to town on Ellie’s summoning
• Ellie is implicated into the spy trade by the Ring
• Casey and Morgan try to figure out if Awesome is cheating
• Steven is dying from Intersect-poisoning
• Shaw is coming back
• Jeffster story with Big Mike wanting to be manager

I’m not saying that Chuck shouldn’t be complex but, as these stories played out, they kept stealing the emotion from each other. If they’d dropped just one or two scenarios (or introduced them earlier in this season instead of saving it for the penultimate episode), it might not have felt so overpacked. Instead, we have a lot of interesting things that, as far as emotional investment goes, feels like someone just sat in a rocking chair told me what was going on instead of letting me live it.

This is all a roundabout way of saying the episode felt a little confused about how it should spend its time but, to be fair, this was also an episode that featured x-ray goggles. No, like they look through walls and stuff. It was not lost on me that they were able to see through the walls in Daniel “Superman” Shaw’s apartment. Yes, I found it amusing when Chuck took the opportunity to look at Sarah using the goggles (because, given the power, any sentient human would). But, with bits like that, maybe I was expecting too much from this episode. Don’t get me wrong: I liked the comedy when it was present. I just felt like all the threads of the episode got short-changed.

And no one knows about being short-changed like Jeffster. They were probably the best example of elements in this episode that didn’t get enough attention to work. Big Mike wanting to be their manager, demonstrated in three short clips, felt rushed and, while watching Jeff sing to customers about wanting them to have his children was funny, it felt like set-up. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that but it felt like set-up, meaning I was thrown out of the episode. It was jammed in with all the other garbage going on so, instead of feeling like I was being shown a story, I felt like I was being told a story.

The most interesting thread of this episode was, no surprise, the return of Steven Bartowski to help guide his son. Again, a little rushed, Steven (summoned by Ellie at the behest of a covert Ring operative) goes through a cycle of emotions in a very short period of time. Scott Bakula is always great but it was even weird for him to try to pull off being upset that Chuck is still a spy and then, a day later, after being witness to the very thing Orion was afraid for his son to be a part of, the reason he took the Intersect out of Chuck’s head in the first place, he flips and says he wants Chuck to be the best spy EVAR (emphasis mine). But it does introduce us to Pops confirming the Intersect is a poison and can take over. Thus we have “the Governor,” a device worn on the wrist that can control the flashes. I guess it was inevitable that Chuck would be able to control the thing in his head but, just as they seemed to be dipping into Spiderman territory (“your powers are killing you!”), they already have a fix. Obviously, this will be a plot point for next week that they wedged into this episode.

We may be able to blame slashed budgets for the lack of set-up. Guys like Scott Bakula and Brandon Routh do not come cheap (see the body double they used for Supes this week) and maybe natural, graceful storytelling was made far more difficult given the restrictions a flailing NBC put on them, especially since the network ordered more episodes later. I’m reminded of a small flare-up recently with the order of Community episodes and how people though NBC was showing them out of sequence. Dan Harmon explained that they wrote a few extra episodes beyond the original order in case the network wanted more (which they did) and then slid those episodes into the regular season. Now, my industry mind is still a bit primative but that sounds like a good plan to me. Maybe the constraints, budgetary and otherwise, didn’t allow them to really plan for the future the way the wanted. Maybe the serialized drama doesn’t allow for that kind of addendum (since all the episodes dovetail into each other) without people crying “filler!” But maybe, just maybe, we could’ve had an extended third season instead of being left with the mini-season. And it would’ve given them an extra few months to reconsider “vs The Honeymooners.”

Good lord was that a bad episode.