The Show Your Show Could Look Like or Chuck vs Stunt Casting
You all know I love "Chuck" and I will advocate for the survival of the show until the end. Unfortunately, I wasn't impressed by last night's episode.
For a perennial bubble show "Chuck" has gotten a lot of great and/or well recognized actors for guest and recurring roles. The further you get into the show the more each episode becomes a game of "hey, its that guy" or "fandom collisions that break your brain". While I'm thrilled to see my favorite 'show that could' continually attract talented people, it seems to me that TPTB have run out of useful things to do with them. This season has brought with it the rotating "Greta" character in an attempt to give the guest cast something to do, but it has yet to be used very effectively. This has culminated in my disappointment with last night's epic failure to utilize Summer Glau.
"Chuck vs The Fear of Death" was an episode that I kept hoping would come together but never did. While a lot of how I feel about the A plot of this episode is going to depend upon the resolution, "Chuck can't Flash" just felt like a rehash of the "Chuck can't Flash" plot from the beginning of last season. We've been here already and proven that Chuck is actually fairly adept even without the flashes. And the Buy More plot was a lot of build up with a rather disappointing resolution. Yes, it was great to hear Casey stick up for the Buy Morians and Team Bartowski, but what value was added by having Summer Glau as Greta? Other than propping up the requisite hot body count of the episode?
No Firefly joke. No Terminator joke. I understand not wanting to over do the in-jokes or cater too much to 'cult' fans. But to have 2 actors from the same cult show on your show at the same time running the same plot and NOT have at least 1 joke/throw away line relating to that show - LAME! If they didn't want Adam or Summer to crack the line there were several other options. I'm sure Morgan, Jeff and Lester have all seen Firefly.
My disappointment with last night's "Chuck" was only highlighted by the awesomeness of last night's X-Files send up episode on "Castle" and the "Just a tv show I used to like" line. Castle was the show Chuck used to look like.
For a perennial bubble show "Chuck" has gotten a lot of great and/or well recognized actors for guest and recurring roles. The further you get into the show the more each episode becomes a game of "hey, its that guy" or "fandom collisions that break your brain". While I'm thrilled to see my favorite 'show that could' continually attract talented people, it seems to me that TPTB have run out of useful things to do with them. This season has brought with it the rotating "Greta" character in an attempt to give the guest cast something to do, but it has yet to be used very effectively. This has culminated in my disappointment with last night's epic failure to utilize Summer Glau.
"Chuck vs The Fear of Death" was an episode that I kept hoping would come together but never did. While a lot of how I feel about the A plot of this episode is going to depend upon the resolution, "Chuck can't Flash" just felt like a rehash of the "Chuck can't Flash" plot from the beginning of last season. We've been here already and proven that Chuck is actually fairly adept even without the flashes. And the Buy More plot was a lot of build up with a rather disappointing resolution. Yes, it was great to hear Casey stick up for the Buy Morians and Team Bartowski, but what value was added by having Summer Glau as Greta? Other than propping up the requisite hot body count of the episode?
No Firefly joke. No Terminator joke. I understand not wanting to over do the in-jokes or cater too much to 'cult' fans. But to have 2 actors from the same cult show on your show at the same time running the same plot and NOT have at least 1 joke/throw away line relating to that show - LAME! If they didn't want Adam or Summer to crack the line there were several other options. I'm sure Morgan, Jeff and Lester have all seen Firefly.
My disappointment with last night's "Chuck" was only highlighted by the awesomeness of last night's X-Files send up episode on "Castle" and the "Just a tv show I used to like" line. Castle was the show Chuck used to look like.