The final season of Chuck released a few weeks ago, and I picked it up on Blu Ray when it did. I finally managed to watch through it, as this was one of my favorite shows when it first aired. The last few seasons of it I kind of missed, mainly because it was difficult to figure out when it was on, and then other things took over as more important, so it took me some time to get to it.
In case you aren’t aware, Chuck is a one-hour long show that involves a friendly, yet nerdy, computer repair professional who works for the Nerd Herd crew of the local Buy More store (definitely patterned after the Geek Squad of the Best Buy stores). In the first episode of the series, an old friend of his from Stanford (where Chuck dropped out) mails him an activation virus that ends up installing the CIA’s entire database into Chuck’s brain, thus turning him into somewhat of a walking super computer. Thus, the CIA sends a crack team to watch over Chuck, which becomes Sarah Walker (the hot blonde played by Yvonne Strahovski) and Colonel John Casey (played by Firefly’s Adam Baldwin). Sarah becomes his handler, and as you can probably suspect would happen, she ends up falling in love with the nerdy Chuck. As the series goes forward, the “intersect”, the device placed in his brain, becomes even more complicated so that it ends up giving him special skills he can draw upon at will, like the ability to learn Kung Fu instantly, and all sorts of other fun stuff.
Anyway, lots of intrigue, and four seasons later, the last season was the finale of the adventure as Chuck and Sarah continue their adventures and see if they can somehow find some kind of life together post-CIA.
The problem with the show is that the wonderful writing that is filled with comedic fun has gotten really stale over the years, and as the season began, I started to suspect that they definitely needed to end this thing. The first half of the season was atrociously bad in both writing and ideas. And then, almost as if they realized it, it kicked into second gear for the second half of the season and actually became quite enjoyable. At one point, it actually became unpredictable, which after the first couple of episodes, I was beginning to think we had a show that had seriously overjumped the shark.
In all, the 5th season was worth it, and let’s just say that there are a couple of episodes that were comedy gold, including one that included Bo Derek playing none other than, well, Bo Derek. At some point, the show became a meta-comedy, where it started even poking fun at itself, and when it hit those moments, it was brilliant. The whole episde with Bo Derek was genius level of comedy for the show, and for the first time in a long time, I found myself seriously laughing out loud.
Shortly after, the season ended, and the journey of Chuck was over. In all, it was a decent journey.