Quick recap, then some thoughts. In Chuck Versus the Final Exam, Chuck has to pass a final test before becoming a full-fledged spy. In this final exam, he’s flying solo without support from the team. Chuck’s objective is to trail a known agent to a meeting with a double-agent mole at a hotel. He needs to visually identify the mole.
During the initial stakeout, Chuck expresses his feelings to Sarah, suggesting that once he’s a full spy that they could finally be together. Sarah has mixed feelings but keeps them to herself: if Chuck becomes a spy they can be together, but if he does become a spy he won’t be the guy she fell in love with anymore. Yvonne Strahovski does a great job of expressing Sarah’s torn feelings just with the wounded expressions on her face.
Shaw calls and interrupts just as Chuck and Sarah are about to kiss, and Chuck heads off to the hotel where he ends up in a steam room fight, and finally makes the visual ID of the mole. Mission accomplished? Chuck thinks so, but it’s not to be.
Meanwhile, Casey is adapting to civilian life at the Buy More, where he stands in for Assistant Manager Morgan while he’s out of town. After Chuck’s mission, Chuck gives Casey a government issue handgun as a gift. Casey reminds Chuck that doing so is a felony, but “a thoughtful felony.”
Chuck meets with Sarah, who asks him to dinner that night. Chuck is so happy he doesn’t notice Sarah’s conflicted demeanor, nor does he notice she has an ulterior motive that doesn’t involve them running away together. When she meets with Shaw, he tells her that his mission, which is not yet finished, is to kill the newly identified mole. She wants nothing to do with it, but he tells her she has to give Chuck the order, because he’ll do it if the order comes from her.
Meeting for dinner, Sarah tells Chuck that his mission is to kill the mole. Chuck doesn’t know if he can do it, and they discuss the ramifications: if he does it, he’ll be a spy and they can possibly be together. If he doesn’t find it in himself to do it, they won’t be able to. Sarah stresses to Chuck that it’s his decision and leaves him to carry out whatever that decision is.
Chuck locates the mole and they fight in a restroom, but Chuck isn’t able to finish him off when he beats the mole. He decides instead to arrest him, but the mole escapes as Chuck walks him out. Chuck catches him near the railroad tracks, and with the mole on the ground and a gun in his hand, Chuck isn’t able to pull the trigger. As Sarah looks on, Casey shoots the mole from outside her field of view so that she thinks Chuck killed him. Casey silently disappears, and later talks to Chuck in the courtyard. He tells him that since he’s a civilian now, what he did was technically murder and that Chuck can’t tell anyone, not even Sarah, that Casey was the one that pulled the trigger.
Chuck tries to reach Sarah on the phone, but she doesn’t answer. She tells Shaw that when she took her final test it changed her forever. The episode ends as an agent arrives to escort Chuck to a waiting flight to DC to receive his final orders as a spy.
What was great about this episode? Casey, of course. Casey is a man at peace with his decisions. He is paying the price for his actions in the last episode (Chuck Versus the Tic Tac, which I neglected to write a recap of), and he’s comfortable with it. He deals with civilian life the only way he knows how, with a commitment to success, and an occasional inappropriate outburst. His under-his-breath growls are priceless.
But Casey is also a man of loyalty to his friends. Over the course of this season, Casey has grown to appreciate Chuck’s skills, and while he’s never going to be a traditional friend in the fuzzy sense, Casey has Chuck’s back. He proves that by stepping in to do what Chuck couldn’t bring himself to do, to kill someone in cold blood.
What else was great about this episode? The longing that Sarah has for a normal life with Chuck. I’m still not convinced that there’s any real romance between Sarah and Shaw, and that it’s merely a substitute for what she really wants with Chuck. Sarah’s dilemma: she can’t have a relationship with Chuck while she’s an agent and he’s not, but if he becomes and agent he will also lose what makes him unique. In that scenario, they can be together finally, but will he be the man that she loves at that point? Sarah knows that taking the final step of actually killing someone changes you, and she fears what that will do to Chuck.
When the show introduced Hannah as a love interest for Chuck and Shaw as a love interest for Sarah the fan community reacted, shall we say, unenthusiastically. At the time I said I trusted the writers to continue to build tension in the relationship, and they have. I’m excited to see where this leads, now that Chuck is a full-fledged spy and Sarah is cautious about what she thinks Chuck might have become.
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ta lego, que Chuck los lleve con bien XD
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