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CHUCK

Real Love in the Spy Life

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Kelly Dean Jolley

For my wife, Shanna

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Table of Contents

Preface

Introduction

Part 1: Framing the Readings

Chapter 1: The Birthday Present

Chapter 2: Echo Park

Chapter 3: Chuck Bartowski

Chapter 4: Sarah Walker

Chapter 5: Coupling

Part 2: The Readings

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Chapter 6: (S01E01) Of the Terrible Doubt of Appearances

Chapter 7: (S01E08) Under the Cover(s)

Chapter 8: (S02E03) A Really Real Relationship?

Chapter 9: (S03E01-S03E10) The Slough of Despond

Chapter 10: (S03E11) Exit Exam

Chapter 11: (S03E12-S03E13) Exorcising Despair

Chapter 12: (S04E03, S04E09) High Anxieties

Chapter 13: (S04E24) Making Vows

Chapter 14: (S05E12-S05E13) Assembling Reminders

Chapter 15: The Aftermath: The Kiss and a Few Loose Ends

Chapter 16: The End: Chuck on Love

Bibliography

Index

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Preface

I watched all of Chuck for the first time in the winter of 2015.

I had seen the first two or three episodes when they aired on NBC

in 2007 but somehow lost track of the show. When I finally

watched the entire show, I was couchbound, sick. Sometime during

the first few episodes, the show overwhelmed me, stormed past my

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defenses and occupied my imagination. I confess I fell a bit in

love with Sarah Walker. (Whatever it means exactly to fall in

love with a fictional character.) I identified with Chuck. (I

have my loser bona fides.)

I would probably have simply ended up a fan and repeat watcher of

the show if not for the final episode. Rarely, if ever, has an

episode of tv had such a deep, lasting effect on me. I could not

stop hearing Jeffster’s cover of “Take On Me”; if I did, it was

only so that The Head and the Heart’s “Rivers and Roads” could

begin. In my head and heart, I kept playing and replaying the

final scene on Malibu beach, Chuck and Sarah’s final on-screen

conversation. I responded so strongly that I felt compelled to

write about the episode. I did. Doing so convinced me that the

show was worth serious reflective effort. So, I started working,

writing about the show as a whole, and not just the final

episode.

The show holds up under reflection. It does not soar or plunge

metaphysically as, say, Buffy does. (Buffy is another of my other

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favorite shows.) But it more closely observes the emotional and

moral nuance of romantic love and the love of friendship, and it

does a remarkable job charting the vagaries of self-ignorance,

self-refusal and self-deception. The show tracks form after form

of human emotional bondage, particularly our human emotional

bondage of ourselves, all the knots, tangles, fankles, impasses,

disjunctions and whirligigs we create for ourselves. (And, yes,

I realize that among my favorite shows are Buffy and Chuck. But

what’s in a name?)

If, by chance, you have bought this book without having seen the

show, close the book and watch Chuck. The book requires knowledge

of the show. Without that, almost all that I say will be

suspended in midair. I am everywhere calling on or appealing to

your own sense of the show, your own sense of its structure, your

own sense of its characters. The point is to enhance your

appreciation of the show. Chuck is what matters--not this book.

(Or, to put it another way, the book only matters because Chuck

matters.) Think of the book as a mode of presentation of the

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show. My aim is not to provide knowledge of new facts about the

show, but rather new knowledge of facts about the show.

I owe debts to a number of friends, students, former students and

colleagues. Chandler Jones and Zachary Lazzari got interested in

the project early on and endured my enthusiastic blather about

the show, as well as a barrage of impromptu readings-aloud as I

completed the manuscript. Both became fans of the show and I

profited from their thoughts about it, about tv generally, and

about the role and the potential of popular art. Sydney Jolley,

Zachary Wellman and Joshua Newton talked about the project with

me as a group and individually, and they moved it along. Mike

Watkins made a number of useful suggestions about the show and

about how to think about it. So too did James Shelley and Hollie

Lavenstein. But by far my greatest debt is to Andy Bass. He got

involved in the project at the very beginning and stood by it,

reading the manuscript carefully, making sage suggestions,

rewatching episodes, and helping me to answer many questions

about the show. He was untiring; his faith in the project

bolstered my own.

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My wife, Shanna, deserves special thanks for being so long-

suffering. She lost me for a while--lost me to a tv show. She

did it with good humor and kindness. She knew I would find my

way back. Much that I write about being a couple, about

commitment and about love I learnt from her.

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Introduction

Since [my] earliest days of philosophic study, I have remained concerned with the works

of philosophers, not in themselves, but as helps to the understanding of experience. I

study the works of philosophers out of an interest which subordinates theory to

understanding. . . . It will be ever important to me to give attention to technical

philosophy but I will never be able to take technical philosophy as the ultimate phase of

a reflective life. --Henry Bugbee

Ben Zoma said: Who is a wise man? He who learns from everybody, as it is written:

From all my teachers I have gotten understanding. --Union Prayer Book

Chuck artfully grafts a spy thriller onto a romantic comedy. It

deepens the romantic comedy by including within it two

complementary Bildungsromane, the stories of the growth of the two

central characters--their growth as individuals, as a couple, and

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as individuals because they are a couple. Each tutors the other;

their we tutors their I’s. The show explores trust and mistrust,

belief and doubt, truth and falsity, reality and appearance. It

also explores hope and despondency, love, loss and loneliness.

Sarah challenges Chuck’s self-mistrust. She gives him the will

and confidence to become what he is (but cannot believe himself

to be). Chuck challenges Sarah’s moral imagination. He quickens

her sense of the human actualities of trust, warmth and hearth.

Sarah models competence for Chuck. Chuck models vulnerability

for Sarah. Chuck becomes a spy while remaining a human being;

Sarah becomes a human being while remaining a spy.

Chuck achieves density and resonance. It is a show of patterns:

of duplications, of symmetries, of echoes, of types and anti-

types. It is animately, virtuosically contrapuntal--like Bach.1

It speaks an elaborate language of images, events, actions,

places, words and music. It also speaks that language quite

quickly and volubly, making serious demands on its audience’s

attention and memory. But it also rewards that attention, that

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active participatory recollection, by steadily ingathering

meaning.

Let me clarify some of my terms. What do I mean by ‘density’ and

‘resonance’? By calling the show ‘dense’ I mean that in it many

meanings are often carried by one image, event, action, phrase or

word. By calling it ‘resonant’, I mean that one word, phrase,

action, event, place or image is often projected into or

recollected in many other contexts. Think of density as a many-

in-one phenomenon and of resonance as a one-in-many phenomenon.

One interesting, complicated example of density is the word

‘date’. The problematic meaning of the word between Chuck and

Sarah is established in the very first episode. They go on what

Chuck takes to be a date. Sarah takes it to be an opportunity to

establish herself as her asset’s handler, i.e., as her chance to

insinuate herself into Chuck’s life and establish control over

him. But one problem with going on a pretend date (of the sort

they go on) is that it is very much like going on a real date

(think how much like waving pretending to wave is). Sarah gets

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dressed up, as Chuck does--except her outfit includes body armor

and weapons. He picks her up and takes her to dinner. They

talk. They go dancing. Chuck intends to go on a date and

believes he is on one. Sarah intends to develop an asset, and so

begins the evening with intentions unlike those that normally are

involved in an actual date, those like Chuck has. But before the

evening ends, her intentions have become unclear. Maybe she is

on a date. It starts to seem--to her--like she is on a date.

Eventually, she is on a date--although she would deny it if

asked. So did they go on a date or not? Yes? No? Sort of?

Whether this is the right word, or at any rate what meaning the

word has, will remain an issue between them. They will come back

to it several times in the course of the show and even in the

final episode. For them, the word bears both an attenuated and a

full meaning--say that it is appearance/reality ambiguous. The

attenuated sense is the sense of a merely apparent date, a

pretend date. The full sense is the sense of a real date. Many

of the words of Chuck are appearance/reality ambiguous, and thus

dense in a problematic way.2

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Here are a couple of examples of resonance in the show (they will

be discussed or make an appearance in later chapters):

Rings: engagement rings, wedding rings (fake and genuine),

ordinary rings, even an evil spy organization known as “The

Ring”--rings appear and reappear throughout the show.

Trains and train stations: many of the significant moments

of the show take place on trains or at trains stations, a

train station in Prague and Union Station in LA are perhaps

the most significant.

Together, the density and resonance of the show make reading it

(I will say more about this use of ‘reading’ in a moment) tricky

in specific ways. Often, the full meaning of an episode will not

be revealed until a later episode, but not because there is

something unexplained in the earlier episode--say, something kept

secret. No, the full meaning of an episode will not be revealed

because there is a word, phrase, action, event or image that gets

projected into a later episode, and which deepens or widens or

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heightens the significance of the earlier one. We can call

density and resonance ‘linguistic’ phenomena: a language is

marked by the way in which its individual words and phrases can

simultaneously carry many different meanings and by the way in

which its individual words and phrases can be projected into new

contexts, contexts in which their old meaning remains part of

their story, but only part of their story. The words now have

more to tell. That is part of the reason I say of the show that

it speaks an elaborate language.

Chuck strives for formal completeness. It is not just telling a

story that begins, has a middle and that ends. Of course, it

does do that. But the story-telling is peculiar. Put it this

way: the beginning of Chuck presupposes its ending as its ending

presupposes its beginning. The final episode presents the end of

the events began in the pilot. But it does more than that. It

retells the pilot episode, reenacts it. By an instance of what

James Joyce in Finnegans Wake calls “a commodius vicus of

recirculation”, the end of the show takes us back to its

beginning a second time, to a second beginning.3 When They Might Be

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Giants sing, “How About Another First Kiss?”, part of the fun of

the song is the impossibility of what is requested. But Chuck,

because it has structuring principles other than temporal ones,

contrives to make what is requested an actuality.4

Understanding the show as linguistic, as speaking a language,

helps to explain why I want to call what I am doing reading the

show. But I use that word to do more than to provide an

appropriate description of my response to the show’s linguistic

character. I also use it because I want to situate Chuck in

relation to various (other) texts--works of philosophy and works

of literature. By saying that I am reading Chuck I am insisting

on the fact (I take it to be a fact) that the show can withstand

sustained comparison to such works. It can be read in the

active, inward and sympathetic way that they can.5 For example,

I repeatedly appeal to the work of the philosopher Gabriel Marcel

in what follows--I have used lines of his as epigraphs for the

book itself and for some of its chapters. Marcel’s work

clarifies the show, helps to bring its deeper concerns and its

fixations into view and to make them easier to understand.

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I realize that this may seem fantastic. After all, a tv show, a

network tv show, a long-arc romantic comedy network tv show?

Surely, pairing Gabriel Marcel with Chuck staggers credulity. I

must be mistreating Marcel. I can’t be serious. --I am serious.

The show can survive such a pairing, and still others that will

appear in the pages below. The pairing does no damage to

Marcel--in fact, it helps to clarify what he is saying and why he

is saying it.

I should add quickly that bringing the show into contact with

such works does not mean that only a person who has seen the show

and read the works I cite or discuss can understand what I have

to say. I do not intend my audience to include just professional

philosophers, or even just amateur philosophers. I am writing

for fans of Chuck who want to reflect on the show. I am writing

for those fans who number among what Robertson Davies called the

clerisy (neither ‘priests’ nor ‘laypersons’):

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The clerisy are those who read for pleasure, but not for

idleness; who read for pastime, but not to kill time; who

love books but do not live for books.6

A person can count as a member of this group in relation to a tv

show too. There are those who watch tv for pleasure, but not for

idleness; who watch for pastime, but not to kill time, who love

tv but do not live for tv. I am writing for members of the

clerisy who love Chuck--who read books in the full immersion of

good tv and who watch tv with the full engagement of their

faculties. My use of these philosophers is meant to enhance

immersion in and engagement with the show.

Although I count what follows as shaped decisively by what is

known as ordinary language philosophy, it is meant to be available to

anyone who has seen Chuck and who believes the show is worth

reflecting on--no preparatory philosophy required. What I write

is not meant to trade in secrets, academic, literary or

otherwise. Still, that term, “ordinary language philosophy,” can

cause confusion. What is ordinary language philosophy?

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There is much more to say about that than I want or need to say

here.7 This should be enough: ordinary language philosophy works

to align words and experiences with human beings in particular

circumstances, particular contexts, human beings who we can

imagine having those experiences and saying and meaning those

words. ‘Ordinary’ does not refer to a particular vocabulary--the

words of the school yard or the words of day labor. (‘Ordinary’

is not a form of diction.) It does not refer to a particular

group of people--the uneducated or non-professional or anyway

non-academic.

Rather, ‘ordinary’ reminds us that words that are said and meant

are words said and meant by particular people, and that to

understand what their words mean you must understand what the

people using the words mean. And, further, it reminds us that

sometimes the words that particular people say fail to mean much

of anything, if anything at all, because the people who are

speaking the words mean nothing very clear or perhaps mean

nothing at all.8

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Philosophy that works to do such things, that orients itself by

means of such reminders, is particularly well-suited to take up

even a long-arc network tv romantic comedy and to find lessons

and depths in it, things worth thinking about, if they are there.

And things worth thinking about are there in Chuck. But ordinary

language philosophy is also, as I have said, philosophy that aims

to be available to anyone, since it claims to know only things

that everyone knows or can know. That does not imply that

everything I have to say about the show is simple, that

reflecting on the show is always easy, one, two, three. It is

not. Chuck, as I have already mentioned, makes demands on its

viewers. Important words and events go by quickly. Its

patterning gets complicated. A good example: Sarah’s initial

walk to Chuck at the Nerd Herd desk gets replayed over and over,

sometimes in flashback (and with changes of spatial or temporal

angles) and sometimes in conversation. It also recurs later, at

the end of the show, as part of a series of different ways in

which Sarah returns to Chuck. We have to take in all of that

patterning before we fully understand Sarah’s initial walk to

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Chuck. It is no exaggeration to say that the entire show is

compressed into that walk from the front of the Buy More to

Chuck.

Given all this, sometimes the viewer has to take Sarah’s

recurrent advice to Chuck to heart: “Don’t freak out.” Sometimes

my reader will need to take the same advice to heart. I have no

interest in making things hard; that does not mean I can always

make them easy. I am committed to doing my best to make them

available.

I have broken the book into two parts. Part One frames the

readings; Part Two provides the readings. Part Two is the heart

of the book. Part One prepares the way for the readings. In it,

I discuss the Intersect (Chapter 1), its effects, Chuck’s

relationship to it, and its different versions. I introduce the

specific philosophical issues that structure the show (Chapter

2), providing a sense of the issues and quick examples of their

roles. But the real value of these issues will not be clear

until I provide the readings, where they will be revealed to be

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deeply important to what is happening. I realize that some of

Chapter 2 is abstract and seemingly distant from the show, but

the issues become concrete and intimate in the readings. I

describe who I take both Chuck (Chapter 3) and Sarah (Chapter 4)

to be as things between them begin, and I briefly characterize

how Chuck relates to Sarah, and Sarah to Chuck. I end Part One

with a quick suggestion for how to chart the progress of the

relationship between Chuck and Sarah, and by explaining how I

take the “Will They/Won’t They?” question, and what I rate as the

basic problem between them.

In Part Two (Chapters 6-14), I work out careful readings of

various key episodes in the show, ones that are key to the

relationship between Chuck and Sarah. I pay quite close

attention to the dialogue—but always to the dialogue in its

context. I also use various philosophical and literary texts to

deepen immersion in the episodes, and it is at this point that

the earlier issues (from Chapter 2) are shown not to be abstract,

but rather to be the issues with which the show is gravid—they

give it its force and form. The readings build as they go, as

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the relationship between Chuck and Sarah grows, and as the issues

that matter to the show unfold. After the readings, I knit

together some loose ends (Chapter 15) and finish by investigating

what the show teaches about love (Chapter 16).

I want to end this introduction by clarifying my aim. I am not

classifying Chuck as straightforwardly a work of philosophy, nor

as straightforwardly a work of literature. I do think it

withstands comparison with works of philosophy and works of

literature. Chuck is Chuck, and there is nothing wrong with that.

It is a network tv show, a piece of popular art. But it is

important to remember that popular art allows for real

achievement--there are possibilities in it for failure and

success, and possibilities for crassness and subtlety. In short,

‘popular’ in ‘popular art’ is not an alienating adjective, as

‘rubber’ is in ‘rubber biscuit’. Without losing our grip on the

fact that a piece of art is popular, we can still go on to

consider it in terms of its real achievement. Given what Chuck

is, I reckon it a good thing that it can be watched with your

feet up. But it can also be watched with your feet down. It

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rewards attention paid to it. If a guilty pleasure is something

that pleases you but ought not please you, Chuck is no guilty

pleasure. The fact that Chuck is fun and funny, the fact that it

entertains and means to do so, does not mean that the show can do

nothing more. The show can be fun and funny in ways that it does

not advertise or insist that its viewers recognize, and it can

educate. Like Chuck himself, Chuck is without guile--but it has

depths. Guilelessness differs from superficiality. The show’s

superficies are open to the public--but so are its depths.

Nothing more is required to enter into them than caring about the

show, about the characters, and paying attention. --You can

learn from anybody or anything--sometimes you can learn more than

you would have guessed. Nothing is too humble for serious

thought. All serious thought is itself humble: in the Pietist

phrase: to think is to thank.

This book is my thanks for Chuck, my book of Thank You.

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Part One: Framing the Readings

In the following chapters (1-5), I provide a frame for the

readings of episodes in the second half of the book (6-16). In

the frame, I address the Intersect, and then I take up various

philosophical topics that figure in the readings. I also provide

preliminary, orienting discussions of Chuck and of Sarah, and of

their relationship.

In the chapter on the philosophical topics, I consider the

appearance/reality distinction, the use of the word ‘real’ (and

other related words), ‘trust’, ‘lie’, ‘love’ and ‘professional’.

All of the uses of these words are rendered especially

significant in the show because the show is caught up in the

embrace of the appearance/reality distinction. That distinction

enciphers much of what happens between or among the characters,

making them hard for each other to understand. And so there is a

constant concern on the part of the characters to discern what is

real, to understand who and when to trust, to tell or refuse to

tell or expose lies, to decide whether love is to be acknowledged

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or denied, to decide what it means to work for the good or to be

one of the “good guys”. Interpersonal relationships on the show

are exercises of cryptography.

The uses of these words, these topics, will be extended or

particularized or diversified in the readings. My discussions do

not exhaust the topics. I do not take these topics to apply

mechanically to Chuck; I do not take Chuck simply to illustrate

these topics. Rather, the topics grow into and are grown into by

the readings. Chuck can help us to understand these topics--for

example, it helps us to see just how wayward and digressive and

twisty the problems of knowing ourselves and knowing others can

be. Keep in mind too that my framing discussions of these topics

stand in interesting relationships to episodes for which I

provide no reading. The topics reach farther into the show than

I can demonstrate here. I am not trying to close the book on

Chuck but rather to open it. My discussions and my readings are

meant to suggest to the reader how he or she can go on reflecting

on Chuck. I leave work for the reader. I aim to provide the

first word on Chuck and these topics, not the last word on them.

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After considering these topics, I turn to a discussion of each

of the central two characters, Chuck and Sarah. I attempt to

capture them as they are as Chuck begins, and to say something

about the ways in which they affect each other. Finally, I

address how to think about their progress as a couple--and about

how to understand the basic challenge each faces, call it the

challenge of relocating your brain in your heart, or the

challenge of acquiring self-knowledge that overcomes not just

ignorance of self but alienation from self.

My focus on the central pair means that I give far less attention

than they deserve to Chuck’s best friends and family, to Morgan,

Casey, Ellie, Devon, Orion, Frost or to Sarah’s friends and

family, the CAT Squad and her father and mother. It also means

that I slight the Buy More subplots of episodes, and so slight

Big Mike, Jeff, Lester and Anna. It also means that I will not

comment on or reproduce much of the stroboscopic humor of the

show, high and low. I will also ignore the music of the show.

These are all very real losses. But no one can say everything at

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once, and I more than have my hands full just trying to

understand the love story of the central pair.

…… The epigraphs that appear in the book, from its opening pages

on, are not ornamental. They play a functional role in the book

akin to the functional role of the music on Chuck. They provide

an atmosphere for the chapters, as well as providing comment on

them. They also typically provide some of the vocabulary of the

chapter. So it is worth lingering over them and working to keep

them in mind while reading.

Recall the mutual pleasures of conversation after the shared

watching of a movie or a tv show that you really enjoyed. My

ambition for the book is that it support such pleasures, that it

will itself be part of conversations about Chuck, that it start

and sustain conversations about the show. So, think of these

framing sections as assembling terms for those conversations and

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as helping to give shape to themes that will be important to

those conversations. And think of the readings sections to

come--the sections being framed--as the beginnings of

conversations about the show. But keep in mind that assembling

terms and giving shape to themes takes both time and a little

effort. The first few chapters are a little like the first

eleven or so episodes of Season 3: you have to work to get

through them, but there is a payoff--in the readings themselves.

A warning: if you have not seen the show or all of it, and want

to preserve its suspense and surprise, beware of reading further.

There are spoilers and spoilers. I am not trying simply to

follow out the show as it develops, but rather to see it (as much

as possible) whole. So I allow myself the freedom to move

forwards and backwards in Chuck time, pairing episodes and parts

of episodes, and pairing dialogue and bits of dialogue as I find

it necessary.

Chapter 1 The Birthday Present: Being and Having the Intersect

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Reflection will, in fact, now bring before our eyes the existence of a kind of dialectic of

internality. To have can certainly mean, and even chiefly means, to have for one’s-self,

to keep for one’s-self, to hide. The most interesting and typical example is having a

secret...This secret is only a secret because I keep it; but also and at the same time, it is

only a secret because I could reveal it. The possibility of betrayal or discovery is

inherent in it, and contributes to its definition as a secret. --Gabriel Marcel

Any book on Chuck must begin with the Intersect. It looms over

the series in much the same way that the One Ring looms over Lord

of the Rings or Excalibur looms over The Once and Future King. The

Intersect brings the major characters of the show together and

causes much that happens to them. And, like the One Ring or

Excalibur, the Intersect is the icon of the show--represented by

a pair of dark spy sunglasses.

Getting clear about the Intersect is crucial to understanding the

show. But it is hard to get clear about the Intersect. It is

mysterious. Probing its mysteries spurs much of the action in

the show. No one seems really to understand it. Even its

creator, Orion (Stephen Bartowski, Chuck’s father), seems not to

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have a full understanding of his creation. Those who have/are

the Intersect--most importantly, Chuck--do not understand it. (I

will explain my have/are talk in a moment.) The mystery grows as

the show progresses, since the Intersect does too. It is in

flux. First, there is the initial Intersect--call it the

Intersect 1.0. Then there is the Intersect 2.0--created by the

CIA (modifying work by Orion). The criminal spy organization,

The Ring, creates their own version of 2.0 too. The CIA modifies

2.0 again as part of the Gretta project. Daniel Shaw attempts to

create an Intersect 3.0 but fails. Morgan and Sarah download a

version of 2.0, but whether it is the version the CIA modified

for the Gretta project is never made clear--although it seems

unlikely that it is. Then there is a final, “pristine” version

of the Intersect that is never given any numerical designation.

It is again a creation of the CIA. Chuck downloads it in the

final episode of the show.

But I am getting way ahead of the story. So let me begin where

the show begins, with the introduction of the Intersect. The

first episode of Chuck is entitled “Chuck vs. the Intersect”.

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Chuck battles the Intersect (in various ways) throughout the

show, making this a particularly fitting first episode title: it

gives a very helpful description of one of the show’s longest

story arcs. The Intersect makes its appearance when a man--

obviously a spy and later identified as Bryce Larkin--enters a

nearly empty white room. The only objects in the room are a

computer monitor and the pedestal on which it rests. Bryce,

bloodied from previous but unwitnessed combat, runs to the

computer and attaches a downloading device to it. He then dons a

pair of dark sunglasses and begins a transfer from the computer

to the device. As he does, the room goes dark and its white

walls become myriad screens, showing thousands of distinct,

flitting images. The phantasmagoria continues until the download

is complete. It is the Intersect that has been downloaded.

Bryce takes off the sunglasses and attaches a small explosive to

the computer, set to give him a few seconds to escape. He runs

toward the door, device in hand. Before he gets there, the

explosion occurs, hurtling him from the room. Guards, alerted by

the explosion, run toward him. He shakes off the explosion, gets

up and fights his way past them, displaying remarkable hand-to-

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hand combat skills and agility. But, just as it looks like he

might escape, he runs into another agent (John Casey). Casey

shoots Bryce, but before Bryce dies, he is able to use the device

to email the downloaded Intersect--to Chuck.

Chuck sits in his bedroom with his best friend, Morgan, playing a

video game and recovering from his birthday party. As they play,

Chuck’s computer chimes, alerting him to the arrival of an email.

Morgan, closer to the computer than Chuck, looks at the screen

and remarks that Bryce remembered Chuck’s birthday. This calls

for remark since, as was established earlier in the episode,

during the birthday party, Chuck and Morgan reckon that Bryce is

Chuck’s nemesis. His relationship to Chuck has spoiled. And so

a birthday email from him is incongruous. Chuck opens the email

and, initially, all that he sees is a prompt that he recognizes

as from the old text-based computer game, Zork. He and Bryce had

fiddled with the game at Stanford (on a TRS-80.). Morgan,

reading the line with Chuck, is puzzled. Chuck however recalls

the response. But before he responds to the prompt, Chuck sends

Morgan home. It is late and time for him to go. Chuck then

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responds to the line of text with another line of text. When he

does, the Intersect starts to run. Chuck’s computer begins to

flash images, one at a time but dizzyingly fast. The

phantasmagoria that flashed on the multiple screens surrounding

the sunglassed Bryce in the Intersect room gets recreated on

Chuck’s single screen. Chuck stands, staring without sunglasses

at the screen, inundated by thousands and thousands of images.

The download of images into Chuck takes so long that a scene cut

to its end has Chuck still standing, transfixed, but now in the

light of the morning sun. His alarm clock goes off. The computer

screen goes dark, the Intersect finishes downloading, and Chuck

falls stiffly like a tree, backwards onto the floor.

Morgan, back at Chuck’s the next morning, rouses Chuck. Chuck

prepares to go to work at the local Buy More and takes a shower.

He turns on his shower radio and when the traffic report begins,

Chuck has his first flash. ‘Flash’ will be his term for the

experience when the Intersect supplies him with information. It

is worth slowing the story of Chuck’s acquiring the Intersect to

say something about these flashes.

35

Chuck’s flashes are not under his control. They happen to him;

he does not make them happen. The experience of a flash, which

is shown to the audience, is something like a visual analog of

hearing voices. It seems closest to having visions, except that

it is an exercise of memory. (There does not seem to be any

tactile, olfactory or gustatory content in a flash.) Typically,

something that Chuck sees triggers a flash (but sometimes

something he hears does). In the content of the flash is

information about or related to the trigger. After flashing,

Chuck knows the information about the trigger and can share it

verbally with others or act on the information himself. His

flashes (as his term for them suggests) are brief. They last a

split second, maybe as long as a second or two. Chuck describes

flashes as memory episodes, as rememberings, but in them, he

remembers things he does not know. The Intersect allows Chuck to

recollect what never happened to him and what he never learnt.

One thing never made fully clear is how long Chuck retains non-

flash memory of the content of a flash. He clearly retains the

memory for at least for a little while. But it does not seem

36

like he simply retains it in such a way that he could later

access it without flashing.

The Intersect in its initial version supplies only what we might

call factual (or putatively factual) information, information

about who, what, when, where, why and how. The Intersect informs

Chuck of the secrets of the intelligence community. It provides

him with ‘intel’. This intel helps to explain what the Intersect

is. The Intersect allows Chuck to have factual ‘memories’ he

never had to acquire in the past.

Later in the pilot, Casey, the agent who shot Bryce and who we

now know works for the NSA, stands in the ruins of the Intersect

room with two others, Langston Graham, the director of the CIA,

and an unnamed, one-star female general (General Beckman), the

director of the NSA. The white room is blackened, charred.

Casey asks about the Intersect, and is told that it represented

the CIA and NSA’s attempt, post-9/11, to “play nice”, to share

their intel. They both uploaded all of their intel onto the

Intersect. But the Intersect was more than a glorified

37

electronic file cabinet. It was also programmed to analyze the

intel and to recognize patterns in it, to connect the dots, so to

speak. So the Intersect ‘knew’ more than either of the agencies

that supplied it with intel. Chuck, possessing the Intersect as

he does, inherits its superior intel. This is implicit in that

each of the CIA and NSA send their best agents to deal with

Chuck, but it is made explicit as the pilot reaches its climax.

Upon seeing a hotel in the distance, Chuck flashes, and so comes

to know the details of a plot against a US general (Stanfield)

that neither the CIA, who had one part of the necessary data, nor

the NSA, who had the other, knew. This flash makes clear just

how valuable and just how dangerous Chuck’s new knowledge is. He

knows what no one else knows, either at the CIA or the NSA.

So Chuck flashes in the shower. The flash disorients and puzzles

him, but he shakes it off, and finishes getting ready for work.

Morgan has come by to get a ride to work from Chuck, since Chuck

has a company, Nerd Herd, car. (He uses it to do on-site work

for Buy More.) Chuck complains that he has a splitting headache.

He asks Morgan to drive, something that, judging by Morgan’s

38

reaction, has never happened before. Chuck also tells Morgan

that he should avoid the 5 on the way to work, since the police

dispersal pattern that day means it will be heavily patrolled.

After saying this, Chuck looks puzzled; he does not yet realize

that he knows what he knows because of his flash.

Bryce sends Chuck the Intersect on Chuck’s birthday. The

significance of the birthday manifest. Chuck gets the Intersect

on his birthday. Gollum, then Smeagol, gets the One Ring, his

precious, on his birthday. (Or rather, on his birthday, he kills

Deagol, who found the Ring, and takes the Ring from him.) And of

course Frodo’s Mordor-bound journey begins when he inherits the

Ring begins at Bilbo’s birthday party. Like the Ring, the

Intersect is burdensome. It weighs heavily on anyone who

downloads it. It makes its downloader intermittently powerful,

but exercises of its power tend to take place in desperate

circumstances and to leave discouraging consequences, serious

marks on the psyche of its user. More than anything, though, the

Intersect threatens the very identity of the person who has

downloaded it. It does this by adding flashes to the person’s

39

life, but more importantly by encroaching on that person’s sense

of self, both by the constant physical stress it puts on the

person’s brain and by its incessant moral stress on the person’s

character, its temptations to abuse its power.

One of the lessons of The Lord of the Rings is that the Ring should

only be entrusted to someone who by temperament and habit is

unlikely to be too tempted by it. It can only be entrusted to

someone who has no lust for power, no need for self-

aggrandizement--to someone rooted in friends, family and home.

To someone who lives under the hill, if not physically, then

spiritually. Chuck, despite his dream of being Charles

Carmichael--a rich young computer mogul--is such a person. He is

humble. And his dreams decisively involve his friends and family

and home. All the technology in his life is organized around his

hearth. He is one of those Robert Frost described in “Don’t Get

Converted, Stay” as capable of resisting pressures to convert or

to change into a fundamentally different and worse sort of

person. Chuck has staying power. Frost puts it this way:

40

My object in life has been to hold my own with whatever’s

going--not against, but with--to hold my own.9

It is hard to imagine a better summation of Chuck’s character.

One episode in the first season explicitly invokes The Lord of the

Rings. In it, Harry Tang has reprogrammed all of the display tvs

in the store so that they respond only to his one remote--the One

Remote. A later episode invokes the books again, when Chuck

calls a female villain an “elf” and later tries to excuse it when

she has taken him hostage by talking of his early love of

Tolkien’s books and in particular of their portrayal of elves.

In Season 5, after Morgan downloads a version of the Intersect

and it unlocks his inner jerk, Chuck at one point calls Morgan

‘Gollum’.

But the shows touches Tolkien’s books nowhere as intimately as in

Chuck’s musing question (to himself, to Sarah, to the breeze) on

Malibu beach as the pilot ends. He wonders why Bryce sent the

41

Intersect to him. Frodo asks his version of that question in the

presence of Gandalf.

I am not made for perilous quests. I wish that I had never

seen the Ring! Why did it come to me? Why was I chosen?10

Gandalf’s reply to this question is almost a refusal to answer:

Such questions cannot be answered. You may be sure that it

was not for any merit that others do not possess: not for

power or wisdom at any rate. But you have been chosen, and

you must therefore use such strength and heart and wits as

you have.

Gandalf answers tactically, indirectly, because if Frodo comes to

believe he merits the burden--especially if he believes he merits

it because of his great power or wisdom, the Ring will consume

him quickly and whole. He can resist it only for so long as he

is willing to suffer it, despite having no story about why he has

been chosen for the suffering. Ditto Chuck.

42

We learn later that Bryce chose Chuck because Chuck has heart.

Chuck, like Frodo, does not think he was made for perilous

quests--call them spy missions. He will learn otherwise.

Although Chuck will eventually start to suffer physical and

psychological damage from Intersect 2.0, he will not suffer moral

damage from the Intersect. It does not lead him into vice--into

an abuse of its power.

Since I have been exploring parallels between Tolkien’s Ring and

the Intersect, let me step back for a moment to take a larger

view. The story of a weapon of great power that functions as a

test of character traces back (at least) to Plato’s Republic. (It

is unclear when we started telling ourselves this story; there is

no end to the telling of it in sight.) In the Republic, one of

the conversants, Glaucon, argues that justice--or, perhaps

better, uprightness--is something no one pursues willingly. We

pursue uprightness only because we fear the consequences of

failing to be upright. To prove this, Glaucon relates the Myth

of the Ring of Gyges. Briefly, a humble shepherd finds a ring

43

that makes him invisible. Previously, he has lived an upright

life. Now, empowered by the Ring, he changes. He begins to

cheat and steal. Eventually, he successfully plots with the

Queen of the country to overthrow the King and kill him. Glaucon

uses the story to illustrate his claim that we do not pursue

uprightness willingly. If we knew we could escape the

consequence of our actions, we would willingly choose not to be

upright. Familiar versions of this Myth, but which do not

involve a Ring, are H. G. Wells’ The Invisible Man and the film,

Hollow Man. These versions, like Glaucon’s, we might call

pessimistic about uprightness, about human nature. Other

versions, like Tolkien’s, are more optimistic. They suggest that

uprightness itself is worth choosing, independent of

consequences. The pessimistic versions take the temptations to

fail to be upright to be too strong for us. The optimistic

versions take the temptations to be resistible, even if at a

cost. Chuck is an optimistic version.

Of course, it is an optimistic version that introduces its own

idiosyncratic features. In the versions of the Myth I have

44

mentioned, the item or the power is at the disposal of its wearer

or possessor: The ring can be put on more or less at any time

(of course, putting it on has unwelcome effects). One can become

invisible more or less at will. But, as I have mentioned, the

Intersect is not at Chuck’s disposal. If anything, the

relationship runs the other way; as Chuck says in S01 E05, “The

Intersect is doing most of the heavy lifting.” The fact that the

Intersect is not under Chuck’s control has significant

consequences in the show, in particular in Chuck’s relationship

to it.

The deepest and most significant consequence is the ambiguity of

Chuck’s relationship to the Intersect. Is Chuck the Intersect or does he

have it? Reasons abound for saying each--and Chuck himself talks

both ways. Very early on, when he first has the Intersect, he

tends to talk of himself as having it. Later, he begins to refer

to himself as the Intersect. So when Chuck downloads the

Intersect, does he undergo what we might call an accidental

change--the sort of change that happens when you catch a cold,

e.g.--or does he undergo something closer to a substantial

45

change--a change in what he is? If we think of the downloading

the first way, it is better to think of Chuck as having the

Intersect; if we think of downloading the second way, it is

better to think of Chuck as identical to (as being) the

Intersect.

After the initial download, Chuck receives the recognitional

capacities that cause him to flash, and flashes provide him with

information--propositional information, mainly, but also things

like photos, schematics, diagrams and architectural plans. The

information Chuck gets allows him to know things, and even allows

him to perform certain rudimentary physical tasks. For example,

if seeing a bomb causes him to flash, and he comes to know how to

defuse it, he can do so, as long as doing so takes nothing more

than simple physical actions, like cutting a wire, or skills he

already possessed, like typing. But new complex physical skills,

actions that a person can only do after much practice or much

training or much habituation, are not part of what the initial

download of the Intersect gives Chuck. To take the most salient

example, Chuck’s initial download of the Intersect does not

46

result in his knowing Kung Fu. His download of 2.0 however does

immediately result in his knowing Kung Fu. 2.0 results in Chuck

knowing, for example, knowing how to knife fight, knowing how to

do rapid-fire marksmanship, knowing foreign languages. None of

these Chuck could do before the download of 2.0; all are things

he can do (with a flash) afterwards. So 2.0 not only downloads

information, but also complicated physical skills. Say that 2.0

provides not only factual memory but also practical memory.

Chuck can ‘retain’ practical knowledge, know-how, that he never

acquired. Chuck can perform the skills more or less perfectly--

but he also has briefly the confidence and poise that having

acquired the skills normally brings with it. The problem though

is that the skills and confidence and poise are lost soon after

the situation changes. The skills are not acquired by practice

or training or habituation--in no normal way. They do not decay

because of lack of practice or so on. They dissipate, disappear;

but they can also re-appear. Chuck ‘borrows’ the skills from the

Intersect--in some sense it is the Intersect who knows how to do

these things. The Intersect lends Chuck his temporary knowledge-

how.

47

Because 2.0 gives Chuck these complicated physical skills, it is

natural for it to seem less like something he has than something

he has become, something he is. But that question never really

gets settled for Chuck until much later in the show, if it does

then.

Our bodies provide the best example of a familiar being/having

indeterminacy. No doubt, we often understand our bodies as sailors

do their ships, as stunt drivers do their cars, or as snails do

their shells, etc. That is, we often understand our bodies as

what we might call prosthetics for our souls. Our bodies are

tools we use. We maintain them, bathe, brush and polish them,

comb, curry, paint, dye and tattoo them. We think of our bodies

as things we have, like possessions. Our possessions tend to be

external to us; they are distinct from us and subjected to a

destiny we do not share. I can buy, sale, own, forfeit, bequeath,

inherit, donate or destroy possessions. I have a different

origin than my possessions. My possessions typically do not come

into being at the same time I do and typically never in in the

48

same event of coming-to-be, or even in the same way of coming to

be.

But however compelling this understanding seems, it cannot be the

full story of our bodies. And that is because we also often

identify ourselves with our bodies. What I here and there call

my body I also now and then call simply me. When I understand in

this way, I am not in my body, I am my body. When I understand

this way, I do not understand myself as a ghostly but essentially

living mini-me encased in a earthy but contingently enlivened me-

suit. I do not live in my body, like an apartment, or outside of

it, as if it were my dollhouse; no, I live bodily.

Once we have reflected on this, we can see that there are

glitches in our understanding of our bodies as things we have, as

possessions. There are also glitches in our understanding of our

bodies as what we are, as our being. Each understanding seems,

at least at times, compulsory; each also seems, at times,

impossible.

49

There are various ways of trying to conceptualize what I am

calling the being/having indeterminacy of our bodies. We might,

for example, attempt to assimilate it to dual aspect phenomena.

Ludwig Wittgenstein made the duck-rabbit (pictured above) famous.11

It is a line drawing--containing one dot. The drawing can be

seen as a duck or seen as a rabbit. Most people can see each

easily, can toggle back and forth at will, but cannot see the

drawing as both a duck and rabbit at one and the same time. Now

it is a duck, now it is a rabbit. Call this seeing the drawing

under dual aspects, now under the aspect of a duck, now under the

aspect of a rabbit. Just so, we might conceptualize the body as

something that can be seen under the aspect of having or under

the aspect of being. In the first case, the body is like our

possession. In the second case, the body is what we are. Now

having, now being. The further thought would be that we can see

the body in both ways, toggle between the ways, but not see it

both ways at the same time. I reckon this a useful

conceptualization, but it is hard to see the two cases as exactly

parallel. After all, the duck-rabbit is a line drawing,

reproducible in pen or ink or chalk. We know what it is own its

50

own, so to speak. We know how to inventory it metaphysically.

(“Yes, here is another line drawing.”) But do we know what the

body is independent of its presentation under the aspects of

being and having? It seems both of the aspects we are seeing the

body under are aspects that metaphysically determine it. We are

not choosing between two interpretations of one (metaphysical)

thing, a line drawing, as in the case of the duck-rabbit. We are

choosing between two different (metaphysical) things. The line

drawing is a line drawing. It is not a duck. (It does not walk

like a duck…) It is not a rabbit. (No hip-hop here.) But the

body seems either to be a possession or to be identical to me.

The duck-rabbit is one reality with two ways of appearing. The

body seems to be two different realities. If we try to force the

issue, by contending that the body is, for example, a material

thing, we fail. After all, we have already been calling it a

body--how does shifting to material thing help us? We still need to

know what the material thing is (is it my tool or identical to

me?) and assimilating it to dual aspect phenomena does not seem

to give us an answer to that question. Or else it gives us too

many--two--answers to that question, answers that are not clearly

51

compatible. The body cannot be both at once. The point is that

we do not have a clear spot for what we are calling the body (or

the material thing) in our metaphysical inventory, such that we

can put it in that spot and, having confidently placed it in

inventory, go on to consider it under the dual aspects. The

aspects themselves seem to matter to the body’s placement in

inventory.12

At any rate, my goal is not ultimately (luckily!) to sort out the

question of what the body is, tool or me. My goal is to

illustrate a familiar having/being indeterminacy. The Intersect

presents Chuck with the same sort of indeterminacy. Is the

Intersect as tool implanted in Chuck or does it somehow become

Chuck himself, so that he is somehow identical to it? It seems as

though the Intersect can only be something Chuck has, a tool

implanted in him, and yet it also seems as though that

description is not clearly correct. At any rate, Chuck himself

will bounce from one view to the other throughout the show, and

his doing so will cause him and, so, Sarah (and others), serious

difficulties

52

The Intersect is both a source of anxiety for Chuck and it

worsens old anxieties. One of the deepest of Chuck’s anxieties

early in the show is that he has squandered his potential. At

one point, he asks Morgan:

Chuck: Do you remember a time when I had potential?

Chuck is having a hard time remembering such a time. Like lots

of gifted kids, and Chuck surely was one, Chuck was for many

years more or less identified with his potential--his

considerable potential defined what he was. As he grew older, he

was expected to actualize that potential, but his doing so was

not meant to be a net loss. As he ‘lost’ potential, he was to

‘gain’ actuality. At Stanford, when Chuck’s life suddenly goes

south, Chuck stalls. The transitioning of potentiality into

actuality stalls. He ends up stuck--at the Buy More. As months

and years pass, and as Chuck’s potential fails to actualize, the

expectations of others turn into disappointments: potential so

long unactualized probably did not exist in the first place.

53

Chuck’s failure to actualize his potential becomes a reason to

think the potential was illusory. Clearly, Chuck has now

internalized the disappointments of others. Even he no longer

quite believes he had, has, potential.

So, among its other functions in the show, the Intersect

concretizes this issue. It represents Chuck’s potential and his

problematic relationship to it. He does have potential but he

cannot seem to actualize it, certainly he cannot actualize it at

will. It gives him--or, keeping this in touch with the larger

problem of being/having indeterminacy--or it makes him, a power.

But, as before in relation to his non-Intersect potential, Chuck

does not know what that power makes him or what to make of it,

what to do with it. He has it or he is it, but what is it, what

is he?

As time passes, Chuck becomes less and less reliant on the

Intersect. Eventually he develops his own skills and abilities,

he becomes what he is. He becomes self-reliant, finally.

54

At the end of Season 2, in S02E22, when Chuck’s co-workers’ band,

Jeffster, plays in an attempt to stall Ellie’s wedding to Devon,

they perform Styx’ “Mr. Roboto”. While Jeffster performs their

cover of this song, Chuck is racing to save Ellie. (That creates

the need for stalling.) At this point, the Intersect has been

erased from Chuck’s brain. The song looks back to Chuck’s two

years with the Intersect--and it foreshadows his downloading of

2.0 at the end of the episode. When he has the Intersect, or

when he is the Intersect, Chuck is not a robot, despite Casey’s

teasing about him being one. But when he has it, when he is it,

Chuck is not exactly human either--he is some kind of composite

being. Is he a human being plus or is he no longer human? And if

he is no longer human, is he more than or less than human?

Chuck feels human, mostly. Still, he is not quite sure of the

answers to these questions. This scene is a focal scene for

Chuck and the Intersect. The song recounts Chuck’s plight—and

highlights the problems the Intersect presents Chuck, the way in

which the Intersect (and the consequences of downloading it)

threatens his sense of self, his humanity.

55

Let me make a few final comments. As Chuck continues, the

Intersect becomes more mysterious. For most of the first two

seasons, the implicit and sometimes explicit suggestion of the

show is that there is something special about Chuck--about the

kind of person he is and about the kind of brain he has.

Although no one ever states that only Chuck can successfully

download the Intersect, that is sometimes suggested. But we

later find out that Chuck’s father has successfully downloaded

it. (What version did his father download? That is unclear. It

also turns out, apparently, that Chuck downloaded some very early

version of it as a child. What role that plays in his

suitability for the later download is unclear. The earlier

download does seem to play some role in his overcoming the

glitches of 2.0 at the end of Season 3.) As I mentioned, Chuck

downloads 2.0 at the end of Season 2. The Ring develops a

version of 2.0, a version that Shaw eventually downloads. Still

later, other CIA agents download an altered version of 2.0.

Those agents do not fare well with it. In fact, it becomes clear

that the sort of person who is taken to be perfect for the

Intersect--a real spy, someone with complete control of his or

56

her emotions, someone whose brain is distant from his or her

heart--is not perfect for it. It is Chuck, who is not a real spy

(by CIA standards), who does not have complete control of his

emotions and whose brain is (mostly) in his heart, who turns out

to be able to handle the Intersect, to use it for good and not to

be turned or changed by it. The agents become drunk with the

power of the Intersect, unable to control it. It takes control

of them.

Other than his worries about whether he has or is the Intersect,

the Intersect has only deleterious physical side-effects for

Chuck. He begins to have flash-dreams, as the Intersect

interacts with his subconscious. The Intersect begins to cause

changes in his brain that threaten Chuck’s long-term

psychological health. Luckily, his father, who has also borne

the Intersect for quite a while, has figured out how to construct

a “governor”, a device (embedded in a wristwatch) that allows the

Intersect to function without damaging the brain of its bearer.

57

Shaw’s time with the Intersect is interesting by comparison. It

is hard to know exactly what to make of the Ring’s version of

2.0, the version Shaw downloads. Shaw seems to have the same

repertoire of skills that Chuck does. He turns out also to need

the governor. But since Shaw has already become a villain before

he gets the Intersect, figuring out its moral effects on him is

tricky. Still, it seems evident enough that the Intersect

hastens his fall. The last time we see Shaw, he is pure villain.

His previous hesitations, his momentary clarities about and

resistances to what he is doing, are gone. He only wants to

hurt, to victimize--to maximize the pain of others. Shaw’s

obsessive vendetta has become more exaggerated. Almost

certainly, the Intersect worsened it.

Morgan and Sarah both suffer serious memory issues when they

download whatever version of 2.0 it is that they download. The

Intersect provides them both with the sorts of factual memory and

practical memory that are provided to Chuck and to Shaw. But it

attacks their personal memory, their ability to bring a

previously experienced person, place, object or incident to mind,

58

to think about it again and to recall what it was like. This

attack on their personal memory also results in losses of factual

memory: wherever their recollection of a fact was itself the

result of or strongly tied to personal memory (say, Sarah’s

factual memory that she married Chuck, which results from or is

strongly tied to her personal memory of marrying Chuck), the

factual memory is lost too. In Morgan’s case, his loss of

personal memory is coupled with a change in his moral character--

the Intersect unleashes his “inner jerk”. Although the Intersect

does not quite seem to have that sort of effect on Sarah’s

character, it does make her seem powerful to herself as she never

had before. She finds it difficult to control the Intersect, to

keep from using its power. It is unclear to what extent this is

a change of character and to what extent it is the result of the

Intersect adversely affecting her brain. But it seems that her

failure to control the Intersect a glitch in its functioning, and

not a failure of character (of self-control) on her part.

59

60

Chapter 2 Echo Park: Real Love in the Panopticon?

Plato worried that philosophical writing would take the place of living conversations for

which, in philosophy, there is no substitute. --Rebecca Goldstein

…[W]hat is the use of studying philosophy if all that it does for you is to enable you to

talk with some plausibility about some abstruse questions of logic, etc., & if it does not

improve your thinking about the important questions of everyday life? --Ludwig

Wittgenstein

The Panopticon

What I am going to do in this chapter is to activate the

philosophical topics that structure Chuck. That means I need

briefly both to introduce and clarify the topic, and to indicate

how the topic structures the show. I will have more to say in

the readings about the topics. I will also be working there to

show how the topics structure the show. Until I begin to discuss

Chuck and Sarah (in the next couple of chapters) and to provide

the readings (in the later chapters), some of what I am about to

61

say may seem to float abstractly above the show. There is little

I can do about that beyond mentioning it and promising that it

will not turn out that way at the end. My goal is to show that

these topics are concretely present in the show. As I said

above, I am assembling terms for conversation. The readings to

come will use the terms.

When the show begins, Chuck lives with Ellie (and with her

boyfriend, Devon) in Echo Park, in a small apartment complex.

The apartment complex is rectangular. The apartments all look

inward at a central courtyard containing a fountain. Echo Park.

It is a place of echoes--a place of confusion, a place of

illusion, a place of memory. I take it to be no accident that

the courtyard of Echo Park, with its inward facing apartments, is

on smaller scale much like the courtyard between buildings in

Hitchcock’s Rear Window. But here, everyone watches everyone

else. Casey moves in and is often peering out of his blinds.

Repeatedly, an important event happening inside an apartment is

being watched by others standing outside, in the courtyard. Echo

Park seems to be inhabited by a race of peeping Toms.

62

But things are worse than they seem. Once the CIA and NSA have

taken Chuck on and have stationed Sarah and Casey to handle and

protect him, the apartment complex becomes the scene of constant

electronic surveillance. Cameras command the courtyard, giving

access to anything that happens in it. Cameras also command the

apartments and their rooms. Listening devices are everywhere.

Chuck is being watched or filmed or both at almost every moment—

or he could be. Almost overnight, Chuck goes from being

unnoticed, a wallflower, to being scrutinized. Chuck’s personal

life becomes the raw material of the professional lives of

others. Even satellites are used to keep track of him--thermal

satellite surveillance.

The constant surveillance serves to block or to severely

constrict the natural flow of feelings and events. In

particular, it blocks or constricts the natural flow of feelings

and events between Chuck and Sarah. Chuck at first does not

realize that he is under surveillance, but when he does, although

it angers him and makes him feel exposed and violated, he often

63

willfully ignores or tries to ignore the surveillance. Often, he

says and acts as he feels he must if he is to be honest, even if

that means allowing others access to his actions and feelings.

However, he does sometimes make concessions to the cameras--he

obscures his point or fails to name names, etc. But the

surveillance has a much stronger effect on Sarah. Sarah is

professional. Her sense of identity, despite the ways in which

she is changing, remains strongly tied to her work for the CIA,

to being the best of the best. Her training dictates that a

handler cannot have feelings for her asset, much less be

romantically involved with him. Feeling for him or dating him in

effect would make a handler/asset relationship impracticable.

Sarah does not want to be unprofessional. And she surely does

not want to be unprofessional under surveillance. So Chuck’s

appeals to Sarah, offered as they so often are under the lens of

a camera or in earshot of a listening device, end up harder to

respond to than they would otherwise be for her--and they would

be hard for her to respond to in the best of circumstances.

Sarah is capable of forgetting herself; now and then she gives

herself away. But knowing she is under surveillance makes her

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especially unlikely to forget herself or give herself away. We

might say that Sarah’s temptation to fantasize that she can be

wholly inexpressive, become ice or stone, is most tempting in

these circumstances. The cameras have a Medusa-like effect on

Sarah--already stony, they tempt her to be stonier still.

An aspect of Chuck that is easy to miss is its insistence on

Chuck himself as Everyman, as representing us all. The Intersect

and the cameras and the bugs--we all live in such conditions now.

The Intersect is in all our heads: the near-rhyme of ‘Intersect’

and ‘Internet’ is no accident. We are all plugged into something

bigger than we are, something we have, depend on, even identify

with, but do not fully understand or control. We live in a space

constantly vulnerable to cell phone cameras and video. Our phone

calls and communiques are collected and stored. We all live

across the courtyard from a less clearly well-intentioned Jeff in

Rear Window; we all live in Echo Park. Smile. Speak up. Someone

is watching, listening.

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The dark technologico-Benthamite fantasy of a Panopticon is

realized in Chuck. Even if Chuck is not under surveillance, he

cannot know he is not. At the end of the first episode, this

strikes Chuck forcibly, and Sarah concedes it.

Chuck: There’s nowhere I can run, is there?

Sarah: Not from us.

In Greek mythology, Panoptes was a giant with a hundred eyes--a

fearful watchman. Jeremy Bentham capitalized on the name

‘Panoptes’, and on the idea of a hundred-eyed watchman in his

Panopticon. The Panopticon was a prison, a circular structure of

cells with an Inspection House in its center. A single watchman

would work in the Inspection House--and could see into any of the

cells without being seen. Of course, it was impossible for the

watchman to watch each inmate simultaneously. But since the

inmates could not tell whether or not the watchman was watching,

they were forced to assume that he was, they had to take

themselves to be under surveillance all the time, even though

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they knew they were not. Bentham claimed that the Panopticon was

a novel way of controlling minds, on a scale never before

imagined. It is not enough to compromise a prisoner’s freedom in

a cell; now, the prisoner has to take himself to be under

constant observation.

We need to remember: Chuck has only a muzzled freedom. Despite

his occasional protests and small resistances, for the first

couple of years with the Intersect, Chuck lives in fear. The

government could take him at any time, put him in a actual cell.

The possibility of being taken--nearly realized in S01E13, for

example--is like a gaping maw Chuck dangles above. But there is

not only that fear, but also the fear of endangering those he

loves, those he works with--anyone near him. A careless word

could put people he knows and cares about in serious danger.

Chuck is forced into recognizing, for all of his supposed

importance as the Intersect, that he is actually insignificant:

he has no rights. He is important, protected, only because of

what he knows as the Intersect. Chuck the person does not really

matter much at all. He can be imprisoned or killed when the

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situation demands. This means that Chuck not only lives in fear,

he lives in servitude. He does not belong to himself. He cannot

choose what to do with his time. He cannot just drop everything

and go on vacation. The government owns him. Thrown into the

spy world, Chuck also has to cope with the universal mistrust of

that world. There, his open nature is a wound. His frankness

and sincerity mark him out for mistrust. Either others in the

spy world refuse to believe him or they judge him a risk, someone

in whom they cannot confide and on whom they cannot depend. This

means that Chuck has to live in ignorance--those he most has to

depend on himself will not tell him anything. Or, if they seem

to tell him something, it is likely to be misinformation. But

the hardest of all of these things for Chuck is the fact that he

is forced to live a lie as the form of his existence. He is

required not just to lie here and there, once in a while, but in

effect to existent in a permanent lie. Even if he can tell the

truth here and there, once in a while, he has to package it so as

not to contradict the permanent lie of his life.

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Now, the show does not insist on these features of Chuck’s life,

but it does remind us of them from time to time. Other

characters remind us of how bad it must be. In S02E12, Tyler

Martin comments to Chuck that his manager is going to prison,

where he will have no privacy: “must be hell on bloody earth.”

Chuck laughs weakly and looks at Casey: “Tell me about it.”

Chuck not only manages to remain a good guy under the weight of

the Intersect, but also in the hell of his muzzled freedom.

Appearance and Reality

Properly distinguishing between appearance and reality, and

properly relating them, has been deemed the wide gate of the

broad way that leads to philosophy. In The World as Will and

Representation, Arthur Schopenhauer treats distinguishing between

appearance and reality as the sine qua non of a philosopher. In

The Problems of Philosophy, Bertrand Russell takes the distinction to

set the basic terms of philosophical progress--i.e., the proper

relating of appearances to realities. The need to distinguish

between and to relate appearance and reality, and the attendant

worry, suspicion and anxiety the need creates, is lodged in the

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center of Chuck. It is the major reason that the show exists in

the condition of philosophy, and its characters are called on to

inhabit that condition, to be philosophers. Russell once

commented that “the philosopher's wish to know [how to

distinguish appearance from reality] is stronger than the

practical man's, and is more troubled by knowledge as to the

difficulties of answering the question.”13 The spies and wanna-

be spies on Chuck wish to know how to distinguish between

appearance and reality, and they are more troubled than normal

people by knowledge as to the difficulty of answering the

question. Chuck and Sarah both have particularly strong wishes

to know and both struggle (albeit in different ways) with the

knowledge of how difficult it is to distinguish appearance from

reality.

One peculiar aspect of Chuck is that its concern with

distinguishing appearances from realities centers mostly on

(other) people’s minds. The central problem is the problem of

other minds. Though there certainly are worries about how to

distinguish between appearance and reality with respect to

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objects, like diamonds and bombs and guns, there are more

worries, and deeper worries, about how to distinguish between

appearance and reality with respect to thoughts, feelings,

motives, intentions and purposes of persons. Transposing the

distinction from the realm of (mere) objects to the realms of

people’s minds greatly complicates the distinction, greatly

complicates distinguishing appearances from realities.

One complication is that objects cannot know that others are

attempting to know them. That is, other people are often

responsive to the attempt to know them. Objects are not

responsive. Another complication is that objects cannot intend

to hide what they are, lie about what they feel or pretend to be

something or someone that they are not. Objects cannot actively

(intentionally, deliberately, purposefully) refuse to or try to

refuse to be known. Objects do not obfuscate. Objects feel no

shame; their cheeks do not redden. (Apples do not ripen from

embarrassment.) Objects keep no secrets.

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Yet another complication is that where human minds are concerned,

both questions about knowing and about being known are shot

through with moral issues, questions of entitlements, rights,

privileges and duties. People have some degree of discretion

over when and how and how much and by whom they may be known.

One person can know something about another that he should not

know. (Think of the Peeping Tom or the identity thief.)

So, the problem of other minds presents itself not only as a

problem of knowing the minds of others, but also as the problem

of making known--or making unknown--your own mind. How can a

person make himself known to others, express his feelings in a

way that communicates them accurately? How can a person keep

from expressing his feelings, keep from communicating them? Is

it possible for a person to keep herself from others for so long

that she can no longer communicate herself? This other side of

the problem of other minds is also a central concern of Chuck.

Of course, Chuck is not trying to solve (either side of) the

problem in its most abstract form--the show is instead focused on

concrete versions of these problems, involving particular persons

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in particular circumstances. But that, I submit, is a strength

of Chuck’s concern with the problem of other minds. Instead of

considering the problem in the abstract, where perhaps it cannot

be profitably responded to, it wrestles with versions of the

problem in the concrete, where details and circumstances provide

handholds for more effective grappling. If we can find a way to

respond successfully to versions of the problem in the concrete,

not having a successful response to the abstract form of the

problem is hardly going to seem a loss

In order to think about Chuck’s concern with appearance and

reality clearly, we need to consider one of the most important

words of the show, the little word ‘real’.14 The first important

thing here is that the word is a quite comfortable, familiar

word. We use it all the time, rarely pausing to worry about it

or about what we are doing in using it. The word comes to us

with a history, a use that we inherit from others. Because that

is so, the word cannot be pushed around willy-nilly. We need to

reflect on what we do and have been taught to do with the word.

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But the word ‘real’ is also--even if noting this creates an air

of paradox--a quite peculiar word. Although it has a use, that

use is not like the use of many other words, words that have one

specifiable, mostly unchanging, meaning--a meaning we feel like

we can point to by means of our index finger. For example, if I

correctly say, “The street light is yellow,” that seems

importantly unlike correctly saying, “The street light is real”.

We can easily enough imagine the street light changing color

without thinking that we are thereby obliged to think of the

street light as having been annihilated. But changing from real

to unreal seems to require that the street light be annihilated,

or somehow replaced with a fake one.

What this suggests is that saying of something that it is real is

rather unlike saying that it is yellow. But unlike how? Well,

the first thing we might notice is that when we say of something

that it is real, we need to (either implicitly or explicitly) say

what it is. I might, for instance, be confronted by something in

the jungle, something that I cannot classify as flora or fauna,

as anything, but I could still say that it is yellow. It would

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be clear what I mean. But if I am standing there in that

situation, perplexed, and say that it is real, would it be clear

what I mean? Real as opposed to what? A real what? One reason

why it would not be clear what I mean is that one and the same

thing can be both a real x and not a real y. A teddy bear is not

a real bear, but it is a real toy. Where I cannot supply a

substantive (a word to replace x or y, a word that answers the

question, what?) I cannot do much, if anything, with the word

‘real’. But I also cannot do much with the word if the situation

in which I use it is a situation devoid of suspicion or something

cognate with it. I call on the word ‘real’ when I am worried

about appearances, about how things look or how things seem, when

I suspect that something is up. If, for example, in the jungle

there are rival explorers who delight in making me think I have

discovered some novelty by mocking one up, I might then say, “It

is real,” meaning that it is not one of their mock-ups.

This shows that ‘real’ is also peculiar in that it is its

negative use that establishes the sense of the term. In other

words, it is only when or where we understand a specific way in

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which something might be or might have been not real that we call

for the word ‘real’. If I have no understanding of how something

might be not real, I am going to find pointless your assertion

that it is real. If I go to the doctor for a vaccination, and she

fills the hypodermic and then, holding it before me, says, “This

is a real needle”, what I am supposed to take her to mean? How

might it fail to be a real needle? Am I supposed to worry that I

am hallucinating? Should I doubt she is a doctor? All the not-

real needles I know are toy needles. That they are not real

needles is obvious (they are made of opaque, bright red plastic,

say). What would be the point of a fake needle that looked this

real? This is an important feature of the use of ‘real’. One

reason why we cannot just point to the meaning of ‘real’, as we

may believe we can in the case of ‘yellow’ is that ‘real’ does

not contribute to the positive characterization of a thing, but

rather serves to exclude possible ways of being not real. (Think

about the jungle examples again.)

Although there is more to say about the use of ‘real’, let me

take a moment here to bring the word back to Chuck. At the

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beginning of Season 3, Chuck and Sarah meet on a train platform

in Prague. They are to run away together. Sarah, sensing a

surprising reluctance on Chuck’s part, implores him:

Sarah: This [she holds his hand], this is simple. This is

a real life.

Chuck understands Sarah, of course, he understands her use of

‘real’. Their past two years together or mostly together

pretending to be a couple, provide the specific sense of how a

life could be not real. The contrast is between being a couple

as a cover and really being a couple. Saying this is her way of

banishing any suspicion of what she means from Chuck’s mind.

One other important feature of the use of ‘real’ is that it is

used as a dimension-word. It is perhaps the most general of a

whole group of words of a similar kind (and Chuck abounds in

these words): the positive terms--‘proper’, ‘genuine’, ‘live’,

‘true’, ‘authentic’, ‘natural’ and ‘normal’. Negative terms that

belong here are ‘artificial’, ‘fake’, ‘false’, ‘bogus’, ‘mock-

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up’, ‘dummy’, ‘toy’--as well as ‘dream’, ‘illusion’, ‘mirage’,

‘hallucination’.

One member of these lists that might seem puzzling is ‘normal’,

since you might rightly notice that something can be both a

normal or an abnormal x without thereby typically being a not-

real x. That is true. But in the vocabulary of Chuck), ‘normal’

is the dimension word most often applied to ‘life’. In that use,

the word is supposed to have as its opposite (the way that

‘genuine’ often takes ‘fake’ as its opposite), ‘spy’, as in “spy

life”. The spy life is supposed to be unreal, a normal life is

supposed to be real. Now, that is not the only way that ‘normal’

is used in the show, but it is an important way. Sometimes

‘normal’ is used in a more normal way. For example, in Season 2,

Chuck tells Sarah she will never be a normal girl--but he does

not mean she is unreal, not even exactly that she is a spy, but

that she is far from ordinary, and so is unfit for the ordinary

life he imagines for himself.

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These dimension words--positive and negative--are the lexical

backbone of Chuck. The entire show lives and moves and has its

being in the dimensions marked out by these words: it takes

place between true and false, genuine and fake, pretend and real,

and so on.

In S01E08, Chuck and Sarah ‘break up’ for the first time. The

word that circulates through that episode is ‘fake’. Part of the

point of the insistence on the word is to make clear that what

they call their cover is, while a real cover, a fake

relationship, they are faking it. But Chuck wants what they are

faking, a genuine relationship. For his part, he is (where his

feelings are concerned) not faking it--he is doing what is

natural, but it is still, in a larger sense, fake. The whole

fake relationship has Chuck fooling himself.

Another word of great importance in Chuck is ‘trust’. (Also

greatly important are a group of ‘trust’-adjacent words, like

‘commitment’ and ‘fidelity’. My discussion of ‘trust’ here is

meant to suggest how to think about those words too. I discuss

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‘commitment’ in some detail later in the book.) The word appears

prominently in the two scenes that bookend the show, the scene on

Malibu beach that ends the first episode and the scene on Malibu

beach that ends the final episode. In the first, Sarah implored

Chuck to trust her. In the second, Chuck implores Sarah to trust

him. And it is Chuck’s ability and willingness to trust--

especially given his history and given his current, Intersected

circumstance--that is one of the things about him to which Sarah

deeply responds.

Why is that? By the time Sarah meets Chuck, trust has become an

issue for her. Let me explain. It is not that Sarah denies that

‘trust’ is meaningless, denies the reality of trust. No one

raised by a con man could really deny that, since it would makes

confidence games unplayable. Rather, Sarah has clearly gone

through various stages in the way she has understood trust. In

her father’s world of cons and marks, her understanding of trust

was decidedly reductive. Trust was a weakness, a form of

credulity, and she and her father prided themselves on not being

weak or credulous, congratulated themselves for their lack of

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trust. But at some point, Sarah stopped understanding trust in

that decidedly reductive way. She later came to understand trust

as a boon, a kind of good thing, but a boon inaccessible to her.

At first she thought of that boon as something like the enjoyment

of music, a pleasant idiosyncrasy, almost like a hobby, that adds

variety and color to a life but is not a necessity. She

certainly did not take it to be revelatory of anything crucial,

even if it would be nice to have it. But by the time she meets

Chuck she is ready to change her mind about that; she is in an

open and expectant state of mind. Chuck will teach Sarah a new

understanding of trust, and eventually will teach her to be able

and willing to trust.

Earlier, I discussed Chuck’s fortitude. That virtue intimately

connects with Chuck’s trustingness. Chuck has every reason to

deride trust, to refuse it to others. His mother abandoned him

as a child; later his father did the same. His college

girlfriend summarily dumps him after his closest friend at

college betrays him--and then his girlfriend and his friend

become a couple. Chuck was deeply in love with Jill. He trusted

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Bryce. Chuck has better reasons than most to fail to be

trusting. Yet, he is trusting. He has endured the battering of

his trust and emerged still able and willing to trust. That

manifests his endurance, his fortitude. Chuck understands trust

as a power, not a weakness. Trusting makes you stronger, not

weaker. Chuck understands trust as communion with something

higher, as a form of faith in your higher self and the higher

self of others. It is required if those higher selves are to be

realized.

Exposure to Chuck causes Sarah to see herself as lacking--she is

unable to trust as Chuck does, to live out his understanding of

trust. For all her competence and professionalism, she is in

this respect powerless in comparison to Chuck. This makes her

Malibu beach plea to Chuck to trust her particularly interesting.

What, exactly, is she asking him to do? Later, when something

Sarah told Chuck about herself proves untrue, and Chuck is

troubled by this, she tells him: “I didn’t say to believe me, I

said to trust me.” Given that it is Sarah who says this, it is

not the contradiction or paradox it seems. Her point is that she

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will have to say all sorts of things as part of her cover or in

order to protect various secrets, but that even if she tells him

things that are untrue, she is true.

So what does Sarah mean when she asks Chuck to trust her? The

answer, I think, is that Sarah’s words are in transit. She is

speaking ahead of herself. She might have said that what she

meant was that Chuck should take her to be concerned about him

and his friends and family, to be intent on protecting him and

them. And of course she does mean that. But she means more than

that, even if she could not explain the more that she means. She

is asking Chuck to trust her in the way that he trusts, even if she

does not know quite how to understand that yet, even if she does

not know all that her request will create between them. Whether

she quite realizes it or not, she is telling Chuck that she is

ready for and capable of change, asking him to believe in her

higher self. He will doggedly believe in it.

In the scheme of the show, Chuck is not only the paradigm of

trust as a virtue, as a power, he is also the paradigm,

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relatedly, of generous-mindedness, another virtue. This is a

virtue that is concerned with judging the merits and demerits of

other people. Chuck shows the virtue by being willing to see

merit in others when the circumstances admit of other plausible

interpretations or when the circumstances are complicated in a

way that masks merit. He also shows it by not being willing to

make judgments of demerit in circumstances that plausibly call

for such judgments. As generous-minded, Chuck cuts other people

some slack. Most of us struggle to be generous-minded. We are

often made anxious by the thought that others are as good as or

even better than we are (in some way). We often do not want to

think well of other people or we do want to think ill of them.

We may not exactly blind ourselves to the merits of others--but

we miss them because we are motivated not to try too hard to find

them. Someone like Chuck, who wants to think well of others, is

willing to try hard to find the merits of others, to be patient

and thorough in searching out those merits. Most of us are

willing to cast a quick glance at the question, settle it, and

move on. Chuck wants others to succeed. He wants what they do

to reflect well upon them and to be noticed by others. Since he

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looks hard for merit, he is in general more likely to find it

than others are. Also, Chuck’s generous-mindedness makes him

less likely to think himself better than others.

As a virtue, generous-mindedness is a power. Just as trust is

not a weakness, a form of credulity, generous-mindedness is not a

weakness, a form of distorted judgment leading to mistaken

evaluations. The generous-minded person evaluates accurately,

competently, and he is conscientious about making the right

judgment. Chuck wants to find merit in others, but he is not

interested in hallucinating its presence. He wants to make the

correct judgment. But because he also wants to find merit if he

can, he is persistent in his search for it. He passes judgment

more slowly and after more careful consideration of the proper

interpretation of the circumstance or more determined effort to

unravel the complications of the circumstances.15

But Chuck’s trust and his generous-mindedness have a crucial

limitation. Neither extends fully to himself. He does not fully

trust himself, he is not willing to work hard to find his merits.

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His past has not lamed his ability and willingness to trust

others, to trust them fully or to treat them in his generous-

minded way. But it has lamed his ability and willingness to

trust himself fully, to work as hard to find his merits as he

does the merits of others. His vision of his higher self has

dimmed. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s bywords—“Trust yourself!”, “Obey

yourself!”, “Rely on yourself!”--are bywords that have gone

goodbye for Chuck.16 Self-mistrust, self-disobedience, self-

disbelief eat at Chuck from the inside.

Sarah comes to trust Chuck quickly--as soon as his disarming the

bomb with the Irene Demova virus. He disarms her by disarming a

bomb. Her developing trust in him manifests itself as her seeing

him as heroic, as a hero. She has faith that he will save the

day. “I trust Chuck!” she tersely says to Casey when he offers

her the choice of trusting his use of a missile to shoot down a

satellite versus Chuck’s ability to shut the satellite down by

beating Missile Command, by getting to the ‘kill screen’ of the

video game. (She is right to trust him; Chuck beats the game.)

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Her trust in Chuck is what allows Chuck to begin to trust

himself.

One of the constant worries on Chuck is lying--the need for it,

when to say it actually occurs (when to say something counts as a

lie), whether it can be excused or forgiven, etc. ‘Lie’ is

another important word in the show. Many similar words also are

in the mix of the show—‘deception’, ‘cover’, ‘pretence’, etc.

Chuck involves almost all the ways of being or doing or saying the

false. I want to concentrate here on the complexity of truth-

telling, as well as on the way lying is destructive of the self.

Different people in different situations make different claims on

us, on what it is to tell them the truth in those situations. We

have to be vigilant--to monitor who we are talking to and where

and when and why. What it is to tell the truth and the truth we

have to tell are fixed by our relationship to the person we are

talking to, and when and where and why.

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This means that being a truth-teller requires not only that a

person have the right habits--habits that involve skills and

sensitivities necessary rightly to understand and respond fitly

to the complexities of the actual situation confronting the

person as he or she is called on to speak. A person has to learn

to tell the truth, to tell what truths can be told to what

person, to tell what it is to tell the truth to that person. Not

having these habits, skills and sensitivities, not having learnt

these lessons makes being a truth-teller more or less impossible.

Being blameless and innocent is not enough: blamelessness and

innocence may cause me to lie, or to fail to tell the truth that

I have to tell.

Understanding truth-telling in this way may seem to open the door

to the liar, to give him not just one but many ways out of his

lie. It does not. It may seem to because we are so constantly

tempted to forget that truth-telling is an action. And acting is

always and everywhere a sensitive occupation. Not just any

action open to just any person at just any time and at just any

place, and not just any person is the appropriate ‘recipient’ of

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the action. What I have observed about truth-telling is itself a

particular instance of this principle.

Truth-telling is a living thing. It is not dead, inert or

unresponsive. Tellers of truth and hearers of truth are both

living beings. But keeping this in mind does not mean that

something told is true just because the teller affirms it or

false just because the hearer denies it. Acknowledging that

truth-telling is an action, a sensitive occupation, a living

thing, does not make truth something we simply make up or make

truth relative in the destructive sense of that term.17

Let me clarify this by means of an example. Almost always, when

two people encounter one another, when they talk to one another,

when they become participants in a truth-telling situation, they

encounter one another as holders of particular stations and

bearers of particular duties. We encounter each other as

strangers, lovers, husbands and wives, teachers and students,

parents and children, employers and employees, waiters and

customers. What counts as truth-telling and what truths we have

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to tell are responsive to these stations and duties. A father,

for example, cannot tell just any truth to his child. Not only

are there things that the father should not tell his child, there

are also things he cannot tell his child. The child would not

understand them. The same sorts of things are true in other

cases. If I am your first-time waiter, and you my first-time

customer, and you answer my question about what you would like to

drink by saying, “I am dying of terminal cancer”, I will not

understand you. Why? Because I will not know what you are

doing, will not know what the point could be of your saying those

words to me in that circumstance. Are you testing me? But what

kind of test would it be? Is this the beginning of a joke? What

would the punch-line be? Are you an actor who has decided to run

lines with a stranger (and what sense would that really make)?

Am I on candid camera or being punked? Did you lose a bet? Of

course I know what you said in one sense; I speak English. Of

course I know the meanings of the words you have used. Of course

I can imagine some relationship between us, and some appropriate

setting that would make the words understandable. But right

here, right now, I have no idea what you mean by your words.

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To believe that truth-telling is not sensitive in these ways is

to be, I judge, cynical about truth as a living thing, cynical

too about our relationships to and duties to others. It is to

fall victim to the myth of the pure (self-)constative—i.e., to

think that words simply assign themselves a full-on meaning, just

on their own, independent of the speaker, what the speaker is

doing, what point he or she might have in doing it, and so on.

It is to believe that we can do something called telling the

truth in a way that can be scored outside of the total speech act

in the total speech situation.18

I admit that the sensitivity of truth-telling makes deciding when

someone lies more involved. There is just more to think about.

The possibility of lying requires the possibility of truth-

telling (and vice versa), but that means that neither is possible

between certain people, at certain times, in certain places and

about certain things.

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When we condemn lying, we tend to focus, understandably, on the

ways that lying destroys our credibility, destroys trust. The

familiar story of The Boy Who Cried Wolf makes clear how lying

destroys credibility. And we all know well enough the

destruction that being lied to can cause, the ways it can darken

our relationships with others and loosen the cohesion between

people and in general demoralize us.

We do not think enough about what lying actually does to the

liar, about lying’s attack on the very core of what it is to be a

person. This goes deeper than a loss of credibility. To become

a liar is to internalize an appearance/reality distinction. To

become a liar is to introduce that duplexity into the heart

itself. By internalizing the distinction, the duplexity, I open a

fault line in my very nature as a person. I now have to mind the

gap between what I believe or feel and what I say I believe or

feel. That is a gap hard to mind.

The liar creates an internal disjunction. He must now keep track

of himself both as himself and as another. He has to have two

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I’s. He has an I who speaks and an I who believes or feels. One

difficulty is that, over time, it can begin to be difficult to

decide which I he actually is or was or will be. When Sarah

admits to Shaw in Season 3 that she can no longer surely

distinguish her cover from who she is, she illustrates the

structure and result of the problem. A person who lies enough

eventually has a life that is all lies. His lying is his life.

The idea that lying is something distinct from his life that

obscures or hides his life becomes harder and harder to take

seriously as there is less and less to him but lying. He is all

lies.

Aristotle said long ago that humans naturally desire to know,

desire for knowledge characterizes us as natural beings. But

knowledge is internally related to truth--anything we know must

be true, a falsehood cannot be known. (I can of course believe I

know a falsehood and I can of course know that something is a

falsehood.) So, a desire for truth characterizes us as natural

beings. Falsehood is unnatural to us, destructive of what we

are, whether we are lying to others or lying to ourselves. A

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life of lies is not a properly human life. This is part of the

reason why the spy life contrasts for Chuck with normal (we might

also say, natural) life. Human beings crave reality, feed on it.

We starve on lies.

Another important word is ‘love’. Being in love is radically

different from being in pain. This remains true despite the

depressing regularity with which love causes pain. Why are they

radically different? Consider pain. Pain keeps no secrets. It

reveals itself as what it is wholly, perfectly in its occurrence.

While it may be that describing my pain taxes my expressive

resources (is it a burning or a pulsing pain or somehow both?),

that reveals more about my expressive resources than it does any

revelatory failure or coyness in my pain. My pain just is what

it reveals itself to be. And while it may be that I do not know

what is causing my pain, that failure is again no revelatory

failure on the part of my pain. Pains tell us fully what they

are; they do not tell us their origins. (Sometimes we can figure

it out because of the location of the pain, if it has a

reasonably discreet bodily location. “What hurts?” “This

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tooth.”) We might say that despite the suffering pains cause us,

they are experienced as infinitely thin--they have no backsides

or hidden crevices. They are also experienced non-

perspectivally--we cannot occupy a spatial vantage point on our

pains. We just have them where we have them. I have no

perspectival relationship to them of the sort that I may to the

bodily part that pains me. (We all normally look down on our

hands, don’t we?) But I cannot be above or below my pain. I can

of course (try to) ignore my pain, a pain. I may even succeed

for a stretch. That is not a perspective on it.

Love does not work like this. As Wittgenstein once trenchantly

commented:

Love is not a feeling. Love is put to the test, pain not.

One does not say: “That was not true pain, or it would not

have gone off so quickly.19

Wittgenstein denies that love is a feeling--he means a bodily

feeling. Of course, love is a feeling, but it is not the same

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kind of feeling that pain is. Why not? Well, first of all, we

take other people’s word for their pains, but do not necessarily

take other people’s word for their loves. As long as you believe

I am sincere, you are going to see little possibility of my being

wrong about being in pain. If I sincerely say I am, then unless

something damned peculiar is happening, I am in pain.20 That is

false of love. You can tell me you are in love; I can believe

you are sincere. I can also still think you are mistaken, self-

deceived. Self-deception has little or no intelligible role to

play in the sorts of feelings bodily pains are.

There may be more of a role for self-deception in the sorts of

feelings emotional pains are, but not much more. Typically, in

that case self-deception is not about the pain itself--as if one

were not in emotional pain after all, were wrong about that--but

rather in the difficulties in identifying its causes or in being

willing to identify its causes.

Love though is not a feeling like bodily pain. It is not a

feeling like emotional pain. It is a different sort of feeling

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all together. Wittgenstein points to the difference by reminding

us that we put love to the test, but do not put pain to the test.

(I am going to focus now just on the contrast between love and

bodily pain, since that is the contrast Wittgenstein was focused

on.)

It is easy to feel pain. You cannot miss that you feel it. But

love? You can, sadly, miss that you feel it. Also, we do not

imagine that we are in pain when we are not. We do,

unfortunately, imagine that we are in love when we are not. So we

put love to the test. Am I sure that I am in love with a

particular woman, Joan? How can I make sure? Maybe I choose to

spend some time away from her, so that I can take stock of my

reactions to her absence (do I miss her, do I check my phone and

email regularly in hopes of a message, do I daydream of her?).

Or maybe I date another woman (do I continue to think about Joan

still, is she the standard against which I judge the new woman?).

In such ways--and many others--we put love to the test. None of

this would make any sense with pain. Maybe I should spend some

time apart from my pain? Maybe I should date another pain? We

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may run tests to determine the cause of pain, but, again, a

person sincerely saying that he is in pain is enough for us to

believe that he is.

At the beginning of the book I posted a line from Gabriel Marcel.

Love may appear in such disconcerting shapes as to prevent

those who feel it from suspecting its real nature.21

I take this to be a profound observation about love. No parallel

observation can be made about pain. We can be in love without

knowing it. We can also refuse to know it--make an effort to

consign the love to a kind of inner darkness, where we do not see

it or can easily overlook it. And while we can of course deny

that we are in pain, such a denial rarely, if ever, could be a

self-deception. I might do it to deceive others; I might do it

to convince you that I am tough. But I feel my pain. I can be

in love without feeling it at all. (This is why Wittgenstein says

that love is not a feeling.) I can distance myself so far from

my love, or refuse it so adamantly, that I can prevent myself

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from having any of the concomitant experiences of being in love

or can blind myself to their occurrence or to their real meaning.

Sometimes I do not have to deceive myself or refuse myself. I

can just miss it--as I mentioned. My love can manifest itself in

an unsuspected way. For example, a woman might take advantage of

opportunities to touch someone, opportunities she takes telling

herself that she is just concerned with his appearance (they are

friends and co-workers after all), when all the while what she is

doing is expressing her love for him. Sarah does just this with

Chuck.

Most of this applies most immediately to Sarah. Sarah is

alienated from her feelings generally, and is alienated from her

love for Chuck in particular. If love were like bodily pain,

this would hardly make sense. As Bryce says to Sarah in S01E10,

“You were never good at this, the saying-how-you-feel part.” One

reason for that is because, for various reasons, she often does

not know how she feels. When she does, she often cannot get

herself to express the feeling.

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A nice example of this point about love occurs in S02E14. Anna,

Morgan’s one-time girlfriend and the girl he still loves, takes

herself to have broken with Morgan. She is seeing a new guy.

But in conversation with Sarah, as she explains why she likes her

new guy, she keeps comparing him to Morgan. Sarah points this

out, and Anna says: “Do you think that means I still love him?”

If love were a feeling like pain, that question would make no

sense. But since love is not a feeling of that sort, Anna asks

someone else to tell her the meaning of what she is doing, to

judge for her whether she is in love. Because love can occur in

such a bewildering array of forms, other people often know better

than we do whether we are in love or not.

This clearly the case for Sarah. Her friend Carina is in town

(S01E04) and makes a play for Chuck. Chuck cannot figure out why

Carina would make a play for him:

Chuck: Wh.. why me?

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Carina: Well, you're sorta cute-ish, but umm, the real

reason is ...I love taking what Sarah wants.

Chuck: Www, wa, me? No, Sarah... Sarah doesn't want me.

Carina: She probably doesn't even know it herself yet... But

I do.

A final important word to discuss is ‘professional’. What is a

professional? What is it to be professional? Chuck takes the

questions seriously. The conception of a professional that the

show offers is more complicated than the one we often use. On

the show, a profession rates as a vocation, something that one is

called or chosen to do, something that is intrinsically worthy

and worthwhile, something that requires great dedication. It is

highly structured by standards: (1) there are high standards of

talent, and of education and training required to enter into a

profession; (2) professional activity is subject to strict codes,

rules, that are agreed upon by the members of the profession and

enforced by them (professionals are self-monitoring, self-

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correcting); (3) the profession is to be guided by the ideal of

serving the public interest and general good; (4) professional

activity is largely autonomous--each member, although ultimately

answerable to other professionals--is entrusted to be the primary

caretaker of his or her own activity. (5) professional activity

demands serious intellectual energy, since it is typically

intellectually challenging and requires constant creativity.

Chuck’s work at Buy More is not professional work. When the show

begins, he has no profession. For someone of Chuck’s

intellectual gifts, particularly his gifts with computers,

repairing computers or phones or video cameras is going to be a

little like asking a gifted surgeon to play Operation. He is not

challenged by what he is doing there. And of course his position

is not autonomous (despite being able to work off-site) and its

code is not developed internally, by those who do the job, but

rather is imposed upon them from above, as part of a corporate

structure. One important contributor to Chuck’s unhappiness and

his loneliness is that he wants a profession, he wants something

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to do that has the demanding structure of standards that a

profession has. He wants a calling.

A central issue in the show, from its very beginning until its

end, is whether spying is a profession. It certainly seems to

involve the right standards and features. But there are deep

questions about whether or not the spy is really autonomous in

the right ways. For example, spies often work under orders--but

whose orders (and with what authority) and orders to do what?

And that question forces another: is spying done in the service

of public interest, does it serve the common good? Casey and

Sarah both think of themselves as the good guys. They take

themselves to be serving the common good. But each of them often

has doubts. The shifting status of the spy life in the show,

especially from Chuck’s point of view (and later from Sarah’s,

too, as they struggle with whether to work for the CIA again in

Season 5), is bound up with such questions. But it is also bound

up, for him in the early episodes, on questions about himself in

relation to the standards of spying: is this something for which

he has talent? How can he get the education and training he

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needs when he needs to get it on the job. Professionals may

receive some part of their training, an important part of their

training, on the job, but it is not typically the only way they

are trained. For all of your training to be on-the-job training

is more typically of craftsmen than of professionals. Can he

accept and internalize the code, the rules, of spying? A rule--

one of the Cardinal Rules--is that spies do not fall in love.

Chuck gets told that repeatedly by different spies. But that is

a rule it is unclear he can live with. Is he capable of the kind

of continuous intellectual energy that spying requires? He is

very smart. Can he channel that into this new activity in the

right ways? These questions (and related questions) dog Chuck

throughout the show, particularly in its first three years. One

of the achievements of the show is the way in which we see Chuck

‘back into’ spying, then almost become a standard professional

spy, then find a way to reimagine what being a spy might involve.

We see someone enter a profession and change its standards from

within. Chuck, the unprofessional, will end up transforming the

professional lives of Sarah and Casey, the consummate

professionals.

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Chapter 3 Chuck Bartowski: The Comfort of the (Nerd) Herd

Surrounded by hordes of men, absorbed in all sorts of secular matters, more and more

shrewd about the ways of the world–such a person forgets himself, forgets his name

divinely understood, does not dare to believe in himself, finds it too hazardous to be

himself and far easier and safer to be like the others, to become a copy, a number, a

mass man. --Kierkegaard

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Who Are You?

Chuck begins with Chuck trying to escape from his own life. More

specifically, he is trying to escape from his birthday party.

Morgan is helping him. Together, they are trying to escape out

the window of his bedroom. (They appear to be repelling from the

window, but they are, as becomes clear, on the first floor.)

Ellie, who has thrown Chuck the party, finds them as they are

escaping, and she reclaims them for the party. This desire to

escape from his life sets the tone of much of the show.

Chuck lives in Echo Park near Burbank. He works for $11/hour at

a local Buy More. He fixes computers. Five years before he was

at Stanford studying electrical engineering. But during his

senior year, his friend, Bryce Larkin, claimed to have found test

keys with answers under Chuck’s bed. He was branded a cheater;

despite professing his innocence, he was summarily kicked out of

school. This series of events also ended up costing him his

Stanford girlfriend, Jill. She not only abandoned him, but she

abandoned him for Bryce. Alone, betrayed and rejected, Chuck

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returned to live with Ellie. Eventually, he landed the job at

Buy More.

At the Buy More Chuck is trapped in Dante’s First Circle. While

he is quite good at his job--he is a genuinely gifted computer

repairman, programmer, engineer and hacker--he cannot identify

with it. He wastes his skill set repairing laptops and doing home

installations—he is a surgical scalpel being used to open packing

crates. Outside of work, he spends his time with Morgan playing

video games. The games are more real to him than his Buy More

life is. The various multicolored virtual realities obscure his

monochromatic reality from him. He is swamped by boredom. He is

not going nowhere--because he is already there. The events at

Stanford have alienated him from his former plans and hopes. Each

passing year makes them more strangers to him. Other than his

sister and his best friend and his fellow Nerds, no one even

regards him as having potential anymore. No one regards him much

at all.

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Buy More dubs the computer repairmen and installers “The Nerd

Herd”. It is as a member of this Herd that Chuck is living when

the Intersect finds him. The point is underscored by Harry Tang

who accuses Chuck of being unwilling, maybe unable, to leave the

comfort of the Herd.

Chuck hides in the Herd. Tang is right. Tang is an ass, but he

is right. One reason for listening to our enemies--they often

see features of us correctly, features that we miss or ignore.

Chuck no longer wants to be an individual or a self, in the sense

of those terms that makes them accomplishments. Chuck willingly

masses with the other Nerds. He adopts their collective

identity. He does this because he believes he has lost his

particular identity, he merits no particular identity. The Nerd

Herd’s shared lack of ambition, their preoccupation with trivia,

their escapism, allows him to continue his unlife unchallenged.

He does not dare to believe in himself.

Who is Chuck Bartowski? The question hunts Chuck. The question

reaches deep into his past, beginning with his parents abandoning

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him in childhood. (His sister raises him.) But the events at

Stanford, just when it seemed he was on the cusp of a prestigious

degree and great things, pulled the life he was building down.

He has wandered in the ruins of that life ever since. That life

is by no means horrible: he loves Ellie and Morgan, and wryly

respects Ellie’s boyfriend, Devon--jokingly referring to him as

Captain Awesome. Chuck is Captain Unawesome. Nothing galvanizes

him. He hasn’t dated since Jill. He has no Stanford friends.

He is not looking for a better job. Chuck is not happy. He does

not live in misery or debilitating depression. He does live in

what Thoreau called quiet desperation. He is desperate for

something, anything. He is passing time, and in the slow lane.

Chuck has little sense of who he is outside of Echo Park. This

is one reason why being thrust into the spy world’s turning

kaleidoscope of identities, of appearances and realities, baffles

Chuck for so long. Being two people is hard enough, but being

two people when you are unsure you are any one person in

particular? That is much harder.

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Chuck is nothing, no one in particular. As he tells Sarah while

they are being chased by NSA agents on the first night out

together, “I’m nobody!” He lives in indeterminacy as an

indeterminacy. Despite having a postal address, his existential

address is Any Side of Anywhere. He is a good guy, a virtuous

one. Yet he can find little or no scope for his virtues outside

of Echo Park, little or no context in which they can be

displayed.

One virtue that Chuck displays and that turns out to be crucial

is fortitude. Not so much fortitude in the sense of the battle-

hardened soldier or secret agent (the sort of fortitude Sarah has

and Casey has)22 but fortitude in the sense of the martyr,

fortitude that allows him to endure, to hold on, to stick to his

convictions, fortitude in the sense that gives him staying power.

An old-fashioned word for what he has is ‘patience’, the sort

that Job had. Even though he does not realize it, and even

though his sister and friends do not, that is one virtue that he

has been exercising since the Stanford debacle. He has not been

willing to yield his innocence, to become generally jaded, to

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take his mistreatment by others to justify his mistreatment of

others.

Chuck has an enormous capacity to suffer--the events of his life

have called that capacity into actuality over and over. His life

involves constant, albeit low-grade, suffering. Humiliations,

big and small, have become routinized in his life. And yet he

neither takes the humiliations to heart, nor attempt to minimize

or deny them. He suffers them and he goes on. Partly, his

openness causes the routine of humiliations. He wears his heart

on his sleeve, where anyone can tug at it. He hides nothing; he

is an easy mark.

His kindness and his open nature are on display in the pilot,

especially in his interaction with a father and daughter. The

father believed he had captured his daughter’s ballet recital on

his video recorder, but he cannot get it to play back. Chuck

points out that there is no tape in the recorder. The man

confesses that he thought that since the recorder was digital, no

tape was needed. Chuck arranges for the daughter to dance in the

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Buy More, and he enlists his co-workers to help him. The girl

feels self-conscious: because she is tall and a bit gangly, she

was always hidden in the back during her recitals. Chuck

encourages her by telling her all the best ballet dancers are

tall. Emboldened, she dances and her dance is recorded. Sarah,

who has just met Chuck at the Nerd Herder desk, and who has

watched all of this happen, is touched by it (she is touched in

particular because he left his conversation with her---one he

clearly wanted to continue—to aid the father and daughter). --

This is a nice bit. The too-tall ballerina’s plight is analogous

to Chuck’s, the too-tall Nerd Herder. He too has been hidden,

hiding behind others, but he is about to step forward into the

spotlight--and in front of (hidden) cameras.

We should remember that even as he hides himself in the Nerd

Herd, Chuck is not as effectively hidden as he thinks. The other

Nerds respect, even venerate him. He is--despite his early

struggles with whether he should try to become the Buy More’s

Assistant Manager--the de facto manager of the store. Whenever

there is a crisis, everyone, including Big Mike, the nominal

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manager of the store in the first few seasons, looks to Chuck.

Even hidden in the Herd, Chuck has something of the hero about

him. On life’s unequal stage, the other Nerd Herders see him as

leader. Even in the Buy More, even before the Intersect, Chuck

has secret powers.

Chuck has no profession. He does not think of Nerd Herding as a

profession. A Post-It Note on his computer in the pilot makes

the point in the form of a joke, wry self-castigation: “I am a

professional nerd.” No profession, that--and no future either.

For Chuck, having a profession means more than having a job that

pays well and bestows prestige. It is clear that what he has in

mind is a calling, a vocation, something that a person does in

service to the common weal, something worth doing for its own

sake. One way of putting this is to say that Chuck desperately

wants to do something that will put him in contact with the

transcendent, with something bigger than himself, even if that

cannot be better captured than to call it “doing good”. He wants

to be part of something good that is bigger than he is, but still

something to which he makes a genuine contribution.

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Chuck talks and talks and talks. He is all verbal. He is not

always articulate--sometimes, often at the worst times, he cannot

find (the right) words. But typically he is articulate, finding

ways to put things for himself and finding ways to put things for

others. He sometimes talks too much, but even when his talk

spirals, his talk is rarely verbal scribbling. His talk is

pointed despite being copious. As a villain observes to Chuck in

Season 5: “You are good at talking.”

He talks a lot about his feelings. It is clear that when he

does, he is not just describing what he feels, but deliberating

about what he feels, finding out how to feel. Chuck’s gifts as a

friend and as a brother are largely the result of his hard work

on what he feels. He does upkeep on his feelings, puts effort

into clarifying them. Chuck often cannot know what he feels

until he says what he feels. He does not speak his feelings into

existence the way God is said to have spoken light into

existence: “And God said, Let there be light, and there was

light.” Rather, when Chuck talks about what he feels, his

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feelings, often inchoately present, develop, become

particularized, take on determinate meaning. A good example of

this is in S01E05, when Ellie tells Chuck she has figured out why

he keeps failing to show up to events they have planned. She

tells Chuck he is in love. He responds, “Yeah. I am…?” Not

having been able to talk to Ellie or Morgan about this, and

knowing Sarah will not talk to him about it, Chuck has not been

able to name his own feelings. He accepts the name Ellie gives

him, love, but only then begins to reckon with what that means.

Chuck needs to express his feelings. When he leaves them

unexpressed--by controlling or curtailing them, or even worse by

denying them--he suffers, is distressed, psychologically and

physically. Talking about his feelings allows Chuck to do more

than just identify them, it allows him to identify with them.

When he cannot talk about them, they seem not only hard to

understand, but to not be fully his--it is as though he is

feeling someone else’s feeling, or as if his feelings are being

caused by or are reactions to things beyond his ken. In that

state, his feelings victimize him, overwhelm him.

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Some (but only some) of the responsibility for Chuck’s

oversharing, for his talking too much, falls on those to whom he

is talking. Almost all of his conversational partners, at least

almost all of them who understand the situation he is in, who

know he is the Intersect, are spies. They have either

functionally eliminated their own emotions or they have achieved

a control of their emotions that makes Chuck’s desire for heart-

to-heart conversation impossible or very difficult (going against

the grain of the control they have achieved). Chuck’s words fall

on deaf or on unresponsive ears. This is the case for instance

of much that he says (especially early on) to Casey or to General

Beckman.

Chuck talks to create order--to create order in himself and in

his world. He is trying to put reality into order. He is old

enough, he is experienced enough, to know that he cannot finish

that work, but he has faith that a meeting of minds is possible,

that authentic communication is possible. He talks to save

himself and others. Chuck aims to relocate himself and his

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family and friends from Babel to Pentecost. He is willing to be

true even though others are not; he is willing to be true so that

others might be so. Chuck speaks because he will not be alone.

Final point: given all that I have said, what sense does it make

to view Chuck as lonely? He has Ellie--and Devon. He has

Morgan. When we consider what he has, though, the question

answers itself. He is lonely because he wants, needs someone to

be in love with, not just someone he loves. His life has a hole

in it. Sarah will fill it. And by filling it, by filling it in

the particular way she will fill it, she will transform the rest

of his life as well.

Chuck + Sarah: There is No Antidote to Her

Early in Season 2, Ellie and Devon, who are struggling to find

time for romance in their cramped schedules as doctors, ask Chuck

how he and Sarah keep the magic in their relationship.

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Chuck: We pretend like we are not really dating.

Which is weird, I know. It forces me to have to win her over

again and again...and again.

This comment captures a feature of the show that resonates

through it until the very end, and it captures his fortitude.

Whereas most men would have finally tired of having to win Sarah

over again and again--and despite the fact that he too does on

occasion grow weary and wants to love someone who would be easier

to love--Chuck has staying power. He is willing to win her over

over and over again. No one stirs him as Sarah does. He

experiences her as a bugle call at dawn, clarion, bracing. Sarah

calls him into action. She is his Chanticleer: she wakes him

up. Her belief in him and her trust in him go proxy for his own

missing belief in himself and trust in himself. She carries him

until he can walk.

Part of the fun of the show, and part of what makes it deeply

interesting, is its reversal of the damsel-in-distress device.

Sarah is constantly saving Chuck. He constantly needs to be

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saved. A running joke through the early seasons is his putative

high-pitched, girlish screams in the face of danger. (He

actually doesn’t do this--much.) Sarah is Chuck’s hero.

Chuck tries a couple of times to uncouple from Sarah, since he is

unsure they are a couple, or since he comes to believe that they

are not a couple, that they are only pretending and never will be

really together. But he cannot stay away from her. As Jeff--who

mostly talks nonsense in the early seasons--wisely comments: No

one else makes Chuck’s eyes light up like Sarah does. For Chuck,

there is no antidote to her. She runs through Chuck’s whole

system. She is there for good.

Sarah, as I will discuss, revels in Chuck’s respectful, wondering

gaze. But Chuck’s respectful gaze is a two-way phenomenon.

Seeing Sarah has existential consequences for Chuck. Here is a

useful comment from Henry Bugbee:

…[W]e tend to respect whatever in the focus of our attention

provides us with a purchase for a fuller and freer

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assumption of responsibility, whatever can be a key to

original personal commitment in action...In general, respect

seems to involve the focus of attention either on that which

can inspirit us and call out our aspiration or on that which

can offer us the resistance, the mettling condition...upon

which the clarification and embodiment of spirit through

action depends.23

Chuck’s eyes light up for Sarah because she fills him with light.

Focused on her, Chuck is given purchase for a fuller and freer

assumption of responsibility. She is the key to his original

personal commitment in action. She inspirits him and calls out

his aspiration; she is also his resistance, his mettling

condition. She is the making of him. No other woman--Jill or

Lou or Hannah--will have this effect on Chuck, however genuine

his regard and affection for her is.

Sarah takes her role as Chuck’s handler seriously. She has her

hands on him often. She is forever adjusting his tie,

straightening his jacket, rubbing his neck. Touching Chuck is

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her analog of his compliments. (I will say something about them

momentarily.) She does not like to talk. She likes to touch.

She does it in ways that leave her plausible deniability--she

knows Chuck is under surveillance, and so she knows she

incidentally is too. So she touches him in what appear to be

professionally acceptable ways. Still, she does it so often, and

does it so often when there is no particular circumstantial need

for it, that it cannot be merely professional.

Chapter 4 Sarah Walker: My Middle Name is Lisa

Perhaps it would be better to say this: the freer and more detached parts of me have

struggled up into the light, but there is still much of me that lies in shadow, untouched

by the almost level rays of the dawning sun. --Gabriel Marcel

Who are You?

She is all competence, all professional, this girl impossible:

focused, cool, smart, strong and beautiful. She merits her

status as the CIA’s best agent. She can do almost anything. But

she is unhappy. She is lonely. She lives without hope. Her life

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needs to change. She is just barely aware of that. Long-buried

hopes and dreams and needs and desires have clambered from their

plots and are now stirring in her, even if only mutely and

clumsily. She must rotate the axis of reference in her life,

rotate it 180-degrees. She does not know how. She is trapped in

mazeways of lies and deception, in a darkened labyrinth with

shifting walls. She can survive there; she can survive there

better than anyone else. She cannot flourish there, however. She

wants to leave the half-light and walk in the sun. She has no

idea how to do that.

Like Chuck’s, Sara’s childhood was strange, costly. Alienated

from her mother, she grew up with her con man father, constantly

on the move, constantly changing names, constantly pretending.

Other people were either suckers or marks. Deceiving while

remaining undeceived was the goal. When she was little, life

with her father represented adventure. But as she grew, while

life with her father remained adventurous, it became less

attractive. Sarah began to understand its dangers and costs.

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She paid many of those costs. Perhaps the most devastating was

her father eventually getting caught, arrested and imprisoned.

At around the time her father was taken from her, in high school,

the CIA stepped in and recruited her. Her previous life served

as an almost perfect training for becoming an agent. With her

father jailed and her mother long-estranged from her, she had no

one, no ties. Her name and address had changed so many times no

one really could piece together an accurate history of who she

was or where she had been (not even the CIA). She had become

more like a shadow or a lingering perfume than a bodily presence.

In some sense, she was not where she was, no matter where she

was.

She rose quickly as an agent. She had enormous gifts and her

childhood had given her a head start. She was preternaturally

knowing--being raised by a con-man made her immune to being

suckered. It gave her an ability to distinguish between

appearances and realities, to avoid being a mark, a sucker, to

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avoid being taken. She has never known a world that was not

structured by lies and deception.

One way in which Sarah is like Chuck is that she too has the

virtue of fortitude. Chuck shows his primarily, but not only, by

enduring things--humiliations, suffering. Sarah shows hers

primarily, but not only, by attacking things or defending Chuck.

Chuck has the fortitude of the martyr. Sarah has the fortitude

of a soldier. Each displays one aspect of fortitude most

prominently--but each has the other aspect too.

Along the way, men have entered and exited Sarah’s life, most

notably Bryce Larkin. As was true of Larkin, the men Sarah

involved herself with were other spies. Being involved with such

men as Larkin required no fundamental change in Sarah, no opening

of her nature. They mirrored her opaqueness. A vivid proof of

this occurs in her later relationship with Shaw. Although they

are a couple briefly, she never comes to call him by his first

name, Daniel.24 Instead, she calls him “Shaw”, his last name,

his surname. And Shaw likes this. It is clear that this is not

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just professional courtesy. It is an outward sign of the inward

nature of Sara’s relationship to Shaw. They are a couple but on

professional terms.

Noting this clarifies a feature of Sarah’s often mentioned in the

show, a feature treated typically as a fault: her inability to

separate her personal and her professional lives. Faulting her

for this involves a false assumption--the assumption that Sarah

has a personal life. She does not. She has only her

professional life. Sure, she clocks in and clocks out, as it

were; she has the occasional vacation. When she clocks out, she

does not go home; she goes back to her hotel room. Her vacations

are simply breaks from work, not a time to refocus on her other

priorities and her other interests, to recreate a self that

exists distinct from the spy.

I am not denying that Sarah spends time alone. Or that she goes

shopping. Or gets her hair done. More importantly, I am not

denying that she is a private person. But that means something

different. She has a closed nature. Unlike Chuck, she does not

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overshare. She does not undershare. She does not share at all.

Her past has a No Trespassing sign nailed to it. Sarah makes this

clear when she becomes so furious with Chuck’s desire to know her

past that she takes the pencil from him he was using to take

notes and hurls it, spear-like, through the glass and into a

picture of herself and Chuck. Still, none of this means that

Sarah has a personal life.

Consider Chuck. He is in the ‘opposite’ predicament. Sarah has

no personal life--her life is all professional life. Chuck has

no professional life. (Face it, the Buy More job does not

count.) His life is his personal life, his love of and active

participation in his life of family and friends. The things

Chuck deeply values are not determined by the values of a

profession--they are things that are his qua the person he is,

not things that accrue to him as a professional. (What does

Sarah have that is hers in this sense?)

In their conversation on their first night out, Chuck asks Sarah

if she has a favorite band. She admits she does not. Her not

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having a favorite band emblematizes her lack of a personal life.

Notice what an interesting admission this is: who does anyone

know who would have no answer to this question? Of course, we

all might know people who have a hard time answering because they

cannot choose. (“I like too many. I can’t decide.”) Sarah is

not dithering between alternatives, unable to decide whether she

prefers The Shins to Bon Iver. She has no alternatives. No

field of choice opens up for her. She likes music in a general,

vague way, as something pleasant to dance to or on the radio or

perhaps in an elevator. But she does not identify with any of

it. Although the question never arises in the show, it is easy

to imagine Sarah similarly embarrassed by the question, “Who is

your favorite author?” Sarah’s hotel room has no stereo, no

books.

It is the emptiness of her personal life that makes the picture

of herself and Chuck that she keeps in her hotel room so

important. No doubt, she (at least initially) told herself that

it was there to protect her cover as Chuck’s girlfriend. But

that is at best a partial explanation. The picture is there

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because of what Chuck represents to her and because of what the

picture represents: it is effectively the only item in Sarah’s

apartment that could be at home in Chuck’s apartment. And it is.

A duplicate photograph is in Chuck’s room. It ties her to Chuck’s

home, to Chuck—who she will eventually call her home.

Sarah’s hotel room itself, beyond the mere fact that it is a

hotel room, is no space for a personal life. The door is green,

cool and distant. The room is decorated in white and silver,

lacking much chromatic color. Fixtures are metal, metallic or

the same cool green as the door. There are mirrors. It is a

place to sleep, to bathe, to dress--a place to stay but not a

staying place. There is no there there.

Chuck’s apartment (the apartment he shares with Ellie and Devon)

provides the instructive contrast. It is warm, colorful and

inviting. Keepsakes abound--photos, posters, knickknacks--all

lovingly placed and carefully preserved. There are plants. It

is a place where people live, where plants live. It is a home.

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That it is a home accounts for Sarah’s repeated early difficulty

in entering it or in accepting invitations to enter. A home is

where personal lives are lived. Sarah does not know how to live a

personal life; she is never at home. She has no home. She moves

awkwardly in homes. Homes are places of protected intimacy.

Intimacy is a strange to Sarah. Her term for the intimacy Chuck

shares with his sister is “family time”. She cannot keep family

time.

A happy home orients and empowers. It is a world inside the

world. For those who have a happy home, the home is a source of

power, a place of contemplation, repair and recreation. It

creates a center in the world, and in doing so turns the chaos of

the world into a cosmos, a place where a person can live. For all

of her difficulty with homes, Sarah comes to realize that she

wants one. Home is where we start from, ordinarily. Not so for

Sarah. It is where she is heading.

Not having a home, living out of a suitcase, being constantly on

the move, sounds adventurous but is ultimately exhausting,

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wearisome. Sarah’s way of living, her professional way of

living, deprives her of the protection of a home, of its comfort

and safety. Although her competence makes her lack of protection

bearable, it becomes apparent that Sarah lives a life she not

only knows to be but experiences as uncomfortable and unsafe.

And she has no place from which to banish that unsafety. She

lives silently besieged. In her room, she is deeply disoriented,

unprotected and alone.

Well, not quite alone. Sarah has a goldfish she keeps in her

room. Of course, a fish can be a pet only in an stretched sense

of ‘pet’. And it is significant that the fish’s bowl is itself

more or less bare, containing only some blue rocks (whose

coolness reflects the coolness of her room’s green door and

furniture). Without denying that the fish is important to Sarah

(it obviously is) it seems less to be her companion than to be a

fellow traveller. It seems to have a largely symbolic value. It

lives much as she does, exposed and alone. She and her fish

spend their evenings together--a bowl inside a bowl.

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Sarah speaks in action. She is physical. She does not like to

talk very much. She is not verbal. She hides her feelings much

as she hides her past. Her feelings interfere with her

professional life. The Cardinal Rule of Spying, as Carina says

in S03E02 (and it comes up in one form or another repeatedly in

the show), is spies do not fall in love.25 Having feelings interferes

with the turning and the burning of assets. It interferes with

your ability to make difficult decisions. Feelings make you

vulnerable or manipulable in the spy world, where there are only

the deceivers and the deceived. Of course, Sarah does have

feelings--she cannot eliminate them, even if she at times to

fantasizes that she can. But she does her best to inter those

feelings, to embalm them, to put them away. If they will not go

away, she has learnt to deny them (not just deny their existence

to others, but to deny their existence to herself).

Sarah desires to disown her past not only as part of a cover, but

as part of her denial or elimination of her feelings. Turning

her attention to the past results in the both bidden and unbidden

memories, and those memories come dipped or saturated in

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feelings. At one point Chuck, desperate to know “one true thing”

about her, asks to know her name. When she balks, he asks to

know her middle name. Sarah sits immobile, frozen. She does not

answer. Chuck, recognizing the deep inner conflict he has

created--she wants to tell him, she cannot tell him--gets up from

his pleading posture before her to retrieve napkins for the pizza

he has brought them. After he walks away, after he is engaged in

the other part of Sarah’s hotel room and out of earshot, she

says, softly, “Lisa. My middle name is Lisa.” She tells him and

she does not tell him.

By the time Sarah walks toward Chuck in the opening episode, she

is ready to change. She is not fully aware of that: she has not

achieved that self-recognition, that full insight into herself.

But she is reoriented, facing in the right direction. Parts of

her have found their way into the light, a new light. She needs

something, but is not clearly aware of that need--and she has no

idea what it is that she needs. She is walking toward Chuck.

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Sarah + Chuck: You are my Home

This faith of hers can only be an adherence, or, more exactly, a response. Adherence to

what? Response to what? It is hard to put it into words. To an impalpable and silent

invitation which fills her, or, to say it in another way, which puts pressure upon her

without constraining her. The pressure is not irresistible; if it were, faith would no

longer be faith. Faith is only possible to a free creature, a creature who has been given

the mysterious and awful power of withholding [herself]. --Gabriel Marcel

Sarah has learnt to control what she expresses. She has learnt

how to keep from expressing things. She has become so adept at

this that she has begun to worry whether natural or genuine

expression is any longer possible to her. She has avoided being

recognized for so long that she no longer is sure that she can

give herself away. Even though she is often standing in plain

sight, no one sees her. She has secreted herself away. She now

fears that she may have forgotten where she put herself. By the

time she meets Chuck, she is ready to be seen and to see. She is

still willing to have secrets, perhaps, but she wants to no

longer be one.

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Let me say this again. Sarah has deadened her expressiveness for

so long that she now lives in fear--not so much of being unknown

(although that is a fear) but of being unknowable, unknowable to

others and even to herself. There was a time in her past when

this fear was rather a fantasy: she wanted to be free of the

responsibility and of the consequent vulnerability of making

herself known to others and known to herself. (Self-knowledge

makes me vulnerable or more vulnerable, at least to myself--

that’s one reason it is almost always bitter.) She was

terrified--and to some extent still is--of giving herself away,

betraying her secrets. She fantasized of having secrets so

secret that even she didn’t know them. She did not want to be

known. She wanted to vanish--did come to vanish from time to

time--into her cover identities. Her alias was her real name.

--I do not say that this fantasy was really coherent, only that

it was hers. But she has come to find it frightening. She

worries that she may have made her fantasy reality, or very

nearly reality--that she is beyond expression, condemned to

having feelings, if she does, that pass by others and by her

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unobserved. If we were to say that to imagine an expression is to imagine

it as giving expression to a soul26, then we might also say that Sarah’s

inexpressiveness suggests soullessness. That is her fear.

She could not put all this into words at this point. At best,

she knows only that the spy life dissatisfies her, that it is not

making her happy. She knows she is unhappy, lonely. She does

not really know why. Chuck clarifies that for her.

In a later episode (S03E06), talking with Chuck about her first

interaction with him, Sarah recalls, “You were sweet. And

innocent. I liked you.” The “I liked you” is a bit of self-

protective understatement, but the rest is straightforwardly

true. Sarah feels something for Chuck immediately. She is drawn

to him. He is sweet and innocent, hovering, as he does, between

being childish and being childlike. (He is much more the latter

than the former, as time will tell.) He is without guile. He is

open and trusting. He has no agenda.

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Sarah is also touched by his immediate reaction to her. As she

walks toward him for the first time, Chuck is on the phone.

Morgan sees Sarah first and exclaims, “Stop the presses! Who is

that? Vicki Vale?” Chuck, hearing what Morgan says but not

looking up to see Sarah, absentmindedly begins riffing “Batdance”

(from Batman): “Vicki, Vicki, Vicki Vale.” Only then does Chuck

look up. As soon as he sees Sarah, he literally drops the phone.

Chuck is awestruck. Of course, a woman as beautiful as Sarah no

doubt has grown used to provoking immediate reactions. But

Chuck’s immediate reaction differs from what she is used to. He

sees her. He does not see her as a body; he sees her as

somebody. And his look is not possessive, greedy. He is and

remains infinitely far from leering. He does not covet her

beauty. For Sarah, Chuck’s gaze is sacramental, baptismal.

Immersed in it, she is reborn.

Sarah will continue to take a (mostly) undisguised delight in

Chuck’s gaze throughout the show. She will also come to depend

on his complimenting how she looks. But the dependence does not

manifest any vanity on Sarah’s part. It manifests her pleasure

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in her capacity to cause him pleasure--and gazing at Sarah does

please Chuck. But it also manifests her pleasure in the specific

quality of his gaze. He sees her. I do not mean that he sees

her soul and ignores her body. I do not mean that he sees her

Platonically. I do not mean that he sees her disinterestedly.

(That is closer to the right way of putting it). Chuck sees her

non-Platonically. He sees a living woman before him--a woman

that exists in three spatial dimensions, warm and breathing. His

gaze expresses desire for her--sexual desire. But the desire is

respectful desire. He sees her as worthy of his deepest respect,

as possessing an intrinsic worth that commands his esteem and

honor. Such a gaze is new to Sarah because she is used to being

seen as a spy or as a body, and not as a non-spy somebody. The

respect she has commanded and commands in her spy life results

from her competence and professionalism--but it is not commanded

by what she intrinsically is. She has commanded respect because

she is good at something, at being a spy, but not because she is

good, full stop. But that is how Chuck sees her. It is fair to

say that Chuck wonders at Sarah, not just at the beginning, but

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always. That wonder guides and accompanies his reactions to her.

It is his first and last attitude toward her.

Sarah’s delight in Chuck’s gaze, her delight in his compliments,

are most clearly revealed in a brief moment in S01E08 (Chuck vs.

the Truth). Sarah, Chuck and Casey have all been exposed to,

poisoned by a gaseous form of truth serum. They are all affected

by it, all telling the truth. They are also going to die without

the antidote. They have located the poisoner and are about to

surprise him. They stand three abreast--Sarah, Chuck, Casey--and

Chuck turns to Sarah, gazes at her as she looks toward him, and

says, in a drugged but utterly truthful tone:

Chuck: God, you are so pretty!

Sarah says nothing in response but as she turns away from Chuck,

her countenance shines, she is briefly incandescent.

One other differently weighted moment of this sort occurs on one

of Bryce’s return visits. Both Chuck and Bryce are standing in

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Sarah’s apartment, ready to go on a mission and waiting for her

to finish getting dressed. She enters the room wearing a

remarkable salmon-colored dress. Both Bryce and Chuck are

affected; she looks stunning. Bryce smiles in appreciation, but

he notices that she is waiting for Chuck’s response. He

withholds it. So, she asks for it from him.

Sarah: So, how do I look?

But Bryce’s return has thrown Chuck into a paroxysmal jealousy,

partly because he feels inadequate--as he always does in

comparison to Bryce. But also Chuck has just moments before

caught sight of Bryce’s suitcase in Sarah’s hotel room. Bryce

notices Chuck notice, and explains that his being there protects

their cover (on the mission they are to pose as a couple--a fact

that further complicates Chuck’s feelings). That is true and that

is all there is to it, but Chuck is hurt, unsure, jealous,

frustrated.

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And Sarah is waiting for Chuck’s response. This is one of the

few moments in the show where Chuck withholds himself from Sarah.

Withholding is as much out of character for Chuck as it is in

character for Sarah. Chuck stammers out an answer but with an

audible lack of enthusiasm.

Chuck: [in monotone] Good. Yeah, yeah, real good. Red’s

not really my color. So…[He steps away then steps back to

retrieve his jacket] Or salmon, or whatever that is.

Visibly crestfallen, Sarah looks down in disappointed puzzlement.

Bryce, who has watched the entire exchange with frank interest,

catches Sarah’s reaction--and is himself thrown into

thoughtfulness.

Chuck is verbal. It is no surprise that one way he establishes

intimacy with Sarah is verbal. (His gaze is the non-verbal way

he establishes intimacy with her.) He verbally caresses her.

Compliments that might seem, and be, a routinized behavior for

another couple, a throw-away, are for Chuck and Sarah of far

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greater importance. They have so little scope for the expression

of their real feelings for one another, that any way of

expressing them becomes hugely important.

Physical PDA--Public Displays of Affection--make Chuck

uncomfortable. Besides, it is unclear to what extent Sarah would

allow him to make physically affectionate gestures: given cover-

story complications of their relationship, Sarah is firmly in

control of whatever physically affectionate gestures pass between

them. She initiates, if she does; he responds, if he does. She

is his handler, after all.

All this, Chuck’s sweetness and innocence, his trustingness and

trust in her, his guilelessness and openness, his gaze’s specific

quality, all this together Sarah experiences as an impalpable and

silent invitation, as a pressure on her that does not constrain

her. He calls her to faith in non-reduced human actualities, to

trust, friendship, commitment and love as powers instead of

weaknesses. The problem for Sarah is that Chuck’s invitation

does not constrain her. Perhaps paradoxically, it would have

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less appeal if it did constrain her. It does not. So she may,

if she chooses, withhold herself, choose not to answer the

invitation. She does withhold herself at times. At other times,

she acts as if she is withholding herself, when she is not. She

often is answering but refusing to acknowledge that she is

answering. Sometimes Chuck just misses that she is answering.

Sometimes he misunderstands her answer. But the invitation,

silent and impalpable, Chuck issues and reissues, again and

again...and again. He hopes for her adherence, her response.

Chapter 5 Coupling

Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps… --Desi Arnaz

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Before turning to detailed discussions of Chuck and Sarah’s

relationship, readings of episodes, I want to talk about it in a

very general way. Obviously, their relationship develops over

time and it is helpful to have a way of tabulating that

development. I am not seriously proposing that anyone use the

following table while watching the show, as you might use a

baseball scorecard during a baseball game. The table is simply a

way of conceptualizing not only the development of their

relationship, but also a way of understanding how complicated

that relationship can be at any moment. The columns represent

the state of Chuck and Sarah’s relationship in an episode. The

rows represent their respective beliefs about the state of their

relationship in that episode. In the first episode, when Chuck

and Sarah go out together, Chuck believes that they are really

together (at least on that night) and so a Yes goes into his box

under Really Together. But Sarah is developing her asset; a No

goes in her box under Really Together, at least at the beginning

of the night. Chuck has no idea (until later in the evening),

that Cover Together is a possible state for their relationship,

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and so a No goes in that box for him. A Yes likely goes in that

box for Sarah.

Character Cover

Together?

Really

Together?

Future

Together?

Type of

Future

Together

(Spy or

Non-spy)

Chuck

Sarah

Most of the first season is concerned with the first two columns.

Are we Really Together? is the big question of that season.

Consider: after the first episode or so, each has a Yes in the

Cover Together box. But the questions are about what goes into

the Really Together box. In S01E08, what Sarah tells Chuck

while--as he believes--she is unable to resist a truth serum

makes him put a No in his Really Together box. But, as we later

find out, Sarah acquired a tolerance for truth serum during her

training. Her tolerance makes her able to resist it when under

its influence, although doing so requires concerted effort. When

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Chuck asks if, in effect, they are Really Together and not just

Cover Together, Sarah answers that they are not. (Chuck asks her

if there is something under their undercover thing, if it is

going anywhere, and Sarah tells him it is not.) But later (in

the next episode), when Sarah kisses him, he changes the No in

the Really Together box into a Yes.

Most of the first two seasons, the answers in the Cover Together

boxes are Yes for both. (There are brief exceptions.) When they

officially become a couple, the boxes in the first column become

more or less unimportant.

The second season is largely concerned with the second and third

columns. In the second season, despite various misunderstanding

and struggles, it is more or less settled that Chuck and Sarah

are, in some qualified sense, Really Together. (The season

begins with the two going on a real—a genuine—date.) The new

problem is whether they do or do not have a future together. The

answers in that box change throughout the season, sometimes so

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dramatically that the answers threaten the qualified Yes in the

Really Together boxes

The early part of the third season throws everything back into

confusion. Chuck and Sarah are Cover Together some of the time,

but at other times their relationship is so imperiled that they

threaten to become nothing to each other. At any rate, at times

the distance between them seems so great that even qualified

Yes’s in the Really Together column seem unlikely ever to come

again. But in the middle of the third season, after Chuck saves

Sarah from Shaw, they begin to date exclusively, putting a

decisive Yes in each of the Really Together boxes and in the

Future Together boxes. From that point until the final few

episodes of the show, the questions become questions about the

exact nature of that future and how quickly it will arrive.

It is very important for me to be upfront about my view of the

relationship, to let my cats on the table, so to speak: What is

being tracked on my chart are Chuck and Sarah’s beliefs or

feelings about the state of their relationship. But on my

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reading of the show, Chuck and Sarah are Really Together from the

end of the first episode on. On my reading, Chuck falls for

Sarah and Sarah for Chuck in the first episode. Chuck is a “Will

They or Won’t They?” romantic comedy, but of a particular sort--

the tension is not so much over whether they will fall for each

other. They fall hard, early. The show is not focused on their

falling in love, but on the difficulties of their being in love.

They are in love with each other all the way through the show,

although Season 3 and the final episodes each problematize that

love. The tension of the show is a tension over whether they

will be able to acknowledge their feelings and the nature and the

depth of their feelings, to themselves, to each other, or to

others. The tension is not whether they will fall in love but

whether they will refuse or avoid that love (a tension that

modulates into a tension over whether they will be lead into a

shared future by that love). Chuck and Sarah suffer because their

love requires that suffering. They would not, could not suffer

as much as they do for as long as they do if they were not in

love from the beginning.

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Chuck and Sarah’s relationship is structured by a duality of

heart and brain. Although I will say more about the duality as I

go along, I want to address it in a general way now, to provide a

helpful anticipation for my later remarks. At the end of Season

2, Chuck gives Morgan (who is struggling with his own issues of

identity and with his own relationship) a bit of sage wisdom,

wisdom applicable to the situations of each of them at the

moment, but also wisdom applicable to the whole show. The lines

resonate outward from their speaking to reach backward to the

beginning of Chuck and Sarah’s relationship in the first episode

and forward to the state of their relationship in the last

episode:

Chuck: Go with your heart, buddy. Our brains only screw

things up.

I mention the line now because one of the features of Chuck and

Sarah’s relationship is the constancy of their hearts and the

inconstancy of their brains.

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They have not been together--Cover Together--for very long before

everyone around them who counts (Morgan, Ellie, Awesome, Casey,

even General Beckman) knows that they are crazy about each other,

that they are in love. As I have said, the duration in the show

is mostly not the duration of their falling in love--but of the

deepening of that love, and more importantly, of their

acknowledgment of it, of their coming to trust its reality. From

early on, the heart of each is set on the other, each represents

the other’s happiness, but neither of them can really, fully,

clearly, openly...acknowledge his or her heart, or fully trust in

the responsiveness of the other’s. Their brains keep screwing

things up.

Chuck is about how to get your brain into your heart, about

making the organs function as one. So it is less a show about

falling in love and more a show about learning that you are, and

learning what that means, and learning what that requires. A

great example: Sarah’s somehow simultaneously surprised and

slightly exasperated comment on her mission log (presumably

recorded a year or so into their relationship) captures the

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point: “I’m in love with Chuck Bartowski and I don’t know what

to do about it.”

Sarah knows that she is in love, but she cannot fully acknowledge

it, allow herself to simply be in love with Chuck. Instead, she

distances herself from her love, stands back to look at it

sideways on. Her relationship to her own feelings is curiously

third-personal: she knows she is in love the way she might know

that someone else is in love, and she wonders what to do about it

as she might wonder what someone else should do about his or her

being in love. Her love is for her a theoretical problem, to be

treated as a theoretical problem that requires a solution.

(Compare: I have a skin rash. What should I do about it?) Her

love for Chuck is a fact about her, one that she at least to some

degree or in some way is frustrated by, and it is a fact about

herself that leaves her puzzled as to how to go on.

That she can treat her feelings for Chuck in this way shows the

distance between her brain and her heart. She has split herself

into two, and her brain is calling the shots. Her heart is

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supposed to take orders from her brain, or, if it does not, then

her brain has to figure out how to get her heart to fall in line.

None of this, the theoretical approach to her own feelings, the

split between her brain and heart, none of this means that Sarah

is not in love with Chuck. What she says she feels, she feels.

She is alienated from her feelings, but she has not falsified

them or mistaken them. She does love Chuck. She also does not

know what to do about it.

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Part Two: Reading Chuck

In the Readings that follow, I will take to heart the ordinary

language philosophical maxim: to imagine an expression is to imagine it as

the expression of a soul. When I bear down on bits of dialogue, this

is what I am trying to do: to imagine it as the expression of

two souls. I am trying to understand the exigency or plight of

the person who is speaking and of the person who is being spoken

to. And I will take the words spoken seriously, no matter how

plain or unremarkable they may seem. That is, I will take the

speakers at their word. By that I do not mean that I will take

everything that is said at face value. (That would be a

particularly strange thing to do with the dialogue in Chuck.)

What I mean is that I will take seriously the fact that it is to

those words, in that order, that a character reaches when

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speaking, and I will take it that understanding what he or she is

saying requires giving an account of those words, in that order--

and of the words’ linguistic station, their place in the

unfolding action of the dialogue. Understanding what is said will

require me to treat the word or words spoken as chosen for

intelligible reasons, although sometimes the reasons will require

seeing the word or words as a dodge or a feint or a half-truth or

a lie.

I spend a little time narrating episodes, particularly the first

and the last. I do not do this because I expect my reader not to

remember the episodes (I expect the opposite) but because some

narration is necessary to provide the setting for what interests

me: I have worked to avoid tedium. But I ask for a smidgen, a

skoosh of indulgence on this score. At any rate, it would be a

good idea to re-watch the specific episode or episodes for which

I provide readings, refreshing memory of it or them.

The readings move in and out of philosophical topics. Most of

the topics discussed have been mentioned already, introduced and

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discussed already. But I try to keep the philosophical

discussion from being long-winded--although the discussions in

the final few readings do get longer-winded. The discussions get

more complicated as I go along. They build, culminating in a

discussion of what Chuck teaches us about love.

I ask and answer questions about what is happening. I aim to

show how considering the philosophical topics intensifies the

experience of the show. The discussions of philosophical topics

do not ask us to break with and step away from what is happening

in the episodes, but instead more deeply to immerse ourselves in

what is happening. Philosophy should increase our depth of

field. It should help us to understand our experience and not

blur it or rob us of it. Philosophy is in the details; it is not

in the neglect of them.

Let me reiterate that my goal is not to provide knowledge of new

facts about the show, but rather to provide new knowledge of

facts about the show. My goal is not to find things hidden in

the show, things others have missed. My goal is to find a way of

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representing the show that allows it to be seen more clearly,

appreciated more fully.

Chapter 6 (S01E01) Of the Terrible Doubt of Appearances

Well begun is half done. --Proverb

In this way I should like to say the words "Oh, let him cornel" are charged with my

desire. And words can be wrung from us,—like a cry. Words can be hard to say: such,

for example, as are used to effect a renunciation, or to confess a weakness. (Words are

also deeds.) --Ludwig Wittgenstein

The pilot episode of Chuck is the show’s arche. The Greek word

means beginning--but means more than just that. It further means

controlling initiative. The practiced archer, with bow taut and arrow

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trained on a target, is the arche of the flight of the arrow--he

is both the origin of the arrow’s flight and he determines the

path of its flight. The pilot does the same for Chuck. It

provides the crucial origin story of the plot--mirroring the

obligatory origin story for superheroes told in comics--and it

provides a set of events and constraints that determine the

show’s trajectory.

One difficulty faced by a show that relies so heavily on

resonance is that it must start somewhere. The items that are to

resonate have to be introduced. But of course in their

introduction, they are not yet resonant. It is not exaggerated

to say that the pilot cannot be understood in its full meaning

until the show ends. But that not to say that the pilot cannot

be understood at all until the show ends. No, the pilot is

intelligible. But its full meaning is not present until the show

comes to an end.

Since I know that sounds puzzling, and since I have said such

puzzling things before (in the Introduction), let me try to make

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my meaning a bit clearer. Imagine a beautiful piece of music,

with a manifest structure of beginning, middle and end. You hear

it and enjoy it. But later another composer composes a variation

on the original piece. After you hear it, you realize new things

about the original. Not because you failed to hear or to

appreciate any bar or note of it, but rather because the

variation displays the original piece in a larger, more

complicated context. You come to see that there are lines of

filiation running from that piece to others that you had not

guessed (perhaps the lines of filiation were also such that the

composer of the original piece was not aware of them, consciously

or otherwise). The variation changes, complicates your

appreciation of the original.

The pilot is in important respects like the original musical

composition. Later episodes work variations on many of the

events in the pilot, putting those events in a larger, more

complicated context. It is not just that the characters have

backstories we do not yet know, although that is true. It is not

just that the pilot poses various questions that do not get

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answered in it, although that is true too. It is rather that

particular events, like Sarah’s walk to Chuck or dance with him,

get redone in variation later, and that we cannot really

understand the pilot dance or the later dance unless we see the

second as a variation on the first. Sarah’s dance has an aura of

indeterminacy about it. What the dance is exactly, what it means

to Sarah in particular, is not fully clear. The explanation

offered implicitly in the pilot is not false; but it is not the

whole truth about the dance. But we cannot know that until

later.

The pilot begins in the dark. We see a jacket being zipped up,

gloves being donned and a bag zipped shut. A makeshift rope of

bed clothes is tied together. A flashlight goes on and off. We

are in the spy world.

Except that we are not. The appearance is deceptive. We are in

Chuck’s bedroom. Ellie switches on the light and looks at Chuck,

crouched on the floor, his back against his window, with Morgan

hanging from the rope just outside.

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Ellie asks Chuck what he is doing. He answers that he is

escaping. It is significant for the show, although easy to miss,

that Chuck’s ‘escape’ is an escape into the spy world, as a spy.

This is the shape of his imagination. He does not seem to

register this fact about himself, however. Chuck wants to escape

from his birthday party. Not just this one, but his original

one, the party on the actual day of his birth, and not just this

one on the anniversary of it. However, Chuck’s wanting to escape

the actual day of his birth is no death wish, nothing so morbid.

It is his way of protest against and seeking asylum from the life

he is living. He would like to start over again.

When the party is over, Chuck is sitting on the edge of the

fountain in the courtyard. Ellie brings him a beer then explains

to him that his lengthy talk about his ex-girlfriend, Jill, is

not something any of the women he was introduced to really wanted

to hear. Chuck, downcast, tells Ellie that he will get over Jill

tomorrow.

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Later that night, Chuck receives the fateful email from Bryce

containing the Intersect.

At the Buy More the next day, Chuck explains to the Nerd Herders

that they should expect a rough day. A new computer virus is

spreading, one that is downloaded whenever any accesses the

website of Irene Demova, a Serbian porn star.

Chuck: Lonely dude call volume will be high. This is a

nasty one kids, a computer killer. Last night, a display

version of our Prism Express Laptop was fried when someone

[he looks pointedly at Morgan] decided to enter Ms. Demova’s

website.

Anna [speaking to the one woman at the Nerd Herd desk] close

the eyes. This is what happens. [Chuck accesses the site.

The computer quickly malfunctions and dies]

Just as the computer dies, Chuck’s attention is drawn to the bank

of tv’s behind him, and a report about a visit to the city by

General Stanfield. Chuck flashes. He realizes that the General

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is already in town, contrary to what the newscast reports.

Chuck’s knowledge puzzles him. He does not understand how he

could know what he knows.

Sarah enters the Buy More and asks Chuck to fix her phone. He

does. She watches as he saves the father of the ballerina. This

is the first of many times she will see Chuck save the day. But

she leaves before Chuck can talk to her again. Morgan notices

that she left her card for Chuck.

Morgan pressures Chuck to call Sarah, but Chuck dithers. He

believes she is out of his league. “Did you see her?” But

Sarah’s attractiveness seems to Morgan reason to call, not reason

not to call. When they enter Chuck’s apartment, an intruder,

dressed ninja-style in all black and with a covered face, is

stealing Chuck’s computer. When the ninja braces for combat,

Chuck freezes. But Morgan, in an act of fiery daring, sudden

courage, throws one vase and then another at the intruder. The

intruder knocks each back into Chuck and one hits him in the

groin. He doubles over as Morgan urges him to do something.

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When Chuck finally tries to intervene, he gets kicked into the

wall. In the fight, his computer gets smashed.

The intruder turns out to be Sarah. We find this out after she

has escaped and doffed her mask in her car. Chuck’s computer is

not only smashed, it is dead. The hard drive was, as Lester

says, murdered. Chuck is freaked out by the entire event. He

decides he needs new locks and walks next door to Buy More to get

some. While there, he flashes on a man in the store, who turns

out to be a terrorist, a bomber. The man suspects that Chuck

suspects him, but nothing comes of the encounter at the last.

The man buys what he came to buy, and he leaves.

Sarah’s boss, when she tells him that Chuck’s computer was

destroyed, tells her it is done. She should get back to

Washington. But Sarah is unwilling to leave. She explains her

unwillingness by pointing out, reasonably enough, that Chuck

might have downloaded the Intersect on an external hard drive,

some backup. Graham insists again that she leave. The problem

is being turned over to the NSA, to John Casey. Graham reminds

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Sarah that Casey is a killer, cold school. No good can come of

the two of them overlapping there. Graham understands Sarah’s

determined unwillingness to leave as the result of a lingering

guilt she feels about Bryce’s rogue actions. He reminds her that

she had nothing to do with any of that. But she insists--she can

fix it. This too is reasonable enough. Both that Chuck could

have backed up the Intersect and that she can fix what Bryce did

are true. The problem is that there is another reason she wants

to stay--Chuck. She started her conversation with Graham while

looking at Chuck (he was entering the Buy More). She said that

she had eyes on him. She did, she does; she has eyes for him.

Even in their brief meeting, he stirred her.

Sarah walks to Chuck at the desk a second time and he fails to

notice her again. He has his head down, chanting that he is

losing his mind. Sarah rings the bell for service and Chuck, his

head still down, reaches out and takes her hand.

Chuck: Morgan, not now. [He looks up to see Sarah smiling

warmly at him. He is holding her hand. He drops it and

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stands up abruptly] Hi! Hi! Phone trouble again?

Sarah: [flirtatiously] Yes, I’m not sure I’m able to

receive calls, ‘cause I never got one from you. [more

seriously] I’m sorry I left so quickly yesterday. I had an

appointment with a realtor. I just moved here.

Chuck: Welcome.

Sarah: Thanks. And [stammering] I don’t really know anyone

here. I was wondering if you would show me around. [again,

flirtatiously] That is, if you’re free.

Morgan, eavesdropping, cannot restrain himself. He breaks into

the conversation to tell Sarah that Chuck is free, that he is

very available. She and Chuck schedule a date for that evening.

Chuck’s availability to Sarah is insisted on in this scene, it is

insisted on in the very final scene of the show, and it runs

through all that happens in between. He is free--for her. He

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has an opening--for her. He is at her disposal, disposable to

her. He will suffer to remain available to her. He has an

aptitude for giving himself, and she has asked for him; he will

bind himself by his gift. She was the one waiting by the phone,

but he is the one who answers her call.

This is also the first time that they touch each other. And

although Chuck touches her by mistake, she does not retreat from

his hand, pull her hand from his. For the next couple of years

it will be Sarah who initiates almost all of the touching that

occurs between them. Chuck initiates this touch, however, this

first touch, and Sarah’s response to that touch is a sudden

realization of hope, a response to the trial her life has become

and to Chuck’s possibilities as the one who might release her

from her captivity. Sarah, like Chuck, is trying to escape from

her life as she knows it. She just does not know that that is

what she is doing. Sarah is turning toward a light she does not

yet fully realize she perceives. As Sarah begins more and more

to experience her spy life, her life as she knows it, as a

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captivity, she will see more and more surely the light of hope

that Chuck is to her.

In a later episode (S04E13), Sarah will reveal to Chuck that she

fell for him in between his fixing her phone and his disarming

the bomb with a computer virus. That means she is falling now,

as she leaves the Buy More. To come to love someone is to come

to expect something from the person, something that you can

neither fully explain nor fully foresee. And, at the same time,

it is to make room for the person to fulfill the expectation.

Just as Chuck has room for Sarah, Sarah is beginning to make room

for Chuck, to expect...something...from him.27 She may not know

quite what it is, but she expects something from him.

Just before Chuck arrives to pick Sarah up for their date, Sarah

is on the phone again with her boss.

Sarah: I don’t know about this guy, Graham.

Graham: Nice guys aren’t sent government secrets.

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[Chuck knocks]

Sarah: What should I do if he runs?

Graham: [as Sarah opens the door for Chuck, who holds a

bouquet of flowers] Kill him.

When Sarah reports that she does not know what to make of Chuck,

she is reporting both professionally and personally. She cannot

categorize Chuck. Her responses to him are not fully under her

control because she cannot fully objectify him, respond to him

only as an asset. When she asks about him running, she again is

doing something both professional and personal. She does not

want to lose him.

Chuck takes Sarah to a Mexican restaurant, the El Compadre. They

talk against a background of Mariachi music. Since their

conversation knits so many things together, and since it will

echo through the show, I quote it all.

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Chuck: So, yeah, I live with my sister and her boyfriend,

Captain Awesome.

Sarah: No? [laughs]

Chuck: It is true, though.

Sarah: So, wait, you call him “Captain Awesome”?

Chuck: Yeah, wait till you meet him. Everything he does is

awesome: mountain climbing, jumping out of planes,

flossing.

Sarah: [laughing] That’s funny.

Chuck: I’m a funny guy.

Sarah: Clearly. Which is good, ‘cause I am not funny.

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Chuck: Is that your big secret, by the way? ‘Cause I’ve

been sitting here, trying to figure out what is wrong with

you...

Sarah: Oh, plenty, believe me.

Chuck: ...And I was thinking either she’s a cannibal or

she’s really not that funny, and I was pulling for cannibal,

‘cause I’ve never met one before.

Sarah: [pausing] Not a cannibal, but I did just come out of

a long relationship, so I may come with baggage.

Chuck: I could be your very own baggage handler. [Each

looks directly at then away from the other] So, the guy,

the ex, the guy, the ex is the reason you moved here from…?

Sarah: D.C.

Chuck: Right.

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Sarah: After I realized that all of my friends were his

friends and that everything about Washington reminded me of

[pause] Bruce, I needed a change, a big one.

Chuck: Bruce...yeah, you give me crap for being Chuck and

you went out with a Bruce? That’s nice. That’s real good.

[they laugh]

Sarah: So, what about you? What skeletons do you have in

your closet? Any secrets? Any women?

Chuck: Yeah, yeah. Actually, well, back in college there

was someone...Actually, that’s all over now. And her

restraining orders are very specific. [they laugh]

Sarah: I like you, Chuck.

Much of Chuck is presented in what appears pleasant banter.

Chuck’s openness, especially to Sarah, opens the conversation,

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when he reveals (without any hint of embarrassment before or

regret afterwards) his peculiar living arrangement--with his

sister and her boyfriend. Just the arrangement makes Chuck look

childish. Had he gone on to mention that his sister raised him,

he would have made fully clear that he still lived at home.

But Sarah takes the revelation in stride, doesn’t pull back from

it. Instead, she seizes on Chuck’s nickname for Devon. When she

laughs and says “No!”, Chuck takes her to be expressing disbelief

about his living arrangement, but she quickly clarifies that her

attention has instead been caught by the nickname, Captain

Awesome. She takes more interest in what Chuck calls things than

in his current situation. She finds the nickname very funny--

although she must also recognize that many of Chuck’s anxieties

about himself are inscribed in Devon’s nickname. Everything

Devon does may be awesome. Chuck does nothing awesome; Chuck’s

flossing is ordinary.

Sarah finds Chuck funny. Her eager response to his jokes (along

with her comment about not being funny) suggests laughing to be

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something Sarah loves to do but rarely does. It is her laughter

and their shared laughter that primarily metamorphoses a

conversation that could be nothing but a clever handler

developing an asset into something more. Sarah is enjoying

herself, forgetting herself, forgetting to see herself and Chuck

as handler and asset. Her laugher is too unself-conscious, too

quick, too obviously the result of listening to him and not

merely of hearing what he says, to be classified as part of a

pretense.

Chuck talks about Sarah meeting Awesome. Chuck’s thoughts have

already turned toward the future--he is hoping she will see him

again. In effect, he is talking about Sarah meeting his

‘parents’ and within scant minutes of the beginning of their

first date. But again she does not pull back from this, but

instead reacts to Chuck’s ending his list of Devon’s awesome

feats with flossing. Although Sarah likely does not have a name for

it (and it is likely Chuck does not either), she recognizes and

responds to Chuck’s on-the-fly reverse-auxesis as the bit of real

cleverness that it is, (Auxesis is rhetorical figure that lists

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items in such a way that the last is climactic; Chuck’s list ends

in anti-climax). So, when she compliments him on being funny,

her compliment results from both her recognition of what Chuck

has done and her reaction to it. This kind of appreciative

acknowledgment is rare for Chuck. People laugh at what he says

often enough (he is funny), but often do not recognize why what

he says is funny.

What does Sarah mean when she then confesses that she is not

funny? Well, she rarely makes anyone laugh. Her spy life has

not afforded room enough or time for joking. She’s all business.

But she also is confessing, in the light of Chuck’s cleverness,

that she is not clever in this way. By that I do not mean that

she estimates herself dumb (she surely is not), but rather that

she knows that she does not have Chuck’s easy access to or

variety of means of expression. Words are hard for Sarah.

The conversation then begins to encroach explicitly on more

intimate issues--it does so when Chuck asks about Sarah’s big

secret. Although Chuck is asking Sarah the question as a

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question about her, he is really asking a question about himself:

What really explains you--a woman like you--being out on a date

with me--a man like me? As the show unfolds, it will turn out

that every time Chuck has (apparently) managed to be Really

Together with Sarah, this anxiety will enfold him. And of course

the inevitability of this anxiety will also dog his attempts to

win Sarah, since he will always be tempted--at least at the level

of his brain, if not his heart--to rate his attempts as quixotic:

How could he win her? How could he even be in the contest for

her heart? The few times Chuck will be tempted to quit trying to

win Sarah, it will be because he has a chance to be with someone

else, someone who he can be with without this anxiety. Chuck’s

self-mistrust makes it very hard for him to believe in himself

and Sarah as a (possible) couple. But what Chuck has a hard time

getting into focus or keeping in focus is that his anxieties

about Sarah are rooted not so much in her beauty or competence as

in the way he experiences her presence as a call to arms, as

inciting a riot of changes in him. Sarah is such that for Chuck

to win her at last, he will have to believe he can win her. (This

is not a condition she lays down, it is one he lays down,

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although he does not yet realize it.) It will be his self-

mistrust ultimately, and not any other man or Sarah’s profession

or Sarah’s past, that will prove to be his final opponent in the

contest for her heart. (Having yourself for opponent is the

worst, since it means that your opponent is just exactly as

strong as you, knows just exactly as much as you know,

understands your intentions and motives just as you do. And of

course, you cannot win by cheating because it will be you who

gets cheated.)

Chuck deftly uses his question about Sarah’s big secret to turn

her confession of not being funny into something funny. Since her

being out with him cannot simply be explained by her liking him,

it must be explained by Sarah having a problem. She cannot be

all she seems to be, she must be, somehow, less. Chuck disguises

how seriously this thought tempts him by choosing as the options

for what is wrong with her one that is patently silly (cannibal)

and one that she has already confessed. Of course, his thought is

not finally that she is not all that she seems to be. He

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displaces his anxiety about himself onto her: It is that he

cannot be whatever it is she thinks he seems to be.

But before Chuck manages this turn of the conversation, Sarah

confesses something more: she confesses that there is plenty

wrong with her. Chuck hears this but does not immediately and

directly react to it. I take it to be clear that he hears it,

and hears it as a muted plea, one that gets repeated in a moment,

when Sarah says that she has come out of a long relationship and

so may come with baggage. That and how Chuck hears Sarah is

revealed by his response: “I could be your very own baggage

handler.” A plea and a self-offering. This is not a striving

for intimacy with Sarah on Chuck’s part; it is the achievement of

it. Neither of them intended for the conversation to take them

here. But Sarah has forgotten herself for a moment. And Chuck

cannot say No to her, has no desire to say No to her. He is

available to her. He wants to and will say Yes. The intimacy of

the moment strikes them both at the same time and they each

quickly look away, breaking the eye contact that subtends their

emotional contact.

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Notice that Chuck has co-opted Sarah’s private word for

herself--’handler’. She begins the evening thinking of herself

as handler, Chuck’s handler. Chuck is her asset. With this one

happy, if ordinary, image--of himself as her baggage handler--

Chuck spins the bottle, so that instead of his being handled, he

is handler--Sarah is his asset. This is a nice example of the

easy-to-miss density of dialogue in Chuck. Because the word

‘handler’ is part of a familiar phrase ‘baggage handler’, it is

easy to miss the multiple meanings that the word carries. Chuck

of course is unaware of them when he speaks the word. But they

are there. In Chuck and Sarah’s relationship, each will be or

become both the handler and the asset of the other--although that

will not be the dominant form of their relationship.

Chuck asks if her ex was the reason she left wherever she had

been. Sarah tells him that she had been in D.C., and that she

realized she needed to leave when she realized that all her

friends were her ex’s friends and that everything in D.C.

reminded her of him. Other than the name, this is all true. She

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misses Bryce. D.C. now appears to her in the shadow of Bryce’s

death. Yet, it is important to keep in mind that the people

Sarah calls her friends (and Bryce’s friends) are her co-workers,

other agents. And everything in D.C. is the CIA. There is no

reason to think Sarah spends time in D.C. with people who are not

her co-workers or that she habitually took long walks among the

cherry blossom trees. She worked. She was with Bryce primarily

when they worked.

Sarah continues her story--and continues confessing. She

needed--she needs--a change, a big one. Sarah does not specify

what would count as a big change. But she is considering Chuck

as she says this. Her comment about coming with baggage is a

comment about her past that is oriented on her future. It means

that if Chuck takes her on, he takes it on. She, like Chuck,

risks a peek ahead. Perhaps she believes nothing can come it,

but she does it.

Sarah reins herself in--and tries to get back to work. She asks

about Chuck’s skeletons, Chuck’s past, Chuck’s secrets. Have

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there been any women? She turns from their possible future to

Chuck’s actual past. Chuck admits to her that there was a woman

in college--but then he pulls back and lets that story go, unlike

at his birthday party, where he had told it, re-lived it, in

excruciating detail. He lets it go because he remembers Ellie’s

rule for the night--don’t talk about old girlfriends. He lets it

go because he does not want to exceed Sarah’s brevity about

Bruce. He lets it go because, for the first time in five years,

he can actually imagine getting over Jill. The woman sitting

across the table from him outshines (his memory of) Jill. In

Sarah’s light, he can even joke about Jill.

Sarah confesses one thing more--responding spontaneously to Chuck

yet again, yet again giving herself away. “I like you, Chuck.”

She does like him. She tells the truth. She is having a good

time. In spite of herself, she is finding that she cannot

maintain a manipular posture in relation to him. Sarah cannot be

face-to-face with Chuck and be simply a spy. Chuck responds to

what she says with pleased surprise.

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This is the first time Sarah uses Chuck’s name, calls him

‘Chuck’. She will use his name over and over again in their

relationship; for example, she will use it over and over again

before the cockcrow of sunrise at Malibu beach. Sarah will

principally use last names in relationships with others. She will

not use the first names of anyone else with a frequency

approaching the frequency of her use of ‘Chuck’. It is not just

the frequency of her use of ‘Chuck’ that marks out the name and

its bearer as holding a special place for her. It is also the

way that she uses it. She calls him by name as a form of

recognition--she recognizes him, she knows who he really is and

can be. She sees him. She recognizes him hidden in the Nerd

Herd, living with Ellie and Devon, still wounded by an old

girlfriend. She recognizes him as the Chuck he believes he has

failed to become.

It is important to keep in mind that my description of this

conversation is not an attempt to capture the moment-by-moment

self-understanding of the characters. For example, my calling

what Sarah is doing confessing does not mean that she takes

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herself to be confessing as she is talking. I presume she is not

classifying her actions in speech as she performs them, as if she

were saying silently, “I am now confessing…” while she audibly

confesses that she comes with baggage. Even Sarah sometimes does

not know (quite) what she is doing at the moment she does it. I

do think that she does realize, part of the way through the

conversation, that she has been confessing. What I am trying to

do is to capture what is actually happening between the

characters. Sometimes that means that I will be interested in

capturing their moment-by-moment self-understandings, but I will

be interested in those only to the extent that capturing them is

required to capture what is really going on. Does Sarah realize

fully that she has revealed as much as she has revealed in the

conversation? No. Does Chuck understand clearly the commitment

he offers Sarah in the conversation? No. But does that mean that

Sarah has not revealed as much as she has or that Chuck has not

offered the commitment he has offered? No. Does this then mean

that Sarah’s revelations and Chuck’s offered commitment are not

deliberate? Yes. Does that mean that these things do not count

as actions on Sarah and Chuck’s part? No. Much of Chuck is

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driven by and explores how much we do without doing it

deliberately, how much we give away about ourselves without

setting out to do so. All of us, even spies, are endlessly,

constantly expressive. To deny that is not to treat our bodies

or voices, our faces or eyes, as screens. It is to deny that we

have bodies or voices, or faces or eyes, at all.

After dinner, Chuck and Sarah walk to a club he has chosen. They

are going to go and listen to a band. He asks Sarah if she likes

music, expecting that he knows the answer. But her answer stops

him. She guesses she does. He asks about her favorite band. She

has no answer. Chuck’s disbelief prompts Sarah to respond.

Sarah: God, I’m not funny. I don’t listen to music. This

must be your worst date ever, right?

Chuck does not answer. His attention has been attracted by a

motorcade passing beneath the bridge he and Sarah are crossing.

Chuck flashes. It is the NATO general, Stanfield, on his way to

give the speech. The flash shakes Chuck and he stands, looking

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away from Sarah and down at the cars. She stands, waiting for a

response. When Chuck does not respond, she tells him that she

was waiting for him to say No. Chuck finally re-enters the

conversation, apologizing for zoning out. He gathers himself and

tells her that he has had much worse dates, experiences with

women, and mentions that one occurred when he was in 11th grade.

Sarah laughs and comments him about having to go back that far.

As Chuck and Sarah enter the club, Casey and other NSA agents are

parked outside. He tells his men that Chuck is their mark. They

are to take him alive. But they can kill Sarah.

In the club, they sit down with drinks to listen to the band that

is playing. Sarah likes them. Chuck is visibly relieved. But

before they can do or say anything else, Sarah spots the NSA

agents entering the club and beginning to move through the crowd.

She reacts, but not immediately. She has to change gears. She

has been on a date, whether that had been her plan or not; she

remains on that date, but now with another, simultaneous mission.

She grabs Chuck and takes him onto the dance floor.

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Sarah proceeds to dance with Chuck while also dancing, in a very

different way, with the NSA agents as they close in. Chuck is of

course fully present to Sarah during the dancing (not that Chuck

does much of it). She overwhelms him. Her dancing is, from the

first moment, provocative. It bespeaks desire. Chuck is both too

poor a dancer and too overwhelmed to react to her dancing in any

nuanced way. He is too affected and perhaps too surprised to

return affection. But there is no mistaking that he is affected.

No doubt, Sarah dances as she does to distract Chuck. She is

trying to keep him from realizing that he is in danger. (It is

not clear that Sarah realizes that she too is in danger, although

she must know that her intention to keep Chuck from the NSA is

not going to make them happy with her.) But Sarah’s dancing

outstrips what that motive sensibly requires of her. Her staring

into Chuck’s eyes, her liberal touching and caressing of him, is

not necessary. Seeing her dance would have been all that was

necessary to insure that Chuck noticed nothing else. She moves

around Chuck as she dances so that she can use the dance floor as

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a combat zone, but all the while hide the combat from him. She

manages to do that, using knives and her hair sticks to wound or

incapacitate the agents. Still, Sarah is not simply pretending

to dance with Chuck. She is dancing with him; she is dancing for

him. She is doing two things--dancing with Chuck and fighting

with the NSA agents, and she is doing them in the same place--the

same space, the dance floor--and she is, to some extent, doing

them at the same time. It is sheer virtuosity. Only someone as

confident in her abilities as Sarah could hope to pull something

like this off, imagine pulling it off. (It is very James Bond of

her.) That she succeeds is remarkable. But there is no chance

for her to investigate the effects of her dancing on Chuck.

Sarah sees Casey and knows that they must try to escape. Her

fighting has bought them a little time.

After a harrowing car chase, Sarah calls for a helicopter to

rescue them. She and Chuck run to a nearby building and emerge

later on the roof. Sarah asks Chuck how well he knew Bryce

Larkin. She tells him that she and Bryce worked for the CIA.

Chuck balks. He cannot believe it. Sarah tells him that not

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only was Bryce a spy but that he was a rogue spy. She demands to

know if Bryce contacted Chuck. Chuck starts to deny it, but then

recalls the email. He tells Sarah about it, telling her that

there were lots and lots of pictures. Sarah finds out that Chuck

saw the pictures. At this point, Sarah realizes that Casey is

coming. She warns Chuck that she may have to point her gun at

him but that he should not freak out.

Casey makes it to the rooftop and demands that Sarah give Chuck

to him. Sarah points her gun at Chuck saying that if Casey gets

any closer she will shoot Chuck. Her threat is that Chuck

belongs to the CIA or no one. Casey happy enough with her

scenario: Sarah shoots Chuck; Casey shoots Sarah; Casey goes to

get a late night stack of pancakes. Chuck tries to run, but as

he reaches the edge of the helicopter pad, he notices the nearby

hotel and flashes. He realizes that there is a bomb plot against

the general.

Chuck explains in more detail. Casey takes Chuck’s knowledge to

prove that Chuck was in fact in league with Bryce. But Sarah

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believes what Chuck has told her. She explains what the email

has done to Chuck. Chuck’s seeing the pictures has resulted in

Chuck’s knowing not only what the intelligence agencies know, but

more. Since Chuck saw the pictures, he knows the information

encoded in them. Chuck, Sarah concludes, is the computer. Chuck

cannot process that.

Sarah wants to know about the plot against the general: is there

still time to stop it? Chuck simply wants out. He explains that

he cannot help them. He would like to but he cannot. They

should get Bryce. Sarah informs Chuck that Bryce is dead. The

both react to what she has said. There is again a moment of

intimacy between them--in the midst of all this craziness. Each

feels what Sarah said. Casey breaks their shared sorrow by

firing his gun and ordering them to go and defuse the bomb.

The three of them rush into the hotel. Sarah and Casey try to

keep Chuck from getting near the bomb. He is too valuable.

Chuck runs past them and leads them into the hotel ballroom in

which the general is speaking. They find the bomb but there is

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little time to defuse it. Chuck, aided by a timely untimely call

from Morgan, realizes that Irene Demova can crash the computer

that will detonate the bomb. Chuck uses the virus to crash the

computer and succeeds with seconds to spare.

Sarah now looks at Chuck in disbelief. Chuck’s heroism moves

her. (One thing worth noting: as the Demova virus does its

dirty work, Demova’s distorted voice says, “This is sexy.” What

Chuck does is indeed sexy. It strikes Sarah that way.) Chuck

impresses himself--he defuses a real bomb. But then he realizes

that his idea might not have worked, that he and everyone else

might have died, and he gets queasy. Casey comments that Chuck

should not puke on the C4. Sarah puts her hands on Chuck’s back

and shoulder, comforting him, reassuring him.

Sarah and Chuck continue to fight over who gets Chuck. Chuck,

though, emboldened by the night, and frustrated and frightened by

it, tells them he is going home. When Casey tries to stop him,

Chuck tells them both that they need him. They do both need

him--professionally, they need him, that is obvious and Chuck is

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right about it. He knows the government’s secrets. And they do

both need him--personally. Chuck will over time bring them both

back to (real) life.

But Chuck does not go home. Too much has happened. He goes

instead to Malibu beach where he sits thinking until sunrise. At

sunrise, Sarah joins him. She has been watching over him all

night. She sits down barefoot beside him, her boots in her hand.

Chuck: There’s nowhere I can run, is there?

Sarah: Not from us.

[Chuck sits silent]

Sarah: Talk to me, Chuck.

Chuck: Yesterday I was making eleven bucks an hour fixing

computers. Now I have

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one in my brain. And I can’t figure out why Bryce did this,

why he chose me. [Chuck

again falls silent] What are you going to do with me? What

happens now?

Sarah: For now, you go back to your own life. We’ll

protect you and you’ll work with us.

Chuck: And my sister, my friends, are they in danger?

Sarah: You tell them nothing to keep them safe. [Sarah is

silent] Need you to do one more thing for me, Chuck.

Chuck: Yeah?

Sarah: [her voice dropping] Trust me, Chuck. [He looks at

her. She smiles slightly and they hold each other’s gaze

until she drops her eyes. She then nudges him playfully.]

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Sarah keeps vigil over Chuck’s dark night. Why does she do this?

Her job is now to protect him. But she is also concerned about

him; she cares about him. He is her asset, but that word has and

will have an essentially contested meaning for her when applied

to him. (Eventually, she will transfigure ‘asset’ into ‘gift’.)

When she tells him what is going to happen now, she issues

orders, albeit gently. She stops that though and shifts to a

request. She needs him to trust her.

In Walden, Thoreau writes, “I think we may safely trust a good

deal more than we do.” This is one of Thoreau’s many sentence-

length puns. Call it a twin. It means that we may safely trust

a greater number of things than we do. It also means that we may

safely trust a good deal (say, a bargain) more than we do. Sarah’s

request that Chuck trust her is her response to his offer to be

her baggage handler. Thoreau continues:

We may waive just so much care of ourselves as we honestly

bestow elsewhere. Nature is as well adapted to our weakness

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as to our strength. The incessant anxiety and strain of

some is a well-nigh incurable form of disease.28

Chuck has apparently been offered a good deal here. Should he

trust Sarah? Should he trust her request that he trust her?

Should he take it to be a way of offering herself to him by being

willing to be trusted by him? Could that turn out just to be her

way of developing her asset, making him dependent on her? Yes.

Chuck, exhausted and bewildered as he is, knows that. Still,

trust is native to Chuck. Like Thoreau, Chuck believes that he

is permitted to waive just so much care of himself as he honestly

bestows elsewhere. He will honestly bestow much of the care of

himself to Sarah. Doing so will help to cure Chuck of the

incessant anxiety and strain he has known since Stanford. Sarah’s

nature will prove to be as well adapted to his weakness as to his

strength.

Should Chuck trust Sarah? Things between them are now much

different than they were a few hours ago, seated at the

restaurant. Chuck has the Intersect. Sarah has a motive to do

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and say what she does and says here even if she is not concerned

for Chuck, even if she does not care for him. As will be true

for a long time between them, there are competing explanations

for what Sarah does, and it is unclear whether Sarah can fully

explain to herself what she is doing.

But if Sarah is making Chuck an offer, one that is responsive to

the one Chuck made her, why does she make it only now? Because

of what has happened since they were at dinner. At dinner,

Sarah’s peek into the future made her aware of her struggles, of

her largely non-existent, messy personal life. When she tells

Chuck that she is not funny and that she does not listen to

music, and then asks if this is Chuck’s worst date ever, her mind

remains partly engaged with and anxious about her problems--

there’s an underlying seriousness to her apparently rhetorical

question. She likes him; he relaxes her internalized self-

demand. Yet, the very personal world Chuck represents to her is

a world she has no standing in. She imagines it well-lit, warm,

inviting--she wants to come in from the cold, she is tired of her

cold wars. She wants to warm up, to be heart-warmed. She has no

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real idea who she would be in that personal world. Still, Chuck

has invited her in and made himself available to (help) her.

Chuck invites Sarah into his world. But he has been thrown into

hers, thrown into the spy world. The Intersect has given him

standing in that world, but it is an imperiled, peculiar

standing. He cannot move safely on his own in those shadows. He

has to wait for the Intersect to flash in order to find his way.

The flashes light up that world very briefly. When they end,

Chuck plunges back into darkness. He is spelunking with nothing

but flash bulbs to light his way. Sarah makes her offer: she

can show Chuck the way, she can see in that dark. He will have

to lean on her, be guided by her, until his eyes adjust (if they

do). She can only help effectively if he trusts her.

We do things when we say things. Words are also deeds. Because

they are also deeds, actions, our words, like our non-verbal

deeds, have lines of consequence that run out from our saying of

them to and past our horizons. Because they are also deeds, our

words are always open to certain questions: Why are you saying

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that? What is the point of saying that? That our words are

always open to these questions does not mean that we always know

or fully know the answers to them. Sometimes we do, sometimes we

do not. And sometimes we can know the answers but refuse or want

to refuse knowing them, or we know the answers and want to keep

someone else, maybe anyone else, from knowing or being able to

guess them. Because our words commit us beyond our knowledge,

because our words reveal us to ourselves or to others beyond our

wishes, words are often hard to say, and words are often wished

unsaid.

Chuck and Sarah have said, done, significant things since he

showed up at her hotel room door with flowers. The characters of

their words are their destinies.

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Chapter 7 (S01E08) Under the Cover(s)

The discovery of a deceiving principle, a lying activity within us, can furnish an

absolutely new view of all conscious life. --Jacques Riviere

Chuck and Sarah have been Cover Together for a while. Chuck

however is becoming restless under their cover. What happens

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between him and Sarah when they are Cover Together seems so much

like what he would want to happen if they were Really Together

that he keeps losing his grip on the thought that they are only

Cover Together.

The problem he faces is made evident in the Wienerlicious. Chuck

and Sarah are in the supply closet, close together, and talking

in soft voices.

Sarah: You ready?

Chuck: Maybe we’re in over our heads.

Sarah: It’s time.

Chuck: You sure it’s not too dangerous.

Sarah: I’ll be an inch away.

Chuck: I’m scared.

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Sarah: Let’s go over it again, make sure we have our bases

covered.

Chuck: [inhales and is silent for a moment, then changes

tone] God, who’d have thought that going out for sushi with

my sister and her boyfriend would make me so freaked out?

Sarah: Okay. Last night we saw a movie.

Chuck: What was my snack of choice.

Sarah: Sprinkled milk duds over your popcorn. What was I

wearing?

Chuck: Blue top, little buttons.

Sarah: Oh, you like that one?

Chuck: I like all of them. What movie were we…

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They are interrupted by a knock on the door. Scooter, the

manager of the Wienerlicious, asks through the door why it is

locked. Sarah quickly unbuttons the top of her uniform and

twists the uniform askew. She tackles Chuck to the floor.

When Scooter opens the door, he finds Sarah on top of Chuck,

kissing him. After commenting about Sarah being on top, Scooter

explains that she is not being paid for make-out breaks with her

boy-toy. Sarah apologizes to Chuck--she had to think fast and

this was what she thought to do. But Chuck hears nothing. He is

still laying on the ground, luxuriating in the warm surprise of

what happened.

When the scene shifts, Chuck is back at the Buy More, seated feet

up at the Nerd Herd desk. The look on his face is a successor to

the look on his face at the Wienerlicious: he has managed to

alloy a thousand-yard stare with bedroom eyes. We do not have to

guess--his mind is still in the Wienerlicious supply closet.

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Nonetheless, Chuck believes that what he imagines will not, maybe

cannot, come to pass. And yet it was teasingly close. She was

just an inch away, after all, maybe less. Chuck loves Sarah.

His desire for her fills him to bursting. And she has just been

in his arms, straddling him, kissing him, her blouse open, loose.

Still, she might as well have been simply a fantasy. Sarah, he

might say, was pretending. Chuck’s natural thought is that if

she is pretending, then she is not really doing what she is

pretending to do. After all, Chuck might continue, what happened

in the closet was not really the two of them making out. He is

not really her boy-toy.

That is too quick, though. Because, if we stop and think, we

realize that Sarah was straddling Chuck, was kissing Chuck. It is

not as though she was not really laying on top of him, but had

cleverly contrived to be holding her body just millimeters above

his, not touching him at all. It is not as though Sarah’s lips

did not actually touch Chuck’s or as if she did not nuzzle his

neck. She straddled him; she kissed and nuzzled him. So, how was

she pretending? If Chuck were to answer, he would say that she

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was pretending because she was kissing him with no romantic

emotion, without any romantic feeling. Her heart was not in her

lips. But again, we should not be too quick. To say that her

heart was not in her lips is not to say that she kissed him

lightly, glancingly--a mere peck. That is not what happened.

She kissed him as if her heart were in her lips. So what Chuck

perhaps should say is that although she did kiss him, hard, that

was mere pretense, a public performance (for Scooter’s benefit)

meant to hoodwink onlookers into thinking that Sarah has romantic

feelings for Chuck.

It may help to think about an example.29 Imagine a jewel thief

who is planning a robbery. He gets a job as a window cleaner and

contrives to have things work out so that the large display

window of the jewelry store he is planning to rob is one he

cleans. As he sprays and squeegees and wipes the window, he is

looking through it, carefully noting the choicest pieces of

jewelry and the locks on their display cases. In this example,

the thief is clearly cleaning the window, and we can say he is

doing it the entire time he is there. But it is also true that

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he is pretending to clean them. His work is a pretense; what he

is really doing is casing the joint.

What Sarah does in the supply closet, and what she does later in

the episode during the double-date with Ellie and Devon (when,

for example, she pulls Chuck close outside the sushi place), and

what she has been doing to and with Chuck since they began being

Cover Together, is like what the thief does. She has been

kissing Chuck, holding his hand, etc. the whole time, but it has

been part of a pretense. What she is really doing is something

else (like the thief casing the joint), not expressing romantic

feeling for Chuck--and whatever it is that she is really doing,

the point of all the kissing and handholding is to hoodwink

onlookers into thinking that she does have feelings for Chuck.

But Sarah does have feelings for Chuck.

So what should we say about the tackling, straddling, kissing?

Sarah does it to Chuck. She decides to do it quickly, under

pressure, in response to Scooter at the closet door. What comes

to mind for her at that moment is (I suspect) what she has

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imagined before. She has fantasized about doing just this--it

leaps to her mind so quickly because it is familiar, a plan

already planned but not executed, maybe one Sarah never expects

to execute but with which she has dallied. So Sarah has imagined

expressing her feelings for Chuck in a way like this. Even more,

she wants to do this to Chuck, with Chuck. What she does might

not be what she would have chosen to do if Scooter had not

created an exigency, a need (and so an excuse), but it is

something she wants to do. She does have romantic feelings for

Chuck. Still, there are times when she denies that, times when

she does not believe it.

One further complication is that Chuck is normally a slightly

more active participant in the pretense. In fact, part of what

is interesting about the supply closet incident is that it moves

from the planning of a pretense in which Chuck will be an active

participant to the indulgence of a pretense in which he is a

passive participant, the ‘victim’. (Remember, Sarah apologizes

to him for tackling him.) But Chuck does have feelings for

Sarah.

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When Chuck participates actively in the pretense, his pretense

differs from Sarah’s. He has romantic feelings for her and he

never (successfully) tries to hide them. He admits to them early

and often. He does not sham. He leaves her in little doubt that

he wants more than to be Cover Together. He wants to be Really

Together. He keeps pressing the button, but nothing seems to be

happening. So when they pretend, as they do at the sushi place,

Chuck understands himself to be pretending that they are a

couple, Really Together. He is helping to hoodwink Ellie and

Devon about that. But he is not pretending to have romantic

feelings for Sarah. He is in fact indulging those feelings,

openly expressing them to her and to others during these fake

dates. So we might say that, for Chuck, his pretense is not aimed

at Sarah at all. It is aimed at others, like Ellie and Devon,

but not at her. He is not trying to hoodwink her. He has an

awful yen for her, no bones about it. He wants Ellie and Devon

to believe he and Sarah are together when (he believes) they are

not—but he is not pretending to have feelings for Sarah.

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Go back to the supply closet. Sarah is kissing Chuck. Sarah

wants to kiss Chuck. She has romantic feelings for him. Those

feelings are in fact charging her kiss. Her heart is in her

lips. So what is the pretense? Well, Sarah’s cloudiness about

her own feelings, her tendency to deny them or to want to deny

them or to alienate them--to treat them as a ‘condition’ she can

get over (like a rash or a headache)--makes this trickier to

answer without qualification than it might be. It may be easier

to think about this in the sushi place than in the supply closet.

At the sushi place, Sarah’s pretense is delicately structured.

She is pretending to be Really Together with Chuck. This

pretense targets Ellie and Devon. It is not supposed to target

Chuck, since he is supposed to know that they are not Really

Together. She also knows that--from Chuck’s point of view--she is

pretending that she has romantic feelings for him. Sarah knows

that is what Chuck believes and she wants him to continue to

believe it--to continue to believe that she is pretending to have

romantic feelings for him. She wants Casey and General Beckman

and others (in the spy world) to believe that too.

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Before fleshing this structure out any more, I want to stop and

note something. Setting aside Sarah’s struggles with her

feelings and struggles admitting her feelings, the circumstances

of her time with Chuck allow Sarah a freedom that she exploits.

That is, since she knows that Chuck believes she is only

pretending, she can express her feelings, indulge her desire for

him (up to a point, anyway) without giving herself away. She can

encourage the feelings he has admitted and reciprocate them

without seeming to violate spy rules generally, or the specific

rules governing handlers and assets. So Sarah can (again, within

limits) simulate being Really Together with Chuck without much in

the way of professional consequences. It is not clear that she

can escape personal consequence so well, however.

Chuck ends up bearing some, most, of the personal consequences--

and since she cares for Chuck as she does, she too can be said to

bear these (but in a different sense: she bears her

responsibility for what he bears). For instance, as I have been

stressing, Chuck’s deep self-mistrust sabotages him over and

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over. Sarah recognizes this and she tries doggedly to get him

over that self-mistrust, to get him to trust himself, be self-

reliant, self-obedient. Unfortunately, Sarah undercuts her own

efforts because Chuck, no fool despite his belief that he is,

keeps picking up on the fact that somewhere, in Sarah’s

delicately structured pretense, there are real romantic feelings

for him. But it is part of Sarah’s pretense to make him think

that there are no such feelings. And this leads Chuck into more

or stronger or anyway new episodes of self-mistrust. Sarah

encourages and discourages Chuck all at once.

Sarah’s pretense requires that she pretend that she is pretending

to have romantic feelings for Chuck. She pretends that they are

Really Together, all the while also pretending that she is

pretending to have romantic feelings for Chuck. The structure is

delicate, or at least this description of it is delicate enough

for my purposes. Perhaps the structure is still more delicate

than this, but I am no Linnaeus of human deception and self-

deception, and it would take a Linnaeus to limn all of the more

delicate structure.30 At any rate, I will make do with claiming

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that Sarah engages in a meta-pretense inside her pretense. The

pretense that she is Really Together with Chuck targets those

outside the spy world. The meta-pretense targets those inside

it, especially Chuck. That is whirligig enough.

The meta-pretense does have direct personal consequences for

Sarah, other consequences she bears. As I have been trying to

keep in view, Sarah is engaged in a struggle with her romantic

feelings for Chuck. She does not know what to do with them. She

sometimes wants to deny that they exist; she most of the time

wants to refuse them, avoid them. Pretending that she is

pretending to have feelings for Chuck only serves to further

problematize her relationship to those feelings.

Chuck is dreaming of Sarah when a new woman shows up at the Nerd

Herd desk--Lou. Lou is a dramatic physical contrast with Sarah--

brunette, not blonde; delicate, not athletic; tiny, not tall.

When Lou and Sarah first meet, Lou is wearing an off-white dress;

Sarah is wearing a black top and dark jeans. The camera moves

back from them with Chuck between them to underscore their

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contrast and their competition. The crucial contrast between Lou

and Sarah, however, is not physical but personal. Lou is all up-

front; she has an open nature. There is no space between what

she feels and what she says or does, no time lag between them.

She is a non-matchmaking Emma Woodhouse to Sarah’s non-affianced

Jane Fairfax. Sarah’s nature is closed.

Lou asks Chuck to fix her phone. They have an instant rapport.

They are in fact quite similar. Lou even uses Chuck’s phrase,

‘freaking out’. (She uses it to describe how she feels about the

loss of all that is in her phone.) I will not rehearse the

dialogue between them, but it is of real interest. What Lou

notes about her phone all applies equally, but in different ways,

to Chuck’s relationship to Sarah and to the Intersect. She

arrives at the Nerd Herd desk and she speaks Chuck’s mind.31

When she returns later, Chuck has fixed her phone. She

excitedly, gratefully, spontaneously hugs Chuck. She has also

brought him a sandwich--she runs a deli in the mall. She has

named the sandwich The Chuck Bartowski. She gives it to him and

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then, looking up at him squarely, tells him he should come by the

deli so that he can taste it fresh. Chuck, a bit overwhelmed and

lately unpracticed in Lou’s sort of directness, says that he

should. This is when Sarah shows up. Chuck cannot quickly

recover. He gets stuck trying to introduce them to each other,

stammering through their names. It gets worse when he has to

explain his relationship to Sarah. He starts the sentence:

“Sarah is my….” but no final word comes. Sarah, in the meantime,

has been watching Chuck closely, especially as he searches for

the word she finally supplies: “...girlfriend.” His hesitancy is

potentially a problem for their cover. But Sarah is curious,

expectant: will Chuck stick to their cover story when it is

inconvenient? Are Chuck’s feelings for her strong enough to

cause him to choose an actual pretense with her (with no

apparent, non-pretense future) over a possible relationship with

Lou (one that might indeed have a future, one that looks

promising)? Chuck’s hesitancy worries Sarah, professionally and

personally. She looks down at the bag containing The Chuck

Bartowski and realizes Chuck is no longer clearly her secret,

hers.

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At the sushi place, Devon teases Chuck and Sarah about not having

slept together. He notes that although they are joined at the

hip, that is not where they are supposed to be joined. Later,

while they wait for Ellie to come home after she tried to save a

poisoned man, Devon again encourages Chuck to have Sarah spend

the night. He tells Chuck that Chuck needs to get on the bike

again. As he does so, Sarah turns around and listens, looking at

Chuck.

Sarah tells Chuck she is concerned about their cover. Devon’s

teasing and his coaching of Chuck underlines that if they are to

be convincingly boyfriend and girlfriend, then saying that they

are taking it slow will work for only so long. Sarah says that

she thinks they should make love. Chuck chokes on his coffee.

It is not just the professional side of things that worries

Sarah. Lou presents a different kind of threat to the cover than

Devon’s curiosity about their prolonged, monkish celibacy does.

Sarah knows that Chuck has been imagining making love to her.

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She understands the significance of the supply closet. She has

made more unbearable his awful yen for her. She knows because

she is suffering the same awful yen (albeit more reluctantly than

Chuck). To take their cover in this direction is a testimony to

Sarah’s awareness that Lou represents real competition for

Chuck’s feelings. Jealousy grips her.

Chuck feels damned between alternatives. The woman he has

feelings for seems fated to remain just out of his reach, always

partially hidden across a step or two of dubious twilight. He

cannot get closer to her, not in the way he wants. The new woman

he could feel for is within reach, indeed visibly is reaching for

him. To choose Lou is to give up on Sarah, but there is no

obvious reason to think that he has any real chance with Sarah.

To choose Sarah is to choose appearance--leavened, admittedly by

a cherished hope--over reality. And it would be to lose Lou.

Simply to have to choose between them would be bad enough--

although he would choose Sarah. To have to choose his dream of

one over the reality of the other--that is an act of faith of which

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Chuck is no longer sure he is capable. Chuck’s frustration

mounts.

On the day of their mission--to pretend to sleep together--they

meet outside the Wienerlicious to be sure everything is ready.

Sarah knows she is taking them into treacherous terrain. She is

going to increase the pressure on them both. Again, It is Lou,

more than Devon, who has made Sarah willing to do this. Devon’s

puzzlement and curiosity are only at the stage of causing him to

tease Sarah and Chuck. He is their friend. There is no reason

to think he is really any serious threat to their cover. But Lou

is such a threat. Chuck could choose Lou. Strange though it is,

Sarah’s plan seems to be to make Chuck really commit to her, to

their fake relationship, by getting him to pretend to sleep with

her. The very strangeness of the plan shows that it is prompted

more by Sarah’s personal feelings for Chuck than by her

professional involvement with him.

After talking to Sarah, Chuck sees Lou in the parking lot. He

chases after and talks to her. Chuck tries to tell Lou that his

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situation is more...complicated...than it seems, Sarah-wise. Lou

cuts through Chuck’s non-explanation. She tells him that she

likes him, likes almost everything about him. What she does not

like is anyone who would cheat on his girlfriend. Chuck agrees

with her. She says that of course he would, and that is another

reason she likes him. She advises him to let her know if his

situation ever gets less complicated. Chuck holds her car door

for her and shuts it. Sarah watches all this from in front of

the Wienerlicious. A look of unhappiness briefly crosses her

face, breaking its normal studied blankness.

(Meanwhile, at the Buy More, Morgan has been assigned the task of

helping Harry Tang’s wife buy her husband a birthday present, a

plasma tv. Morgan helps her and tells her to meet him in the

home viewing room so that they can finish the paperwork and

complete Harry’s surprise. Morgan does not realize that Lester

and Jeff are filming his conversation with Tang’s wife and that

they get footage of her hugging him in thanks. They show the

clip of the hug to Tang, who watches it jealously. The cut from

Sarah watching Chuck talk to Lou takes us directly to Harry

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watching film of his wife hugging Morgan and making plans to meet

Morgan. The cut takes us from the controlled but still readable

expression on the face of Sarah to the uncontrolled and easily

readable one on Tang’s face. They are both jealous.)

That night, Chuck prepares for the mission by lighting candles

and putting on soft music. He dances alone, awkwardly. Sarah

arrives at his bedroom door, her hair carefully done, wearing a

short black coat. She pauses at the door, watching Chuck. She

smiles at him and what he is doing. She has imagined some such

scene. He sees her and stops dancing, embarrassed. She tells

him that Ellie let her in. She looks around the room and asks

Chuck what he thinks is going to happen. Chuck asks her why she

asks: what does she think he thinks? Sarah says she does not

know--but she points out the candles and the music and then asks

him if he knows they are just spending the night together for

cover. He answers coyly that he does know that. By now, he

continues, he is pretty familiar with the concept of faking it.

Annoyed by his tone, but more perhaps by his use of the word

‘faking’, Sarah lashes back at him, reminding him that they have

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to take the mission seriously. He becomes annoyed in return and

turns off the music.

I want to go through this again. What does Chuck think is going

to happen? We know what has been on his mind more or less ever

since the Wienerlicious supply closet. There is little doubt

that in remembering the event and in reimagining it, Chuck has

again been struck by the suspicion that what Sarah did to him in

the closet was something she wanted to do. He suspects that

maybe she does have feelings for him. His suspicion breeds hope.

He lights the candles and plays the music out of hope. Sarah

douses that hope right away after she enters the room, although

she was gratified to see and hear the favors of that hope as she

stood in the doorway.

When she asked Chuck what he thought was going to happen, what

did she think he thought was going to happen? She wanted him to

hope they would make love and not pretend to, she wanted him to

want that. Of course, had he said so, she would not have made

love to him. (Casey has a bug in the room and is listening.

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Sarah must know that, and by itself that would have prevented

anything from happening.) Chuck does hope they will make love,

but instead of admitting it or simply taking the conversation in

another direction, Chuck first becomes coy and next does what

Sarah herself does constantly--he answers a question with a

question. And his question puts her on the defensive, since it

is out of character for Chuck and since she too wishes that they

could make love. Chuck asks her why she would possibly think he

thinks anything else except that they are there to complete their

mission of pretense. He continues that he is by now pretty

familiar with the concept of faking it. He means at least two

things. One, that he has had to bear the consequences of Sarah’s

faking feelings for him by kissing him, etc., when she seems to

not have to bear any consequences. Two, that he is no longer as

naive as he was--his candles and music are not favors of hope,

they are nothing more than props in his effort to help their

pretense along. He can fake things too. Perhaps he is so willing

now to aid the pretense because he has become less invested (or

believes he has) in the pretense becoming reality. Lou hovers

over the bedroom.

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Chuck gets in the bed. Sarah takes off her coat to reveal purple

lingerie. Chuck responds with greater annoyance. She gave him a

hard time about the candles and the music, and now she is wearing

that? She claims that she is wearing it for her cover. Chuck

notes that it does not cover anything. Sarah continues, claiming

that it is possible that Ellie or Devon could walk in, and that

what she is wearing is what a girlfriend would wear to seduce her

boyfriend. Wearing the lingerie is just being professional. To

which Chuck quips, “Yeah, the world’s oldest profession.” Sarah

gets angrily into bed beside Chuck.

Why is Sarah wearing so little? The claim about Ellie and Devon

walking in (although it turns out to be prophetic--they do later

walk in) is not something likely enough that Sarah really needs

that particular purple lingerie. She could have borrowed a t-

shirt from Chuck and seemed just as genuinely to be going about

the seduction of her boyfriend. The sudden walking-in of Ellie

or Devon is no real justification. Her comment though that the

lingerie is what a girlfriend would wear to seduce her boyfriend

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is, if also no real justification, more interesting. Sarah wears

so little because she wants to be as much like Chuck’s girlfriend

that night as the two of them can stand, to be almost the

girlfriend she would be if she could. She is warding off Lou.

She is asking Chuck to commit to her, to their relationship, by

pretending to sleep with her, to choose for her and against Lou

when she (Sarah) knows that he believes their relationship is

myth-eaten and has no future.32 Sarah is willing to let Chuck

see her, to see her in lingerie. It may not be all Chuck wants,

but it is all she can now give him. She wants him committed to

her, to go through with and on with the pretense. But she is not

simply asking him to give something; she gives something in

return. There’s an interesting passage in Chesterton’s Orthodoxy

where he notes, “To keep to one woman is a small price for so

much as seeing one woman.”33 Chesterton’s thought here is that

the blessing of seeing a woman is more than adequate reward for

fidelity. Sarah is hoping that Chuck will rate his situation in

a similar way.

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This is a very sensitive sort of gift, a very sensitive sort of

gambit. Chuck’s response to her when she comes in and asks him

what he thinks is going to happen nearly spoils any chance of

them finding a mood in which what she plans to give can be

properly given and properly received. Chuck’s prostitution quip

absolutely destroys the chance. What Sarah is asking for and

what she is giving gets rebranded as a commercial sexual

transaction, as if he were paying for her favors. It is no

wonder she gets so angry, no wonder she wraps herself in the

covers, making sure Chuck can no longer see her.

While Chuck and Sarah are in his bed, under their covers, facing

away from each other, they hear Ellie begin fighting with Devon--

a fight prompted by the truth serum by which Ellie has been

poisoned. Chuck and Sarah become contrite. Chuck asks if he and

Sarah are beginning to sound like Ellie and Devon. Sarah turns

toward Chuck; she says they sound a little like the fighters.34

She turns the rest of the way toward him and asks if he is ok, if

there is something he wants to talk about? He turns toward her,

asking about what the rules are for their thing? Sarah hears the

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question as equivocal--is Chuck asking about them, about the

rules of being Cover Together, or is he asking about them, about

the rules of their being Really Together while they present

themselves as only Cover Together? That Chuck asks more than one

question in those words causes him to sputter a bit when she asks

what he means. He hardly knows how to say what he means. He

remains for a moment in the equivocation. He asks if,

hypothetically, they can see other people. Sarah forces him out

of the equivocation by talking about their relationship as a

cover. Given that their cover is boyfriend and girlfriend,

another person in the mix would make for serious challenges--not

to mention the rigorous vetting the new person would have to

undergo to determine her motivation. Chuck balks. Her motivation?

Wouldn’t she be motivated by love? Sarah admits that would be

ideal, but she also notes that he is a very important piece of

intelligence and that he has to be handled with extreme care.

Though Sarah talks as a professional spy, her words echo. She

would like to be motivated only by love where he is concerned,

she would like to handle him with extreme care, but he is a very

important piece of intelligence. None of this makes Chuck happy.

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And of course he has no confidence that Sarah’s words echo for

her. Sarah finally brings up Lou. She knows Chuck is interested

in Lou. Chuck balks again. He tells Sarah that he is just going

to sleep on the floor. She responds that it will compromise

their cover. He claims he feels compromised already.

Ellie bursts into the room followed closely by Devon. She talks

strangely to them. Sarah begins to suspect that something

serious is wrong. Casey shows up; his bug had been fouled by

crosstalk. He begins to search the apartment for other bugs.

Ellie collapses and Casey finds the bug behind her ear. He

declares that she has been poisoned.

Later, at the hospital, a desperate Chuck speaks into the bug

found on Ellie, claiming that he has found the codes. His idea

is to lure the poisoner to the hospital. It works--the poisoner

comes. He walks into a trap. Sarah is pretending to be Ellie.

She and Casey end up in a standoff with him. He has a vial of

the poison he can smash; they have their guns. At just that

moment, Chuck bursts in. He has found the codes in Ellie’s

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sweater. He accidentally knocks the poison to the floor, and all

four of them inhale it. The poisoner grabs the codes from Chuck

and runs. Casey is able to knock him down by throwing a crutch.

The poisoner drops the device he used to track the bug and also

drops the vial of antidote he was carrying. Sarah is able to

catch it before it hits the floor. She and Casey demand that

Chuck take it, but he will not. He tells them he is going to

agree to take it and then run to save Ellie--the truth serum is

affecting him. He does what he said he would do. He saves

Ellie.

So Chuck and Sarah and Casey are all poisoned, all under the

influence of the truth serum. Sarah tells Chuck how sorry she is

about all of this. He tells her it is ok. But then he notices

the device the poisoner dropped, and realizes they can use it to

find him. They immediately set out to do so. They find the

poisoner and force him to give them the antidote. As Sarah and

Chuck are about to take it, he stops her.

Chuck: No, wait, wait, wait. Not yet.

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Sarah: Why? What’s the matter?

Chuck: Nothing. It’s just that this will probably be the

last chance that I have to know

the truth. I know you’re just doing your job here, but

sometimes it feels so real, you know? So, tell me. You and

me. Us. Our thing under the undercover thing. Is this

ever going anywhere?

[Sarah pauses for a long time, looks down, sighs]

Sarah: I’m sorry, Chuck. No.

Chuck: Got it. Got it. Thank you for being honest. Even

though I guess you don’t really have a choice in the matter.

We find out just before the episode ends that Sarah has been

trained to withstand the effects of truth serum. It takes

effort, and act of will, but she can do it. She tells Casey that

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she has been trained in this way when he calls to ask if she has

compromised herself with the asset. She says that she might have

if not for her training.

Apparently, Sarah lies to Chuck. In its simplest

characterization, to tell a lie is deliberately to say something

in discrepancy with what we unreflectively believe. But, as I

pointed out in the section on lying earlier in the book, it is

not so easy to decide when two people are in a circumstance where

that characterization applies. To think through what happens

here, we need to answer a prior question: What entitles Chuck to

ask Sarah what he asks her? Chuck himself notes that Sarah,

drugged, has no choice but to be honest. Of course, Chuck

misunderstands, since he has no idea the drug can be resisted.

But if he believes she has no choice in the matter, can he count

her response as honest? To be honest is to choose to tell the

truth because of the value that you set upon it as truth.

‘Honest’ qualifies a choice, an action, not simply a set of

words. If I say what is true because I am drugged, it looks like

I make no choice, that I perform no action (nothing over which I

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exercise mastery): saying what is true simply is what happens to

me. It is as if the drug spoke, not I. (Chuck seems to be

taking advantage of the situation.) So there is a problem with

Chuck’s request here. It is not clear he is entitled to ask this

of Sarah, and so not entirely clear that Sarah lies, even if we

agree that what she says is false. But maybe the question of

Chuck’s entitlement to ask should be considered from another

angle. Consider the supply closet again. What entitles Sarah to

tackle Chuck, to kiss and nuzzle him? Presumably, the answer is

that it is her concern for their cover, and so her concern for

Chuck’s safety. But Sarah seems to take more from Chuck than

that entitlement allows her. She knows how he will react to what

she has done, how it deeply it will affect him. Surely, there is

something else she could have done. Couldn’t she simply have

looked guilty when the door opened? What Sarah does tells us

more, as I have suggested, about what she wants to do than what

she needs to do. She oversteps her entitlements. Chuck’s dim

realization that she has, in the closet and elsewhere (in her

purple lingerie) is what causes Chuck to ask her what he asks--

even in a situation where he is not entitled to ask. Say that

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Sarah’s overstepping of her entitlements (understandable though

they are) has lead to Chuck’s overstepping of his. She has made

her answer to his question so urgent for him that his asking is

understandable. Put another way: if Sarah is entitled to do to

Chuck what she does in the closet and in his bedroom, it is her

feelings for Chuck that supply the entitlement. If so, then

Chuck seems to be entitled to ask if there are really such

feelings. Of course, he should not ask now, while Sarah is

drugged. --But, then again, so is he. His question, and not

just her answer to his question, we may also take to be spoken by

the drug. His interest in the truth of her feelings is truthful.

They are both under the influence.

So, there are problems with Chuck’s entitlement to ask what he

asks. That is, given what he believes about the drug and Sarah’s

being under its influence, he should not believe himself to be

entitled to ask. But since Sarah is able to resist the drug--and

even though Chuck does not know that--does that mean he is

entitled to ask after all? She can give an honest answer. It is

not clear that she can plausibly deny that Chuck is really

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entitled to ask. Given what he believes about the drug and about

her, he should not believe he is entitled to ask--but we know his

first belief is false, so what about the second? Is it false

too? Is Chuck entitled to ask? If we think he is, then Sarah

does lie to Chuck. If we think he is not, then Sarah does not

lie to Chuck. My point is not to work out finally whether to say

that Sarah lies or does not lie. Rather, my point is to

underscore the bizarre complexity of the situation the two of

them are in. The human heart is an organ of mazes. Add in cover

stories and supply closets and bedrooms and purple lingerie and

truth serum, and its mazes become all but impassable.

The next day, Chuck visits Sarah at the Wienerlicious. He tells

her that nearly dying made him aware of the things he has not

done, things he has not said. He tells her that the first thing

on the list was this--and he steps toward her. She looks at him

expectantly. But he tells her they have to break up.

Chuck: We need to break up.

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Sarah: What?

Chuck: You know, you know, like fake break up our pretend

relationship. [Sarah sighs, looks away and then back at

Chuck] I just can’t do this anymore, you know?

The longer we go, the longer we keep trying to fool people

into believing that we are a real couple...The person I keep

fooling the most is me. [Sarah looks into his eyes and is

silent; Chuck seems to search for more words, then quickly

leaves]

This is what the supply closet has bred. Chuck knows that his

feelings for Sarah are real. Because they are, and because of

the nature of his and Sarah’s pretense (and the nature of hers,

though he does not know this), his feelings are constantly being

encouraged and discouraged, led forcibly from supply closet to

bedroom, called forth and then sent away. He has to pretend

something is real that he wants to believe is real--and so he

keeps coming to believe that it is. He is, was, is fooling

himself. But he thinks she has told him the truth: she is not

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for him. They have no future. Nothing is happening under their

covers.

Again, when Casey calls to ask about what she and Chuck said to

each other, he asks if she has compromised herself. That word

has been floating around in various conversations. (It has been

in play since the pilot--at the very beginning, when Chuck and

Morgan attempt to escape from the birthday party, they hear Ellie

approaching. Morgan whispers that they have been compromised.)

Sarah told Chuck on their bedroom mission that he would

compromise their cover if he slept on the floor. Chuck replied

that he felt compromised. The meaning of the term in play here

is, roughly, to cause to become vulnerable or less effective. Casey and

Sarah use the term primarily in relation to a lessening of

effectiveness; Chuck uses it primarily in relation to becoming

vulnerable. The deep problem for Sarah is that it means something

in Chuck’s sense for her too. She has been compromised, but her

job and her inexpressiveness make her unable to do anything about

it.

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What was Sarah expecting when Chuck drew close to her, to tell

her that they needed to break up? The answer is connected to the

bedroom mission. She hoped there that Chuck would choose her and

their pretense together over a possible reality with Lou. Just

so, in the Wienerlicious, she hopes that Chuck will still choose

her and their pretense together--still choose it though it has

been almost completely darkened by her ‘confession’ that nothing

is happening between them. Chuck lit candles and played music as

favors of his hope. She looks at him expectantly after breaking

his heart because she wants that heart. She did not want to

break it. Perhaps she can only hold it through veils of

pretense--but she wants to hold it.

Chuck turns in another direction. He walks to Lou’s deli, goes

in and begins to talk to her. They sit down and have coffee

together, laughing. Sarah watches this, again from in front of

the Wienerlicious. She wants to sit where Lou is sitting.

Instead, she turns and retreats inside.

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Chapter 8 (S02E03) A Really Real Relationship?

A friend is Janus-faced: he looks to the past and the future. He is the child of all my

foregoing hours, the prophet of those to come, and the harbinger of a greater friend. –

Emerson

Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and

slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance…till we

come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is,

and no mistake.

--Thoreau

I want to begin this chapter with a few comments about Bryce

Larkin. He comes to Burbank three times. Whatever the

explanation or the reason for each visit, he plans each time to

leave Burbank with Sarah. Three times he leaves without her.

Bryce loves Sarah. He wants to believe that she loves him. But

as early as his first visit, he begins to have doubts. He picks

up on something in Sarah’s responses to Chuck. She has eyes for

Chuck and not for him. He is Bryce Larkin, of course: he is

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handsome, magnetic, and dangerous. He can stir any woman,

especially one who has a past with him. We see this when he

kisses her. But Sarah pulls away from him. Later, when talking

to Chuck, she realizes that Chuck witnessed the kiss. Sarah says

that Bryce kissed her. That is true. She kissed him back--but

that was in the heat of the moment. She came back to her senses.

Bryce’s attractiveness for Sarah at this point is much like Lou’s

attractiveness for Chuck.

Bryce represents a romantic relationship free from the

complications, frustrations and sufferings of her relationship

with Chuck. She has been there and done Bryce: he would be

easy, familiar. He would not constantly issue invitations to her

to change. He still takes her to be the woman he knew when they

were together--he is happy for her to remain that woman. While

she would not be able to give herself completely to Bryce as she

dreams of giving herself to Chuck, she would not have to continue

the painful self-refusals that staying with Chuck requires, the

alarming self-revelations he causes.

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Bryce’s first appearance in Burbank is as counterpoint to Lou.35

He follows her complication of Chuck’s life, and relationship to

Sarah, by complicating Sarah’s life, and relationship to Chuck.

And he does complicate things. At the end of S01E10, Sarah is

faced with the choice between Bryce and Chuck. Chuck is calling

on her cell; Bryce is calling on the landline of her room. The

episode ends with Sarah dithering between them, unsure what to

do. Early in S01E11, Chuck fears Sarah has gone with Bryce. She

has not shown up for work at the Wienerlicious. We find out that

she is, uncharacteristically, still in bed. She has had a hard

night. The decision between Chuck and Bryce has been made in

Chuck’s favor, but Chuck wins by a slim margin. Of course, it is

important to remember when considering the margin that Bryce’s

appearance has served to deflect attention from the true cause of

the chill in her responses to Chuck, from the true cause of her

almost leaving Burbank. Chuck takes the chill to be the result

of Sarah’s response to Bryce, to the reawakening of old feelings

for her partner. He fully expects her to choose Bryce. But

although Bryce does complicate things, he is not the true cause,

the true problem. The true problem is that Sarah kissed Chuck

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(S01E09). That kiss shatters her meta-pretense. It exposes her

real feelings for Chuck, and does so after she had fought against

the effects of truth serum to keep the meta-pretense in place.

Sarah’s professional mask has slipped. Chuck has caught his

first sure glimpse of her. She has no plausible deniability for

what she has done. She is angry with herself personally and

professionally--she knows better. Now Chuck does too.

So her struggle to decide between Chuck and Bryce is not a simple

vying of her feelings for one with her feelings for another. It

is a struggle between coping with her self-revelation and staying

with Chuck versus freeing herself of all this soul-burdening

complication by leaving with Bryce. But Sarah chooses the burden

of staying with Chuck. She will have to work out how to respond

to the kiss. She is not giving up on (what she could have with)

Chuck.

The third and last time Bryce will come to Burbank, Chuck will be

free of the Intersect. Sarah can be, if she chooses, free of

Chuck. She and Bryce will go back to D.C. to work together

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there. That is what Sarah at first plans to do: she has her

orders. Chuck learns of her plan only after he asks her to go on

a vacation with him, to help him spend the money the government

has paid him for his work with Sarah and Casey. But Sarah

eventually realizes she cannot leave. She would rather quit to

be with Chuck. Bryce learns this and has to come to grips

finally with the fact that Sarah is truly in love with Chuck.

But Chuck does not find out that Sarah has chosen him over Bryce

until it is too late to act on the knowledge. He has to download

the Intersect again, and put himself and Sarah back into the cage

of handler/asset that they have paced in for two years.

Bryce’s second visit to Burbank sees him leave empty-handed too.

He cannot win against Chuck. Chuck’s longtime conviction that

Bryce is the better man gets reversed. It is Bryce who becomes

convicted--although it is not exactly a surprise to Bryce (he

knows Chuck too, is his friend)--that Chuck is the better man.

In fact, it turns out that Bryce has never won a woman from

Chuck. Jill, Chuck’s Stanford girlfriend, did not actually leave

Chuck for Bryce. She pretended to under orders (she became a

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Fulcrum agent in college) but she never loved Bryce, never slept

with him. She left Chuck against her will. She loved him. For

all of Bryce’s glamorous, sexy mystery, Chuck turns out to be the

keeper. Bryce is not in town long before he realizes he is no

longer a serious rival for Sarah’s affections. Her affections

are firmly anchored to Chuck.

Chuck and Sarah begin Season 2 by going on a date—a real date.

The NSA has created a new Intersect and it looks like Chuck is

going to become obsolete--the sooner-rather-than-later fate of

all technologies. Beckman discharges him from service. Chuck

knows that Sarah is likely to leave soon, and he asks her out.

She knows it is imprudent to accept, given that she remains a CIA

agent, but she cannot help herself. She agrees. Meanwhile,

Beckman has ordered Casey to kill Chuck. They cannot have him

running around Burbank with a head full of state secrets. Casey

is reluctant, but accepts the order.

Chuck and Sarah’s date starts well and then goes sideways.

Despite that, Sarah agrees to go out with Chuck a second time.

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That date never happens. Casey enters Chuck’s apartment as Chuck

prepares dinner for Sarah. He sneaks toward Chuck, gun drawn.

At the moment when he has to decide whether he will kill Chuck or

not, there is a knock on the door. Sarah is there. She breaks

the news to Chuck that there will be no date. The new Intersect

has proven to be a trap. It has exploded, killing Langston

Graham and others. Chuck is still the (one and only) Intersect.

She is again his handler. He is again only her asset. Casey

steals back out of the apartment.

But the date has opened up new territory for Chuck and Sarah.

Each of them has gotten a chance to think about a future together

in a serious way. Each wants that future. Sarah allows Chuck to

see that she wants it. And, although they revert to being only

Cover Together, they have a genuine sense that they have a future

as Really Together, if only Chuck can be freed of the Intersect.

Each of them cherishes the thought of that future. Sarah tells

Chuck twice (once each in different episodes, the second time

with an unmistakable inflection) that he can do anything he

wants, and that when he is free of the Intersect, he can have

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everything he has dreamt of. She plainly means that he can have

her. So she has pledged herself to him--conditionally. Neither

of them wants that condition; they are just stuck with it. They

have to free Chuck of the Intersect. Even as conditional,

however, the pledge changes the tonality of their relationship.

Although much continues as before, there is a greater openness

between them, a more easy intimacy.

This is what Bryce first picks up on when he returns. The

difficulty is that although Sarah knows that Bryce is no rival

for her affections (and Bryce comes to know it, too), Chuck does

not know it. For him, having Bryce in town is bad enough.

Finding that Bryce is staying with Sarah is worse. But finding

that the new mission requires he be a waiter while they pretend

to be an overly amorous married couple is the worst.

Chuck’s jealousy predictably leads him to screw up the mission

and to get himself taken captive by a Fulcrum agent, the elfin

agent I mentioned briefly in the Intersect chapter. Although the

microchip the mission targets remains in the hands of the man who

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is decrypting it for Fulcrum, Sarah chooses to save Chuck rather

than completing the mission. She runs after Chuck and his

captor, leaving Bryce to try to get the chip (but the man gets

away with it). An explosion injures Sarah after she has rescued

Chuck; she has a concussion and has to spend some time in the

hospital. Bryce lingers around her room. Devon, alerted to

Bryce’s presence by Ellie (Ellie does not realize who he is,

other than that he is Sarah’s old boyfriend), talks to Bryce

while treating a cut on Bryce’s face. He explains to Bryce that

Sarah loves Chuck.

After talking with Sarah, Chuck’s jealousy cools. She tells

him--in her typical encryption--that he is not going to always

come in second to Bryce. The new tonality of their relationship

allows Chuck this time rightly to decrypt what she has said.

Later, after Chuck has established contact with the microchip

man, Bryce and Casey and Chuck meet the man at Union Station,

planning to trade him immunity from charges and a few million

dollars for the chip. (The chip contains, among other valuable

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secrets, the actual identities of Sarah and Casey and Bryce, and

it identifies Chuck as the Intersect.) Just as the trade is

about to be made, the elfin Fulcrum agent appears. She grabs

Chuck and holds him before her as a shield, gun to his head.

This moment is a replay of a scene that opens the episode. Sarah

and Bryce are in Columbia in 2005. They are posing as a married

couple, the Andersons. (They have adopted the same cover for the

mission in this episode. Chuck has to watch as Bryce slips a ring

on Sarah’s finger and calls her “Mrs. Anderson”.) During that

2005 mission, Bryce was grabbed by an enemy agent and held just

as the Fulcrum agent is holding Chuck. Bryce encouraged Sarah to

shoot the man holding him despite the fact that she might have

killed him had she missed. She took the shot and did not miss.

Chuck has a gun to his head. Bryce realizes that Sarah has

arrived on the scene. He expects her to take the shot and makes

it clear to her that he does. But when the moment comes to do

it, she cannot pull the trigger. She cannot risk Chuck’s life

for the mission. She cannot risk Chuck’s life in that way even

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to save him. Luckily, Casey shows up in time to shoot the

Fulcrum agent.

Bryce confronts Chuck about the situation before he leaves. He

explains to Chuck that Sarah’s feelings for him are going to get

someone--likely her--killed. She cannot do her job and hesitate

as she did. He asks Chuck what he is going to do about it.

Chuck answers that he does not know. Bryce tells Chuck that he

trusts him to do the right thing. Chuck always does the right

thing. That is why Bryce sent him the Intersect.

Sarah acknowledges to Casey that she hesitated. She let her

guard down momentarily and that was a mistake. But she can

protect Chuck. Casey does not answer her directly. He only asks

that she hand him a chamois cloth; he is cleaning his gun. But

his failure to respond to what she said speaks his disapproval.

She leaves to talk to Chuck.

Chuck is in a brown study outside his apartment. He sits on the

edge of the fountain. Sarah joins him after she stops to take a

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breath, steeling herself. They are supposed to have dinner with

Ellie and Devon. Each tries to start talking at the same time.

Each has something that needs to be said before they enter the

apartment. Chuck plunges in first:

Chuck: Look, we both know how I feel about you, so I am

just going to shoot straight. Sarah, you’re the greatest

thing that’s ever happened to me. You’re beautiful, you’re

smart, you laugh at all my stupid jokes, and you have this

horrible habit of constantly saving my life. [Sarah laughs]

The truth is, you’re everything that I thought I ever wanted

and more. The last few days, all I can think about is our

future together, about what it’s going to finally be like

once I get the Intersect out of my head, how we’ll finally

be together for real--no fake relationships, no covers, no

lies. [Sarah smiles at him; Chuck pauses, gathering

himself] But the more I think about it, the more I realize

that you and I can never have a future together. I fooled

myself into thinking that we could, but the truth is, we

can’t. Because even if we had a real relationship, it would

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never really be real. I’d still never know anything about

you--your real name, your hometown, your first love,

anything. And I want more than that. I want to be able to

call you at the end of a bad day and tell you about some

funny thing that Morgan did and not find out that I can’t

because you’re off...somewhere in Paraguay quelling a

revolution with a fork. I’m a normal guy...who wants a

normal life. And as amazing as you are, Sarah Walker, we

both know that...you will never be normal.

Sarah: [painfully] You know, someday, when the Intersect is

out of your head, and you have the life that you always

wanted, you’ll forget all about me.

Chuck: [obviously heartsick] I seriously doubt that.

[Sarah reaches out and touches him]

Sarah: Come on. We better get inside. They’re waiting for

us.

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[She stands first, moves in front of Chuck; her eyes well

with tears; Chuck stands behind her, looking at her; he

joins her and they enter the apartment]

In a show of painful moments between Chuck and Sarah, this is one

of the worst. (It is one of the worst “It’s not you, it’s me”

speeches of all time.) It ruins the new easy intimacy between

them. But it does much more than that. Chuck says what he says

to Sarah in response to what Bryce has told him. She can only do

her job, keep herself safe, if the future she so desperately

wants with him--the future for the sake of which she could not

pull the trigger--is taken from her. And so Chuck takes it from

her. He does so in a way that maximizes its pain. He does not

do it deliberately. Rather, as he tries to come up with a story

she will find plausible, he speaks out his own worst fears and

hers. He wants the future she wants; he wants it just as badly.

But he does not know how that future will go. If he is free of

the Intersect, he is free--but free to be what? Sarah might then

really become his girlfriend. She would, however, still be a

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spy. How would their life together work? Sarah has the same

worries. If she did not, she might have protested. Perhaps she

was preparing to say the same sort of thing. She was steeling

herself to say something, at any rate, that would have had the

same consequence. She would have had to find a way to destroy

any present hope of a future with Chuck. Her guard has to go back

up.

Chuck’s reason for saying these things is telegraphed in his

initial remarks. He is going to shoot straight. He pauses for a

split second between ‘shoot’ and ‘straight’. It is Sarah’s

failure to shoot that he is addressing. What he says to Sarah,

despite the fact that it secures what she wants too, at least in

one way, outlines her own nightmare about herself: that she has

become a woman for whom a normal life--a husband, children, a

home--is an impossibility; that the man she wants cannot want

her, not finally, not when a future together comes to seem more

real. Her future is in places like Paraguay. She will not wear

a ring. She will hold a weapon. She will not put children to

bed. She will quell revolutions. Chuck’s words also give us the

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color of his fears: that he will never merit her; that his life

will always be too small, too limited, to hold her; that he will

become tiresome to her, a burden, slaving at the Buy More while

she saves the free world.

When Sarah attempts to comfort him and herself by claiming that

once he has a normal life, he will forget her, we get a look into

the speech she might have made if Chuck had not plunged in first.

She might have told him that his feelings for her were temporary

or unreal, brought on by the danger and chaos of his situation.

That the feelings were not substantial, not lasting. That when

he found a real love, what he felt for her would evaporate;

vanish like a vapor in the sun.

But perhaps the most painful part of what Chuck says, despite the

pain of everything else, is his comment that even if they had a

real relationship, it would never really be real. The wording

dizzies, doubling down as it does on ‘real’. Up until recently,

they have had a fake relationship. Recently, although their

current relationship is still fake in a way, they have both been

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waiting expectantly for the day when the fake could become real.

Chuck says that that cannot happen. It cannot happen because

Sarah will remain a spy. Worse, it cannot happen because she

cannot really share herself with him. Despite her pledge of a

future with him, he still knows nothing about her. She has not

shown any tendency to open up. Her past is a blank. And so

beyond their worries about how their future would go, there is

the worry about whether there really can be a them to face that

future. Chuck must know the woman he loves. He does not know

Sarah.

Sarah reaches out to touch him because she understands why he is

saying this. His comment about shooting straight makes that

apparent to her. But even though she understands why he is

saying it, she cannot discount what he says. What he says is

true: it is truer, perhaps, than he intended. He wanted her to

stop believing in a future with him. Despite what he says,

despite the fears he has, he still wants to believe in a future

with her. But, how can he, if she has stopped believing? For

them both to have a future, she has to stop believing in a future

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for them together--at least that is what Chuck believes. She has

to prepare for Chuck to forget her--that seems to be what she

believes. He will have to live with being unable to do that,

with her being unforgettable.

‘Real’, remember, is a dimension word. When Chuck talks of a

really real relationship, he is relating dimension to dimension.

‘Real relationship’ contrasts of course with the fake, the cover

relationship they have been maintaining. But ‘really real

relationship’ contrasts a relationship in which the lovers are

open each to the other, in which neither keeps secrets, in which

each knows and is known by the other. Chuck fears that even if

he and Sarah are Really Together, they will not be Really Really

Together—that they will be lovers but not open to each other,

known to each other. To borrow a pair of images from Thoreau,

Chuck fears that even if he and Sarah manage a relationship that

registers, along one dimension, on a Realometer, it will fail to

register along another—or will register only on a Nilometer.36

Chuck wants a relationship that is real along both dimensions,

that registers on the Realometer, no matter which way it is

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turned. He wants nothing that registers on a Nilometer: he

craves only reality. But he will come to see that knowing the

details of Sarah’s past is not as crucial to a really real

relationship as he thinks: what matters is her presence, her

present. Today is the only really real day.

The next episode of Season 2 incarnates the issues of this

conversation. Chuck and Sarah end up interacting with an old

friend of Sarah’s from high school, Heather. Heather and her

husband happen to be in the Buy More when Heather recognizes

Sarah. Recognizes her--in the sense that she knows she knows

Sarah. But she cannot immediately place her. Heather follows

Sarah to the Orange Orange and tells Sarah that she knows her.

Finally, it clicks: Sarah is Jenny Burton. She and Heather were

in high school together in San Diego. Chuck overhears their

conversation, first by watching them by means of a security

camera in the Orange Orange, and then by entering the shop.

Sarah is pleased neither that Heather is in the shop nor that

Chuck has wedged himself into the conversation. But when Chuck

is introduced to Heather’s husband, he flashes. The husband is

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an engineer working on a top-secret super bomber. There is

reason to be suspicious of him.

Chuck and Sarah go to dinner with Heather and her husband, and

then end up going to Sarah’s high school reunion. It turns out

that Heather’s husband is going to sell secrets, so as to make

enough money to keep his wife in the style she demands. But it

turns out that the spy who is directing the operation, who is

getting the secrets from him, is his wife. She is a freelance

spy. When Sarah realizes that Heather is involved in the plot to

steal the secrets, she hunts her down in the school locker room

and eventually overcomes her in a long, brutal fight, much of

which takes place in a watery locker room. Sarah re-enters the

gym, soaked and bloody, just as she is announced as reunion

queen. The whole episode recalls both Grosse Pointe Blank abortive

reunion and Buffy’s Prom.

All in a rush, Chuck and Sarah confront the issues raised in

their conversation outside his apartment. Sarah’s resolute,

forbidding secrecy about her past, is underscored by her

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frustration and then anger with Chuck for pushing to know more

about her high school years. She takes the pencil from him that

he was going to use to jot down a few facts--ostensibly as

preparation for dinner with Heather and her husband--and she

throws it through the framed picture of the two of them that sits

on the desk in her apartment.

Sarah’s past shames her. She was a wallflower, awkward,

unflatteringly dressed. Her hair was cheaply cut and her teeth

in braces. She was overlooked and undervalued. It is hard to

believe that she could have become the super spy she becomes.

Hers is a strange variant of the ugly duckling-to-beautiful swan

story, a harmless ugly duckling-to-deadly beautiful swan story.

The CIA was Sarah’s finishing school. But although her shame

encompasses these surprising (given who Sarah is now) but not too

unusual facts, it does not center on them. It centers on her

father. A confidence man raised her but that did not raise her

confidence. What seemed rakish and adventuresome when she was

younger turned into something to be denied, hidden, as she got

older. It was a life of lying and pretending, a life of

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deception and manipulation, a life of contingency plans and

constant self-monitoring and self-surveillance. Checking behind

you becomes as important as looking ahead. The bit of her high

school life Sarah dwells on is the day her father was arrested.

As it turns out, that event shortly predates her induction into

the CIA. In fact, it is Langston Graham, her CIA boss, who is

responsible for both. Graham has her father arrested. He has

conned some powerful, dangerous people. Jailing him is the best

way of protecting him. Graham explains this to Sarah when he

finds her in the woods, as she digs up a box of money that her

father had buried--their contingency plan against his being taken

or jailed. Graham tells Sarah that he wants to do for her what

he did for her father. She takes this to mean that he wants to

jail her, and she extends her hands to him, wrists up for

cuffing--a gesture of surrender. He does not want her

surrender--he wants her for the CIA.

Sarah’s refusal to share her past with Chuck, like many of her

withholdings, is both professionally and personally motivated.

It is professional. She cannot share herself with her asset.

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She told Chuck very early on that he should trust her, not

believe her. Chuck will come to understand those words--or at

least to understand them better, soon. But it is also personal.

It is about the shame of her past. She does not want Chuck to

know how strange her past was or how much pain she still feels

about it. Chuck, intuitive as he is, and especially as observant

of her as he is, knows something like this is true. He knows she

is not just keeping secrets. She is protecting herself. In the

pilot episode, Casey described himself as someone who breaks

things; he does not fix them. Chuck is the opposite: he fixes

things; he does not or tries not to break them. Chuck wants to

help Sarah. She does not want to admit needing his help.

The other thing that Chuck and Sarah face in this episode is the

dismaying reality of Heather and her husband. They turn out to

be exactly what Chuck fears he and Sarah would turn out to be,

mismatched. Sarah knows this fear too. Heather may have had

romantic feelings for her husband at first, but those feelings,

whatever they were, quickly decayed into contempt. Soon, he

represented little but a paycheck; soon that paycheck represented

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too little. Her husband remains in love with her. She has

betrayed that love again and again. She is Paraguay--he is Buy

More. Although neither Sarah nor Chuck talks to the other about

what Heather and her husband represent to them, each sees the

representation. Each has to gauge the representation: is Sarah

Heather? Is Chuck Heather’s husband? How can they avoid what

they see played out before them in distressing detail?

At one point, Heather wonders aloud how Sarah could have thought

she was seriously in love with her husband. The answer: because

Sarah is in love with Chuck. Why would she take to be impossible

what is actual in her own life? Heather’s husband, failing to

see just how similar he and Chuck are in certain ways (he takes

Chuck to be a battle-hardened agent, someone like Casey), talks

about how unlikely it is that Heather married him. Chuck looks

at Sarah at that moment--in a point of view shot--and knows how

luck he is to have her near him. He tells Heather’s husband that

sometimes the nerd gets the girl. Chuck is not just trying to

encourage himself, or Heather’s husband; he says what he says

because of what he knows about the woman he is looking at and

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thinking of as he speaks. She is not Heather. He may know next

to nothing about her past--although he knows more now than he

did--but that does not mean that he does not know her. What he

said before was a mistake. Chuck may not enjoy the presence of

Sarah’s past; he may not be certain of the presence of her

future; but he knows the presence of her present. He can trust

her, even if he has very little in the way of accumulated facts

about her past to believe about her.

Later, after the mission has ended, Chuck goes to see Sarah. He

brings her a raw burger for her blackened eye. He also brought

one cooked, prepared as she likes it--with extra pickles. She

tells him that she will answer one question about her past; she

owes him that much. Chuck passes on her past. He does not ask

any question. He tells her that he knows her, even if she thinks

he does not, even if at times he forgets he does. He knows she

is a girl he wants to share a burger with. They both relax--and

find their way back to a brief moment of the easier intimacy that

they surrendered before. Chuck comments that sharing the burger

is going to be messy. He knows her--he knows how she likes her

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pizza, her sushi, and her burgers. He knows that he can trust

her, even if he does not have a lot to believe, to know about

her. He knows enough. Can they have a real relationship that is

really real? Chuck now believes they can--and, anyway, it is no

better to be safe than sorry.

Chapter 9 (S03E01-10) The Slough of Despond

My heart is smitten, and withered like grass. --Psalms 102:5

Now I saw in my dream that, just as they had ended this talk, they drew near to a very

miry slough that was in the midst of the plain; and they being heedless, did both fall

suddenly into the bog. The name of the slough was "Despond." Here, therefore, they

wallowed for a time, being grievously bedaubed with the dirt.... --Pilgrim’s Progress

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Season 3 opens with a series of 10 episodes that takes Chuck and

Sarah deep into a mire, deep into despondency. They are still in

love with each other. Painfully so. But events have taken place

between the end of Season 2 and the beginning of Season 3 that

have disrupted their relationship. Misunderstandings, wounded

pride, unexpected hurts, unmerited disappointments, and unwanted

changes--all contribute to the mess. Two basic problems

structure the episodes, one from the past (and told in

flashback), the other occurring across the episodes. The one

from the past is Chuck’s refusal to run away with Sarah when she

has arranged for them to run. The other is Chuck’s becoming a

spy. The two basic problems are intertwined. Sarah asks Chuck

to run away after she finds out that the government wants to

train him to be a spy. The government forces her hand. She does

not want Chuck to become a spy. She fears that if he does, it

will require him to change in ways that would destroy him and

what she most values in him: his sweetness, his innocence, his

trust, his generous-mindedness. So she makes a play, a play to

save him and to save the emerging version of herself. They need

to run.

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When Sarah shows up at the rendezvous, a train station in Prague,

ready to run away with Chuck, she has revealed herself as fully

as she ever has, she reveals who she is and reveals her heart’s

desire. As is typical, recognition by others exacts the cost of

self-recognition. (Much of what happens with Sarah in her

relationship with Chuck is captured in that one sentence.) She

acknowledges herself and her feelings; she owns them. She stands

on the platform, openly committed to Chuck and to a future with

him. That makes his refusal of her so awful. The woman who has

avoided recognition at all costs wants to be recognized and is

recognized. Recognized, and refused. The man who taught her the

dream of a normal life, and who is at the center of her dream,

destroys it.

Throughout the first two seasons, Chuck has wanted the Intersect

out of his head. He has wanted Sarah and wanted a normal life

with her. But even as he became more clear about all that and

more confident of Sarah’s feelings for him, he never got much

clearer about himself and what he, Chuck, was going to do in that

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normal life. He never got clear about himself professionally.

At the end of Season 2, finally free of the Intersect with

Orion’s (his father’s) help, he can see no further ahead than a

dance with Sarah at Ellie’s wedding reception and a possible

vacation with Sarah afterwards. General Beckman offers him a job

as an analyst, but he is so freshly excited to be Intersect-free

and to have a chance to be with Sarah, that the offer has no

immediate appeal. He turns Beckman down.

But when Chuck downloads Intersect 2.0 and begins to understand

what it does, he begins to think ahead to what he might do, what

he might be professionally. He not only feels that the new

Intersect obliges him to become a spy, he begins to want to

become one. For all of Chuck’s desire to get free of the

Intersect and be normal, it is clear during the first two seasons

that being a spy is not exactly a career choice forced on Chuck

from the outside. His attempted escape with Morgan from his

birthday party--done in spy mode--shows that spy craft imprints

Chuck’s imagination. His father has turned out to be a spy.

And, for all his blunders and gaffes, the truth is--as Sarah has

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seen all along and as Casey comes reluctantly to admit--Chuck has

gifts for spy craft—gifts other than the Intersect. While it

would be too strong to say that Chuck knows he wants to be a spy,

and still a bit too strong to say he wants to be a spy without

knowing it, he has been moving in this direction--maybe not in a

straight line, but steadily. The combination of his successes

and his admiration of Sarah and Casey and of what they do has

worked on him. And he was already primed. As Sarah says to

Chuck in S01E12, spying is the job Chuck never asked for--and the

job he was supposed to have. Sarah means that in a limited way,

of course; she means that he was supposed to be a spy in the way

that he is in their first year together. When Chuck gets the

chance to become a spy in full, Sarah balks. She knows what that

will mean.

When Sarah asks him to run away with her, he accepts--although

after a noteworthy half-beat of hesitancy: he has not chosen the

spy life yet, but he is in the process of choosing it. For them

to run successfully, Sarah has to make plans, purchase new

identities, and so on. Since that will take time, she tells

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Chuck to go ahead to Prague and begin his spy training. She will

meet him at the train station there in three weeks. Those three

weeks, unavoidable, will have severe consequences.

When Chuck arrives at the train station to meet Sarah, he looks

different. He is wearing a long, dark coat. He is not wearing

his tennis shoes, but rather black shoes that look very much like

the ones Bryce wore. In fact, he looks more like Bryce than like

Chuck. His new look is unmistakable. Chuck has embraced the spy

life, has chosen to be a spy. When Sarah kisses him

passionately, he is unresponsive--or, better, he chokes back his

response to her, swallows it. He does not return her embrace.

Their roles have reversed. She stands before him in brightly

lit, fully expressed desire--for him, for their life together.

He steps into shadow. He knows what he is giving up. We, as

viewers, knowing Chuck, also know how immensely difficult and

costly this step must be.

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Why does he do this, why does he do this to them, why does he do

it to himself, why does he do it to her? He rejects the woman he

loves and has long longed for. He chooses what he kept claiming

he did not want (a spy life) over what he kept claiming he did

want (Sarah, and a life with her)? Why?

A difficult question. Chuck’s motivations have become opaque,

not just to Sarah but also to himself. One thing is clear: his

feelings for Sarah remain what they were. He wants them to be

Really Together. But he now envisions a new future for himself

and so for them. Sarah has been cherishing a version of Chuck’s

old vision for their future, a vision of a simple life, a real

life, even if they must pay the price of running to have it. (Of

course, Sarah has only known a running life, so she has little

sense of how abnormal that life would seem to Chuck.) She knows

the costs the spy life has had for her. She does not want Chuck

to pay those costs. And if he does, that may mean that the spy

life will have one final, bankrupting cost for Sarah: it will

take Chuck from her by destroying who he is.

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Earlier, I described Chuck as an indeterminacy in an

indeterminacy. Chuck now believes that there is something

determinate he can become, wants to become, ought to become--a

spy. At one level, Chuck chooses to become a spy because he

wants to become something in particular, because he has wanted to

escape from indeterminacy since events at Stanford rendered him

an indeterminacy. Downloading 2.0 suddenly gives him the chance

to be something in particular. In fact, it gives him the chance

to be quite a something in particular. Previously, he felt he

could only be a spy more or less. (When Devon earlier said in

amazement that Chuck was a spy, Chuck’s response is: “More or

less”.) He could only be a spy in a limited way. Now, because of

the Intersect 2.0, he can be a spy more, not less, even a super

spy. At last he would be doing something he was good at and

something that mattered. Even more, it is evident that Chuck has

always been anxious about the fact that he and Sarah seem so

unequally yoked--she all silent competence, he all talky

incompetence. He wants to be worthy of her, to be her equal. --

Think of this as an account of Chuck’s personal inclination to

become a spy.

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But more important ultimately is Chuck’s conviction that becoming

a spy is his duty. He may not have asked for this life, for the

Intersect, but he did at least choose to download 2.0. He did it

under duress, but he did it. The controller may chafe but he is

willing to play. He did not download it involuntarily, as he did

the first time. Once he has 2.0 and realizes the sort of weapon

it makes him, Chuck finds that his own character demands that he

not keep the Intersect under his hat, run away with it and leave

the world to fend for itself. Duty calls. Without this part of

the story of Chuck’s motivations, it is hard to imagine him

choosing against Sarah and for spying. Impossible, actually.

His personal inclinations do not bind Chuck in that way. He has

always been willing--and always is willing--to put Sarah ahead of

himself and his inclinations.

Chuck’s conviction that he is duty-bound to become a spy seems to

be carry-over from the conviction that caused him to download

2.0. Just before he decides to download 2.0, Chuck has a series

of flashbacks. He recalls asking why Bryce chose him for 1.0.

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He recalls Sarah’s comment to him that she knows he can do

anything, since she has seen him in action. He recalls Beckman

telling him that his country is calling, that it is time for him

to become a spy. He recalls Sarah’s question: “How many times

do you have to be a hero to realize you are that guy?” The

accumulated effect of the flashbacks is a conviction that he must

download 2.0, that he is that guy, the guy who does what he must

do. The guy who answers the call of duty. He accepts that he is

called to be a hero; he answers his country’s call; he endorses

and justifies Sarah’s faith in him.

With all that still on his mind, and with 2.0 in his mind, Chuck

makes a similar choice when asked to become a spy. Additionally,

during the three weeks he has been training, Beckman and other

officials have been stressing his duty, how important he is, how

much good he can do. That external reinforcement of his internal

conviction that it is his duty carries the day.

And it is really duty that motivates Chuck ultimately, not his

personal inclination--although the two largely line up with each

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other. We can say that Chuck has two sets of reasons to become a

spy, duty and personal inclination, each of which, in certain

circumstances, would be enough to motivate his decision. But it

is his duty that does motivate him here; later events will make

that clear. Here, as he does in many ways in Season 3, Chuck

steps into Sarah’s place. Like hers through the first two

seasons, Chuck’s actions become equivocal, subject to different

explanations, one professional, one personal. This is a

beautiful, subtle reversal of the structure of the first two

seasons.

Sarah enormously influences Chuck during the first two years. I

have talked about Chuck’s humility, present before he meets

Sarah. That humility was however unprofitably yoked to his self-

mistrust. Humility yoked to self-mistrust easily degenerates into

self-accusation, self-disparagement and pervasive feelings of

inferiority. Certainly, Chuck’s humility threatened to

degenerate in those ways--did degenerate in those ways

occasionally. Sarah’s example and her steady encouragement have

transfigured Chuck’s self-mistrust into self-trust, self-

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reliance--or very nearly so; he is making progress. That change

has resulted in Chuck’s humility being newly yoked to (an old but

newly forceful) high-mindedness. Downloading 2.0 and realizing

what it does has provoked Chuck’s high-mindedness. Chuck senses

the possibility of greatness in himself and he tries to prepare

for it. He is coming to see himself as Sarah sees him. High-

mindedness makes Chuck more susceptible to the call of duty.

Although Sarah did not create their circumstances, she did

(largely) create the very change in Chuck that in those

circumstances robs her of him.37

But all this is unclear to Sarah as she stands rejected on the

train platform. She fears that Chuck simply desires the spy life

more than he desires her. It is easy to sympathize with Sarah’s

confusion. First, Chuck has no clear understanding of his own

motivations. The presence of his personal inclinations alongside

his conviction of duty leaves him wondering which motivates him.

(He knows how easy it is to try to excuse a choice made out of

personal inclination by claiming that it was instead made out of

duty.) Chuck’s unclarity about his own motivation explains his

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disastrous botching of his speech to Sarah on the platform. He

botches it in a way that makes it sound as if he is motivated by

personal inclination. Second, in her surprise and confusion and

pain, it is hard for Sarah to see how Chuck could be acting

impersonally, from duty, instead of acting out of personal

inclination. The decision he makes is, after all, a deeply

personal one for Sarah. And, when a person acts from duty, the

act typically goes against personal inclinations. But in Chuck’s

case, even if he is acting against certain deep personal

inclinations (and he undoubtedly is), he is not acting against all

of his personal inclinations. (He is not acting on those

personal inclinations but he is not acting against them either.)

He has personal inclinations to do what he does from duty. But

then it is always easier to think that it is those inclinations

that are doing the motivating, not the duty. Sarah does seem to

think that.

We all have difficulty believing that duty itself can motivate.

We tend to think that only desire can do that. But a person can

choose against desire, and not merely for the sake of a

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different, stronger desire. Reason itself, and the capacity of

reason to recognize duty, can motivate a person. That is what

happens to Chuck. He does desire to be a spy, but he also

desires to run with Sarah. He chooses to be a spy because it is

his duty. Doing so means he chooses against his desire to run

with Sarah. And it means that he chooses in a way that leaves

his desire to be a spy playing no particular role in the choice.

That desire is a wheel that turns nothing in the Chuck mechanism.

Later, in S03E02, Sarah will begin to see that it was not

personal inclinations that motivated him and she will begin to

see that in fact he did choose against deep personal

inclinations, against his desire to be with her. Chuck manifests

this (although Sarah is not there the first time to hear it) in

his anguished cry to General Beckman when she decides to

terminate Chuck’s training.

Chuck: You don’t know what I gave up for this!

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Chuck’s training goes bust because he cannot control the

Intersect 2.0. He cannot flash on skills at will. Designed to

be downloaded by an accomplished spy, like Bryce Larkin, 2.0

requires that someone be coolly detached if it is to function at

will. Despite his desperate desire to succeed--and in fact

partly because of it--Chuck cannot remain detached enough for 2.0

to function smoothly. His emotions keep interfering. He gets

too anxious, too panicky, to be able to command the power of the

Intersect. So, after months of training fail to fix this,

Beckman pulls the plug. Chuck’s feelings are a liability that

cannot be overcome. She closes down the training and, in effect,

fires Chuck.

Of all the humiliations Chuck endures on the show, this one most

tests his fortitude, his ability to endure. He returns home,

lost. No Sarah. No job. No Sarah because he said no to Sarah.

Sarah will not return his calls. Chuck collapses into failure

and cheeseballs. He stops shaving. He stops going out. He

stops.

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Eventually, a cheeseball shortage sends Chuck out, and back to

the Buy More. He learns while he is there that Sarah is back.

Chuck goes to look for Sarah but finds Casey instead. The

wreckage of Chuck shocks Casey. He asks what happened between

Chuck and Sarah. Chuck says he messed up and that he has to fix

things. Casey starts calling Chuck “The Lemon”--a reference to

his failure as a spy and to his general failure.

Sarah knows that Chuck has failed. Her reaction to that failure

is layered. On top is a “serves-you-right” guilty pleasure in

his failure, a grim satisfaction that his choice has proven to be

the wrong one. But at a deeper level, she is relieved: She did

not want Chuck to lose himself and she feared that his becoming a

spy would require that. He would have to become willing to do

what spies are willing to do. She is gratified to find that his

nature has in fact remained open, that he is still the man he was

when she much earlier said of him

Sarah: He’s my asset. He’s my guy.

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She may no longer refer to him that way, but he remains that guy.

The apparent closing of his nature at the train station was

either mere appearance or something short-lived. Of course, his

open nature also painfully re-engages feelings she wants to bury

and forget. At a still deeper level, because she does in fact

remain in love with Chuck despite everything, she is saddened by

his failure. She did not want him to succeed; still, she sees

and feels the failure as if she were Chuck. Her love for him

gives her access to and reason to occupy Chuck’s point of view.

She feels his pain. She is grieved by his grief. And she can

also see and feel his self-recrimination and loss, his feeling

that all that has happened to him is his own fault or the result

of his own inadequacies.

But what of Sarah during the further weeks of Chuck’s training,

failure and cheeseball addiction? What she does immediately

after Chuck’s refusal is never fully explained. It seems that

she, predictably enough, soon returns to work, using the chill of

the spy life to ice her heart. Chuck hurt her deeply. Not only

is she a woman spurned by the man she loves, but also the whole

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metaphysics of hope that she had begun to live in collapses back

into her familiar metaphysics of despair. The man who was the

object and tutor of her hopes destroys them.

Chuck has made her angry, angry with a smoldering anger. Her

hurt causes her anger, but so too does her shame. She, the CIA’s

best spy--she, of all people, she who has seen past and seen

through every con, she has been conned. At least that is how she

feels. She has been enlisted in the ranks of suckers and marks,

the deceived. All her hurt and anger bubble over when Chuck

shows up, out of the blue, in the middle of her current mission

with Casey. Chuck uses the Intersect to pose as a Mariachi

guitar player. This of course puts what is happening to them now

into conversation with their first date. While he plays, Sarah

dances with her current asset. She dances provocatively. Her

dancing recalls her dancing with and for Chuck on their night out

together. She dances for Chuck again now, but in a very

different sense of ‘for’. She dances to display what he has

refused, given up, lost. She stares at him off and on for the

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entire time she dances. Chuck gets her point. Her provocations

are no longer for him as they once were. He is not their target

now, but only their witness. Sarah is so intent on making her

point to Chuck that she misses the assassin that she and Casey

are using her asset to trap.

During S03E02, Sarah tells Chuck it is time for him to train.

After they have changed and moved into the training area, Sarah

picks up a bo stick and hands one to Chuck. She tells him to

defend himself and she attacks him--under control but with a

palpable fury. He remains immobile. He does not defend himself.

She attacks again, still less under control and more furious.

Even so, he still does not defend himself. Maddened, Sarah asks

him why he won’t fight her, why he won’t flash. He answers: “I

don’t want to hurt you.” At this point Sarah loses control and

strikes Chuck savagely on his legs, sweeping them from underneath

him and causing him to drop hard on his back. “Don’t worry,

Chuck,” she then says, “You can’t.”

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This is one of several understandable small cruelties that Sarah

works on Chuck while they wallow in the slough. It is worth

dwelling on a bit longer. No doubt Chuck’s unwillingness to

train irks Sarah, especially since she has now been tasked with

his training. If he wants to be a spy so badly, he ought to be

willing to train. At the very least, he needs to learn to

control the Intersect’s flashing, so that he can be counted on in

the field. But far worse, Sarah has been tasked with bringing

about the very thing that she most fears--changing Chuck into the

kind of a person who succeeds in the spy life (at least as

success is judged by the CIA). General Beckman forces Sarah to

become the chief agent of the change in Chuck she does not want

to see. Not all her anger or her hurt can make her cause that

change without a severe cost to herself. But in the midst of it,

for Chuck to say that he does not want to hurt her after hurting

her so badly is unbearable. Her parting shot, her claim that

Chuck cannot hurt her, is aimed to hurt him. She does not deny

that he was able to hurt her. But now she has changed. She is

invulnerable to him, closed. The slow, painful opening of her

nature Chuck had invited and helped her to achieve no longer

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exists, or at least it no longer exists for him. Of course, the

whole scene underscores the fact that what Sarah says is false,

although she is not exactly lying to Chuck. She wants to be

closed to him, believes that she is closed to him or very nearly

is so. She still loves him all the same; she is as vulnerable as

ever. Maybe more so.

This is why she is so cold to Chuck for so long, and why she

permits herself various small cruelties. Carina is right when

she explains to Chuck in near-paradox: “Sarah is cold because

she loves you.” By having allowed Chuck to recognize her,

acknowledge her, and by having recognized and acknowledged

herself, Sarah is known to Chuck as she was not before. His

increased knowledge galls Sarah. She now has to go to far

greater lengths than she once did to avoid being revealed again

to Chuck. The woman Chuck loves and is loved by now finds it

even harder to conceal things from him, to prevent revelations

under the questions of his gaze. So she very nearly shuts down.

She does everything she can to be opaque to Chuck.

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She changes her makeup. Her lipstick is no longer red, but icy

pink. The color of her clothes cools. Her clothes become non-

chromatic, or nearly so: lots of black, white, grey, beige.

Gone are the saturated chromatic colors of the first two years of

their time together. The style of her clothes changes too. Gone

are the revealing clothes of the first two years. She replaces

them by clothes with, e.g., high necklines, often taut around

Sarah’s throat, or with long sleeves. She has covered herself

and changed her palette. Her change in dress warns Chuck away

and punishes him. It also suggests how much of an effort it is

taking to treat Chuck this way.

Sarah’s change in dress suggests that she has, almost all along

in the show, been dressing in part for Chuck. I do not mean that

for two years her clothes, etc., made her uncomfortable or

embarrassed. She liked the way she dressed; Sarah likes clothes

and knows that she looks good in them. She exercises careful

choice in what she wears. But she came to like the way she

dressed more because of Chuck’s reaction to it. She dressed

intending to be appreciated by and to have an effect on Chuck.

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(Think of the salmon dress.) But the change in her dress shows

just how keyed into Chuck’s reactions her choices had been--it

shows that by being itself so keyed into Chuck’s reactions to it.

She knows that at some nearly conscious level the change pains

him, that he experiences it as a refusal of him, a refusal of the

gaze that once delighted her. That refusal is punishment. Chuck

never seems to recognize the (significance of the) change of

dress per se. But it is clearly part of why he finds her so cold

and so distant, so intent on rebuffing him. It does punish him.

Non-chromatic camouflage obscures the woman he knew. He cannot

find her.

I have discussed three small ways that Sarah is cruel to Chuck:

the cruelty of her dance, the cruelty in the training session,

and the cruelty of the change of dress. Another small cruelty

occurs when he and Sarah are undercover, helping Carina steal a

weapon from an arms dealer. Carina has infiltrated the arms

dealer’s life and has become his fiancé. At their engagement

party, he and Carina are talking with Sarah and Chuck. The

groom-to-be says to Chuck (in reference to Sarah, standing beside

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Chuck), “Maybe you will be next!” Chuck answers in a way that

sounds perfunctory, part of the cover, but which surely expresses

his feelings for Sarah. “I would be the happiest guy on the

planet.” Sarah laughs artificially and then adds curtly: “He

really would!” Her implication is clear, at least to Chuck: I

could make him incredibly happy. I would have made him incredibly happy. He

squandered his chance.

Yet another small cruelty occurs when Sarah, finally willing to

talk briefly with Chuck about what happened in Prague,

redescribes what she did in the language she used a couple of

years earlier when she denied the significance of The Incident

(the time she kissed him in S01E09). She calls what she did in

Prague a mistake.38 She claims that she acted impulsively, in a

way that is out of character for her, and that she will not do it

again. (She said much the same in earlier). Her calling what she

did a mistake implies that she did not really come to recognize

Chuck, to know him. She only thought she had. She was wrong.

Her claim that she acted impulsively, out of character, implies

that if Chuck took and takes her presence on the platform to be

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revelatory of who she was and is, he is wrong. He did not and

does not recognize her after all. They are strangers.

Sarah’s anger eventually cools. Her hurt remains. And making

her hurt worse, she must be the agent who must make Chuck an

agent, must help him learn the cool detachment necessary for the

Intersect’s smooth functioning. She must close Chuck’s open

nature. She must teach him to mistrust others. After he has

broken her heart, she must denature his.

During all these events, Chuck wants to talk--above all to Sarah.

But he cannot find a moment to do so or Sarah will not talk to

him at any length when he does. He is being taught to control or

cancel out his feelings. He is being required to lie to others--

not just for their protection, but in order to control or

manipulate them. He is becoming hard, a deceiver. He wants to

be a spy, but he does not want this. (Chuck’s problems with the

CIA and with Intersect 2.0 are captured in that sentence.) The

changes are taking a toll on Chuck, but the changes are also

opening distances between himself and the people he most needs to

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talk to in order to understand the changes, own them, accept or

refuse them. The changes are also opening distances between

Chuck and himself. Lying destroys the self--and Chuck is

beginning to experience that destruction—his character shows

cracks and grows vague around the edges. But Sarah will not

really talk to him and he can’t really talk to Morgan or to

Ellie. He cannot tell anyone how he feels. Because he cannot

shape, consider and express how he is feeling, he becomes more

and more alienated from himself and from his feelings. His

inability to sort out how he feels looks to Sarah like his

achieving the ability to control or cancel his emotions, since he

seems to be expressing nothing, or not much. His deep confusion

makes him seem closed or seem to be closing.

While Chuck and Sarah are thus mired down, bedaubed with

recrimination and self-recrimination, regret and confusion,

despondent over the loss of each other, new people enter their

lives.

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Chuck meets Hannah while on his first solo spy mission. Shaw (I

will consider him later) has put Chuck aboard a plane to Paris,

and his mission is to steal an electronic key a from a Ring agent

who is on the flight. As he pursues that mission, he meets

Hannah. She is a gamine brunette (much like Lou), and she takes

to Chuck immediately, as he does to her. They spend much of the

flight talking, but it turns out, as they both admit when the

plane lands, that neither has been strictly truthful with the

other. Chuck claimed to work for company much more glamorous

than the Buy More and in a much more glamorous capacity. Hannah

has avoided revealing that she has been fired, and is making the

trip to clean out her desk (her work is computer oriented) to

prepare to return to the US. Chuck invites her to come by the

Buy More, if she is ever in Burbank. She does come by. She

applies for and accepts a job in the Nerd Herd.

Chuck begins to train her. Spy business keeps interrupting her

training sessions. Eventually, she tells Chuck she has taken the

job so as to be close to him. Chuck’s feelings for Sarah have

not changed; he tries and partly succeeds in convincing himself

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that they have. He begins to date Hannah, and eventually sleeps

with her. But he keeps her wholly in the dark about who he

really is or what he really does. He lies to her with regularly

and with impunity—he does not lie to keep her safe, for some

purpose that might mean he is not lying or is to be excused for

doing so. He lies to her out of convenience. That is very much

out of character for him. Hannah is crazy about Chuck. She has

no sense that he is the kind of man who would lie to her, deceive

her, use her. But it turns out that Chuck has does all three.

When he finally realizes what he has done, finally realizes that

he was using Hannah to hide his pain and distress from himself,

he does the honorable, if too-late thing: he tells her that they

should not see each other, that there are things about him she

cannot know and he cannot tell her. She calls him a liar--the

best one she has ever encountered. She could not have said

anything worse to him, more hurtful. He leaves her drenched in

tears; he is drenched in regret and self-loathing.

In the meantime, Sarah has developed a relationship with Shaw.

Our first glimpse of Shaw is a glimpse of his hand, again and

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again flicking open and lighting a Zippo lighter. The obsessive

gesture immediately aligns him with Captain Queeg in The Cain

Mutiny: Queeg obsessively rolls ball bearings in his hand. Shaw

is the man who will take over team Bartowski. Although it will

be in a different, more understandable but also more spectacular

way than Queeg, Shaw too will turn out to be a man whose personal

demons destroy his leadership. Shaw is broken.

He is also handsome, intelligent and self-assured. He is strong

and decisive. He seems utterly willing to sacrifice himself--for

his team, for his country. Still, there is something wrong with

him. He is, as Morgan will later point out, as stiff as a board.

There is something unbending about him, something hard but also

something brittle. He shows that hardness in various ways--

perhaps most interestingly when he brutally attacks a captured

assassin for coming on to Sarah. Shaw no doubt takes himself to

be defending her and her honor, but what he does is cruel and

unnecessary and he is blind to that.

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Early on, Sarah recognizes that Shaw is not quite right. She

does not warm to him immediately. But she begins to sympathize

with him when she finds out that the Ring murdered his wife (who

was also a spy). There is no doubt his feelings for his wife are

genuine and deep--in fact, they seem in a way too genuine, too

deep--but that is not perfectly clear at the beginning.

The real story of Sarah’s interest in Shaw though has to travel

by way of Chuck. Chuck, despite his brief relationship with

Hannah, has been desperately lonely through the entire season.

Sarah too is desperately lonely. Added to her loneliness is her

heartsickness over the changes in Chuck. And added to that,

Sarah feels responsible for those changes--both because she has

been involved in the training that is causing them and because

she is in some sense the reason Chuck is involved in the spy

world in the first place. (Sarah has felt this way for a long

time, whether rightly or wrongly. Recall that she first

confesses how sorry she is about everything in S01E08, during a

moment when she is not resisting the truth serum.) Her drifting

toward Shaw seems to be caused importantly by her regret and

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self-loathing. She now wants--or believes she wants--to somehow

to find her way back into her own past, past her time with Chuck

in Burbank and past her time in the CIA. She wants to find the

self she has lost. Notably, Shaw’s effect on Sarah--or at least

on her orientation during the time she is with him--is all

backwards. Choosing Shaw is for Sarah a retrograde choice. He

is not all to blame for her strange nostalgia--most of the blame

falls on the circumstances, on how much she hates what has

happened to Chuck, to her, and to her and Chuck. But he is so

focused on his own past he sees nothing to respond to in Sarah’s

nostalgia, no indication of a problem. With Shaw, she re-enters

and reverts to the sort of professional intimacy that she had

with Bryce. As I mentioned, Sarah does not even call Shaw by his

first name, Daniel. She calls him Shaw. He likes that. He

tells her it is “very professional, very sexy.” (This is another

indication of how out of touch with Sarah Shaw is.) Shaw though

will prove to be no Bryce. Bryce may have been mercurial, but he

was not broken. Sarah cannot turn toward the future with Shaw,

not as she could with Chuck.

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Worst of all, Shaw is too lost in his own pain to be able to help

Sarah with hers, past or present. He is too trapped by his own

past to free Sarah from hers, so that she can re-inhabit it. He

has feelings for Sarah, no doubt, but he is ultimately unhandy to

himself and unavailable to her. He is not at his own or anyone

else’s disposal; he is closed tight around his old hurt, hardened

over it, emotionally sclerotic. His present is his past.

But Sarah does not clearly realize these facts about Shaw. She

just knows she is hurting, and that Chuck is the cause of that

hurt (even if it is not all his fault). She wants to stop

hurting, to find turn away from what is happening to Chuck toward

something that at least does not cause her pain. And there is

Shaw—flirting with her, tending to her (he brings her coffee),

even risking himself to save her. She chose against Bryce

because she has hopes for a future with Chuck. She chooses for

Shaw because she no longer has hope for a future with Chuck.

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Chapter 10 (S03E11) Exit Exam

But without exception, he is eternally responsible for the kind of means he uses. And

when he will only use or only uses those means which are genuinely good, then, in the

judgment of eternity, he is at the goal...Reaching the goal is like hitting the mark with

his shot; but using the means is like taking aim...But no irregularities of the aim are

permissible. --Kierkegaard

Things get worse for Chuck and Sarah before things get better.

In 3x11, Chuck is told that the decision has been made in

Washington to put him to the test, a spy final exam. If he

passes, he will be a spy, an official agent of the CIA. He will

be sent to Rome to pose as a wealthy expatriate playboy. He will

have a villa, a car, a yearly stipend. Chuck responds with

excitement to the news, but then Beckman tells him that he will

not be taking team Bartowski to Rome. Sarah and Shaw will move

to Washington to oversee counter-Ring efforts. But Sarah is to

administer the test—and as she tells him when the test begins the

next day, as administrator she is more like a proctor than like a

partner.

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That line captures an aspect of the prolonged, Season 3

difficulties between Sarah and Chuck. She has been forced into

an administrative role in his life, forced into teaching him to

be a spy. Of course, Shaw has done a lot of the work too, but

less by teaching Chuck than by simply throwing him into

situations that forced Chuck to either succeed or die. Casey has

also had a hand in this. In fact, from Chuck’s point of view,

Casey has really been his most important teacher in Season 3.

Whether Chuck could quite put his finger on it or not, Sarah has

been too conflicted about him and his training to be as effective

as she might have been teaching someone else. Shaw has been too

dictatorial and too enigmatic, too jealous, really to teach Chuck

or to serve as an effective example. It has been Casey who,

sometimes by mercilessly mocking Chuck, sometimes by means of

reminders, but most often by means of explicit example, has done

the hands-on teaching of Chuck.

But now Chuck faces a pass-or-fail final test. Sarah is no

longer his partner. He is alone and must do this alone. Sarah

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shows up at Chuck’s apartment early in the morning of the day the

test starts. She hands him a portable video player on which

there is a recorded message from General Beckman. His mission is

to figure out the identity of a CIA mole, a double agent. Chuck

is to follow the man they have identified as the buyer of the

mole’s secrets (a man named Anotoli), and who is supposed to meet

with the mole. The hope is that Anotoli will lead them to the

mole, allow them to learn his identity. Chuck is to stake out

the hotel spa where the meeting is to take place, and, when

Anotoli arrives, follow him. Sarah will go along on the stakeout

to continue proctoring the test. Before Sarah leaves, Chuck

points out to her that this will probably be their final mission

together.

Chuck: I’m just saying...Last mission. Kind of makes you

think. Old times. Good times. Dangerous, but--but good.

Sarah: Yeah. It does.

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Chuck’s facing a future without Sarah makes him yearn for the

past, when he was with her--sort of with her, at least. Sarah

feels it too. They seem to have no future. They have very

little present left.

Chuck shows up at the stakeout looking very much the spy--dark

suit, blue shirt, dark tie. He is carrying two cases of

equipment. He opens one, and quickly and efficiently sets up for

the stake out, just finishing when Sarah arrives. She compliments

Chuck on the set-up. He then opens the other of the cases he was

carrying. Inside, it looks like a high-tech picnic basket--food,

champagne, glasses, bottle-opener, mp3 player. Chuck pours them

both a little champagne and then gives Sarah some food: sizzling

shrimp, like on their first stake out. They sit down and Chuck

uses a remote to turn on the mp3 player. Hall and Oates’

”Private Eyes” begins to play. Sarah recognizes this as the song

that played on their first stake out.

Chuck: You’re going to miss me in D. C. You know that,

right.

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Sarah: [her voice dropping] I know.

Chuck: So, you and Shaw, you’re going to be... Living

together? Is that it?

Like, are you... you guys real serious or what?

Sarah: I don’t know. It... it’s different.

Chuck: Different how?

Sarah: Than with you.

Chuck: [stammering] You know, I’m... I’m…

Shaw phones at this point, wanting to know why Chuck is not

wearing his ear piece, so that he can get instructions from Shaw.

Chuck and Sarah both put in earpieces and both pick up

binoculars. The scene recalls the scene in Rear Window in which

Jeff and Stella are both watching Thorwald’s apartment, Jeff

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through a long-vision lens and Stella through binoculars. But

unlike Jeff and Stella, Chuck and Sarah are not really using

their binoculars to bring the present closer, but rather their

past, and their past possibilities.

Chuck: What I was going to ask you a minute ago, or what I

was about to say,

anyway [he lowers his binoculars to look at Sarah] was that

I’ve been [stammering] thinking about what it used to be

like between us, before Prague [he lifts his binoculars].

And thinking about what life would be like for us if we’d

made different decisions back then. [Chuck lowers his

binoculars but keeps looking straight ahead, and speaks more

emphatically] If I had made a different decision back then.

[Looking at Sarah] Look, I know we couldn’t be together

before because I wasn’t a real spy, but if I pass this test,

then we wouldn’t have to choose between the job and us. If

I pass this test, we could be together. That is, of course,

if you’re willing to give it another shot?

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Sarah has held her binoculars to her eyes through Chuck’s entire

speech. She has given him no reaction. She keeps her eyes

private. She continues to look at the past, reconsidering it in

the light of Chuck’s words, and wondering if she can let the past

be past, and turn (again) toward a future with him. She lowers

her binoculars a few beats after his question. They look at each

other, both breathing quickly. They lean in to kiss each other

when Shaw interrupts again. They have missed Anotoli’s arrival.

Despite the fact that he is on the cusp of becoming a spy, Sarah

sees the old Chuck at last. He has changed, but the change seems

not to have been substantial. He is still hers, even if he is

about to become her peer.

What else can be said about the fact that Sarah makes herself

available to Chuck once more, in spite of their past, and in

spite of Shaw? Part of Sarah’s difficulty during the months

between Prague and this stake-out conversation (focused on

Prague) is that the changes Chuck and her love of Chuck had

initiated in her have become permanent. She cannot any longer be

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satisfied to be what she was. But those changes were not

finished. She has not become the self that she envisioned,

become the self she envisioned becoming with Chuck. She is stuck

in transit, between stations. She revealed this when she earlier

told Shaw her real name.

Sarah: It’s like I’m watching Chuck disappear, and the

further he gets from who he is, the...Well, the more I want

to remember who I am--who I was before all of this...I’ve

been on this assignment for almost three years and I’ve

never told anybody my real name.

Shaw: Not even Chuck?

Sarah: No. Not even Chuck.

Shaw: So, what is it?

Sarah: [struggling] It feels so weird to say it out

loud...I’m Sam. My real name is Sam.

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Chuck’s disappearing has made Sarah even more aware of her own

long personal disappearance from her life. She wants to remember

who she is. His forgetting funds her remembering. The

peculiarity of the tense Sarah uses is important. Normally, we

remember who we were. But she wants to remember who she is. She

knows who she has been for most of her life--the CIA’s best

agent--but she wants to know who she is, the person she could be

and is on the way to being, a person who will could be a

continuation of the girl she was before her father and the CIA

bent her into the shape they wanted. Chuck was the one who was

helping Sarah recollect herself. He was, as he said to her on

their first night out (when Sarah said she came with baggage),

her “personal baggage handler”.

In Plato’s dialogues, Socrates invokes what he calls the Theory

of Recollection as his way of explaining philosophical

education--call it the acquisition of real knowledge and of real

self-knowledge. He relates a myth according to which our souls

pre-existed their bodies and for that time in the presence of the

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Forms, the perfect exemplars of Beauty, Justice, etc. But when

our souls fell into bodies, our bodies obscured the acquaintance

with the exemplars that we had enjoyed. Now, when we learn, what

we are doing is recollecting those exemplars, getting

reacquainted with them. The best way of doing this was to submit

to Socrates’ interrogation. Under his questioning, we can, as it

were, loosen our ties to the body and re-see the exemplars.

Socrates oversees our recollection, acts as our personal baggage

handler.

I relate this to highlight Chuck’s Socratic role in Sarah’s life.

She is trying to remember, not the Forms (or not exactly--maybe

she is trying to remember the Form of herself?) but herself, the

woman who has been obscured by and for much of her life. In the

midst of her recollections, Chuck failed her. She is no longer

happy to live in forgetfulness of herself, but she has not yet

come to knowledge. She is in an existential predicament like

that of having a word on the tip of your tongue but being unable

to recall it—except her predicament is worse. The word she

speaks to Shaw, her own name, is her attempt to recall the

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forgotten word, to speak the word that she hopes will bring her

to the knowledge she wants, the word that will change her. She

hopes that if speaking the word, her real name, does not cause

her to recollect, that it might at least engage Shaw, get him to

take on the Socratic role Chuck played. But that role is beyond

Shaw. He cannot respond to Sarah’s need. Sarah moves on the

margin of her own reality, like a sleepwalker. But Shaw will not

be able to awaken her. He will leave her somnambulant.

By the time of the stake out, Sarah knows this. She has genuine

feelings for Shaw, but they are not the same as her feelings for

Chuck. What she and Shaw could have might be something worth

having--it might stave off loneliness, offer professional

camaraderie, provide pleasures--but it will be limited in

relation to what she and Chuck had and could have. That

knowledge accounts for her leaning in to kiss Chuck, for her

renewed availability to him. Only he can do for her what she

needs and wants done. Chuck is the one who can save her.

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Chuck leaves the stake out to follow Anotoli, but he tells Sarah

that their conversation, their interrupted kiss, is not over.

Chuck overcomes a series of miscues and is able to identify the

mole, whose name is Perry.

At this point, Chuck believes he is a spy, that he has passed his

test. He also believes that Sarah is willing to give a

relationship with him another shot. The next day, he shows up at

the yogurt shop, radiant. Sarah asks him to dinner. He is

excited; he had intended to ask her to dinner. But she tells him

not to be too excited. She asks him to meet her at Traxx, a new

restaurant in Union Station. Chuck leaves already anticipating

the evening, not really registering Sarah’s caution.

Sarah shortly afterwards talks with Shaw. She tells him that she

did as Shaw wanted and has asked Chuck to dinner. Shaw informs

her that Chuck’s test is not over, that one thing remains. Chuck

has to take care of Perry. Sarah asks if that means that Chuck

is to capture him and bring him in. Shaw says no. It means that

Chuck has to kill Perry. Sarah is shocked. A spy’s first killing

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is called the spy’s “Red Test”. Sarah did not realize Chuck

would have to pass that test now. She refuses to have anything

to do with it. But Shaw will not allow her out of it. She is

the one person, Shaw claims, who can order Chuck to kill Shaw and

get Chuck actually do it.

It is hard not to think that Shaw is driving this so hard,

choosing to require the Red Test now and requiring Sarah

administer it, because it is part of his gambit for Sarah. Shaw

registers her feelings for Chuck. At some level, he knows that

he cannot just shove Chuck out of his position in Sarah’s heart.

He needs Chuck to vacate that position; he needs Sarah to evict

Chuck. The Red Test is the way to get these results. If Chuck

kills the mole, he vacates Sarah’s heart; if she witnesses it,

she will evict him from her heart. Chuck will be doubly

finished, by his own hand and by Sarah’s. There will be no

coming back for him. Sarah will be free to be Shaw’s.

Before Chuck goes to Traxx, he runs into Casey at the Buy More.

He tells Casey that everything is coming up roses--he has passed

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his test and Sarah has agreed to have dinner with him at Traxx.

Casey suspects that something more might be going on. (Clearly,

Casey anticipates that Chuck may yet have to face the Red Test).

He too warns Chuck, tells him to be careful.

Chuck arrives at the restaurant handsomely dressed, bouyantly

happy. He believes he has everything he has wanted in his grasp

(everything duty demands, everything inclination desires)--a

career as a spy and a genuine relationship with Sarah. Yet

again, Chuck takes himself to be on a date with Sarah when he is

not--and this one will not become a date as it progresses.

He sits down and Sarah promptly breaks the news to him. His test

is not over. He must complete one more task. She tells him that

Perry is on his way to Traxx and will arrive in five minutes.

Chuck’s mission is to kill Perry. Sarah slides him a handgun

tucked into a red table napkin (the red of roses, the red of

blood). Chuck looks at Sarah in bewilderment. He asks (in

disbelief) if she is serious. Chuck tells her he cannot do it.

She responds by underscoring the consequence of refusal (or of

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failure). He won’t become a spy. And then he realizes: if he

doesn’t become a spy, he and Sarah probably have no chance at a

genuine relationship. He states this; she agrees. Chuck’s mind

tailspins. He confesses to Sarah that when all this started, he

thought he had no chance to be a real spy. He has that chance

now. And if he does not go through with the mission, then he

will relapse, become again the indeterminacy he has been for so

long.

Chuck: But if I...If I can’t do this, then [stammering]

what will I be?

Sarah: Then you’ll be Chuck, and there is nothing wrong

with that.

Chuck sits in silence, staring at her, imploring her.

Sarah: I’m sorry. That’s all I can say. The rest is your

decision.

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Sarah gets up to leave the table and take her place in the

station to observe. Chuck asks her to wait. He asks if they are

absolutely sure about Perry. Sarah says they are. His target is

Perry. His orders are clear. The evening has changed direction

on Chuck violently.

He is in a vise. He believes his hope for a future with Sarah

depends on his becoming a spy. If he fails, the CIA will be done

with him and Sarah will be reassigned. She will move on,

presumably with Shaw. But if he coldly kills a man--even a true

villain like Perry--he will lose himself, and, he knows, lose

Sarah too. Chuck can either revert into the loser he was or he

can pervert himself into a killer. Either way, he loses Sarah.

Perry shows up and joins Chuck, obviously wary. Chuck tells him

that he needs help identifying some possible moles. Perry

volunteers his help, but then excuses himself, and heads to the

bathroom. Chuck realizes that the mole has made him, and he gets

up and goes into the bathroom. He and Perry end up in a fight.

Chuck disarms him. Then, gun in hand, he stands over the mole.

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But Chuck cannot shoot Perry. Instead, he tells Perry that he is

under arrest. He leads Perry, at gunpoint, out of the restroom.

But the mole, a seasoned agent, starts walking quickly, opening

up distance between himself and Chuck. He throws a female

traveller into Chuck’s path and runs. Chuck chases him. Sarah,

having observed all of this, chases Chuck.

Perry runs into the freight yard. Chuck closes on him and fires

a warning shot. Eventually, Perry trips and Chuck catches up

with him. Perry pleads with Chuck not to shoot him. Chuck’s

finger tightens on the trigger--then it loosens. Perry sees this

and reaches for a gun holstered on his ankle. A shot rings out;

Perry slumps to the ground. Chuck momentarily believes he has

pulled the trigger. He looks at his gun in disbelief. But then

he wheels around and sees Casey, smoking gun in hand.

Sarah is far enough behind Chuck when she begins chasing him that

it takes her a few moments to locate him in the freight yard.

When she does finally find him, she sees Perry dead on the ground

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and Chuck standing over him, his gun in hand at the end of his

outstretched arm. Shaw then speaks to her through her earpiece.

Shaw: Well?

Sarah: [in distress] Chuck is a spy.

Sarah enters a tailspin. Her worry that Chuck was disappearing

seems to be confirmed. She sees him vanish in the freight yard.

Her belief that he is gone, that he killed Perry, crushes her.

When Shaw later asks her if she is still in love with Chuck, she

says no. Not now. She does still love him, of course, but she

decidedly no longer wants to love him--but for reasons different

from those she had to his refusal in Prague.

Chuck remains bewildered. He walks back into the courtyard at

Echo Park beside Casey, and asks Casey what it all means. Even

though Sarah and Shaw and Beckman all think he passed the test,

he knows he didn’t. Casey says that no one--including Sarah--can

ever know that he pulled the trigger. Technically, legally, what

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Casey did was murder. But Chuck still cannot process it all. He

knows that he is not technically, legally, a spy. He failed the

test.

Chuck: I don’t know who I am. I don’t know what I am.

Casey: You’ll have to work that out for yourself, Chuck.

Chuck goes to his apartment and tries to call Sarah. She refuses

the call. He leaves her a message telling her that he needs to

talk to her. Someone knocks at his door. Taking it to be Sarah,

he quickly opens it. But it turns out to be an aide to General

Beckman, who has come to take Chuck to Washington for his

induction and final processing.

The Red Test pulls the generalized despondency, sadness and

frustration of the first ten episodes of Season 3 into a fully

particularized form. Sarah has forgiven Chuck for the past, but

before they can make anything of that forgiveness and find their

way (back) together, the Red Test derails them. Sarah makes

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herself available to Chuck again and loses him again. Chuck again

gets lost in indeterminacy. They have managed to end the episode

in the states in which they began the Season. The specific

reasons for those states differ, but it looks again like Chuck

has done something that ruins their chance to be Really Together.

This time, however, Sarah regards herself as importantly

responsible for what he has done. He would never have been in

the rail yard if it was not for her. He was following her

order--even if it was reluctantly given. But that makes the

situation worse, not better. Her intensified self-loathing and

self-recrimination over her part in what has happened complicates

her grief over the loss of Chuck, Chuck’s loss of himself. Chuck

is gone and with him Sarah’s chance to remember who she is. Shaw

knew her real name, but Chuck knew the real Sarah—he was in the

process of introducing her to herself. The comfort she can look

forward to is the stiff, professional embrace of Shaw. She will

miss Chuck—and she knows it.

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Chapter 11 (S3E12-13) Exorcising Despair

Metaphysics considered as a means of exorcising despair. Being as the place of fidelity.

--Gabriel Marcel

What follows is the story of Chuck and Sarah working free of the

Slough of Despond. I provide a reading of both S03E12 and

S03E13--and that makes for a longer chapter, but the two episodes

are structurally integrated in important ways, and so I want to

keep them under one chapter heading.

(S03E12) Reacquiring Agent Walker

Chuck is an agent--technically. Beckman has offered him a dream

cover—as a wealthy young playboy in Rome. It turns out, he also

gets to have a team there and he is allowed to choose the members

of that team. Chuck does not take himself to have carte blanche

however. He takes Sarah to be beyond his choosing, since Beckman

has assigned her to the Ring taskforce.

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But Chuck is unsure about accepting the job. He expresses his

doubts to Beckman. She gives him a week to gather himself. At

the end of the week, he is to report to Washington to assemble

his team. Surprisingly, Beckman does give him carte blanche

(perhaps she believes that the situation with Shaw means that

Chuck will not choose Sarah anyway). But Chuck immediately sees

that there is a possibility here: if he can get Sarah to agree,

he will pick her; she and he can be together in Rome. Instead of

going to Bali or Bora Bora, as Beckman’s aide expects when she

buys him plane tickets, Chuck shifts B’s--Burbank, Bob Hope

Airport. He is going to try to win Sarah back again--but the

obstacles he faces have become much larger. Most importantly,

Sarah still believes his hands are red.

What Sarah believes of Chuck is the counterpoint of what Chuck

believed of Sarah in S02E11: In a Christmas tree lot, Sarah comes

face-to-face with a Fulcrum agent who has discovered that Chuck

is the Intersect. After a particularly brutal fight among the

trees, Sarah manages to disarm him and retrieve her own gun. He

stands before her with his hands up, but he has told her that he

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ranks so highly in Fulcrum that nowhere she can jail him will

keep them from finding a way to get to him, keep him from being

able to eventually tell them what he knows. Sarah considers what

he has said. She judges it to be credible. She kills him.

Chuck is trying to find Sarah in the trees. He finally sees her

in the distance. He arrives too late to overhear the agent’s

threat. All he witnesses is the agent’s challenge to Sarah to

take him in. But Chuck does not realize that what the agent says

is a challenge; Chuck takes it to be a surrender. So when Sarah

kills the agent, Chuck responds with horror. He turns and

leaves, heading back to the Buy More.

Sarah’s decision to kill was not made lightly. Earlier, she told

Chuck she would never let anyone hurt him. She acts so as to

protect him, realizing that the man can make good on his threat.

Killing him is the only way to ensure Chuck’s safety. Even so,

Sarah shoots him at a cost. She is visibly shaken by what she

has done.

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By the time she rejoins Chuck at the Buy More, she has composed

herself. Chuck does not reveal that he witnessed her kill the

agent. When he asks her what happened, she lies. She tells

Chuck that the Ring agent was taken into custody and is going to

jail. Then, she tells him one part of the truth, the part that

motivated her: Chuck is safe.

Chuck cannot make his peace with what Sarah has done. It begins

to cost him sleep, slipping him into nightmares. His memory of

what she has done intrudes itself into his interactions with her,

souring them. Eventually, he tells her what he saw and she

explains the decision she made. Chuck accepts the explanation

and accepts her.

Chuck’s Red Test resonates with this. The gunshot in the

railyard echoes the gunshot in the tree lot. Sarah, like Chuck,

witnesses an event--but from a perspective that causes her to

misunderstand it. Chuck arrived too late; his problem was time.

Sarah is both too late and she is standing in the wrong place.

She cannot see that it was Casey who killed Perry. Her funereal

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comment to Shaw expresses everything she feels: “Chuck is a

spy.”

What happens here throws into relief the different place of

killing in the lives of Sarah and of Chuck. Chuck knows Sarah

has killed people. He flashes on video of her killing two people

in the final moments of the pilot episode. He has witnessed her

shoot and kill people. But those cases were self-defense or the

defense of others (often of Chuck himself). Chuck can live with

those deaths, even if they disturb him. Chuck understands what

Sarah does. His distress at the killing in the Christmas trees

thus turns on his belief that Sarah killed when killing was

unnecessary. It is Chuck’s view that Sarah only kills if

necessary. What he takes himself to see when she shoots the

Fulcrum agent is an unnecessary killing.

How does Sarah understand what she has done? As I said, she does

not kill the agent with impunity. That he represents no physical

threat to her or anyone else at the moment she kills him is

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something of which she is fully aware. Given that, killing him

is costly for her.

We might understand Sarah’s predicament in something like this

way: When she kills someone attacking her or someone she is

protecting, what she does is something almost involuntary. In

the abstract, she would rather not have to kill anyone, but in

the here and now, in the particular situation, she does choose to

kill. So her killing of the person does count as voluntary, as

something she does. Still, because she would rather not have had

to do it, and because she did it to avert something dreadful,

something she fears (say, the killing of Chuck), what she does is

excusable. Sarah can live with it. However, when she shoots the

Fulcrum agent, he is no immediate threat to her, and no immediate

threat to Chuck (whatever might have been true of the threat

long-term). Because of that, the voluntariness of her killing him

is thrown into relief. What she does looks less like something

involuntary than the other cases (even though it was still

voluntary in the other cases). And yet, the agent is a threat,

he is bent on doing something dreadful, on revealing Chuck’s

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identity, and thus of bringing about Chuck’s torture or death.

So, despite the difference in circumstantial features, what Sarah

does ultimately seems to her something she can live with,

although she feels greater regret that she did it than she does

in the other cases. In the other cases, she can say--and we know

what she means even if what she does is still voluntary--she had

to do it. There was no time for any other option. But in this

case, while she can say she had to do it, there was time for

other options. (That does not mean there actually were any.)

And--what of Sarah’s own Red Test, which now becomes part of

unfolding events. Why does it become part of the story now? It

helps to clarify Sarah’s revulsion at what she believes Chuck has

done. Sarah killed the woman she killed (it turns out to have

been Shaw’s wife, Evelyn) in cold blood, simply in obedience to

an order. True, at the last moment, Sarah thought she was in

danger--Evelyn reached for something and Sarah thought it was a

gun. Still, she did not know that was what Evelyn reached for

and Sarah shot her without knowing. In her retelling of the

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event, her revulsion and regret are apparent. Sarah says that it

was the worst day of her life.

Sarah wanted to save Chuck from such an experience. It nearly

devastated her, and she is and was both better trained and

differently minded than Chuck. She protected her feelings

better; she closed herself off more effectively. But the Red

Test hurricaned through her defenses, flooding her with misery.

Despite her belief that Chuck has changed, has become more closed

off, she has a hard time imagining Chuck surviving the aftermath

of killing Perry. And if he does survive it, then it means that

the Chuck she loves, the Chuck that had changed her so much, the

Chuck who had become a constituting part of the person she hoped

to become and was becoming, that Chuck will be no more. That

Chuck could not kill Perry, and if he did, could never find a way

to live with having done it.

Chuck gives us three different relations to killing in its three

central characters. Casey, especially early on, is closest to a

cold-blooded killer. Langston Graham calls him a killer in the

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pilot and we witness his almost casual apparent killing of Bryce.

Casey is willing to kill by order. But over time, he begins to

find that difficult. He threatens it constantly. But there are

people--Chuck, for instance, and Sarah--who he will not kill,

even when under orders. Casey may not be a reluctant killer,

exactly, but he comes to have limits, orders he will not take.

Sarah is a reluctant killer, a warm-blooded killer. She can do

it. She does it. She would rather not. One reason she admires

Chuck’s refusal to kill is because it is the absolute form of her

reluctance to kill. She would rather be like Chuck than like

Casey. Chuck is no killer at all. Of course, he does kill (or

believes he has). I will get to that soon enough.

And so back to the action: Chuck flies back to Burbank. His

mission: to reacquire agent Walker. Morgan, Devon and Casey all

join him in his efforts--Morgan and Casey because (beyond their

friendship for Chuck) they both want to be part of the team, to

get out of Burbank and the Buy More. Devon (beyond his

friendship with Chuck) does it because he wants Ellie to go to

Africa with him to be part of Doctors Without Borders--and he

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knows Ellie will never leave if Chuck is to be left behind in

Burbank, alone. So the four of them begin to plot to get Sarah

and Chuck together.

Chuck has found a new clarity. He wants to be a spy, still wants

that despite his reluctance about it in conversation with

Beckman. But what he wants is to be a-spy-with-Sarah. He does

not want to be a spy without her. Now, while it is not quite

right to say that he does not want to be with her without being a

spy, something like that is true.

Chuck’s primary opponent in winning Sarah is himself. (The

entire show could be called Chuck vs. Chuck.) To win her, he

needs to overcome his self-mistrust. Becoming a spy is his name now for

that self-overcoming. But it is crucial to bear in mind (as I noted

earlier) that it is not Sarah who lays down this requirement for

winning her. Sarah knows who and what Chuck is and can be. The

person he has to prove something to is himself--he has laid down

the requirement, although he is at best dimly aware that he has.

He simply feels the requirement; he does not feel its origin.

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So, while it is not quite right to say that he does not want to

be with her without being a spy, it is right to say that he does

not want to be with her without having overcome his self-

mistrust. (Keep in mind that ‘overcoming’ self-mistrust is not a

once-and-done kind of thing, and that Chuck knows and will come

to know this. He wants to achieve a workable equilibrium with

his self-mistrust, an equilibrium that involves restores itself

when it is compromised.) He lays down this requirement because

wants to feel he deserves Sarah’s admiration and trust, not just

personally but professionally. He has it already--but he does

not feel he deserves it. Chuck’s whole life, although he only

lately has come to understand it (and there will be more for him

to understand) has been spy-crafted; it is his family business.

He is following in Orion’s footsteps, his father’s footsteps--but

he is emulating, not imitating his father. Being a spy turns out

to be what he is destined for--it is in his blood. Emerson,

speaking of vocation, of doing what you were meant to do, writes:

There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at

the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is

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suicide; that he must take himself for better, or worse, as

his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good,

no kernel of nourishment can come to him but through his

toil bestowed on that plot of ground given to him to till.39

Chuck has at long last come to this Emersonian conviction. His

education, his training, although not finished, has taken him to

this point--it is in this respect complete. Emerson uses the

language of marriage as the axis of his remark. There is a time

when we must take ourselves for better or worse, till death us do

part. We must find a way to choose ourselves if we are to

realize ourselves. This is not selfishness; it is rather the

coming-to-be of a genuine self. Up until now, Chuck has but

half-expressed himself: he has been, to continue with Emerson’s

wording, “ashamed of that divine idea which he represents”.40

That divine idea, Emerson claims, may be safely trusted.

(Thoreau’s claim that we may safely trust a good deal more than

we do repeats Emerson.) Chuck is finally ready, finally really

beginning to trust himself. Chuck takes himself for better or

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worse. He had to do that before he could hope to take Sarah for

better or worse.

Casey earlier responded to Chuck’s anguish about not knowing who

he is or what he is by telling him that he was going to have to

work that out for himself. Chuck is doing that. He wants to be

a spy. But he is increasingly sure that he wants to be a spy of

his own sort, not a spy of the CIA’s sort. He wants to be a spy

who falls in love, who puts down roots and who does not kill.

That is, he wants to be a spy who shatters the commandments, the

Cardinal Rules of Spying. What he wants requires a revolutionary

conception of what a spy is or can be. He has to reconceptualize

the whole business, work it out for himself. He has not yet done

that but each day he grows more aware of the need to do it. (His

father’s example matters for this.41) Chuck will be a spy on his

own terms. But it will take him time to figure out how to be a

spy and be himself too.

Sarah is now with Shaw. Seeing what she thinks she saw has lead

her to decide to go to D.C. with Shaw. (It is significant that

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choosing Shaw means going back to the place Chuck has helped

Sarah leave, to the life she had experienced as captivity.

Again, Shaw takes her backwards. He is retrograde.) When Chuck

finally finds her in Castle, she is cold and distant, obviously

unhappy to see him. Chuck tries to tell her that what she did

not see what she thought she saw, but he cannot tell her the

truth--it would require him to repudiate Casey’s gift of saving

him from Perry and from the Red Test, and it would require that

he put Casey in jeopardy. As is usual, Chuck will not pursue his

own ends at the cost of his friends. He tells Sarah that the

situation is more complicated than she knows. He implores her,

“You have to believe me.” She states she does not believe him--

and in a tone as flinty as any she has ever used with Chuck.

Casey describes the exchange later as Chuck crashing and burning.

Chuck, freshly hurt by Sarah’s coldness and distance, and

especially by her flat refusal to believe him, feels like he

should quit. Quit. Let her go. Let her go with Shaw. Let her

go with Shaw to D.C. Luckily for him, his friends are not ready

to yield. Morgan reminds Casey that love is a battlefield.

Casey acknowledges Morgan’s Benatar-ish wisdom.

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Morgan and Casey and Devon highjack Chuck as he is walking home.

They have borrowed Jeff’s van. They are wearing spy gear. They

have come to help him. Devon hands Chuck a suit and orders him

to get dressed--reservations are in ten minutes.

It turns out that the reservations are for Sarah and Shaw. They

are on a date, going to dinner. But it turns out that not only

is Chuck’s team keeping Shaw and Sarah under surveillance, so is

the Ring. The Ring wants Shaw.

Shaw and Sarah sit down. They talk as wine is poured. Sarah

looks around the restaurant and at Shaw and says that it is nice.

Shaw says it is perfect. The difference in description is

telling. Given the situation, Sarah is happy enough with what is

happening between them, happy enough with Shaw. But being with

him is not her idea of perfect. She has given up on perfect.

Happy enough, nice, will have to do.

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Shaw also describes what he takes to be perfect about the

evening: everything. They are about to make a fresh start. “No

Burbank,” Shaw comments, “no baggage.” This whirls us back to

Chuck and Sarah’s first date, their first night out together.

Sarah said she came with baggage. Chuck offered to be her very

own baggage handler. It is hard to imagine that the phrase does

not strike Sarah. It illustrates again the difference between

the two men. Shaw cannot really believe Sarah leaves Burbank

with no baggage. But he is willing to say it, as if saying it

makes it so. He is asking Sarah to return to her old ways (to

his ways), to bury her feelings and to hope they eventually

suffocate and die. He is not the man to help her work through

them, reconsider them, name them, feel them, acknowledge them.

He wants Sarah to bury Chuck the way he believes he has buried

his wife, Evelyn. But the spectre of Evelyn is about to rise.

Using a device to disguise his voice, Morgan engineers a phone

call to Shaw. Shaw leaves the table to take the call. Morgan

tells Shaw to leave the restaurant. After Shaw leaves, Morgan

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attempts to keep him from returning by making him walk from place

to place.

After Shaw exits the restaurant by the side door, Chuck enters,

wearing the suit. He walks to Sarah’s table and asks her if the

seat across from her (vacated by Shaw) is taken. Sarah asks

Chuck what he is doing at the restaurant.

Chuck: I’m here for you.

Sarah: What do you want me to say?

Chuck: I want you to say that you will come with me to

Rome.

Sarah: Well, you know that I can’t and you know why.

Chuck: Look, Sarah, I don’t want to have to make a scene in

front of all these very nice people, but I will literally do

anything to change your mind.

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Sarah: Well, then tell me what really happened at the train

tracks. If you didn’t kill the mole, then who did?

Chuck: Look, I don’t want there to be any secrets or lies

between us ever again. So, please, let me just have this

one. And I promise I will never lie to you. Listen, I know

you think I’m not that same guy that you met the first day

at the Buy More. And you know what? You’re right. Okay.

You’re right. The guy that I was back then hated himself

for not knowing what he wanted to do with the rest of his

life or who he wanted to spend it with, but now? Finally,

now...I know. I want to be a spy. And I want to be with

you.

Sarah: What are you saying?

Chuck: Sarah, I’m saying...that I…

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In the meantime, Shaw has discovered Morgan’s ruse and has eluded

two Ring agents who try to capture him. But just before Shaw can

rejoin Sarah, another Ring agent stops him. He holds a gun and

tells Shaw that the Ring director wants to talk to Shaw face-to-

face. Before Shaw can respond, Devon, worried that Shaw is

returning to hurt Chuck, tackles Shaw and they stumble into and

shatter the restaurant window, falling in a splash of glass

shards between Sarah and Chuck, ending Chuck’s stalled sentence.

Chuck begins this conversation by saying to Sarah what he is

always saying to Sarah. “I’m here for you.” The sentence is a

twin. It has one meaning here, in this particular context, and

another one that relates generally to their relationship.42 In

this context, emphasis falls on ‘ for you’: “I am here for you”.

He has come to reacquire Agent Walker. But the emphasis falling

on ‘for you’ does not disguise the other meaning of the sentence,

the general one. “I am here for you.” He is still, after all

that has passed between them, much of it disastrous and hurtful,

--he is still available to Sarah, still hers. And Sarah’s

response is also a twin: “What do you want me to say?” Emphasis

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in this particular context falls on ‘say’. “What do you want me

to say?” She means that she is out of words, knows no way to fix

what is wrong between them. That is one meaning. But the

sentence also acknowledges their constant problem--Sarah’s

inexpressiveness, her difficulty with the saying-how-she-feels

part. “What do you want me to say?” She knows there are words

that need to pass between them, but even now, when perhaps what

he wants her to say (“I love you”) she believes she can say in

the past tense (“I loved you”), she cannot say it. That is the

other, general meaning.

Chuck answers both questions at once, or tries to. He gives her

words to say in context that will also answer to the general

problem. He wants her to say she will come with him to Rome.

Sarah cannot say those words, however, and she takes Chuck to

know why. Chuck killed Perry on the train tracks. No suit, no

clever plan to win her again, can change that fact of hard

record. Chuck cannot tell her what happened at the tracks, but

he again tries to get her to believe him. It was not what she

thought happened. He asks to be allowed this one secret.

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Despite Sarah’s defensiveness when their conversation begins, and

despite the measured pleasantries of her date with Shaw, Sarah

asks Chuck to tell her what happened on the train tracks. This is

significant, and Chuck responds to it. Earlier, when she told

him she did not believe him, it seemed that she had said her last

word on the subject and would listen to no more. But in the

meantime, she has obviously begun to wonder if Chuck might have

been telling the truth. She may not believe him yet. But it is

no longer certain that she disbelieves him. Sarah has a hard

time doubting Chuck--she would rather doubt her own eyes.

Because he sees that Sarah has softened toward him again, at

least a little, Chuck hazards dangerous terrain--the question of

whether he has changed. This has been much on his mind lately,

as it has on Sarah’s for a while. Chuck now says something to

Sarah he has not yet said in so many words. He admits he has

changed. He has changed because the guy she met at the Buy More

hated himself. Chuck has rarely, if ever, uses this word,

‘hate’. It is an interloper in his normal lexicon. Just as

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Chuck is no killer, Chuck is no hater. Except that he was. He

reserved his hatred for himself. He secreted it (or tried to).

He hated himself for not knowing what he wanted to do with his

life or whom he wanted to spend it with. But he does know now.

He has known since Sarah showed up at the Buy More, although then

he knew through a glass, darkly. (He knew whom--but did not

know how. He did not know what--but what found him.) Chuck has

at long last--finally--overcome his self-hatred, his self-

mistrust. He has chosen himself for better or worse. Wed to the

new man he has become, he presents himself to the woman he wants

to wed, to spend his life with. Chuck refines his confession

into a proposal.43

Sarah has long known Chuck’s hatred of himself. She has been the

primary agent of his coping with that, overcoming that. Her

example and her educating of him has mattered a great deal, but

more than anything it has been Chuck’s always-present-but-never-

confirmed feeling that she loves him that has supported his

growth. But she thought he had stopped growing, had in fact

died, killed by himself when he killed the mole on the train

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tracks. In a way, confessing his self-hatred and his having

overcome it is the best proof he can offer Sarah, short of giving

up Casey, that he did not do what she worries that he did. He

has not passed the Red Test. But he has passed his own test. He

has come to terms with himself--he is not ashamed of his divine

idea. None of this would be true if he killed the mole. And it

is from this new relationship to himself that Chuck speaks. He

is ready to pass for what he is. He wants to spend the rest of

his life as a spy, but only if it is as a spy with Sarah. And

that means only if he can be a spy on his own terms. What he

wants to do and who he wants to do it with are inextricably bound

together.

This is the best proof he can offer, but the question remains:

is it enough? Sarah hears what he says. She hears him refine

his confession into a proposal. She cannot quite believe it.

She needs him to confirm it. “What are you saying?” Chuck

begins to explain but the glass shatters. Chuck does not get to

finish.

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The next day, Shaw volunteers to allow the Ring to take him. His

plan is to use a tracking device, get close to the Ring director,

and then for Beckman to send in an airstrike targeting the

tracking device. Sarah protests. Shaw is proposing a suicide

mission. Shaw responds to her protest by telling her that he is

prepared to sacrifice his life to kill the person who killed his

wife.

I have called Shaw broken. Here the fault line in his character

opens visibly. This is the man who the night before was talking

of a new life and a fresh start with Sarah. But in the light of

the next day, he is willing to sacrifice that, and himself, to

get revenge. Shaw’s flicking lighter recalled Captain Queeg.

His now-revealed black desire for vengeance recalls Captain Ahab.

Shaw is willing to take everyone and everything to the bottom

with him so long as Evelyn’s killer drowns--everyone and

everything, including Sarah and a future with her. No possible

future can free Shaw from his entrapment in the past.

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Shaw swallows a tracking device and leaves to rendezvous with the

Ring agents who are to take him to the director. Sarah continues

to try to get Shaw to change his mind. But he will not yield.

Sarah, not yet given time to think through what Shaw is doing and

saying, is struck most strongly by the apparent heroism and self-

sacrifice of his action. No doubt Shaw understands it that way

too. But her understanding of him and his understanding of

himself are both mistaken. What Shaw does has the form of

heroism but lacks its power. He pursues a personal vendetta, not

national security. That will become apparent.

Shaw’s choice is an inside-out version of Chuck’s choice in

Prague. Chuck has personal inclinations to become a spy and he

felt obliged to become a spy. The question was which of those,

his inclinations or his duty, really motivated him. It turned

out that it was his duty he was following, not his inclinations.

But it looked--at least to Sarah--that it went the other way

around. Shaw has personal inclinations for vengeance and they

line up with his genuine desire to serve his country. (Shaw is

broken but not all bad.) What motivates him? It will turn out

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to be his personal inclinations, his vendetta. But it looks to

Sarah like it goes the other way around. Once again, Sarah has

been left on the platform of a new life.

Chuck arrives as Shaw leaves. Sarah explains what Shaw is doing.

Sarah tells Chuck that she is not going to let Shaw go in alone.

Chuck tells her that Shaw will not be alone. He then locks the

door of the room Sarah is in. She asks him why he would help

Shaw. Chuck responds that he knows how much Shaw means to her.

He leaves to follow Shaw.

Sarah eventually is able to escape the locked room. She gets an

SOS to Casey in the Buy More, and he helps her. She leaves to

follow Chuck and Shaw. But she is well behind them. Chuck,

meanwhile, discovers that Shaw’s tracking device has been

removed. He is at a loss; he has no way to continue to follow

Shaw. It turns out that Jeff and Lester, stung by not being

included in Morgan’s plan to help Chuck, have decided to show off

their stalking skills by stalking Shaw. They have followed Shaw

and the Ring agents who met him to the building where Shaw is to

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meet the director. They call Chuck to impress him with their

prowess, and he gets the address of the building from them.

Chuck takes Shaw’s car and heads toward the address.

Chuck’s taking Shaw’s car is his way of throwing off the last

vestiges of Shaw’s influence over him. Shaw has ordered Chuck

around for a long time, thrown Chuck into danger after danger.

Ordered his Red Test. And, from Chuck’s point of view, Shaw has

taken Sarah. Chuck has suffered this because of his self-

mistrust, because of his desire to become a spy, because he felt

inadequate in comparison to Shaw. But when he slips into Shaw’s

car the point is made: Chuck is as much a spy as Shaw, and a

better kind of spy because he is a better person, a whole person.

If Shaw is the American Hero (the name of the episode is Chuck

vs. the American Hero), Chuck is the Last American Hero.

Chuck gets to the building and goes in--armed with a tranquilizer

gun and stun grenades. Nothing lethal. He works his way deep

into the building, taking out Ring agents with the gun and with a

brief Intersect flash. One of the Ring agents accidentally sets

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off one of Chuck’s stun grenades, but Chuck is able to recover

his senses first and to knock out the last of the agents.

Meanwhile, the Ring director has shown Shaw video footage of his

wife’s death. Shaw discovers that it was Sarah who killed his

wife. Shaw screams in misery and attacks the director, only to

realize that the director is not there in the flesh. It is just

a projected image. Shaw gets tasered from behind and collapses.

Chuck finds Shaw, puts him on his shoulder (thus doing for Shaw

what Shaw had done for the poisoned Sarah in S03E07) and carries

begins to carry him out of the building. Beckman has given the

order for a bomber to drop its payload. Sarah arrives just as

the bomb hits and the building erupts in a massive explosion.

For a brief moment, Sarah believes that both Chuck and Shaw have

died, but then she sees Chuck emerge from the smoke and flame,

Shaw still on his shoulder. She smiles--and cries--in relief.

Beckman congratulates the team on the success of the mission, and

she tells Sarah she is looking forward to working with her in

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D.C. Sarah is due to fly to D.C. later that evening. Chuck

comes in after Sarah has finished talking to Beckman and asks how

Shaw is doing. Sarah says that he is still unconscious but is

expected to make a full recovery. She thanks Chuck for saving

him. Chuck then switches gears, carefully.

Chuck: Look, I don’t want to pester you, Sarah, or become

some nuisance that you can’t avoid. I’ve seen Morgan go down

that road far too many times to count. And since I’ve

already given the fancy, eloquent version of this speech

before, right now I’m just gonna be blunt and honest. I

love you. One more time just because it feels really nice

to say: I love you. I feel like I’ve been bottling this up

forever. I love you.

Sarah: Chuck, you don’t have…

Chuck: I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m getting out of hand,

but...Look, you were right in Prague. You and I, we’re

perfect for each other, and I want to spend the rest of my

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life with you. [Sarah has been walking slowly toward him as

he says this] Away from everyone else and away from this

spy life.

Sarah: Chuck, I’ve made a commitment, and not just to Shaw.

Chuck: Don’t go. Don’t do it. Leave with me instead.

Tonight at seven o’clock, we meet at Union Station, we go to

Mexico, and after that, anywhere that you want. I would,

however, like to go and see the Eiffel Tower at some point,

if that’s at all possible. --Don’t answer now. Don’t say a

word. I don’t want to have to convince you. I just want

you to show up. I’m gonna kiss you now...if that’s ok. [He

takes her face into his hands and kisses her gently, slowly.

She begins to respond but he releases her] I’m gonna go home

and pack, both summer and winter wear. I love you, Sarah

Walker. I always have. [Chuck leaves]

Chuck has been waiting forever to say this to Sarah face-to-face.

But before, even when he had a chance to do so, he got in his own

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way. He said the words in S03E02, but Sarah was really not there

to hear them, separated from him at the time by both a door and

by his refusal in Prague. He said them then as he fell

unconscious. Sarah has always known he loved her. She has

wanted and not wanted to hear him say it. Wanted, because it

would have felt as good for her to hear as it would have felt for

him to say. Not wanted, because it would have made their cover

messier than it already was. Now, he says it and she hears it.

Four times. Four times he tells her that he loves her. He has

from the beginning; he always has. And then he brings up Prague.

He voluntarily assumes her position when she asked him to run

away with her. He switches places with her, so as to disclose

the full reality of his regret for what he did. He puts himself

in her place; he will risk suffering as he knows he made her

suffer. He prostrates himself before her emotionally. And, for

once, he does not ask her for words. He asks only for an action.

By not asking for words, he gives her space to make her decision

freely. He does not want to have to convince her. He wants her

to convince herself. He just wants her to meet him. Chuck has

superimposed Union Station on the station in Prague. He wants a

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chance to do it over, if she is willing to do it over. He

switches their places and runs her risk.

Chuck underlines that Sarah was right in Prague. They are

perfect for each other. Perfect. ‘Perfect’ was the word Shaw

wanted to use. ‘Nice’ was the word Sarah used. She still

reserves that word for Chuck, for them. Can she now rouse

herself past her lingering doubts, past her commitments to Shaw

and Beckman, and choose Chuck? He has chosen himself so that he

can choose her. Her choice hangs in the balance. Her face when

Chuck leaves betrays deep emotion, but it does not betray her

choice. Has Chuck done enough to keep her from choosing to be

happy enough?

Chuck asks Sarah to leave the spy life. He does this because it

was what she asked him to do in Prague. She was willing to do it

for him, he is willing to do it for her. He does not necessarily

want to give it up, but he will. In his own eyes, Chuck has

become a spy--even if not one of the CIA sort. He wants to be a

spy of his own sort. But he is not willing to be one without

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Sarah, cannot be one without Sarah. And he is willing to give up

being one if it is required to be with her. Because he has

become one, he can give being one up. What mattered most to

Chuck was overcoming his self-hatred, his self-mistrust. He has

done that. Giving up being a spy for Sarah’s sake will not

deprive him of what mattered most. He will have to find a new

profession. But he feels equal to that demand, equal to himself.

He was going to have to work out what kind of spy he would be

anyway. Chuck may have been born to be a spy, but he was made to

love Sarah Walker. Chuck has other reasons too. He and Sarah

are both (technically) agents. They are Beckman’s, to be ordered

as she chooses. She has, in the past, strongly discouraged a

relationship between Sarah and Chuck. Remaining at Beckman’s beck

and call is risky for them.

In the more elaborate version of his speech--the one in the

restaurant--Chuck asked Sarah to go to Rome with him. Why does

he now ask her to go on the run with him? Rome has come to seem

too much like Chuck’s reward for killing the mole, as if he were

not just a killer but an assassin. In that way, Rome has been

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tainted for them both. The taint involves a mistake, but it is

nonetheless real. But the point is that Chuck needs Sarah to

know that he has not chosen the spy life over her, that his

desire to be a spy with her is not a desire primarily to be a

spy--but with her along as a bonus. No, if anything, it works

the other way around. He wants to be with her--but with being a

spy as a bonus. But what he wants most, decisively, is her. He

can be anything as long as she is beside him. Going on the run

and not to Rome shows this to Sarah.

Meanwhile, at the hospital, Shaw has awakened. He sits up in his

hospital bed. He looks haunted, hunted. He reaches immediately

for his wedding ring. He stares at it darkly for a moment, then

puts it on and looks away in thought. His phone rings and he

answers it. We do not know who has called. He leaves the

hospital. No one else knows he has awakened.

Sarah is in her hotel room, packing. She has both a plane and a

train waiting, a trip to D.C. or a trip to Mexico. Shaw or

Chuck. (She is in a position like the one when she had to choose

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whether to go with Bryce or stay with Chuck. That choice was

complicated by something she did: she kissed Chuck. This choice

is complicated by something she worries Chuck has done: killed

the mole.) Nothing she is packing, nothing she is wearing, makes

clear her intention. She hears a knock on the door. It is

Casey. He asks if Sarah has a second and she invites him in.

Casey tells her he wanted to come by and tell her something about

Bartowski. She remarks that if Casey has come to plead Chuck’s

case, it is really is not necessary. Casey says that Chuck did

not send him, Chuck does not know he is there. Casey confesses

that he just wants to tell Sarah something in case it changes

anything for her. He continues and tells Sarah that he killed

the mole. Chuck did not do it. He notes that Chuck is not a

killer, not wired that way--the way that Casey and Sarah are. He

finishes what he has to say and heads to the door. She thanks

Casey before he can leave, joy flushing her face. He says, “You

have a nice life, Walker.”

Where was Sarah going? Did she know when Casey knocked? Or was

she packing disjunctively, as it were, to go either with Shaw or

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with Chuck, but without yet having decided? What she says to

Casey when she thinks he is there to plead Chuck’s case is hard

to read: if you are here to plead his case, it is really is not

necessary. Not necessary--because she has decided to go with

Shaw or because she has decided to go with Chuck? The depth of

Sarah’s emotion when Casey explains what happens suggests that

perhaps she had decided to go to D.C. Or perhaps it suggests

that she had decided to go with Chuck but that she had done so in

lingering self-division, since she still did not know what

happened at the train tracks. My best guess is that at that

Sarah still does not know what she is going to do. She wants to

go with Chuck, but she is committed to going with Shaw. That

commitment might not have too much weight for her (it was made in

distress, made under emotional duress), but she still does not

know what to make of Chuck. He has changed. The changes do not

seem to be for the worse, as she thought. He saved Shaw when

there were good reasons for him not to risk himself to do so. In

fact, he saved Shaw for her, because he could not bear to see her

lose her love, despite the fact that he had lost her love. And

Chuck had told her at long last, face-to-face, that he loved her.

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But the rail yard keeps all of this from being perfect--and that

is what it should be. Can she choose Chuck if choosing him means

that she gets almost perfect (perfect, except for that pesky worry

that he may have become a killer)? Is almost perfect clearly

better than happy enough--especially if perfect had once seemed

within reach? Which is the worst form of settling?

I do not know Sarah’s answers to these questions. I believe that

she was asking them of herself when Casey came. She tells Casey

that pleading for Chuck is unnecessary because she does not

believe Casey has anything to tell her that will make her

decision for her. She has all the now-available information.

She knows Casey is fond of Chuck. What he has to say will not

change anything, add anything new to her deliberations. She has

no inkling that Casey had anything to do with the killing of the

mole. When Casey tells her that he killed the mole, what she

wanted to do all along becomes possible, and it becomes possible

for it to be perfect--she no longer has to choose between almost

perfect and happy enough. She can choose perfect.

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After a brief scene shift to Chuck waiting for her at Union

Station, we see Sarah changed and leaving her hotel room. She

stops, taking thought, and then reaches into her bag. She takes

her gun from it, smiles, and tosses it on the bed. She is on her

way to Union Station--to the union she has wanted for so long.

She has no gun but she will travel.

But as she tosses her gun on the bed, her door bursts open and

Shaw is there. He tells her Washington will have to wait. He

has a lead on the Ring director. Sarah says she has to call

Chuck. Shaw tells her she can do it from the car. He pulls her

from the room. Chuck’s phone rings, but it is Beckman, ordering

him to Castle. When he gets there, Beckman shows him the video

of Sarah killing Shaw’s wife. (The video was recovered in the

wreckage of the Ring building that was bombed.) Sarah tries to

call Chuck, but her phone has no signal. She asks Shaw where

they are going. “To settle an old score,” is his answer.

Like Sarah, Chuck is left waiting for a train, alone. Prague has

been, sadly, fully superimposed on Union Station. Chuck believes

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that Sarah has chosen Shaw and refused him. They are done. He

made his play, did all he could do; it was not enough. But he

has no time to react to that. Shaw knows Sarah killed his wife.

Chuck knows Shaw well enough to know what this might mean. So

does Beckman. Chuck needs to find Sarah, to save her.

(S03E13) “I’ll Save You Later”

When Sarah and Shaw reach their destination, Shaw tells her that

the Ring director is inside the building. He claims that the NSA

received intelligence of this--the NSA picked up a signal. But

Beckman has told Chuck that she has no idea where Shaw is. So,

Shaw is either lying or he has been duped by the Ring. Sarah

short-circuits the lock on the warehouse, and, as she enters, she

asks Shaw to cover her. He raises his gun as if to do so, but he

trains it on her as she turns away. Sarah works her way

cautiously into the warehouse. As she pauses on the landing of a

flight of stairs, she realizes that Shaw is not covering her.

Shaw is gone.

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Sarah senses that something is wrong, odd. She activates her

tracking signal. Chuck (back at the Buy More, entreating Casey

for help) notices this and, aided by Casey, calls in a major

tactical force, soldiers, planes, stealth bombers--even a tank.

Anything to save Sarah.

As Sarah goes deeper into the building, she hears a woman’s

voice. As she gets closer to its source, she finds multiple tv

sets playing the video that Shaw has seen and that Beckman showed

to Chuck. While Sarah watches, she recognizes the woman, and

then sees the footage of herself shooting the woman. She stands

transfixed. Shaw approaches from behind her, with his gun

trained on her again. Sarah turns from the tvs and sees Shaw.

She stiffens and asks him what he is doing. He still has his gun

aimed at her. Shaw looks at the screen and sees his wife

smiling, and he begins to lower his gun. She asks Shaw why the

Ring would have video of her first kill, the worst moment of her

life. Shaw tells her to take a breath and then tells her that

the moment on the video is the worst moment of his life too.

Sarah asks who the woman is and Shaw explains that it is his

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wife. Sarah, in mounting horror, exclaims: “I killed your wife?”

Shaw explains that Sarah was used, manipulated, by the Ring:

“This isn’t your fault.” He repeats that and then, without

warmth, embraces Sarah.

Chuck has arrived in time to see the final moments of this

encounter. As Shaw embraces Sarah, Chuck gets a call on his

walkie-talkie, and Shaw and Sarah realize he is there. He is

there--but he has no one to save. He has to cancel everything--

including the tank.

Back at Castle, Beckman dresses Chuck down. His rescue operation

cost a fortune. Chuck tries to explain. He reminds Beckman that

they both thought that Shaw was going to kill Sarah. In fact, it

is Shaw who says the words, “Kill Sarah”, before Chuck can get

them out.44 Shaw defends Chuck’s actions as those of a true spy.

While Shaw talks to Beckman, Chuck asks Sarah if she is ok. She

is. She thanks him for saving her, and notes that she

appreciated the tank. Beckman suggests that the team must be

disbanded; they cannot work together given the past. But Shaw

denies that claim. He says that he and Sarah still have the same

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goals, to take down the Ring and its director. He asks Sarah if

she is still with him, if they can still be a team. She says

yes. Chuck, hearing all this in a different register, unhappily

comments that everyone (meaning Shaw and Sarah) is (are) back

together again.

At home, Chuck contacts Beckman to protest putting Shaw back in

the field with Sarah. He points out that Shaw must be an

emotional train wreck given what he now knows. No one can

control his feelings that well. But Beckman throws this back at

Chuck--Shaw is a true professional, but Chuck is not. That is

why she is going to go on with her original plan and move Sarah

and Shaw to Washington to head up the Ring task force. Chuck is

to stay in Burbank until she can figure out what to do with him.

Beckman backs the wrong spy.

What was Shaw planning to do with Sarah? Shaw was lying. He did

not believe the NSA picked up chatter about the Ring leader’s

location. What they find in the warehouse Shaw expected to find.

He planned to confront Sarah, surely, to test her to see if she

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had known who she had killed, and probably to kill her or to

abduct her so that he could kill her where and when he wanted.

But Shaw is not all bad. He does have real feelings for Sarah

(and he can see that she did not know that she killed his wife),

and he has a hard time going through with his plan in front of a

screen of his wife smiling and telling him she loves him. Shaw’s

feelings for Sarah, for his wife, and his sense of duty manage to

just overtop his vendetta. His awkward embrace of Sarah provides

the image of his inner conflict, as he tries simultaneously to

hold her close and to keep her distant. But his inner conflict

is far from settled. Despite what he tells Beckman, he remains

obsessed by what he knows. That knowledge is slowly hardening his

heart. His vendetta will win out.

Chuck believes that Sarah has refused him. She is with Shaw. He

has also destroyed his professional standing with Beckman. He

may have an agency badge; she no longer rates him an agent. He

was going to give that up or was prepared to do so, but now he

has been fired, so to speak; he got no chance to quit. Beckman

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pink slips him a second time. Other than Sarah thanking Chuck for

saving her--and although that was sincere, it must have stung

Chuck, given that she turned out not to need saving, apparently--

Sarah gave Chuck no sign that she was on her way to meet him when

Shaw showed up at her room. Beckman’s announcement that Sarah

and Shaw are going to D. C. while Chuck waits for Beckman to find

something to do with him is the final defeat. His plan to

reacquire Agent Walker not only fails, it fails spectacularly.

It has accomplished nothing but to land him back in a

depressingly familiar position--alone in Burbank. He is to slip

back into indeterminacy, back into waiting. Except now he has to

re-inhabit his old life while all of it reminds him of Sarah and

of what he has lost. To say it is better to have loved and lost than never to

have loved at all is to recollect the past in tranquility. At the

time of the loss, it surely seems better never to have loved at

all.

When Morgan visits Chuck later that day, he finds Chuck sitting

on the couch, drinking whiskey and playing Guitar Hero. Morgan

knows Chuck. He knows that if Chuck is mixing gaming with

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whiskey, his friend is in deep distress. Chuck explains to

Morgan that Sarah is leaving with the other guy. Chuck thought

he had a chance but he did not.

Morgan tries to take the whiskey from Chuck. Chuck flashes and

ties Morgan up in a wild tangle of gaming cords. Chuck sits

against the wall, in his underwear, still drinking, and listening

to O. M. D.’s “If You Leave”. He is also misquoting Pretty in Pink:

“I believed in her. I didn’t believe in me.”

Sarah knocks on the door and enters. She takes in the carnage in

one glance. Morgan tells her that Chuck is in a bit of a low

spot. Chuck knows she is leaving with Shaw. Chuck has also

eaten an entire carton of sugar-free mint ice cream. (Morgan

concedes that is not such a big deal by itself--but you also have

to factor in the heavy consumption of whiskey.) Sarah cuts

Morgan loose and asks him to leave her and Chuck alone.

Sarah sits down on the floor with Chuck. He begins to apologize

for his condition.

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Chuck: Look, I...uh..I know what I look like. The mint ice

cream sobered me up pretty good.

Sarah: [laughing gently] Chuck, it’s ok.

Chuck: No, it isn’t. I thought I could save you. I

thought Shaw was bad and I was gonna to save you and we were

gonna be together. But that didn’t happen.

Sarah: Shaw’s a good spy.

Chuck: [in exasperation] I get it, ok. I think everybody

gets it. Shaw is amazing. And you two are gonna go run off

together and save the world. And that’s...great news for the

world. [calming] But earlier, in my drunken haze, I

realized that I hadn’t asked you a question. A really

important question that I’d like to ask you now, if that’s

ok. Just once, for the record...Sarah, do you love me?

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[Sarah takes a breath as she sits in silence; Chuck looks

down at himself]

Chuck: Wow, I’m...uh...I’m in my underwear. [his voice

rises] I’m sitting in my underwear, holding a plastic

guitar. There’s a very good chance I’m making a complete

fool of myself, isn’t there?

[Sarah has been struggling with herself through Chuck’s

comment. She still hears only his question about whether

she loves him; she looks away from him as he talks, then

back at him]

Sarah: Yes.

Chuck: [taking her to be answering his question about

whether he is making a fool of himself] I should probably

put some pants on.

Sarah: No, Chuck. Yes. [she smiles slightly]

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Chuck: Wh...uh, what?

Sarah: Chuck, I fell for you a long, long time ago, after

you fixed my phone and before you started defusing bombs

with computer viruses. So, yes. Yes.

[She slides over to him, takes his face in her hands and

kisses him; Chuck returns her kiss]

Chuck: Wait, wait. What about my Red Test?

Sarah: Casey told me. He told me that he killed the mole

and that you couldn’t do it. And it was the best news that

I’d ever heard, because it means that you haven’t changed.

You’re still Chuck. You’re still my Chuck.

[Chuck smiles and then they both laugh]

357

Sarah did not betray to Chuck that she was on her way to Union

Station to run away with him. She understands how all that

transpired among Shaw and herself and Beckman looks to Chuck. But

since they were in Castle, with Shaw and Beckman, and since they

have not run away (yet, anyway), she cannot let Chuck know what

she wants him to know. That is why she shows up at Chuck’s

apartment. Although she certainly did not want Chuck to set

himself afloat on whiskey and mint ice cream, it is clear that

she is not wholly shocked. She knew her failure to share her

decision would be taken by Chuck to reveal a decision against

him. Although she does hurt Chuck, her decision is

understandable. And she means to undo the hurt as soon as

possible. All this is built into her tone of lovingkindness to

Chuck when she consoles him about his current condition: “Chuck,

it’s ok.”

Chuck does not recognize the significance of her visit. He is

too hurt, too unhappy, too far gone in “If You Leave” to

understand her arrival. He does not try to hide his heartbreak

from her. He shares it with her despite his being heartbroken

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over her. Shaw is the better man. Good for him. Good for her.

Good day to be the world. Bad day to be Chuck.

Still, Chuck has a question, an important question he has never

asked Sarah. He never dared to ask it, although he got close in

S01E08. “Sarah, do you love me?” Chuck has never been sure how

she would answer this question. He has felt love in her, in her

kiss, in her touch, in her glance, in various of their Cover

Together moments, especially on the train platform when he

refused the love he felt in her. But there have almost always

been other explanations for what she felt, and there was always

his tendency to doubt himself, to mistrust what he felt because

he could not take himself seriously as the object of her love.

And there was always the Intersect. But even in his drunken

haze, in his heartbreak, Chuck is not the Chuck of old. Despite

his feeling that he is slipping back into his old life, he would

be a new wine in an old wineskin, a new Chuck in that old life.

It would not hold him for long. Chuck dares to ask the question

he would not dare before.

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Words are hard for Sarah. She now knows how she feels. She

acknowledges it. She does not want to leave that feeling

unexpressed. She does not want to withhold herself from Chuck.

Still, words are hard for her to say. Wanting to say them does

not change that. Sometimes wanting to say words can make saying

them harder. She freezes for a moment in the glare of that

question, in its demand for self-exposure. She cannot say the

three words together. But she can still answer Chuck’s question.

He takes her silence to be her answer, a wordless No. Because he

believes she has said No, he realizes his self-exposure--that he

is sitting, still a little drunk, in his underwear, wearing a

plastic guitar. He must be making a fool of himself; he must

look pitiable. Sarah finally answers his question. “Yes.”

Chuck understands her to be agreeing that he has made a fool of

himself. She is telling him she loves him. He decides to cover

up, put some pants on. Sarah says No. She means that he has

misunderstood. Her Yes was in answer to the bigger question. She

explains in her way that she has always loved him. She fell for

him when she first met him or soon thereafter--somewhere between

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the Intellicell and Irene Demova. Chuck had told her he loved

her four times. Sarah tells Chuck Yes four times.

It has taken Chuck and Sarah three years to get here. But before

they can bask in the glow of what has finally happened between

them, Shaw has a new mission for them, a three-man op. Chuck is

to be the third man. Shaw is unknowingly to be the third wheel.

Shaw leads them to the Ring director’s headquarters. The plan is

to kidnap the director. But things go sideways. The Ring

director mentions the Ring’s Cipher, their attempt to create an

Intersect of their own. Chuck and Sarah make a play for it.

They end up captured by Ring agents. Shaw shows up in the nick

of time, shooting and killing all the Ring agents other than the

director. Shaw sends Sarah and Chuck out with the Cipher. When

the elevator doors close behind them, they hear Shaw shoot the

director. They leave.

But Shaw has not shot the director. The entire operation turns

out to have been a way of getting the defective Cipher into the

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hands of the CIA so that the CIA can figure out what is wrong

with it. They do, and Shaw gets access to that information.

Shaw points out that the Cipher’s key parts were made in France,

and he is able to convince Beckman to send him and Sarah to Paris

to follow up on the manufacture of the Cipher. But Shaw is now

working for the Ring.

Beckman tells Chuck he is not ready for the mission and orders

him to stay home. Chuck is worried. He frets to Sarah that he

and she are never going to get their chance. She reassures him.

“Once I get back,” she says, “it is all going to happen. You and

me.” She kisses him. “Don’t worry, just one more mission.”

But after Shaw and Sarah leave for France, Chuck discovers the

charade that Shaw was playing at the Ring director’s

headquarters. The fights were staged. Morgan shows this to

Chuck after Chuck (impressed with Shaw’s fighting prowess) shows

video of the fight to Morgan. Chuck realizes that Sarah is in

grave danger. Shaw is a Ring agent.

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Beckman rebuffs Chuck’s efforts to explain that Shaw is a double-

agent. She suspends him when she discovers that he has brought

Morgan with him into Castle. In his hour of greatest need, Chuck

has no resources--other than Morgan and Casey.

Casey to flies to Paris with him. While they are in transit,

Shaw walks with Sarah through the streets of Paris. They reach a

particular spot and Sarah, reacting to it, continues along the

sidewalk while Shaw stops. Shaw steps aside and watches as Sarah

begins to remember what happened in this spot--her Red Test. This

is where she killed Shaw’s wife. She inhales sharply. She

realizes what is happening. Sarah asks if this is some kind of

trap, and Shaw replies that Sarah killed his wife--Sarah couldn’t

think he would be ok with that.

At this point, Sarah begins to have trouble holding her gun

steady. Shaw has drugged her. She drops the gun and begins to

lose her balance. The Ring director, newly arrived, picks up the

gun. Sarah collapses and Shaw catches her. Shaw and the

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director, Sarah in tow, go around the corner to a cafe to discuss

the details.

The toxin Sarah has been drugged with numbs her nervous system

but leaves her conscious. She cannot feel anything or initiate

motion, but she remains aware of what is happening around her.

Shaw seats Sarah at the cafe and explains the nature of the

toxin. He wants her to understand why he is doing this, wants

her to see what is happening. Shaw is clearly still battling

himself. His desire for vengeance has won, but that does not

mean that other parts of him are not struggling against what he

is doing. In Chuck’s phrase, Shaw is emotional swiss cheese.

Shaw’s explanation for what he is doing is only barely coherent.

Killing Sarah is supposed to make the CIA feel the pain he felt.

He will show them that they betrayed the wrong man. At this

point, Shaw’s desire for vengeance has claimed his rationality as

a victim. He is no longer making sense: he just want to return

pain for pain, to lash out at the world. Sarah having been the

person who killed his wife makes her the target of his rage. And

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it is now running the show. The lighter has been lit; it will

not be closed; it will now burn until it is empty.

Sarah weeps in immobility, tears running down her otherwise

expressionless face. Her fate, Chuck’s fate, Shaw’s smoldering,

virulent hate, they have all been wound together and are now

unwinding here at a Paris cafe, one that Shaw has visited every

year on the anniversary of Evelyn’s death. Sarah’s drugged state

is itself an image of the fate that really awaited her had she

chosen Shaw: missing Chuck, locked in unhappiness, sealed in

inexpressiveness. She would have been a drug to dull Shaw’s

pain. He would never have been able to soothe hers.

The Ring director collects the information about the flaws in the

Ring’s Cipher, and leaves Shaw to do what Shaw has brought Sarah

to Paris to do. Shaw is going to show Sarah the river—“It is

beautiful at night.” After the director leaves, Shaw notes that

it is almost time to go. Sarah registers something familiar,

something unexpected. Chuck, dressed as a waiter, has gotten

behind Shaw and has a gun pointed at him. Shaw reads what has

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happened in Sarah’s eyes. Without turning around, he asks how

Chuck found him. Chuck tells him that he read every scrap of

paper about or by Shaw. Shaw always came to this cafe on the

anniversary of his wife’s death. It made morbid sense that he

would take Sarah here.

Shaw’s self-loathing rises for a moment to the level of his

hatred. He tells Chuck to kill him. Chuck, looking at Sarah and

remembering the Red Test, says he will not do that. Shaw stands

up and attacks Chuck. Chuck tries to flash but his fear for

Sarah, the weight of the moment, keeps it from happening. Shaw

overcomes him and leaves him on the pavement. Shaw tells Chuck

that he does not want to hurt him. This is not Chuck’s fault.

He also informs Chuck that he has not told the Ring that Chuck is

the Intersect. Shaw warns Chuck that if he follows them, Shaw

will kill him. Shaw drags Sarah away.

Chuck emotions have gotten in the way again. But Chuck’s gun is

on the ground beneath the cafe table. He retrieves it and chases

Shaw to the bridge. Shaw is preparing to throw Sarah into the

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water. Chuck yells for him to stop. Chuck tries to talk to

Shaw, to get him to stop what he is doing. But Shaw is too far

gone. He remembers his wife and steels himself. He aims to

shoot Chuck. Chuck fires more quickly than Shaw, hitting him

several times. Shaw falls over the edge of the bridge, grabbing

Sarah’s arm so as to take her with him. Chuck runs to Sarah and

holds onto her as Shaw loses his grip and plunges, bleeding, into

the water below.

The next morning, Sarah is asleep in a hotel room in Paris.

Chuck, working on the computer, is watching over her. She begins

to wake up and he goes to her side, sitting down on the bed. She

is dazed a bit at first.

Sarah: What happened?

Chuck: Everything’s ok now.

Sarah: And what about Shaw?

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Chuck: He’s dead. I’m sorry.

[Sarah recalls the night before in a rush of half-sentences]

Sarah: Oh, my God. You shot him.

Chuck: I couldn’t let him hurt you, Sarah. Trust me, I did

what I had to do. But I’m still the same guy. I’m still

Chuck. I promise.

Sarah: [in a tone of hushed realization] You saved me.

[She leans forward and kisses Chuck. After a long kiss,

Chuck pulls back and they look at each other; Chuck breaks

into a wide smile and kisses Sarah]

At this point, Beckman appears on the computer. Chuck had put it

down on Sarah’s other side when he sat down on the bed. They

pull back from their kiss, each breathing hard and trying to

regain composure. Beckman begins to detail another mission after

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congratulating them on the evening before, and the capture of the

Ring director. Chuck asks Beckman for a few more days in Paris.

She refuses; she needs them in Burbank asap. Chuck motions for

Sarah to shut the computer. She turns the screen away from them

and shuts it. Chuck starts to say something, when Sarah cuts him

off.

Sarah: Shut up and kiss me.

They embrace and disappear beneath the covers, no longer just

Cover Together, but Really Together.

Chuck’s vigil over Sarah’s drugged slumber answers to her vigil

over him on Malibu Beach. Those must have been lonely hours.

Chuck has killed Shaw. He knows how Sarah reacted when she

thought he had killed Perry. In the midst of Chuck’s joy over

Sarah’s safety, his stomach must have knotted. What will she

say? How will she react? But when Sarah asks about Shaw, Chuck

does not waver. He does not mince words. Shaw is dead. Sarah

recalls what happened, recalls Chuck’s shooting Shaw. “You shot

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him.” Chuck clearly regrets that necessity, but it was a

necessity. He would kill to save her. He would do anything to

save her. He tried to save her before--but he arrived too early.

He arrived in Paris just in time to save her later. This is what

Sarah promised him in S01E13, when he was to be transferred to a

CIA holding facility—“I’ll save you later.” The handler

(agent)/asset structure between them has become fully reciprocal;

Sarah has taken the role of damsel in distress from Chuck. Chuck

did not blunder into saving Sarah. He did it more or less on his

own and without any real aid from the Intersect. When he had to

save her, he did. Sarah has long regarded him as a hero. He is

now her hero. He saved her. He is her Chuck. He has overcome

Shaw; he has overcome himself. Emerson:

Self-trust is the essence of heroism. It is the state of

the soul at war, and its ultimate objects are the last

defiance of falsehood and wrong, and the power to bear all

that can be inflicted by evil agents. It speaks the truth,

and it is just, generous, hospitable, temperate, scornful of

petty calculations, and scornful of being scorned. It

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persists; it is of an undaunted boldness, and of a fortitude

not to be wearied out.45

Chuck has changed. Sarah has changed. He is not exactly the man

she met at the Buy More. She is not exactly the woman he met

there. Each has become an integral part of the other. They are

mutually constituting selves. They have found their way from a

world with a low grey sky to one with a sky high and blue. They

have abandoned the metaphysics of despair each lived in alone: a

metaphysics that was both the product of loneliness and

productive of it, a metaphysics of life degraded, alienated and

servile, a metaphysics in which trust and fidelity are at best

pleasant delusions, and hope a faulty calculation of futures that

all turn out to be bleak. But they are now learning that fidelity

and hope can lead to something that has the character

simultaneously of a return, a homecoming, and of something

completely new, an all-at-once deja vu and vuja de. In that Paris

bed, they are together again for the first time.

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They have adopted a new metaphysics, one of hope. It teaches

them to believe that things will be the same as before, but

different and better than before. They have found the morning of

yesterday on the day after tomorrow.

When Chuck and Sarah return home in the next episode (S03E14),

Chuck will point out to Ellie that Sarah is with him. She will

be overjoyed: “You guys are back together?” Chuck answers

without any qualification: “We’re together.”

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Chapter 12 (S04E03, S04E09) High Anxieties

One’s foes are of his own household. If his house is haunted, it is by himself only. Our

choices are our Saviors or our Satans. --Amos Bronson Alcott

(S04E03) White Wedding, Rugrats and a Mini-van?

In Season 4, the focus of the show decisively shifts to Chuck and

Sarah’s future. Although things between them are good (they are

Really Together), both of them harbor anxieties about the future.

Sarah is anxious about the reality of her commitment to Chuck,

about whether she has changed enough to choose Chuck and stick to

that choice. Chuck is anxious about whether he is really capable

of holding Sarah’s affections. Sarah is worried about herself and

the superficiality or depth of her changes. Chuck is worried

about himself and how to explain his attractiveness to Sarah.

Each of these anxieties becomes the focal point of a Season 4

episode.

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Sarah is worried about Chuck’s having mentioned marriage and

children. He mentioned them by repeating what Devon had said

about Chuck and Sarah being next to be married and to have kids.

Chuck’s remark was made interrogatively, as both were falling

asleep, but it stunned Sarah into wakefulness. She remains

troubled by it the next day, early when she is sparring with

Casey, and later through the main events of the episode. Chuck’s

remark scares her. And that makes her anxious. The old Sarah,

the all-spy Sarah, would have reacted like that, if she had

reacted at all. That Sarah did not fall in love, that Sarah did

not put down roots: she obeyed the Cardinal Rules of Spying.

But the new Sarah, the spy-and-person Sarah, has fallen in love

and is putting down roots. Still, the thought of permanence

makes her panic. Why? Is the panic normal or does it reveal

that the new Sarah is not so far after all from the old one? What

does her fear mean?

While Sarah is struggling with these questions, and worrying

about having to face Chuck and admit to being scared by talk of

marriage and children, the mission to Monaco that they were

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supposed to go on gets cancelled. Instead, they are ordered to

stay in Castle and to tend to two prisoners who have to spend the

night in Castle’s cells. The prisoners were on their way to

another location when their transport truck broke down. New

transport is to be provided in the morning. It turns out that

each of the prisoners has a history with Chuck or with Sarah.

One is Hugo Panzer, the Ring agent bested by Chuck on his first

solo spy mission. The other is Heather Chandler, Sarah’s nemesis

from high school and a spy in her own right. Chuck flashes on

Heather--she is in the Intersect 2.0--and he realizes she has

some sort of tie to his mother (code name “Frost”) for whom he

has been searching. He tells Sarah and she reluctantly agrees to

interrogate Heather in order to see if Heather has any

information about Frost.

Heather, no slouch at the spy game herself, quickly divines

during the interrogation that Chuck and Sarah are a couple. She

zeroes in on Sarah and starts jabbing at her. She keeps telling

Sarah that Sarah cannot really make the choice she seems to have

made, that her commitment, even if it appears real, is not real.

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Over and over, Heather tells Sarah she knows this because she and

Sarah are the same. In fact, as Heather talks about Sarah,

Heather keeps shifting from the singular ‘she’ to the plural--to

‘we’ or ‘our’. At one point she tells Chuck:

Heather: She’s all spy. White wedding, rugrats, minivan.

It’s not in our wiring. I’m right. She can’t face it.

That’s why she’s upset.

Heather is right in a way--or better, she was right at a time.

In the past, Sarah was like Heather. In many early episodes of

the show, Sarah is shown against her own reflection, the

reflection representing Sarah’s unrealized but realizable self,

the person who she was groping her way toward. Sarah has stepped

through the looking glass; she is realizing that previously

unrealized self. Heather now steps into the place of the Sarah

that cast the reflection. But how much distance separates the

Heather-Sarah and the new Sarah? Heather does upset Sarah.

Chuck remains calm through most of the sparring between the two,

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although by the time it ends he has become curious and slightly

anxious about the root of Sarah’s anger and frustration.

The verbal sparring between Heather and Sarah takes place largely

while the two of them, with Chuck bringing up the rear, are

crawling through the ducts of Castle. They are trying to escape

from Hugo, who has freed himself and is trying to kill Heather.

(He is acting on orders from Volkoff, the Season 4 villain.

Heather has screwed up an arms deal he had arranged.) The verbal

sparring eventually becomes physical. Hugo appears and begins to

fight with Chuck. Heather takes the opportunity to try to

escape, and Sarah has to fight her to keep that from happening.

Eventually, Casey, who has entered the ducts from the top, in the

Buy More, captures Hugo. Sarah and Chuck take Heather to the

roof where they wait, with Hugo and Casey, for transport. The

transport turns out to be full of Volkoff’s men, and Sarah and

Casey end up in a gun battle with them while Chuck chases Hugo,

who has escaped back into the ducts. Casey gets shot in the leg

and Heather expects Sarah to turn her over to Volkoff’s men. It

is what she would do in Sarah’s place.

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Heather: I know you, Walker. I know what you’re going to

do.

Sarah: You don’t know who I am or the thoughts in my head.

We have nothing in common.

With that, Sarah gives Heather Casey’s gun, and she and Heather

manage to wound or kill all of Volkoff’s remaining men. Chuck

finally captures Hugo--with Big Mike’s help. While the whole

group waits inside Castle for the real CIA transport, Heather has

one last conversation with Sarah.

Heather: Maybe you’re right. Maybe we aren’t alike at all.

Maybe you are capable of love, affection, vulnerability. I

hope so. Chuck seems like a really nice guy and he’s really

in love. Are you?

Heather’s tone here has changed from hectoring, looking for a

response, to a genuine concern, a concern like the one that Sarah

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has felt for herself since Chuck repeated Devon’s comment. But

although Sarah, as is her way, fails to answer Heather’s

concerned question, she has discovered the answer for herself.

She has survived her gut check. She is not the Sarah of old.

Sarah: The other night, when you repeated what Awesome said

about us being next

having kids...It scared me. And I wanted to tell you

earlier. I’ve been thinking about it

all day long.

Chuck: And Heather kept poking the topic with a

needle?...You’re nothing like her.

Sarah: For a long time I was exactly like her. And it took

me a night in the guts of the building to realize that I’m

not anymore. At all. And I don’t want to be. But I do

need to take things...slow.

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Chuck: I’m not ready for parenthood either. One day,

hopefully, but not now, not yet, anyway. Who are we

kidding? I’m barely on solid food myself. So...slow.

Sarah: Ok. So, slow.

Chuck: Super slow. Really slow.

Sarah now knows that it is possible for her to give herself to

Chuck and bind herself by that gift. She can take the

opportunities their life together offers her as favors.

But it is clear later (in subsequent episodes) that Chuck, while

happily willing to take things slow, is becoming worried about

himself as the object of Sarah’s love--about whether Sarah is in

love with him or in love with the Intersect version of him. He

begins to worry about whether he is choice worthy for Sarah as

plain Chuck or whether he is only choice worthy because of the

power the Intersect grants him. When he begins to worry about

this, Sarah’s desire to take things slow threatens to change its

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aspect, and he begins to worry that it is really a form of

hesitation. Sarah is now convinced that it is not hesitation,

but doubt settles on Chuck.

(S04E09) Losing the Intersect, Losing Sarah?

The doubt becomes serious when Chuck loses the Intersect, when it

gets suppressed. Suddenly, Chuck cannot flash. He is thrown

back on his own native devices, his own power. Chuck is exposed

to a device that ‘suppresses’ the Intersect. After the exposure,

he cannot successfully flash. He or some circumstance can

initiate flashes, but the nascent flashes fizzle, glitch before

anything comes of them.

With the Intersect suppressed, General Beckman demotes Chuck to a

benchwarmer. Sarah and Casey handle missions while a team of

scientists begins to study Chuck to see if they can find a way to

release the Intersect. Chuck is examined, poked and prodded,

shown various pictures and videos, but nothing has any effect.

The lead scientist then provides a strange image that structures

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much of what happens next. He claims that there is, as it were,

a large stone sitting on the Intersect, keeping it suppressed.

The question is: what or who in Chuck’s life is the stone. The

image is strange because it is unclear why it is the image

chosen. The suppression of the Intersect is not a psychological

event brought on by some psychological pressure or disturbance in

Chuck. It is not, for example, a suppression brought about by

stress. (Although that possibility does get mentioned.) A

device brings it about like the one that gave Chuck the Intersect

in the first place. So it is hard to see why the image of the

stone fits--since that image suggests that Chuck is responsible

for the rock and so could, if he could get his head straight,

also remove it.

I do not deny that Chuck’s anxiety about the loss of the

Intersect makes the whole situation worse. That the doctors

regard Chuck as responsible is unsurprising. But nothing Chuck

has done, even unconsciously, is in any way the whole story; it

is not clear that any such thing is even central to the story.

Anyway, after the team of doctors surrenders, a new therapist

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appears. He is an agent himself, but also a doctor. His first

idea is that Chuck needs surprise or pain to move the stone and

release the Intersect. So he arranges various sorts of surprise

attacks on Chuck, and he hurts Chuck repeatedly. But none of

this works either. Chuck, growing more desperate, obligingly

enters into the therapies, allowing himself to be hurt. All this

is a measure of how badly he wants the Intersect back.

He wants it back because he fears that without it, he is no

longer a spy. He wants it back because he fears that if he is no

longer a spy, he will cease to be attractive to Sarah. Chuck

suffers from a peculiar performance anxiety--not the expected

sexual performance anxiety, but a flash performance anxiety. The

opening of the next episode makes this clear. Chuck and Sarah

are in bed together and she straddles him. She tells him that

there is something she really wants--she wants him to flash. But

he can’t do it. When she realizes she cannot, she rolls off him

in disgust. Chuck then realizes Lester is in bed with them--and

Lester tells him that he cannot hope to keep a girl like Sarah if

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he can’t flash. Chuck finally awakens, realizes it is all a

dream.

The therapist finally decides that the only thing that can

release the Intersect is PFOD, Pure Fear of Death. He arranges

for Chuck to accompany him on a very dangerous mission to

Switzerland, one that endangers them both. The therapist’s hope

is that if Chuck is forced to confront a life-threatening

situation, the fear the situation causes will kick start the

Intersect. Chuck goes along with the arrangement. Sarah,

however, is absolutely against it. The plan terrifies Sarah,

putting Chuck beyond her help. But that is the rub. The

therapist has come to believe that Chuck cannot really confront

PFOD for as long as Sarah accompanies him. Chuck will believe,

does believe, that Sarah will save him. She always saves him.

And of course, since he does not have the Intersect, Sarah

rightly judges Chuck to be even more vulnerable than usual, even

more in need of her.

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Chuck does not want to be needy. He feels like that will make

him, if not now, then later, unattractive to Sarah. Chuck knows

how competent, how professional Sarah is. He knows how much she

values these traits. With the Intersect, Chuck is Sarah’s peer,

in competence and nearly in professionalism. He may even be more

than her peer in competence. When the Intersect 2.0 is working

smoothly--alas, never a commonplace for Chuck--Chuck is a weapon,

one so dangerous that General Beckman can talk of the need to

protect the world from Chuck as possibly more important than

protecting Chuck from the world.

The therapist’s attempts to provoke PFOD in Chuck, to release the

Intersect, fail. But he and Chuck manage to steal a jewel in

which the Belgian, the villain of the episode, is concealing

secret information. Chuck and the therapist confront the villain

in the gondola used to get up to and down from the mountain

hotel. Sarah, who has left Burbank to come and help, has almost

arrived, but the therapist urges Chuck to provoke the

confrontation (before she gets there and can save Chuck), and to

provoke it in the gondola, where there is no hope of escape. The

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confrontation goes sour. The therapist is shot and killed.

Chuck, despite hanging from the gondola by his fingertips, never

flashes. The Belgian takes him, having figured out that Chuck

has the Intersect.

Chuck’s disappearance unhinges Sarah. She cannot sleep, cannot

rest, until she finds him. In her panic, she becomes hard and

wild, unpredictable. It is not just her panic that provokes

this. It is also provoked by Chuck’s absence. Chuck’s presence

helps Sarah to remain open, to not just have the feelings she

has, but to be properly responsive to them. He softens her. He

helps her to keep in view the fact that others around her are not

just suckers or marks, are not just obstacles, are not just

enemies, but fellow souls.

Fear and exhaustion (she cannot sleep with Chuck gone) rack

Sarah. She violates the Thai embassy, and gets Casey to help

her, so as to kidnap the Belgian’s contact, a Thai aide, in hope

of learning something about Chuck. Sarah is about to begin to

beat the information from the aide when Casey stops her. Casey

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had earlier told her that Chuck needed her to be a spy, not his

girlfriend. Casey corrects himself: Sarah isn’t acting like a

girlfriend, she’s acting like the spy he knew before they came to

Burbank, Langston Graham’s (the CIA chief) “wildcard enforcer”.

Casey tells her that he did not like that spy. Sarah, enraged by

her failure to get information from the Belgian’s man, and

further enraged by Casey’s words, is ready to kill them both.

She steps toward Casey in a cold, deadly fury. At that point,

Morgan, who has witnessed the conversation, steps between Sarah

and Casey. He is able to calm Sarah enough to get her to agree

to go home and try to get a couple of hours sleep.

Morgan appreciates that he hazarded himself in by stepping in

front of Sarah. He confesses to Casey that he was terrified. He

also notes appreciatively that Casey was not afraid. But as

Morgan walks away, Casey has to shake off his own fear of Sarah.

While Sarah is trying to rest, Morgan checks on her. She has

found a map with drawings on it in Chuck’s Nerd Herder shirt.

Sarah had gone to the shirt hanging in the closet door in order

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to touch it, to smell it, to bring Chuck back to her. Morgan

initially denies any knowledge of the map, but when Sarah admits

how much she misses Chuck, Morgan cannot keep from telling her

that the map was Chuck’s proposal plan. Some of it Chuck had

planned when he was a boy, the rest he had been adding in, trying

to think of things that would be meaningful to Sarah and to him.

Sarah wonders when he was planning on doing this, on proposing.

Morgan: Ever since he lost the Intersect, the proposal plan

got put on hold.

Sarah: Why? Did he think I wouldn’t want to marry him

without the Intersect? Is that

how I made him feel?

Morgan: No. No, Chuck knew that...Chuck knows that you

love him, Sarah. Okay, it’s just, you’re kind of a big fish,

you know, and to a regular guy with no supercomputer in his

head, I got to think that’s pretty intimidating.

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Sarah: But that’s not the reason why I love Chuck. I do

want to spend the rest of my

life with Chuck--with or without the Intersect.

Morgan: That’s fantastic. That’s great. Yeah, and he

knows that right, because you told him that.

Sarah: [stands in stricken silence]

Morgan: Oh.

Here is the root of Chuck’s current anxiety about Sarah. He is

not really an anxiety about her, but about himself. From Chuck’s

point of view, for him to be loved by a woman like Sarah is

miraculous. It defies explanation. Or, it would, if he did not

have the Intersect. The Intersect supplies the explanation.

This is another reason why Chuck is so often caught up in a

having/being indeterminacy where the Intersect is concerned. On

the one hand, if the Intersect is something that he has, then

Sarah loves, not him, but a possession of his. On the other

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hand, if the Intersect is what he is, then Sarah loves him. The

fact that he has lost the Intersect proves, however, that he is

not it. Even worse, it is now something that he had. So why

would he expect Sarah to stay? The only explanation of her

having been with him is no longer available as an explanation.

Here again we see how deep Chuck’s self-mistrust can run, how

seriously it can flare up even if he has generally overcome it.

Sarah of course is a particular difficulty, since she means so

much to Chuck. He cannot quite see how it is possible for Sarah

to love him, this particular guy with this particular history.

His self-mistrust causes him to think that he needs an

explanation where he really does not need an explanation--or at

any rate, not one like the one he thinks he needs. He reckons

that Sarah loves him because of characteristics or features he

has. But this would mean that if he were to lose those

characteristics or features, she would not longer love him. Or

it would mean that if she met someone who has those

characteristics or features to a higher degree than Chuck, her

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affections would transfer to that person. But love does not work

like that. Robert Nozick makes the point.

Apparently, love is an interesting instance of another

relationship that is historical, in that (like justice) it

depends upon what actually occurred. An adult may come to

love another because of the other’s characteristics; but it

is the other person that is lovd, and not the

characteristics. The love is not transferable to someone

else with the same characteristics, even to one who ‘scores’

higher for these characteristics. And the love endures

through changes of the characteristics that gave rise to it.

One loves the particular person one actually encountered.

Why love is historical, attaching to persons in this way and

not to characteristics, is an interesting and puzzling

question.46

It is an interesting and puzzling question. Chuck’s confusion

here is understandable. We all feel it from time to time. To

misquote Elizabeth Barrett Browning: “Why do I love thee? Let

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me count the characteristics.” We all sometimes want

explanations of a certain sort for our loving or for our being

loved. The fact that we often come to love someone--fall in

love--because of a person’s characteristics also makes it seem

that such an explanation must be available. If such an

explanation is available for how we come to love, must not such

an explanation be available for the continuance of love? But it

is not. Sarah loves Chuck--Chuck. With or without the

Intersect. No doubt the Intersect, or better yet, the selfless,

self-sacrificing use Chuck made of it, played a role in her

coming to love him, although it is by no means the only thing

that played a role in her coming to love him. It is worth

remembering that by Sarah’s own account, she fell for Chuck

between his fixing her phone and his defusing a bomb with an

internet porn virus. The Intersect did not actually play the

starring role in that stretch of Chuck and Sarah time.

But Chuck’s struggle with the Intersect, the being/having

indeterminacy of it, makes it doubly hard for him to admit that

love is historical. He cannot stay convinced that he could be

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what she loves, and not his characteristics. And the

characteristic of his that seems to him to have to play the major

role in explanations of Sarah’s feelings is his having the

Intersect. Or, maybe what she loves is the Intersect, and he is

the Intersect. At any rate, it is the Intersect that is doing

the heavy lifting of her affections. But now he is not the

Intersect--so she no longer loves him. He is wrong about this

but he does not know it.

We can guardedly appeal to reasons (reasons mentioning

characteristics) in explaining falling in love, explain this to

ourselves as a matter of premises-to-conclusion reasoning. But

even to the extent that such reasoning plays a role in our

falling in love, it is scaffolding that supports nothing once we

are in love. If it did, then it is hard to see how we could be in

love with someone, an historical person, and not simply with an

instance of a characteristic or an instance of a set of

characteristics. If we love instances of characteristics, then

it would seem that we should choose other, better instances of

those characteristics when they are available, when some new

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person appears who is a better instance of the characteristics,

or that we should cease to love when the instance fails any

longer to count as an instance, when the historical person

changes. But we know that actual love is not really vulnerable to

such changes.47 Once we are in love, although there is no reason

to treat our loving an historical person as irrational, our love

is no longer susceptible to the sort of explanation our falling

in love is susceptible to. Consider the line from Doctor Zhivago:

They loved each other because all things desired that it be

so: the earth below, the sky above, the clouds and the

trees.48

This parodies the demand for explanation despite having the

outward form of an explanation.

Why does Chuck love Sarah? Why does Sarah love Chuck? My talk

about their effects on each other, my talk of what they represent

to each other or example to each other, may make it seem that I

am offering explanations of their being love. But I am not.

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Rather, it is because they love each other that they can affect

each other as they do, represent what they do, serve as examples

as they do. Why do they love each other? To borrow a line from

Tristan:

Because it was he, because it was she.

There is nothing more to say. Love is not a problem. Love is a

mystery.49

The conversation with Morgan sends Sarah completely over the

edge. She comes back to Castle carrying a black duffel bag.

When Casey tries to stop her, to find out what she is doing, she

tells him that he should leave, that he won’t want to be any part

of what she is about to do. Casey refuses, so Sarah kicks him

into a holding cell and locks the door.

She enters the aide’s cell, and like some mad Mary Poppins in

black leather, starts emptying her bag in front of him. Inside

are various instruments of torture. The aide, who has been

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smirking at Sarah, confident that an American agent in an

American facility would not beat or torture anyone, tries again

to work up a smirk. He claims not to be afraid, but he is

beginning to fear. Sarah agrees with him that she would not

normally threaten someone with death by ammonia injection--

burning the person from the inside out. She fills a syringe with

ammonia and walks toward the aide. She explains:

Sarah: ...This man that I’m looking for--he loves me. He

wants to marry me.

Aide: [chuckles] I see. It’s amazing what a woman will do

to find a husband. Even

the toughest spies in the world are just racing against that

biological clock. Tick, tick,

tick...tock. [chuckles again]

Sarah: You got me. I’m just a needy, love-crazed girl on a

husband hunt...who’s trained in over two hundred ways to

kill you. [She stabs the hypo into the aide’s neck]

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Afraid yet?

The aide cracks and tells Sarah that the Belgian has a hideout in

the jungles of northern Thailand, near the Burmese border. When

she shares this information with Casey, he tells her that those

jungles are full of killers. She needs to take him with her.

She refuses.

Sarah: You’re not going where I’m going. I’ll do anything

to get him back, and I’m not going to take you down with me.

You were right. I’m different without Chuck. And I don’t

like it.

Casey: You let me out of here. You need me.

Sarah: [turning and leaving] No, I need Chuck.

The false bravado of the aide contains some truth. “You got me.”

Sarah does want children, even if the idea still frightens her.

And she is getting older, even if she is not yet nearly at an age

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where every tick-tock counts. When she says she is a needy,

loved crazed girl, she is not pretending to confess, even if her

continuing to note that she is trained in two hundred ways to

kill makes the specific wording of her confession misleading.

Needy, she is. Love-crazed, yes. But ‘a girl’? Well, yes, but

mainly no. This is a girl who was the CIA’s wildcard enforcer. No

mere slip of a thing, pulling petals from daisies. In S02E01,

when Sarah and Chuck go on their first fully official, real date,

Sarah teases him into telling her what he thinks of her. Chuck

uses the word ‘girl’ but then quickly corrects himself: ‘woman’.

But he next mentions the fact that she could kick the asses of

everybody in the restaurant. In that context, and given what has

been established about Sarah, the mention of that fact simply

goes by as he goes on to talk about her being smart and cool,

etc. But here, with Sarah more or less literally love-crazed,

and in light of Casey’s comments about who she used to be, and

especially in light of Casey’s fear of her, it comes home: This

is a dangerous woman. When she is with Chuck, the safety is on.

Without him, she is ready to go off. The Belgian’s taking Chuck

has weaponized her (again).

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Sarah registers this change. She registers it as a reversion,

backsliding. But in her fear, she cannot stop it. And she fears

to stop it--if she does not (again) become a weapon, can she save

Chuck? She says she is different without Chuck. Sarah is only

now developing a capacity for self-description and self-

revelation; her vocabulary of self-description remains

impoverished. For Sarah, ‘different’ in highly emotional

contexts like this one means, not the same but worse. That is what

she meant (in S03E11) when she described her relationship with

Shaw as different from hers with Chuck.

Once in Thailand, Sarah begins to cut a path of destruction

through the jungle. She enters a remote bar, full of men,

killers, and within a few seconds, she establishes that she is

easily the most dangerous person in the room. She is granted an

audience with the owner of the bar who tells her both that he

does not like the Belgian and that he will tell her where to find

him--but only if she agrees to fight his best fighter, and wins.

He tells her that he has heard about her: a giant blond she-male

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fighting her way through the jungle. Sarah nods, agrees to his

terms.

After she wins the fight and is united with Casey and Morgan, who

have finally caught up with her during, they quickly patch

Sarah’s wounds and race to the Belgian’s hideout. Once there,

they use Morgan to create a distraction (“the magnet”), and Sarah

and Casey overwhelm the guards.

Meanwhile, the scientist the Belgian has employed to extract the

Intersect from Chuck, Dr. Mueller, is having little success. He

has been trying to play on Chuck’s anxieties, particularly his

anxieties about Sarah in order to get Chuck to flash. But,

despite driving Chuck’s anxieties higher and higher, the

Intersect does not respond. No flash. Chuck has been enduring

hurtful dream after hurtful dream, all induced by the scientist

and almost all involving Sarah either refusing herself to him or

simply leaving him. The Belgian, growing more frustrated, tells

Mueller to hurry. Mueller says that all that is left to do is to

move to Phase Three. In Phase Three, Mueller stops trying to

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make Chuck anxious enough to flash. Instead, Mueller wipes Chuck

from Chuck’s brain, leaving only the Intersect. Chuck--his

personality, his memories, his anxieties--all will be erased,

leaving only the Intersect. Retrieving the Intersect at that

point should be relatively easy. The Belgian gives Phase Three

the go-ahead.

We are given a phenomenological rendering of the process, a

dreamlike immersion in Chuck’s erasure. Mueller described the

process as physically erasing Chuck, starting from the outer edge

of his brain and working in, finally erasing him from its inner

recesses. Phenomenologically, this means that Chuck’s experience

of the erasure begins in the Buy More, and involves the loss of

his co-workers there, proceeds to Echo Park and the loss of Ellie

and Devon, continues to Chuck and Sarah’s apartment, and

eventually ends in their bedroom, where Sarah will be taken from

him. (No one is as deep in Chuck’s head as Sarah.) The Buy More

staff vanishes, then the Buy More, then Ellie and Devon, and then

the apartment begins to disintegrate.

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Sarah and Casey burst in on Mueller and the Belgian. Sarah

knocks the Belgian through a window (this is keyed to the

disintegration of Chuck’s apartment, as shattered glass from its

windows flies all around him). Sarah rushes to Chuck, who sits

in a laboratory chair, festooned with electrodes. She

frantically begins unhooking them, calling to Chuck to come back

to her. (This is keyed to Chuck opening the door to their

bedroom, all that is left of his world, to find Sarah there--but

she is not vanishing.) Sarah tells Chuck that she is there. (At

this point, Chuck ‘hears’ what she is saying to him in Thailand

as said to him in his dreamlike state). In Thailand, Sarah is

wearing black, and is dirty, injured, dripping wet. She crossed

a stream to surprise the guards. In their bedroom, she is

angelic, dressed in white, softly lit. In the dream, Chuck hears

her as he looks into his room.

Sarah: Chuck, I’m here.

Chuck: But you’re not. You’re not real. This is a dream.

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Sarah: I came to rescue you. I’m right here, Chuck.

[Switch to Thailand]

Sarah: Chuck, please, come on.

Morgan: Hey, hey, hey. Tell him what you told me before.

He’ll hear that. I know it.

This is your chance. Don’t be Sarah Walker the spy, be

Sarah Walker the girlfriend.

Sarah: Chuck, please. Chuck, I love you. Please wake up.

I have so much that I want to tell you. [Switch to their

bedroom] I found your proposal plan.

Chuck: No, no, no. This is my mind playing tricks on me.

You don’t know anything about my proposal plan.

Sarah: You were going to do it on the beach in Malibu,

where we watched the sunrise after our first date. There

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were several racecars involved.

Chuck: I revised that.

Sarah: Chuck, I want to spend [switch to Thailand] the rest

of my life with you. I don’t care if you have the Intersect

or not. Without you, [switch to their bedroom] I’m nobody.

I’m nothing but a spy. Come back to me, Chuck. I want to

marry you. [Switch back to Thailand: Sarah kisses Chuck

and he awakens; they embrace as Sarah weeps]

These are words Sarah needed to say--but most of all they are the

words Chuck needed to hear. They are spoken to the very heart of

his anxiety. Part of the point of the two Sarahs, the real one

in Thailand and the dream one in their bedroom, is that Sarah’s

words carry all the way into the inner recesses of Chuck’s brain,

all the way to the bedroom; they strike down, in their calm

truth, his anxious fear that she is not in love with him, but

with the Intersect. But the other part of the point is that

Sarah in Thailand, dripping and dirty, weeping from panic and

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relief, has pledged these things before witnesses, before Casey

and Morgan. Dream Sarah in white underscores the fact that the

real Sarah has made her vows to Chuck. She will marry him

because, in effect, she has.

But her words here matter in other ways. “Without you, I’m

nobody. I’m nothing but a spy.” These words echo Chuck’s in the

pilot. “I’m nobody.” Each of them has become somebody, but each

has done so by gifting herself or himself to the other. For

Sarah, to give Chuck her freedom is the best use she can make of

her freedom. For Chuck, the same thing is true in the other

direction. Each is willing to substitute the other’s freedom for

his or her own. This is what it is for two people to belong to

each other. Chuck belongs to Sarah, Sarah to Chuck. And,

finally, Chuck knows it. Morgan will underline it for Chuck

later:

Morgan: I mean, maybe it was a good thing that you lost the

Intersect because now,

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you know that girl loves you. I mean, she will do anything

for you.

Chuck: Thanks, buddy.

Morgan: Yeah, no, seriously, anything, ok? I had to pick a

Thai tooth out of her arm.

Chuck: Ow! I’ve got people who will take teeth and leeches

for me. I’m a lucky guy.

“Without you, I’m nobody. I’m nothing but a spy.” In a similar

moment--another instance of the new acquist of true experience--

Katharine Hepburn’s character in The Philadelphia Story, Tracy Lord,

will find herself willing to acknowledge her need of Cary Grant’s

character, Dexter Haven. As she is about to get married (again)

to Dexter, to walk down the aisle in her hat and dress, Tracy

asks her father a question:

Tracy: (To her father) How do I look?

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Mr. Lord: Like a queen--like a goddess.

Tracy: And do you know how I feel?

Mr. Lord: How?

Tracy: Like a human. Like a human being.

Standing before Chuck in her black fighting gear, bloodied,

exhausted, Sarah has never looked more like a spy. As she fought

her way across Thailand, she had never been more a spy, never

been more a weapon, never been more dangerous. But with Chuck

she is more than a spy. And how does she feel as Chuck awakens?

Like a human. Like a human being.

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Chapter 13 (S04E24) Making Vows

Marriage is a contract, a contract to pass out of the sphere of contract; and this is

possible only because the contracting parties are already beyond and above the sphere

of mere contract. --F. H. Bradley

Church bells ring. But for what do they ring, and for whom? Do

they peal joyously or do they sound solemnly? Just before Chuck

and Sarah’s wedding, Vivian Volkoff attacks Sarah using a strange

high-tech weapon called ‘The Norseman’. It allows its user to

kill at a distance but more or less infallibly, since the weapon

is somehow linked to the victim’s DNA. To pull the trigger is to

initiate a process that terminates in the death-by-poisoning of

the victim. The attack occurs at the wedding party. Sarah grabs

her head, asks about a noise (only she can hear it), and then she

collapses, blood running from her nose. Chuck knows what has

happened; Vivian called him as she pulled the trigger, making

sure he knew that she was responsible, and so making sure he knew

that he was responsible, since this is Vivian’s vengeance for Chuck

having taken her father from her.

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All this occurs in S04E23. S04E24 opens with a flashback to a

week before. Sarah and Chuck are in bed. He asks if she is

awake and she turns over to face him in answer. They talk about

the fact that they are one week from the wedding, and acknowledge

to each other that they are anxious. But their anxiety is not

about being wed--it is about the wedding, the ceremony itself.

Sarah, in particular, finds the prospect of sharing her intimate

feelings in public daunting. They decide that it will ease their

anxiety if they practice the wedding together, so that they will

ready for anything.

The episode toggles between Chuck’s desperate efforts to find a

way to save Sarah and the two of them in their apartment,

practicing--pretending?--to get married. I focus on what occurs

in their apartment.

This is the second crucially deflected scene in their courtship.

By ‘deflected’ here I do not mean postponed, but rather that what

we see is not the event itself (or the whole of it) but rather a

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simulacrum of the event or a failed form of the event or a ‘part’

of the event.

The first is Chuck’s proposal. We are shown various, rather

complicated bits of planning for the event. Chuck first enlists

Morgan to help him run a proposal sub-mission during another

mission. But Sarah and Casey figure out that Chuck and Morgan

are planning the sub-mission, and Sarah takes control of it--to

make sure it happens.

It almost does. Chuck is almost to the crucial words when they

are interrupted. That interruption puts into motion a plan to

allow Sarah to infiltrate Volkoff industries in an attempt to

save Chuck’s mother, who has been in deep cover there for years.

We eventually see the successful proposal, but it is in the

distance, down a hospital hallway. On our end of the hallway, so

to speak, a janitor waxes the floor. The noise of the waxing

machine heightens the sense of distance from Chuck and Sarah. We

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see him offer the ring. We see her accept it, embrace and kiss

him.

Chuck does not spend a lot of its time forcing its viewers to

consider their own act of viewing the show. The show is not arch

or ironic or meta-fictional in constant or obvious ways. But it

does force the viewer into self-awareness as a viewer from time

to time--it gently reminds us that we are watching. There are

reminders that we have a relationship to Chuck and Sarah (and

everyone else) all-too-much like the relationship of Casey to

them. We watch and we listen. We keep them under surveillance.

We are a race of peeping Toms. In one episode, there is a

reference to someone as “the spy who spies on spies”. It is hard

not to hear that as a description of us, the viewers, too. We

are in are own way implicated in the spy world, part of the

Panopticon, sitting in our living rooms as if in the Inspection

House. Our tv watching resembles spy craft. This scene in

particular matters to us as viewers--we want to be close to it,

even in the midst of it. We were teased into believing we would

see it in the earlier episodes. But now we are pushed back, made

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to stand back, and while we are allowed to see what happens, we

do not enjoy any intimacy with the event. It is as if we have

been told: “Give them a minute.” The couple that has enjoyed so

little genuine privacy for four years is finally given a few

minutes to be with each other, uncrowded--without us bugging

them. The moment is theirs and not ours—even as it is ours.

These moments that force us to consider our own act of viewing

also force us to consider the roles of appearance and reality in

our lives as viewers. While we watch Chuck we watch a real show.

But what we see happen in the show is not real. It is a collage

of sets and props and actors acting. The sets are real; so too

are the props and the actors. But, real sets are not real

apartments; real props (like the prop of The Norseman) are not

real weapons; the actors are real people and they are really

saying lines, but they are not really Chuck or Sarah and they do

not really say the lines they are really saying. They say the

words as if they meant them but they do not. The actors have a

‘cover story’. We know it is a ‘cover story’ but we treat it,

for an hour at a time or so, as if it were a true story. In this

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way, we have, from the beginning of the show, been caught up

watching a ‘cover’ couple playing a cover couple that is a real

couple. We watch caught ourselves in mazeways of pretense and

reality, of what is real and what is unreal. Like Sarah, we know

how to move around in the mazeways, but also, like her, we should

on occasion ask ourselves what exactly we are up to--do we know

where the cover ends and real life begins? (I am writing a book

about this show. --What am I doing? I pause here for thought.)

The deflection of the wedding works in a different way. Instead

of decreased intimacy, we have an increase of it: we are allowed

to see them practice the ceremony and to share their unchecked

reactions to what is to happen, what is to be said. But, since we

see all of this while Sarah’s life hangs in the balance, it

becomes more fraught, more fragile. Will they get the chance to

do this for real? Will they get to make it official?

Sarah is in her yellow nightie with a short white robe over it,

barefoot. Chuck has put a blue-grey suit jacket on over his

pajamas. Sarah begins the ceremony wearing a doily on her head,

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simulating a veil. Chuck reaches for it and removes it

ceremoniously. Sarah is smiling widely, laughing. Chuck laughs

too. The moment has tremendous symbolic significance. Sarah has

been veiled from Chuck for most of the time he has known her.

While the veils protected her, kept her from being known, they

also made it nearly impossible for her to make herself known.

Our faces harden into the contours of the masks we wear. Chuck

has removed those veils with painstaking care. He now removes

the last. He knows this woman. She is gladly known. She knows

this man. He is gladly known. ‘Know’ has older meanings--

perhaps most famously used in the Authorized Version--like to

approve and to acknowledge with due respect and to commit or have. The

meanings coalesce here. Their wedding celebrates and consecrates

their mutual knowledge.

Sarah picks up a piece of paper on which she has written her

vows. Chuck gently chides her. This is their wedding ceremony.

He has written his vows in a leather journal--a document

appropriate to the occasion. But Sarah is satisfied with her

vows.

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Sarah: I think I covered the bases.

Chuck: Ok, cool. Yeah, good, good. You go then I’ll go and

then we’ll have a little note session, afterwards.

Sarah: Ok. I’m just gonna go…

Chuck: You go..mm hmm.

Sarah: [clearing her throat] “Chuck, you’re a gift. You’re

a gift I never dreamed I could want or need. And every day

I will show you that you’re a gift that I deserve. You make

me the best person I could ever hope to be, and I want to

spend and learn and love the rest of my life with you.”

Chuck is listening with his eyes closed as Sarah begins to read.

He opens his eyes as the words reach his heart. Sarah begins by

reading but ends speaking the words from her heart directly to

Chuck’s heart, heart to heart. The woman who is no good at the

415

saying-how-she-feels part says how she feels with more direct,

economical and poetic power than anyone else--including Chuck--

ever manages. She summons and commands a word magic here, one

that even Chuck, for all his articulateness, cannot summon or

command. Perhaps it is overcoming all the years of living at a

distance from her feelings, refusing and abusing them, perhaps it

is the freshness of her efforts to express herself, perhaps it is

Chuck’s ability to invite expression from her. Perhap it is all

of these--and also perhaps it is love itself, love’s uncanny

ability to raise us above ourselves, to allow us to do and be

what we never imagined we could do or be. Sarah speaks from

within the glow of a mandoria, the meeting place of the person

she was and the person she hopes to be--the person she is and

keeps becoming. In their very first extended conversation, in

the Mexican restaurant, Chuck used a complicated rhetorical

figure to make a joke about Devon. Sarah uses one to capture the

multiple-dimensionality of her life with Chuck: she wants to

spend the rest of her life with Chuck, to learn (for) the rest of

her life with Chuck, she wants to love Chuck and to love with

Chuck (to share the things they love) for the rest of her life.

416

The three verbs ‘spend’, ‘learn’ and ‘love’ all govern ‘the rest

of my life with you’ but they do so in different ways.

But the most striking feature of Sarah’s vows is the way in which

they transfigure Chuck and reveal the way he has transfigured

her. Just before Sarah walks to Chuck for the first time, she is

on the phone being briefed about him. He is her asset. Asset.

An asset is something disposable, something to be used. He is

now her gift. Gift. A gift that she deserves and wants to

continue to deserve. Gifts are not mere assets. Assets I can

have with no question of desert. But not gifts. Gifts impose

responsibilities on the person who receives them. If someone

paints me a picture and gives it to me, and I take it home and

use it as a serving tray, that will be taken (so long as there is

nothing else to say) as an expression of contempt not only for

the gift, but also for the giver of it. Sarah knows how lucky

she is that Chuck appeared in her life--a comet lighting up her

darkness, quickening her numbness--and she wants him to know how

grateful she is. Her vows give thanks for Chuck. Her asset she

unveils as her gift.

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Wonder overcomes Chuck. Her vows plumb his heart, find in it

depths of responsiveness he did not know it had. She asks if the

vows were talky. He tells her the vows are perfect, so perfect.

He hugs her to him.

After Chuck and Volkoff save Sarah, we are taken into the

ceremony just after Sarah has made her vows. The bells peal

joyously. Sarah sighs, satisfied and relieved, and Chuck begins

to speak.

Chuck: Right. My vows. My turn for that. They just don’t

cut it. I’m sorry Sarah. How do I express the depth of my

love for you? Or my dreams for our future? Or the fact that

I will fight for you every day? Or that our kids will be

like little superheroes, with little capes and stuff like

that? Words can’t express that. They don’t cut it. So no

vows. I’ll just prove it to you every day for the rest of

our lives. You can count on me.

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Sarah: Perfect.

Chuck of course makes vows here. What he means is that he will

not read the vows he wrote. Sarah’s vows already made him

describe them as a complete tear down, a page one rewrite. He

has not found anything better that he could prepare to say. And

so his vows are his confession of inarticulateness before this

woman and the prospect of a life with her. The man of words

finds that they have deserted him. Eliot, deserted similarly,

wrote

Words strain,

Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,

Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,

Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,

Will not stay still.50

Chuck has attempted a raid on the inarticulate but returned

empty-handed. The guy who is good at the saying-how-he-feels

part fails to find words. But his very inarticulateness is

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deeply expressive. Sarah is closer to him than words are. She

has accepted his invitation into the very heart of who he is--and

so it is easier for him to show her his avowal than to say vows

to her. He is her very own baggage handler. He is her guy. He

will fight for her. She can count on him. He is very available.

His schedule is wide open.

Together, their vows testify to their wonder at each other. R.

W. Hepburn notes that

Wonder does not see its objects possessively: they remain

‘other’ and unmastered. Wonder does dwell in its objects

with rapt attentiveness.51

Hepburn continues by explaining that although we may reach a

point at which the interrogative element in wonder--”What is

this? How can it be?”--may no longer expect further answers, it

still remains in a muted and generalized form. We always find

ourselves in an interrogatory posture before proper objects of

wonder. She continues

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With [the interrogatory element] may persist also an odd

sense of the gratuitousness of the object and its qualities.

Its existence strikes us as a gift, undeserved. A sense of

unlikelihood pervades the experience.

Both Sarah and Chuck, each in his or her own way, is struck by

the gratuitousness and the unlikelihood of the other. Each is

struck by the sense that the other is ‘other’ and yet belongs to

him or her. Each is struck by the fact that the other, loved and

trusted, remains still unmastered. Their fidelity to each other

will be, will have to be, a creative fidelity. They vow to dwell

with each other in rapt attentiveness.

Rings and Commitments

The natural flights of the human mind are not from pleasure to pleasure, but from

hope to hope. --Samuel Johnson

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Rings structure Chuck. The first prominent one is Devon’s

engagement ring for Ellie, an inheritance from his grandmother.

He gives the ring to Chuck for safekeeping. Predictably, things

go wrong and the ring goes missing. Chuck manages to find it and

return it to Devon, who proposes and is accepted. It is

important to note that Morgan, who figures in the story of how

the ring goes missing, takes it to be a ring that Chuck intends

for Sarah.

It seems like someone is always getting married or pretending to

be married on the show. It is hardly a stretch to say that Chuck

and Sarah live their life as a Cover and Really Together couple

under the sign of a ring.

In S02E03, Bryce brings rings into Castle for himself and Sarah,

so that they can reprise their roles as Mr. and Mrs. Anderson.

Later, Chuck gives Jill a fake engagement ring (but a real

diamond) when she is taken from prison to help him find his

father. (Chuck gives Jill the ring to fund her escape from

prison and from Fulcrum. He tells her he had dreamt of giving

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her a ring--but not like that.) At the end of Season 2 (S02E22),

Chuck is in charge of the rings for Ellie and Devon’s wedding.

Sarah at one point asks to see them; Ellie wanted her to make

sure Chuck did indeed have them. In Season 3 (S03E14), Chuck and

Sarah, newly together, pose as newlyweds. They use metal rings

from the pull cords on the train blinds to aid their cover. Also

in Season 3, Shaw manifests his obsession with revenging his

murdered wife by staring fixedly at his wedding ring. (He also

finds his wife’s rings, her engagement and wedding rings, in the

spy box with her final papers.) His obsession with his ring also

foretells his eventual defection to the Ring.) In S04E03, Big

Mike brings an engagement ring to work and, in a maneuver like

Devon’s in Season 1, asks Morgan to keep it safe for him. That

ring ends up falling through a grate and into the ductwork

uniting the Buy More to Castle. It bounces its way down through

the ducts and ends up on the floor of Castle. It is behind Sarah

as she faces Chuck and they talk about taking things slowly.

Chuck sees it fall, bends down on one knee to retrieve it. Sarah

believes for a moment he is proposing. For a moment, he believes

he might be too. He isn’t--but an engagement ring now indelibly

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and unmistakably hovers over Chuck and Sarah, forcing each really

to begin the hard work of getting clear about what it means.

They work through conversations recommended by a book called, 101

Conversations Before “I Do”--a book Sarah describes as covered in

wedding rings. Still later in Season 4, when Chuck is ready to

propose to Sarah for real, he has a ring and carries it around

for a while before he gets successfully, finally, to propose to

her. And at the end of Season 4, during the practice ceremony

Chuck and Sarah perform in their apartment, they twist pipe

cleaners around one another’s fingers in place of their wedding

rings. They exchange rings of course at their wedding. And, in

Season 5, Chuck reminds Sarah of his entitlement to ask certain

questions by pointing to his wedding ring.

Why all the rings? Rings resonate through the show. They seem

all to function--including the name of the criminal spy

organization, The Ring--as symbols of commitment. Who and why

and to what are you committed? That is an overarching question

of the show. Are you committed to the spy life, or to a normal

life, to a future together of a certain sort, or to a future

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together come what may? Are you committed to the greater good or

your own good? And, even more generally, what is a commitment?

How can limited creatures like human beings so much as make

commitments--for example, a commitment to prove every day that we

deserve a certain gift, another person? Can a person make a

commitment without knowing it? How does self-deception

complicate our commitments? To what sorts of limitations or

complications of knowledge or of the will is commitment subject?

While Chuck does not present answers to all of these questions,

it does prompt the asking of them.

Consider the central paradox of commitment. Any commitment I

make binds me with respect to the future. If one person vows

fidelity to another--as in a marriage ceremony, or even in vowing

to date the other person exclusively--it looks as if the person

making the vow is either assuming a continuity of feelings or

choices stretching into the future, or the person is guilty of

insincerity. The problem is that each option seems confused.

How can any person, knowing how inconstant feelings and choices

are, really assume a continuity of them stretching indefinitely

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into the future? It would seem, given such knowledge, that

anyone making a commitment must be doing so insincerely. They

cannot promise what they promise; it is not in their power to

make such a promise; they know that. On the other hand, if we

take them actually to assume that there will be continuity of

feeling and choice, and so sincerely to promise, and then it

seems that they purchase sincerity at the cost of ignorance. So

the person’s ‘commitments’ turn out to be the product either of

her ignorance or of her insincerity--and in either case, they

fail to be proper commitments. How can we so much as make a

commitment?

Some will answer summarily, cynically: we cannot. ‘Commitments’

are a dupe. They either manifest our ignorance or they display

our insincerity. We should accept that we are not creatures who

can make promises, stake themselves, bind themselves, make

resolutions. All of that is just ornamental coping, an attempt

to pastel over our neon variableness, inconstancy. There is

really no more to us than there is at the moment: the present

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sums us. We are no more than the cacophony of our present

desires and choices.

One problem with such cynicism about ourselves is that it

confuses the act--say the act of desiring--with the object of

desire. While it may be true that the act of desiring happens

now, the object I desire may be something future, may even be a

certain future. The object of desire is not present in the way

that the desire is. We are creatures for whom such desires are

as natural as desires for what is right in front of us,

contemporary with us. We are creatures who naturally orient on

the future--creatures of wish and hope and expectation. We only

understand our present in relation to our past and our future.

Kierkegaard’s famous claim that we live forward but understand

backward is true, so far as it goes. It is true that our settled

understanding of ourselves, to the extent that we have one, is

backwards looking. But we cannot live forward without being

forwards-looking. What I see is of course not a procession of

facts (perhaps it is like that for the prophet, who can ‘recall’

the future) but a procession of projections, imaginations,

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wishes, fears, dreads. Many of these may turn out to be false or

groundless. But they are internal to my understanding of my

present as I live through it. It is unclear I could inhabit a

human present that did not reach forward in this way.

The cynic may take this to concede the point instead of pushing

back against it. Since we do not know the future, how can we

promise it? Again, what sense do commitments make? We cannot

live human lives without orienting ourselves on the future. I

concede that we do not know the future. But ignorance of the

future cannot preclude our orienting ourselves on the future--and

one of the basic ways we do that is by committing ourselves. And

we do commit ourselves. I do not deny that we sometimes make

commitments insincerely--people lie to each other and to

themselves. I do not deny that we sometimes make commitments as

a result of deliberate or negligent ignorance--that we choose not

to know things that should keep us from making commitments or

that we simply make no effort to know things that should keep us

from making commitments. But these sorts of ignorance are not

ignorance of the future, but of the present--ignorance of things

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about myself or about others that I choose or do nothing to

overcome. Neither Sarah nor Chuck is ignorant in either of these

ways. That does not mean that either knows all there is to know

about herself or himself, or about the other, but that they are

neither deliberately nor negligently ignorant of herself or

himself or about the other. But these sorts of ignorance are not

the sorts that figures in the paradox of commitment. That is

ignorance of the future.

Commitments do not deny ignorance of the future, they instead

acknowledgment it. We should have suspected this. After all,

prudence is itself a virtue--and it is future-oriented but is not

a form of prophecy. Not only do we not need the power of

prophecy to be prudent, we do not even have to project what we

take to be the future of our commitments all that far. We do need

to think ahead, consider and weigh what we are doing and what we

take the future to hold, but we only have to go so far--after

that we pass “the golden mean” and head toward vice, the vice of

over-scrupulousness.

429

One reason to suspect the paradox of commitment is that the

paradox excludes the other, excluding the fact that a commitment

is often to another person, as Sarah and Chuck’s commitments,

vows, are. Such commitments, and they are the ones most central

in Chuck, are typically responsive. They are called forth or

elicited by the other. These commitments are oriented on the

other, not on ourselves (although of course we matter to them).

Anyone thinking about herself exclusively or even primarily in

the moment of committing to another has gotten turned around. And

such commitments are properly two-sided: one person commits to

another who commits to the first in turn. So, despite the fact

that prudence is involved in commitment, the other calls

commitment into being, by responsiveness to the other. My

commitments in that sense are not wholly, simply produced by me--

as if I were a one-man band. No, another calls them into being.

I can withhold myself, refuse to commit, but that does not make

the call go away. And such a withholding may be more a failure

of heart than it is a success of prudence. There are people

worthy of our commitments, people we are properly responsive to.

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But I still need to say more about ignorance of the future. This

sort of ignorance is not deliberate and it is not negligent. It

cannot be helped. We cannot be blamed for it. But does it

destroy commitment or render it insincere? No, it does neither.

As I said, commitments acknowledge our ignorance of the future;

they do not deny that ignorance. Commitments do not deny that we

are temporal beings, beings in time. Commitments instead reveal

our awareness that we are temporal beings--and acknowledge the

finality of time for us. It is my ignorance of the future that

gives my commitment its weight and its meaning. Commitments

reveal that although I am a temporal being, and although I do not

know the future as I (may) know my present, I cannot be exhausted

by my present. I may not transcend time, exactly, but I am

temporally extended. My present is in fact a kind of trinity--my

past, my present and my future all mysteriously distinct and yet

one. I am in my past by memorial, in my present by contemporary

presence, and in my future by commitment. Any genuine human self

has this oneness-in-three-dimensions. There is wisdom in the

adage that we should live in the present--but that means we

should pay attention to it, and not allow it to be obscured by

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backwards-looking reverie or by forwards-looking fantasy. But I

cannot live in the present if that is supposed to mean living

only in the now, without any influx of the past or the future.

My now, my human now, is a past-and future-involving present--it

is not a mere temporal nullity, an infinitely thin joining-point

of what was and what will be. No one can live in such an

infinitely thin joining-point; no one can dwell in time that does

not have room enough even for one. I experience my present as

mixing--but mixing without confusing or denaturing--my yesterday,

my today and my tomorrow. I can distinguish the three, but none

makes sense in isolation from the other two. Commitments occur

in time as I live it, in lived time, and not in time as some

clock counts it, winding down. As is ordinarily the case,

cynicism impugns realities in our life by abstracting them from

that life and then asking us how to identify them. When we

cannot, it takes that to show that the realities are not really

real: but this is the metaphysical equivalent of impugning the

reality of artichokes by pulling their leaves from them and

‘discovering’ that the artichokes have vanished, and so claiming

they were an illusion all along.

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Chapter 14 (S05E12-13) Assembling Reminders

At the heart of charity [love] is presence in the sense of the absolute gift of one’s-self, a

gift which implies no impoverishment to the giver, far from it; and so we are here in a

realm where the categories valid in the world of things entirely cease to be applicable.

--Gabriel Marcel

Vast, my God, is the power of memory, more than vast in its depths, immense and

beyond sounding--who could plumb them to their bottom? Even though this is a power

of my own mind, it is what I am, still I cannot take it all in. The mind is too limited to

contain itself--yet where could the uncontained part of itself be? Outside itself, and not

in itself? Then how is it itself? Over and over I wonder at this, dumbfounded by it. --St.

Augustine

The work of the philosopher consists in assembling reminders for a particular purpose.

--Ludwig Wittgenstein

A Fork Stuck in the Road (S05xE12)

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In Season 5, Chuck and Sarah are married. Chuck is free of the

Intersect. Chuck continues to struggle with the issue of who he

is without the Intersect. He no longer doubts he is a spy, but

he wonders whether he can be a full spying partner with Sarah and

Casey. They are super spies. He seems at best run-of-the-mill,

a guy with skinny arms. Sarah continues to struggle with the

question of whether the spy life is optional for her. She was

willing to leave it in order to save Chuck. But that necessity

is gone. They are spies. They are spies together. If she

leaves now, it will have to be for reasons other than saving

Chuck. Just as the two of them begin to find their way through

these struggles and to share a vision of a future that will admit

of the normal home and family they both want, everything changes.

Sarah ends up downloading the Intersect to save herself and

Casey. Without her downloading it, both would almost certainly

have died. But the Intersect she downloads is the virulent

version that Morgan downloads at the end of Season 4, the version

that nearly wiped his memory clean, the version that, as Morgan

puts it, unleashed his inner jerk. After downloading it, Sarah

flashes repeatedly. As a result, she begins to lose her memory--

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first forgetting who Alex (Casey’s daughter) is. Chuck and Casey

(with Ellie’s help) try to keep Sarah from flashing any more.

They blindfold her, hoping to her from flashing and so keep

anything else from being lost until they can take the Intersect

from her. But Nicholas Quinn, the villain of the final few

episodes, ends up taking Sarah hostage.

While holding her hostage, he uses a series of images to force

her to flash again and again and again. Each flash consumes some

part of the last five years, of her time with Chuck. By the time

Quinn finishes, Sarah has apparently been ‘rewound’ to where she

was prior to arriving in Burbank. It is as if she had never been

there. Quinn claims to be her handler and tells her that Chuck

is her enemy, a rogue spy. He has killed people she cares about.

She has been under deep cover, posing as his wife. They are

married, but their marriage is--for her--just part of her cover.

Her orders are in: she is to kill Chuck Bartowski. But before

she does, she is to retrieve the pristine version of the

Intersect that Quinn claims Chuck is searching for. She is to

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take back her life from Chuck, the life that Quinn says Chuck

stole from her.

One reason why the lies Quinn tells are effective is that they

remain, in a strange, photonegative way, an image of the truth.

Chuck did not steal Sarah’s life from her--eventually she will

realize it was Quinn who did that. But Chuck changed her life so

radically, changed her so radically, that this new-old Sarah

would hardly recognize the woman she became, Mrs. Chuck

Bartowski. The distance she feels initially from those missing

five years is not the distance of constant lying and deception

(as she believes), but rather of change. Chuck’s Sarah has

undergone a (slow) conversion in the last five years. Her world

came not only to seem but to be different. What she has become

capable of saying and meaning--for example, her strikingly Chuck-

like conversation with Gertrude Verbanski about Gertrude’s

feelings for Casey (S05E05)--is something that the new-old Sarah

could never imagine meaning, much less saying. She became

someone different, someone who recognized new problems and new

opportunities in her life; her world had transformed. And so her

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difficulty finding her way back to Chuck’s Sarah could suggest

that there never was such a person. Chuck’s Sarah was merely the

product of a cover, if she had even that much reality.

Even worse, we know how alienated Sarah was from herself when she

came to Burbank. Although she was changing--at least she had

changed enough to be prepared to be changed--she was lost amid

myriad refusals to know herself. What Quinn does to her

apparently recreates that structure in her. So even if she

begins to feel or remember, she has once again become a woman

disposed to fight against her feelings, to deny (significance to)

her memories. This is something to bear in mind throughout the

final episode and what I will say about it.

Because of the retrogression Quinn has wrought, we are given a

glimpse of how things between Chuck and Sarah could have gone.

She might not have fallen for him; he might not have fallen for

her. Perhaps he would have been her asset, eventually given up

the Intersect, and she would have left Burbank for her next

mission. Perhaps he would never have been able to give up the

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Intersect, and Sarah would have handled his transfer to a secure

facility, a prison. Perhaps she would have been ordered to kill

him. Perhaps she could have done it. Perhaps. But the strong

suggestion of the final episode is that as long as it was Sarah,

and as long as it was Chuck, they would find a way to be

together.

From the time Sarah returns to Chuck (under orders from Quinn)

until the time she reveals herself to be working against Chuck

and the team, Sarah’s use of Chuck’s name seems strained,

strange. When she finally reveals herself, it becomes clear why.

She has switched from her intimate, second-personal use of his

name, his name as recognition of who he is and as a call to him,

to a distant, third-personal use of this name. Since Quinn, she

has been calling him ‘Chuck’ but she has been addressing

Bartowski. After she is revealed, she drops ‘Chuck’ and openly

uses ‘Bartowski’. They are on a last name basis. Of course, it

is legally her last name, too, which makes the whole thing

stranger, harder to bear. She does not hear ‘Bartowski’ as

referring to her.

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Let me focus on this. Martin Buber calls attention to the

difference in structure between I-Thou address and I-It

address.52 Central to this difference is that in I-Thou address,

one whole and unique person comes face-to-face with another but

without subsuming that other under any preconceived or

prejudicial category. The other is encountered as sui generis.

(This is related to encountering the object of wonder as ‘other’

and unmastered.) An I-It address involves confronting a detached

object, typically confinable to a particular region of space and

time, and confronting it as belonging to a particular

preconceived category. The categorization of the object makes it

something to be manipulated, controlled, handled. The It-object

matters only as it has a place in my experience, and not really

on its own. In Chuck, the handler/asset relationship is, in its

typical structure, a paradigm of I-It. Sarah’s ‘problem’ as the

show begins is that she cannot maintain that structure in

relationship to Chuck. He is an It that will not stay

categorized: she experiences him as a Thou. (As he does her--and

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this also plays its role in affecting her, in making it difficult

for her to keep him firmly categorized.)

Throughout the show, Sarah’s ‘Chuck’ was always a particular

Thou-term. Her recognition of him is not a preconceived

categorization but its opposite. It is her recognizing,

acknowledging, him. That recognition is not recognition of him

as falling under some handy concept, as belonging to a particular

category; it is rather her recognition that he is he, sui generis.

He is not something to be manipulated, controlled, handled: he

matters in himself and not only as a placeholder in her

experience (in her plan, her mission). We can see why the show

early and late judges the CIA’s sort of spy life to be a bad

thing: it dehumanizes. The handler/asset relationship in its

typical structure shows this to be so. The I-It relationship

dehumanizes the other in obvious ways.53 But it also dehumanizes

the I in the I-It relationship. This is less obvious--but

crucially important. The point is less obvious because it is

natural to assume that the ‘I’ in ‘I-It’ and in ‘I-Thou’ is

univocal, that it means the same thing. But it does not. The

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shift from ‘It’ to ‘Thou’ is decisive for the ‘I’ too. When the

other, the It, is categorized, treated as something to be

manipulated, handled, as an asset, then the I is reflexively

categorized too, as a manipulator, a handler. The cost of

dehumanizing others is the cost of dehumanizing yourself--perhaps

not in the same way, but always ultimately to the same degree.

The coils of moral logic here are adamantine. The spy life is

populated with I that are Its. There are no Thou’s there.

This must be kept in mind. The life to which Chuck and Sarah

aspire--a normal life--has all the trappings of conventionality--

Gertrude Verbanski refers to them once as Ward and June. The

house that Sarah dreams of is a white house with a picket fence

and a red door. But they are not really choosing

conventionality--what Emerson would call ‘conformity’. They are

choosing a life in which they can be human and humanize others.

(Think of Sarah’s Season 1 comment to Chuck as she tries to get

him to talk to Bryce: “Be a friend. You’re good at that.”

Chuck humanizes those who are around him. His power to do so is

measured by the changes he works in Sarah and in Casey. Sarah is

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learning how to do this too. And, then, Quinn happens.) They

want a life populated with Thou’s. Their dream house’s

‘conventionality’ is a sign of their humility as a couple, their

desire to have a home that is a place of human encounter. Sarah

has to correct Chuck about this, because he initially thinks she

will want what most people would mean by “a dream home”--a

mansion overlooking the ocean. But that is house is not a house

for the sort of life she wants—or for the life he wants, as he

comes to realize. There is, in their decision in favor of this

sort of house, something of what was in Thoreau’s decision for

his sort of house—the difference in price notwithstanding.

Sarah’s shift to ‘Bartowski’ is her shift into an I-It structure:

if she is going to kill Chuck, as she believes she will, then she

surely does not want to encounter him as a Thou. She also surely

does not want to expose herself as an I, the I of an I-Thou

structure. But scant moments after she reveals herself to be

working against Chuck, Chuck appeals to her as he always does,

refusing her I-It structure and re-imposing his (their) I-Thou

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structure. He appeals to Sarah not to do what she is doing, not

to steal the Intersect. He appeals to her as her Chuck (as a

Thou) and makes his appeal to the Sarah he knows (as a Thou). And it

works or at least is working--until Quinn (speaking through her

earpiece) demands to know where Sarah is. She then re-imposes her

I-It structure, knocking Chuck down by striking him with her gun.

Sarah will refer to Chuck as ‘Bartowski’ openly (she had, as I

have suggested, been covertly doing so since her return to their

apartment) after this. She continues to refer to him this way

until three things happen in rapid succession while she and Chuck

are in their dream home: (1) she remembers, briefly, carving

their names into the door frame of their dream home; (2) Quinn

bursts in and admits that he has lied to her and used her; and

(3) Chuck takes the bullet Quinn fired at her. Although she does

not call him ‘Chuck’ in the immediate aftermath of these events,

she will call him that soon. And when she does, she has clearly

shifted back to her old use of ‘Chuck’, to her use of it as

second-personal, as a recognition of him, as a Thou-term.

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After Quinn shoots Chuck, Sarah fires at him but misses. She

does not give chase, however. Instead, she rushes to Chuck. She

is bewildered, thankful, unsure, panicked--all at once, and with

good reason. Chuck tells her he is wearing a vest. She wants to

do something for him, but he hears the sirens approaching and

tells her that they are coming for her. He pleads with her to

run. She runs.

She runs back to her old hotel room, where (presumably) Quinn

reinstalled her as part of getting her to believe that he is her

handler, that she still works for the CIA. She is rushing to

pack her things when Casey enters. Sarah grabs a knife and

prepares to fight him. But he is not there to fight. He has

brought her something. He asks her what she remembers about him.

She replies that mostly she remembers his reputation as

unfeeling, unforgiving, and unquestioning about his orders. He

smiles and tells her he knew her by reputation and that their

reputations were the same--maybe that was why they fought all the

time. But he goes on to explain to her that they became friends.

Bartowski made them both “a little soft”. He takes a manila

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envelope from his pocket and puts it on a table. He says goodbye

and leaves.

Sarah opens the envelope to find a CD--it is her mission logs,

kept since she came to Burbank. She had seen the first one.

Quinn used it as part of his strategy to get her to believe him.

In the first one, Sarah notes matter-of-factly that she is to be

Chuck’s handler--to get him to trust her and to find out what he

knows. The CIA will then decide what to do with him. But now

Sarah gets to see all her logs.

The logs contain her reaction to various events in her time with

Chuck: her finding Chuck’s desire to get to know her endearing;

her hurt at Chuck’s breaking up (or fake breaking up) with her;

her exasperated shock of self-recognition after she kisses Chuck.

The last of the logs we are shown (Day 564) is a log made after a

day during which nothing had really happened. But Sarah logs the

day anyway, talking to herself because she knows, has admitted to

herself, that she loves Chuck Bartowski and that she does not

know what to do about it. Now, Sarah weeps as she watches

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herself, as she listens to herself log her relationship with

Chuck.

Chuck leaves Ellie’s apartment (he had gone there after Sarah

escaped from their dream house), and forces himself to face his

own, now empty apartment. He moves slowly, sore from having been

shot and from having been beaten by Sarah. He pauses at the

door, dreading to open it, dreading the finality of accepting the

emptiness of their home.

Sarah: [firmly but gently, familiarly] Chuck!

Chuck: Sarah!

Sarah: [moving closer to him] I just wanted to tell you

that I believe you. I believe everything that you told me

about us. But...the truth is, Chuck, I...I don’t feel it.

Everything that you told me about us and our story--I just

don’t feel it.

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Chuck: Right. Right, I don’t know what I was expecting,

you know? So what are you doing here?

Sarah: Well, I wanted to say sorry for everything that

happened today. But, uh, most of all I wanted to say good-

bye.

Chuck: Where are you going?

Sarah: Quinn took away my life...and I have to...well, I

have to find him. [Pause] Bye.

[She looks at Chuck and smiles a small, kind smile]

Chuck: Bye.

Sarah believes it all. That she was married to Chuck--

officially, genuinely, really married to him. That he loves her.

That she loved him. But everything hangs on that shift of tense;

the shift from ‘loves’ to ‘loved’. Sarah loved him. She goes on

to explain that although she believes it all, she does not feel

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it. She loved him; she no longer loves him. He is alone in the

present tense. A thundercloud of heartbreak in a drop of

grammar.

She knows that she loved him--she now has that factual knowledge.

But it is not a personal memory. She cannot recall what it was

like to love him, recall how she felt when she loved him, for she

cannot re-live any of it.

She no longer feels it. I would not impugn Sarah’s sincerity.

She believes that she no longer feels it. Does she no longer

feel it? Or is this the revival of her old self-refusals, of her

alienation from how she feels? Her mission logs showed her how

she felt. What did she feel as she watched them?

Sarah has not fallen out of love with Chuck--not as we ordinarily

understand that phrase. While what we ordinarily understand by

that phrase is not something voluntary, and although what has

happened to Sarah (her memory loss) is not voluntary, it was also

not like falling out of love. Falling out of love takes time, no

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set amount exactly, but more time than what happened to Sarah

took. Sarah has not fallen out of love with Chuck; she has

forgotten that she loves him. But this forces us back into a

consideration of tenses. Sarah takes herself not to love Chuck

any more. She does not feel it. She loved him; she does not

love him. But her situation can be described in a different

way--she has forgotten that she is in love with him, forgotten

that she loves him. Ellie will suggest this way of understanding

what has happened.

Now is a good time to remind ourselves of what Wittgenstein notes

in Zettel. (I discussed this in Chapter 2.) Love is not a feeling--not a

feeling of the sort that pain is. While a person in pain might be

distracted from the pain for a time, and so say that it was

forgotten during that time, it would not have vanished from

consciousness. Instead, the person’s attention was focused

elsewhere. But the pain remained in consciousness to be attended

to. A person can be in love, however, without that love being in

consciousness at all--at least at any particular moment. This is

not to deny that there are feelings (of roughly the same sort as

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pain) characteristic of love: deep breathing, a pounding heart,

a flush of warmth: but none of these is love and I can be in

love (at a given moment) without feeling any of them. (Imagine I

am performing an intricate, absorbing task—repairing a delicate

mechanism. During that time, I am in love with my wife. But I

will not experience any of the feelings characteristic of love

during the repair--not even if you ask me (while I continue the

task) if I love my wife and I answer truly that I do.) I do not

mean for any of this to suggest that the idea of forgetting that

you are in love with someone makes obvious sense. But Sarah’s

predicament is extraordinary. We may have to chivvy language to

make sense of it.

Should we say that Sarah still loves Chuck (but has forgotten

that she does) or should we say that she no longer loves him?

Maybe the answer to that question is in the answer to another

question--one that Chuck asks. He asks Sarah why she has come

back to Echo Park, come back to their apartment, come back to

him. It is not clear how searching Chuck intends that question

to be, but where Sarah is concerned he has a knack for asking the

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right thing at the right time. (And he asks her this question a

couple of times in the final episodes.) If she feels nothing,

why face this parting? Why not spare herself further awkwardness

and him further pain? She says that she wants to say she is

sorry for what she has done, that she wants mostly to say good-

bye. She could have called; she has his number. She could have

left him a note. One thing anyway is straightforward: he is

Chuck, the Thou-Chuck again, not Bartowski, not the It-Chuck.

She has found her way back to where she was, momentarily, in the

Intersect room, and where she had been since their first night

out together. And it cannot be quite right to say that she feels

nothing. She says does not feel it--love. (Notice how Sarah is

back again in the place where that word is hard, maybe

impossible, for her to say. She has as much trouble denying that

she feels it for Chuck as she had affirming that she did.) But

she feels. She feels like she owes him. She cannot just leave

him without saying good-bye. She feels something. Maybe it is

love, still. Maybe she has forgotten that what she feels is

love.

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Chuck is a show about the head and the heart, about getting your

head into your heart. These final episodes problematize those

two organs and their relationship more complicatedly than any

others in the show. Perhaps the language we are looking for is

that language. Maybe the right, the best, thing to say is that

Sarah’s head and her heart have completely parted company. Quinn

disunited them. Her head, her brain, is confused, unsteady,

unsure. She cannot wrap her brain around what is happening to

her. But what of her heart? Pascal long ago reminded us that

the heart has reasons of which the head knows nothing. What is

true of Sarah’s heart? Does it still respond to Chuck as it did?

Was that prior responsiveness the product of her head, of

reasoning? She has carried Chuck’s heart in her heart for a long

time. Has Quinn driven that heart from her heart? Must a

stranger to her head register as a stranger to her heart? Chuck

moved her heart before she knew much of anything about him.

Chuck asks Sarah where she is going. Sarah answers by declaring

that Quinn took away her life. He has stolen something from her.

Something she wants to get back. That in itself is a significant

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bit of phrasing. Sarah may not feel it. But she wants to feel

it. That is important. When Chuck pleaded with her in the

Intersect room not to do what she was doing, she responded to the

plea. Later, she admits to Quinn she made a mistake. She says

she will not do that again. This is familiar language for Sarah

to use of Chuck. After the Incident, the kiss in S01E09, Sarah

tells Chuck that she made a mistake and will not do it again.

But she does. After he refuses her at the Prague train station,

she tells Chuck that she acted impulsively, and that she will not

do that again. But she does. She responds to Chuck in the

Intersect room, she let him get close. She proclaims she will

not do that again. But she will. Chuck once said that he had to

win her again and again…and again. She has been won again and

again…and again.

Sarah turns; she leaves Chuck standing alone in the dark.

I Will Not Forget Thee (S05E13)

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It is two weeks later. The final episode of Chuck begins with

Sarah, stowed away in baggage on a plane carrying Quinn and

another man, Edgar, from whom Quinn is purchasing one part of the

Key. The Key is necessary for the safe use of the Intersect

glasses--and it has three parts. Quinn, if he can find the other

two pieces, can download a pristine version of the Intersect.

While Quinn secures part of the Key from Edgar, Sarah arms

herself and begins to sneak toward Quinn. Quinn realizes she is

there. He grabs his companion’s gun and faces Sarah. She gives

him her verdict: “You stole my memories and you ruined my life.”

Just before she can shoot Quinn, Edgar pushes a button and the

plane suddenly banks, spoiling Sarah’s aim. She misses Quinn.

She falls and drops her gun. Before Quinn and Edgar can shoot

her, however, she rolls an explosive against the plane door. It

explodes, and the air rushes from the cabin. Sarah loses her

grip on the seat cushion and gets pulled to the door, her head

slamming against it. She falls from the plane, unconscious, into

the bright blue sky.

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Chuck, meanwhile, is abed. He has been there for the most of the

last two weeks. He awakens and finds Morgan looking at him.

Ellie is in the room too. She pulls back the curtains, splashing

the room with sunlight, and appoints that very day the day that

Chuck will get Sarah back. Chuck balks, asking how many people

are in his room, just as Devon walks in with baby Clara.

Everyone agrees (including Clara): Chuck can get Sarah back.

But Chuck still stalls. He says that he is back where he was

before--alone in Burbank

Ellie corrects him. He is not alone. He has all of them. And

he is not the person he was five years ago. Chuck sits up

finally, but he still refuses. He cannot get Sarah to remember.

He cannot get her to fall in love with him again. Ellie

responds:

Ellie: Chuck, it’s clear that we can’t force Sarah to

remember, but emotions, feelings, those are powerful things.

And if you can find Sarah, maybe you can spark some of these

memories.

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Ellie is advising a change of tactic. Before, Chuck had tried to

restore Sarah’s emotions by restoring her memories. This was

explicitly what he tried in their dream house. Ellie is

suggesting the opposite approach. Forget the memories. Engage

Sarah’s feelings. If Chuck can do that, then perhaps the

memories will follow, hitching a ride on the emotions. Instead

of trying to make Sarah remember, he should make love to her (in

the now largely archaic sense of that phrase): He should attend

to her, court her, woo her. If he wants her to remember her

past, he needs to forget about it. Ellie is confident of this

tactic. Chuck is encouraged but doubtful. He asks if Ellie

really thinks it could work. Could Sarah just snap out of it?

The scene cuts to the still falling, still unconscious Sarah.

Her eyes snap open. She regains consciousness and pulls her

parachute’s ripcord. But she is over the water. She will have

to swim. The scene shifts back to Chuck donning his Buy More

clothes, giving himself a pep talk. Sarah may be the best spy in

the world, but he is Chuck Bartowski--she is not out of his

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league. The scene sequencing mimics the scene sequencing in the

pilot as the two of them prepared for their date. They are

preparing for a new date.

Sarah rises from the sea like Venus, blown by the wind and

carrying spring with her. Sarah has her familiar air of cool

distance, but that now is refigured by the imagery as the gaze of

Venus herself. Botticelli’s famous picture has been put in

motion.54 This woman was made to love and to be loved. Her life

went in a different direction for a while, and has veered off

again, but she is what she is. She will find her way back. She

will be reborn. Chuck meanwhile says that he can do it. He can

make Sarah Walker fall in love with him.

Casey is meeting with Beckman. She wants him to kill Quinn. She

tells him that five years in Burbank can turn a person into

butter. She needs old Casey, her best agent. And so, parallel to

Quinn making Sara into the old Sarah, Beckman tries to make Casey

is into the old Casey.

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Morgan tells Chuck that what Chuck needs to do is to kiss Sarah.

Morgan, while admitting that he has been watching lots of Disney

movies with baby Clara, is certain it will work. Ellie suggests

that this is crazy.

In order to find Sarah, Chuck enlists Jeff and Lester. They

coordinate a lightning-fast search for Sarah only to realize that

she is standing in the Buy More, at the Nerd Herd desk. Chuck

goes to find her. Chuck sees Sarah at the desk. He is standing

behind her, roughly where she stood when we saw her for the first

time in the first episode. She is wearing an outfit that matches

the outfit she wore that first time. She has returned to Chuck

again. And, just as was true in the early days they were

together, she has an explanation of why she is there, an

explanation that she believes, but that is hard to take as

exhausting her reasons, given where she is and what she is

wearing. Chuck walks to her, finishing the spatial reversal of

their first meeting. They say hello to each other. Chuck,

unable for a moment to restrain himself, asks her here in the

light the same question he asked her in the dark of the apartment

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courtyard: “What are you doing here?” He had hoped to find her.

He did not expect her to come to him. Chuck takes control of

himself and starts again. He lets her know how great it is to

see her. He declares that she looks fantastic--and that she

always looks fantastic (“That’s kinda your thing.”) Then he asks

her again--what is she doing at the Buy More? She explains that

she needs the spy base, Castle. She has lost Quinn, but she

knows he is going to meet the man who has the second part of the

Key. She needs Chuck’s help. She needs Chuck’s help to find the

man, a German, Renny Deutch. She continues by admitting that she

read Chuck’s profile. She knows he is good with computers.

Quinn had given Sarah profiles on Chuck and his team when he

convinced her that they were the bad guys. Sarah may only be

remembering what she read then. But her slight hesitation as she

mentions having read Chuck’s file suggests that she has studied

the file even after she learnt of Quinn’s double-cross, after she

left Chuck standing in Echo Park. She is trying to remember.

(Perhaps the file has played the role for her that her picture of

herself and Chuck used to play—but the file has played it without

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her recognizing it or admitting it, played the role of making her

feel comfortable, safe?) While Chuck begins a computer search

for the German, Sarah begins to walk through Castle. Her

absorption in what she sees keeps her from realizing that Morgan

has walked into the room she is in. Surprised, she attacks

Morgan but quickly realizes who he is and releases him. Sarah

apologizes but Morgan takes the blame, admitting that he and

Sarah have danced that dance before. He knows better than to

surprise her.

Sarah is looking for Deutch. She does have a use for Chuck, for

Castle. But what is she doing there? Beckman knows what

happened to her. Beckman wants Quinn dead. It would seem that

Beckman’s resources would be Sarah’s for the asking. One phone

call is all it would take. Chuck is a formidable hacker. But

the quickness with which he finds Deutch for Sarah suggests that

about any hacker could have done the job for her. Certainly, the

CIA could have done it. Why does she return to Chuck, to Castle?

Sarah told Chuck in S03E14 that although she had been all over

the world, Burbank is the only place that ever seemed like home.

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And she has told Chuck that he is her home. There is little

doubt she is there because she wants to come home—she is coming

home. Her absorption in her surroundings in Castle suggests that

she is trying Chuck’s tactic, trying to force herself to remember

something, anything, of the life Quinn stole from her.

Unfortunately, Castle does not immediately enliven any memories.

Chuck’s computer search reveals that Deutch is in Berlin. In

response to this information, Sarah notes that she needs to get a

plane ticket to Berlin. Morgan urges Chuck, sotto voce, to go on

the mission with her. Chuck asks about the mission. Sarah is

blunt. Her plan is to kill Quinn and then to disappear forever.

Before Chuck can ask anything else, Sarah continues:

Sarah: I-I-I can’t be here. I don’t know how to be the

woman you remember me as. All I remember is being a spy, a

good one. It’s all I know how to do.

Sarah volunteers this speech. The issue has been on her mind.

Getting to Castle has not helped, as she hoped it might. But she

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frames the issue in a genuinely interesting way, not so much in

terms of memories, recorded experiences, thoughts, feelings, but

in terms of know-how. Sarah is a woman of skills, competencies.

There is little doubt that at some level she wants to come home,

she wants her life with Chuck back. She wants to retrieve what

was stolen, rebuild what was ruined. She still may not be

feeling it, but she is, as I said, feeling something. Whatever

it is, it is working on her like leaven, modifying and

transforming her. But she does not know how to do what she wants

to do. She does not know how to be Chuck’s wife. She does not

deny that she wishes she knew how or that she desires to know

how. She just does not know how. What she does know how to do

is to be a spy--so that is what she is going to do. (Sarah has

always had a tendency to hide or take refuge in her

competencies.)

What Sarah wants to know how to do, how to be Chuck’s wife, to

love him as a wife loves her husband, is not something to be

learnt by finding a pundit or teacher. There are no courses in

what Sarah wants to know how to do. The know-how she wants is

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not something that she can get by instruction, factual or

technical. She cannot learn it as she learnt to be a spy. There

is no basic training. What Sarah needs is inculcate a kind of

caring, a habit of taking certain sorts of things seriously,

taking them to heart. She has inculcated that kind of caring in

the past, she took the right sorts of things seriously and to

heart. She thinks she has forgotten how to do those things--but

it is unclear that such things can really be forgotten. ‘Forget’

just is not used in this way. It is not at all obvious that

Sarah has ceased to care about all that she previously cared

about as Chuck’s wife. It is obvious that she has not. True,

she seems not to care about the most important thing of all,

Chuck. But is that quite right? He reached her with his plea in

the Intersect Room. She remembered carving their names into the

doorframe. She wept during the mission log. She went to Chuck

before she left Burbank. She has returned to him again. Maybe

she does not love him. Maybe she does not realize that she loves

him. But she cares about him. He has been on her mind. They

have been on her mind.

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Chuck volunteers himself and Morgan to go to Berlin with Sarah.

She needs them. If she goes by herself, she may end up dead. At

first, Sarah seems unwilling to take them. She hands Chuck a gun

and asks if he knows how to use it. He claims that he does, that

he is lethal. Sarah tells him he will have to be and she

consents to him and Morgan going with her.

In Berlin, Chuck worries about what will happen if he has to use

the gun. Morgan reminds him that Sarah fell for him in part

because he was unwilling to shoot people. With that reminder,

Chuck joins Sarah. They follow Renny into a restaurant. It

turns out to be exactly like El Compadre, where Chuck took Sarah

on their first night out. Chuck explains this to Sarah. Morgan,

watching over them from a van parked on the street and talking to

Chuck through an earpiece, calls it fate.

After they are seated (in reversal of their positions at the

table in the pilot) Chuck tells Sarah that he reckons that the

restaurant is a sign. He relates more of their first night out--

their sort-of date--to her: That he thought he had somehow

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stumbled into a date with the most beautiful woman in the world,

that he had been incredibly nervous, that they had talked and

laughed, that they had gone dancing after dinner. Sarah asks him

to stop, but she is smiling slightly as she does. She reminds

him that they are on a mission. The focus is Renny. Chuck

points out that it is their story and asks if she really does not

want to hear it. Sarah never says that she does not want to hear

it. She does not want to hear it now. Maybe she will want to

hear it another time. Renny in the meantime gets a phone call

from Quinn. Quinn is worried about Sarah finding him, so he asks

Renny to meet him in another location.

They end up at a fancy dress ball. They have changed clothes--

Chuck into a suit and Sarah into a gown. Chuck looks at her and

comments on how beautiful she looks. She thanks him for the

compliment and then reaches over and straightens his tie. She

tells him he looks great. (We know from earlier episodes that

she likes him in suits and tuxedos.) Sarah notes that she needs

to find someone to dance with, so that she can get close to

Renny. Chuck is offended. She can dance with him. She taught

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him how to dance. And with that, he leads her onto the floor and

into an effortless, graceful dance. He spins her to him and she

tells him, “Get me close!” He misunderstands and pulls her tight

against him. She is suddenly breathless. But she manages to

correct him. She meant that he needed to get her close to Renny.

Chuck dances her to Renny, but does not break eye contact with

her. When Renny answers his phone, Chuck pulls her close again.

They overhear Renny complain that Quinn is paranoid and has

changed location again. Sarah does not try to pull away as Renny

leaves; she remains breathlessly in Chuck’s arms, her face almost

against his.

Quinn’s next chosen location is a Berlin Wienerlicious. Chuck

and Sarah put on uniforms. Chuck looks admiringly at Sarah in

her uniform--she looks just as she did during their first year

together when she worked at a Wienerlicious near the Buy More.

He smiles and she asks him why, but he does not answer. While he

wipes off tables, Sarah begins to work at the counter. Quinn is

late. They will have to wait on him. So Sarah begins to

reorganize the drink cups, pointing out that they are in the

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wrong order. Chuck, struck by this, explains to Sarah that she

worked at a Wienerlicious in Burbank as her cover. She is

remembering. But when Chuck tells her this, she loses the thread

of the memory. Still, if she is faithful in little things,

eventually she will be faithful in bigger ones. Chuck urges her

to try and recover the thread, but Quinn enters the restaurant.

Renny hands Quinn the second part of the Key. Quinn shoots Renny

and Renny’s bodyguard. One of Quinn’s men leads Morgan into the

Wienerlicious. Casey has been tracking all of these goings-on

from a helicopter above the action. Quinn orders Chuck and Sarah

to drop their guns. Chuck immediately lowers his; Sarah does

not. Chuck reaches over and pushes it down gently, then takes it

from her. “It’s Morgan.” Chuck puts their guns on the ground.

Quinn, crowing over having them at his mercy, reminds Sarah--

since she has forgotten--that her husband is one of the world’s

great pussies. Quinn takes aim at Chuck. Sarah grabs a sharp

stick (used for roasting wieners), and hurls it into Quinn’s gun

hand. Combat breaks out, with Sarah and Chuck and Morgan all

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fighting against Quinn’s men. Quinn tries to flee. Sarah yells

for Chuck to follow and he does.

Chuck gets into position to shoot Quinn. Sarah is running behind

Chuck. She tells him to take the shot. Chuck will not. Chuck

ends up firing a warning shot into the air that not only fail to

stop Quinn, it disables Casey’s helicopter. Luckily, Casey and

his men are able to land before anything more serious happens.

Casey takes Chuck and Sarah and Morgan back to Castle. He puts

Chuck and Sarah in separate but adjoining cells. He handcuffs

Morgan to a chair. He wants Morgan to let Alex know that he is

going away. They argue about what Casey is doing, about his

refusal of his daughter, about his abandoning his team.

Chuck and Sarah, meanwhile, are arguing too. She cannot

understand why he did not kill Quinn. He let Quinn escape and so

get one step closer to assembling the Key. Chuck tries to

explain: killing was never his thing. Sarah asks him if he is a

spy and he says he is, but that one thing she liked about him was

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that he would not pull the trigger. He says that maybe at first

she thought he was weak or scared, but that she eventually stood

up for him. She did not want him to be any other spy. She did

not want him to change.

Casey calls Alex a liability. Then he stops himself. He did not

mean it; he just has to be ruthless. Morgan calls Casey out.

Casey is afraid--afraid that the ‘soft’ agent he has become in

Burbank is actually himself at his best. Being ruthless does not

make Casey better at his job, Morgan contends, but worse at it.

Morgan’s words reach Casey. He frees Morgan and then Chuck and

Sarah.

Casey is a voluntary version of what Sarah is involuntarily. He

wants to make himself forget what Burbank means and has meant to

him. He wants to be the unfeeling, unforgiving, unquestioning-

of-orders cold-school killer he once was. He wants this because

the vulnerabilities he has developed in Burbank continue to

frighten him far more than armed enemies. Friends, a daughter, a

growing love for Gertrude Verbanski—all these expose Casey.

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While Sarah has not chosen her new-old ruthlessness, her

reactions to Chuck in Berlin have confused and alarmed her. He

pleases her. He excites her. She listens to him. He was able

to take her gun; she did not fight him. He will not kill,

certainly not simply for revenge. Even if she wanted to, she

cannot categorize this man by means of her preconceptions or

others’. Hacker, sweetheart, dancer, friend, fighter, pussy?

Chuck’s mom shows up just in time to keep Sarah from leaving--his

mom has intel on the Key. Eventually, the team figures out that

Chuck’s father gave the final piece of the Key to Beckman, but

that she does not realize he gave it to her. They also find out

that Quinn was seen entering the Opera house where Beckman is

scheduled to be. They rush to save her and to stop Quinn.

Quinn has rigged a bomb to detonate if Beckman leaves her seat.

But they also figure out, once they have inspected the bomb, that

it is anyway set to explode when the music stops. Chuck’s mom,

back at Castle but patched into the Opera house security, informs

them that Quinn is in the stairwell, heading to the roof. Chuck

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and Sarah give chase. Casey tasks Morgan with finding a way to

keep the music playing. Luckily, Jeff and Lester have followed

the team--they overheard Chuck relay to Ellie that they had found

Beckman and were going to save her. Morgan enlists them to delay

the explosion--reprising their performance at Ellie’s wedding in

Season 2--and Jeffster takes the stage and begins to play just as

the orchestra finishes.

Chuck and Sarah catch up with Quinn on the roof. Chuck tells

Sarah not to shoot Quinn; they need him to defuse the bomb. But

Quinn goes for his gun, intending to shoot Chuck. Sarah kills

him. Chuck grabs the Intersect glasses. He now tells Sarah that

he had a plan, a good one, to get the glasses and to use them the

one remaining time to give her back her memories. (The Key

allows for only a one-time use of the glasses, and all the other

versions of the Intersect have been destroyed.) But without

Quinn, the bomb cannot be disarmed--unless Chuck downloads the

Intersect once more. Sarah asks him if his plan would have

worked. He affirms that it would. But Chuck has no choice. He

cannot save Sarah, save her memories. He cannot get her back.

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He has to save the innocent people listening to Jeffster below.

Sarah recognizes the necessity--and she recognizes its cost to

Chuck. He will lose the woman he would die for, that he loves

more than he loves himself. His anguished cry from Season 3 is

all but audible: “You don’t know what I gave up for this!” He

downloads the Intersect.

As Jeffster completes their song, Chuck and Sarah run down the

stairs and then run to Beckman. Using the Intersect, Chuck is

able to open the box containing the workings of the bomb. Inside

is a Prism Express laptop. It is the very type of computer that

was used by the Serbian demolition expert in the bomb set to kill

General Stanfield. Chuck kneels between Sarah and Casey, bent

over the laptop. The visual tableau is the same as in the pilot.

Chuck is stymied for a moment, recalling the specs of the

computer, when Sarah suggests Irene Demova. Chuck immediately

realizes that will work. And then he realizes that Sarah

remembered it, remembered it from five years ago. Chuck uses the

virus as he did before and manages to defuse the bomb just as

Jeffster finishes. Casey embraces Beckman. Both Chuck and Sarah

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see this, each wants to embrace the other, but for different

reasons, neither does it. Sarah leaves.

Jeffster covered a-ha’s “Take On Me” while all this unfolded.

The song represents Chuck’s plea to Sarah--it has always been his

plea to Sarah. “Take On Me” means, among other things, espouse

me--adopt me as yours, take me as your cause, choose me. But of course

‘espouse’ has the meaning, wed me, marry me. The issue again is

one of commitment--in a sense it is an issue of re-marriage. Can

Sarah commit to Chuck, not only in ignorance of the future, but

also in (partial) ignorance, forgetfulness, of the past? Can

Sarah make a leap of faith like this? Chuck is inviting her to

do so and something deep in her, deep past personal memory, is

responding.

The walls between them began to fall in Berlin. In fact, the

first shot of Berlin in the episode, the one that establishes it

as the scene of the action, is of the Brandenburg Gate, where

vigil was held before the fall of the Berlin Wall. The Gate

symbolizes the difficult history of East and West Germany, and of

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Europe, but it also symbolizes unity and peace. Can Chuck and

Sarah reunify? The wall between them is falling, will fall. We

hold vigil.

Back at Castle, Beckman presides over the final dissolution of

team Bartowski. And then she leaves. Chuck and Sarah and Casey

sit in silence for a moment. Chuck notes that they are back to

the original three, the original band. Casey takes that as his

cue--he worries that Chuck is going to get emotional, and he

wants to avoid that. But then he does so himself, grabbing Chuck

and giving him a fierce hug. Sarah observes this closely.

Casey, the man she now knows mostly from his old reputation,

loves her husband. That Chuck could inspire this depth of

feeling, this kind of friendship in the unfeeling Casey speaks to

her. Casey leaves Chuck and Sarah together alone. Chuck

mentions Irene Demova. Sarah says that she does not know what it

means--by which she means that she does not know what her

remembering it means. Chuck suggests--maybe it is a new

beginning, a fresh start? Sarah does not reject that suggestion;

she does not accept it either. She says she needs time to think,

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time alone. She can feel herself changing. Is she changing again

as she changed before, changed into Chuck’s wife? Is she

remembering how to be the woman Chuck remembers her as? Sarah

begins to leave. Chuck starts to tell her about Morgan’s

theory--that they just need to kiss--but he decides against it.

He is not going to force anything. The kiss cannot be just his

idea--unless she wants it, it cannot work.

Chuck does not know (at the moment) where she is going, but it

seems clear that her plan has changed. Before Berlin she said

that she could not be in Burbank. Her plan was to kill Quinn and

disappear forever--presumably far from Burbank. But she does not

leave Burbank. She decides to do her thinking there.

What is Sarah going to think about? Chuck--and herself. The

changes that are taking place in her are changes that she

believes are leading her back to Chuck. She wants them when she

understands them that way. But they are also leading her away

from the life she has known, the life she knows how to live, the

spy life. They frighten her when she thinks of them that way.

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She had not understood how much change Chuck had brought about in

her, the depth of the changes. She wants to be Chuck’s wife--she

is again becoming his wife. But requires that she let go of what

she knows and reach toward something that she cannot yet take

hold of. Her hands, reaching forward into futurity, have begun

to scale themselves to grasp her life with Chuck. She has not

grasped it yet. When Beckman dissolved the team, Sarah said that

she needed to find herself. She does not think she is just a

good spy. She knows that she was--and that she is--more than that.

She has to find her way to that more. She has to understand who

she is.

Sarah leaves Chuck in Castle. Later, he is in the apartment

courtyard, seated by the fountain with Morgan. Chuck wants to

find Sarah. He needs to talk to her.

Chuck: Morgan, she could be anywhere.

Morgan: Ok, you know where she is. You once told me to

listen to our hearts because our brains only screw us up.

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Chuck: I was in love then.

Morgan: You’re still in love. I want you to imagine

something for me, ok? Where is she right now? Don’t think.

Use your heart. Where is she?

[Chuck is silent, and then a look of realization crosses his

face]

Chuck gets caught in tenses. He was in love. Morgan reminds him

that he is still in love. He has not fallen out of love. Chuck

needs to stop thinking and to rely on his love for Sarah. That

love provides him an access to her that is very nearly like her

access to herself. Where would Sarah’s love for Chuck take her?

It is not too much of a stretch to say that Morgan has presided

over Chuck and Sarah’s relationship from the beginning. One of

his qualifications for presiding over it is his long-time, truly

intimate friendship with Chuck. Other than Ellie, he has known

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Chuck longer and in a closer, more daily way than anyone else.

Morgan’s joking talk with Ellie in the first episode about their

kid growing up so fast is, while silly in one way, not silly in

another. Morgan is not a father figure to Chuck, but he is the

one significant, constant male influence in his life. Most of

Morgan’s life has been a disaster area--except for the area

around Chuck. He has tended to that and kept it straight. When

Morgan tells Sarah in Castle--before the trip to Berlin--that he

was happy it is to her that he had passed the status of being

Chuck’s number one, go-to friend, he means it. He fought it for

a while (think of his panic when he mistakes the ring Devon

intends to give to Ellie for one Chuck intends to give to Sarah).

But he also knew--practically before anyone else--the kind of

upheaval she was causing in Chuck. He was jealous--but only

because he could see what was happening. He got over the

jealously. He was happy to see his friend happy. But he never

has gotten over taking Chuck seriously. He hears what Chuck

tells him and he remembers it, as he proves by the fountain.

Chuck has basically followed Ellie’s suggested tactic: he has

not tried to force Sarah to remember. Morgan helped him with

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that, advising Chuck by earpiece as Chuck and Sarah moved from

place to place in Berlin. What Morgan remembers--Chuck’s own

advice to Morgan from the end of Season 2--is the advice Chuck

needs. (How much better would most of our lives be if we took

just a fraction of our own advice?) Chuck needs to stop trying to

outthink Sarah, stop trying to guess where she has gone. Chuck

loves her--she still loves Chuck despite her forgetfulness.

Chuck has been trying to get her to feel that again, to feel some

inkling of what the two of them share. --Where would she go?

Chuck finds her where he realized he would find her. At Malibu

Beach. She sits, wrapped in a sweater, looking toward the sun on

the horizon. Chuck walks to her and sits down beside her, taking

the position relative to her that she occupied relative to him

during their morning conversation on the beach so long ago.

I mentioned before that part of the fun of the show is its clever

use of the reverse damsel-in-distress structure, with Chuck the

distressed damsel and Sarah the knight-errant. But in these final

two episodes that structure gets firmly reversed. It now is the

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actual damsel who is in distress. Chuck is the knight-errant.

That they have switched roles was already inscribed in Sarah’s

downloading the Intersect. She had it; Chuck did not. But it

was not until the Intersect and Quinn did their terrible damage

to her that the reversal was made fully explicit. The Intersect

added something to Chuck’s life, much of which was bad. The

Intersect takes something from Sarah’s life, almost all of which

was good. Just as Chuck sat lost on the beach, Sarah sits trying

to find herself on the beach. She has gone to find herself where

she found Chuck.

That she went to the beach to find herself is hopeful sign. She

is beginning to feel it. She ends up on the beach not because of a

belief about it but because of how she feels about it, how it

makes her feel. This becomes clear when she speaks to Chuck

after he sits down beside her and tells her he was hoping she

would be there. It is also suggested by her wordless initial

reaction to his showing up. She expects him. Maybe she has not

formulated the expectation as an explicit thought. Maybe she has

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not told herself in so many words for what she is waiting--but

she is waiting for him.

Sarah: This place is important, isn’t it?

Chuck: Yeah, yeah, very much. This is actually where you

told me I was going to be ok. That I could trust you. And

that’s exactly what I am doing now, I’m asking you to trust

me. Sarah, I don’t...I don’t want anything from you. I-I

just need you to know that wherever you go, I’ll always be

there to help you. [Sarah, listening closely, nods] Someone

you can call. [Chuck’s voice breaks] Whenever. [Sarah looks

at him, her eyes welling with tears; Chuck looks into her

eyes in silence for a moment] Trust me, Sarah. [His eyes

fill with tears] I’m here for you always. [Sarah looks at

him, exhales gently, then looks out toward the horizon]

Sarah: Chuck? Tell me our story.

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Chuck: Yeah, yeah, uh...Where to begin. Well, uh, it

started with a guy who worked at Buy More. [Sarah, again

listening closely, smiles broadly] And, then, one day, an

old college friend of his sent him an email that was filled

with secrets. And then, the next day, his life really

changed when he met a spy named Sarah, and he fell in love…

As Chuck continues, Sarah listens in rapt attention; she smiles,

laughs, cries. Her body language transforms. She is no longer

stiff and uncertain near him. She is relaxed, involved in the

story, no longer focused on what she has lost but on what she

stands to gain. She touches Chuck, gently, intimately but

casually, in a gesture reminiscent of her bumping him playfully

with her shoulder when they sat together on the beach before. As

Chuck finishes, she wipes away tears.

Chuck mentions that Morgan has a theory. Sarah asks what it is.

Chuck explains that Morgan believes that with one kiss, she will

remember everything. She laughs: “One magical kiss?” They both

laugh. Chuck starts to apologize for bringing it up but Sarah

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cuts him off: “Chuck?” “Yeah?” “Kiss me.” They look at each

other: Chuck smiles. Sarah looks at him intensely. He leans

in, his arm around her shoulders, and kisses her, first

tentatively, then more intently. His other hand moves up to her

face and they continue the kiss. The screen goes black.

When Chuck sits down, Sarah comments that the beach is important.

It becomes clear that she does not remember exactly what happened

there. She only knows that something important did, because she

can feel it. She cannot (yet) re-live it, but it is welling up

inarticulately in her. The place moves her emotions.

‘Important’ for Sarah is a word like ‘different’. ‘Important’

means significant and good. That is why she is there. That is why

she has stayed there. Being there makes her feel--and makes her

feel better. She knows that the significant and good thing that

happened there is something involving Chuck, something between

the two of them. That is why she is not surprised to see him,

why she has been expecting him, waiting on him. This is where

she found him. She is waiting for him to find her.

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Sarah told Chuck it was all going to be ok. He is there to tell

Sarah the same thing. Her distress will not defeat her. It will

end. She asked him to trust her, and in so doing committed

herself to him for the first time in their life together. Chuck

re-commits to her now. He re-commits in light of the changes of

recent days. He puts no pressure on her. He asks for nothing

from her, expects nothing of her (as his wife). He only wants

her to know that she can count on him, as he told her on their

wedding day. She can count on him even if she leaves him, even

if she decides not to take him on. She can trust him, no matter

what she decides to do.

Chuck gifts himself (again) to Sarah. Her asset will not stay an

asset--some strange alchemy turns it always into her gift. Chuck

gives himself to her absolutely, categorically. No strings are

attached. He is at her disposal. Sarah nods. She believes this

and she feels it. This man has a genius for commitment to her.

He is as good as his word. She knows that, knows it beyond her

missing memories. She knows it in her very responsiveness to it.

Things have changed, she has changed--but he is still her Chuck.

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She is ready now to hear their story. She was not sure she was

ready in El Compadre, despite the fact that what she heard of it

pleased her. She is sure she is ready now. She has been waiting

on him--and she has been waiting to hear this. The woman Chuck

is going to tell her about no longer seems so strange and so much

a stranger to Sarah. The distance between Sarah Walker and Sarah

Bartowski has shrunk. She can hear the story as a story about

her, and not just as a story about someone she used to be.

Sarah’s predominate reaction to the story is joy. The story’s

simultaneous properties of it-could-not-have-been-like-this and

it-had-to-be-like-this (the simultaneous properties of every good

love story) must have stood out. As she listens to the story of

her love for Chuck, she becomes not just a witness to that love

but the bearer of it. She identifies with herself.

Despite the fact that Morgan’s theory is what prefaces the kiss,

it is crucial to see that Sarah does not ask Chuck to kiss her as

an experiment--as if the point were to either confirm or

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disconfirm Morgan’s theory. The kiss does put his theory to the

test, but that is not what Sarah is doing and it is not what

Chuck is doing. Sarah wants Chuck to kiss her. She wants to

kiss him. Desire, not Disney magic, demands the kiss. As Sarah

falls in love with Chuck again she is remembering that she loves

him. (Platonic Recollection indeed!) Her contemporary and her

past feelings are fusing into one continuous feeling that

stretches back to their first meeting at the Nerd Herd desk. She

reclaims and is reclaiming what Quinn stole from her. (The

exchange resonates with the exchange between Chuck and Sarah at

the end of S03E13. He starts to say something and she stops him.

“Shut up and kiss me.”)

So does the kiss work? Is Morgan right or is Morgan wrong? I do

not deem this the focal question. It is natural to be curious

about it, and I will say something about how I believe it should

be answered. But we need to see what is in front of us before we

speculate about what we are not shown. By Sarah’s own admission

(in Season 3), she fell for Chuck in between his repairing her

phone and his defusing the bomb using Irene Demova. In effect,

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what Sarah is saying is that she fell for him during their night

out together. She has fallen by the time she joined him on the

beach the next morning. And Chuck’s telling of their story has

him falling for her more or less at the time he met her. The

phone’s fall from his shoulder was sacramental, the outward and

visible sign of his inward fall for her. There is no reason why

Sarah cannot fall in love with Chuck just as quickly a second

time. Especially when she has never fallen out of love with him.

These two call to one another. They have from the beginning.

Chuck re-commits to Sarah not only in the face of his ignorance

of the future, but in the face of his worry that she will not

choose a life with him. But he will be committed to her even if

that is her choice. Sarah directs Chuck to kiss her as her way

of re-committing to him. She re-commits not only in the face of

her ignorance of the future, but in the face of her fear that her

memory of their five years together may never return. It is our

ability to commit while acknowledging our ignorance--and so our

worries, and so our fears--that makes commitment the profundity

it is in our lives. Chuck and Sarah show us what it takes. They

are ready for anything. Each has placed his or her hope in the

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other. They believe that tomorrow will be the same but better. “Are

you guys back together?” Ellie once asked Chuck. His unqualified

response bears repeating: “We’re together.”

They kiss in promise. The sun is not setting on their lives

together. They are awake to each other. There is more day to

dawn. The sun is but a morning star.

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Chapter 15 Aftermath: The Kiss, and a Few Loose Ends

So--does the kiss work? There are strong reasons to believe that

it does. I believe that it does. The final episode trajects

unquestionably toward Chuck and Sarah being reunited. Now, there

are only two possibilities for that reunion--either it takes

place because the kiss works or it takes place despite the kiss

failing to work. The inner logic of the final episode requires

one of these two outcomes. But what reasons are there for

thinking that the kiss works?

Perhaps the strongest is this: Quinn’s attack on Sarah’s memory

serves as counterpoint to the Belgian’s attack on Chuck’s memory

and personality in S04E09. Two things are especially noteworthy

about that episode. First, Sarah brings Chuck back with a kiss.

She does so despite the doctor, Mueller, telling her that it is

too late. But Mueller could not get deep enough into Chuck’s

brain to expunge Sarah. She goes deeper in Chuck than Chuck

goes. Her kiss calls him back to her. Second, it is Morgan who

urges her to appeal to Chuck, not as Sarah Walker the spy, but as

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Sarah Walker the girlfriend. It is Morgan who urges her to

appeal to him, to his feelings; he prophesies (correctly) that

that will bring him back. Mueller was not mistaken about how much

of Chuck had been expunged, but he knew nothing about the

restorative power of Sarah’s love. The parallels are so obvious

that they do not need to be commented upon. If Sarah’s kiss can

restore Chuck, then his kiss can restore Sarah’s memory. Chuck

has kept Chuck and Sarah interlocked in counterpoint from the

beginning--for every Bryce there is a Jill, for every Christmas

shooting there is a Red Test. Since Sarah saves Chuck with a

kiss, Chuck saves Sarah with one. Given the logic of Chuck, that

is a QED moment.

There is also the general role of big kisses between them: the

Incident, the kiss egged on by Roan Montgomery, the kiss on the

run at the end of Season 2 (S02E21), the kiss after Chuck’s

speech in Castle in S03E11, the kiss after Sarah’s answers in

03E12, the kiss in the Paris bed in S03E13, the kiss after the

proposal in S04E13, the kiss in Thailand in S04E09, etc.--the

kisses between Chuck and Sarah play a role in the show like the

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role of songs in many musicals: they are not breaks in the

action, but a change of register into a more significant form of

the action. When Chuck and Sarah kiss in these moments, the kiss

itself changes them; it does not just mark a change in them.

Given their history, it is hard to see how this kiss could fail

to bring about the desired change.

Also, despite the worry that the Intersect has destroyed or

annihilated Sarah’s memories, it obviously has not. She has

forgotten, but that does not imply that she cannot eventually

remember. Somewhere, at some level of depth in Sarah’s memory,

her life with Chuck remains. We all know the experience of

forgetting something that we know we know, the experience of

knowing that we know it despite not being able to recall it at

will right now. Sarah is in a large-scale analog of that

situation. She starts to do something that involves her

remembering--like properly rearranging the cups on the

Wienerlicious counter--and she remembers, but as soon as her

attention is drawn explicitly to what she is doing, she loses the

thread of memory. She can remember as long as she does not know

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she is remembering. Or, she starts to remember--like remembering

carving their names on the doorframe of their dream house--and

something happens to dash the memory. One reason why the change

in her body language in the final scene matters is that it

suggests that she is, at last and again, relaxed, that she has

shifted her focus from not remembering to listening to their

story. And, as we know, it is usually when we stop trying to

remember that the tantalizingly close memory returns to us. The

kiss really does not need to be literal magic--as it would if

Sarah’s memories had been annihilated. The kiss does not have to

be an instance of creatio ex nihilo. It has to bring her memories

back (back from behind whatever barrier Quinn and the Intersect

erected) but it does not have to recreate them from whole cloth.

The Brandenburg Gate in Berlin thus does not just represent the

wall between Chuck and Sarah (it is about to fall) but also the

wall between Sarah and herself, between Sarah and her memories

(it too is about to fall).

Back to Morgan once more: Morgan has not only presided over

Chuck and Sarah’s relationship, he has also been prophetic where

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it is concerned and at times other than the one in Thailand.

During a Thanksgiving episode (S02E08), he predicted Chuck and

Sarah would show up for dinner, and they did. He is the one who

warned Chuck about the “Achilles Heel” of relationships--and

although it initially looked like he was wrong, in the end he

proved to be right. In general, where Chuck, or where Chuck and

Sarah are concerned, Morgan has proved to be right. He is the

Intersect of Chuck, as he says. He knows better than anyone else

what is going on with his boy. Remember, it is Morgan who

corrects Ellie when she counsels Chuck to break with Sarah. He

tells her that Sarah is the one, whether Chuck acknowledges it or

not. When Chuck is with Sarah he says--and he is exactly right--

Chuck is the Chuck they all thought he could be.

Another important piece of data about the kiss is the contrast

between the next-to-last and last episodes. The next-to-last

episode ends in darkness, with Chuck standing alone and Sarah

leaving to pursue Quinn. But the last episode begins in bright

daylight, both in the sequence with Sarah on Quinn’s plane and

the other with Chuck in bed. Sarah hits her head as she falls

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from Quinn’s plane--and of course getting hit on the head has

long been the conventional way of both beginning stories of

memory loss, and more importantly, of ending the story of memory

loss. The blow to the head restores or precedes the restoration

of memory. Even more significant, Sarah snaps out of

unconsciousness in time to pull her parachute and save herself

from her free fall into the water. And Chuck is awakened by

Ellie and Morgan and in time for him to save himself from a free

fall into cheeseballs. The shift from darkness to light, and the

awakenings that accompanies the shift, strongly presage that the

worst is over, that Chuck and Sarah will in fact find each other

again, that the kiss will be their change from dark to light.

The truth is that Sarah cannot leave Chuck. The fury and pain

Quinn causes sends her after Quinn, but she delays that trip long

enough to go back to the apartment, to talk to Chuck. And then

after narrowly missing Quinn, she returns to Burbank, to the Buy

More, to Chuck. Once Quinn has been killed and his bomb defused,

she returns to Chuck again, this time by returning to their

place, the beach, and waiting for him to join her. And of

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course, she tells Chuck to kiss her because she wants to kiss

him. He is her home. Where else would she go? For a place to

be home--or for a person to be a home--requires far more than

belief that the place or the person is home. What it involves

goes deeper than belief. It is not even clear that it really

requires a belief. It involves embodied or somatic responses:

feeling at home is far more about embodied response to a place or

person than it is about a belief or even an emotion we might feel

about the place or person. It is a bodily way of being at the

place or with the person--call it being-at-home. That specific way

of being contrasts strongly--and we all know this, if we stop to

reflect on it--with our bodily way of being when we are not at

home, being-away-from-home. Take a vivid case: being in a large

city for the very first time. We experience the place as

strange, a scene of endangerment, a scene of abandonment--and

perhaps we do this despite what we believe or feel about the

place. We do not know where we are--but that lack of knowledge

is itself primarily an embodied lack. We do not know what to do

or where to be. We can find no place to relax, to drop our

guard, to settle down. We are homesick. But our way of being at

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home is completely different. We do not experience endangerment

or abandonment. We know where we are. We know what to do and

where to be. We are comfortable, safe.

Sarah is homesick. Perhaps this above all shows that the idea

that Quinn wholly reset her to five years before in her past is

merely apparent. He reset her in terms of what he can now

remember, in terms of her personal memory. He has locked away

her personal and some factual memories of or about the past five

years. But he has not, because he cannot (short of killing

Sarah) completely erase those five years. They live on in her

embodied responses. What her head may have lost, her heart and

her body have kept. (Think of the Wienerlicious cups.) When

Sarah stops worrying about her lost memories of Chuck--

particularly as she gets out of her own head and becomes involved

in shared tasks or conversations with him--her old embodied

responses begin to return. They lead her to Malibu Beach.

While I am on the topic of home, let me explicitly recall a scene

from an earlier episode, S04E02. Sarah has been living with

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Chuck for eight months but has not unpacked. She lives in his

apartment, but out of her suitcase. Understandably, this is

something that worries Chuck (and something Morgan, who is living

with them, has noticed and is worried by). For many years, that

suitcase has been more Sarah’s home than anything else has been.

She has never really had an ordinary home, a permanent, settled

place. The meaning of her packed suitcase preoccupies the two of

them during their mission in the episode. At one point, Sarah

starts to hang her things in their closet, but Chuck stops her:

he does not want her to do it for him, but because she is at home

there. As the episode ends, Chuck enters the bedroom--he finds

Sarah there, with all her clothes in the closet, her unpacked

suitcase on the bed. She tells Chuck she wanted to unpack; she

has not had a home before and she wants theirs to feel like one.

Chuck notices a photograph peeking out of the interior pocket of

her suitcase. It turns out to be of a photograph of the two of

them. In the picture, Chuck stands behind Sarah, embracing her,

holding her to him. Sarah explains that the photograph goes

everywhere she goes--that it is in her suitcase at all times. It

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eases her when she is away from him. She then tells Chuck that

he is her home, and that he always has been.

The photograph has evidently been well travelled and much

handled. It has been clearly been in her suitcase for a long

time. Its place in the internal pocket of her suitcase is a

place of honor, her Holy of Holies--the place that is for Sarah

the physical representation of her heart. She keeps Chuck there

always. This prefigures Chuck’s finding Sarah in his

psychological counterpart of their bedroom when the Belgian tries

to wipe everything but the Intersect from Chuck’s mind. Each has

reached into the other’s deepest recesses, the deepest recesses

of the embodied other. Mueller could not oust Sarah from Chuck;

she is intertwined with all that he is, head, heart and body.

So, too, is Chuck for Sarah. Quinn cannot oust him. Chuck may

not currently be in Sarah’s head, but he is under her skin, in

her blood, bred in her bone.

We may take ourselves to be too sophisticated seriously to

endorse the idea of marriage creating one flesh, or we may

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endorse it, but only as a metaphor. But I wonder if we should

not take it seriously as metaphysics. Taking it seriously as

metaphysics means believing that two people can commit to one

another, over time anyway, to a degree that makes the commitment

reside in them bodily, not just psychologically. They do become

one flesh. The body of one becomes the body of the other: each

finds the embodied other to be his or her home, each is

comfortable in the other’s skin. Maybe this should be our

preferred measure of intimacy, this unification of the flesh.

Sarah gives every sign of it. This is why her heart pulls her

back home even while her head counsels her to disappear.

Recall Chuck and Sarah in bed together in S04E21. They are

spooning, asleep. Their bodies have found their way to each

other but doing so does not involve their consciousness, any

belief or desire of which either is aware (since they are

asleep). But there they lie, fitted to each other. Their

default bodily posture toward each other is shown to us. They

belong together: their bodies belong together--being apart is an

unnatural bodily posture for them. Love, as we know it, is an

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embodied emotion. We have no idea what it would be to love in a

disembodied way. Our tendency to ‘spiritualize’ love works

against us. We need always to remember that if we are to keep

the distinction between the ‘spiritual’ and the ‘bodily’, and

keep it in its correct place, the ‘bodily’ is the vehicle of the

‘spiritual’. We are of the earth, earthy--and we move into

futurity always trailing dust.

One other thing worth mentioning is the idiosyncratic nature of

the season-ending episodes of the show. Unlike many shows, Chuck

never ends a season by simply ending the season arc. Chuck never

ends a season by withholding the ending of the season arc and

waiting to resolve it until the next season. Instead, Chuck ends

the season arc and then establishes the new arc, begins the next

story, before it comes to a season end. The point of this sort

of season-ending episode seems to be to leave the viewer

satisfied with the end of the season story arc but anticipating

the development of the next season’s arc. The show-ending

episode has the same nature. It ends the show and leaves us

anticipating a story arc we know we are not going to see play

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out. We are left to imagine it. But there is no reason to think

we have been left to imagine them parting, and little reason to

think that they are anything but fully back together when the

screen goes black. Chuck and Sarah’s story develops around

trust, around two people coming to trust each other, and the

changes in them that their mutual trust creates. The show ends

by denying us knowledge to make room for our faith. These two

trust each other. We should trust them and what trust they have

and are.

I said at the very beginning of the book that I count Chuck a

romantic comedy--at least that is what it is at heart. The spy

thriller aspects of the show are wound around the basic romantic

comedy structure. I have not argued for that way of classifying

the show, and I really will not argue for it; I take it to be too

obvious to even permit argumentation. (When you try to argue for

what is obvious, you have to find premises to support what you

take to be obvious. But if your conclusion is obvious, how are

your premises to be more obvious? To argue in that situation is

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to condemn yourself to sophistry.) But I do want to explain

myself a bit more now that I am bringing things to a close.

So Chuck is a romantic comedy. More specifically, it is a

variant of screwball comedies, a variety of romantic comedies

made famous in Hollywood in the 30’s and 40’s. A crucial typical

feature of the screwball comedies was that in them the woman took

the lead. Usually, this was because she belonged to the upper

class, or at any rate belonged to a higher social class than the

man. Usually, she came from and had money. The screwball

comedies thus allowed for sometimes quite serious reflection on

class and economic issues but from within the ‘safer’ general

structure of a comedy. But it was also typical for the man to

woo the woman by explicitly educating or re-educating her, often

changing the modality of her relationship to her class or wealth,

or by changing, recharging her imagination--providing her with

new dreams, new forms of satisfaction. The man is typically

being educated or re-educated too, by the woman, but also by his

reflection on her education or re-education. But the man’s

education or re-education is typically implicit. This is the way

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screwball comedies built Bildungsroman into their structure. A

classic example is Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night.

In that film, Ellie Andrews (Claudette Colbert) is a spoiled,

wealthy young woman who has come increasingly to experience her

wealth and celebrity as captivity. She is desperate to escape it

but is unsure how to do so. Eventually, desperate, she slips

away from her father and marries a man he strongly dislikes, King

Westley. Her father manages to find her and take her away from

her husband before the marriage can be consummated. Her father

wants the marriage annulled. He has her aboard his yacht as he

tries to get this to happen. Ellie jumps ship in Florida. She

gets to a bus station and boards a bus to New York, on her way

back to her husband and to the consummation of their wedding. On

the bus, she meets another passenger, Peter Warne (Clark Gable).

Warne is a down-on-his-luck newspaperman--and he eventually

recognizes Ellie (her father has mounted a very public search for

her) and recognizes that a story about her return to Westley

could change his professional fortunes. Ellie has almost no

money on her; she mis-manages what she has. Peter has only a

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little. Peter tells her he will take her to Westley if she gives

him her story, exclusive. She agrees. She ends up having to

rely on him and his modest funds as they head north together.

Ellie’s giving away of the bulk of that fund, a bus breakdown,

and another passenger’s recognizing Ellie complicate their

journey. But along the way, Ellie’s initial half-hearted

contempt for Peter transforms into whole-hearted love. Peter,

still believing that he is chasing only Ellie’s story, and not

Ellie, fails to realize that he has fallen in love with her too.

They stop for a night as they near their destination, New York.

They pretend to be a married couple so as to get a room. They

have used this cover before, in earlier motor lodges. Playing

the roles of husband and wife has led each into a kind of

confusion about who and what they are, as the roles come to seem

immediately natural, comfortable. Soon, they are pretending to be

what, for all intents and purposes, they are, a real couple.

Peter attempts to make their shared rooms less bothersome to Elli

by hanging a blanket (a cover) between their beds. As they fall

asleep in the last of their stops before New York (Ellie has

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managed to finagle a stop out of Peter, who wanted to go on since

they are only three hours away), Peter tells her dreamily of the

kind of woman he wants--one that is game, that will gladly share

his adventures, a girl who hungers for the same things he does.

Ellie prompted this reverie by asking Peter if he had ever been

in love. Ellie hears what Peter tells her and realizes that she

has come to share his dream. She leaves her bed and joins Peter

on his side of the blanket. She tries to make him understand

that she wants to be the girl he describes--she is hungry for

those things too. At first, Peter does not understand. He

cannot quite fathom what Ellie has said to him or his reaction to

it. He sends her back to her side of the blanket, back to her

bed. After a while spent thinking, measured by an ashtray full

of cigarette butts, he finally understands. He asks Ellie if she

meant it. She has gone to sleep. Peter decides to drive the

rest of the way to New York. He plans to sell their story to get

them enough money to marry. Ellie awakens and thinks Peter has

abandoned her. Heart-broken, she calls her father and surrenders

herself to him. Her father drops his objections to Westley.

They plan a large, public wedding.

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Peter, meanwhile, takes himself to have been duped, played. He

calls Ellie’s father, demanding money. Ellie’s father takes him

to want the large reward that had been offered, but when Peter

meets with him, all he wants is about forty dollars--his expenses

for taking Ellie north. Suspicious now that Peter is in love

with his daughter, instead of suspicious that Peter is another

gold-digger, her father gets Peter to confess that he loves

Ellie.

As he walks down the aisle with Ellie, her father (who has also

noticed that she is deeply unhappy) tells her that Peter only

wanted to be repaid for his expenses, that Peter loves her. He

tells her she can run again--this time with his blessing: he has

a car waiting for her. She runs from Westley and to Peter.

Chuck re-conceives the typical features of the screwball comedy,

of a film like It Happened One Night. Instead of a class or

economic disparity between the woman and the man, between Sarah

and Chuck, there is a professional disparity. She is a have,

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Chuck is a have-not. And Sarah not only has a profession, she has

reached the top of her profession. She seems far above Chuck.

Many of the “she’s out of your league” jokes in the show turn on

an ambiguity--it is not just that she is so lovely, although that

is often enough what is meant, it is rather that she is so

competent, and Chuck so apparently (comparatively) incompetent.

Of course, Sarah will see past that apparent incompetence

quickly. She sees Chuck.

Chuck wins Sarah in part by re-educating her. He changes what

she thinks a spy can be, changes her understanding of and her

relationship to her profession. He also teaches her that there

are things worth having, things that are crucial to have, things

that being a spy cannot get for her. A profession, a true

profession, still has limits. Professions only work when the

professional has and can maintain a meaningful non-professional,

personal life. The ideal of serving the general good loses its

meaning when the professional loses any grip on his or her own

personal good. That does not mean that a professional, a spy,

might not choose to give up his or her life for the general good;

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it means rather that if the professional loses his or her sense

of being someone who has a good, and whose good is included in

the general good, his or her service of the general good becomes

empty, formal or ritualized. It is not quickened by a sense of a

personal stake in that general good. And without that sense, it

is unclear that a spy can genuinely sacrifice herself for the

general good, since meaningful self-sacrifice means giving up

your good so that the good of others can be realized. For as

long as Sarah is nothing but a spy, she cannot be the sort of spy

Chuck has taught her is possible. And of course they do

eventually decide that the sort of spy they want to be differs so

much from the sort of spy the CIA wants that they need to go out

on their own, and even shift their livelihood to combating cyber

terrorism. Most importantly, Chuck teaches Sarah about being

human and about the vulnerability that is an undeniable,

desirable part of being human. He models vulnerability to her--a

vulnerability that is not a weakness but instead the achievement

of meaningful contact with reality, the reality of yourself and

the reality of others. (A meaningful contact that empowers the

person who achieves and maintains it.) CIA spy craft teaches the

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that a spy can know the mind of another without being responsive

to that person as a person--it teaches that others can only be

third-personal objects of knowledge, not second-personal

participants in mutual acknowledgement. But other minds cannot

be known this way, and attempting to know other minds this way

darkens our knowledge of our own minds.

But one way Chuck varies the typical features of screwball comedy

is by also having Sarah explicitly educate Chuck. In fact, she

educates him in multiple ways. The most crucial is her educating

him to trust himself. But she also teaches him many other

things, like how to control himself, how to be silent, how to

dance. She inspirits him, moralizes him after his long, post-

Stanford demoralization. Chuck’s life had flattened out, closed--

Sarah restores a foreshortened perspective. She broadens his

horizons--opens up the world beyond Echo Park. It is their

education of each other (of course others play a role in this,

Casey for Chuck, Ellie for Sarah, and so on) that gives the show

its internal Bildungsromane structure. Few network tv shows have

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ever charted personal growth for its characters more extensively

and believably than Chuck

Let me end by talking of endings. I suspect that one reason why

a number of fans of the show disliked the ending was that they

confused their reaction to the end of the show with their

reaction to the end of the episode, to the storyline about

Sarah’s memory loss and its possible return. Chuck’s power

resides ultimately in how invested we became in these characters

and in the world they inhabited. They came to be presences in

our real lives despite being fictional. The show took our heart

captive. And so its ending is not something we can meet

tranquilly. No, we hate that it ends. The ending makes us sad.

That is perfectly appropriate. Watching the final episode is

like having to say goodbye to friends who we will not see again.

That sorrow hangs over and permeates the final episode, and it

can seem like that sorrow somehow determines the ending, decides

how it is to be understood. We are sad--and so we attribute that

sadness to the ending of the storyline. But they are two

separate endings--one can be happy (the storyline ending) while

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the other is sad (the end of the show). To respond properly to

the final episode, we have to keep the endings and our reactions

to them separated. I have had my say about why I regard the

storyline ending as happy. Let me say a word or two more about

the ending of the show.

Samuel Johnson, writing the final essay in his series of essays,

The Idler, discusses what he calls “our secret horror of the last”.

He notes that

There are few things not purely evil, of which we can say,

without some emotion of uneasiness, “this is the last”.55

He continues by linking this secret horror to the limits of our

life and our dread of death. We mark periods of our life in

various ways--and one of them is by the duration of a tv show

that matters to us. And when a period of our life ends, we make

a “secret comparison” between part and whole; we are forcibly

reminded that life itself has a final episode, that our show too

must end. Eventually, all screens go black. I mention this not

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to be morbid, but rather to explain why I find reacting to the

final episode correctly to be hard to do. The show is ending,

and we experience our secret horror of the last, we experience

the pain of parting with these friends. That there is a reminder

of death in all this seems to me undeniable. But there is also a

reminder of death internal to the storyline of the final episode.

Sarah’s memory loss, if permanent and complete, feels

functionally equivalent, for Chuck, to her dying. He loses her

(or at least five years with her), despite the fact that she goes

on living. Their five years together is irrevocably taken from

them. That does not happen. But the specter of it haunts the

unfolding of the storyline. But then another specter of death--

the reminder that the last brings with it--also haunts the ending

of the show. One specter is laid to rest, the one in the

storyline. But the other remains. And in the black of that

final screen, it is hard to tell the specters apart.

This brings me to the last of my loose ends. Given that the

show’s basic structure is that of a screwball comedy, the ending

can seem strangely inappropriate. What is comedic about the

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ending? What if Jane Austen had put Fanny Price through all of

the paces of Mansfield Park only to end the book by having Edward,

married to Fanny, lose his memory of their life together as a

couple? That is hard to imagine, despite Mansfield Park being the

least cheery of Austen’s novels. My point here is simple enough.

What in the inner logic of the show (as a whole) demands this

ending? I recall a friend of mine, a teacher of creative

writing, telling me that she began her classes by telling her

students that they were not allowed to end any story by writing

—“Then he/she woke up; it had all been a dream”. The reason is

that she found that stories that ended that way were stories that

had either given up on earning a proper ending or had simply

opted for a clever ending, hoping that the sheer cleverness of

the ending would make it seem acceptable (despite the inner logic

of the story not demanding the ending). A version of this

question lingers after the last episodes of Chuck. Are the last

episodes clever? Yes, very much so. Do they emotionally involve

the viewer? Undoubtedly. Are they the right way for the show to

end? Well. That is less sure.

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Notice that this is question differs from two questions I have

already answered. One--is the end of the final episode happy?

(Yes.) Two--is the ending of the show sad? (Yes.) The question

I am asking is about authorial prerogatives. No doubt the author

or creator of a work of art has a kind of unchecked power over

it. The creator of a work of art can make it whatever the

creator wants. Yet the creator seems also to be bound by the

nature of the work created. Consider a poet writing the final

stanza of a poem. You might say that a poet is free to write

whatever she wants, however she wants, in the final stanza. Yet

that final stanza has to be appropriate to the other stanzas.

Not just anything will do if the poet wants to write a good poem,

if she wants to finish this poem, say, instead of starting

another. The ending episodes of Chuck are the final couple of

stanzas, added to 89 other stanzas. Are they appropriate?

I am not sure about the answer to this question. But I think we

need to acknowledge that the question does arise, and that many

ardent fans of the show were dissatisfied with the final episodes

because of it. Whether these fans were watching with any

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explicit recognition of the genre of screwball comedy, the fans

have seen enough of such movies and tv shows to have a sense of

their general structure, a sense of why they count as romantic

comedies. If the kiss works, then the show does not deviate from

its general structure as it ends. But if the kiss does not work,

or even if it does but we do not know that, it does deviate.

That by itself is not a problem--the question is whether Chuck

can earn the right to the deviation. Now, as I mentioned, the

final episode does complete a contrapuntal structure when it is

related to S04E09. But is that enough to earn the right to the

deviation?

I can focus the question better by asking it in another way.

Throughout the show, it has almost always been the case that

Chuck and Sarah learn something about themselves or their

relationship from their spy missions. The show has been about

coupling. But then it uncouples the central pair

(psychologically and symbolically--think of how things end on the

Bullet Train, as Quinn uncouples the car in which he has Sarah

from the other cars of the train). Presumably, doing something

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so radical should have a rather hefty payoff--some really

important lesson about themselves or their relationship that the

event teaches them. Arguably, there is an important payoff for

Chuck--along one dimension, at least. He attains a degree of

self-mastery he has never before attained. But does that self-

mastery better their relationship? How? How can we know for

sure? Given the trajectory of the final episode, we can believe

that it will, but even if we do, can it justify what Sarah (and

everyone else) has gone through? Sarah Bartowski has grown over

her five years in Burbank. She has earned that growth, suffered

for it. The show has earned her growth. If we compare the woman

of Season 5 to the woman of the pilot, the growth is readily

apparent. It is among the things that matters most in the show.

So, should it be forfeited or risked for anything less than a big

payoff--sort of like the one that ends the Slough of Despond in

Season 3 (in S03E14)? There is a long thematic drop from Nina

Simone’s “Feeling Good” to The Head and Hearts “Rivers and

Roads”, although both are great songs. The distance of that

drop, and the distance from Sarah Bartowski to Sarah Walker,

measures of what Chuck risks in the final episode.

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Note that I am still in the interrogative here, still asking

questions. As I said, I am unsure about how to answer them. I

ask them in part to help to clarify why so many disliked the

final episodes. That dislike is not unintelligible. I do not

share it but I understand it.

What I am sure of is that the final episodes are not just about

Sarah’s memory but also about ours. Unlike many shows that end

with a montage of memories unjustified by anything in the story-

line, but rather justified only by the episode being the last,

Chuck gets us to re-live the show but in a way justified by the

story-line. Chuck is trying to get Sarah to feel it again; Chuck

is trying to get us to feel it again. We meet the show again.

And maybe that is another reason why we part from the show deeply

happy and deeply sad—we say hello while we say goodbye.

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Chapter 16 The End: Chuck on Love

Eros

The sense of the world is short, --

Long and various the report, --

To love and be beloved;

Men and gods have not outlearned it;

And, how oft soe’er they’ve turned it,

‘Tis not to be improved.

--Emerson

For a show that is so firmly wired into popular culture, into the

movies, into television, into gaming and so on, Chuck maintains a

surprisingly counter-cultural tone. This is clear, first and

foremost, in the Intersect itself, which symbolizes the often

uncontrolled and often unthinking place of technology in our

culture and in our daily lives, our smallest habits. Worries

about dehumanization make periodic appearances throughout the

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course of the show. The point is never to be a rejection of

technology, some Luddite reflex, but rather a recognition that we

are not thinking enough in the face of technology, that we are

constantly ignoring or putting off the question of technology.

Jeffster’s cover of “Mr. Roboto” resonates through the show,

right until its final episodes, where the human cost of

technology--Sarah’s loss of her memory--makes the question

painfully urgent. Technology has benefits, surely; it has costs

just as surely. We need to keep the books on it in both black and

red ink, carefully tallying just where we are, and what we are

gaining and losing.

Another obvious instance of the show’s counter-cultural tone is

the Buy More itself, with its omnipresent, mindless signs, urging

more buying (from the customers) and more selling (from the

employees). The Buy More is a temple to our consumption-driven,

consumptive lives. Again, Chuck contains no suggestion that we

should simply abandon those lives--or even that we could do so.

But it does ask us for what we are living those lives. What are

we buying and why? Are we buying just to buy more, to have more,

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and in response to no genuine need? Are we using purchasing

power as a sop for our lack of real power over our lives and over

ourselves? Do we camouflage our terror of serious choice and

serious commitment with a plethora of unserious choices and the

temporary commitments of built-in obsolescence? Here today,

replaced tomorrow. We live in a blizzard of Kleenex. We do not

ask ourselves where it all comes from or where it all goes. Why

do we not think more about this? We allow what we are interested

in completely to eclipse what is in our interest.

But Chuck is nowhere more counter-cultural in tone than in its

portrayal of love--in particular of the kind of love I have

focused on, the kind shared by Chuck and Sarah, romantic love. It

is not just that the show is quite clear about the fact that love

is not a feeling of the sort that bodily pain is. The show also

recognizes that romantic love can take a bewildering variety of

forms, forms sometimes so unpredictable that it takes time and

reflection to recognize them for what they are. We cannot simply

introspect to determine whether we are in love or not. But we

are also prone to mistaking our love--we sincerely claim to feel

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it when we do not and sincerely deny feeling it when we do.

Chuck also shows unmistakably that love has its own agenda, its

own schedule.56 It does not concern itself with finding

convenient seasons, it does not shy away from settling on someone

we could never have predicted it would find.

This does not mean that love is immune to criticism, that it

cannot be inordinate or inappropriate--in either kind or degree.

It does mean that criticizing love is different than criticizing

a syllogism. Love is not irrational. But it is surely not

rational in the way that discursive reasoning, drawing a

conclusion from a premise, is rational. It is surely not

rational in the way that building a birdhouse is rational. It is

rational in its own way, answerable to standards of its own.

Romantic love is something that only a rational being can feel.

It is not available to non-rational creatures. We may talk of

states in the lives of non-rational creatures that play a role

like romantic love does in ours, but that is a comparison across

fully distinct genera, not a recognition of identity. A dog’s

life (for all its glories) simply does not have the requisite

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complicated warp and woof to allow romantic love to occur in it.

Consider: A dog can expect its master to come home. But it

cannot expect him to come home in exactly twenty minutes, or to

come home a week from Tuesday.57 Dogs are temporal creatures as

we are, but they are not the same temporal creatures we are.

Only a rational creature can inhabit time as we do. Mutatis

mutandis ditto for romantic love—only a rational creature can love

as we do. Perhaps that does not make love rational, or does so

only by means of a pun, but it makes our rationality matter to

our love. Our rationality is implicated in our romantic love.

But it is not implicated in the way it is in syllogistic

reasoning or as it is in means-end reasoning. It is implicated

as a particular capacity for recognition, as a kind and clarity

of moral vision and moral imagination, as involving a selfless

form of self-discipline--as the exercise of what John Keats

called “negative capability”.58

When John Keats coined that phrase, he had in mind a capability

to live in mystery without constantly reaching for concepts or

categories with which to master the mystery, to domesticate

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‘otherness’; he had in mind a capability to bear up under mystery

without attempting to fit it into some closed, rational system.

The person of negative capability exercises a sincere and severe

self-restraint. Such a person’s rationality is implicated in

that self-restraint, in the recognition and the control of each

attempt to conceptualize or categorize, each attempt to master

the mystery--rationality recognizes and controls its own tendency

to overstep its boundaries. Love involves rational self-mastery.

This self-mastery is for the sake of the beloved, for the sake of

allowing him or her to appear as he or she truly is: the self-

mastery allows love of the beloved without distorting self-love.

Such self-mastery does not deprive a person of conceptual or

categorical resources, but it rather allows all such resources to

be truly and passively actualized (even created, called into

being) by the beloved, by the unique value of the beloved. In

other words, this self-mastery allows reason to function as it

should, untilted and unshaken, in its recognition of what is

real, what is of real value.

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Typically, when our romantic love is open to criticism, when it

is inappropriate or inordinate, it is so because of the

distortion of self-love. Our projection of ourselves, our

willful enforcement of concepts or categories, our desire to tame

the ‘otherness’ of the beloved, to render him or her a part of

our system, all of these produce loves that are confused in kind

or degree. There is an old saying: the person to whom all

things taste as they should is wise.59 The problem is that we

typically are not wise, and that things do not taste as they

should. We cannot help ladling a generous helping of ourselves,

our wishes or fears, our tremors and itches, our prejudices and

preconceptions, into things. And then what we taste, good or

bad, is partly the backwash of self.

A rational and rationally maintained openness to the beloved can

be extravagantly costly. It requires that we surrender our more

or less default deployment of manipular concepts and categories.

We have to suffer the full shock of the beloved. No bullet proof

vests, no padding. It demands a continuous and attentive

responsiveness to the other, with no substitution of fantasy for

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reality. We have to love the beloved, the person we see, not the

person we wish we saw, the person we fantasize seeing. And it

demands that we find the beloved, the person we see, continuously

lovable--through changes and difficulties, for better or worse.

We are committed to finding and to responding to the real value

of the beloved, to remaining in fidelity to that real value--

because no change in the beloved can render him or her valueless

(including death). The beloved is recognized as a sui generis

value. The beloved is and always will be a sui generis value. The

beloved is a gift we spend our lives deserving.

But because the beloved in romantic love is another person, new

possibilities for criticism and problems open up. One person may

as a matter of fact be selflessly self-disciplined in the way

that love requires, but the beloved may, willfully or not,

misrepresent himself or herself. They may lie, pretend, be

victimized by self-deceptions--and so distort or be distorted.

In such a case, the lover may respond to a value other than the

sui generis value of that person, and so love inappropriately or

inordinately. Of course, that need not happen. A person who is

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self-deceived often is known to others, known sometimes exactly

as self-deceived. And of course lies and pretenses can be

recognized, seen through. (As Austin rightly says: “You cannot

fool all of the people all of the time” is analytic, trivially

true.) Sometimes remaining undeceived is a matter of the lover

remaining free from deliberate or negligent ignorance of the

beloved; sometimes it is a matter of loving the beloved in a way

that the beloved may not love himself or herself, loving the

beloved in a way that allows the lover to recognize qualities in

the beloved that the beloved does not recognize in himself or

herself.

Chuck and Sarah love each other with selfless self-discipline,

they each exercise negative capability. That does not mean that

each does not succumb to moments of weakness, moments when they

become tired of maintaining the kind of openness to one another

that is their way of being together. They tire: they ache: they

wait and they wait and they wait--suffering all the while, lovers

trapped in a sometimes Beckett-like game with no clear ending.

But they go on. They wait because of external and internal

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problems--Sarah’s profession and Chuck’s non-profession, the

Intersect, Sarah’s self-refusal and self-deceptions, Chuck’s

hankering after normalcy and his attempt to make himself into the

CIA’s sort of spy.

What we see as we watch them is the non-negotiable martyrdom that

is internal to real love of any kind, and so to romantic love.

This is one reason why romantic love itself must be pure of self-

love.60 And it is the resoluteness of Chuck’s insistence on that

purity that makes the show deeply counter-cultural.

Chuck’s response to Sarah’s loss of memory--in particular in his

gifting of himself to her on Malibu Beach--models the sort of

selfless self-discipline, negative capability, I am attempting to

describe. He loves her--but he expects nothing from her, demands

nothing for himself. He means that he does not expect her to be

the woman he remembers. His love for her is free of self-love.

He asks her to trust him. But that too he does for her sake, so

she will know there is someone out there who loves her, who will

do anything for her, who is just a phone call away. What Chuck

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does is willingly to re-occupy the position of Sarah in Prague

and his own position in Union Station--but his current position

is more fraught, since so much is at stake, so much stands to be

lost. Sitting beside Sarah on Malibu Beach, Chuck declares that

he will be her husband, whether she will be his wife or not. He

loves Sarah for her sake, not for his. He wills her good as hers,

not as his. All traces of codependency are gone. He still

loves, needs and desires her--more than ever. But he is now a

whole person, fully grown. She is not carrying him any more. He

carries himself. When Chuck assures Sarah that he does not

expect anything from her he reveals a degree of self-mastery that

is new to him. It is the fullness of the changes she initiated in

him long ago.

This is the mystery of mature romantic love--each person is

whole, complete, and yet each is an integral part of the other.

This is how a man loves a woman or a woman a man. How can a

mystery like this be actualized? When one person makes the other

person’s good his own, but without attempting to dictate or

coerce the other’s good. When he rejects concern with justice,

529

fairness--concern with scorekeeping--because it is foreign to

love. When he does not give only as much as the other gives,

requiring matching contributions. No, it is actualized when he

gives completely, absolutely, without ever calculating ratios.

The mystery is actualized when the ineliminable risk of love is

accepted. It is actualized when the necessity of trust is

accepted. No risk, no love. No trust, no love. Running love’s

risks, exercising love’s trust: each is a form of suffering;

each is something to be borne. Each makes stern demands; each is

a form of exposure. But the unimprovable joy of love requires

exposure, requires patience, requires staying power. We suffer

for love. The lover is a martyr to the beloved. Love takes

fortitude. It is not for the faint of heart.

530

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Marcel, G., Creative Fidelity (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Company, 1964).

Marcel, G., Homo Viator (Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1951).

Nozick, R., Anarchy, State and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974).

Pasternak, B. Dr. Zhivago (New York: Pantheon Book, 1958).

Plessner, H., Laughing and Crying (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970).

Russell, B., The Problems of Philosophy (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2007).

Thoreau, H. D., The Variorum Walden (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1962).

Tolkien, J. R. R., The Lord of the Rings (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965). Wallace, J., Virtue and Vice (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1978).

532

West, M., Transcendental Wordplay (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000).

Wittgenstein, L., Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958).

Wittgenstein, L., Zettel (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1967).

1 Chuck is pervasively committed to counterpoint. Much of its

counterpoint is simultaneous, happening internal to a particular

episode, as multiple story-lines unfold all at once. However, much

of its counterpoint is non-simultaneous, happening across episodes,

as later story-lines unfold in a contrapuntal relationship to an

earlier one or earlier ones. Counterpoint engineers some of the

show’s density and resonance, simultaneous counterpoint sometimes

engineering density, non-simultaneous sometimes engineering

resonance.

In case the reader is unfamiliar with counterpoint, here are some

helpful comments of Dan Brown’s on counterpoint in Bach

(http://whybach.crosstownbooks.com/chapter.html):

Everyone knows what counterpoint is: two or more melodies

sounding simultaneously. Everyone also knows, or at least has a

sense, that counterpoint is a sophisticated business, abstruse,

complex, and mathematical.

Yet it's also clear that you don't have to be a musical

sophisticate to comprehend and even enjoy counterpoint; ask any

child who's sung "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" or "Frere Jacques" as

a round . The pleasure involved is actually rather primitive at

base, a dizzy buzz in the face of simultaneity. It may be

enhanced by the more meditated impression that, in following

more than one melody at once, we're enjoying an expansion of our

normal capacities: "I didn't know I could do that!" something in

us exclaims. If the combination of melodies is an extraordinary

one—at once very complex and very beautiful, say—the exclamation

may be altered to "How did [insert genius here] contrive that?"

On rare occasions, a combination will be so extraordinary as to

suggest the miraculous ("How can that exist?"), a whiff of

which, when it comes to the pleasures of counterpoint, is the

most exalted of all.

I will have more to say about density and resonance directly.

2 Consider another example in which ‘date’ is problematically dense

(but in a slightly different way)--the movie Say Anything. Lloyd

Dobler claims that he and Diane Court had a first date in the food

court of the mall. They sat across from each other and ate. Lloyd

observes that eating is an important physical event and that they

shared that event. But it is unclear that Diane had any idea that

they were eating together, much less that they were on a date. Later,

after Diane breaks up with him, Lloyd will drive by the mall in the

rain. He comments (he is recording his thoughts for a friend on a

tape recorder), “This is the scene of our controversial first date.”

3 Wake is a giant circle. Chuck is more a helix--it involves

repetition, but not of the self-same events. Rather what count as

repetitions are analogs to old events but in new circles.

4 Not only does Chuck contrive a second first kiss for Chuck and

Sarah, it also contrives a second first date—at least this is what

Sarah calls the date they have in S02E01. This is a nice example of

the way the structuring principles of the show and its resonance

coincide.

5 I borrow the term, ‘reading’, and use it in much the same way as

Stanley Cavell does in his Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of

Remarriage.

6 Davies, R. A Voice from the Attic: Essays on the Art of Reading p. 3.

7 For anyone curious to know more about ordinary language philosophy,

see my “Ordinary Language Philosophy” in The Edinburgh Companion to

Twentieth-Century Philosophies; or Baz, A. When Words are Called For: A Defense of

Ordinary Language Philosophy.

8 Cavell, S. “The Avoidance of Love”, p. 270. I am closely

paraphrasing Cavell, but not quite quoting him. Cavell’s essay

greatly influences both what I say in this book and how I say it.

9 Frost, R. Poetry and Prose, p. 421.

10 Tolkien, J. R. R., The Fellowship of the Ring, p. 70. My thanks to Andy

Bass for reminding me of these lines.

11 See Wittgenstein, L. Philosophical Investigations, p. 194e.

Wittgenstein made the drawing famous, but its creator was Joseph

Jastrow, a psychologist.

12 For more on the being/having ambiguity, see Marcel, G. Being and

Having: An Existentialist Diary, Part One (pp. 9-174, especially pp. 154-

174). For a slightly different but equally rewarding consideration

of our relationship to our bodies, see Plessner, H. Laughing and Crying:

A Study of the Limits of Human Behavior, pp. 23-47 and passim.

13 Russell, B. The Problems of Philosophy, pp. 1-2.

14 This section on ‘real’ is deeply indebted to J. L. Austin’s

discussion of the term in Chapter VII of his Sense and Sensibilia.

15 This discussion has profited much from James D. Wallace’s

discussion of generous-mindedness in Virtues and Vices, pp. 136-139.

16 Since Emerson’s notion of self-reliance plays an important role in

what follows, I should station a warning here: I reject the popular,

reductive understanding of the notion that turns it into a middling

insular hubris—a jealous, B.T.O.-style “Looking out for Number One”.

Instead, I understand self-reliance as sustained self-acknowledgment

(not self-assertion).

17 Nothing I am saying relativizes truth itself. The

circumstantiality I am interested in determines when we are in a

position to tell the truth or to lie to each other, it does not

determine whether, when we are in such a position, we tell the truth

or we lie.

18 I borrow this last line from Austin. For more on some of the ideas

undergirding this discussion of lying (for example, the notion of a

‘constative’), see his How to do Things with Words, pp. 1-11.

19 Wittgenstein, L. Zettel 504.

20 Setting aside complications from examples like phantom limb pain.

Such examples introduce problems I do not propose to respond to here.

21 Marcel, G. Being and Having, p. 163.

22 Chuck is no coward. But his ability to endure is most often

featured in the show. Typically, Sarah and Casey take care of most

of the secret agent work. Of course it is also worth remembering that

Chuck will never stay in the car.

23 Bugbee, H. “The Moment of Obligation in Experience”, p. 2

24 She actually will call him “Daniel” once--after he is discovered

still to be alive. She uses his name not in a face-to-face encounter

with him, but rather when she sees him on tape from a surveillance

camera. In that case, I take her use of his name to be the

expression of simple human feeling (and not of any lingering romantic

attachment). Despite what he tried to do to her in Paris (where Shaw

tried to kill her), she did not wish him dead anymore than Chuck did.

25 Another rule is: Spies do not put down roots.

26 The line is from Cavell, S. The Claim of Reason, p. 355.

27 These last three paragraphs have profited greatly (in both tenor

and terminology) from Marcel’s delicate analysis of hope in “Sketch

of a Phenomenology and Metaphysic of Hope”, in Homo Viator, pp. 29-67.

28 Thoreau, H. The Variorum Walden, p. 31.

29 Austin, J.L. “Pretending” in Philosophical Papers, p 253-271,

especially p. 259.

30 There are further delicacies of structure. For example, in the

sushi place, Sarah is pretending to be Really Together with Chuck. But

her meta-pretense is her pretending that she is pretending to have

romantic feelings for Chuck. I will just note that pretending-to is

different in various ways from pretending-that. A person can pretend

that something is so without indulging any particular current

personal performance, but pretending-to typically involves indulging

in a particular current personal performance.

31 It is worth noticing that Lou’s appearance at the Nerd Herd desk

recapitulates Sarah’s in the pilot—except Lou has no spy agenda.

32 Bear in mind that Sarah will make such a choice herself in S01E10.

Bryce will ask her to go deep undercover with him. We know that he

still has it--as Sarah says. He can still rouse her feelings. And

she was in love with him once, if in a different way than she is in

love with Chuck. Sarah ends up choosing to stay with Chuck, and on

her current assignment, even when it means she is choosing something

she hopes for but has no idea how to have over something immediate

and real, something comfortable and known. Sarah chooses for hope,

Chuck did not (at least not immediately--he began to see Lou). Chuck

had reason to think there was no hope. Sarah may not see how her

hope could be realized, but she has no reason to believe it simply

cannot be realized. After the kiss in S01E09, Chuck rallies again and

chooses for hope--chooses what he never wanted to stop hoping for all

along. Sarah’s choice was not easy either. The morning after, she

oversleeps, wound in her bedclothes. It was a long night.

33 Chesterton, G. K., Orthodoxy, p. 63.

34 Neither seems to notice the oddity of their fight sounding like

that of an established couple. For complicated reasons, and not the

same ones in both cases, each is blind to the fact that they are a

couple.

35 Of course, in arc of the show, Bryce’s true counterpoint is Jill.

But Lou functions that way in the first season.

36 Walden, p. 94. Thoreau lifts the term ‘Nilometer’ from Diodorus of

Sicily. He is shifting its meaning, since, in Diodorus, the

Nilometer measures the rise of the Nile during flood season. But

that means it also measures the chance of annihilation, which Thoreau

(inveterate punner) would have noticed. He shifts the meaning still

further, and uses it to mean not quite that, but rather a device for

measuring appearances, for measuring the unreal.

37 None of this cancels Chuck’s humility. Humility and high-

mindedness not only may but should cohabitate. Only so can each be

prevented from a distortion--into crippling inferiority or into

vaunting pride.

38 Chuck makes Sarah make ‘mistakes’ like these--The Incident, the

dating early in Season 2, the shot she could not take later that

Season, Prague and, much later in Season 5, her allowing him to

exchange Intersect glasses when they are in the Intersect Room. He

has no antidote to her; she has no impregnable defense against him.

Of course, these are not mistakes in the sense Sarah is suggesting.

They are not accidents either. They are self-revelations that occur

against Sarah’s will and to her regret.

39 Emerson, R. Essays and Lectures, p. 259.

40 In the quotation I used as an epigraph for Chapter 3, Kierkegaard

writes of forgetting one’s name as it is divinely understood. This

is Kierkegaard’s expression for what Emerson calls being ashamed of

that divine idea which [a person] represents. Such shame Emerson

calls conformity. Kierkegaard calls it becoming a copy, a number, a

mass man.

41 However, as I said, Chuck will emulate but not imitate his father’s

spying. Although the sort of spy his father was is preferable to the

sort of spy the CIA wants to make Chuck, he does not want to be

exactly his father’s sort of spy: he does not want to leave anyone

behind. That is the reason why Chuck’s insistence that his father

turn around and that they go back for Sarah and the others (in

S03E18) is so important: Chuck wants to be a spy who falls in love,

a spy who puts down roots, a spy who does not kill and a spy who does not

leave anyone--particularly loved ones--behind. This is why I say Chuck emulates

but does not imitate his father.

42 For more on verbal twins, see Clarke, T. “The Legacy of

Skepticism”. This idea of twinning is deep in the structure of

Kierkegaard’s thinking too, and can be seen over and over again in

it. (He applies it not only to verbal actions, but also to non-

verbal actions, etc.) It occurs often in Emerson and Thoreau. For

more on the phenomenon there, see West, M. Transcendental Wordplay.

43 The two of them are constantly on the verge a proposal and are

constantly making vows. Sometimes the form is explicit—at the end of

S02E24, when Chuck proposes a vacation, or in S03E14, when they twice

make vows, once to end their spy life and again to recommence it.

Sometimes it is suggested but not made explicit, as in the date scene

in S02E01. There, Sarah says more or less what she says to Chuck in

the restaurant: “What are you saying, Chuck?” But there too he is

interrupted before he can make it explicit.

44 Note that although Shaw is apparently merely completing Chuck’s

sentence, what he says when taken by itself expresses what is clearly

becoming Shaw’s overriding imperative: “Kill Sarah!”

45 Emerson, pg. 375.

46 Nozick, R. Anarchy, State and Utopia, pp. 167-8.

47 When Sarah thinks Chuck has killed the mole, she claims she no

longer loves him, no longer loves him because he has changed. But

she does still love him. She may not choose to be with him, but that

is a different matter. She does not stop loving Chuck and then start

again after Casey’s visit; she loves Chuck the whole time.

48 Pasternak, B. Doctor Zhivago, p. 253.

49 On the problem/mystery distinction see Foster, M., Mystery and

Philosophy (SCM Press, 1957). Foster inherits the distinction from

Marcel and develops it specifically in relationship to analytic

philosophy.

50 Eliot, T. S. Four Quartets, p. 42.

51 Hepburn, R. Wonder and Other Essays, pp. 134-5.

52 Buber, M. I and Thou.

53 A useful example: the complaint about women being treated as

objects is a complaint, and a just one, against the tendency for

women to be treated as the It in I-It relationships. Chuck underlines

this problem in its portrayal of Sarah in relationship to Chuck, who

treats her resolutely as a Thou, and in relation to several of the

other characters in the show, who treat her unthinkingly as an It.

(Harry Tang’s reference to Sarah as “Blondie” shows the I-It

structure in one word. There are many other such moments.) Chuck

appreciates that Sarah is beautiful, that Sarah is beautiful; other

characters on the show appreciate (in a different sense of the term)

that Sarah is beautiful. The last part is what matters--they really do

not need to know her name.

54 Recall that Cole Barker (in S02E15) compared Sarah being below

ground in Castle to a Botticelli being locked in a basement.

55 Bate, W. Samuel Johnson: Selected Essays from the Rambler, the Adventurer and the

Idler, p. 355.

56 I am talking about being in love, not falling in love.

57 Wittgenstein, L. Philosophical Investigations, Part II, i.

58 For more on this, see Bates, W. Negative Capability.

59 The line is St. Bernard’s: “He that tastes, and apprehends all

things in their proper and natural taste, he that takes things aright

as they are, nothing distastes him, nothing alters him, he is wise.”

60 It is worth noting that we cannot secure the correct differences

among romantic love and the love of friendship and the love of family

by claiming that one or the other admits of an admixture of self-love

whereas the other or others do not. Self-love may be more easily

mixed with romantic love--that is a thought worth pursuing, although

I will not pursue it here--but it can clearly mix with the others as

well. We all know parents who live through their children. No, the

differences have to be anchored in another way, by distinguishing

among the loves themselves. While none in its proper form involves

self-love as internal to it, that does not mean that they all have

the same proper form, the same phenomenology, the same internal

standards. For example, romantic love internalizes temperance in a

different way than does the love of friendship or the love of family.

But this is a topic for another book.