Chuck, "Chuck vs. First Class": Up, up and away

A review of tonight's "Chuck" coming up just as soon as I write a letter to the airline...

"Let me be a spy. Let me out of the car. I'm ready." -Chuck

One of the reasons I assume NBC sent out five episodes of "Chuck" season three for critics to review is that the network wanted us to see the Chris Fedak-scripted "Chuck vs. First Class," the best of the bunch, and the third season episode that had the most fun, and the strongest handle on, Chuck's transition from schmuck hiding in the car to honest-to-gosh secret agent man.

This is a tricky thing the show is doing. Fedak and Josh Schwartz talked about the Intersect 2.0 as "a game-changer," but whenever I hear that phrase used to refer to a TV show, I usually think either A)I liked the game they were playing just fine and don't want it changed, or B)I didn't like the game and the show is therefore unlikely to change enough for me to care. By giving Chuck all these abilities, and by having people like General Beckman and now Agent Shaw accelerate his transformation from asset to spy, the writers risked robbing the show of a lot of its charm - of changing it from a spy show whose unlikely hero can save the world because he's good at Missile Command or label-making, to a more traditional spy show with a more conventional hero.

An episode like "Chuck vs. First Class" shows that the writers have managed to find a happy medium between letting Chuck grow and changing the show too much. Yes, Chuck goes on a solo mission on a fancy airplane(*) for the first time, but he has Shaw, Sarah and Casey talking him through most of it. He gets the Intersect to work well enough to become both an expert fencer - in a very entertaining, very "Chuck" fight sequence where our man again manages to stop the bad guy without lethal force - and later nunchuk master, but he also has to employ his ability to squeal like a girl, and the nunchuks never actually get used because Shaw and Sarah have taken out the bad guys via remote control. Chuck develops, a little - and it would be frustrating if he didn't - but the writers aren't pushing him as fast as Sarah fears Agent Shaw is, and they're not losing the essence of the series in the process.

(*) That was some very cool design work by the production team on that first class cabin, even if I doubt most airliners actually have room for a large wetbar these days.

In addition to advancing Chuck's career arc as a spy, and giving us more insight into Shaw - whose wife was, as I guessed, the agent he mentioned losing in last week's episode - "Chuck vs. First Class" also sets the stage for some kind of love rhombus between Chuck, Sarah, Shaw and Hannah, the charming woman Chuck meets on the plane and then helps get a job in the Nerd Herd, played by Kristin Kreuk. (This creates a superhero in-joke that I'm not entirely sure was intended, with Sarah heading towards the movie version of Superman and Chuck towards TV's Lana Lang.)

I've expressed my impatience with the Chuck/Sarah Unresolved Sexual Tension, but I'm actually okay with this particular wrinkle. First, Brandon Routh has been very interesting as Shaw. (As others have said, there were many problems with "Superman Returns," but he wasn't one of them, and I would hope he gets the post-cape career he deserves rather than the marginalized one Christopher Reeve had before his accident.) Second, though I was never much impressed by her during the brief period when I cared about "Smallville," I thought Kristin Kreuk fit in very nicely here, and had good chemistry with Zachary Levi. So I can actually understand Sarah and Chuck being drawn to these respective newcomers. I think the show needs to have some forward movement with the two of them soon, but at the same time I can go with the delaying tactics more easily when they're plausible and/or likable. (Lots of shows just come up with delays for the sake of delay, and don't bother to put much thought into them.)

The cherry on the sundae that is "Chuck vs. First Class" is the Buy More subplot, maybe my favorite story set at the store since Jeffster! played "Africa." With "Chuck" (mostly) flying solo, Fedak was free to tap into a comedy gold mine the show has mostly left alone over the last two-plus years: John Casey as Buy More employee. The idea of this veteran, homicidal NSA bad-ass being forced to spend large chunks of time working retail alongside the likes of Jeff and Lester is probably something the show could have done more with sooner. The problem, I guess, is that Buy More subplots usually occur while Operation Bartowski is off on a mission, and that wasn't a problem here. So for once we got a real sense of just how much the other employees are afraid of Casey, and we also got to see Casey applying spy tactics (first fear, then brainwashing) to put down Lester's insurgency. Adam Baldwin and Joshua Gomez made a nice team, and I hope this isn't the last we see of the NSA-colonel-turned-Buy-More-lieutenant-Ass-Man.

Some other thoughts:

• On the last day of press tour, Warner Bros. held a "Chuck" press conference at the Buy More set, with the whole cast, plus Schwartz, Fedak and Brandon Routh (who has learned very well from the show's spoiler-paranoid atmosphere how to answer a question without saying anything at all). A couple of highlights: First, Yvonne Strahovski said that when the Intersect 2.0 was introduced, she worried that Levi was going to take away all her kung fu scenes, which she enjoys - "But it's been good. It's been more fun because now we get to do kung fu together." (The panelists, and several reporters, "Awwww"ed at that.) Second, when Schwartz was asked when we would next see Jeffster!, he said, "We have to build to it. Jeffster is something we can't unleash too early. Otherwise, afterwards is disappointing. So, we gotta earn it. But it's coming." (Fienberg did a more detailed write-up of the set visit, if you care.)

• Have there been previous mentions of Sarah being a trained pilot? We know that Casey can fly jets, but it seemed odd when Shaw said Sarah could, too.

• Stone Cold Steve Austin made, as you'd expect, an effective Ring baddie, but I also liked the casting of Josie Davis (who once upon a time was the "plain" younger sister on "Charles in Charge," before growing up to be a soap opera vamp) as Serena the evil flight attendant.

• When we visit Lester's home for the first time, there's a picture of him being bar mitzvah'ed, which is a photo of a young Vik Sahay's head pasted onto someone else's bar mitzvah photo. Funny sight gag, but it doesn't exactly track with some season one scenes that implied Lester was recently converted to Judaism and/or was preparing to be bar mitzvah'ed as an adult. Because unless you're Danny Duberstein, you don't usually get bar mitzvah'ed multiple times.

• This week in "Chuck" pop culture references: Chuck tries to order a martini "shaken, not stirred" like James Bond used to (before Daniel Craig got the part); the codenames Shaw uses to communicate with the plane-controlling satellite are taken from "War Games" ("Crystal Palace" was the code for NORAD missile command) and the Bourne films (David Strathairn was working on Blackbriar in the third movie); the brainwashing sequence looked very similar to a scene from the Warren Beatty '70s conspiracy thriller "The Parallax View"; and the line Lester says about Morgan ("Morgan Grimes is the kindest, warmest, most understanding human being I've ever known in my life") comes from the brainwashed soldiers in the original "Manchurian Candidate."

• This week's musical selections included the Otis Redding version of "Respect," Carla Bruni's "L'Amourese," Mackintosh Braun's "Wake Up" and "Ready, Aim, Fire" by unknown (which, I'm told, is the name of the band).

• Though we never get to see Hannah's flat, her description of it lives up to the Roger Ebert rule that all movie and TV apartments and hotel rooms in Paris must have a view of the Eiffel Tower from the window.

• Last season's finale confirmed that Chuck does, in fact, get a paycheck from the government for his spy work. Do he and Casey (who just got a raise from Morgan) get to keep their Buy More paychecks, too? (Now that Sarah works at a government front, this isn't an issue for her like it was in the Wienerlicious days.)

What did everybody else think?