TV Jots

After Chuck and a really enthusiastic Casey sprint through the parking lot of Buy More to catch a shoplifter, Chuck heads over to the Wienerlicious next door, where Sarah is posing as the sole cook and waitress, not to mention Chuck’s girlfriend. They make a date for that night, their second, but when Chuck shows up, he finds both Sarah and Casey. They put him in a secluded area with a large video screen to test which images will trigger his data flashes. A doctor named Jonas Zarnow also arrives, although the two agents don’t allow him and Chuck to see each other, and he manages the images displayed to Chuck in order to verify if he can somehow remove them. He determines that he can. But, while the doctor is driving on a secluded road later that night, a cell phone on the backseat of his car rings just before the vehicle explodes in a burst of flames.

The next morning, Chuck’s big sister Ellie shows him a headline on the front page of the newspaper, “Bank Executive Dies in Robbery,” accompanied by a picture of his college roommate Bryce Larkin. At the scene of Dr. Zarnow’s destroyed vehicle, Sarah finds a burnt cell phone underneath the wreckage. She doesn’t show it to Casey, who’s also on site, but later tells Chuck that the phone is a “NSA incinerator, special issue designed to eliminate all biological traces.” She then actively throws suspicion on Casey to keep Chuck from having secret meetings with him, just as Casey earlier instructed Chuck not to trust Sarah or have secret meetings with her because she might be rogue just like her former partner Bryce. The two agents subsequently have a free-for-all when Casey visits Wienerlicious to directly accuse Sarah. She kicks his butt, and he flees when a customer enters.

Casey’s response to his beat-down is to call in a fake Nerd Herd onsite service request and then accost Chuck en route. He tries to convince Chuck that Sarah is the one who killed the doctor, until a ringing cell phone on his backseat allows both men to escape from the vehicle before it too blows up. Afterwards, Casey tells Chuck that Sarah is “cleaning the operation” to get rid of everyone she’s had contact with. Chuck then remembers that Ellie invited Sarah to a dinner party that night so they could meet, and he rushes home to find Sarah already there.

Casey crashes the gathering moments later, posing as a new neighbor, and pulls Chuck aside to feed him one of Sarah’s former aliases, which precipitates a data flash in which Sarah singlehandedly kills an entire group of people in France by poisoning them. When Ellie comes into the room and mentions Sarah brought a desert, a chocolate soufflé, Chuck instantly assumes it’s poisoned, as well. He doesn’t worry about the miniature quiches that Casey brought, and after unsuccessfully trying to stall desert several times, Casey sets the soufflé aflame by knocking a candle on it, and Chuck douses the fire in the bathtub.

When Sarah forces Chuck to explain his actions, she realizes Casey didn’t kill the doctor either. She leaves in a hurry, with Casey and Chuck close behind, but not close enough to prevent someone from shooting her with a tranquilizer dart before locking her in the trunk of a car and speeding away. The person also manages to shoot Casey. No worries, though, because the NSA agent laced his quiche with microbits, which they can trace with the locator technology installed in Chuck’s car without his knowledge. Unfortunately, Chuck’s best bud was the only who ate the dish, and the pair end up at Buy More, where Morgan is watching the big-screen TV.

Chuck helps Casey pinpoint the location another way by asking him what he would do if he were the kidnapper. This leads them to a dock where a helicopter is ready to go. Casey heads towards the chopper after instructing Chuck to stay in the car and do nothing. But, while sitting there, Chuck notices a still living Dr. Zarnow, Sarah’s abductor, exiting a nearby warehouse. He goes inside and finds Sarah bound to the ceiling. Dr. Zarnow returns before he can fully free the agent, however, and seeing the doctor for the first time triggers a data flash that reveals the kidnapper has been selling U.S. scientific information to North Korea for years. The doctor shoots a tranquilizer dart, hitting Chuck, who wakes up in the helicopter shortly afterwards to find that his pocket protector kept the dart from penetrating his skin.

Chuck instinctively tries to escape by grabbing the dart gun and shooting the pilot, leaving no one able to fly the helicopter, and then the doctor. Panicked, he’s unable to follow Casey’s dense instructions, yet he manages to land the helicopter when Sarah tells him to imagine he’s playing one of his flight-simulator video games. The greeting he receives back on the ground is one of anger, though, for putting his human computer brain in such danger. Sarah informs him that what Bryce did goes against everything she believes in, and she promises him that if he ever accuses her of being a double agent again, the mission will be over and she’ll return to Washington, D.C., in a heartbeat.

Ellie advises a downcast Chuck to just apologize to Sarah, which he does at Wienerlicious, and she asks him if he’s ready to continue his missions while keeping them secret from his loved ones. Before he can reply, Ellie, Captain Awesome, and Morgan arrive for an impromptu lunch party of corn dogs.

Next on “Chuck Versus the Tango”…

Chuck experiences job troubles twice over and must prove his worthiness for the open assistant manager position at Buy More, while in spydom, he lands and must survive his first genuine undercover gig.

Tags: Adam Baldwin, Chuck, Joshua Gomez, NBC, Sarah Lancaster, television, tv, Yvonne Strahovski, Zachary Levi