Hi guys, I’m covering for Steve this week. I’m a big Chuck fan, been watching from the beginning, so I was excited to review the show, but “Chuck Vs. The Tooth” was sadly a little disappointing, in that it mostly kept the madcap, zany tone the show’s been enjoying for this six-episode mini-arc, but at the same time tried to tackle way heavier storylines, and just ended up being very tonally confusing.
I didn’t have a problem with season three’s darker tone but I enjoyed the last two weeks’ episodes and their concentration on Chuck and Sarah working the kinks out of their new relationship. “Chuck Vs. The Tooth” got off to a seemingly similar start by showing us Chuck and Sarah watching Spies Like Us on the couch and making kissy faces at each other. They’ve evolved the nerdy TV-watching, plus frequent sex, relationship that we all dream of!
But things quickly got intense as Chuck starts having bizarre dreams (which were quite well-staged, with General Beckman clashing cymbals together and Shaw getting repeatedly and bloodily shot over and over again, I presume to appease the Shaw haters) and he becomes convinced that the President of Zamibia (which did not seem to be a real country, but that is a common way of spelling Zambia, but the flag was wrong, so I was confused) is going to be assassinated. Beckman sends him to a psychiatrist played by Christopher Lloyd, who informs him that the Intersect may be placing too much pressure on Chuck’s brain and driving him slowly insane.
As a premise, I don’t have a problem with that. Makes perfect sense that having a CIA computer in your brain probably wouldn’t be good for the ol’ synapses in the long run. But Chuck’s dreams, and this insanity diagnosis, are sprung on the audience mighty quickly. And not even halfway into the episode, after Chuck punches out a Zamibian scientist in an effort to get data from his false tooth, he gets chucked into a CIA sanitarium for being bonkers.
The episode decided to play most of these developments lightly, which was pretty much all it could do, because the pace they came at us was pretty manic. But I think that exploring Chuck’s mental degradation and confinement in a psych ward with other crazy spies could have been played a little darker. Sure, we were supposed to believe that Chuck was despondent, and that Sarah and Casey thought he might be gone for good, but because everything had moved so quickly, we knew he wasn’t, and that it’d all get wrapped up soon.
Still, Sarah and (slightly more surprisingly, but not really) Casey’s fidelity for Chuck, and their showing up at Christopher Lloyd’s house to argue on his behalf, was very sweet. Sarah eventually coming around to tell Chuck she loved him was fine (I wasn’t aware this was a problem for them, as they’ve already moved in together, but it worked). And at the end of the episode, Chuck is told that just because he isn’t crazy now, doesn’t mean he won’t be in the future, so I’m glad they’re not dropping this plot for good after one week. But an episode that has several jokes about a psych patient called “Merlin” while giving Christopher Lloyd absolutely nothing to do just feels a little off.