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CHUCK Real Love in the Spy Life

Kelly Dean Jolley

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This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.

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For my wife, Shanna

4 Love may appear in such disconcerting shapes as to prevent those who feel it from suspecting its real nature. Belief in loneliness is the first illusion to dispel, the first obstacle to overcome; in some sense, the first temptation to conquer. --Gabriel Marcel

Men more frequently require to be reminded than informed. --Samuel Johnson

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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 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

6 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 Notes

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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 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 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,

8 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 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 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

11 memory. But it also rewards that attention, that 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 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

12 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

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 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

13 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 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’):

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.

15 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?

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

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

16 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 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 deeply important to what is

17 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 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

18 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 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 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

20 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.

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 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

21 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 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.

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CHAPTER 1 THE BIRTHDAY PRESENT: BEING AND HAVING THE INTERSECT 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 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

23 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”. 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-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.

24 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 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

25 supplies him with information. It is worth slowing the story of Chuck’s acquiring the Intersect to say something about these flashes.

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 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.

26 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 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 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.

27 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 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

28 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:

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 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

29 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.

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

30 upright. To prove this, Glaucon relates the Myth of the Ring of Gyges. Briefly, a humble shepherd finds a ring 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 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

31 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 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 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,

32 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.

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

33 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.

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

34 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 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 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,

35 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

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

36 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. 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.

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

37 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.

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 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

38 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.

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

39 memory, their ability to bring a previously experienced person, place, object or incident to mind, 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.

40

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 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

41 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.

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 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

42 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 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.

43 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 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

44 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 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.

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

45 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 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 wannabe 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 objects, like diamonds and bombs and guns, there are more worries, and deeper worries,

46 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.

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?

47 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 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.

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

48 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 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 which something might be or might have been not real that we call for the word ‘real’. If I have no understanding

49 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 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.

50 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-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.

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

51 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 ‘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 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

52 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 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

53 or paradox it seems. Her point is that she 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, 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 generousminded. 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

54 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 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. 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

55 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.) 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.

56 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 the action. What I have observed about truthtelling 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,

57 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 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.

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

58 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.

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 I’s. He has an I who speaks and an I who believes or feels. One

59 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 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

60 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 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 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.

61

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 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 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.

62 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 selfdeception. 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 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-

63 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.

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?

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.

64 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-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 to do that has the demanding structure of standards that a profession has. He wants a calling.

65

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 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.

66 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

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 returned to live with Ellie. Eventually, he landed the job at Buy More.

68 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.

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.

69 Who is Chuck Bartowski? The question hunts Chuck. The question reaches deep into his past, beginning with his parents abandoning 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.

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.

70 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 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 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.

71 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 tootall 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 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

72 part of something good that is bigger than he is, but still something to which he makes a genuine contribution.

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 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.

73 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.

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 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.

74

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.

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.

75 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 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 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

76 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 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.

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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 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

78 and costs. 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 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.

79 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 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 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

80 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 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

81 protect her cover as Chuck’s girlfriend. But that is at best a partial explanation. The picture is there 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.

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.

82 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, 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.

83 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 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

84 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.

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.

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

85 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 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.

86 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 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 nonspy somebody. The respect she has commanded and commands in her spy life results from her

87 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 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 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.

88

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.

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.

89 Compliments that might seem, and be, a routinized behavior for another couple, a throw-away, are for Chuck and Sarah of far 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 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.

90

91

CHAPTER 5 COUPLING Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps… --Desi Arnaz

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, 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 Spy or Non-spy Chuck: Sarah:

92 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 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 dramatically that the answers threaten the qualified Yes in the Really Together boxes

93 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 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

94 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.

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.

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,

95 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 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 supposed to

96 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.

97

98

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 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.

99 The readings move in and out of philosophical topics. Most of the topics discussed have been mentioned already, introduced and 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 representing the show that allows it to be seen more clearly, appreciated more fully.

100

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 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.

101 Since I know that sounds puzzling, and since I have said such puzzling things before (in the Introduction), let me try to make 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 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.

102 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.

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.

Later that night, Chuck receives the fateful email from Bryce containing the Intersect.

103 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 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.

104 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. 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 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).

105 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 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.

106 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 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 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

107 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.

[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.

108 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.

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.

Chuck: Is that your big secret, by the way? ‘Cause I’ve been sitting here, trying to figure out what is wrong with you...

109

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.

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?

110

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, 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 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

111 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 unselfconscious, 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 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.

112

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 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, 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.)

113 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 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.

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

114 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 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 coworkers, 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.

115 Sarah reins herself in--and tries to get back to work. She asks about Chuck’s skeletons, Chuck’s past, Chuck’s secrets. Have 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.

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

116 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 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 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.

117

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 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

118 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.

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 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

119 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 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 believes what Chuck has told her. She explains what the email

120 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 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

121 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 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 one in my brain. And I can’t figure out why Bryce did this, why he chose me. [Chuck

122 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.]

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

123 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 as to our strength. The incessant anxiety and strain of some is a wellnigh 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 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.

124 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 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

125 questions: Why are you saying 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.

126

127

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 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.

128 Chuck: I’m scared.

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…

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.

129 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.

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

130 straddled him; she kissed and nuzzled him. So, how was she pretending? If Chuck were to answer, he would say that she 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 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 doubledate 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

131 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 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.

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

132 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.

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

133 is pretending to have romantic feelings for him. She wants Casey and General Beckman and others (in the spy world) to believe that too.

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 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.

134

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 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 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

135 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 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

136 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.

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. 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.

137 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 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 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

138 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 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

139 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 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. 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

140 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.

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 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

141 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.

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

142 about? He turns toward her, asking about what the rules are for their thing? Sarah hears the 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. 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.

143

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 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.

Sarah: Why? What’s the matter?

144 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 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

145 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 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 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

146 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 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.

147 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 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

148 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.

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 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.

150 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 selfrevelations he causes.

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 (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 metapretense in place. Sarah’s professional mask has slipped. Chuck has caught his first sure glimpse

151 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 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,

152 Chuck’s Stanford girlfriend, did not actually leave Chuck for Bryce. She pretended to under orders (she became a 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. 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.

153 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 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 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

154 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 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.

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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 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 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:

156 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 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 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

158 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 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 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.

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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 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 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.

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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 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.

161 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 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 ducklingto-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 deception and manipulation, a life of contingency plans and constant selfmonitoring 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

162 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. 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 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

163 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 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

164 surrendered before. Chuck comments that sharing the burger is going to be messy. He knows her-he knows how she likes her 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.

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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

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.

166 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 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

167 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 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 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.

168 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.

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.

169 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.

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.

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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. 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 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,

171 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, selfdisparagement 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-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 disastrous botching of his speech to Sarah on the platform. He botches it in a way that makes it

172 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 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.

173 Chuck: You don’t know what I gave up for this!

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.

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.

174 Sarah knows that Chuck has failed. Her reaction to that failure is layered. On top is a “servesyou-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.

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

175 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 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

176 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.”

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 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.

177 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.

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. (Think of the salmon dress.) But the change in her dress shows just how keyed

178 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 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

179 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 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 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

180 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.

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 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

181 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 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.

182

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 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.

183 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.

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.

184

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.

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

185 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 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.

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.

186

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.

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.

187 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 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?

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

188 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 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.

189 Shaw: So, what is it?

Sarah: [struggling] It feels so weird to say it out loud...I’m Sam. My real name is Sam.

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 selfknowledge. He relates a myth according to which our souls pre-existed their bodies and for that time in the presence of the 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.

190

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 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.

191 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 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

192 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 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 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.

193

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.

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.

194 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 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

195 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 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 herself available to Chuck again and loses him again. Chuck again gets lost in

196 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.

197

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.

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

198 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 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.

199 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 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

200 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 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 longterm). 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 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

201 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 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 pilot and

202 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 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.

203 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. 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 selfmistrust. (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 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

204

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 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.

205 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 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.

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.

206

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.

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 attempts to keep him from returning by making him walk from place to place.

207 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.

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

208 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…

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 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

209 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.

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,

210 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 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 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

211 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.

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.

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.

212 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 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

213 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 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 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

214 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 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…

215

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 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 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

216 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 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 Sarah, cannot be one without Sarah. And he is willing to give up being one if it is required to be with

217 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 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.

218

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 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 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

219 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. 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 nowavailable 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.

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

220 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 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.

221 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.

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 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.

222 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 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 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.

223 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 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.

224 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 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.

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.

225 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?

[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.

226 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]

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]

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,

227 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 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.

228

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 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.

229 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 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.

230 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 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

231 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 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 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.

232 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 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.

233

Sarah: And what about Shaw?

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 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

234 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 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:

235 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 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.

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.

236 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.”

237

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.

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?

238

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 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. 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.

239 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, 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.

Heather: I know you, Walker. I know what you’re going to do.

240 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 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.

241 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.

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 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.

242 (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 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

243 the story. Anyway, after the team of doctors surrenders, a new therapist 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 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 lifethreatening 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,

244 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.

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 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

245 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 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 to touch

246 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.

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]

247 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 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 affections would transfer to that person. But love does not work like that. Robert Nozick makes the point.

248 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 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 what she loves,

249 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 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.

250

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. 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 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:

251 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] 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.

252 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 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).

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 selfdescription 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.

253

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 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 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.

254

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.

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.

255 Chuck: But you’re not. You’re not real. This is a dream.

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 were several racecars involved.

Chuck: I revised that.

256 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 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:

257 Morgan: I mean, maybe it was a good thing that you lost the Intersect because now, 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?

Mr. Lord: Like a queen--like a goddess.

Tracy: And do you know how I feel?

Mr. Lord: How?

258 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.

259

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.

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.

260 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 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 see him offer the ring. We see her accept it, embrace and kiss him.

261 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 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

262 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 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, 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

263 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.

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

264 Chuck’s heart, heart to heart. The woman who is no good at the 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. 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

265 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.

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.

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

266 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 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

267 remains in a muted and generalized form. We always find ourselves in an interrogatory posture before proper objects of wonder. She continues

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

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.

268 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 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 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

269 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 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

270 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 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 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

271 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, 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 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

272 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.

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.

273

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 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

274 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.

275

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) 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

276 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--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 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

277 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 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 Intersect, and Sarah would have handled his transfer to a secure facility, a prison. Perhaps she

278 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.

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

279 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 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 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

280 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 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 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

281 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.

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

282 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 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 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.

283

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.

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.

284 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 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 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.

285

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 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 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

286 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.

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.

287 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 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) 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

288 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.

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.

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

289 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 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.

290 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 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.

291 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 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. 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.

292

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 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

293 Sarah wants to know how to do. The know-how she wants is 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.

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,

294 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 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 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

295 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 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 goingson 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),

296 and hurls it into Quinn’s gun hand. Combat breaks out, with Sarah and Chuck and Morgan all 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 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

297 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, unquestioningof-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. 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 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

298 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. 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

299 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 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 remarriage. 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 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

300 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, 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. 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

301 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.

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

302 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 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 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

303 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 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

304 thought. Maybe she has 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.

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

305 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 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.

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

306 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.

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-couldnot-have-been-like-this and it-had-to-be-like-this (the simultaneous properties of every good love

307 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 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, 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

308 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 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.

309

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 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.

310 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 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 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

311 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 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 from Quinn’s plane--and of course getting hit on the head has long been the conventional way of both beginning

312 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 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

313 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 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 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

314 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 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 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

315 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 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

316 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 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 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

317 of a comedy. But it was also typical for the man to woo the woman by explicitly educating or reeducating 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 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 mismanages what she has. Peter has only a 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

318 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 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

319 surrenders herself to him. Her father drops his objections to Westley. They plan a large, public wedding.

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, 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.

320 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; 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 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

321 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, postStanford 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 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.

322 But they are two separate endings--one can be happy (the storyline ending) while 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 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

323 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 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.

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.

324 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 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

325 something 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.

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

326 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.

327

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 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.

328 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, 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 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.

329

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 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

330 ‘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.

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.

331 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 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 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

332 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 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 selflove.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 does is

333 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, 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.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Austin, J. L., How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975).

Austin, J. L., Philosophical Papers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979).

Austin, J. L., Sense and Sensibilia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962).

Bate, W. J., Samuel Johnson: Selected Essays from the Rambler, Adventurer and Idler (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965).

Baz, A., When Words Are Called For (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012).

Buber, M., I and Thou (Edinburgh: T &T Clarke, 1937).

Bugbee, H., “The Moment of Obligation in Experience”, The Journal of Religion, Jan. 1953, Vol. 33, No. 1, pp. 1-15.

Cavell, S., Pursuits of Happiness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981).

Cavell, S., “The Avoidance of Love” in Must We Mean What We Say? (New York: Charles Scribners, 1969), pp. 267-353.

Cavell, S., The Claim of Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972).

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Chesterton, G., Orthodoxy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1908).

Clarke, T., “The Legacy of Skepticism”, Journal of Philosophy Vol. 69, No. 20, 1972, pp. 754769.

Davies, R., A Voice from the Attic: Essays on the Art of Reading (New York: Penguin Book, 1990).

Emerson, R. W., Essays and Lectures (New York: The Library of America, 1983).

Eliot, T. S., Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Jovanovich, 1943).

Frost, R., Poetry and Prose (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Wilson, 1972).

Hepburn, R. W. Wonder and Other Essays (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1984).

Jolley, K. D., “Ordinary Language Philosophy”, The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century Philosophies (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), pp. 85-95.

Marcel, G. Being and Having (Glasgow: The University Press, 1949).

Marcel, G., Creative Fidelity (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Company, 1964).

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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).

West, M., Transcendental Wordplay (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2000).

Wittgenstein, L., Philosophical Investigations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1958).

Wittgenstein, L., Zettel (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1967).

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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]

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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.

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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.

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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. 111. 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

22

Marcel, G. Being and Having, p. 163. 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

26

27

Another rule is: Spies do not put down roots. The line is from Cavell, S. The Claim of Reason, p. 355. 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.

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.