chuck: i have seen all of it now

In continuing stay-at-home avoidance of watching anything new, I went to watch Chuck.

Full disclosure: I didn't get much past season one the first time around: I think early season two. So as it turns out, that's why all my memories were so positive and pleasant.

If you haven't watched, this may encompass the experience: I finally understand what it means to hatewatch.

I thought it was a voluntary process, like, you can stop if you don't like it. No, it's not; you can't stop, how quaint of anyone to think so. There's just some grim form of geas or some shit--I don't know, do I look like an evil witch who does this to people?--that drives you onward and downward into the bowels of hell.

The worst thing is: this was insane enough that it could have been my favorite show.



1.) The Intersect V2 As Inner Matrix.

The Intersect V2 now comes with downloadable physical abilities. Yeah.

That was such bullshit I wanted to scream. That the side effect was Chuck the Super Spy was just salt in the open, bleeding wound. I could have actually dealt with the inner Matrix bullshit (not well, but I could) if it hadn't resulted in the second.

2.) Chuck the Super Spy

Everything that made Chuck so interesting was just stripped away. He became very special in every way and therefore became very boring. And they hit every bad cliche in the making, including the "Will Never Kill Even Though You Sort of Fucking Should" bullshit (Casey did it for him????)

It would actually have been goddamn hilarious if Chuck couldn't actually use any of the physical skills or used them badly and inaccurately or weirdly most of the time because he wasn't a trained spy and continued grimly not to really want to be. No, he does want to, just not the parts that make him uncomfy.

3.) The Intersect Is Suddenly Everywhere

It went from cool and mysterious to stupid and mysterious to dumb and ridiculous when there were Intersects, Bad Intersects, Matrix Intersects, and Enemy Group Intersects like every fucking where. Everyone was doing it. Suddenly the way it worked changed with the needs of the plot and then it didn't make sense.

4.) Oop, Chuck Isn't Actually a Regular Smart Guy

Nope: his missing parents are Super Genius Dad Who Invented the Intersect (really) and Super Double Agent Spy Mom (sort of).

Also, everything's connected. Everything. Even though in a just world, this wouldn't happen, but no, this is part of a Plan. All of it.

5.) The Series Finale

I can't even deal with how much I hated, hated, hated it. Sarah loses her memory due to Bad Intersect upload (yeah, that's a thing), goes after Chuck because she believes teh random villain when he says Chuck is just a mission (WHY? YOU'RE A CIA AGENT SURELY YOU'RE MORE PARANOID THAN THIS), then has a second of almost memory so doens't kill Chuck, then can get it back with the last pair of intersect glasses? (they have been throwing around these glasses with upload capabilities but apparently they just--don't make them anymore for some reason?) uploaded with her memory????? (something?) but Chuck has to use them to save people again, so she can't remember any of her friends and family and in the end he's telling her about their lives together.

Five. Fucking. Years. Of Sarah development? GONE. All her relationships with people not Chuck? Gone. And there was so fucking much. Gone.

6.) And Here's Why I Hate Watched

There were so many ridiculous, outlandish, incredibly fun plots, and I would have adored all of them (except the series finale) except Chuck is a boring goddamn superspy and not fun. The entire charm was that Chuck was fairly ordinary, just super smart; first the Super Genius Intersect Creating Dad broke that down and superspy finished it (Superspy Mom was annoying as fuck but anticlimactic).

But some of the plots were ridic and fantastic and that just made it all so much worse.



This has been a vent.

Comments

[eva_rosen]

'they're really super special' and/or 'they're all actually related' is the kind of lazy, boringly ridiculous writing that has made me quit so many, many shows (bonus cliché : 'the prophecy is about the lead, complete with picture with their current haircut!')

[seperis]

'they're really super special' and/or 'they're all actually related' is the kind of lazy, boringly ridiculous writing that has made me quit so many, many shows (bonus cliché : 'the prophecy is about the lead, complete with picture with their current haircut!')

That's what drives me nuts. I love both of those, like a lot, but they aren't easy to pull off; they take work to get right and the payoff is enormous. And almost no one ever comes close; they take the concept without any of the meaning or doing any of the work. It's just as shortcut to make a character special which--no. No, please God. Stay away from my epic themes, people; you can't be trusted with them.

[ivyfic]

I think there's an inevitability in long-running shows that, if the character has missing or dead parents, those parents turn out to be retroactively super special, and everything that happened so far has been fate/planned. (HAI SUPERNATURAL) I usually hate it, since it takes away from the main character by turning them from a driver of their story to a pawn. But I think somewhere five seasons into any show, someone in the writers room is going to be like WE SHOULD BRING BACK THE DAD.

Exception to this rule--Worf. If you're going to bring on his parents and they turn out to be that adorable, they can stay.

[seperis]

Late reply buT THISSSS!

In SPN, their biggest problem was that the plotline could carry that kind of thing; like I said above, I'm all about epic shit like that! It's my crack!--but then they didn't ever stop doing it to up the ante. Dead mom being a hunter from a family of hunters? The real reason Sam got the demon blood was her deal? COOL: that deepened the plot and gave really good reasons for stuff that happened and FUCK YEAH WORLDBUILDING. Dad genealogy/Men of Letter? Uh, sure, okay, I can--wait, CUPID BECAUSE LONG TERM MAGICAL GENETIC ENGINEERING ARE YOU FUCKING WITH ME?

(That's only the part I can remember of the horror.)

I usually hate it, since it takes away from the main character by turning them from a driver of their story to a pawn.

Yes. There's a line between giving the character and plot reasons for happening or backstory and then just removing all agency for the characters. And it's not actually a narrow line here; there's a ton of wilderness to explore in the concept of backstory influencing the future or even mapping it with the present subverting or working beyond it or within it, but no; writers throw themselves into a Calvinist Predetermination Morality Play which even Calvin might have been like "uh, this is a little extreme, dudes, slow your roll".

Exception to this rule--Worf. If you're going to bring on his parents and they turn out to be that adorable, they can stay.

Well, of course. It's Worf.

[misbegotten]

I'm so glad I stopped at season 2. But your service to fandom by watching and reporting on the whole thing has been noted.

[seperis]

There are scars, can't lie. But I know my duty.

[kore]

I thought it was a voluntary process, like, you can stop if you don't like it. No, it's not; you can't stop, how quaint of anyone to think so. There's just some grim form of geas or some shit--I don't know, do I look like an evil witch who does this to people?--that drives you onward and downward into the bowels of hell.

Oh yes! that was me and the end of the X-Files.

[deird1]

That was me and Torchwood. Couldn't stop until I'd hatewatched every last minute of it.

[ivyfic]

Ooooooh, Torchwood was definitely a hatewatch. I've even done a hate rewatch of Torchwood.

[niqaeli]

May I commend to you my braintwin's Chuck vid Get Off from Club Vivid 2009 as anodyne to wash the taste of the later seasons out?

Also she wrote some really good fic, but fair warning: it is, uh, kind of fucking depressing? Like, I love it but it's. Not a happy story.

[seperis]

Downloaded and read!

You were right on the depressing, but I do I appreciate the somewhat ambiguous ending. I'm not sure she meant it to be, but that left a lot of food for thought on Chuck's future.

[niqaeli]

I mean, the author is dead, long live the author... but, y'know. Taking all that as read, I can tell you she quite deliberately left it an open question; it was always meant to be an ambiguity. ;)

I personally believe simultaneously contradictory things about the implications of the ending, ha. We are fen; we hold multitudes in our heads. (And on that note: at some point I'm going to get around to reading Tamsyn Muir's the Ninth books; I'm reliably told the second book is especially, gloriously gonzo in a very particularly transformative-works-fandom mode of storytelling. The aesthetic is either going to hit beautifully or have me gritting my teeth but either way I'm very curious to see said storytelling in action.)

[amalthia]

I think I also stopped watching at season 2. Season 1 was fun...then the show went downhill.

[lilacsigil]

I stopped one episode into Chuck getting the physical upgrade and I think I'm still pretty happy with that decision.

[ivyfic]

I don't remember how far I got with Chuck. I remember that for a certain period, they thought they were going to be cancelled every year and then weren't. So they'd do some big, satisfying, shake up the board season finale (blow up the store!), and then just reset all the pieces at the start of the next season and pretend that nothing has changed. It started getting very boring.

It's funny--this should be a show I go back to. The side characters were all so much fun. I should be super into this fandom. But yes, all the things above. They just kept developing things that made it less and less interesting.

At least it gave us Matt Bomer? I had a conversation in a bar circa this era with a woman who worked at USA who was telling me that, you know that cute roommate character on Chuck? We're going to give him his own show!

[ivyfic]

My biggest hatewatch was watching every single episode of Andromeda. That was never a *good* show to begin with, but by season five everyone involved decided they wanted to keep having jobs but didn't want to be doing that show anymore and they just...etch-a-sketched it into an entirely different series. It became its own elseworld AU. And some of those episodes are the worst television I've ever seen. There was one where they characters were like speaking beat poetry in front of a black void like some sort of high school film student art film. I cannot explain to you why I watched all of it, except that this was the early days of DVDs on Netflix, and the concept of even being able to watch every episode of a show was new.

[unovis]

Oh, good God, yes.

[seperis]

...you just gave me my first motivation to watch the show.

[rivkat]

Yep. So much fun to sooooooo bad. So awful to Sarah.

[seperis]

...I am seriously never going to be over that. It wasn't the only sin, only the worst; season three was also a dick about it. (and Ellie, Good God. Why. Why. Why.)

The only two bright spots were Carrie-Anne Moss and Dr. Awesome, to be honest. Somehow--no idea how--they managed not to fuck Dr. Awesome up. I have to assume they tried and failed.

[rivkat]

I only learned how right wing the actors playing Chuck and Casey were after the fact, but I can't think that helped. Agreed on Awesome and Carrie-Anne Moss. I thought about pretending the show ended after a couple of seasons, but even then I can't work up enthusiasm for a rewatch.

[seperis]

So twelve years ago, you mentioned wanting a threesome in comments. Apparently I wrote the first four pages and just found it.

Better late than never?

*****

Casey hadn't expected to be able to keep it from Walker; no matter his general low opinion of the CIA, she's smarter than she acts and probably knows about as many ways to kill him with one finger as he does. He expected the surprise, but not the amusement, and while he can live without hearing her quote his own fucking words about feelings and assets, Chuck at least gets the opportunity to talk about his feelings (and hers, and Casey's, God help them all) at length (in private, for which Casey is eternally grateful), which makes him happy, so Casey calls it even.

Interesting side benefits: Chuck improves his aim practically overnight, which just goes to show that proper motivation can do wonders for any skillset.

There are five missions, thirty-five shifts at Buy More, one hundred eighty-nine separate sexual acts (five of which are legal, because they were in Massachusetts at the time), and four pairs of sweatpants migrating between households before Casey decides it's not so much a fait accompli as possibly the most practical approach to asset protection invented. There's also Ellie's thoughtful looks, which makes Casey uneasily aware that from the outside, it's starting to look like Chuck is involved in a retail-esque ménage a trois, and that can only end in a family dinner where he and Walker are asked about their intentions while Devon looks on in warm approval and broadcasting alternative lifestyle enthusiasm (Awesome has no lower setting when it comes to anything, ever).

It's all just too disturbing for words, mostly because it's true.

Which of course is when it all goes to hell, because that's how the universe works and it's not like Casey didn't have penciled in "when situation reaches relative stability, Larkin will show up" on his calendar or anything. Though come to think, he damn well should have.

Chuck takes four extra shifts without even realizing it, and Casey finally gives up on waiting for him to be sensible and calls him in sick when he tries for his fourth back-to-back, because at that point, Chuck tried to leave the apartment wearing Casey's boxers and one of Ellie's tank tops with his name badge.

It's pink, which is the deciding factor; Grimes takes care of the shift problem and Walker is starting to look like Larkin's next cup of coffee will have an arsenic additive, so Casey figures his work is done and shoves Chuck into bed with the reminder he's an expert with chemical coercion.

Walker shows up hours later, looking exhausted and disgruntled, which Casey assumes means Larkin is not dead yet. It's disappointing. "He's prepping for the mission," Walker says, helping herself to a cup of coffee, black, no sugar. "We start in thirty-six hours."

"He's staying at your place?"

Walker gives him a flat look, draining the cup before kicking off her shoes. "I need to sleep," she says, putting the cup in the sink and going by him up the stairs to the bedroom. Casey thinks he should argue the point, then gets an extra blanket (blankets and pillows being the two things Chuck won't share) and throws it at her before shoving Chuck toward the middle of the bed. "If you snore--"

"He'll shoot you," Chuck answers sleepily, locking an arm around his pillow. "So to make sure this isn't some demented fantasy sequence, I'm guessing there's a clear and present danger to my life?"

Casey hesitates, eyeing Walker kneeling on the bed. "Someone is tracking down Larkin's contacts," he says finally.

"Intersect?"

Walker takes a deep breath and lies like breathing. "We don't know why. But there are six dead already."

Chuck opens his eyes. "Vengeful ex-girlfriend?" he says hopefully.

"Wouldn't be a stretch--" Casey starts, and Walker picks up a pillow. "We know the pattern but we don't know who is doing it and Larkin doesn't either."

Chuck nods, eyes closing. "Right. So status quo impossible. I'm going to sleep and pretend this is actually the fantasy sequence. Night."

Casey rolls his eyes and fights for a pillow, making sure Chuck can't feel the gun he's wearing, watching as Walker slips an extra knife under her pillow. He can feel Chuck's tension like piano wire, relaxing incrementally only when Casey reaches for him with a mumbled "Yeah, really subtle with the gun there." Over his head, Casey sees Walker smirk, and then there's nothing but the even sound of their breathing, comforting and familiar.

*****

Larkin shows up before dawn, which is insult on top of the injury of a lousy night of sleep and listening for things that aren't there. Casey makes coffee and doesn't poison it, which is his good deed for the day.

"He's here?" Larkin says with a frown, eyes flickering toward the stairs. When Casey doesn't answer, Larkin sighs. "Get them both. I have something."

Walker wakes up almost as soon as he walks in the room, untangling herself from Chuck so smoothly he only sighs, capturing his third pillow and burrowing under all three. Sliding into a pair of sweat pants, she studies the bed for a second, mouth tight. "He doesn't need to hear this," she says finally, voice flat. "Not yet."

"Walker--"

Blue eyes flicker up. "Not yet. Not until--" she trails off, swallowing. "Casey. We didn't get the order yet."

The 'we' is a kind fiction. Casey didn't get the order, and they've been here longer than they ever could have expected when this first started. That Casey might not get it at all means one of two things: uncharacteristic mercy on the part of the government, or someone else will be coming for Chuck. And Casey doesn't believe in mercy.

"You know--" he starts, then stops, hating this hideous sense of vulnerability, even if it's only witness is the only person he'd trust with Chuck's life. "Walker--"

She reaches out, grabbing his hand, fingers tight around his. "I know."

*****

Chuck takes the sight of Larkin in Casey's living room with a vague squint and a general frown that's more about the lack of coffee than anything else. From the couch, Walker holds out the extra cup without looking up from her newspaper, and Casey can see Chuck's fighting the urge to propose. Sitting down, he slumps against her shoulder and pretends Larkin's not there badly.

Casey hates using the word cute, but there's nothing else that really applies. Dropping muffins on the coffee table, he pushes Chuck over enough to get a seat and waits for Larkin to be useful. It's pretty much worth it to see Larkin staring at the three of them with vague alarm.

"They're checking the security cameras," Larkin says, toying with his own cup; Casey half-wishes he'd told Walker where he kept the drugs, because the day could be improved with a convulsion or two. Chuck doesn't look up, using Walker's hair like a shield, but Casey can tell from the tension in his body that he's perfectly awake. "We should be able to get a picture."

"Hmm." Walker opens to another page; Casey realizes she's the one that took his navy sweats. "All right, meeting in--twenty hours. We'll stay put until--"

"Shift," Chuck says, voice muffled. "Got--"

"Casey and I will both be there," she says.

"I thought I was sick."

Casey reaches over and pushes Walker's hair out of Chuck's face. "Grimes will want to come nurse you," Casey tells him seriously, amused by the flash of terror, because Anna will come with him and that woman is not subtle.

Chuck frowns, but he sits up, finishing his coffee. "Shower," he says, not looking at Larkin. Standing up, he leaves his cup on the coffee table. Casey doesn't bother being discreet following him, catching him two steps up and pushing him up against the wall. Chuck starts to protest, then shrugs. "A picture will help," he says finally. Casey kisses him until the tension leaks out of him, then does it for a while longer just because he wants to. "Be honest; my life is a hybrid Big Brother meets Punk'd pilot series and I'm going to win a million dollars if I don't snap before it's over."

Casey nips the corner of his mouth. "Five hundred thousand."

Chuck squints. "Discount reality show. Just my luck." Chuck slides a hand down Casey's shorts. "Share a shower? I'll make it worth your while."

Like Casey's going to say no to that.

*****

[rivkat]

Hey, it's a *nice* Election Day surprise! Thanks--as I head off to poll greeting.

[seperis]

Thanks!

I also have one and a half pages of Chuck and the Mail Order Spy (because a mail order bride just sounded like something that would happen to him) and now I really want to know where I was going to go with it.

I found so many random fic, its surreal.

[gwyn]

Oooohh man, I thought I had successfully blotted all this out of my brain. I stuck with it to the end but I just hated the direction it went, and regretted the creative energy I had poured into it.

[seperis]

This. Just--why do that to the show? WHY?