About Last Night: Chuck, A Recap

Monday, May 10, 2010
8:00 p.m. - 9:00 p.m.
Chuck, "Chuck Versus the Tooth"

I don't really want to get in the habit of writing recaps—a) because they take too long and b) because so many other sites already do them—but Monday's Chuck was just so great that I feel like I have to show you guys what you're missing. So if this didn't convince you to start watching, maybe the following will:

Previously, on Chuck: Ellie and Awesome go to Africa, where Awesome gets sick with something that looks like malaria but isn't, according to an evil Ring operative named Justin who's posing as a Doctor Without Borders. Sarah and Chuck move in together, and Chuck is so happy that it looks like the Cheshire Cat just vanished in front of his face leaving only its ridiculous, oversized grin. It's a little sad, actually. You just know that kind of bliss can't last.

Read the rest of the super-long, super-detailed recap after the jump, or just watch the episode on Hulu. The latter might actually be quicker (and will almost certainly be more entertaining). Spoiler alert, duh.


Opening scene: Chuck is lying on the couch with his head in Sarah's lap. There's something boring and seemingly irrelevant on the news about a Beethoven concert and some dude from Zamibia (not a typo; fictional country), but our guy's too in love to care about such things, so Sarah changes the channel to something more in line with their googly-eyed happy-go-lucky-ness: Spies Like Us, starring Chevy Chase and Dan Akroyd. Sarah doesn't like the movie, but there's nothing else on because it's Monday, and while the rest of us are lucky enough to watch their lives unfold week after week, they're stuck with a film that violates, like, a million different CIA protocols. Chuck makes a joke that Sarah doesn't get, but her obliviousness is cute, and he's so enamored that rainbows and hearts practically shoot out of his eyes when he looks up at her, which should be nauseating but is really just kind of sweet. He tells her he loves her, and she smiles but doesn't say anything, much to his obvious and kind of pathetic dismay. Then suddenly the credits are rolling and he's waking up, and out of nowhere she says the words he's been waiting to hear: Chuck, I love you. But, wait, General Beckman is at the window banging cymbals together in time with Beethoven's Fifth, and Shaw is at the door bleeding from where Chuck shot him and holding Zamibian takeout, which, naturally, freaks out Chuck, who grabs his guns and just starts shooting at Shaw over and over and over until Shaw falls into the fountain in the courtyard and starts sinking into the deep blue looking a little like Jack at the end of Titanic. It's a dream, thank goodness. Except Chuck's been having a lot of these dreams lately, and he's pretty sure they're trying to tell him something. Like...

The Ring is going to try to kill the president of Zamibia at the Beethoven concert tomorrow night! Oh, is that all? Casey thinks Chuck could have waited to share this information until morning, Sarah says Chuck's been under a lot of stress, and Beckman (in pajamas!) tries to be understanding but clearly thinks Chuck's losing it a little and is understandably grumpy at having to literally lose sleep over it. Enter, Christopher Lloyd, CIA therapist and this week's fantastically random guest star.

In the next scene, Chuck is lying on one of those chairs that only therapists in movies and on TV shows have, while Christopher Lloyd sits with a pad of paper in his lap, writing notes about Chuck's adorably jumpy rambling, though I'm pretty sure he doesn't describe it as such. Chuck starts in on Sarah to avoid talking about his father, but Doc Brown, er, Dreyfus wants to discuss the Intersect. Wait, he knows about the Intersect? He's a CIA therapist, Chuck—he knows about everything. Dr. D. thinks the Intersect is putting too much stress on Chuck's mind, so he suspends Chuck from duty and sends him home to go crazy where he can't hurt anyone like, say, the president of Zamibia. Suspended from duty?! But who will save the world?

Awesome is on the couch looking, well, awesome despite the whole fake malaria thing, and—shocker!—he feels awesome, too. He can't wait to get back out there. I'm not sure where "there" is. Ellie has his medicine—which he clearly doesn't need—but before she can give it to him, she runs into Casey, who sympathetically recounts his own "four or five" bouts with malaria and offers Ellie some medicinal African snake herbs. She's creeped out because she still thinks he's a drunk with a history of indecent exposure, but he's really just trying to be nice. Poor Casey.

Back at Chuck's place, Sarah almost-too-cheerfully asks how Chuck's therapy went, and Chuck lies and says it was great and he's fine, even though it wasn't and he's not. Which she'd know if she saw him pacing back and forth in the Buy More home-entertainment room. Thankfully, Morgan sees him instead and volunteers to help Chuck a) protect the visiting head-of-state and b) get the evidence he needs to prove he's not going insane. Because what are friends for if not to violate government orders on a dangerous mission to verify your relative mental health, which, honestly, is looking sketchier by the second? Anyway, somehow Morgan manages to score two tickets to the symphony and two tuxes from the mall—no cumberbunds, call him crazy—so the BFFs agree to suit up (à la Barney Stinson) and meet at the car. Inside, at the Nerd Herd help desk, Jeff and Lester are objectifying young women and old, lumpy housewives (Jeff's words, not mine), when in walks a familiar set of legs on mile-high red platforms. Anna Wu is back! She asks for Morgan, but Jeff and Lester tell her she shouldn't see him. He's in a bad place, they say—a place of maturity and levelheadedness and responsibility. Anna doubts he's changed that much, but then he walks out in a tux looking kind of great and in a hurry to go do something really cultural and sophisticated, and she looks both irked at his brush-off and totally turned on. Morgan, 1; Anna, 0.

Meanwhile, Ellie is at the Buy More buying Seasons 1-15 of ER for Awesome, but there's some guy in a hat looking all shady and following her around the store. It's evil Ring operative Justin (henceforth known as eRoJ), and he's here to see her. Can they go somewhere and talk? Of course, man who poisoned Captain Awesome! Talk away.

Chuck and Morgan arrive at the symphony and take their seats next to a woman who apparently likes to actually hear the music when she goes to a concert, because she keeps shushing them when they're trying to talk about important things like, um, girls. Morgan wants to know if Chuck thinks that Anna wants him back, and, if she does, should he take her back? Sure, she broke his heart and sent him into a self-loathing spiral, but she's the love of his life, Chuck. Wait, why are they at the symphony again?

Outside the Buy More, eRoJ whips out a fake CIA badge and tells Ellie the government needs her help to track down her father, who's wanted by some very bad people—one of whom is her neighbor John Casey. Ellie can't believe it—even though, really, she's never liked Casey all that much anyway—so eRoJ tells her to watch him for a while. She'll see. She wants to tell her husband and brother, but eRoJ says it's not a good idea. They'll think she's crazy, he says. And there's already one loony-bin bound Bartowski in the family.

Sarah goes to Castle and finds Casey, who wants to know why she's not out with Chuck on their fancy date. Fancy date? Oh, you mean the one Chuck took Morgan on instead so they could stop the president of a nonexistent country from being assassinated by the Ring? That one? Crap. Casey and Sarah pull up video footage from the Buy More and see Chuck holding two tickets to the symphony. The symphony! They're on their way. No need to rush, though, because Chuck's not going to get anything done while he's sleeping. Yup, he's sleeping. And here comes another dream!

Chuck's onstage at the concert hall, and there's no one in the audience except Shaw, who's still bleeding from the two holes in his chest but seems otherwise totally fine, or, you know, as fine as you can be when you're dead. The dream isn't about him anyway—it's about the Zamibian president, who's sitting in a box above the stage while one of his aides holds a machete to his throat and glares menacingly down at Chuck. That's enough to startle Chuck awake, and when he comes to, he sees the aide from his dream in the box with the president and decides to take action. He gives Morgan his backup tranq gun in case of emergencies and then sprints up the aisle just as Sarah and Casey arrive at the concert to stop him. Sarah meets Chuck in the lobby and says he should have told her what he was going to do, but Chuck begs her to give him the benefit of the doubt, and, partly because she loves him and partly because he looks really fantastic in his tux, she agrees to accompany him to the president's box. Meanwhile, Casey slips into Chuck's seat next to Morgan and tells him to get up and leave quietly or be killed and dragged out—his choice. Morgan reaches for the tranq gun, but Casey's hand gets their first and pulls the trigger, knocking le Grimes into a deep sleep.

Up in the president's box, Chuck orders the aide from his dream, one Dr. Kowambe, to stand up and be frisked. The aide makes some lame joke about preferring to be felt up by "the pretty one," but Chuck isn't laughing—he's sure Kowambe is working with the Ring, despite the president's outrage and insistence to the contrary. Then Kowambe smiles, and Chuck goes all cross-eyed and dizzy—he's having a flash! The Intersect tells Chuck that the proof he needs is in the doc's tooth, so Chuck does what any professional spy would do under orders to not do anything: He punches Kowambe, sending one of the man's teeth flying out of his mouth and onto the carpet. Not surprisingly, the president's security team steps in and grabs Chuck—though why they waited this long is beyond me—as Sarah looks on helplessly. Cut to a psychiatric hospital where our favorite spy is being led into a room by two orderlies who seem impervious to his anguished cries of protest. Hearts of stone, clearly.

Back at Castle, General Beckman wants to know how Chuck and Morgan managed to cause an international incident that the President of the United States himself had to apologize for—in Zamibian, which apparently has a lot of clicks and vowels. Beckman says Dr. Dreyfus thinks Chuck's condition is worse than previously diagnosed, and Sarah's confused because Chuck said he was fine, and...he's not? Not to worry, says the General. She'll do everything she can to help Chuck, because—dramatic pause—she cares about him too. Beckman, out.

Dr. D. is giving Chuck a tour of the psych hospital, but all Chuck wants to know is whether there's been any word from his team. Dreyfus says Chuck should focus on coming to terms with his psychiatric incarceration and maybe meet a few of his fellow crazies. A wide-eyed patient named Lewis who prefers to be called Merlin saunters up then and asks Chuck what he's in for before stumbling off muttering something about his own team, to which Chuck basically says, um, what? Merlin, it turns out, is a former CIA agent—just like every other patient in this loony bin. They've all cracked under the pressures of spy life—and it looks like Chuck is next. As he scans the room glancing at all the men crouching in corners, kung fu-ing the air, and talking to imaginary people on their imaginary walkie-watches, he begins to sincerely doubt his own sanity. And who can blame him?

Ellie stops by Casey's place under the pretense of getting those African snake herbs for Awesome but really just to do some recon for eRoJ, and, wouldn't you know—this happens to be the one time in the history of the world that Casey neglects to latch his gun closet. The door swings open, revealing an arsenal of weapons, and Ellie all but runs screaming for the hills. She heads home to Awesome to share her revelations, but of course Awesome already knows about Casey's guns—and why he has them—so he tries to neutralize Ellie's concerns by telling her she sounds crazy, which a) is never a good idea and b) plays right into eRoJ's manipulative little hand.

At the hospital, Sarah and Casey sit across a table from Chuck, who's beginning to sound seriously off his proverbial rocker. He coughs up Kowambe's lost tooth and passes it into Sarah's reluctant hand, all the while saying stuff like "The truth is in the tooth" and sporting some serious crazy eyes, neither of which is helping his case much. The tooth, according to Chuck, contains Ring intel of some kind, so Sarah promises to test it and get him out of there. They kiss, and he's escorted away by an orderly. Love is crazy.

By the looks of things at Castle, Sarah is running every test imaginable to prove Chuck's theory about the tooth. Casey cautions her against getting her hopes up, but she knows Chuck is right. He has to be. Except...he isn't. The tooth is just a tooth. Sarah's face falls, and even Casey looks a little sad. Have faith, people!

Morgan finds Casey later in the Buy More and demands intel on his BFF. Anna walks up just after Morgan finds out that Chuck is on lockdown in a mental hospital, and he's so distraught that he ends up blowing her off again, much to her visible shock and awe. Dissed twice by Morgan Grimes? Unheard of. Now she really wants him. Morgan, 2; Anna, still 0.

Sarah calls Chuck, who maybe just won a game of Connect Four, to tell him that the tests were negative but that everything is going to be OK, which of course means that something really bad is about to happen. Cue Kowambe and his men, who've come to pay a visit to our little mental patient. The receptionist says she can't let them in without approval from Dr. Dreyfus, so they'll either have to leave or be escorted out. That won't be necessary, Kowambe says. And then he shoots her and the security guard who came to help her. With a tranq gun, but still. Trigger-happy much?

In another part of town, Sarah knocks on Dr. D.'s door to plead Chuck's case. Chuck's special, she tells the good doctor. He can't just be deteriorating—there has to be more to his condition than that. He needs to be okay. She needs him to be okay. Because—wait for it—she loves him. Finally! She just wants to go to him and talk to him—try to figure this thing out. She's begging. And she's not the only one, according to Dr. D. Casey's there on Chuck's behalf, too. At this point, my heart grows about eight times its normal size and I swear it's just going to explode with love for this show and for Adam Baldwin, in particular. The look on his face as he stands behind Dr. Dreyfus almost makes me cry, and I never cry. Except when the Dodgers lose. So, maybe I cry a lot.

Anyway, I should probably save my tears, because it looks like Chuck may need them later. Kowambe and his men have Chuck trapped in a little room with lots of scary-looking equipment, and Kowambe wants to know why Chuck took his tooth. Or, rather, why Chuck took his real tooth and left the fake one—the one with the Ring intel—still in his mouth. Chuck takes a second to process this and then is ecstatic because it means that he's not crazy and that he was right. He's not crazy! He was right! Kowambe is bad! Oh, wait, Kowambe is bad. And now he's filling a large needle with some kind of neon-green psychotropic truth serum and sticking it into Chuck's arm. So, happiness: short-lived.

Chuck yells Dr. D.'s name, distracting Kowambe and his men just long enough so that he has time to run out of the little room they're keeping him in and into a big room with all the other mental patients. He yells for the spies turned psych-ward inmates to help him, but no one so much as looks up—until Merlin comes in and calls them all to attention: Spies, attack! It's a valiant gesture, but the poor men are no match for Kowambe's tranq gun, and he shoots them all asleep with barely a flick of his wrist. No one believes you, he tells Chuck. No one is coming for you.

Think again, Kowambe! Sarah bolts in and pretty effortlessly takes out the three Zamibian thugs with a series of seriously bad-ass martial-arts moves and a little help from Casey's gun. Then she rushes to be with Chuck, who's woozy both from the green stuff and from that drug we call love. You came back for me, he says to Sarah. I'll always come back for you, she replies. And so will Merlin, Merlin says. Creepy. But not even he can ruin the moment. I'm not crying, I swear. Allergy season is just really bad this year.

Once things are back to normal, General Beckman apologizes to Chuck. It seems Kowambe was illegally harvesting human organs and experimenting with genetic manipulation and re-engineering. He planned to sell his research to the Ring. So Chuck was right, which we already knew but is good to hear nonetheless. Beckman can't give Chuck a clean bill of health, though—that has to come from Dr. Dreyfus. No problem, right?

Problem. Dreyfus still thinks the Intersect will eventually overwhelm Chuck's mind, so even though he's cleared for duty now, mental deterioration is likely inevitable. Looks like our guy may go crazy after all. Dr. D. advises Chuck to discuss this with his partner/girlfriend. Hear that, Chuck?

Meanwhile, at the Buy More, Anna is mad. She even threatens to call corporate if Morgan blows her off again. All she wants to do is give him this box of stuff he left in Hawaii. Morgan rifles through the box but realizes he doesn't actually need anything in it, so he tells her he's OK without it. But there's one more thing he forgot, she says. A kiss. Apparently, it took Morgan running away from her for her to realize she wanted him back. But that's not good enough for Chuck's BFF. He doesn't want her back. How do you like them apples, Anna? Morgan, 3; Anna, -5. And that's the match, folks. Victor: Grimes.

Chuck goes home to Sarah to talk about his fated mental breakdown, but before he can say anything, she pipes up with this: She loves him. She's never felt this way about anyone. Before, the only future she could think about was her next mission. Now all she can think about is a future with him. Aw. Chuck's so touched that he can't bring himself to tell her that a future with him might include more trips to the psych ward. So he lies. Again. Because lies never come back to haunt you.

Outside, in the courtyard, Ellie and eRoJ are meeting secretly in the shadows. She believes he's right about Casey—about everything—and she wants to help. Can she get in touch with her father? He moves around a lot, but, yes, she has a way to contact him. ERoJ thanks her and assures her she's serving her country well. Scumbag.

That night, Chuck has another dream. He's in a hospital bed hooked up to all kinds of machines. Shaw's back, and though there's blood on his shirt, he's not actually bleeding anymore. Which means...what, exactly? According to Shaw, it means he's still alive. And he wants to kill Chuck, I think, because he leans in then to choke him. Chuck wakes up in bed with Sarah, who wants to know if he's OK. He's fine, he says. It was nothing. Just the dude I killed to save your life who now wants vengeance for both his wife's death and his, even though his didn't actually take. Go back to sleep.

Next week: Scott Bakula returns as Papa Bartowski, Ellie hits Casey with a frying pan, and a lot of other really crazy stuff happens. Just watch.