**Beware the Spoilers**

CHUCK: Episode 1.9– Chuck Vs. the Imported Hard Salami

There’s just something about turning a sci-fi/ spy/ comedy/ thriller/ drama into an occasional soap opera that makes it less funny. I know, I know, you gotta have a little romance here and there, but can’t it be romance? Just straight, Chuck dating Sarah romance? MUST there always be a love triangle in every series I follow? Okay, so it’s going for romantic comedy here, I get it. But more time is spent in this episode dealing with Chuck’s desperation for sex than his actual feelings for Sarah. I don’t get that. In the same episode with a giant “Chuck is a great guy theme” Chuck actually says the line, “Is it just me or is the government out to make sure I never have sex again?”

I’m just not sure the writers on this show are totally cut out for dealing with the romance. Not only does Chuck say that, but he also does absolutely everything he can to keep his new girlfriend Lou with him, after his mission spying on her ex-boyfriend the gun smuggler forces him to lie to her. But at the end, when Sarah finally kisses him while they both think they’re about to be blown up by a bomb, it’s clear that he really wants Sarah. I know he was trying to move on when he thought his and Sarah’s relationship would always be fake, but this is a pretty sensitive guy with feelings. If he likes Sarah that much, would he really be so sweet to this other girl?

Sarah finally admits she’s fallen for Chuck and the Lou plot wasn’t dragged out for several episodes. I did really like Lou a lot and I hope she returns later, but I like Chuck and Sarah’s chemistry more and I want to see their relationship blossom. But wait… it looks like we’ll have to wait even longer to see them together because now Bryce is STILL ALIVE!!! Big surprise. The NBC promos are trying to act like this is a huge deal, but I saw it coming from this first episode. If a series pilot has a character who is dead but talked about a lot and was integral earlier in a character’s life, that show will usually find some way to bring him/her back to life or reveal that he/she was never dead (ala Livia in Journeyman). And even if this had to be done, why NOW? I just wish the show would establish relationships, move on, and explore them as the series continues, rather than focusing on the ones that aren’t happening yet. This is a fun, witty, hilarious show and when romance is the foreground rather than the background, it loses something.

But at least Casey was brilliant this episode. There’s a scene where Casey and Sarah walk in on Chuck in the bathroom while he’s brushing his teeth. “Is there nothing sacred to you people?” Chuck asks. Casey says, “Just the right to bare arms.” And when he claims to be working for the FDA and corners Lou, just before he leaves, he points at her and in an almost accusing tone he says, “And by the way… your salami is delicious!” Priceless.

3 out of 4 points

HEROES: Episode 2.9– Cautionary Tales

What can I say? After last week’s episode, the show feels like Heroes again! Everyone had the best acting I’ve seen this season, especially Hiro and his father. I was a little sad that Hiro decided not to save his father at the end, but the way it was accomplished was so moving that losing George Takai from the series was almost worth the moments here we got to see between father and son. Hiro’s father convinces him, rather nobly, that it is his time to die and that Hiro must use his power responsibly– they can’t play God. And probably the best written scene (next to Hiro’s eulogy at the end) was Hiro explaining to his younger self 17 years earlier at his mother’s funeral that both his parents would have to die and it was the order of things.

Meanwhile, Mohinder has kind of joined the dark side, which seems a little strange since he’s also the voice of the all-wise narrator at the beginning and end of a lot of episodes. We’ve watched this character for over 30 episodes now, and I’m not sure I buy that he would willingly go along with killing anyone, for any reason. He’s been so skeptical of the Company all season that I didn’t make the leap that he was actually being seduced by them. Again, there’s a part of me that wants all the major characters to not suddenly turn evil, or at least join evil, after I’ve put so much stock in them, but I do take comfort in the fact that Mohinder doesn’t just shoot Bennett because Bob tells him to. He shoots him to save Bob, which is at least a little noble.

We finally find out who killed Hiro’s father, which I kind of called last week once we learned that Adam was at the Company before the beginning of this season. He would be the person with the biggest vendetta against them, and frankly, it’s hard to blame them. The Company has turned into one big frightening underground freak show, and I’m really ready for it to be taken down. There has been such a focus on it this year that I’ll be very disappointed if it isn’t completely destroyed by the end of the season. Parkman discovering he has greater power than he thought was forced at first, I thought, but in this episode, it’s giving his character room to grow. He spent the whole episode experimenting with his ability to telepathically persuade people to do anything, and then Mrs. Petrelli (in her best performance this year) tells him that if he continues, he will become his father, the Nightmare Man. Is it worth the risk? Those are the kinds of questions I like to see characters wrestle with. And although I still hate that he’s stayed pretty evil after the lesson I thought he learned last year, I’m looking forward to seeing what Bennett does when he gets out of that facility.

We finally saw some more action this week and the flying effects looked much better to me than they had in the past. The CG looked more natural and better integrated with the actors, which is good, because there was quite a lot of it. The effect where Hiro stops time to look at his father’s killer is seamless as always and the scene looked quite dark and epic.

3.5 out of 4 points

JOURNEYMAN: Episode 1.9– Emily

This episode is the culmination of everything that has led up to it and really managed to capture the essence of the show. Unlike my one complaint from last week’s “Winterland,” the time travel wasn’t just a B-story that had to be thrown in to follow the set formula of the show. Instead of just helping Emily, the girl who was kidnapped by a man named Bennett, like he is supposed to, Dan tries to stop Bennett for good. At the end of the episode, we find that his decision has come back to bite him, just like Livia said it would. Dan doesn’t know it yet, but now that Bennett’s out of jail, he’s going to get his revenge on Dan for putting him there.

This is what can set a show like this apart from its predecessors. It has to be more than figure out who you’re supposed to help, help that person, everything’s okay until next week when it all starts over again, or it’s Quantum Leap. When the time travel affects the present, like the money from the 70s Dan was caught with, and like Bennett in this episode, the show is working to its full potential. Add to that the fact that every aspect of Dan’s personal life was dealt with this time and you have a really stellar episode. In forty-five minutes, we saw the issue with his brother thinking he’s insane, his kid having behavioral problems, his wife throwing a mug of coffee at a wall because Dan’s time traveling is getting worse, and Dan’s boss having to justify to the guy from the FBI why Dan hasn’t had many by-lines in the paper lately. This stuff is great because all of it is because of Dan’s condition. The time travel, this time, completely affected the present, in more than one way. And I also love that last week, Livia said the time jumps would get longer, and this week, they really were a little longer.

I was really sad that Dan screwed up time so the conversation he had with Jack about his time traveling never happened. He was finally starting to buy it, which I’ve been waiting for so that Jack can have more of a function than simply make Dan’s life really hard. At first I thought it was an annoying plot device, but seeing the preview for next week, it still looks like Jack is going to believe in it sooner rather than later. Everything is about to come to a head, and I still hope that includes our finding out more about the nature of time travel. There was one misplaced scene in this episode– back in 2001, Dan goes to his old house to see his son when he was a baby. This happens right after an intense scene where he tells Livia he’s going to stop Bennett and to hell with the consequences. It just didn’t fit, and Five For Fighting’s “Superman” especially didn’t fit as the background music there.

3.5 out of 4 points

LLAP

-Cap’n Logan

Beware the Spoilers

CHUCK: Episode 1.8– Chuck Versus the Truth

This week Chuck was funny as usual, especially when Chuck, Casey and Sarah were all affected by the truth virus and had to find a way to get the antidote while being forced to tell the truth. But I felt there were some missed opportunities. The episode suffered because it was too focused on Chuck and Sarah not ever getting to be together. Chuck’s getting pulled in several directions, liking Sarah but also getting interested in other girls because his false relationship with Sarah isn’t really fair to him. By the end of the episode, when he finally tells Sarah he wants a fake breakup to their fake relationship, I felt like Chuck was almost being made out to be the bad guy and Sarah the victim, as she watches Chuck and the other girl having coffee together (in slow motion, no less) through a window in the final scene.

I’ll say this up front: I don’t like love triangles. It’s more than obvious Sarah likes Chuck and only used her trained resistance to the virus to say it wouldn’t go anywhere because that’s her job. So now she’s going to watch him be with another girl and I’m afraid the show (like oh so many seasons of Smallville) is going to be more about the relationship Chuck and Sarah can never have, instead of focusing on the humor of the spy-in-a-Buy-More premise, which is infinitely more interesting. I much would rather the show explore Chuck and Sarah really dating while trying to pretend to the government that they’re still just pretending, which is where I thought they were going once Sarah told Chuck they should finally “make love.”

I thought Tang walking in on the three during a government briefing was classic, but a little abrupt. I wish there had been an episode between that and Casey convincing him he was going to be a government agent and had to go to another location. Tang just got the assistant manager position and I thought they were just beginning to explore the really funny hell he would put Morgan and the others through. Guess not.

Oh, and Awsome finally gets some screen time in this episode and we find, through the truth virus, that his and Ellie’s relationship isn’t as perfect as it appeared. Cudos for bringing him a little further into the fold of the cast.

2.5 out of 4 points

HEROES: Episode 2.8– Four Months Ago

Much akin to last season’s “Six Months Ago,” this episode takes us back to moment after the ending of last season to answer most of the viewer’s burning questions. The way it took care of all those mysteries was masterful, epic, and made me feel, for the first time this season, like I was watching the same stellar piece of television I saw from last season.

I bought almost everything. I loved the way Nathan’s face was disfigured and how Adam’s blood healed him. I loved how Adam and Peter broke out of The Company. I especially loved the fact that DL didn’t die the way we thought he did, and his story in this episode, though otherwise unnecessary, was his strongest in the series. And although I still don’t like Peter’s amnesia plot, I was glad to see it was because of the Hasian and not the explosion. Maybe the most interesting piece of information given, though I’m not a big fan of Niki, is that multiple personalities are a way some people’s minds cope with these powers. Now that I know that, I’m much more comfortable with the idea of Niki’s multiple personalities and it’s cool that she has a new one. It does make one wonder why none of the other super powered people have exhibited these symptoms before, though.

And it was a little strange how Peter exploded and came back to life in time to save his brother– I wouldn’t have figured, being completely blown apart, he could regenerate that quickly. If I missed something, someone please clue me in.

What I don’t understand is why the writers find it necessary to keep us in the dark until they’re good and ready to explain everything. This episode was fantastic, but it didn’t make me appreciate the rest of the season any more. If anything, I longed for the plot and feel of season 1. All this season has done up to this episode is slowly plant a lot of questions to be answered by this episode. But that’s not how good mysteries are made. Those aren’t the kind of secrets I want to see. A good mystery is one both viewer and protagonist are trying to solve. In Heroes, the characters we all know and love week to week, even the not-as-morally ambiguous ones, know things we don’t simply because the writers haven’t revealed those scenes yet. Most of the mystery only stems, then, from information they haven’t told us, that they should have. The reason a show like Lost works, even though we all still have more questions than answers, is that we’re on an even playing field with the main characters. They’re as confused as we are. So I feel strung along by Heroes this season, and I think it was only done because the writers assumed people would keep tuning in to find out what really happened after Peter exploded. But this episode should have been the first episode this season and gone on from there. Then the plot could have moved forward, remained epic and exciting, and every plot point they’ve already set up could have still happened, only we would have more of an understanding of what was going on. Is that really so wrong?

4 out of 4 points

JOURNEYMAN: Episode 1.8– Winterland

This week’s episode furthered the ongoing plot quite a bit, which I’ve really been waiting for. I’ve been appreciating all of the previous elements that have come back and added more to the overall plot arc. This episode has one of the coolest examples– the $20.00 bill Dan gave a cabby in the 90s that hadn’t been printed yet– and now it looks like the FBI is going to either figure out he’s time traveling or develop some hilarious, bogus theory about how things from the future keep winding up in the past. It’s a very smart show and it keeps getting smarter. I thought that scene several episodes ago with the $20.00 bill was just a throw-away gag, and it’s nice to see it link up with Dan’s brother, since he was apparently the cop who was chasing Dan.

I was a bit disappointed that more wasn’t revealed this week about the nature of the time traveling. We’re still completely left in the dark as to what (or “who,” as Livy hints) is causing it. In fact, we actually have more new questions now than answers. Why is Livy being sent to the future instead of the past? Why was she in the 80s for such a long period of time? Why is she now only (we assume) traveling when Dan does and to the same time he does? And why both of them? Did she somehow make him a time traveler too? I must say, I didn’t call her being from the past and I think it’s quite intriguing, but I was left a little empty since the scientist who thinks Dan’s writing a novel was shown in the previews. That made me think he would reveal some real facts, but all he really made clear was that he knew Dan was a time-traveler and that he felt he had to be really cryptic about it.

The trackings have been mostly interesting up to this point, but this episode was finally so much about the major players in the show that I lost interest in the girl Dan was following in the 70s. It seemed unimportant, like they just had to throw some little time travel plot in there because that’s the formula of the show and it’s the only way to reveal that Livy is from the 40s. So Dan accidentally got her sent to jail and then went back again and fixed the whole thing? I kind of expect plots like that in a Quantum Leap-esque premise. What I’m interested in is how the time traveling affects Dan’s real life and whether or not there’s a higher power at work. My opinion of the show could completely rise or fall depending on what the nature of this time traveling turns out to be. The one cool thing about the 70s scenes, though, was Dan getting giddy to see Nixon giving the “I Am Not a Crook” speech and Livy not having the slightest bit of interest, since she lives in the 40s.

3 out of 4 points

Chuck, Heroes, and Journeyman air on NBC from 7:00 to 10:00 PM on Monday nights. You can also watch full episodes of all three shows on nbc.com.

LLAP

-Captain Logan