Chuck season 5 episode 6 review: Chuck Versus The Curse

This review contains spoilers.

5.6 Chuck Versus The Curse

Chuck is grinding out its final season like it has a one point lead and there are five minutes to go for a play-off place. While a mild improvement on last week’s abysmal episode, Chuck Versus The Curse was almost entirely devoid of any imagination whatsoever.

Similarly devoid of any idea as to who is trying to make their lives hell, Team Carmichael decides to dig out the cabin in the woods set one more time. Elle and Awesome have a romantic dinner, while everyone is pursued by CIA operative Rebecca Romijn, who sadly is neither naked nor coloured blue in this appearance.

Even clothed she’s fine, given the cartoon dialogue her character is given, and even manages a trademark pout when she’s finally outmanoeuvred. But there’s no BuyMore at all this week, though I’ve got a feeling that they’ll be back in force for Christmas.

What we do get is the welcome return of Bonita Friedericy’s Beckman, and an exceptionally thin narrative where the Awesomes get to think they’re spies – again.

Into this mix they threw a rather odd idea that Morgan and Chuck had special boxes where they kept their most valuable things, or Personal Artefacts Never To Share (hence the acronym, PANTS). Morgan reveals this to Alex, who eventually gets to see inside Morgan’s, er, PANTS. You see, it’s an obvious joke, but one that’s set up over a couple of scenes and then never actually used, until me, now.

In the end it just seemed like a guffin to avoid finding anything useful for Morgan to do, and to return Alex to the show. Since he lost the Intersect, it’s been a problem what to do with Morgan, although I’m confident that they could have come up with something better, and even funny, if they’d tried hard enough.

What I think annoyed me more than anything else was the general sloppiness of the entire episode, like the production team was thinking more about what they’d be doing next instead of this show. As such, the writers left some BuyMore-sized plot holes in their script, and those shooting it couldn’t be bothered to fix them. The most obvious of these involved the supposed abduction of the Awesomes, where they got in a Limo thinking it was a romantic surprise organised by each other.

Once in there, we see the doors locked, but minutes later they open the locked doors while the vehicle is moving. How? And, as it turned out, they weren’t being abducted, so why did the driver lock the doors anyway? Those and other questions were never answered.

If the team behind Chuck can’t be bothered to even try, then why should viewers make the effort to watch? There are six Chuck stories left, and the Christmas story with the return of Brandon Routh is up next. Perhaps 2012 will see this show return briefly return to form before it’s too late. I can only hope.

You can read our review of Chuck season five episode five here.