Chuck season 5 episode 7 review: Chuck Versus The Santa Suit

This review contains spoilers.

5.7 Chuck Versus The Santa Suit

Boy, the clunker episodes just keep coming, don’t they? As a Christmas special goes, this one was like the most contrived version of Alias that Chuck‘s tried to deliver yet, with tinsel on it.

Chuck Versus The Santa Suit didn’t make me laugh once, not even a small internal chuckle that might easily be confused with indigestion. This was mostly because the writers forgot to but any gags in here, instead choosing to fill the time with some exceptionally poor dialogue and a half-arsed plot, where Daniel Shaw comes back to get his revenge on Chuck. Which he does entirely in studio sets they’ve already paid for, and with some moustache twirling that seemed to be borrowed from Whacky Races.

And then, just when I thought this whole exercise couldn’t get any dumber, they threw a cameo with Stan Lee in here, being himself… for no logical or relevant reason. It was the sort of “Hey, look who that is…” moment, where Scooby Doo meets Laurel and Hardy, despite them both being long dead. But by the time Stan had turned up, they’d buried more potential comedic moments than Persians at the battle of Thermopylae, so the corpse of this gag lay unnoticed amongst the fallen.

I could talk about Jeff and Lester, Big Mike, the Awesomes, and Beckman, but it’s all too painful to recall, and I respect them all as performers too much to make any of them relive it. They can only deliver lines they’re given, and they got to spout many diabolical ones here.

Having got Daniel Shaw back for very little logical reason, he’s disposed of in just one story, doing the entirely tedious ‘monologue mistake’ junket. And then, like Kahn’s grave spitting exit, he throws a complete spanner in Sarah’s works by mentioning the ‘baby’ from his prison home. Eh, what?

If we’re meant to accept that Sarah has a secret child, then Chuck will not only have jumped the shark, but also barbequed it for good measure.

Given the dive that this show has taken, right now I’m on the verge of stopping these reviews, on the basis that I can’t see the point of having a weekly downer by watching and writing about how depressed it makes me feel to see this once imaginative and proud show dragged so low.But having got this far, I’m determined to go on to the bitter end, however unpalatable that might be. There are only five Chucks left, so how bad can they make it?

A bigger part of me wishes I couldn’t imagine the answer to that question.

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

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