Gratuitous Lists: Top Ten SFF Finales

Welcome to a new feature on the blog, where I list things in a list format because everyone likes lists. However, no-one (well, me) likes the incessant arguing over the placement of things on lists rather than their actual merits, so I'm not doing that.

Here is a list of what I think are the best final episodes of SFF TV series over the years, listed in no particular order but with my favourite one at the end. So, let's do this.

Blake's 7: Blake

Season 4, Episode 13, aired 21 December 1981

"Well, this doesn't look good."

An ending so unexpected that people are still talking about it thirty-three years later. In the closing moments of the final episode of the series, our long-missing idealistic hero, Blake, is revealed to have become a mercenary fighting for money and has betrayed his former comrades to the tyrannical Federation. His morally ambiguous second-in-command-turned-leader Avon guns him down...only for it to be revealed that Blake was still fighting the good fight all along and had a larger plan in mind. Cue Federation soldiers appearing and executing the entire regular cast of the show. The series ends by fading to black as Avon - apparently - is shot dead as well.

Bleak and nihilistic doesn't even begin to cover it, although it was later revealed that the show was never meant to end this way. A planned fifth season would have revealed that most of the characters would be still alive, having been stunned rather than killed. The BBC's announcement that this was final episode took the cast and crew as much by surprise as anyone, but for many years they suggested this had been the plan all along. So, not quite as ballsy as it first appeared, but still a jaw-dropping way to end the series. The rest of the episode is pretty good as well, with its famously cash-strapped effects team doing a reasonable job of depicting the crash-landing of our heroes' ship, Scorpio, on the surface of Gauda Prime.

Chuck: Chuck versus the Goodbye

Season 5, Episode 13, aired 27 January 2012

When in doubt, finish on a beach with an amnesia storyline. Actually, don't, unless your show is as good as Chuck.

For five seasons Chuck trod a careful path between out-and-out comedy, spy hijinks and a romance centred in the gradual development of lead character Chuck Bartowski from a loser working in an electrical store to a convincing secret agent able to woo his team-mate Sarah Walker. That made the decision the showrunners took in its final few episodes, with the erasing of Sarah's memories meaning she had no idea about their relationship, all the braver. Still, trope-savvy fans were expecting her memory to be restored in the final episode and All To Be Well. That didn't happen, with the series ending with Chuck apparently realising he had to win over Sarah from scratch. A surprising ending that didn't take the cop-out route and also featured some fantastic other scenes, such as the main villain being defeated to Jeff and Lester's memorable cover version of "Take on Me" by A-Ha, Morgan finally winning Casey's respect and several callbacks to the very first episode of the series.

Firefly: Objects in Space

Season 1, Episode 14, aired 13 December 2002

"Well, here I am."

Firefly was never meant to end with this episode, of course, but it makes for a surprisingly fitting denouncement and arguably its finest hour. The crew are trapped in deep space as a bounty hunter stalks their ship, trying to capture River Tam and getting embroiled in a battle of wits with her. The episode is moody and intense, tremendously well-written and directed by Joss Whedon (who later said it was the one piece of work he'd use to represent everything he's ever done) and featuring lengthy allusions to the work of Jean-Paul Sartre (the DVD commentary is worth a listen on this score) as well as knockout performances from Summer Glau and Richard Brooks as Jubal Early. The episode also features the eventual acceptance of River Tam into the ranks of the crew, ending a thematic storyline begun back in the pilot. But, yeah, this was an ending that came too soon.

Star Trek: The Next Generation: All Good Things...

Season 7, Episode 25, aired 23 May 1994

For a show about exploring deep space in the far future, ending with a poker game and gratuitous cleavage shot is an interesting stylistic choice.

After seven seasons, Star Trek: The Next Generation bowed out with a relentlessly entertaining romp that served as a greatest hits of the show's past. Q returns, keen to finish the trial he began in the pilot episode (and inadvertently hinting that maybe the whole thing was a pointless test, with humanity itself poised to evolve into the Q at some point in the distant future) and Picard has to find a way of allowing humanity to survive. The episode is rammed so full of plot holes that it doesn't even begin to make sense, but it's worth it to kick back and enjoy seeing the likes of Tasha Yar and Romulan Commander Tomalak again, as well as the futuristic, three-nacelled Enterprise cutting through Klingon warships like they're butter. A comprehensively superior way for TNG to bow out than its series of indifferent spin-off movies.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Chosen

Season 7, Episode 22, aired 20 May 2003

For the show that once blew up a high school as a form of cathartic release and commentary on growing up, going the whole hog and nuking the entire town was really the only way to top it.

When Buffy started, the title character was trying to avoid her role as the 'chosen one' whose destiny is to save the world. Seven seasons and several world-saving antics later (including at the cost of her own life, twice) the series, ironically, ends by doing exactly what Buffy wanted back in the beginning: by taking her status as the chosen one away by gifting the powers of the Slayer on hundreds of other girls all over the world. It's a surprisingly effective and clever ending given they couldn't kill her again or have her lose this final battle, this time against the very nature of evil itself.

As a finale the episode works on all sorts of other levels as well, with Willow finally moving on from her PTSD at the death of Tara and her resulting brush with evil in the previous season and Spike embracing his role as a hero. Only the death of Anya, which goes almost completely unnoticed by anyone apart from Xander, strikes a duff note. But the mistakes can be forgiven for those final shots of Sunnydale - the suburban American dream hiding the nightmare of the Hellmouth - being destroyed and the gang standing around wondering what to do next, the world their oyster. It's an ending ripe with possibilities, which the 'canon' Season 8 and 9 comics have really failed to live up to. Still, as endings go which wrap things up but leave room for more adventures, this is a very strong one.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: What You Leave Behind

Season 7, Episode 25, aired 2 June 1999

It's important for a finale to give emotional closure to the character arcs we have followed over the course of many years. But if you have 500 starships blowing the living crap out of one another, that helps too.

If TNG ended with a fun romp, its darker, superior spin-off DS9 ended with an epic tragedy. Hundreds of millions are killed as the Federation, Romulan Empire and Klingons join forces to destroy the Dominion forces in the Alpha Quadrant once and for all and the Dominion chooses to go down in a Götterdämmerung of fire and slaughter rather than surrender. Unlike the Picard-heavy TNG finale, the DS9 closer gives every character a moment to shine. Bashir and Dax finally (after seven years and numerous twists and turns, including one of them dying) get it together, O'Brien tires of the insanity of life on the frontier and gets to take his long-suffering family home and both Kira and Rom get promotions. But it's the way the show comes full circle to the events of the pilot episode, with Sisko fulfilling the role the Prophets laid out for him way back then, that satisfies the most. There's also the fact that the show doesn't sugar-coat its ending, with 'poor, simple' Garak getting the pardon he's been craving for so long, only to find his home is a blasted wasteland that will take decades to rebuild. And in the middle of everything, the producers even find time for a much-needed moment when the Klingon revelry in death and chaos repulses their Federation allies, an antidote for a franchise that has too-often depicted these sociopathic thugs as cuddly good guys.

All the more impressive is that Deep Space Nine, unlike it's near-rival Babylon 5, was not planned out ahead of time, yet the finale does a fantastic job of tying up all of the loose ends, making sure every character's fate is at least addressed and ending on the simple note of Jake looking out into space for his missing father. Its elegance makes the absolute ham-fisted butchering of the finales to Voyager and Enterprise years later look all the worse.

Babylon 5: Sleeping in Light

Season 5, Episode 22, aired 25 November 1998

Babylon 5: our last, best hope for pizza. I may have misread that.

Five years in the planning, Babylon 5's final episode is a quiet coda to everything that came before. Set twenty years after the rest of the series, it touches base with most of the characters and shows how their lives were changed by their experiences fighting the Shadows and Psi Corps, and what impact that had on them as people. Whilst the focus is on Sheridan's dying days as he knows the end foretold by Lorien has come, there's also time to touch base with the rest of the cast (including actors tragically no longer with us, such as Richard Biggs and Jeff Conaway) and see if it was indeed "all worth it". It's a brave and atypical choice to end the series this way, with showrunner and head (and, for most of its run, only) writer J. Michael Straczynski being the guy to turn the lights off ahead of the station's final demolition.

Avatar: The Last Airbender: Sozin's Comet Part 4: Avatar Aang

Season 3, Episode 21, aired 19 July 2008

Okay, he's 13 and she's 15 (there's a Weird Al Yankovic song in there somewhere), but he's just defeated Mark Hamill in epic single combat, so arguably justified.

Over the course of its three seasons, the anime-influenced animated series Avatar: The Last Airbender dedicated itself to telling just one story, one with a definitive beginning, middle and end. This final episode delivers what the previous sixty episodes had been building towards: the showdown between Aang and Fire Lord Ozai. The episode delivers on that score, with a magical battle that outclasses all the others in the show to date. Simultaneously Katara has to take down Azula in her own epic battle, and Sokka and his friends have to somehow destroy an entire Fire Nation sky armada before it can wipe out the Earth Kingdom. Cue enormous explosions and lots of destruction. But in the end it's the characters fates which are more important and the decision to end the series in Iroh's tea shop is an inspired one. It's a rich and satisfying ending that no amount of M. Night Syamalaning or inconsistent spin-offs can weaken.

Life on Mars/Ashes to Ashes

Season 3, Episode 8, aired 21 May 2010

"Pub?" "The interdimensionally weird one down the road that acts as the crossroads between life and death? Okay."

From the moment Sam Tyler was hit by a car in 2006 and somehow woke up in 1973, viewers were on the edge of their seat wondering what the hell was going on. Life on Mars itself had a strange and surreal ending which was a bit too open-ended, explained when a year later we got the spin-off/sequel series Ashes to Ashes, in which Alex Drake finds herself joining Team Gene Hunt in the 1980s. Over the course of three seasons Ashes to Ashes stepped out from its predecessor's shadow to deliver a different spin on the same premise. The final season, in which the team are hounded by the devil-like Jim Keats, perhaps steps a little bit too far into the territory of the weird and surreal, but the final episode offers a logical explanation for everything that's happened. It's also a depressing, heartbreaking end for many of these characters...but it is lightened in those final moments as Gene Hunt delivers his spiel to his latest time-slipped recruit and David Bowie's "Heroes" blasts into life over the end credits.

And to my favourite:

Angel: Not Fade Away

Season 5, Episode 22, aired 19 May 2004

"Let's go to Caprica, Agents of SHIELD, Bones and Person of Interest. Sorry, work. I meant to say work."

 
There are several reasons why I find Buffy's spin-off to be better than its parent show: the presence of a story arc spanning the whole series (as opposed to just one season), the theme of redemption and consequence that is much more devastatingly explored and its more adult view of the world, being a show about taking responsibility for your own decisions rather than moving through adolescence and finding yourself. It's also a show with more weight, with a gradually building sense of doom really from the moment Doyle buys the farm halfway through Season 1. By the end of Season 5 our characters have been, in some cases literally, to hell and back. Some of the heroes have fallen along the way - Cordelia is dead and Fred, her body possessed by the demon Illyria, is gone and almost certainly not coming back - but the threat remains as it has done from the first episode: the demonic law firm Wolfram and Hart. In the final episode of the series Angel and his comrades take down the Circle of the Black Thorn, thereby declaring war against the Senior Partners. No longer willing to tolerate Angel's defiance, the Senior Partners unleash the armies of hell on Los Angeles. The series ends with Angel pondering that he's always wanted to kill a dragon. "Let's go to work."

It's an ending that's amusing for being simply way beyond the show's budget to deliver properly, so cutting away before the fight begins is the only way it can be done. It also thematically makes sense: Angel was always about the fight and the struggle for what is right, no matter the odds. It's a battle with casualties. Wesley falls along the way and Lorne, though still alive, has his soul irreparably damaged when he coldly executes Lindsey on Angel's orders. There is also hope. Whilst the odds may be against our heroes (several thousand versus four), it helps that two of them are undead vampires with centuries of experience in combat and one is, er, a dark goddess from beyond the dawn of time. The After the Fall comic indeed suggests they are victorious...at the cost of Gunn being turned into a vampire and Los Angeles descending into the pits of hell (but who'd notice?).

But as a way of ending a series without either being too saccharine or taking the mickey out of the audience's intelligence, Angel finds just the right balance, and is thus my favourite TV show finale of all time. This week.

Bubbling Under

The BBC's Merlin (2008-12) is never going to be winning prizes for greatest genre show of all time, but it was a moderately entertaining show throughout its run that kept up the tension over whether Merlin's magical abilities would be discovered quite well. The final episode focuses on the revelation of Merlin's abilities to the mortally wounded Arthur and the resulting fall-out from that discovery. Perhaps they should have revealed it earlier, but basing the finale around the revelation and the impact on the characters was a good choice. The final scene showing the ancient Merlin hiking around modern-day Glastonbury, not so much.

Meanwhile, the short-lived Space: Above and Beyond (1996) may have been pretty terrible for most of its run before a late-season improvement in quality, but its final episode is striking enough that it's still talked about today. Several characters are apparently killed off, others are trapped on a planet and only two of the heroes survive to get back to their bunks. It's a surprisingly bleak ending. Even if the show had returned, it would be hard to see how they'd have pulled everyone out of the fire without it being seriously unconvincing.

On a lighter note, the final episode of Spaced (1999-2001) got the gang back together after splitting them up and ended on a high. The combination of Take That's "Back For Good" and a main battle tank is particularly memorable. A scene retroactively added later on confirming that Tim and Daisy do get it on and have a family is a little too on-the-nose, but the original episode ended in a way that was just perfect.

The short-lived Ultraviolet (1998) - aka The Show That Gave Unto The World Idris Elba - was brilliance incarnate, but the fact that writing, producing and directing it almost killed the creator meant that the planned second season was never made. This was almost certainly for the best, as the show's final episode is now a note-perfect battle of wills between the leader of the Code Vs (vampires) and the main characters which gradually intensifies as the vampires' true plans to trigger nuclear armageddon to darken the skies for centuries to come - obviously to their benefit - is revealed. Amazing stuff, especially when Stephen Moyer's vampire character is resurrected and promptly flees to the set of True Blood.

Finally, and a close contender for this list, was the final episode of Quantum Leap. For a show so resolutely optimistic and hopeful to end on such a downer - Sam Beckett never returns home and never sees his friend Al again - was an unexpected, brave choice. This was controversial at the time, with the feeling that showrunner Donald Bellisario was being too cruel to the characters after five years of putting them through the wringer. But seen from twenty years down the line, this was an appropriate choice, allowing Sam to go on and help thousands more people.

The Wertzone Special Award For The Episode That Should Have Been The Last One Of Its Series

Four years of fleeing across the galaxy only to get irradiated to death in what briefly appears to be Brooklyn? Best. Ending. Ever.

Battlestar Galactica: Revelations

If the rebooted Battlestar Galactica had ended with its mid-Season 4 finale, it would probably still rank as one of the greatest SFF shows of all time (despite a seriously below-par third and fourth season). Revelations was not only the best episode of the series in more than a year, it delivered the single most gut-punching SF cliffhanger since the ending of Blake's 7. The 30,000+ survivors of humanity, chased halfway across the galaxy by marauding robotic murderers, finally reach their long-dreamt-of safe haven, the thirteenth colony of Earth, only to find it a burned-out radioactive ruin. The final tracking shot takes in our speechless characters' reactions as they gaze across the river at the obliterated remnants of their hopes and dreams and abruptly cuts to black.

Sadly, BSG came back with another half-season of increasingly bizarre and bemusing plot turns until it turns out that it was all a fake-out and there was another planet called Earth our characters finally stumble across thanks to mystical magic music pumped out across the galaxy by some disembodied super-intelligence via the resurrected ghost-thing of a regular character, resulting in the colonisation of 'our' Earth 150,000 years in the past. Except they then had to explain why the fossil record shows that humankind evolved here on Earth, resulting in some quite ridiculous hoop-jumping that feels like the writers are simply taking the piss out of the audience's intelligence. Going out on the note that Japanese robots may one day destroy us sent exactly the wrong message, whilst going to the "All Along the Watchtower" well for the fifteen hundredth time that season was just an indulgence too far.

That just goes to show that you can have too much of a good thing. But the other shows on this list show you can have an ending that is satisfying, wraps things up and remains true to the spirit of the series. Let's hope that some of our present-day big hitters, like Game of Thrones and Orphan Black, get resolutions that are as satisfying.

Chuck: Season 5

Chuck Bartowski no longer possesses the Intersect, but has still matured into a confident and capable secret agent. As he mentors the new Intersect, he also has to deal with the fact he and his team are now independent contractors with bills to pay and rival companies to compete with. When, yet again, a dangerous agent comes after the Intersect, Chuck has to call upon his resources and training to stop them.

Chuck has always been a curious show, a geek comedy with dramatic and romantic overtones whose tone has often spun on a dime. The show has always done a good job of managing these different tones and styles, keeping everything grounded though Zachary Levi's earnest-but-sympathetic performance as the title character. In the fifth season, the show experiences several additional such tonal shifts, as Chuck is betrayed by his best friend (but it turns out not to be his fault) and, most surprisingly, has his life almost ruined in the final few episodes of the series. For a show that's always been quite warm-hearted and entertainingly cheesy, the surprisingly bleak tone of the final few episodes comes as a bit of a shock.

The season - renewed purely to be wrapped up - only consists of thirteen episodes and it appears there may have been budgetary restrictions in place: our previous season villains were played by well-known actors such as Chevy Chase and Timothy Dalton. This year we get Angus Macfadyen, a very solid Scottish actor best-known for his supporting role in Braveheart (as Robert the Bruce). He does a good job, but lacks the geek-cred his predecessors brought with them. Even more problematic is the fact that he only appears in the last few episodes of the season with little build-up and his character is never really explored in much depth (in contrast to Dalton's hammy-but-complex Volkoff).

The truncated run causes issues throughout the season. Storylines that would have been given whole episodes to develop in the second through fourth seasons are here disposed off way too quickly. An entertaining on-going subplot involving Carrie-Ann Moss as a rival contractor (and potential romantic interest for Casey) has enormous potential, but kind of peters out with no real climax or pay-off. Most frustratingly, there is relatively very little action in the Buy More. Big Mike, Lester and Jeff barely get any lines in some episodes, although a late-season subplot that sees Lester and a reformed and sober Jeff finally discovering what's going under their feet does help reduce this problem a little.

Most surprising is a divisive late-season storyline involving amnesia. Given the tone of the show, I was confidently expecting some last-minute solution or cure would be found. Instead, we get a highly inconclusive ending. It's not quite The Sopranos, but the series ending without ever answering the central question poised by the last couple of episodes is an unexpected and possibly even brave choice. Whether it's the right choice is one that fans will be arguing about for years to come (or unless the much-rumoured Chuck movie gets off the ground). For myself, Chuck has always been first and foremost an escapist and fun show, not a gritty drama like the new BSG or something from HBO. Ending the show in this manner feels out of character for the series, and a little bit of pointless torture for our main characters who really deserved more of a happy ending.

That aside, the final season of Chuck (***½) is entertaining, well-acted and often quite funny. The shortened episode order means some storylines aren't developed very well, and the ending will be divisive, but certainly the season is worth watching for established fans. In particular, the way Chuck's character develops across the five seasons, going from nerd to an intelligent, resourceful agent (exemplified by the shots of Chuck on the DVD spines, which cleverly show this development) does pay off very well here. The season is available now in the UK (DVD) and USA (DVD, Blu-Ray).

Chuck: Season 4

Chuck Bartowski embarks on a personal mission to track down his missing mother, aided by John Casey and Sarah Walker. However, they soon discover that Chuck's mother may have ties to Volkoff Industries, an international arms-dealing organisation based in Moscow and now their their #1 target. Complications ensue as Chuck and Sarah get engaged, Ellie and Devon have a baby and an old computer resurfaces which may hold the key to an old mystery...

Chuck's fourth and penultimate season is a bit of a mixed bag. It's as reliably watchable as ever but a feeling of staleness is never too far away. Chuck's search for his mum feels a little derivative of his earlier search for his father. The producers try to make the two storylines more individual by painting the characters very differently and approaching the plots in different ways (we meet Chuck's mother very early on and see how she reacts to Chuck's attempts to find her), but there is the feeling that we have been here before. Linda Hamilton's casting as Chuck's mother may also be a geek-friendly nod to the audience (and an excuse for a few Terminator gags), but unfortunately Hamilton gives a stiff and somewhat unconvincing performance that doesn't help the problem.

Much more successful is Timothy Dalton, channelling pure scenery-chewing villainy in his role as Volkoff, an evil arms-dealer with a surprisingly sentimental side (a sequence where he plays charades is particularly demented). His appearances are highlights of the season.

Where the story goes awry is in the show's descent into predictable cliche. Sarah and Chuck have been together for more than five minutes, so clearly they now have to talk about getting married, with all the attendant, predictable storylines that brings along with it. The actors do their best with the material, but it feels like Chuck-the-espionage-comedy-drama is losing ground to Chuck-the-soap-opera, which is a fundamentally less interesting show. This isn't helped by the emphasis moving more away from the Buy More, with less screen time for Jeff and Lester's crazy antics or Big Mike's curiously entertaining Subway obsession. Isaiah Mustafa (aka 'the Old Spice advert guy') appears a recurring employee at the Buy More which sets up an amusing storyline, but again it fails to fulfil its potential and he soon disappears.

Still, the show remains enjoyable on an episode-by-episode basis. At 24 episodes, it's the longest season of the entire series and this would risk the storyline becoming overstretched, but the writers break it into two half-seasons to better handle things. The first half revolves around the battle against Volkoff and the search for Chuck's mum, whilst the second sees a return to more stand-alone storylines before a new story arc involving Volkoff's daughter (an under-written Lauren Cohan) kicks off. This arc, in which Chuck inadvertently turns Volkoff's daughter from an ally into an enemy, is potentially fascinating but falls apart due to some clunky writing and contrived events.

The fourth season of Chuck (***½) has many individually entertaining episodes and moments, and the regular cast remains as watchable as ever, but there is a feeling of tiredness creeping into affairs. However, the show is rejuvenated by a shake-up in the final episode that could make the fifth and final season more interesting. The season is available in the UK (DVD) and USA (DVD, Blu-Ray) now.

Chuck: Season 3

Charles 'Chuck' Bartowski and his handlers, Sarah Walker and John Casey, have successfully defeated FULCRUM, a rogue intelligence agency. The Intersect, the combined intelligence database of the entire United States which has been downloaded into Chuck's brain, has been radically upgraded. Now Chuck has access to advanced weapons and kung fu skills, amongst other abilities. But Chuck's emotions are getting in the way of him being able to do his job. A new agent, Daniel Shaw, is assigned to the team to help train Chuck as a spy, but this has unexpected results.

After the relentlessly entertaining second season of Chuck, the third season gets off to a surprisingly weak start. Rather than picking up immediately on Season 2's cliffhanger ending (where Chuck comes into possession of the Intersect 2.0), we rejoin the action six months later. This causes problems even with Chuck's elastic notions of plausibility (why are Sarah and Casey hanging around Burbank for six months when Chuck isn't there?) and necessitates a lot of backtracking and flashbacks to fill in the gap. Once we're past the hurdle of the first few episodes (and a somewhat dubious Vinnie Jones guest role), however, things improve a lot. The second season's format of stringing together several multi-episode arcs into one cohesive whole is repeated and is almost as successful as previously. Brandon Routh is decent in the new role of Shaw, with the writers not wasting any opportunity to highlight his previous major role as Superman (even draping him in the American flag in one amusing scene).

As usual, the season has a good mix of comedy and drama, with some great stand-alone stories (Armand Assante's turn as a somewhat demented, American-friendly version of Castro is especially entertaining) standing alongside the ongoing story arcs. Most satisfying is the unexpected way the show's set-up suddenly changes. Major characters discover Chuck's secret with little forewarning, altering the show's premise for the better by dropping the 'secret identity' storyline just as it was starting to get a little stale. Chuck and Sarah's relationship is moved onto another level, again just as the 'will they/won't they' angle was running out of steam. Even Casey is given a stronger personal storyline, as he discovers a family he never knew he had and becomes conflicted over contacting them or not. And, as usual, the more serious spy stuff is balanced out nicely by the lunacy going on over at the Buy More store.

Overall, the third season of Chuck (****) is funny, self-aware and entertaining. It's not quite as a good as the second season, due to a dodgy set-up in the first few episodes that results in a lot of backtracking and wheel-spinning and the fact that the new bad guys, the Ring, are identical to FULCRUM. Beyond that, the show evolves its premise and characters in compelling new directions and shows a willingness to change even fundamental parts of the premise when necessary. The season is available now in the UK (DVD) and USA (DVD, Blu-Ray).

Chuck: Season 2

Chuck Bartowski continues his double-life, working at an electrical goods store in Burbank whilst also helping the CIA and NSA deal with threats to American national security. Chuck has the Intersect - the USA's combined database on all known terrorist and criminal threats - downloaded into his brain and is now an invaluable resource to the American government. However, Chuck is desperate to return to his old life and sets out on a mission to locate the creator of the Intersect and get him to remove it from his head...


The second season of Chuck picks up after the events of the first season (truncated by the 2007-08 Writer's Guild of America strike) and, for a while, it's business as usual. The Chuck formula - Chuck solves a spy problem whilst dealing with a more mundane crisis at home or at the store - is intact and remains entertaining, but also risks becoming stale after a few episodes. Luckily, the writers have taken steps to minimise that problem by bringing in a sequential series of multi-episode storylines. In short order, Chuck has to deal with the reappearance of an old girlfriend, try to track down his missing father so he can give his sister away at her wedding, find the original scientists who created the Intersect, deal with a CIA investigation into Sarah's ability to be his handler (given their growing closeness) and deal with a head-on confrontation with FULCRUM, a shadowy and criminal intelligence organisation.

This structure allows the series to sustain 22 episodes without becoming too tedious or repetitive, helped by enjoyable writing and great performances from the regulars and guest stars (Scott Bakula! Tricia Helfer! Chevy Chase!) alike. The writers aren't afraid to give real character development and growth to their recurring actors, particularly Zachary Levi and Yvonne Strahovski as Chuck and Sarah. Their will-they, won't-they relationship may be a long-running series cliche, but is given a few twists here (particularly the fact that Sarah is well aware of Chuck's feeling from the start) that makes it a bit more interesting. Particularly well-done is that it feeds Chuck's character growth, turning him from a listless nerd into a much more capable spy by the end of the season. Adam Baldwin also develops a bit more as action man John Casey over the course of the season, though surprisingly he doesn't have many episodes that focus on his character. Instead he is mainly used for macho comic relief, aside from some nice moments in the final episodes where he grudgingly admits to, if not liking, than at least finding Chuck mildly tolerable and useful.

As usual, the dramatic storylines are counterbalanced by a strong humour quotient. This usually manifests in storylines in the Buy More. Over the course of the season there are multiple changes in management, culminating in the power-crazed Emmett rising to dominance late in the season. We also encounter Lester and Jeff's synth-rock cover band (whose covers are...interesting, to say the least) and feel Morgan's pain as his mother embarks on a noisily passionate relationship with Big Mike. As with the first season, though it's not as prevalent this time around, there is the feeling that you could set a whole series in the Buy More with these characters and it would be just as much fun without the spy stuff.

Overall, the second season of Chuck (****½) is relentlessly entertaining. There are a couple of episodes that don't work quite as well as the others, but otherwise this is a terrific season of television which rarely flags or lets up the pace. The only problem is that by its end if feels like the series is pretty much over, and the addition of a few moments at the end of the finale establishing the direction of the third season feels a little incongruous: the series was very nearly cancelled after Season 2 and renewed at the last minute, explaining why the end of the season wraps everything up and then rather abruptly opens up again. The series is available now in the UK (DVD) and USA (DVD, Blu-Ray).

Chuck: Season 1

Chuck Bartowski works for a huge electronics store in Los Angeles, Buy More, but is still annoyed at being framed for a misdemeanour he didn't commit which led to him getting thrown out of Stanford University several years earlier. Bryce Larkin, Chuck's former best friend and the guy who framed him, sends Chuck a mysterious email which causes him to pass out. When he wakes up, he discovers that he has downloaded the Intersect - the entire American secret database on international criminals, terrorists and other restricted subjects - into his brain. With the Intersect itself destroyed and Larkin dead, this means that the CIA and NSA need Chuck to help them defend American interests. Thus, he is forced into a double life of maintaining his working life at the Buy More whilst also helping CIA agent Sarah Walker and NSA agent John Casey fight international crime using his subliminal knowledge.


Right from the start, Chuck puts its colours on the mast: this is going to be a show where the idea is to watch it and enjoy yourself, with even the vaguest hint of realism thrown out of the door. In an age where American network shows are being ignored in favour of 'edgy' cable series, it's a relief to find a show that is just so much damn fun.

Chuck works on a number of levels. The casting is excellent, with Zachary Levi making for an appealing protagonist, balancing geekiness with likability and a growing ability to cope with the crazy situations he's been thrown into. The ridiculously attractive Yvonne Strahovski makes for a great straight-woman as Sarah, who pulls off the 'coldly professional CIA agent' character well but then develops the role to become more conflicted in her loyalties as the season progresses. The mighty Adam Baldwin - Jayne from Firefly - is also great as Casey, whose first instinct in any situation is extreme violence. The supporting cast, notably Chuck's family and his fellow workers at the Buy More, are also well-cast and entertaining.

The show also has a great deal of geek-cred. One episode hinges on Chuck and his best friend Morgan (Joshua Gomez) being able to carry off their Halloween trick of dressing up as a sandworm from the Dune books, whilst in another Chuck reminisces on bonding with an ex-girlfriend over playing EverQuest. Another episode uses (classic 1980s text adventure) Zork references as a plot point. References range from the pretty obvious to the fairly obscure, and catching them is fun in itself.

The series follows the now-traditional structure of having a season-spanning arc mixed up with lots of stand-alone episodes. The arc is actually fairly slight (there are hints that the NSA are building the Intersect 2.0 and indicating that once it is ready, Chuck will be expendable) but there are some ongoing character arcs and developments from episode to episode that work quite well. One character point - that Morgan has a huge crush on Chuck's sister - is actually a bit stalker-ish in the first couple of episodes due to the writers overegging it, but they sensibly pull it back and then dispose of it after giving Morgan another girlfriend later on, resolving the issue before it becomes too much of a problem.

The individual episode storylines are mostly enjoyable, particularly the season finale in which the entire Buy More is cleared out after listening devices are discovered and the characters have to discover the fate of the store manager's stuffed fish. Something that is slightly problematic is that the somewhat mundane storylines at the Buy More or involving Chuck's family are often more enjoyable than the spy stuff, which is often formulaic (though always watchable). There are problems that ideas are reused a few too many times (particularly with Casey getting into trouble with a beautiful female agent which goes a bit wrong, which happens twice within a few episodes), but overall the series carries its stories off with aplomb. The show may actually have been helped by the first season being cut short by the 2007-08 Writer's Strike, allowing the producers to end the season early before too many more story points were revisited and prepare themselves for the second season.

The first season of Chuck (****) is very entertaining, amusing and nicely geeky, with genuine wit and charm overcoming its more formulaic and cliched elements. The show balances humour and drama quite well, and the overall package is highly enjoyable. The season is available now on DVD in the UK and USA.