It’s been a while since I last wrote about ‘Chuck’ here in the blog. While I’ve continued to follow the show, I don’t always get around to watching it with enough time to recap an episode before the next one airs. Now that the series has run its “Fall Finale,” I figure that this is a good time to check in and see where things are at.

A lot has happened over the course of this season. The Intersect in Chuck’s brain was scrambled. His mother Mary (Linda Hamilton) is actually a spy codenamed “Frost,” who may or may not be on the side of the bad guys. She claims to be working undercover to bring down the evil Alexei Volkoff (Timothy Dalton), but the CIA has no record of this, and her actions often seem contradictory. Chuck doesn’t know whether to believe her or not anymore. As he tells Sarah, “You want to be able to trust your mom, not worry that she’s gonna shoot you in the face.” Ain’t that the truth?

In ‘Chuck vs. the Leftovers’, Volkoff (who still doesn’t know that Chuck is Mary’s son) sends a group of assassins to take out Agent Carmichael. Because Chuck is basically defenseless without the Intersect, Frost has to intervene to save him, which of course prompts a “Come with me if you want to live” gag. They retreat to Castle to plan their next moves.

Meanwhile, the Buy More is having a Black Friday sale. The hot item of the season is a new 7G smartphone that can both send and receive phone calls! (That puts it several steps above my damn phone.)

Volkoff assumes that Frost has been captured by the CIA, so he and a group of his nogoodniks invade the Buy More to rescue her. They knock out Jeff and Lester, take them hostage, and then cut off all communication within the store and the CIA base. Eventually, even Casey is captured. This leads to a fun subplot in which Morgan, wearing a wifebeater and no shoes, has to play ‘Die Hard’ in the store’s duct system to rescue Casey and turn the CIA defenses back on. That doesn’t go as well as he might have hoped.

Soon, Chuck and Sarah have no choice but to surrender and pretend to turn Frost back over to Volkoff, who it turns out is madly in love with her. As he’s about to shoot Chuck, Frost intervenes again, this time by spilling the beans that he’s her son. She tells Alexei that she hid this from him because she was embarrassed to have such a black sheep in her family. Because Volkoff is basically nuts, he buys the story. Even better, when Ellie calls to check in on Chuck, Volkoff decides that they all need to get together for a big family meal of Thanksgiving leftovers. And if it doesn’t go perfectly, he’s going to kill everyone.

So Chuck, Sarah, Mary, and Alexei (pretending to be Mary’s MI-6 handler again) all show up for dinner with Ellie and Awesome, who have no idea what’s going on. An awkward game of Charades ensues. Chuck surreptitiously fills Awesome in, who tries very hard not to freak out too visibly. I really like the fact that super-competent Awesome is so terrible at the spy stuff.

At the end of the evening, Mary manages to both save her family and retain her cover with Volkoff. Even though they’re all safe again, Awesome is extremely mad at Chuck for putting them in danger. However, he gives Chuck the laptop that Ellie found in their father’s car. Chuck is able to activate it with a secret pass phrase only he would know, and the laptop runs a program that fixes the Intersect.

The final line: “Guys, I know kung-fu… Again!”

As far as I’m aware, the show is still scheduled to return for a second half to the season in mid-January. While ratings haven’t been great, the series is very fortunate to air on NBC, which still has nothing better to replace it with.