Chuck midpoint

A geeks wet dream. Take one superpower add a beautiful blonde who loves you for yourself and steadfast friends and you have the perfect fantasy for any self respecting geek. Yours included. What I didn't expect to find when I started watching it was a deep story.

Chuck starts out as an innocent everyday loser lacking in direction when an incident changes his life forever. Getting the intersect in his brain gave him the superpower to propell him out of his humdrum existence. From there with the support of his handlers Casey and Sarah he begins to explore what it means to be a spy. In doing so he realized that what he was doing with his life was not the dream he had wanted. Spying gave him the excitement he was craving and the beautiful girl many of us want.

Still deep in geek territory here Chuck in the second season began to realize the dangers that came with his new life. He was getting tired of the constant lying and yearned for the chance at a real life, much like us all, with Sarah at his side. She and Casey had been his mentors. Casey teaching him the hard lessons that come with real life and Sarah how to open up and be the hero he wanted to be. However the problem was he never chose to be the intersect. That power was an accident but he took on the responsibility of it. When he had the chance to lose it he took it in a heartbeat and was ready to begin a real life, away from lies and loss of life. He wanted Sarah to join him but her journey wasn't like his. At the end of the second season Chuck chose to be a hero and accepted all the responsibilities that came with it.

The third season of Chuck begins his hero journey. He loses the girl and is forced down a direction that would have been unthinkable in the beginning. Sarah can't help but feel an intense regret at what she has done to this innocent man and can't stand to be reminded of her guilt in destroying a good man. Chuck is following his heroic journey and when he finally reaches the end his ability to protect his family will be realized and he will become an equal for Sarah not reliant on her.

 Sarah however is on her own journey which is quite different from Chuck's. She was his mentor, his Merlin. As such she wants him to succeed and grow but knows she must let him go to fail or succeed on his own. When he does exactly what he was groomed for she can't bear to see what she has done. Her journey is different from Chuck's. Her hero's journey is over and she accepts her place in the world. When she meets him he rocks what she believed was acceptable and forced her to examine what she's always believed was solid. When she takes a step out of her comfort zone and tries to run away with Chuck his rejection almost destroyed her. She couldn't trust before and when she opened up she was hurt again. Chuck sliding deeper into the spy life to the point of killing someone, or rather to be seen killing someone when he actually didn't, was the final straw. She didn't want anything to do with the man. He is lost to her.

What about the rest? The Buy More members are mostly static. Morgan is beginning to parallel Chuck's journey. He had been shown the truth and is starting his own heroic journey but his story is played more for the comedy. Jeff, Larry and Big Mike are also quite flat. They are there as the fool, a way to show real life. As such they are the worst that it could be but still realer than Chuck. His sister is still the innocent while Devon can't handle the truth. He was happy where he was and his world made sense. Now he can't handle it but he's trying.

Each of their stories are not enough to hold a series as a hole but together they give us something special. For a geeks dream come true to sophisticated storytelling Chuck has everything.

And I'm only half way through. I'm excited to see where they will go from here and how the characters will grow.