Daily Writing, Day One "Chuck"

(Note-I'm trying to write more (daily, in fact), and I intend to have a short essay up here every day (or almost every day). Enjoy!

Tonight, the tv show Chuck is coming back. Somehow it has survived to its third year, and I'm very grateful that it has. The show may not have begun in the best of ways considering that I spent the first few minutes of the pilot shouting advice at the tv. I generally don't do that. But then a supercomputer program is downloaded into his brain, and becomes an asset protected by a NSA (Casey, played by Adam Baldwin) and a CIA agent (Sara, played by Yvonne Strahovski). Over the last two years Chuck, the man and spy, has grown, and now it appears he'll no longer have to sit in the car (the most repeated line in the first two seasons is "Chuck, stay in the car!"), but has become an agent in his own right.

The program has also grown. When the promos first aired it seemed the show would be nothing more than a form of wish fulfillment--the lonely geek whose life seems to be a dead end in a fictional version of a box store (The Buy More) geek squad (the Nerd Herd, catchy, isn't it?), and he is suddenly rescued from these doldrums by a beautiful blonde, becoming a geek James Bonds. It's more than that, really. All those things are true, but what it's really about is being a young man, talented, but drifting, with all the education you can buy (Stanford, in this case), leaves only him with a job that pay little better than minimum wage, and then suddenly thrust into a role of some kind of responsibility and trying to grow into it. It is a way that I often feel. I have my skills and ambitions, and I hope that this will all pay off.

Not only does Chuck find that the life of a spy not that it's all cracked up to be, he also discovers having a beautiful handler(hehe)/fake girlfriend also proves to be complicated. First, desire is real but cannot be expressed. Second, even if two people have the same sentiments, it does not mean that they can share these sentiments. These complications are ones that we all experience as we grow older. When we are young with infatuation as training wheels we think that our emotions will lead the and they will be 100% shared with the one we love. As we grow older we realize that love is really the emotional barometer of trust, which is our willingness to put our lives in the hands of others. As our trust in others fluctuates, so do our emotions. Love is really a game of trust, and we are left hoping that our gamble will be rewarded. This gamble does not always pay off in Chuck's new world as he tries to keep up with the parallels of relationships and spy-craft, with their covers, disguises and two-timing.

The show may seem to be superficial, but really it handles many difficult topics deftly, slyly, till only later you realize its depths. Chuck is first rate escapism--don't get me wrong--, but it escapes from our misconceptions to stranger and more covert facets of our lives.