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A comment Kevan made the other day got me to thinking, what if _____ never happened? How would that have changed the Chuck’s (both the show and the character) trajectory? I know fan fiction deals with this concept frequently, but for those of us without the talent or desire to write a full-on story, consider these prompts for a brief spec in the comments.
What if…
- …Graham wasn’t killed at the beginning of season 2? How would that have impacted the Intersect project? Chuck and Sarah’s relationship? Casey’s character development? Beckman’s relationship with Team Bartowski?
- …Chuck has followed through on the plan to run away with Sarah in Prague? Would the show have become “The Fugitive”?
- …Casey had to follow through on the kill order? Could he have done it? Would he have become the villain as Chuck tried to stay a step ahead?
- …Bryce and Sarah were never partners? Would Sarah have met Chuck?Assuming Bryce was still involved in Chuck’s life, would he have met Sarah AFTER Chuck did?
- …Chuck had let Sarah talk by the fountain, at all, ever, in season 1? Seriously.
These are just a few of the “what if” scenarios we could play with all summer. Feel free to post your own in the comments.
What if NBC had placed Chuck in a less-murderous time slot three years ago?
It didn’t start out this bad but over the second through fourth season it was quite lethal.
Seriously – that has to be the worst spot in primetime. To (probably incorrectly) quote Mr. Bartowski himself, “Monday nights can be such a wasteland.”
well, now they are. But Fridays in the fall are going to be awesome… 😀
What if the writer’s strike never happened? Chuck seemed to be on an upward trend prior to that.
I’m still steamed about the 9 lost eps to the strike. Never get them back.
i thought that the beginning of season 2 were the episodes that were suppose to be the end of season 1 but moved because of writers strike….but ya i would be so much happier with 9 more episodes
Haha! What if Chuck’s hatred for Bryce was so intense that he immediately deleted his email without opening it?
lol good one but there wouldnt have been much of a show.
What if Morgan hadn’t stolen that condom?
Or what if cooler heads hadn’t prevailed and Sarah ended up pregnant…
I’d love for Sarah to be pregnant
I sometimes wonder how the show could have developed without the intersect 2.0. It was clearly a story device to bring Chuck to the level of “super spy” but could that have occurred without it or using some other story device…?
I would have loved to see this played out. I think Chuck could have become a spy without the 2.0; just a different sort of spy. The character today still works most things out without the 2.0’s add-ons; seeing the ‘hero’s journey’ achieved on his own abilities would have been worth seeing.
There were two major events that I think were horrible mistakes from a story telling perspective.
Intersect 2.0 became a deus ex machina. It changed the entire nature of the show. S1 and S2 worked so well because C/S were complete opposites. Chuck was a fish out of water in spy land and Sarah was a fish out of water in real person land. Them helping each other with their limitations was the romance of the show. That one event killed it, IMO.
Chuck stiffing Sarah at Prague was so ooc that it made you wince. Is this the Chuck we’ve been pining for her for two years? And now that she’s willing to be with him, he’s going to shove the ticket in her hand and walk away? No way. Then compounding it, he starts to pine for her again in the very same episode. Then, just when she’s ready to forgive him, he goes off on his first solo mission and comes home with a new girl.
Hard to root for that guy.
Those two events led to some silly stories in S3 with characters that we didn’t recognize… or like. Just to milk wt/wt for one more season. They were such mistakes that the show will never fully recover from them.
well they couldnt have chuck quit being a spy and it led to it being a point where they couldnt have a fake relationship anymore so if they were to get back together it would have to be real which it was and it paid off
Wow Bill, very, very well said. That captured my thoughts exactly.
I have to add a third one in for season two that is my personal pet peeve, it’s that the overall flow just was not there. From the Buy More sub plot to the fact that Morgan went above and beyond being blind at what was happening. Nothing seemed to flow well, and that put I think a lot of people off the show, never to recover.
JC
Considering that leaving with Sarah would have meant leaving all of his family and friends, people he had been shown to be intensely loyal too and which had stood by him for far longer than Sarah had, I don’t think that rejecting Sarah in Prague was out of character.
But then again, I’m part of the minority of people who only really started liking Chuck after The Intersect 2.0. I had watched the first two seasons on DVD (and skipped through most of the sections with the Buymore) but I had previously been turned off by the fact that Chuck was still a fish out of water after two year. I also pretty much only liked Sarah because Chuck did during the first two seasons. She was too hard to read as a character, and she seemed too eager to tell Chuck whatever he needed rather than speaking her own mind or really showing anything about her own personality.
But that’s who Sarah was. She was a professional spy who was there to do her job, and not become a ‘normal person’.
Mel, I particularly like the last one: Did he ever let her get a word in? lol
I’ll second the fifth one. Hilarious, Mel. 🙂
The time I would have liked to see Chuck let Sarah speak at the Fountian was early S2 in Break-Up.From Marlin to the end of Break-Up, Chuck had broken down Agent Walkers walls I would love to know what she wanted to say before he broke her heart and told her they could never be together because she could never be normal.
What if… the writers stuck with the original concept developed in Seasons 1 and 2 on how the Intersect worked. What if… the kill order and government mistrust developed in Season 2 wasn’t swept under the rug in Season 3. What if… Chuck and Sarah ran away in Prague (heck, why even go to prague, just runaway). What if… the Ring was established as a real threat in Season 3. What if… Shaw was a bad guy from the getgo sent by Beckman because shouldn’t wasn’t sure Casey would execute the kill order? What if… the government uses Ellie/Devan as levarage against Chuck?
If it created a Fugitive arc instead of a PLI trapezoid, without becoming The Fugitive, I think Aces would have been happier with the show since Season 3. I would have loved to have seen a rogue Intersect 2.0 arc that ended with a more genuine resolution of the government mistrust plotline.
Alas, hindsight is 20/20 and what I like may not be what others might like but chew on this: Given where they’re at with the show going into Season 5 now that Team Bartowski are freelance spies, what if… They hadn’t blown up Orion’s cave?
Where is this freelance spy agency going to get it’s missions from? Seems like Orion’s cave could have been the source for a lot of stories with this plotline. Seems like the writer’s shot themselves in the foot when they wrote that out of the story.
Agreed on Orion’s base. There could have been seasons worth of material there. I hoped that stuff was in Orion’s laptop, but since that version of the Intersect got uploaded all over the place, it clearly didn’t.
What if Mary never left? “Screw that, I’m not leaving my kids motherless for Volkoff.”
What if Hartley wimped out on that Intersect upload?
What if Alex Coburn had decided to come home to Kathleen instead of going with Keller?
what if Roan had decided to meet and settle down with Diane instead of leaving for Morocco?
What if Chuck did get drafted into that Omaha project?
What if Sarah decided not to shoot Evelyn Shaw?
Ech, so many “what ifs”, and those are only from the top of my head…
In Chuck vs The Predator, what if Jeff and Lester hadn’t thought of targeting the Beverly Hills Buy More instead of Burbank?…
Game over.
wait, come to think of it, Morgan was the one with the idea.
I think we actually know the answer to the “what if…” question about Chuck and Prague. If Chuck and Sarah DO runaway together, we get Chuck Versus the Honeymooners.
I think the writers actually storyboarded it that way once they knew they’d get more episodes for Season 3. The original 13 are what happened when Chuck said no to Sarah in Prague. The extra six, starting with Honeymooners, are essentially what happens if Chuck and Sarah DO run away together. They end up on a train, meet a purported bad guy, and realize they were meant to be together as spies.
A nice, practical example of the “many worlds” theory of quantum mechanics. And you thought Chuck was just a silly show 🙂
what if young chuck didnt play on his dad computer in chuck vs the ring part 2 would his dad still be working on the intersect now
yes because he was trying to fix Volkoff who was intersected before chuck was born
What if Sarah had said no to the proposal?
I know the answer to that one – 4 million angry fans outside NBC offices with torches and pitchforks.
1. What if Ellie uploaded the Intersect instead?
2. What if John/Alex had gone home to Kathleen?
3. What if Anna Wu was actually recruited for field work and that’s why she left Morgan?
4. What if Casey [temporarily] got the Intersect?
5. What if Forrest had succeeded in seducing Devon?
how about this one what if Ellie had saved Papa B
What if Chuck saved Sarah in the finale but he didn’t have that little USB of Agent X? Because he gave the untraceable passports and stuff to Vivian so Team Bartowski would’ve all gone to jail!! :O
What if Morgan did not download the intersect?
Kind of early to talk about that one since we have no idea what he can do with it or if it’s even functional.
Then I’d be a happy camper 🙂
what if Sarah really was replaced as Chuck’s handler? Would Chuck have quit the CIA? Would he have followed her?
OR
What if Bryce had sent to intersect to Jill?!
One of the things that I feel hurt the show early on, was the way the writers dealt with Sarah’s shooting of Mauser in cold blood.
The writers, when they returned from the Holiday break that yr, basically took one of the most powerful moments in the shows short history, Sarah’s shooting of Mauser in cold blood & resolved in a 1 ep two minute segment.
Sarah did not kill Mauser, because she was an agent protecting the intersect.
Sarah killed Mauser, because he and Fulcrum were a threat to the man she loved. That ep. was Sarah’s first real admission to herself, I think, how much she loved Chuck. She could no longer fight it or hide it.
Chuck seeing Sarah kill Mauser, also, changed his perception of her.
It would have been great storytelling I felt, had they made that a real Dramatic & Lengthy plot point for the two of them. Had they written t out as they should have. Dealing with the big Dramatic shooting of Mauser, the way that the writers did after the Holiday break, was just terrible in my opinion, to treat it like no big deal. This event, & the ridiculous new love interests yet again for the two of them, in the 1st half of S 3. Especially, Sarah & Shaw’s supposed Attraction, are two events that have really hurt this show in my view.
BMB.
What if jeffs name was moe. Would jeffster be molester?