Chris Fedak Discusses Season 3, the Season Finale & Season 4

Alan Sepinwall has a new interview with Chuck co-creator Chris Fedak where he talks about season 3 as a whole, the decision to give fans closure in 3.13, the real season finale, and much more.

I want to start by going back to “Chuck vs. the Other Guy.” Once upon a time, that was going to be the finale of the season, and that played to me like you guys said, “We got season 3 by the skin of our teeth, so just in case, let’s give our fans a real ending this time.” Am I reading that correctly?

Absolutely. When we were looking at season 3, we always knew that section of the story, those first 13 episodes, the end would be Chuck and Sarah together, and that we would build the whole season around that: Chuck wanting to be a spy and Sarah’s perspective on Chuck, and then culminating in that moment of Chuck’s first kill. The original iteration of the finale – we found out early enough when we were working on episode 13, so we were able to scale it back a little bit, but it was going to be a bit more of an epic battle on the Eiffel Tower. When we realized we were going to be airing that in the middle of the season, we scaled that back to the bridge scene, and I think that worked quite well. It was going to be more of an Intersect v. Intersect scene, like we did in in the season finale, episode 319.

But it would have ended either way with Chuck at least appearing to kill Shaw?

Yes.

Well, you spend the first 13 with Sarah concerned about the idea of Chuck killing anybody. And then we come to that point, and he does kill Shaw, and Sarah is okay with it, and understands that a Chuck who is a killer is still “my Chuck.”

Right. That Chuck is the same guy. Even though he’s a hero and done these amazing things, in the end he’s actually killed someone to save her live, he’s still the Chuck Bartowski who saved her life.

(Read the full interview on HitFix…)