—Ellie I'm almost certain that my constant and incessant need to watch every, single sneak peek of the Chuck season five premiere practically spoiled my overall enjoyment of this episode. If you watched all the sneak peeks that were available, you could have almost guessed the plot… save for the small details, of course. So I'll try my best to critique the premiere while disregarding the lack of newness due to my own impatience. For the most part, "Chuck vs the Zoom" was just a setup to make Team Bartowski the underdogs yet again while establishing that the Intersect isn't what makes Chuck great — in fact, all along it's been Chuck that has made the Intersect great. Chuck is, and always will be, the man with a plan. And since we've only got twelve episodes left after the premiere, we can't have him moping around for the rest of them. So by episode's end, Chuck has realized this, but not too soon before The Eraser freezes Carmichael Industries's bank account. It's a move that has finally made the Buy More even remotely important, something the show has struggled with since late season three, but even then Chuck couldn't save Jeff and Lester from being non-important in their own right. The B-story, which includes the Buy Morons, have been largely uninspired since around the same time. In this episode, we got Jeff and Lester trying to scam people out of money… for absolutely no reason whatsoever (besides the obvious fact that everyone loves money). What made the Buy More great wasn't just Jeff and Lester's schemes and borderline grossness, it was the parallels they drew to the spy plot or at the very least how they interconnected somehow. Think back to the season two premiere, when Chuck is surrounded by bad guys and calls Morgan up on speaker who's back at the Buy More in a cage fight and lists the supposed and seemingly backup that Chuck has. Or Chuck and Sarah playing married couple in "Chuck vs the Suburbs" while Big Mike is going through a divorce. That's what I mean. … Read the rest of my review at NoWhiteNoise!
