The Big Bang Theory & Chuck Reviews

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The Big Bang Theory 4x21 'The Agreement Dissection'

- I am so very over the Penny vs Priya crap. I dislike Penny and the other girls’ bitchiness about Priya. I also dislike that Penny has been basically kicked out of the boy’s routine – that she doesn’t come to dinner as she has for the last four years, that she doesn’t join their activities. They’re her friends as well.

- I love that it means we’re really getting to see Penny having girlfriends. I love the Penny, Bernadette and Amy friendships. I would like more (and it kind of feels like they’re written by a guy who finds female friendships this weird alien unknowable mystery) but I do love how clearly the three of them like each other and how fun they have together. The scene at the bar was delightful. The three of them are fairly different but they just work really well. I love that Penny and Bernadette accept Amy for who she is.

- Definitely one of my favourite moments of the episode was Amy getting fed up with Sheldon, turning to Penny and saying “give me sugar, bestie” before kissing her (and a very chaste kiss at that) and then all three girls bursting into delighted giggles. It was adorable! ♥

- Bernadette is pretty great. Penny has had Sheldon getting her used to his and Amy’s type of personality for four years which explains Penny’s easy acceptance of her but Bernadette accepts her because she is just that sweet. I also think the two share a similar weirdness and that helps (plus she managed to get the best of Sheldon.) I continue to love Amy – her singing ‘I kissed a girl and I liked it’ in the cab made me giggle, her dancing was amusing and I loved her final scene with Sheldon. They were really the highlight of the episode. Although Bernadette turning down the guy who asked her to dance because she was engaged made me roll my eyes. He asked for a dance not a date.

- When Penny asked if Sheldon had ever kissed a girl for a moment I was so sure that he would end up being kissed by all three girls before the end of the episode. I’m kind of sad that it didn’t happen that way.

- Sheldon continues to be his usual entertaining self. I did feel sorry for him when Leonard and Priya turned the roommate agreement around on him but he kind of deserved it. Still I loved him blackmailing them at the end. Also Sheldon, as usual, got some great lines. “I don’t know how to process that” and “I saved a nun’s life why am I being punished” being the two that stick out.

- I wasn’t happy with Leonard ordering Greek because he knew Sheldon hated it even more than he did because that was just mean for the sake of being mean.

- I continue to like Leonard/Priya and I like how Priya is portrayed as an intelligent person who is a good and relatable person despite the bitchiness between her and the girls.

Chuck 4x22 ‘Chuck Versus Agent X’

This was an excellent episode. I really enjoyed it.

- I love that Volkoff is Agent X aka Hartley Winterbottom – the CIA scientist Stephen used the Intersect on first, who he created a cover identity for and then got lost in it. That is an excellent twist. The execution of the reveal, however, was a bit lacking. I figured out that Hartley was Alexei as soon as Chuck flashed on the house being in England but more importantly it really felt like the show dragged out the reveal to the end in a way that didn’t make sense. I mean they were with his mother. Did she not know what his new identity was? Even if she didn’t know why exactly doesn’t she have any pictures of her grown son in her house? Yeah, it’s been thirty years but he was in his twenties when she last saw him and those pictures should have been prominent.

- One issue with all of this is Mary’s role. She left Stephen and her kids when she went undercover with Volkoff and the beginning of this season was all about finding her. It appeared that Stephen spent his entire life trying to find her but never succeeded. And yet he also apparently spent his entire life also trying to bring back Hartley’s true personality. So how exactly do those work together? How could Stephen not know his wife had become Alexei’s right hand? Was Chuck right that Mary might have been trying to help Stephen return Alexei back to who he was? Was everyone wrong that Stephen didn’t know where Mary was this whole time? I hope we get answers about this.

- Casey was clearly smitten with Mrs. Winterbottom, “You’re the mother I never had” LOL, and his “I love this woman” pretty much describes how I feel as well. She was awesome. I loved her playing the ‘genial and helpless old woman’, I loved her taking over the gun and her utter glee at all the violence and mayhem. I mean she blew up her own house and laughed as she did it. It was awesome. She clearly had to have been a spy in her youth. M-15 or something. I feel like she’s kind of a homage to Mirren’s character in RED but I don’t care because I loved getting an older female character like this. I hope we see her again because she was fun. The fact that she’s Hartley’s mother and Vivian’s grandmother makes me think we will.

- I’m really glad that all the secrets between Chuck and Ellie are now out in the open and that Ellie is in on all the spy stuff now.

- Ellie’s bachelorette party for Sarah actually made me pretty sad. The two of them going off together to the spa for the day, happily, would have been much more enjoyable. Actually Sarah being so obviously down on a spa day and disappointed seemed off to me. I mean she already did her wild bachelorette party with the CAT squad; people who were actually her friends. I really think that she would have enjoyed having a quiet time with Ellie and found it more fun than a big party for the exact same reason that the actual party ended up making me sad: Ellie filled it with people but no one Sarah really knew or was close to. It was former co-workers for her cover that she’s clearly not close with as well as people she doesn’t even know from Ellie’s work. Even without the spy problems I don’t think Sarah would have had fun at the party. She would have had to be ‘on’ the whole time and wouldn’t have been able to relax at all. The whole thing just didn’t work for me. I’m going to attribute Sarah’s original disappointment to her hoping for her and Ellie to go out drinking and dancing or something more active than a spa day.

- Something I remembered when there was the whole confusion over the ‘agent X’ question was that scene, last season I believe, where a young Chuck (nine or so?) looks at Stephen’s Intersect computer and appears to ‘upload’ the Intersect. That was kind of a WTH scene and yet it was never brought up again. I really want to know what that was about and how that affected Chuck.