Post by DM: Dersite Merchant on Feb 4, 2012 0:18:40 GMT -5
Phew. [wipes brow] Done! Last version of this app pulled Chuck from post Season 3; this one takes him clear from post series finale; after all five seasons. If you don't want to take the time reading all of this, perhaps a lighter read like War and Peace...
Full Name: Charles Irving Bartowski
Nicknames: Chuck, Charles Carmichael, The Intersect
Age: 30
Height: 6'4"
Weight: I can't find Zachary Levi's weight
Gender: Male
Race: Human
Alliance: Good
Home: Burbank, California, USA
Franchise: Chuck
Physical Description: Chuck is Caucasian with dark, wavy hair, and brown eyes. He'll wear a variety of outfits, though his most seen outfit is his Buy More uniform consisting of an untucked short-sleeved dress shirt; a gray tie; a pocket protector with Nerd Herd name and logo, his name and photo, and a barcode; black dress pants, and gray chucks.
Weapons: Generally anything he can get his hands on and "flash" on (see Abilities/Powers), though he generally sticks to non-lethal weapons. His weapon of choice, however, seems to be the tranq gun, which he's proven himself highly accurate even without flashing.
Abilities/Powers: Due to his high memory capacity, Chuck's brain is able to contain an entire database of FBI/CIA/NSA data in the form of subliminal imagery--this database is known as the Intersect. The Intersect's primary ability in a human host is the ability to recall intelligence of a particular subject--such as a person or object of interest--if he sees or hears a distinct feature, object, or sound related to it or some specific keyword. If the Intersect recognizes something Chuck sees or hears, he will "flash" on it, meaning the Intersect will show pull up a rapid-fire display of pictures and documents explaining the subject. One can tell when Chuck has flashed if they know the subtle hints to look for, such as Chuck briefly going slightly cross-eyed and fluttering his eyelids, rapid wide-eyed blinking, or suddenly exhaling and catching his breath. Another clue is Chuck suddenly showing fear as as result of flashing on something dangerous. Otherwise, there's little external indication of such an event occurring.
An ability of the Intersect revealed in "Chuck vs. the Dream Job" allows Chuck to crack computer codes humans normally cannot crack without running them through a computer merely by concentrating on the visual of the code.
After Chuck downloads Intersect 2.0, he's given the additional power of flashing on abilities. In other words, if he sees or hears anything related to any known trained ability--from kung fu to speaking Thai--he will be able to do it. However, these abilities are always only temporary, and if Chuck isn't in control of his emotions, the Intersect can completely take over his actions. There have, in fact, been times when Chuck has flashed on combat abilities at the most inopportune moments and had to struggle not to hurt someone.
After Chuck arrived on Dimensional Island, the Interdimensional void seemed to have an odd effect on the Intersect data in his head. Chuck can now somehow recall intel on objects, individuals, events, and skills he comes across on the island from any universe that contributes to it, even though most of it would likely have never been put into the Intersect in the first place.
Skills: Chuck displays a number of skills even without having to flash on them. These include expert-level computer programming and home electronics assembly--both of which he puts to work for the Nerd Herd--as well as accuracy with firearms (as long as they're the non-lethal variety, such as tranq guns). Chuck can also display effective leadership skills as long as he's in his comfort zone rather than some chaotic life-and-death situation, and nearly the entire Buy More staff look up to him despite the fact that he's merely one of the Nerd Herders.
Personality: Chuck is an intelligent, thoughtful, and modest young man who just wants the best for his friends and family. He had a pretty bright outlook on his future during college until his roommate framed him of cheating and his girlfriend reportedly slept with said roommate. After that, Chuck's self confidence crashed and burned, leaving his sister Ellie and friend Morgan concerned about him. Things started to look up when Chuck met Sarah, but things quickly turned terribly frightening when Chuck learned who she worked for and why she was sent after him.
At the start of the series, Chuck was often very finicky and hated being around gore, needles, or guns. While he's gotten considerable less finicky, Chuck's aversion to guns never really left. As such, he prefers to use the more non-lethal tranq guns. But if a loved one's life is on the line and there is absolutely no alternative, he will kill to save them. While he hates having to keep secrets from those in his personal life, he wants to protect them too.
Early on in his spy career, Chuck created the alias Charles Carmichael for himself. Carmichael was every bit as smooth, confident, and successful as Chuck wasn't. Nonetheless, as he continued to help the government with the missions they gave his team, and with some confidence boosts from Sarah, Chuck has slowly grown into that role. However, Sarah has recently started to wonder if that sweet and honest guy she'd grown to like was starting to disappear as a consequence.
History: Perhaps to better understand Chuck's history, we should dwell into the history of that which has become a major part of him in the recent years: the Intersect.
CIA engineer Stephen J. Bartowski lead the government project in the 1980's to create a powerful intelligence database that could criss-cross data from the different intelligence communities (CIA, NSA, FBI, you get the picture) to find patterns the agencies themselves could not. The data was stored in the form of subliminal images, and if someone with strong enough memory recall were to view these images they'd be able to later draw on its data by seeing trigger images or hearing keywords. This database was called, of course, the Intersect. Stephen and his team worked in secret, referring to each other by Greek mythology based codenames--Stephen's own codename was Orion. According to Stephen himself, he didn't necessarily design the WHOLE Intersect, "just the really cool parts."
Stephen knew how the subliminal imagery worked--in fact, he'd uploaded a prototyped Intersect into his own head as a field test; the data is still in his head to this day. But what he didn't know was that the government was planning on using his invention to create an army of super soldiers. He had learned the whole truth, though, by the time he'd completed the original cipher, the Intersect's "brain" essentially. Knowing that when word got out to hostile agencies of the super soldier possibilities his family could be put in jeopardy, Stephen purged his personal files and went on the run.
In Stephen's family were two children: Elanor Fay Bartowski, or Ellie, and her four-year-younger brother, Charles Irving Bartowski, or Chuck. Chuck was a fairly successful student in school and lived a pretty decent life, though their father had been described as "never really there." Some point during Chuck's childhood, he'd stumbled upon a prototype of the Intersect in his father's office and unwittingly started a test run. Though the run shut down halfway through due to system failure before it could upload any actual intel into young Chuck's brain, the fact that Chuck was still "okay" after processing all the data that had managed to get through made Stephen (who'd just arrived after the fact) realize there was more to his son than meets the eye...
Around when Chuck was in 5th grade, their mother supposedly got sick of Stephen's behavior and left. With Stephen as inattentive as he was, Ellie and Chuck learned to take care of each other. Since the age of six, Chuck had been best friends with Morgan Grimes. While Morgan has been considered annoying by some (especially Ellie, whom he had a huge crush on), he was always there to support Chuck during bad times, such as their mother leaving. In return, Chuck was always there to bail Morgan out when he got himself in trouble. It was sometime after their mother left that Stephen felt his proximity with his children would put him at risk. As a result, he snuck away on the night he promised them pancakes for dinner. Not knowing of his work for the government, his children assumed he'd merely abandoned them.
After graduating high school, Chuck enrolled in Stanford on an engineering scholarship. There, he and his roommate, Bryce Larkin, hit it off immediately over their mutual interest in programming and love of the text-based RPG Zork. In fact, the two would go on to create their own version of the game. Bryce offered to introduce Chuck to his friend Jill Roberts, but Chuck ended up meeting her anyway when she dropped her books on the way to class. The two became friends for awhile before eventually going out. Chuck excelled in his college courses, and his amazing memory recall rate made him an exceptional candidate for a CIA military project in Omaha. But Chuck never got the message from Professor Flemming about the interview, because the already recruited Bryce Larkin--feeling that CIA work would destroy Chuck's innocence--kept it from him. "You can't put him out on the field! He won't survive!" Bryce insisted, but Flemming explained his test records were too good for him to keep Chuck from the CIA. In order to protect Chuck, Flemming and Bryce set things up to look like Chuck had cheated on those tests, and he was expelled from Stanford as a consequence.
Unaware of the real motives behind Bryce's actions for "framing him," Chuck felt deeply and personally betrayed. Things got worse when rumors began circulating that his girlfriend Jill and Bryce slept together, and Chuck's self esteem spiraled downward. Shortly after his expulsion, Chuck took on a job as a retail salesman ("greenshirt") at the electronics store Buy More. He went on with this job for some time before the manager, "Big Mike" Tucker, began noticing his skills with computers. Big Mike then promoted Chuck to the store's electronics repair team, the Nerd Herd. Ironically, despite not having a lot of confidence at the time, Chuck became a sort of de facto leader of the Nerd Herd, and even some employees outside of the team began looking to Chuck for guidance. This included his old childhood friend, Morgan Grimes, who stayed in retail after Chuck's promotion.
On Chuck's 25th birthday, Ellie tried helping him get over Jill by inviting real women (mostly her coworkers at the hospital) to his party, but his baggage leftover from Bryce and Jill's betrayal drove all potential partners away. It was on that night that Bryce broke into the room in the Directorate of National Intelligence containing the Intersect computer. After copying all the intel from the computer to a handheld and destroying the original, Bryce escaped the building while attaching the stolen data to an e-mail. By the time he reached the parking lot, he was shot down by NSA's Major John Casey but not before commanding his handheld to send the e-mail to Chuck and subsequently self-destruct. The e-mail was encoded with a challenge from Zork, which Chuck (not knowing anything about the e-mail's contents or Bryce's spy life at the time) answered as if playing their own version of the game (Bryce encoded it this way to that anyone else who viewed the e-mail wouldn't gain access to the data). As soon as Chuck answered the challenge, the Intersect data flowed out onto his monitor, and he inadvertently uploaded it into his brain. The following day, Chuck began having flashes regarding the visiting General Stanfield and and a Serbian demolitions expert named Vuc Andric and began to wonder what the heck was wrong with him.
Although the government lost the original data and the copy Bryce had made, they were able to trace the e-mail to its recipient. As a result, both the NSA and the CIA independently sent their best agents--John Casey and Sarah Walker, respectively--to track down Chuck and retrieve the data he got. Sarah observed him at his workplace by posing as a customer with a broken phone. After Chuck made quick work of the repair, and then went to help a little girl whose father forgot to use digital tape in his digital camcorder to record her ballet sequence, Sarah found herself interested in his affable and well-intended personality. Sarah made plans to break into his apartment and steal his computer, but she left a card with her number just in case the need for a back-up plan would arise. And arose it did, as when Chuck caught a "ninja" trying to steal his computer, the resulting scuffle destroyed it. After some hesitation from Chuck (still brooding over Jill), she managed to land a date with him in the hopes of learning if he had an external drive.
The date, however, went downhill fast when Major Casey and his team arrived, and Sarah was forced to drag him away and then disclose everything when things became too suspicious for him. During a Mexican standoff between Sarah and Casey on a heliport with Chuck in the middle, Sarah listened to Chuck explain how he opened the e-mail and realized he'd uploaded the data. With a few more flashes, Chuck finally put all the clues together and concluded that Andric was going to bomb Stanfield at a conference he was speaking at. After locating the bomb, Chuck was able to defuse it because he was familiar with the computer model and knew of a deadly virus Morgan had destroyed the display copy at the Buy More with. Not fully understanding how these flashes were triggered, the government decided it was best to leave Chuck in his regular life and leave Sarah and Casey there to protect him. However, disclosed to no one but Casey, their superiors had decided that once the Intersect was rebuilt, Chuck would be too great a liability to let live.
At first, though, the government attempted to see if the Intersect data could be removed from Chuck, to which they enlisted NSA scientist Dr. Jonas Zarnow. Unfortunately, Dr. Zarrow turned out to be a traitor who planned on selling Chuck and all the secrets in his head to hostile nations. The whole scenario brought to surface some trust issues between Chuck and his handlers, but it also ultimately quelled them. While Casey maintained a cover as a greenshirt at the Buy More and Sarah as the counter girl of the local Weinerlicious and Chuck's girlfriend, Chuck would occasionally accompany them on black op missions and use the Intersect intel to help them. He was always told to "stay in the car," but it never worked out that way; "It's never safe in the car," Chuck had told them when they found him once being dangled out a several-story window by a mercenary.
While Chuck and Sarah's relationship was just a cover and both knew it, they still had growing feelings for each other. This may be why Chuck felt so betrayed when he learned from her DEA "friend" that Bryce Larkin was not only her CIA partner but also her lover. That only made things even more complicated when the team caught a smuggling ring sneaking a surprisingly alive Bryce back into the country in a hibernation casket. When brought to a CIA medical center, Bryce refused to talk to anyone but Chuck, and he subsequently "kidnapped" his old college buddy when the finally met. It was during the elevator ride down that Chuck ran into a one Tommy Delgado and flashed on the hostile splinter organization known as Fulcrum. After a scuffle or two, it was finally revealed that Bryce had really blown up the Intersect computer and sent its data to Chuck to keep it out of Fulcrum's hands. After Chuck helped keep Bryce from getting recaptured by Fulcrum, who currently believed he'd uploaded the Intersect himself, Bryce went underground.
About a year later, the government had been nearing completion of the new Intersect computer. But production had to halt when the computer's "brain," the Cipher, was stolen by a Fulcrum-hired mercenary (mentioned earlier during the "stay in the car" part). Team Bartowski managed to recover the Cipher, but Colt's men managed to steal it again before the team broke into their Burbank-stationed base to retaliate. Unfortunately, while they managed to capture the mercenary, all they got was a Trojan horse Cipher and didn't realize this until too late. Casey's orders to terminate Chuck had been set to activate as soon as the new Intersect did, but they were thankfully cancelled the moment the fake Cipher blew up the new Intersect, killing CIA Director Langston Graham. While Team Bartowski managed to recover the real Cipher, the government was still back to square one. Of course, Chuck still has no idea how close to death he'd been.
Upon retrieving the real Cipher, the government discovered that Fulcrum had also gotten away with an "Intersect Refresher"--a drive with updated data for the new Intersect--and had hired a software magnate to decode it. To Chuck's shock and jealousy, Bryce had come out of hiding to work with the team to recover the drive and would be posing with Sarah at one of the software magnate's parties as an affectionate couple. When Chuck ran afoul with the Fulcrum agent dealing with the magnate, Sarah broke ranks to save him and was critically wounded as a result. Bryce told Chuck it was her feelings for him that nearly killed Sarah, convincing Chuck that maintaining a professional relationship was best for both of them. On his way back into hiding, Bryce left Chuck with a pair of sunglasses "for a real spy," which Chuck didn't realize contained a copy of the Intersect Refresher until after he put it on and uploaded it.
A month following the missions to retrieve the Cipher and Refresher, Chuck ran into Jill, whose boss named Guy LaFleur he flashed on to be working on a deadly bio-weapon. The CIA made Chuck look like a successful business man to help him get back with Jill to find out more about the bio-weapon, but his coworkers Jeff and Lester inadvertently blow his cover. When it is discovered LaFleur was trying to expose the creation of the bio-weapon to prevent Fulcrum from using it and then a Fulcrum agent defenestrated the scientist, a disguised Sarah had to go to the hearing in his place. The Fulcrum agent released the bio weapon at the hearing, and when Chuck went to his ex-girlfriend for help, she wouldn't listen and Chuck was forced to expose his "Charles Carmichael" persona to her. In the end, the two were able to reverse-engineer an antidote and save everyone. Chuck and Jill began a secret relationship under his and Sarah's cover one, much to Sarah's discomfort.
Team Bartowski infiltrated the late LaFleur's apartment to find a list of undercover Fulcrum agents and, after following a series of clues, found the encrypted drive. Chuck ended up taking the drive from the team's base, Castle, to ransom for the captured Jill, and the drive was subsequently destroyed. Fortunately, Chuck managed to create a copy with one of Moragn's software pirating drives. Unfortunately, he learned from Sarah and Casey that Jill had been one of the Fulcrum agents listed. A series of events, coupled with some manipulation of circumstances here and there, led to Jill and her handler infultrating and taking over Castle, but Chuck was able to take the base back and arrested Jill after she nearly killed Sarah.
The following Christmas Eve, the Buy More was crashed into at the end of a highly publicized car chase and the entire staff--along with Ellie and her finance, Devon Woodcomb ("Captain Awesome")--were held hostage by the seemingly inept criminal Ned Rhyerson. Sarah and Casey snuck into Buy More via the tunnel behind the break room lockers, but when Ned discovered the two, he "accidentally" shot Casey's toe, leaving him with a limp. A hostage negotiator named Lt. Frank Mauser managed to convince Ned to release two hostages--Sarah and Casey. When Chuck flashed on Mauser, though, he realized the whole thing had been set up to find out what the CIA and NSA were protecting at the Buy More. To protect his friends and family, Chuck admitted to Mauser he was the Intersect, not Bryce. When Sarah and Casey manged to put the clues together themselves, they managed to stop Mauser from driving off with Chuck, which led to a chase between Sarah and Mauser in a tree farm. Sarah knew from Mauser's gloating that he now knew Chuck's secret and that he was high up in Fulcrum's hierarchy, so she shot him to prevent him to protect Chuck. She then told Chuck Mauser had been taken into custody, but Chuck saw the whole thing and was deeply disturbed that Sarah would lie to him about something like that. Chuck finally admitted to knowing the truth a few months later after a mission to save a seedy rock star from a nuke dealer. By the end of another mission involving getting the codes for a rogue military satellite from the kill screen of Missile Command, the CIA was able to collaborate with Stanford to award Chuck the three credits he'd missed out on due to expulsion needed to graduate. He received his degree in the mail soon after, which Ellie and Devon believe he'd earned taking online courses.
Team Bartowski went undercover in a suburban cul-de-sac where a Fulcrum couple lived. But when a string of hijinks led to Chuck uploading a sample of a Fulcrum Intersect, he came to realize only too late that the entire neighborhood was a front for the hostile agency. When the team was captured and the full Fulcrum Intersect successfully tried on Chuck (all previous guinea pigs died from intel overload), Chuck pretended to have been turned long enough for Casey to sneak into the control room and turn the Fulcrum team's own Intersect against them, incapacitating the lot. The team, aided by an undercover MI-6 agent named Cole Barker, later attempted to recover a drive with valuable information from one of the deceased agents and a Fulcrum-issue decoder to crack it. While Chuck managed to crack the chip on his own--and discovered it revealed his identity as Fulcrum's human Intersect, he also inadvertently foiled Cole's attempts to acquire the decoder and everyone but Casey was captured for torture. While Casey managed to free his partners with a strike team, Cole was later recaptured on the road. Given he knew at that point that Chuck was the Intersect, protective custody seemed imminent for Chuck.
Fortunately, the tortured Cole managed to escape and returned to Castle shortly before the team was assigned to hunt down a scientist codenamed Perseus who was believed to be behind the creation of the Fulcrum Intersect. Dr. Busgang (aka Perseus), as it turns out, was led to believe by his Fulcrum handlers that he was working on this Intersect for the legitimate government. And when Chuck managed to track him down and ask him whether or not the Intersect could be removed from the human brain, he told him only the chief inventor, "Orion", would know that but was shot dead by his handler before he could say anything else.
Determined to find the one man who could help him return to a normal life and disappointed by the government's inability to find this Orion, Chuck began an off-the-book search himself. When Stephen detected his own son's attempts at locating his CIA codename and dug in enough to discover he had the Intersect in him, he anonymously made contact with Chuck with plans to meet him in person. He'd hoped to reveal who he was then proceed to help him remove the Intersect. But these plans were hindered by both the government and Fulcrum's ongoing attempts to find him, which had been going on since he first went on the run. In the end, Stephen was forced to fake his own death via Predator missile to the helicopter he was supposedly on, before he had the chance to reveal himself to Chuck. However, he did leave with Chuck a "just in case I die" package containing schematics of the Intersect, supposedly to help him figure out how to get the Intersect out by himself.
Meanwhile, for some time, Chuck had also been trying to locate his father by his civilian identity (unaware at the two men were the same) so that he could walk Ellie down the isle at her wedding. When his search proved fruitless, Sarah ran her own off-the-books search for the man. As part of a Plan B, Stephen allowed Sarah to locate his civilian identity and covertly led to Chuck flashing on a flier for the launching of his old rival's new operating system, RIOS, which the CIA believed contained a virus. After a series of hijinks involving Chuck going undercover as a Roark Ind. employee to stall the launch, Chuck compared some of the Intersect schematics to an overhead sketch of the company complex to realize Roark had been building an Intersect. It was during Chuck's nighttime infiltration of the complex that Stephen was finally able to reveal he was Orion and proceed to modify Roark's Intersect to remove the one in Chuck. But as it turns out, Roark's Intersect was incomplete, and Roark had merely flushed Stephen out to capture him and have him complete it.
Chuck (with Casey's help) was able to convince their NSA superior, General Beckman, to assign Team Bartowski with the task of rescuing Stephen, provided Chuck didn't let his personal feelings get in the way. In order to locate where Fulcrum was holding him, Chuck resorted to promising Jill witness protection should she cooperate in the effort. Their attempt to get information from her "Uncle Bernie" failed when he tried to kill them before suffering a fatal heart attack at the sight of Chuck performing a defensive stance called "The Morgan," so the team tracked a phone call for Bernie to a Fulcrum facility they say Stephen is being held at. The team was identified though, when attempting to infiltrate the facility, and in the commotion, Jill overheard orders to move Stephen to a base called "Black Rock." While she doesn't know where that is, Chuck flashed on its location. Chuck then revealed the witness protection was a lie but helped her escape in return sneaking back to share what he learned with him. When It was found out that the team both failed to rescue Stephen and lost Jill, Beckman ordered Sarah to lure Chuck into a trap to be placed underground for his own protection. But when Chuck ends up pulling an Unintentional Guilt Trip on her, Sarah reveals the deception and tells him to ditch his GPS locater watch to go AWOL to search for Stephen.
Beckman was definitely not happy about the two going on the run and ordered Colonel Casey to track them down (giving him that promotion in the process). Chuck and Sarah made it to the town Chuck's flash told him Black Rock would be at, but they found nothing but a ghost town. It was at a motel they stayed at outside the town that Casey found them. And although they managed to work together and escape after Fulcrum agents ambushed them, Casey still arrested them. On their way out of the town, Chuck caught a covert message from his captive father regarding something at the old drive-in theater at midnight. Casey refused to turn around to check it out, but he contacted Beckman to inform her of what Chuck saw, and she in turn promised to look into it.
Meanwhile, Devon was starting to become wary of Chuck's absence and suspicious of Casey when he caught him snooping around Chuck's room for clues (prior to finding him and Sarah at Black Rock). Talking to two of Chuck's workmates at the Nerd Herd, Jeff and Lester, Devon came to the conclusion that Casey has been stalking Chuck and infiltrated his apartment with their help to learn why. While there, he tripped an alarm that alerted Casey back at Castle of the intrusion. Jeff and Lester, meanwhile, were trying to stir up trouble with the new tyrannical assistant manager, Emmett Milbarge, by blowing out a generator outside with a cherry bomb they found in Casey's locker, ultimately causing a city-wide blackout and unwittingly freeing Chuck and Sarah from their electronically-sealed cell. While they were ultimately able to prevent Casey from killing Devon, Chuck knew Devon had seen too much and disclosed his secret to him. He then asked him to "be awesome" by covering for him with Ellie.
After leaving Casey tied up in his own home, Chuck and Sarah left once again for Black Rock, eventually finding the underground bunker Stephen was being forced to work on the Intersect. Casey, however, managed to escape, but learned in the process that Beckman had decided it would be better to send an air strike to take out Black Rock despite the fact that they'd lose Stephen in the process, and ended up joining Chuck and Sarah when he located them again. While Sarah and Casey infiltrated the bunker to rescue Stephen, Chuck learned of Roark's plans to create an army of Intersect-encoded Fulcrum agents via the theater screen and snuck off to stop him. Ultimately, they were all captured and Roark's plan went on. But Stephen had pulled a fast one on them--instead of reconfiguring the Intersect for Fulcrum's desires, he reconfigured it to do exactly what he originally intended to do: remove the Intersect from Chuck. The team managed to escape Black Rock with both Stephen and the Intersect before the air strike came. Unfortunately, so did Roark.
Soon, Ellie's wedding to Devon was underway. Chuck, meanwhile, had quit the Buy More (along with Casey) to get away from Emmett who'd managed to connive his way to the manager position (leaving Big Mike working as a greenshirt). With Chuck free of both the Intersect and the Buy More, Beckman offered him a position as an analyst, but Chuck turned the offer down and claimed he wasn't a hero. At the wedding, Sarah checked to make sure Chuck had the rings before informing him that, due to his declining his offer, she would have to go away to work with the future new human Intersect: Bryce Larkin. Chuck's day was only made worse when Roark arrived promising to kill Ellie should Chuck not deliver the Intersect to him. Upon Chuck meeting with him, Bryce refused to hand over the Intersect to Fulcrum having made a promise not to for Orion (surprise! He'd been operating under Stephen's orders the whole time! The part about sending it to Chuck, on the other hand...), so he offered to give himself up since Fulcrum still believed he was the human Intersect. The team managed to detain Roark after a brief gunfight between the heroes and his Fulcrum team, which quickly turned in their favor when Casey's strike team arrived but destroyed the reception hall in the process. Not that it mattered, considering Jeff and Lester's performance of "Mr. Roboto" (called in by Morgan to stall the wedding when told Chuck forgot the rings, which he really didn't) set the sprinkler system off ruining the ceremony. In the end, Chuck made it up for his sister by using his government paycheck to buy her the small beach wedding she always wanted. Things were really starting to look up at that point.
But of course, plot twist! One of the men on Casey's strike team, Miles, executed Roark before killing all his teammates only sparing Casey in return for saving his life in the past. All Casey learned from Miles before he knocked him out cold was that he was with a hostile agency other than Fulcrum. At Devon and Ellie Woodcomb's lively reception, Sarah danced with Chuck, gently shooting down his denials of being a hero. While she contemplated turning down her offer to take part in the new Intersect project to go on vacation with Chuck, Stephen saw Bryce away while asking him about the new architecture of the Intersect the government had him re-reconfigure. When he asked Bryce what this new Intersect does, he only told him, "You don't want to know." Stephen, however, knew something was up when he flashed on the agent escorting Bryce away and learned he was supposed to be dead.
When Bryce made it to the room where the new Intersect was, he was ambushed by hostile agents and was fatally wounded before he could seal himself inside. While the recently arrived Sarah and Casey began a shoot-off with the agents, Chuck snuck into the Intersect room to find the dying Bryce who'd learned that Fulcrum was a subsidiary of the agency the spies outside worked for--the Ring. Bryce was meant to upload the Intersect into his own head before destroying it to keep it out of enemy hands, like the Ring, but he'd been killed before he had the chance. Chuck thought back over the past two years of the good he'd done and the encouraging words from his teammates, and he went on to fulfill Bryce's dying wish for him to destroy the new Intersect... right after uploading it into himself. The Ring failed to capture the Intersect, but the agents decided they could still execute the government agents that ruined that chance. But as everyone would learn that day, one of the new Intersect's capabilities was flashing on advanced abilities, and Chuck stunned everyone by defeating all the Ring agents with an impressive display of kung fu.
Chuck decided not to tell his father he'd uploaded Intersect 2.0, and Stephen left again believing his son's spy life was over. Over the next several months, Chuck went into spy training, which he essentially flunked due to his emotions getting in the way. But when Chuck managed to save his teammates when he and Sarah were captured by a Ring operative, Beckman allowed Operation Bartowski to continue. She also warned Sarah that Chuck's emotions will make Intersect 2.0 hard to control, and now instead od protecting Chuck from the world, they had to protect the world from Chuck. Devon, meanwhile, got involved with a mission to save a foreign premier from Ring assassination when he got mistaken for a spy and captured by the hostile organization. He was ultimately saved from their grip by CIA Agent Daniel Shaw, whom the Ring was tricked into believing Devon killed for them.
Shaw went on to help Chuck with his spy training and proved to be one tough teacher. One unorthodox method he used was sending the rookie on a surprise mission against two Ring agents on a first class flight en route to Paris. The item he ultimately acquired from them was the key to a lockbox the team had confiscated before Shaw even arrived that turned out to be full of Ring intel Shaw and his late wife had gathered. On that plane, Chuck met a young woman named Hannah who'd just recently been fired from her job and offered her a position at the Nerd Herd, which the newly deputized Assistant Manager Morgan would be able to back him on. Since Chuck and Sarah were broken up (both for real and in their cover), he began a relationship with Hannah, unaware that Morgan had feelings for her as well. Meanwhile, Shaw and Sarah seemed to be getting into a relationship themselves. However, when Chuck's spy life began putting Hannah in danger, he had to end it with her.
Despite his progress in his spy training, Sarah began worrying he was starting to lose all his best qualities in it; case in point when he burned his first asset, a lonely man the Ring had hired to reverse engineer what was left of the Intersect 2.0 computer. But the point was truly hammered home only following Chuck's final spy test, which involved killing a mole in the CIA--his "red test"; little did she realize, it was actually the recently decommissioned Casey's handiwork, made to look like Chuck's. In any case, Chuck had graduated to full genuine CIA agent, legitimately or not, and was given the option of choosing his own team. But the one partner he wanted most--Sarah--wouldn't join because she thought his spy training had killed away everything she liked about him... that is until Casey privately admitted to his "unsanctioned murder" to help Chuck pass his exam. Meanwhile, though, the director of the Ring had managed to track down Shaw and revealed to him that his wife was not killed by the Ring, as he thought, but by Sarah during her own red test. Driven insane by the grief, Shaw swore revenge.
With the nutty Batman Gambit he pulled, he would've succeed in revenge too had it not been for one small moment of dumb luck. Shaw managed to pull off one stunt made to look to chuck like a revenge attempt but was actually his way to forgive Sarah for supposedly being "played by the Ring;" this discredited Chuck in Beckman's eyes when he foolishly rushed in to save Sarah. Then, in a plan conceived between him and the director, he took the two with him on a mission to infiltrate the base and capture the director, and when the director pretended to lure the two into a trap, Shaw swooped in, took out the Ring agents and killed the director... or so Chuck and Sarah thought. They even made it out with the cipher to the Ring Intersect, which was flawed and diagnosed by CIA engineers. When Shaw took Sarah on a mission to Paris to find the lab the cipher was built in (Chuck was excluded, due to his fumbles before), he was actually taking her to the spot she killed Eve Shaw to kill her there himself in a form of poetic justice.
As stated, it would've worked had it not been for dumb luck: dumb luck named Morgan Grimes. Having learned about Chuck's spy life when he witnessed a small Ring cell infiltrate Castle base only to be defeated by Chuck, Morgan was shown footage of Shaw's fight at the Ring base and immediately noted the whole thing was staged, thanks to his experience with bad kung fu movies. Unable to convince Beckman, Chuck went to Paris to rescue Sarah himself (well, with the aide of Casey, who captured the Ring director). Shaw was skeptical that Chuck would be willing to kill him, but with Sarah's life on the line, Chuck shot Shaw three times in the chest and his body fell into the river blow. After Shaw was gone, Chuck and Sarah began dating exclusively. They believed they'd have to do it in secret, but in the end they returned to Burbank where Beckman discouraged but accepted the relationship. Casey, meanwhile, traded the captured director with Beckman for his old job back and an official spot on the team for Morgan.
With the exception of Chuck and Sarah's relationship, things returned to relatively normal. That is, until Chuck began having weird dreams he was convinced were trying to tell him things. At first, Chuck was deemed crazy until his dreams came true and the CIA concluded that the Intersect was working with his subconscious to create those dreams. But they also believed this was because the Intersect was putting stress on Chuck's brain, and the Intersect would eventually overwhelm Chuck to the point of insanity. Meanwhile, Stephen had returned to Burbank when Ellie sent him a coded message saying she missed him. In reality, she was calling him back home because a Ring agent posing as a CIA one convinced her that John Casey was an enemy agent who would harm her father unless she helped them put him into protective custody. The Ring's real aim was to get a device from Stephen called the Governor, which Stephen revealed to Chuck upon learning he'd uploaded the new Intersect could help keep it from overwhelming its user; he offered to make Chuck one. The Ring was unable to retrieve the Governor from Stephen, but they called a recovered and very much alive Daniel shaw to upload the newly completed Ring Intersect anyway.
Shaw's next Batman Gambit involved convincing the intelligence community he'd actually been acting as a double agent sanctioned by Beckman's higher ups and exposing Chuck's diagnostics from the CIA psychiatrist. When he flashed on intel from a past Team Bartowski mission, chuck saw but no one believed him, allowing Shaw to further convince everyone that Chuck was already going mad. Chuck managed to escape via help from his father who'd just completed Chuck's Governor, but Shaw managed to have Sarah and Casey detained and Operation Bartowski shut down, so Chuck went back to rescue his friends on the promise to Stephen they'd do this "the smart way." With help from Ellie, who'd learned from Devon and Morgan about Chuck's spy life, they found the Ring base that contained both the medical technology used to save Shaw from death and the Ring Intersect he uploaded. However, just when an Intersect fight was about to go down between Chuck and Shaw, the latter shot Stephen down to leave Chuck emotionally compromised.
With Chuck, Sarah, and Casey detained, Shaw put into motion the final steps to have the team executed. But Ellie, having secretly witnessed her father's murder, pulled up Devon and Morgan as back-up, tailed them until sheer dumb luck allowed the latter two to rescue Team Bartowski from death. Now on the run due to the intelligence community believing Shaw over Chuck, the team suggested going underground, but Ellie wouldn't hear it; she wanted justice brought to her father's killer. Contacting a detained Beckman, Chuck learned that the Ring Elders would be at an upcoming spy conference where Shaw would speak and covertly help them take over the entire intelligence community in a coup d'etat. Chuck was able to trick Shaw into exposing the Ring elders and simultaneously staged a public confession from Shaw by broadcasting it to the entire conference from what Shaw thought was a private room. But Chuck was unable to get back his Governor Shaw stole, because his flashes were getting more strenuous.
Shaw, now a fugitive, tracked Chuck back to the Buy More and rigged it with explosives he'd detonate unless Chuck faced him. In a massive kung fu battle, Shaw had the upper hand on chuck at first due to the stress the latter's Intersect put him him, but Chuck managed to rise up and defeat him. Morgan, meanwhile, found the detonator but accidentally dropped it. The store, however, had already been evacuated already by then, and the government personnel inside managed to escape before the whole place blew. The blame for the Buy More explosion was unwittingly placed on two... ahem, eccentric Buy More employees who suggested to their boss burning the store down to save their jobs and appear to be heroes (don't ask, please). Chuck, meanwhile, got his Governor back and quit the spy life, which Beckman agreed to. He was still allowed to keep a tranq gun or two for self defense in a debt of gratitude for saving the intelligence community.
Then he learned from a posthumous video from his dad about his intelligence work outside the government to find Chuck's missing mom, and of adversaries of his that Chuck would no longer be safe from now that he was dead. Despite not working for the government anymore, Chuck took up Orion's mantle and began using the clues he'd already gathered to search for his mother, pulling Morgan into the hunt with him. Their efforts quickly led them to the Russian arms dealer Volkoff Industries; the same arms dealer Sarah and Casey were investigating. After they got caught up in each other's missions, Sarah and Casey agreed to help with the search behind Beckman's back. As the search goes on, Chuck learns from Casey's old team turned traitors and Sarah's old rival that Mary Bartowski worked as Volkoff's right hand woman going by the code name Frost and supposedly never left his side.
Mary, as it turned out, was working deep undercover to bring down Volkoff Industries from within. Allegedly. But when the government found evidence otherwise, and she was arrested and put in lockdown in Castle just as she was about to meet again with her recently declared pregnant daughter. There was only one way to prove Mama B's innocence: find her MI-6 handler Gregory Tuttle, who could present a file on her mission to prove as such. Chuck and company took the disc to the only computer he knew could run it--one in his father's secret basement lab--but found the disc to be empty. This was all a ploy set up by Tuttle, who was really Alexei Volkoff, and he and Mary had Chuck's Intersect wiped and him and Sarah tied up before blowing the lab sky high. Mary, however, secretly slipped them a means of escape before leaving with Volkoff.
Ellie, meanwhile, wound up in possession of one of her dad's advanced laptops containing information on the Intersect. Without knowing the full story (particularly her brother's involvement), Ellie was able to fix the overheating bug that plagued the system with her neurology expertise, but the computer locked up immediately afterwards. Devon handed the computer on to Chuck to see if he could figure it out. And when he input a password Orion set up so only the two of them would know, the fixed Intersect was uploaded into his brain.
In a further effort to bring down Volkoff from within and rescue Mama B from her predicament, Sarah agreed to go deep undercover herself--just as Chuck was planning on proposing to her. She and Mary track the main database of Volkoff Industries to a computer system called HYDRA, which Chuck tricks Volkoff into transferring to a mobile station as basically "Orion back from the dead". From there, the team infiltrated his ship, The Contessa, and managed to set up a transfer of HYDRA to Stephen's shed computer by means of a virus he created. After having Volkoff arrested, the team had enough time to return to witness the birth of Devon and Ellie's daughter, Clara. On that same night, Chuck made his proposal to Sarah.
While Chuck and Sarah prepare for their wedding, they wound up having to protect Volkoff's daughter, Vivian McArthur from her father's old business. Unfortunately, they lost her to her father's footsteps and made enemies with her. Now the new leader of Volkoff Industries, Vivian began hunting down the elusive "Agent X", an unknown individual who was apparently the only one Volkoff ever feared. Through some investigation of their own, Team Bartowski discovered Agent X was an MI-6 analyst named Hartley Winterbottom, who had his identity overwritten by a faulty Intersect to become...Alexei Volkoff. The team tried to keep their findings a secret to prevent complications, but a shady high-ranking CIA agent named Clyde Decker picked up the scent and moved to "clean up" operations.
On the night of wedding rehearsal, Vivian had Sarah poisoned by a powerful DNA weapon called the Norseman, and only Volkoff would've been able to retrieve the antidote. Unfortunately, Decker had both his and Chuck's Intersects removed and set a team up to arrest them should they manage to retrieve the antidote and try getting it to Sarah anyway. After some reconciling between Alexei/Hartley and Vivian, they were able to retrieve the antidote in time. And with the help of their friends (and a team of Spetsnaz paratroopers), Chuck made it to Sarah with the antidote on time. Team Bartowski were essentially "fired" for their actions and went on to live a normal life. That is, until Decker reveals to Chuck that his entire spy life the whole series had been manipulated behind the scenes. Using the Volkoff Industries assets given as a Wedding gift, Chuck and co. began the independent spy organization Carmichael Industries.
Things got a little complicated, unfortunately, when Morgan put on a pair of sunglasses addressed to Chuck from Beckman, inadvertently downloading an Intersect to his brain. After a month of preparing, Carmichael Industries went into business with Morgan as their secret weapon. The Intersect, unfortunately, began going to Morgan's head in all the worst ways, and it soon became apparent that it was erasing his memories as well. With the help of Beckman, who mysteriously reported she never even sent the glasses in the first place, the team was able to suppress the faulty Intersect and Morgan began his campaign to restore his lost pop culture knowledge. Sadly, as he'd ousted himself as the Intersect, Decker had him marked for assassination, and one could not be called off despite his Intersect's suppression. Carmichael Industries managed to save Morgan from future assassination attempts, but not without complications.
The bugged Intersect glasses, as it turns out, were arranged to be given to Chuck by Daniel Shaw, who still wanted revenge on Team Bartowski. After escaping prison, Shaw kidnapped Sarah and held her in Castle on lockdown to force Chuck into stealing the Intersect 3.0 from the government for him. But Chuck instead tricked Shaw into suppressing his own Ring Intersect before being taken back to jail. Believing they'd seen the last of the Intersect, Carmichael Industries considered retiring from black ops style missions and settling with an office career of fighting cyber-terrorism. That was when they learned Morgan, during his period being mind-poisoned by his Intersect, recovered another pair of glasses with the same copy from a team of rogue spies and managed to hide it. Jeff and Lester, meanwhile, were coming dangerously close to learning about their spy lives. They always managed to get them off the scent temporarily but never for good.
The man the rogue agents work for, Nicholas Quinn, kidnapped Chuck, holding him ransom for the Intersect glasses. When Sarah and Casey found themselves shot into a corner trying to save him, Sarah downloaded the Intersect herself and led a mission between the two to save Chuck as he was being transferred on a Japanese bullet train. But just as the bugged Intersect had bad effects on Morgan's brain, so it also had them on Sarah's. After a fight on the train, Quinn was able to make off with Sarah and used the effects of the Intersect to erase all her memories of the time spent with Chuck. Acting as her handler, Quinn tricked the amnesiac Sarah into going on a mission to retrieve the latest copy of the Intersect from a Japanese facility and kill "rogue agent" Chuck. While he couldn't get her to remember first-hand, Chuck was able to convince Sarah of the life they had together, but not before Quinn got away with the newly Intersect-loaded glasses.
Quinn knew the Intersect was bugged. However, he also knew of a special Key that could be used to fix it. The key could not only fix the bug but turn the Intersect into exactly what Stephen intended it to be: a teaching tool, not just a weapon. Ellie hypothesized they may be able to use it to restore Sarah's memories. But when Beckman's life was put on the line and Quinn was killed in their fight before he could tell how to disarm his bomb, Chuck was forced to upload the fixed Intersect himself to save his former general. In the end, Chuck was able to short out the bomb with the very same virus he used on his first mission, which Sarah miraculously remembered, Jeff and Lester of all people managed to stall the bomb's detonation until then in the most unlikeliest of ways. Beckman thanked the team and wished them luck with their lives. Sarah, while still mostly without her memories, was willing to give falling in love with Chuck again a chance, and it seemed her memories would come back given enough time...
Other: Sometime between the events of the Season 3 finale and arriving on Dimensional Island, Chuck managed to merge his Governor watch with his CIA communicator watch for radioing Sarah and Casey. Not that this would be of any importance here unless Sarah and Casey were to arrive on the island.
Picture: Chuck at the Buy More, in front of the Nerd Herd desk
Full Name: Charles Irving Bartowski
Nicknames: Chuck, Charles Carmichael, The Intersect
Age: 30
Height: 6'4"
Weight: I can't find Zachary Levi's weight
Gender: Male
Race: Human
Alliance: Good
Home: Burbank, California, USA
Franchise: Chuck
Physical Description: Chuck is Caucasian with dark, wavy hair, and brown eyes. He'll wear a variety of outfits, though his most seen outfit is his Buy More uniform consisting of an untucked short-sleeved dress shirt; a gray tie; a pocket protector with Nerd Herd name and logo, his name and photo, and a barcode; black dress pants, and gray chucks.
Weapons: Generally anything he can get his hands on and "flash" on (see Abilities/Powers), though he generally sticks to non-lethal weapons. His weapon of choice, however, seems to be the tranq gun, which he's proven himself highly accurate even without flashing.
Abilities/Powers: Due to his high memory capacity, Chuck's brain is able to contain an entire database of FBI/CIA/NSA data in the form of subliminal imagery--this database is known as the Intersect. The Intersect's primary ability in a human host is the ability to recall intelligence of a particular subject--such as a person or object of interest--if he sees or hears a distinct feature, object, or sound related to it or some specific keyword. If the Intersect recognizes something Chuck sees or hears, he will "flash" on it, meaning the Intersect will show pull up a rapid-fire display of pictures and documents explaining the subject. One can tell when Chuck has flashed if they know the subtle hints to look for, such as Chuck briefly going slightly cross-eyed and fluttering his eyelids, rapid wide-eyed blinking, or suddenly exhaling and catching his breath. Another clue is Chuck suddenly showing fear as as result of flashing on something dangerous. Otherwise, there's little external indication of such an event occurring.
An ability of the Intersect revealed in "Chuck vs. the Dream Job" allows Chuck to crack computer codes humans normally cannot crack without running them through a computer merely by concentrating on the visual of the code.
After Chuck downloads Intersect 2.0, he's given the additional power of flashing on abilities. In other words, if he sees or hears anything related to any known trained ability--from kung fu to speaking Thai--he will be able to do it. However, these abilities are always only temporary, and if Chuck isn't in control of his emotions, the Intersect can completely take over his actions. There have, in fact, been times when Chuck has flashed on combat abilities at the most inopportune moments and had to struggle not to hurt someone.
After Chuck arrived on Dimensional Island, the Interdimensional void seemed to have an odd effect on the Intersect data in his head. Chuck can now somehow recall intel on objects, individuals, events, and skills he comes across on the island from any universe that contributes to it, even though most of it would likely have never been put into the Intersect in the first place.
Skills: Chuck displays a number of skills even without having to flash on them. These include expert-level computer programming and home electronics assembly--both of which he puts to work for the Nerd Herd--as well as accuracy with firearms (as long as they're the non-lethal variety, such as tranq guns). Chuck can also display effective leadership skills as long as he's in his comfort zone rather than some chaotic life-and-death situation, and nearly the entire Buy More staff look up to him despite the fact that he's merely one of the Nerd Herders.
Personality: Chuck is an intelligent, thoughtful, and modest young man who just wants the best for his friends and family. He had a pretty bright outlook on his future during college until his roommate framed him of cheating and his girlfriend reportedly slept with said roommate. After that, Chuck's self confidence crashed and burned, leaving his sister Ellie and friend Morgan concerned about him. Things started to look up when Chuck met Sarah, but things quickly turned terribly frightening when Chuck learned who she worked for and why she was sent after him.
At the start of the series, Chuck was often very finicky and hated being around gore, needles, or guns. While he's gotten considerable less finicky, Chuck's aversion to guns never really left. As such, he prefers to use the more non-lethal tranq guns. But if a loved one's life is on the line and there is absolutely no alternative, he will kill to save them. While he hates having to keep secrets from those in his personal life, he wants to protect them too.
Early on in his spy career, Chuck created the alias Charles Carmichael for himself. Carmichael was every bit as smooth, confident, and successful as Chuck wasn't. Nonetheless, as he continued to help the government with the missions they gave his team, and with some confidence boosts from Sarah, Chuck has slowly grown into that role. However, Sarah has recently started to wonder if that sweet and honest guy she'd grown to like was starting to disappear as a consequence.
History: Perhaps to better understand Chuck's history, we should dwell into the history of that which has become a major part of him in the recent years: the Intersect.
CIA engineer Stephen J. Bartowski lead the government project in the 1980's to create a powerful intelligence database that could criss-cross data from the different intelligence communities (CIA, NSA, FBI, you get the picture) to find patterns the agencies themselves could not. The data was stored in the form of subliminal images, and if someone with strong enough memory recall were to view these images they'd be able to later draw on its data by seeing trigger images or hearing keywords. This database was called, of course, the Intersect. Stephen and his team worked in secret, referring to each other by Greek mythology based codenames--Stephen's own codename was Orion. According to Stephen himself, he didn't necessarily design the WHOLE Intersect, "just the really cool parts."
Stephen knew how the subliminal imagery worked--in fact, he'd uploaded a prototyped Intersect into his own head as a field test; the data is still in his head to this day. But what he didn't know was that the government was planning on using his invention to create an army of super soldiers. He had learned the whole truth, though, by the time he'd completed the original cipher, the Intersect's "brain" essentially. Knowing that when word got out to hostile agencies of the super soldier possibilities his family could be put in jeopardy, Stephen purged his personal files and went on the run.
In Stephen's family were two children: Elanor Fay Bartowski, or Ellie, and her four-year-younger brother, Charles Irving Bartowski, or Chuck. Chuck was a fairly successful student in school and lived a pretty decent life, though their father had been described as "never really there." Some point during Chuck's childhood, he'd stumbled upon a prototype of the Intersect in his father's office and unwittingly started a test run. Though the run shut down halfway through due to system failure before it could upload any actual intel into young Chuck's brain, the fact that Chuck was still "okay" after processing all the data that had managed to get through made Stephen (who'd just arrived after the fact) realize there was more to his son than meets the eye...
Around when Chuck was in 5th grade, their mother supposedly got sick of Stephen's behavior and left. With Stephen as inattentive as he was, Ellie and Chuck learned to take care of each other. Since the age of six, Chuck had been best friends with Morgan Grimes. While Morgan has been considered annoying by some (especially Ellie, whom he had a huge crush on), he was always there to support Chuck during bad times, such as their mother leaving. In return, Chuck was always there to bail Morgan out when he got himself in trouble. It was sometime after their mother left that Stephen felt his proximity with his children would put him at risk. As a result, he snuck away on the night he promised them pancakes for dinner. Not knowing of his work for the government, his children assumed he'd merely abandoned them.
After graduating high school, Chuck enrolled in Stanford on an engineering scholarship. There, he and his roommate, Bryce Larkin, hit it off immediately over their mutual interest in programming and love of the text-based RPG Zork. In fact, the two would go on to create their own version of the game. Bryce offered to introduce Chuck to his friend Jill Roberts, but Chuck ended up meeting her anyway when she dropped her books on the way to class. The two became friends for awhile before eventually going out. Chuck excelled in his college courses, and his amazing memory recall rate made him an exceptional candidate for a CIA military project in Omaha. But Chuck never got the message from Professor Flemming about the interview, because the already recruited Bryce Larkin--feeling that CIA work would destroy Chuck's innocence--kept it from him. "You can't put him out on the field! He won't survive!" Bryce insisted, but Flemming explained his test records were too good for him to keep Chuck from the CIA. In order to protect Chuck, Flemming and Bryce set things up to look like Chuck had cheated on those tests, and he was expelled from Stanford as a consequence.
Unaware of the real motives behind Bryce's actions for "framing him," Chuck felt deeply and personally betrayed. Things got worse when rumors began circulating that his girlfriend Jill and Bryce slept together, and Chuck's self esteem spiraled downward. Shortly after his expulsion, Chuck took on a job as a retail salesman ("greenshirt") at the electronics store Buy More. He went on with this job for some time before the manager, "Big Mike" Tucker, began noticing his skills with computers. Big Mike then promoted Chuck to the store's electronics repair team, the Nerd Herd. Ironically, despite not having a lot of confidence at the time, Chuck became a sort of de facto leader of the Nerd Herd, and even some employees outside of the team began looking to Chuck for guidance. This included his old childhood friend, Morgan Grimes, who stayed in retail after Chuck's promotion.
On Chuck's 25th birthday, Ellie tried helping him get over Jill by inviting real women (mostly her coworkers at the hospital) to his party, but his baggage leftover from Bryce and Jill's betrayal drove all potential partners away. It was on that night that Bryce broke into the room in the Directorate of National Intelligence containing the Intersect computer. After copying all the intel from the computer to a handheld and destroying the original, Bryce escaped the building while attaching the stolen data to an e-mail. By the time he reached the parking lot, he was shot down by NSA's Major John Casey but not before commanding his handheld to send the e-mail to Chuck and subsequently self-destruct. The e-mail was encoded with a challenge from Zork, which Chuck (not knowing anything about the e-mail's contents or Bryce's spy life at the time) answered as if playing their own version of the game (Bryce encoded it this way to that anyone else who viewed the e-mail wouldn't gain access to the data). As soon as Chuck answered the challenge, the Intersect data flowed out onto his monitor, and he inadvertently uploaded it into his brain. The following day, Chuck began having flashes regarding the visiting General Stanfield and and a Serbian demolitions expert named Vuc Andric and began to wonder what the heck was wrong with him.
Although the government lost the original data and the copy Bryce had made, they were able to trace the e-mail to its recipient. As a result, both the NSA and the CIA independently sent their best agents--John Casey and Sarah Walker, respectively--to track down Chuck and retrieve the data he got. Sarah observed him at his workplace by posing as a customer with a broken phone. After Chuck made quick work of the repair, and then went to help a little girl whose father forgot to use digital tape in his digital camcorder to record her ballet sequence, Sarah found herself interested in his affable and well-intended personality. Sarah made plans to break into his apartment and steal his computer, but she left a card with her number just in case the need for a back-up plan would arise. And arose it did, as when Chuck caught a "ninja" trying to steal his computer, the resulting scuffle destroyed it. After some hesitation from Chuck (still brooding over Jill), she managed to land a date with him in the hopes of learning if he had an external drive.
The date, however, went downhill fast when Major Casey and his team arrived, and Sarah was forced to drag him away and then disclose everything when things became too suspicious for him. During a Mexican standoff between Sarah and Casey on a heliport with Chuck in the middle, Sarah listened to Chuck explain how he opened the e-mail and realized he'd uploaded the data. With a few more flashes, Chuck finally put all the clues together and concluded that Andric was going to bomb Stanfield at a conference he was speaking at. After locating the bomb, Chuck was able to defuse it because he was familiar with the computer model and knew of a deadly virus Morgan had destroyed the display copy at the Buy More with. Not fully understanding how these flashes were triggered, the government decided it was best to leave Chuck in his regular life and leave Sarah and Casey there to protect him. However, disclosed to no one but Casey, their superiors had decided that once the Intersect was rebuilt, Chuck would be too great a liability to let live.
At first, though, the government attempted to see if the Intersect data could be removed from Chuck, to which they enlisted NSA scientist Dr. Jonas Zarnow. Unfortunately, Dr. Zarrow turned out to be a traitor who planned on selling Chuck and all the secrets in his head to hostile nations. The whole scenario brought to surface some trust issues between Chuck and his handlers, but it also ultimately quelled them. While Casey maintained a cover as a greenshirt at the Buy More and Sarah as the counter girl of the local Weinerlicious and Chuck's girlfriend, Chuck would occasionally accompany them on black op missions and use the Intersect intel to help them. He was always told to "stay in the car," but it never worked out that way; "It's never safe in the car," Chuck had told them when they found him once being dangled out a several-story window by a mercenary.
While Chuck and Sarah's relationship was just a cover and both knew it, they still had growing feelings for each other. This may be why Chuck felt so betrayed when he learned from her DEA "friend" that Bryce Larkin was not only her CIA partner but also her lover. That only made things even more complicated when the team caught a smuggling ring sneaking a surprisingly alive Bryce back into the country in a hibernation casket. When brought to a CIA medical center, Bryce refused to talk to anyone but Chuck, and he subsequently "kidnapped" his old college buddy when the finally met. It was during the elevator ride down that Chuck ran into a one Tommy Delgado and flashed on the hostile splinter organization known as Fulcrum. After a scuffle or two, it was finally revealed that Bryce had really blown up the Intersect computer and sent its data to Chuck to keep it out of Fulcrum's hands. After Chuck helped keep Bryce from getting recaptured by Fulcrum, who currently believed he'd uploaded the Intersect himself, Bryce went underground.
About a year later, the government had been nearing completion of the new Intersect computer. But production had to halt when the computer's "brain," the Cipher, was stolen by a Fulcrum-hired mercenary (mentioned earlier during the "stay in the car" part). Team Bartowski managed to recover the Cipher, but Colt's men managed to steal it again before the team broke into their Burbank-stationed base to retaliate. Unfortunately, while they managed to capture the mercenary, all they got was a Trojan horse Cipher and didn't realize this until too late. Casey's orders to terminate Chuck had been set to activate as soon as the new Intersect did, but they were thankfully cancelled the moment the fake Cipher blew up the new Intersect, killing CIA Director Langston Graham. While Team Bartowski managed to recover the real Cipher, the government was still back to square one. Of course, Chuck still has no idea how close to death he'd been.
Upon retrieving the real Cipher, the government discovered that Fulcrum had also gotten away with an "Intersect Refresher"--a drive with updated data for the new Intersect--and had hired a software magnate to decode it. To Chuck's shock and jealousy, Bryce had come out of hiding to work with the team to recover the drive and would be posing with Sarah at one of the software magnate's parties as an affectionate couple. When Chuck ran afoul with the Fulcrum agent dealing with the magnate, Sarah broke ranks to save him and was critically wounded as a result. Bryce told Chuck it was her feelings for him that nearly killed Sarah, convincing Chuck that maintaining a professional relationship was best for both of them. On his way back into hiding, Bryce left Chuck with a pair of sunglasses "for a real spy," which Chuck didn't realize contained a copy of the Intersect Refresher until after he put it on and uploaded it.
A month following the missions to retrieve the Cipher and Refresher, Chuck ran into Jill, whose boss named Guy LaFleur he flashed on to be working on a deadly bio-weapon. The CIA made Chuck look like a successful business man to help him get back with Jill to find out more about the bio-weapon, but his coworkers Jeff and Lester inadvertently blow his cover. When it is discovered LaFleur was trying to expose the creation of the bio-weapon to prevent Fulcrum from using it and then a Fulcrum agent defenestrated the scientist, a disguised Sarah had to go to the hearing in his place. The Fulcrum agent released the bio weapon at the hearing, and when Chuck went to his ex-girlfriend for help, she wouldn't listen and Chuck was forced to expose his "Charles Carmichael" persona to her. In the end, the two were able to reverse-engineer an antidote and save everyone. Chuck and Jill began a secret relationship under his and Sarah's cover one, much to Sarah's discomfort.
Team Bartowski infiltrated the late LaFleur's apartment to find a list of undercover Fulcrum agents and, after following a series of clues, found the encrypted drive. Chuck ended up taking the drive from the team's base, Castle, to ransom for the captured Jill, and the drive was subsequently destroyed. Fortunately, Chuck managed to create a copy with one of Moragn's software pirating drives. Unfortunately, he learned from Sarah and Casey that Jill had been one of the Fulcrum agents listed. A series of events, coupled with some manipulation of circumstances here and there, led to Jill and her handler infultrating and taking over Castle, but Chuck was able to take the base back and arrested Jill after she nearly killed Sarah.
The following Christmas Eve, the Buy More was crashed into at the end of a highly publicized car chase and the entire staff--along with Ellie and her finance, Devon Woodcomb ("Captain Awesome")--were held hostage by the seemingly inept criminal Ned Rhyerson. Sarah and Casey snuck into Buy More via the tunnel behind the break room lockers, but when Ned discovered the two, he "accidentally" shot Casey's toe, leaving him with a limp. A hostage negotiator named Lt. Frank Mauser managed to convince Ned to release two hostages--Sarah and Casey. When Chuck flashed on Mauser, though, he realized the whole thing had been set up to find out what the CIA and NSA were protecting at the Buy More. To protect his friends and family, Chuck admitted to Mauser he was the Intersect, not Bryce. When Sarah and Casey manged to put the clues together themselves, they managed to stop Mauser from driving off with Chuck, which led to a chase between Sarah and Mauser in a tree farm. Sarah knew from Mauser's gloating that he now knew Chuck's secret and that he was high up in Fulcrum's hierarchy, so she shot him to prevent him to protect Chuck. She then told Chuck Mauser had been taken into custody, but Chuck saw the whole thing and was deeply disturbed that Sarah would lie to him about something like that. Chuck finally admitted to knowing the truth a few months later after a mission to save a seedy rock star from a nuke dealer. By the end of another mission involving getting the codes for a rogue military satellite from the kill screen of Missile Command, the CIA was able to collaborate with Stanford to award Chuck the three credits he'd missed out on due to expulsion needed to graduate. He received his degree in the mail soon after, which Ellie and Devon believe he'd earned taking online courses.
Team Bartowski went undercover in a suburban cul-de-sac where a Fulcrum couple lived. But when a string of hijinks led to Chuck uploading a sample of a Fulcrum Intersect, he came to realize only too late that the entire neighborhood was a front for the hostile agency. When the team was captured and the full Fulcrum Intersect successfully tried on Chuck (all previous guinea pigs died from intel overload), Chuck pretended to have been turned long enough for Casey to sneak into the control room and turn the Fulcrum team's own Intersect against them, incapacitating the lot. The team, aided by an undercover MI-6 agent named Cole Barker, later attempted to recover a drive with valuable information from one of the deceased agents and a Fulcrum-issue decoder to crack it. While Chuck managed to crack the chip on his own--and discovered it revealed his identity as Fulcrum's human Intersect, he also inadvertently foiled Cole's attempts to acquire the decoder and everyone but Casey was captured for torture. While Casey managed to free his partners with a strike team, Cole was later recaptured on the road. Given he knew at that point that Chuck was the Intersect, protective custody seemed imminent for Chuck.
Fortunately, the tortured Cole managed to escape and returned to Castle shortly before the team was assigned to hunt down a scientist codenamed Perseus who was believed to be behind the creation of the Fulcrum Intersect. Dr. Busgang (aka Perseus), as it turns out, was led to believe by his Fulcrum handlers that he was working on this Intersect for the legitimate government. And when Chuck managed to track him down and ask him whether or not the Intersect could be removed from the human brain, he told him only the chief inventor, "Orion", would know that but was shot dead by his handler before he could say anything else.
Determined to find the one man who could help him return to a normal life and disappointed by the government's inability to find this Orion, Chuck began an off-the-book search himself. When Stephen detected his own son's attempts at locating his CIA codename and dug in enough to discover he had the Intersect in him, he anonymously made contact with Chuck with plans to meet him in person. He'd hoped to reveal who he was then proceed to help him remove the Intersect. But these plans were hindered by both the government and Fulcrum's ongoing attempts to find him, which had been going on since he first went on the run. In the end, Stephen was forced to fake his own death via Predator missile to the helicopter he was supposedly on, before he had the chance to reveal himself to Chuck. However, he did leave with Chuck a "just in case I die" package containing schematics of the Intersect, supposedly to help him figure out how to get the Intersect out by himself.
Meanwhile, for some time, Chuck had also been trying to locate his father by his civilian identity (unaware at the two men were the same) so that he could walk Ellie down the isle at her wedding. When his search proved fruitless, Sarah ran her own off-the-books search for the man. As part of a Plan B, Stephen allowed Sarah to locate his civilian identity and covertly led to Chuck flashing on a flier for the launching of his old rival's new operating system, RIOS, which the CIA believed contained a virus. After a series of hijinks involving Chuck going undercover as a Roark Ind. employee to stall the launch, Chuck compared some of the Intersect schematics to an overhead sketch of the company complex to realize Roark had been building an Intersect. It was during Chuck's nighttime infiltration of the complex that Stephen was finally able to reveal he was Orion and proceed to modify Roark's Intersect to remove the one in Chuck. But as it turns out, Roark's Intersect was incomplete, and Roark had merely flushed Stephen out to capture him and have him complete it.
Chuck (with Casey's help) was able to convince their NSA superior, General Beckman, to assign Team Bartowski with the task of rescuing Stephen, provided Chuck didn't let his personal feelings get in the way. In order to locate where Fulcrum was holding him, Chuck resorted to promising Jill witness protection should she cooperate in the effort. Their attempt to get information from her "Uncle Bernie" failed when he tried to kill them before suffering a fatal heart attack at the sight of Chuck performing a defensive stance called "The Morgan," so the team tracked a phone call for Bernie to a Fulcrum facility they say Stephen is being held at. The team was identified though, when attempting to infiltrate the facility, and in the commotion, Jill overheard orders to move Stephen to a base called "Black Rock." While she doesn't know where that is, Chuck flashed on its location. Chuck then revealed the witness protection was a lie but helped her escape in return sneaking back to share what he learned with him. When It was found out that the team both failed to rescue Stephen and lost Jill, Beckman ordered Sarah to lure Chuck into a trap to be placed underground for his own protection. But when Chuck ends up pulling an Unintentional Guilt Trip on her, Sarah reveals the deception and tells him to ditch his GPS locater watch to go AWOL to search for Stephen.
Beckman was definitely not happy about the two going on the run and ordered Colonel Casey to track them down (giving him that promotion in the process). Chuck and Sarah made it to the town Chuck's flash told him Black Rock would be at, but they found nothing but a ghost town. It was at a motel they stayed at outside the town that Casey found them. And although they managed to work together and escape after Fulcrum agents ambushed them, Casey still arrested them. On their way out of the town, Chuck caught a covert message from his captive father regarding something at the old drive-in theater at midnight. Casey refused to turn around to check it out, but he contacted Beckman to inform her of what Chuck saw, and she in turn promised to look into it.
Meanwhile, Devon was starting to become wary of Chuck's absence and suspicious of Casey when he caught him snooping around Chuck's room for clues (prior to finding him and Sarah at Black Rock). Talking to two of Chuck's workmates at the Nerd Herd, Jeff and Lester, Devon came to the conclusion that Casey has been stalking Chuck and infiltrated his apartment with their help to learn why. While there, he tripped an alarm that alerted Casey back at Castle of the intrusion. Jeff and Lester, meanwhile, were trying to stir up trouble with the new tyrannical assistant manager, Emmett Milbarge, by blowing out a generator outside with a cherry bomb they found in Casey's locker, ultimately causing a city-wide blackout and unwittingly freeing Chuck and Sarah from their electronically-sealed cell. While they were ultimately able to prevent Casey from killing Devon, Chuck knew Devon had seen too much and disclosed his secret to him. He then asked him to "be awesome" by covering for him with Ellie.
After leaving Casey tied up in his own home, Chuck and Sarah left once again for Black Rock, eventually finding the underground bunker Stephen was being forced to work on the Intersect. Casey, however, managed to escape, but learned in the process that Beckman had decided it would be better to send an air strike to take out Black Rock despite the fact that they'd lose Stephen in the process, and ended up joining Chuck and Sarah when he located them again. While Sarah and Casey infiltrated the bunker to rescue Stephen, Chuck learned of Roark's plans to create an army of Intersect-encoded Fulcrum agents via the theater screen and snuck off to stop him. Ultimately, they were all captured and Roark's plan went on. But Stephen had pulled a fast one on them--instead of reconfiguring the Intersect for Fulcrum's desires, he reconfigured it to do exactly what he originally intended to do: remove the Intersect from Chuck. The team managed to escape Black Rock with both Stephen and the Intersect before the air strike came. Unfortunately, so did Roark.
Soon, Ellie's wedding to Devon was underway. Chuck, meanwhile, had quit the Buy More (along with Casey) to get away from Emmett who'd managed to connive his way to the manager position (leaving Big Mike working as a greenshirt). With Chuck free of both the Intersect and the Buy More, Beckman offered him a position as an analyst, but Chuck turned the offer down and claimed he wasn't a hero. At the wedding, Sarah checked to make sure Chuck had the rings before informing him that, due to his declining his offer, she would have to go away to work with the future new human Intersect: Bryce Larkin. Chuck's day was only made worse when Roark arrived promising to kill Ellie should Chuck not deliver the Intersect to him. Upon Chuck meeting with him, Bryce refused to hand over the Intersect to Fulcrum having made a promise not to for Orion (surprise! He'd been operating under Stephen's orders the whole time! The part about sending it to Chuck, on the other hand...), so he offered to give himself up since Fulcrum still believed he was the human Intersect. The team managed to detain Roark after a brief gunfight between the heroes and his Fulcrum team, which quickly turned in their favor when Casey's strike team arrived but destroyed the reception hall in the process. Not that it mattered, considering Jeff and Lester's performance of "Mr. Roboto" (called in by Morgan to stall the wedding when told Chuck forgot the rings, which he really didn't) set the sprinkler system off ruining the ceremony. In the end, Chuck made it up for his sister by using his government paycheck to buy her the small beach wedding she always wanted. Things were really starting to look up at that point.
But of course, plot twist! One of the men on Casey's strike team, Miles, executed Roark before killing all his teammates only sparing Casey in return for saving his life in the past. All Casey learned from Miles before he knocked him out cold was that he was with a hostile agency other than Fulcrum. At Devon and Ellie Woodcomb's lively reception, Sarah danced with Chuck, gently shooting down his denials of being a hero. While she contemplated turning down her offer to take part in the new Intersect project to go on vacation with Chuck, Stephen saw Bryce away while asking him about the new architecture of the Intersect the government had him re-reconfigure. When he asked Bryce what this new Intersect does, he only told him, "You don't want to know." Stephen, however, knew something was up when he flashed on the agent escorting Bryce away and learned he was supposed to be dead.
When Bryce made it to the room where the new Intersect was, he was ambushed by hostile agents and was fatally wounded before he could seal himself inside. While the recently arrived Sarah and Casey began a shoot-off with the agents, Chuck snuck into the Intersect room to find the dying Bryce who'd learned that Fulcrum was a subsidiary of the agency the spies outside worked for--the Ring. Bryce was meant to upload the Intersect into his own head before destroying it to keep it out of enemy hands, like the Ring, but he'd been killed before he had the chance. Chuck thought back over the past two years of the good he'd done and the encouraging words from his teammates, and he went on to fulfill Bryce's dying wish for him to destroy the new Intersect... right after uploading it into himself. The Ring failed to capture the Intersect, but the agents decided they could still execute the government agents that ruined that chance. But as everyone would learn that day, one of the new Intersect's capabilities was flashing on advanced abilities, and Chuck stunned everyone by defeating all the Ring agents with an impressive display of kung fu.
Chuck decided not to tell his father he'd uploaded Intersect 2.0, and Stephen left again believing his son's spy life was over. Over the next several months, Chuck went into spy training, which he essentially flunked due to his emotions getting in the way. But when Chuck managed to save his teammates when he and Sarah were captured by a Ring operative, Beckman allowed Operation Bartowski to continue. She also warned Sarah that Chuck's emotions will make Intersect 2.0 hard to control, and now instead od protecting Chuck from the world, they had to protect the world from Chuck. Devon, meanwhile, got involved with a mission to save a foreign premier from Ring assassination when he got mistaken for a spy and captured by the hostile organization. He was ultimately saved from their grip by CIA Agent Daniel Shaw, whom the Ring was tricked into believing Devon killed for them.
Shaw went on to help Chuck with his spy training and proved to be one tough teacher. One unorthodox method he used was sending the rookie on a surprise mission against two Ring agents on a first class flight en route to Paris. The item he ultimately acquired from them was the key to a lockbox the team had confiscated before Shaw even arrived that turned out to be full of Ring intel Shaw and his late wife had gathered. On that plane, Chuck met a young woman named Hannah who'd just recently been fired from her job and offered her a position at the Nerd Herd, which the newly deputized Assistant Manager Morgan would be able to back him on. Since Chuck and Sarah were broken up (both for real and in their cover), he began a relationship with Hannah, unaware that Morgan had feelings for her as well. Meanwhile, Shaw and Sarah seemed to be getting into a relationship themselves. However, when Chuck's spy life began putting Hannah in danger, he had to end it with her.
Despite his progress in his spy training, Sarah began worrying he was starting to lose all his best qualities in it; case in point when he burned his first asset, a lonely man the Ring had hired to reverse engineer what was left of the Intersect 2.0 computer. But the point was truly hammered home only following Chuck's final spy test, which involved killing a mole in the CIA--his "red test"; little did she realize, it was actually the recently decommissioned Casey's handiwork, made to look like Chuck's. In any case, Chuck had graduated to full genuine CIA agent, legitimately or not, and was given the option of choosing his own team. But the one partner he wanted most--Sarah--wouldn't join because she thought his spy training had killed away everything she liked about him... that is until Casey privately admitted to his "unsanctioned murder" to help Chuck pass his exam. Meanwhile, though, the director of the Ring had managed to track down Shaw and revealed to him that his wife was not killed by the Ring, as he thought, but by Sarah during her own red test. Driven insane by the grief, Shaw swore revenge.
With the nutty Batman Gambit he pulled, he would've succeed in revenge too had it not been for one small moment of dumb luck. Shaw managed to pull off one stunt made to look to chuck like a revenge attempt but was actually his way to forgive Sarah for supposedly being "played by the Ring;" this discredited Chuck in Beckman's eyes when he foolishly rushed in to save Sarah. Then, in a plan conceived between him and the director, he took the two with him on a mission to infiltrate the base and capture the director, and when the director pretended to lure the two into a trap, Shaw swooped in, took out the Ring agents and killed the director... or so Chuck and Sarah thought. They even made it out with the cipher to the Ring Intersect, which was flawed and diagnosed by CIA engineers. When Shaw took Sarah on a mission to Paris to find the lab the cipher was built in (Chuck was excluded, due to his fumbles before), he was actually taking her to the spot she killed Eve Shaw to kill her there himself in a form of poetic justice.
As stated, it would've worked had it not been for dumb luck: dumb luck named Morgan Grimes. Having learned about Chuck's spy life when he witnessed a small Ring cell infiltrate Castle base only to be defeated by Chuck, Morgan was shown footage of Shaw's fight at the Ring base and immediately noted the whole thing was staged, thanks to his experience with bad kung fu movies. Unable to convince Beckman, Chuck went to Paris to rescue Sarah himself (well, with the aide of Casey, who captured the Ring director). Shaw was skeptical that Chuck would be willing to kill him, but with Sarah's life on the line, Chuck shot Shaw three times in the chest and his body fell into the river blow. After Shaw was gone, Chuck and Sarah began dating exclusively. They believed they'd have to do it in secret, but in the end they returned to Burbank where Beckman discouraged but accepted the relationship. Casey, meanwhile, traded the captured director with Beckman for his old job back and an official spot on the team for Morgan.
With the exception of Chuck and Sarah's relationship, things returned to relatively normal. That is, until Chuck began having weird dreams he was convinced were trying to tell him things. At first, Chuck was deemed crazy until his dreams came true and the CIA concluded that the Intersect was working with his subconscious to create those dreams. But they also believed this was because the Intersect was putting stress on Chuck's brain, and the Intersect would eventually overwhelm Chuck to the point of insanity. Meanwhile, Stephen had returned to Burbank when Ellie sent him a coded message saying she missed him. In reality, she was calling him back home because a Ring agent posing as a CIA one convinced her that John Casey was an enemy agent who would harm her father unless she helped them put him into protective custody. The Ring's real aim was to get a device from Stephen called the Governor, which Stephen revealed to Chuck upon learning he'd uploaded the new Intersect could help keep it from overwhelming its user; he offered to make Chuck one. The Ring was unable to retrieve the Governor from Stephen, but they called a recovered and very much alive Daniel shaw to upload the newly completed Ring Intersect anyway.
Shaw's next Batman Gambit involved convincing the intelligence community he'd actually been acting as a double agent sanctioned by Beckman's higher ups and exposing Chuck's diagnostics from the CIA psychiatrist. When he flashed on intel from a past Team Bartowski mission, chuck saw but no one believed him, allowing Shaw to further convince everyone that Chuck was already going mad. Chuck managed to escape via help from his father who'd just completed Chuck's Governor, but Shaw managed to have Sarah and Casey detained and Operation Bartowski shut down, so Chuck went back to rescue his friends on the promise to Stephen they'd do this "the smart way." With help from Ellie, who'd learned from Devon and Morgan about Chuck's spy life, they found the Ring base that contained both the medical technology used to save Shaw from death and the Ring Intersect he uploaded. However, just when an Intersect fight was about to go down between Chuck and Shaw, the latter shot Stephen down to leave Chuck emotionally compromised.
With Chuck, Sarah, and Casey detained, Shaw put into motion the final steps to have the team executed. But Ellie, having secretly witnessed her father's murder, pulled up Devon and Morgan as back-up, tailed them until sheer dumb luck allowed the latter two to rescue Team Bartowski from death. Now on the run due to the intelligence community believing Shaw over Chuck, the team suggested going underground, but Ellie wouldn't hear it; she wanted justice brought to her father's killer. Contacting a detained Beckman, Chuck learned that the Ring Elders would be at an upcoming spy conference where Shaw would speak and covertly help them take over the entire intelligence community in a coup d'etat. Chuck was able to trick Shaw into exposing the Ring elders and simultaneously staged a public confession from Shaw by broadcasting it to the entire conference from what Shaw thought was a private room. But Chuck was unable to get back his Governor Shaw stole, because his flashes were getting more strenuous.
Shaw, now a fugitive, tracked Chuck back to the Buy More and rigged it with explosives he'd detonate unless Chuck faced him. In a massive kung fu battle, Shaw had the upper hand on chuck at first due to the stress the latter's Intersect put him him, but Chuck managed to rise up and defeat him. Morgan, meanwhile, found the detonator but accidentally dropped it. The store, however, had already been evacuated already by then, and the government personnel inside managed to escape before the whole place blew. The blame for the Buy More explosion was unwittingly placed on two... ahem, eccentric Buy More employees who suggested to their boss burning the store down to save their jobs and appear to be heroes (don't ask, please). Chuck, meanwhile, got his Governor back and quit the spy life, which Beckman agreed to. He was still allowed to keep a tranq gun or two for self defense in a debt of gratitude for saving the intelligence community.
Then he learned from a posthumous video from his dad about his intelligence work outside the government to find Chuck's missing mom, and of adversaries of his that Chuck would no longer be safe from now that he was dead. Despite not working for the government anymore, Chuck took up Orion's mantle and began using the clues he'd already gathered to search for his mother, pulling Morgan into the hunt with him. Their efforts quickly led them to the Russian arms dealer Volkoff Industries; the same arms dealer Sarah and Casey were investigating. After they got caught up in each other's missions, Sarah and Casey agreed to help with the search behind Beckman's back. As the search goes on, Chuck learns from Casey's old team turned traitors and Sarah's old rival that Mary Bartowski worked as Volkoff's right hand woman going by the code name Frost and supposedly never left his side.
Mary, as it turned out, was working deep undercover to bring down Volkoff Industries from within. Allegedly. But when the government found evidence otherwise, and she was arrested and put in lockdown in Castle just as she was about to meet again with her recently declared pregnant daughter. There was only one way to prove Mama B's innocence: find her MI-6 handler Gregory Tuttle, who could present a file on her mission to prove as such. Chuck and company took the disc to the only computer he knew could run it--one in his father's secret basement lab--but found the disc to be empty. This was all a ploy set up by Tuttle, who was really Alexei Volkoff, and he and Mary had Chuck's Intersect wiped and him and Sarah tied up before blowing the lab sky high. Mary, however, secretly slipped them a means of escape before leaving with Volkoff.
Ellie, meanwhile, wound up in possession of one of her dad's advanced laptops containing information on the Intersect. Without knowing the full story (particularly her brother's involvement), Ellie was able to fix the overheating bug that plagued the system with her neurology expertise, but the computer locked up immediately afterwards. Devon handed the computer on to Chuck to see if he could figure it out. And when he input a password Orion set up so only the two of them would know, the fixed Intersect was uploaded into his brain.
In a further effort to bring down Volkoff from within and rescue Mama B from her predicament, Sarah agreed to go deep undercover herself--just as Chuck was planning on proposing to her. She and Mary track the main database of Volkoff Industries to a computer system called HYDRA, which Chuck tricks Volkoff into transferring to a mobile station as basically "Orion back from the dead". From there, the team infiltrated his ship, The Contessa, and managed to set up a transfer of HYDRA to Stephen's shed computer by means of a virus he created. After having Volkoff arrested, the team had enough time to return to witness the birth of Devon and Ellie's daughter, Clara. On that same night, Chuck made his proposal to Sarah.
While Chuck and Sarah prepare for their wedding, they wound up having to protect Volkoff's daughter, Vivian McArthur from her father's old business. Unfortunately, they lost her to her father's footsteps and made enemies with her. Now the new leader of Volkoff Industries, Vivian began hunting down the elusive "Agent X", an unknown individual who was apparently the only one Volkoff ever feared. Through some investigation of their own, Team Bartowski discovered Agent X was an MI-6 analyst named Hartley Winterbottom, who had his identity overwritten by a faulty Intersect to become...Alexei Volkoff. The team tried to keep their findings a secret to prevent complications, but a shady high-ranking CIA agent named Clyde Decker picked up the scent and moved to "clean up" operations.
On the night of wedding rehearsal, Vivian had Sarah poisoned by a powerful DNA weapon called the Norseman, and only Volkoff would've been able to retrieve the antidote. Unfortunately, Decker had both his and Chuck's Intersects removed and set a team up to arrest them should they manage to retrieve the antidote and try getting it to Sarah anyway. After some reconciling between Alexei/Hartley and Vivian, they were able to retrieve the antidote in time. And with the help of their friends (and a team of Spetsnaz paratroopers), Chuck made it to Sarah with the antidote on time. Team Bartowski were essentially "fired" for their actions and went on to live a normal life. That is, until Decker reveals to Chuck that his entire spy life the whole series had been manipulated behind the scenes. Using the Volkoff Industries assets given as a Wedding gift, Chuck and co. began the independent spy organization Carmichael Industries.
Things got a little complicated, unfortunately, when Morgan put on a pair of sunglasses addressed to Chuck from Beckman, inadvertently downloading an Intersect to his brain. After a month of preparing, Carmichael Industries went into business with Morgan as their secret weapon. The Intersect, unfortunately, began going to Morgan's head in all the worst ways, and it soon became apparent that it was erasing his memories as well. With the help of Beckman, who mysteriously reported she never even sent the glasses in the first place, the team was able to suppress the faulty Intersect and Morgan began his campaign to restore his lost pop culture knowledge. Sadly, as he'd ousted himself as the Intersect, Decker had him marked for assassination, and one could not be called off despite his Intersect's suppression. Carmichael Industries managed to save Morgan from future assassination attempts, but not without complications.
The bugged Intersect glasses, as it turns out, were arranged to be given to Chuck by Daniel Shaw, who still wanted revenge on Team Bartowski. After escaping prison, Shaw kidnapped Sarah and held her in Castle on lockdown to force Chuck into stealing the Intersect 3.0 from the government for him. But Chuck instead tricked Shaw into suppressing his own Ring Intersect before being taken back to jail. Believing they'd seen the last of the Intersect, Carmichael Industries considered retiring from black ops style missions and settling with an office career of fighting cyber-terrorism. That was when they learned Morgan, during his period being mind-poisoned by his Intersect, recovered another pair of glasses with the same copy from a team of rogue spies and managed to hide it. Jeff and Lester, meanwhile, were coming dangerously close to learning about their spy lives. They always managed to get them off the scent temporarily but never for good.
The man the rogue agents work for, Nicholas Quinn, kidnapped Chuck, holding him ransom for the Intersect glasses. When Sarah and Casey found themselves shot into a corner trying to save him, Sarah downloaded the Intersect herself and led a mission between the two to save Chuck as he was being transferred on a Japanese bullet train. But just as the bugged Intersect had bad effects on Morgan's brain, so it also had them on Sarah's. After a fight on the train, Quinn was able to make off with Sarah and used the effects of the Intersect to erase all her memories of the time spent with Chuck. Acting as her handler, Quinn tricked the amnesiac Sarah into going on a mission to retrieve the latest copy of the Intersect from a Japanese facility and kill "rogue agent" Chuck. While he couldn't get her to remember first-hand, Chuck was able to convince Sarah of the life they had together, but not before Quinn got away with the newly Intersect-loaded glasses.
Quinn knew the Intersect was bugged. However, he also knew of a special Key that could be used to fix it. The key could not only fix the bug but turn the Intersect into exactly what Stephen intended it to be: a teaching tool, not just a weapon. Ellie hypothesized they may be able to use it to restore Sarah's memories. But when Beckman's life was put on the line and Quinn was killed in their fight before he could tell how to disarm his bomb, Chuck was forced to upload the fixed Intersect himself to save his former general. In the end, Chuck was able to short out the bomb with the very same virus he used on his first mission, which Sarah miraculously remembered, Jeff and Lester of all people managed to stall the bomb's detonation until then in the most unlikeliest of ways. Beckman thanked the team and wished them luck with their lives. Sarah, while still mostly without her memories, was willing to give falling in love with Chuck again a chance, and it seemed her memories would come back given enough time...
Other: Sometime between the events of the Season 3 finale and arriving on Dimensional Island, Chuck managed to merge his Governor watch with his CIA communicator watch for radioing Sarah and Casey. Not that this would be of any importance here unless Sarah and Casey were to arrive on the island.
Picture: Chuck at the Buy More, in front of the Nerd Herd desk
