The game unchanger

“Only thing that changes are the clothes.” —Chuck Bartowski

You don’t have to read these previous posts if you don’t want to, but it might help.

Before I dive into this, a short note on spoilers: If you are someone who watches/might one day watch the TV shows or films that I discuss in a given post, and you like being “unspoiled” about the events/twists/revelations of the latest episodes of that show, then you shouldn’t read that post.  In many cases I will be discussing an episode from the night or nights before, and I am not going to hold back or allude my way around new information.  I will put the name of the show(s) I will be discussing in the tags above each post, so you can know to stop reading if you’re not up-to-date on that show.  (There is, of course, a lot to be said about the entire concept of spoilers, and whether the fact that foreknowledge may actually ruin a work of narrative art for the viewer says anything about the quality of that work [short answer: yes and no], but I will reserve that for future posts.)  (Perhaps this whole disclaimer or a version of it should appear somewhere on the sidebar. I’ll put that on the list of technological things I must learn how to do.)  And so: onward.

As I have been saying, one of the crucial distinctions between a television episode or season that ends on a cliffhanger and an episode or season that culminates in one of the increasingly popular devices for sustaining suspense that I have been describing—two of which I have termed “the last-minute reveal” and “the game changer,” (any resemblance to the title of a  recently-published sensationalistic book is purely coincidental)—can be found in the impetus to speculate that they inspire in their audiences.

Cliffhangers reduce audience speculation to a choice between given alternatives: will the beloved character live or die? Game-changing or revelatory endings of shows/seasons, on the other hand, inspire speculation of a much more creative, protracted and wide-ranging sort: but wait, if that is true, then what are the implications for everything we thought we knew about this show? And what might happen next?

This provides us with another, even more intriguing (to me, anyway), explanation for the apparent waning of the cliffhanger and the ascendancy of these other devices.  Audiences deeply enjoy engaging in this latter kind of speculation.  Not only is it a mental challenge, but it gratifies our desire to become involved in the story, to participate in the show we love.  While this is in a sense only one version of the kids of desire that keep us reading/viewing/engaged with any narrative (we “enter” the story or become “immersed” in it, we “identify” with the characters, &c.), it is not far-fetched to suggest that in our communication- and information-saturated culture, contemporary television audiences feel uniquely inspired, entitled and even empowered to become involved in the progress of their favorite narratives.  This sense of emotional engagement in narrative speculation drives, and is likely driven in turn by, the kind of online forums I briefly discussed in my post on seriality and suspense.

Television writers today know all of this, and their episode endings, and particularly their season finales, thus employ a range of methods aimed not only at leaving audiences in suspense, but specifically at provoking their speculation.  Which makes watching the following season’s premiere episode particularly interesting, both for those who have engaged in the speculation and those who are interested, like I, in examining suspense, speculation and narrative desire as social phenomena.

All of which is to say, season premieres are just plain fun to look at critically.  My favorite kind is the one referenced in the title of this post.  When a season premiere ends in a game-changing move, I like to speculate not about what the next season will be like, specifically, but about what must be going through the writers’ heads as they try to figure out what the next season will be like.   Will they have the guts to let the game-changer be just that, and render the show a very different animal when it comes back?  This has been known to happen (J.J. Abrams has proven himself particularly fearless in doing so, and if Fringe lasts a few more seasons, expect to be spending a lot less time in Walter’s lab and possibly a lot more time in alternate universes), but it is a serious risk.  Writers and runners of popular television shows have, by and large, proven themselves to be rather tone-deaf when it comes to understanding what it is that keeps viewers coming back to their shows week after week (even Joss Whedon, whom I love and who does game-changing turns better than almost anyone, seems not always to see the basis of the attraction of his own shows, vide Buffy season 6), and messing with the formula too much can thus cause the fans to write the show off.

But nobody can accuse the creators of the silly but extremely enjoyable show Chuck of not understanding what keeps the audience into the show.  They would have had to be blind not to get it, really: in a nutshell, the sexual tension between Chuck and Sarah, the ridiculousness of a main character who has a computer in his head and goes on secret missions but has to work at a shittastic job, the amazing cluelessness of the other denizens of said shittastic job, and the sexual tension between Chuck and Sarah.

And last season’s finale, in which Chuck quit his job at the Buy More, and then got an even bigger computer downloaded into his head, which gave him the ability to kung-fu-disarm four gunmen, among other things, threatened to upset if not negate all of those qualities. This “game changer” suggested that now Chuck will be an actual spy, a super-spy, rather than a bumbling guy who saves the day by being clever and determined, that he will no longer need to work at the Buy More, and that either he and Sarah will either be able to be together, or they will be separated by circumstances for good.  The fans, while almost universally in favor of seeing Chuck kick some gunman ass, were understandably apprehensive, and it was with some pleasure over the last five months that I imagined the writers of the show saying, “oh shit oh shit oh shit what the hell are we going to do now?” How, in other words, were they going to reset the show, after this development, to retain the elements that the fans enjoy without simply going back to the way the show was before (by, say, having the new knowledge, but not the old, taken out of Chuck’s head somehow)—which would squander the exciting narrative possibilities offered by this change, and would still alienate audiences, who would end up feeling manipulated into speculating about a game-changer that went nowhere.

I have to give kudos to the writers, therefore, (the episode, “Chuck versus the Pink Slip” was penned by Chris Fedak, the show’s co-creator, and Matt Miller) for showing a remarkable understanding not only of their show and its audience, but also of the nature of the expectation and speculation that their season-ender inspired.  I say this not because they managed to find a way to incorporate Chuck’s new talents into the story while retaining his bumblingness, putting him back in the Buy More and prolonging his tense relationship with Sarah, but because they did so in a way that clearly banked on the fact that satisfying their audience’s desires and rewarding its speculation in this way would be enough to make everyone ignore or forgive that the storyline made absolutely no sense whatsoever.  In a show that asks us to suspend a whole lot of disbelief anyway, this was a very smart gamble, and despite its logical insanity, was one of the most cleverly managed season premieres I have ever had the pleasure of seeing.

Briefly: The new intersect computer in Chuck’s head gives him access to practical knowledge like kung fu and mariachi guitar, but Chuck still has to learn how to access this knowledge, and he is a total bust at that part.  His emotions get in the way and he either can’t access the knowledge when he needs to, or suddenly accesses it when he doesn’t (he has to physically restrain himself from automatically using his martial arts skills on his bullying ex-boss).  And he is still the only person with the intersect.  So to continue using his knowledge, and to protect both him and others, he is put back into the Buy More, Sarah and now-colonel Casey are reassigned to be his handlers and, with a few significant but not unwelcome differences (along with the new skills, Morgan is now Chuck’s roommate), all is pretty much back to normal.  Oh, and in the intervening time Chuck broke it off with Sarah to focus on being a superspy, so they’re back in the long-lingering-looks phase again.

Very satisfying—emotionally.  Logically….What?  So Chuck’s problem, which is making him a) useless to the government and b) a danger to those around him, is that he is not in control of his emotions.  So the CIA’s solution is to put him back in a place where he has to lie to those closest to him, to work every day with a the woman he loves but can’t be with, and to use as cover a job that makes him feel stifled and inadequate.  Great way to get those pesky emotions under control, government!

But my point here is that it doesn’t matter.  At all.  The writers of Chuck understood that a game-changing season finale is, at heart, an emotional appeal, not a logical one, and so keeping their viewers happy meant satisfying their desires, not their understanding.  And in fact, the logical incoherence of the episode has its own emotional appeal—as it sets up a central tension for the coming season, between the theory that Chuck is a better spy when he is in control of his feelings, and the sense that viewers connect with, that Chuck is a better spy (or at least a better one to watch) precisely because he is not in control of them.  (A possibility that, while intriguing, doesn’t make the episode any more logical, as the very person who propounds the former theory, General Beckman, is the one who assigns them their new-old roles.)

In the end, it is an extremely silly television show.  But it is a show that is fundamentally about two things: information and desire.   Specifically, the prolongation and deferment of desire, and the ways that we use incomplete information to interpret the world.  And of course, these are what narrative theory is about as well.  I’d be hard-pressed, in fact, to come up with a better definition.