It Still Stings: Chuck Ended 30 Seconds Too Early

Editor’s Note: TV moves on, but we haven’t. In our feature series It Still Stings, we relive emotional TV moments that we just can’t get over. You know the ones, where months, years, or even decades later, it still provokes a reaction? We’re here for you. We rant because we love. Or, once loved. And obviously, when discussing finales in particular, there will be spoilers:

Long before she was racking up award nominations for her work as Gilead’s most complex villain-turned-antihero on Hulu’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Yvonne Strahovski played super-spy-with-a-heart-of-gold Sarah Walker on NBC action comedy Chuck, which aired on NBC from 2007 to 2012. For four and a half seasons, viewers (and Chuck himself, played by Shazam! star Zachary Levi) fell hard for Sarah’s no-nonsense badassery, fierce loyalty, and deep kindness… until suddenly, in the show’s final season, it all went away. 

The premise of Chuck was simple, if a bit silly: After being emailed a top-secret archive containing the entirety of the NSA and CIA databases by his former college roommate, a nerdy Buy More (a Best Buy analog) employee finds himself unwittingly embedded with knowledge and skills that turn him into the world’s most valuable weapon. Of course, the NSA and CIA immediately send out two of their top agents to investigate: Sarah for the CIA, and John Casey (Adam Baldwin) for the NSA. But after realizing that Chuck isn’t a covert operative and really is just a well-meaning doofus in way over his head, the three eventually team up. And while Sarah originally only poses as Chuck’s girlfriend to gather information, the two gradually fall in love and ultimately get married at the end of Season 4.

Unfortunately, everything falls apart in the last three episodes of Season 5, when Sarah has her memories erased by final boss Nicholas Quinn (Angus Macfadyen). Suddenly, she is an even more ruthless version of the stone-cold Sarah we met at the beginning of Season 1, with no recollection of her husband, family, friends, or any of the character-defining experiences she’d been through over the past several years. And although Chuck tries his very best to help her regain her memories in the series finale by using the same Intersect technology that gave him his unwanted powers in the pilot, he is ultimately forced to use it to disarm a bomb instead.

Shortly thereafter, during the bomb-disarming sequence, Sarah surprises everyone by bringing up an old computer virus from Season 1 as the solution to their problem, hinting that her memories may be coming back on their own. But by the end of the episode, she still can’t remember her romance with Chuck or any of the personal details that defined her. As the series drew to a close, it seemed that it may actually end with Sarah and Chuck as strangers, which felt unspeakably cruel for viewers who had invested five years in their relationship.

But then, in the final moments, as the two sit beside each other on a beach—mirroring a scene from the pilot episode—Chuck shares a theory from his best friend, Morgan (Joshua Gomez), that one magical kiss might restore Sarah’s memories. After thinking about it for a second, Sarah decides it’s worth a shot, uttering the show’s final line: “Chuck, kiss me.” And Chuck does. 

And… that’s it. That’s how Chuck ends. Chuck and Sarah, kissing on a beach. Does she ever get her memories back? We never find out. 

After the finale aired, series creators Josh Schwartz and Chris Fedak told TVLine that they liked the ambiguity of the scene, with Fedak saying, “I think it’s certainly a happy ending, but I also think that we like a little bit of ambiguity. Leave it up to the Chuck fans to take their own individual impression away.”

And here’s the thing: Was Fedak watching his own show? Because up until that finale, Chuck was never ambiguous in its themes or plotlines. It was a rambunctious action-comedy mashed up with a classic rom-com, delivering ’80s-esque spy capers every week alongside an endearing slow-burn will-they-won’t-they love story. Chuck and Sarah’s romance throughout the series was structured just like countless Hollywood action romcoms, from Romancing the Stone to Knight and Day. It spent five seasons building toward a straightforward happily ever after, only to sucker punch us at the altar. 

And look, I’m not allergic to ambiguous endings. Does Angel slay the dragon? Is Leonardo DiCaprio still dreaming? Is Deckard a Replicant? The answers are left up to the viewers and that’s okay, because they fit within the consistent themes and frameworks of their stories. The problem with Chuck is that it pulls a bait-and-switch in its final moments. It set up a satisfyingly sweet romance, then took a hard left into Nicholas Sparks-esque tragedy right at the finish line. Sure, life is unpredictable, but Chuck never tried to make us believe it was anything other than pure escapist fantasy. No one was watching Chuck for their weekly bitter dose of hard reality. We had Breaking Bad for that. 

So no, Chris Fedak and Josh Schwartz, I do not like that particular bit of ambiguity. Especially since you had all the pieces to actually deliver a satisfying ending—the ending that you’d arguably spent five seasons setting up—and then dropped the ball. As a matter of fact, the final scene of the series comes so close to fixing the mess that the writers had set up that some fans have re-edited it to do just that, inserting a series of Intersect-like flashes (which were used throughout the series to indicate Chuck getting new spy knowledge downloaded into his brain) to show Sarah getting her memory back.

That’s all it would have taken. Just 30 more seconds of quick flashes to show that Morgan’s theory worked, true love actually does conquer all, and Sarah and Chuck live happily ever after. 

Maybe that’s not how it works in real life. But Chuck—a show that was always about good triumphing over evil, finding your inner hero, and the limitless power of love and friendship—never seemed too concerned about real life, focusing instead on being an entertaining and inspirational story of everyday people getting to do extraordinary things. Given that, I don’t think it was too much to ask for it to have used its final moments to give Chuck and Sarah (and of course, the viewers) one last scene of pure, unambiguous happiness before saying goodbye. 

Lauren Thoman is a Nashville-based freelance pop culture writer whose writing has appeared in numerous online outlets including Parade, Vulture, and Collider. She is also the author of the novel I’ll Stop the World. Find her at her website, or on Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook. 

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