I could have said goodbye to the show with this episode more easily than with other Chuck finales, but having to would have been horrible. It’s appropriate that the episode should end with the line “Guys, I know Kung-Fu.” If any episode deserves to reference the season 2 finale, it’s Cliffhanger, because this finale has given us more to look forward to – and, at the same time, more closure – than any Chuck finale to date.
Chuck season 4 episode 20 series#
I’ve always loved Chuck, but the last time I was this invested in an episode was two years ago, in April 2009 when Ring aired, making me laugh harder and tear up more than any hour of the series up to that point. It’s all here, better, perhaps, than ever before. Action comedy ridiculously high stakes and above all else, the kind of heartwarming emotion only the best stories can deliver. Having just watched the episode, I can’t say whether or not it’s the best episode since my personal favorite, Chuck Versus the Ring, but it’s absolutely the most all-around satisfying. It’s the ultimate culmination of four years of storytelling, and in just 42 minutes, packs in everything that makes Chuck wonderful. That makes me more ecstatic than I can express through words, but at the same time, Cliffhanger is, despite its title, the very first episode of Chuck that would have put me at peace as an actual series finale. In all likelihood, it was to be the series finale – but thanks to a last minute renewal for the fifth (and final) season, it’s just a season finale. The first half of season four went out with a tremendous bang in the form of Chuck Versus the Push Mix, and though this hour left us with no cliffhangers, ending with Chuck and Sarah engaged just wouldn’t have felt right – the story had to go further. So we got six more episodes and Chuck Versus the Ring Part II, which left us hanging to learn about Mama Bartowski and the family’s history.
Chuck Versus the Other Guy put Chuck and Sarah together at last, and we couldn’t leave it there – we had to see them as a couple. Ring gave us the Intersect 2.0 and one hell of a cliffhanger, one we needed to see resolved. Each has been designed in such a way that they could close out the entire series if the show was cancelled, but none of them would have been truly satisfying resolutions. Thanks to NBC’s strange start/stop scheduling over the past few years, Chuck has had four ‘finales’ in two seasons, each of them memorable for many varied reasons, but uniformly epic in the mold the season 2 finale, Chuck Versus the Ring, set.