There’s Something About Sarah

I did not discover Chuck until January 2011. I just can’t recall seeing a promo for the show during the last four years. Maybe I’m just too old to remember, ... or maybe the suits at NBC weren’t doing their job. I think that Chuck was a clue in a crossword puzzle whose answer was Zachary Levi. I asked my wife who he was and got some vague answer, so I looked it up on IMDB, found a synopsis of the show, found the pilot on-line, and the rest is history. We watched 3-1/2 seasons over a couple of months, 3-4 episodes a night, in order. We liked it, ... a lot.

I looked up the actors on-line, as none were anyone I recognized ... trolled on the web and came across some fan sites, and then stumbled onto this blog. It was, to say the least, enlightening. It started me thinking about Chuck, Sarah and their relationship. Chuck is an open book. It’s clear what he wants and why he acts as he does. But Sarah, ... Sarah is truly an enigma. What does she want? Why does she behave as she does? As the story progresses and we think we understand, then she surprises us.

The Chuck/Sarah relationship is about two deeply insecure people trying to find each other in a dimly lit room—bumping into furniture, other people, and occasionally each other (without knowing it)—until the lights finally come up and they can see clearly.

Sarah is deeply insecure? Not according to the Conventional Wisdom (CW) that has been developed by serious fans. She has been described many ways:

Top CIA spy ... wild-card enforcer ... kick-ass woman ... resourceful ... a con artist who could “read” people ... a liar ... a killer ... a girl with a “type” ... unemotional ... a dichotomy of “lioness” and “lamb” ... reactive ... a poor planner ... a maker of bad choices,

... but never as insecure.

However, the Sarah of CW is at the center of a conundrum that cannot be resolved in a satisfactory way: If Sarah really loves Chuck why does she cause him so much emotional pain by continually acting in ways that create cognitive dissonance for him. She does things and looks at him in ways that signal she has feelings for him and then tells him that there is no possible future for them. She knows, intellectually at least, how Chuck feels about her, because he tells her straight out on many occasions.

She created the fake-relationship cover story. Its purpose was to explain why they were with each other (when they were with each other). But she clearly didn’t have to be by his side 24/7 to protect him. She had her own apartment. Who was protecting him at night? She worked near the Buy More doing surveillance, but who was right by his side during the day. Casey it turns out. The fake relationship really only covered evenings and weekends ... and missions.

If she really loved Chuck all along, [“I fell for you a long, long time ago after you fixed my phone and before you started defusing bombs with computer viruses” (3-13/15:39)] but could never have a future with him because of her job, then the most humane thing for her to have done would have been to get reassigned to somewhere else. He would get over the loss. She might have to live with it, but she was supposed to be good at suppressing that stuff.

She appeared to try that tack, half-heartedly, but General Beckman said no (and Sarah seemed OK with that). But she still had other options.

She could have put herself at arms length from Chuck, in a less tempting cover role—a business relationship of some sort. She could have stuck to protecting him on missions—they could have mission specific cover roles. After all there were times when he had other "girlfriends" and that didn’t seem to present an insurmountable security problem. Just let him have the other girl and bow out gracefully. But she didn’t. She always reappeared within apparent reach.

She could even have opted to make it a real relationship regardless of the “cardinal rule of spying”. There were precedents. The “role models” Craig and Laura Turner are a married spy couple, and Roan and General Beckman are also shown in 4-14 to have had a relationship in the past for which feelings still exist.

However, she stuck with the fake relationship cover that actually hurt both Chuck and her. She must have known Chuck was hurting even though he never explicitly said to her, “Sarah, why are you hurting me so much?” No matter how we rearrange the assumptions of CW we can’t get away from this problem. There seems to be no good reason why Sarah needs to hurt Chuck in order to do her job. And it remains a problem even if we hypothesize that she has some hidden long-term strategy to ultimately be with Chuck.

So let’s take an Alternate View and assume that there is something else about Sarah motivating her actions—something not found in CW. Let’s start with the fake relationship. What if it was more complex than it appeared to be on the surface? What if she had to be close by Chuck not just to protect him, but to satisfy some need of her own? What might that need be? And why would a fake relationship be more appealing than a real one? To explore this question we need to understand Sarah before she joined the CIA. We learn quite a bit from the flashbacks—in “Cougars”, “DeLorean”, and “Wedding Planner”.

Sarah had a totally dysfunctional childhood and adolescence. Her only real confidant was her father. Although he loved her in his own strange way, and saw to her physical needs and education, he provided no emotional support. And even before he was arrested he was in and out of her life. [She actually discusses this over the course of the show.] There is no evidence that she ever had any friends, especially friends her own age. When she was with her father—or expected to be with him—she was happy, because of the adventure. When he was gone, specifically after he had been arrested, she was a social outcast—lonely, rejected, a loser. Look at her walking down the high school hallway taunted by her classmates because her father is in jail ... it’s the face of depression. If she had had any real ability as a con artist she would have had them eating out of her hand. Watch her frantically digging up the money her father left for her under the tree. She’s like a feral animal that was raised by wolves. She lashes out at Graham, throwing a knife that barely misses him, then gives up in submission by putting out her hands ready to be cuffed. These are intensely painful memories that Sarah does not want to dredge up, and that’s why she resists so vigorously when Chuck tries to learn about her past. It’s no coincidence that the flashback in “Cougars” occurs as she is mercilessly attacking a punching bag. She is also attacking a bag when she flashes back in “DeLorean”.

Emotional intelligence doesn’t just happen. Emotions have to be experienced to be learned. Sarah experienced loss, fear, rejection, abandonment, and probably anger, over the first 18 years of her life, but she never experienced trust or love (or humor, joy, optimism, etc.) She had no self-esteem. She adored her father—he was an Alpha male. But she never had a peer confidant, thus never learned empathy. Her hormones were flowing when she was a teenager, but it appears that she was never in love, or even had a crush. She wanted a normal life but she was alone with no one to turn to. And the pain of depression—she bottled it all up. Adrenaline eased the pain. Adventure, excitement, and risk provided the adrenaline. The spy life was the medicine that allowed her to get her through the day. Sarah became a spy to escape from the pain of reality, not to be a hero. But she had made a Faustian bargain with the CIA that added guilt to her insecurity. [re: her red test “It was the worst day of my life.” (3-11/41:52)]

Sarah, when we first met her, was emotionally incomplete ... Graham’s wild-card enforcer ... considered not-so-nice even by (c)old school killers like Casey. She existed on an adrenaline high from mission-to-mission. Bryce, her partner, is an alpha male. He runs the team. He’s like her father in that respect. And Bryce abandoned her just like her father had. She didn’t love Bryce. Her relationship to him was most likely friend-with-benefits. In fact, she never loved anyone besides Chuck, and that love wasn’t fully realized by her until 3-16.

Before Sarah met Chuck she had given up all hope of ever having a normal life, and had resigned herself to living the rest of her life, however short that might be, as a spy. [“Before you the only future I could think about was my next mission.” (3-16/39:50)] When you have nothing real—no one to live for—it’s easy to become the risk-taking, emotionless professional that she was. But Sarah the spy was not hiding her emotions, she was hiding her lack of emotional experience.

Sarah had been used her whole life. Used by her father to run cons. Used by the CIA as a seductress and sometime assassin. Used by her CIA partners for sex. After joining the CIA and prior to meeting Chuck she had lived in a world consisting only of spies and bad guys. Chuck’s simple act of kindness helping the little girl at the Buy More recreate her ballet video was something alien to Sarah’s world—but it was an epiphany of sorts for her. She sensed a possibility, however slim, of actually becoming whole and living a normal life at some point. And she sensed (or maybe just hoped) that Chuck might be the agent of that possibility—a safe harbor where she could explore her emotional landscape and hopefully fill in the missing pieces.

The first evening out with Chuck clinched it. He was sweet, shy, funny, and intelligent and he seemed to like her for herself (even though it was her cover self)—he was not someone out to use her. Of course even if she understood her own psyche at that point, she couldn’t explain the whole situation to Chuck. It would have been too embarrassing a revelation for a tough-as-nails spy. She was afraid that if she really opened up too soon he might see her emptiness and her window of opportunity would be lost. She was deeply insecure about her lack of emotional experience. Getting whole was a long-odds gamble for her, anyway, and there was no way that she could even attempt it without Chuck.

So she latched onto him and she didn’t let go. Chuck couldn’t help her if he was locked up in a CIA facility somewhere, so she had to keep him out and keep him safe. She was handling him as much for herself as for the CIA. It was little selfish at first—ironically, she was using Chuck—but it had to be that way. She needed proximity to him, his family, and his friends to experience normality in a safe environment. That’s why the fake relationship cover story. It kept her close to him. She couldn’t commit to him because she feared that she might not succeed in becoming whole. It hurt Chuck, but initially she didn’t have the empathy to see that—she couldn’t really read the hurt because she was so wrapped up in her own insecurities. A real relationship was not an option at that point (even though that was not against the rules) because she didn’t know how to do that yet. But the fake relationship was real enough to her, and it provided her the opportunity to become whole. Love was something she still needed to learn. It would take time. At first she “loved” Chuck as her agent of change, then she ultimately loved him as a man.

Every time she encountered something or someone that might separate her from Chuck—the possibility of his being locked away in a CIA facility, killed by the CIA, monopolized by various “girlfriends”—you could see the sadness in her eyes. She fought to keep him safe and available to her.

Sarah’s journey had elements of “growth” and “redemption”, as described by CW, but primarily it was a journey of healing. It was a journey that required her to resume the development of her emotional toolbox that was arrested during her childhood and adolescence so that she could become whole. And the farther along the path to normalcy she traveled, the more desperately she wanted to complete the journey to attain a normal life with Chuck. As she developed empathy over time, she began to see that her actions sometimes hurt Chuck, and that hurt her too, but she saw no other options.

What we see as Sarah’s internal conflict was not between being a spy and living a normal life; it was between her desire to become whole and live a normal life, and the emotional risk that that process entailed. What if she failed? What if she could never be normal? Maybe it was too risky to try. But she had to try, and it became her primary objective.

Chuck, when we first met him, had experienced the full range of emotions, but was, like Sarah, an emotional basket case due to betrayal and rejection. He had regressed to playing video games with Morgan. Nonetheless, when Sarah looked at Chuck and his family and friends she saw love, trust, and empathy in action.

At the CIA, Sarah had gotten by on intellect and physicality alone. Her particular emotional deficiencies were never noticed because spies were supposed to suppress them anyway, so no one looked. Chuck looked at Sarah and saw a beautiful, intelligent, strong woman—the girl of his dreams. He missed the incomplete child beneath the surface because Sarah hid it so well. That’s why he was so confused by her.

The two of them had the same problem—they thought that they were not good enough for each other. Sarah needed to become whole both for herself and to be good enough for Chuck. She envisioned a future with Chuck in the normal world. Chuck needed to become strong for himself, but also to prove himself good enough for her by becoming a spy (but a spy who never killed anyone in cold blood). He was willing to straddle both worlds in order to have a future with Sarah. They eventually met in the middle. Chuck became a spy, but never gave up his humanity. Sarah became whole, and though she continued to work as a spy, it was no longer to escape from reality, but for all the right reasons.

It was a journey of missteps and bruises as they navigated through that dimly lit room— chronicled by the pilot through episode 3-16. They brushed past each other so many times. There were times when Sarah felt that she had lost Chuck: when he didn’t run away with her in Prague in 3-1... when she thought he had killed the mole in 3-11. There were times when he broke off the fake relationship, in 1-8 and 2-3.

The breakup in 2-3 was especially ironic. Chuck doesn’t understand Sarah’s real issues so he tells her that they can’t have a real future together because she is a spy and [“I’m a normal guy, who wants a normal life. And as amazing as you are, Sarah Walker, we both know that you will never be normal.” (2-3/40:01)] Chuck sees it as high praise. Sarah is devastated. It’s her worst nightmare that Chuck, the person she is depending on to help her become normal, feels that it is not possible.

But despite the missteps and doubts, she doesn’t give up. And finally in episode 3-16 Sarah has her major breakthrough in the encounter with Dr. Dreyfus at his front door. That was when she finally understood that she loved Chuck no longer as a mixture of healing agent and man, but solely as a man.

Subsequent to 3-16 she still has a few other emotions—such as joy, optimism, humor—to flesh out. Up to this point she has really been somewhat of a tomboy (although one that looked good in a dress). During the whole proposal and wedding planning phase of the story we see her discovering feelings that any normal twenty-something girl would have already been through, including all of the giddiness about getting married.

By the time she has to deal with all things Volkoff, she has largely healed and is determined to protect Chuck and his family ... her family.

In hindsight, Sarah’s journey towards emotional completeness, and the missteps taken by her and Chuck along the way, explain the changes we observe in her behavior over the course of the show.

 

—Bill