CYBORGS ON NETWORK TV!

I like "Chuck." I like it a lot. To catch allo'y'all up as quickly as possible: chuck is a geek loser working very hard at the "buymore," an electronics superstore, to not live up to his genius-level potential until one day an experimental supercomputer called "The Intersect" is implanted in his brain granting him access to the ultimate intelligence database by way of "flashes" -- unwrapping of said intelligence into his conscious mind through a visual trigger -- which results in the government deploying two crack agents and a lot of fancy hardware to protect "The Asset" from an ambiguous axis-of-evil type secret group known as Fulcrum, priority 1, as well as to take advantage of his capabilities in saving the world, priority 2. One of the agents is a "perfect dime piece" as my brother might say, and she and Chuck fall in love but are separated by the official nature of their relationship and the endlessly unfolding hijinx as can be imagined per the show's premise. A delightfully entertaining mix of comic book high-geek secret agent shit with great bufoonery from the employees of the buymore with a heart-warming alternative family drama (Chuck and sister were abandoned by father at a young age and I'm pretty sure the mom died at some point. Chuck, sis, and sis's fiance all live together).

Now, the meat. Chuck is a modern cyborg. His brainspace has been invaded completely. He works through the machine; the machine works through him. This doesn't make him into a superman, it makes him into a commodity. He is referred to as "The Asset," he has "handlers," and, most importantly, Chuck's central struggle is not in saving the world--that comes secondarily--it is in asserting his person-ness in the face of the both fulcrum and the government's attempts to pack him up and pull the computer out of his head.

The show is borderline subversive in the way it handles this drama: Chuck's humanity is repeatedly threatened, and he wins every time without even trying, without exaggerated gestures of heroism and, mostly importantly, without violence. It's as if, at the moment the machine inhabited him to the extent that he was no longer Chuck, some protector's spirit rose up and out, ceding the flesh to unlock life in the machine and destroying the machine's rational, binary perfection. A real cyborg! This protector's spirit follows Chuck through all of his unlikely trials and smites all the clowns that would mistake a fellow man for an object to be treated as less than human.

Telling also that the setting for Nick Bottom and Peter Quince's descendents is an electronics superstore. The employees make a circus of corporate america, turning a warehouse of a shop on steroids into a village. The goods and geekeries transformed into symbols of status, as opposed to the more common reality of symbols stripped and sold, which is something we witness daily.

Watch chuck! It's awesome!