| "Chuck Versus the Alma Mater" | |||
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| Chuck episode | |||
Bryce Larkin and Chuck Bartowski in a game of Gotcha! |
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| Episode no. | Season 1 Episode 7 |
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| Directed by | Patrick Norris | ||
| Written by | Anne Cofell Saunders | ||
| Featured music | "Don't Look Back in Anger" by Oasis | ||
| Production code | 3T6456 | ||
| Original air date | November 5, 2007 | ||
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| Episode chronology | |||
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| List of Chuck episodes | |||
"Chuck Versus the Alma Mater" is the seventh episode of the first season of Chuck. It aired on November 5, 2007, and finds Chuck returning to Stanford to track down a data disk, and answer questions about his past. Meanwhile, Morgan must lead a revolt against the tyrannical Harry Tang.
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Professor Fleming is in the lecture hall, giving a lesson on subliminal imagery, when he sees a sinister figure enter the class. He hastily calls an early dismissal and flees, grabbing as many papers as he can and calling for help: He had made a copy of intelligence he should not and now someone is after it. Chuck and the team attend a briefing with General Beckman in the Home Theater room of the Buy More, where Chuck is stunned to learn that Fleming, the professor that had him expelled, was working for the CIA. Beckman wants Chuck to use his connection with Fleming to facilitate his extraction, but Chuck declines. Awesome, his frat brothers, and Ellie are preparing for the UCLA/Stanford game and are asking Chuck to come with them, but he again refuses to return to the school. However, while cleaning out boxes of memorabilia from college, Chuck flashes on his old Stanford ID.
Chuck confronts Casey as to why he's in the Intersect, but Casey does not know. Chuck agrees to accompany them to pick up Fleming, and though told to stay in the car while Sarah and Casey go inside the safehouse where Fleming is staying, he gets out when the Professor arrives. Fleming is pleased to see Chuck, and teaches him a secret phrase: "Are you coming to the toga party?" to use if he's in trouble. Chuck asks him why the CIA has a file on him. Fleming apologizes, but before he can say more is shot from behind with a crossbow by Magnus Einar, an Icelandic agent. Fleming tries to give Chuck a scrap of paper with a cryptic number code written on it and asks him to give it to Bryce Larkin, but Einar takes it first.
Fleming is taken into surgery, while Sarah and Casey ask about the numbers. Chuck is unable to remember them all, however, and once again declines joining them to follow-up on the lead at Stanford. Ellie gives him a copy of Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire that he checked out before being expelled, and while looking at the spine, he realizes that the numbers Fleming gave him was shelving code for a book at the Stanford library. He quickly passes on this intelligence to Casey and Sarah, and realizes that Fleming must have hidden the data in the library, where Chuck and Bryce played games of Gotcha! There was a particular location Bryce used to hide spare darts, but Chuck realizes he has to go there to find it.
Chuck, Sarah and Casey join Ellie, Awesome and his frat brothers at Stanford. Leaving his family at the tailgate party, Chuck and the team head to the school's library, where Chuck finds Bryce's hiding place and the disk. However Magnus has followed them and the three flee from him and his henchmen but are eventually pinned down in a lecture hall, where Chuck discovers the disk contains a list of students recruited by the CIA, including him and Bryce. Chuck escapes out a side door while Casey and Sarah hold off Einar's men. He finds a computer and begins calling in backup from the students on the disc using the code Fleming taught him. Most arrive at the lecture hall with heavy firepower to relieve Casey and Sarah, while another student ambushes and incapacitates Einar before he can kill Chuck.
Back at home, Sarah allows Chuck time to review his file on the disk before confiscating it. In it, Fleming was about to record an interview with Chuck when Bryce enters and reveals that Chuck never got the message. Fleming says that Chuck is ideal for the Omaha Project, and touts his high rate of retention of subliminal information; he further states that, because the promise Chuck shows, Chuck will drafted rather than recruited and he will be "in, no matter what." Bryce fears that Omaha, a military project, would destroy his friend and that he's too good of a person to be forced into that life. With no other options, Bryce requests that Fleming help him falsify records to show Chuck cheated on his exams, invalidating his test scores and sparing him from recruitment. Chuck realizes Bryce sacrificed his friendship with Chuck to save him, and that if Bryce got him expelled to protect him, maybe there was a reason for him destroying the Intersect as well (And Sarah notes that maybe there was a reason he sent the Intersect to Chuck).
Part of the episode is revealed in flashbacks. When asked why Bryce turned him in, he tells him he brought it on himself, even though Chuck did not do what he was accused of. It was Fleming who revealed that Bryce turned him in for cheating. Chuck also recalls when he first met Bryce at Stanford.
Harry Tang has been on a campaign to restructure the store to his own satisfaction. He implements several policies that have become unpopular, including scheduled lunches and breaks. Morgan finds that he and Chuck can no longer share their lunch hour, to which Chuck laments the loss of "Surf and Turf Wednesdays and Fridays." Harry also institutes a "Green" program, but the final straw comes when Harry hijacks the Buy More video wall during one of the employees' competitions—a race to identify as many television programs in a minute as possible—with a universal remote that gives him control of all the TV sets on the wall: "One Remote to control them all."
With Chuck away visiting Stanford, Morgan leads a revolt against Harry. The staff decides the best approach is to steal the One Remote. While Anna flirts with Harry as a distraction, Lester steals Harry's locker key and hands it off to Morgan. However when Morgan attempts to remove the remote he is caught by Harry after Lester tips him off. Harry confines Morgan to "The Hole," where he is forced to deal with angry customers and returns. He calls Chuck and gains the access code to Harry's remote. Morgan locks Harry out, and barters his way out of the Hole.
Although Chuck had referred to his experiences at Stanford, Bryce's betrayal, and their friendship several times over the preceding six episodes, "Chuck Versus the Alma Mater" was the first to explore this history in detail. Chuck and Bryce are shown meeting in the school quad in 1999 when Bryce notices Chuck's C++ textbook, and their mutual interest in computers and programming was apparent from the beginning. Zork, which played a key role in "Chuck Versus the Intersect," was also mentioned, and as mentioned in the pilot, Chuck and Bryce would go on to create their own special version of the game together. The episode also reveals that Jill was a friend of Bryce's, and that he was the one who introduced her to Chuck. No other details of the relationship between Bryce and Jill would be revealed until Chuck Versus the Gravitron in Season 2. The episode reveals Chuck was expelled in 2003.
Previous episodes vilified Bryce for getting Chuck kicked out of school. The revelation that he only did so to protect his friend, even at the cost of losing that friendship, was an unexpected twist. The purposes of Bryce's actions would be further explored in "Chuck Versus the Nemesis."
Professor Fleming mentions Chuck is an ideal candidate for the Omaha Project, however no explanation of what this project was given. Omaha also resurfaced in a quip by Bryce later on, which Casey offers could be a possible code word for Sarah.[1] Whatever the nature of the project, Chuck's high retention rate of subliminal data made him an ideal choice by Fleming for the project to the extent that Chuck would not be given the option of refusal (basically a drafting as opposed to a recruitment.)
This episode is also the first to offer a possible explanation for how the Intersect functions. One of the images in Fleming's presentation to his class is a picture of a flower that also appeared prominently in the Intersect data in "Chuck Versus the Intersect." The picture of the flower is actually composed of hundreds of smaller images tiled together to create the main picture. As Fleming explains, the eye only sees the entire image, but the mind subliminally recalls the smaller pictures that make it up. Chuck's unprecedented recall rate would allow him to remember these images.
Also, Ellie and Awesome are revealed to have attended UCLA.
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