Chuck

Chuck's History

Chuck is a twenty-something underachiever who lives in the Echo Park Section of Los Angeles, California and works at a dead end job at the Burbank Buy More, he is the supervisor of its Nerd Herd tech support division. On his birthday in 2007, an e-mail from an old friend changes his life.

On his 26th birthday, in September 2007, Chuck opens an e-mail from Bryce Larkin that uploads the full contents of a CIA/NSA supercomputer known as the Intersect into his brain. The Intersect serves as a database for the combined collected intelligence of both agencies. The primary Intersect computer had been destroyed by Larkin, making Chuck's brain the only depository of this top-secret information. The government learns that Chuck is the last person contacted by Larkin, so both the CIA and NSA, independent of one another, send agents to find him.

The CIA dispatches Agent Sarah Walker to evaluate Bartowski and, if possible, retrieve the Intersect, while the NSA sends Major John Casey. The two agents eventually cross paths, and Sarah fends off Casey, recognizing that Chuck is exactly who he appears to be, a nice guy caught up in events beyond his control. They discover that Chuck has become a human Intersect; he sees a rapid-fire series of images - known throughout the series as "flashes" - of intelligence from the Intersect database whenever he subconsciously recognizes a bit of related information either audibly or visually. The two agencies conclude that Chuck is an intelligence asset and must be protected; they assign Sarah and Casey jointly to the task.

An additional wrinkle in Chuck's life turned upside down is that Chuck is smitten with Sarah from the first moment she walks in the Buy More. Before she reveals who she is, she and Chuck had a semi-successful date, during which she told him she liked him, apparently a sincere sentiment and not just for the sake of her cover.