There were three great things about “Chuck Versus the Tango”: A Shawshank reference, the implication that Anna has an even wilder side than was obvious and the first of many Buy More/spy world parallels.

Not a bad haul for the third episode of Chuck’s first season. This was where Chuck got his GPS watch and where the phrase “Chuck’s Stable o’ Ho’s” was coined. Casey trimmed a bonsai, Chuck ran into an old college chum and Harry Tang painted the word picture for Chuck with his most awesome name.

And this was the first of several episodes in this season that would leave me wondering about the awkward sexual tension that seemed to surround Chuck and, unfortunately, his sister.

Glad the writers righted that ship.

This was the first regular episode, too, in a way, following what I look back at as the two-part pilot. Pretty soon I’ll run out of firsts to talk about, but this third week of Chuck Me Mondays still had plenty. I wasn’t too active on the Twitter side myself, getting off only a handful of tweets. Still, it looked like a decent turnout.

This is turning out to be a great way to pass my summer Monday nights. Check out the rest of my recap after the jump

Art dealers are dying of lead poisoning at an alarming rate as a rather unattractive painting makes its way to L.A. for auction. What that means for Chuck is that he’s going to get to go on his very first mission.

Sarah and Casey are divided on whether that’s best for him. Ellie and Morgan are similarly divided as to what’s best for Chuck, but in a different way.

That’s one of my favorite things about this show, those parallels. Since they’ve become a staple of most episodes, it was cool to look back and see the first time it was tried. The way the two were interwoven, with lots of cuts back and forth, made it even more fun.

At issue, as it usually was back then, is Chuck’s future. Early on Big Mike asks him where he sees himself in five years. It’s a good question for a manager to ask a senior staffer. My thought was to wonder what Chuck would have made of the question five years earlier, figuring he sure didn’t see himself at the Buy More.

Well it isn’t long before Chuck and Sarah are talking over lunch about the same question. It’s when he comes up with the alias Charles Carmichael. Apparently that was his pseudonym for the successful software tycoon he saw himself one day becoming. Notwithstanding Bryce Larkin, that’s pretty much who he would have been.

A sympathetic Sarah lays out his part in the mission, since the General wants to see him in action.

Thanks to a little sarcastic mischief by Casey, Chuck believes learning to Tango on the fly would help. (I guess in Season 3 he’ll just flash on how to Tango.) Of course, Awesome spent a semester in Buenos Aires and does a mean tango, gladly teaching Chuck. Talk about bizarre scenes, made more so by the cutaways to Sarah getting her weapons on and Casey trimming his bonsai tree. Huh?

The mission goes slightly awry when Chuck flashes on an MI-6 agent he mistakes for the ruthless La Ciudad. Of course that leads Sarah and eventually Casey away while Chuck inadvertently makes nice with the real La Ciudad. The feminine article in the should have tipped them all off to the fact that it would be a woman.

So while an armed standoff takes shape up on the roof, Chuck tangoes with a killer.

La Ciudad: Uh, Mr. Carmichael.

Chuck: Please, Chuck.

La Ciudad: Chuck, I believe your hand is supposed to be on my hip.

Chuck: Yes, apparently I learned the girl’s part. Would you mind leading?

La Ciudad: Not at all.

But she figures him out after Morgan all but blows his cover by calling from the locked merchandise cage. There was some uncomfortably descriptive language in the way Morgan described Chuck to the woman with the phone, by the way.

Chuck figures out La Ciudad’s identity too, flashing on her neck scar. So it’s upstairs with the goons for him. Luckily he’s got his new GPS watch on so Sarah and Casey could track him.

One little wrinkle they threw in that bears dwelling on is Chuck’s old college pal Watterman. The guy’s a total schmuck, and he nearly blows Chuck’s cover until Chuck flashes on his business card. It was a cool moment for that time in the show, but we never see Chuck flash on random things like that anymore. They should do more with that, show viewers how he can’t fully control the Intersect as it affects his whole life.

But anyway, it was a hilarious setup for when La Ciudad jumps the balcony and busts into Watterman’s room below, only to have one of her goons fall past a few moments later. Bet they scared that guy straight.

It gave the episode an odd rhythm for La Ciudad to get away only to return to the Buy More to kill Chuck—not in a bad way, just a little weird. Of course it set up one of the best lines of the series when Chuck is discovered by Harry hiding from the goons beneath the counter.

Harry: Chuck, hiding from work again?

Chuck: I think I dropped something. Go away, Harry.

Harry: Oh you wish I would. I’m not going anywhere, Chuck. When you go to sleep at night, all you’re going to see is Harry Tang in your face.

Casey spots the goons immediately and seems to take real pleasure in dispatching one of them, who had a gun on him at the time. Impressive stuff, especially the elbow slam on the deep freeze. Of course he gets the second goon so much better with the flying microwave after Chuck mistakenly thinks he locked the bad guy in the cage. That lock was broken this morning.

(Hey Chuck, he could just shoot you through the gate if he wanted.)

Up on the roof, Sarah’s having a tougher time with La Ciudad, who she ID’d by her scar. (Cool parallel there, huh?) Such a great fight scene, though, right down to Sarah’s kick-ass tag line, “Hang here.” Nothing beats a beat down with handcuffs. Really playing to the demographic with the entire sequence.

Before I gloss past it, but Morgan really distinguished himself as the faithful friend in this one. He rallies the Nerd Herders to Chuck’s cause, at least until he locks himself into his own personal hell. The scene with the operar music was a cool shout-out to Shawshank’s Andy Dufresne locked inside the warden’s office with the guards beating down the door. Totally missed that hte first time despite seeing Shawshank Redemption about 12 times.

Did you notice that Anna brought Morgan coffee the next morning and seemed generally sympathetic to him the whole episode. Was that the seeds of their relationship right htere?

In the end, Chuck fixes all the broken computers, impressing Big Mike who knows there’s nothing wrong with a man wetting his whistle once in a while.

Back at the Awesomes, Chuck and Ellie have a heart to heart about the way he’s been avoiding her. There was one line from Ellie that reminded me a lot of the Season 2 finale when Sarah asks him how many times he has to be a hero before he’ll realize he is one.

Ellie: I just know what an incredible guy Chuck Bartowski is and sometimes I’m not so sure that he knows it.

True that, sis. Later on, Chuck and Sarah have another of their many frustrating moments that you think will end in a kiss until it doesn’t. Thankfully Morgan breaks the tension by stepping out of the shadows creepily and noticing Casey—who he spotted following Chuck and Sarah into the home theater room earlier in the episode—spying on them from his window.

True, Morgan, that dude is creepy. But so are you, my man.