Chuck Versus The Alma Mater - Plot Summary - Main Plot

Main Plot

Professor Fleming is in the lecture hall at Stanford, 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 who 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 Stanford. However, while cleaning out boxes of memorabilia from college, Chuck flashes on his old student 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 is 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 of the promise Chuck shows, Chuck will be 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 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).