Covert Affairs was Kinda Lame Until it Became ... Awesome??

Ummmm ... shit.  Covert Affairs has been on for like ... over 2 years now, right?  It's in the second half of its third season right now.  I have successfully ignored the crap out of this show this entire time, which I was perfectly happy about, because as much as I love a good spy show, this one always seemed SO generic to me.  I mean right down to the title itself ... Covert Affairs ... how much LESS descriptive can you get than that?  You might as well just call it, "Spy Show".  Or as I just saw on another blog which made me laugh out loud, "Secret Stuff."  The previews always made it seem like a possible Alias rip-off too, not just because it's about a female spy, but it seemed to focus on the whole "balancing friends/family and my secret spy life" theme as well.  Because of my past deep love of Alias, this made me angry, so I purposely didn't bother to check it out.

Rating the TV Romance, Part 4: Chuck and Sarah

When I was re-watching a few episodes of Alias for my last "Rating the TV Romance" post, I re-watched an episode called "A Higher Echelon", the second ep in a 2-ep arc in which Marshall Flinkman (nerdy SD-6 spy gadget inventor extraordinaire) gets to go on his first mission (with Sydney of course).  Towards the end of the episode, Sydney is in the middle of saving him after he has been kidnapped by bad guys, and after she saves him, he manages to bust out a moment where he returns the favor using sheer nerdy ingenuity (i.e. one of his inventions) - a secret parachute that can be hidden in the lining of a jacket.  Syd and Marshall are stuck in a tall building with no way out, so the parachute comes in very handy at that moment.  The moment when Marshall suddenly turns from nerd to bad-ass spy, at least for that short minute in time, is when he straps Syd onto him so they can jump out a window together, and follows this up with: "My name is Marshall J. Flinkman, and I'm here to rescue you!!"