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Casey app for Ataraxion
CHARACTER INFORMATION
Name: John Casey (Alexander Coburn)
Canon: Chuck
Original or Alternate Universe: Original
Canon Point: End of Season 4
Number: 008 >> 089
Setting:
Regular old modern day in Burbank, California, where the spy world has collided with the world of the Buy More and every episode has suspicious amounts of marketing from Subway in it. Okay so maybe things are a little more technological than is strictly realistic, and there’s a supercomputer in this poor guy’s head, but that’s totally normal, right? Oh, and spies are dazzlingly attractive, unless they work for the NSA, in which case they’re just Plain Jayne.That was a Firefly joke okay I’ll go shoot myself now.
History:
Chuck is a long lasting series with short episodal storylines interspersed over a season long storyline, following different enemy groups in each season from one to the next. Enemy groups such as Fulcrum, The Ring, and then Volkof Industries each take a firm standing as opponents from one season to the next. As a result, this history will make note of seasonal occurances rather than giving a blow by blow of the episodes themselves, and I will attempt to surmise Casey’s role in it rather than telling the story.
Pre-series
Born Alexander Coburn around 1971, very little is known about Casey’s early life and career, except that he was a choirboy, and in his late teens found himself inducted into the US Marine Corps. The day he left, Casey proposed to Kathleen McHugh, his fiancée, at a bus shelter, not knowing that she was pregnant at the time.
By 18/19, in 1989, Casey was a Lieutenant in Honduras, a star sniper, and had found himself noticed by higher ups for his particular talents. However Casey has never tested well, as would be proven later in the series when infiltrating Fulcrum, and he found himself not sufficiently qualified to train with Special Ops, a disappointment that pushed him to fake his own death and give up his life at home in order to join NSA Black Ops. He wasn’t aware that his fiancée was pregnant with his daughter, and would consequently wait for him almost indefinitely.
After joining the NSA and before going on to train with Ty Bennett some four or five years later, Casey would be involved in the Costa Gravas revolution, making assassination attempts on a man whose life he would later save – Costa Gravan Premier Alejandro Goya - and earning himself the name ‘The Angel of Death’. Casey in fact served in a number of different places following his joining the NSA, in some of the most dangerous places in the world; Bosnia, Syria, Iran, Afghanistan, Chechnya; and has spent enough time in other countries that he becomes deeply unhappy at the suggestion of having to ‘go back to France’, grumbles about having to visit Russia, and makes mocking comments about Paris being romantic.
To be more specific, Casey would be tortured in Syria by Baath Separatists, seal a vault full of terrorist gold up in Iran, spend two years undercover in Afghanistan, and while also undercover in Chechnya find himself on the outside of a terrorist attack, having lost a woman he had become deeply involved in name Ilsa. She had apparently been a victim, however it would be later revealed that she was a French Spy, although not before traumatising poor Casey for years.
And then there was the Intersect.
Season 1
Casey, working for the NSA, shoots dead a CIA agent breaking into a secure facility; the agent, Bryce Larkin, has just destroyed a computer that contains the joint intelligence of both the NSA and the CIA, but as well as having destroyed it, Bryce had uploaded it, sending the computer to a man he hasn’t seen in years; a man by the name of Chuck Bartowski. Chuck uploads the computer – called the Intersect – straight into his brain, and Casey, as well as Agent Sarah Walker working for the CIA’s interests, are both separately dispatched to find the stolen information and recover it.
Having discovered where the secrets have gone, Casey and Sarah are both assigned to guard the Intersect – Chuck – and protect him from people who might be trying to find those secrets too. It turns out there’s a lot of them, the very first being a doctor sent in by the CIA to establish whether or not the Intersect really is in Chuck’s head; Doctor Zarnow fakes his own death, cunningly making it seem like Casey and Sarah may be targeting each other, and making it easier to alienate and access them, so that he can attempt to find out who the Intersect is.
Casey, meanwhile, and for the duration of Operation Bartowski, takes a job as a Green Shirt selling appliances at the Buy More, something he isn’t actually all that bad at. However his real job is to wait for the new Intersect to be built, and then eliminate Chuck – but only after protecting him for the next six months. At this point the job is just another job to Casey; it takes him a while to actually warm to Chuck at all. Or Chuck to him, actually.
They proceed to go on missions together, Casey very often saving Chuck from his own messes, or crashing in at the last moment to save the day, and actually to be quite fair Sarah and Chuck saving Casey on occasion too, such as when he finds himself seduced and tied up in his underwear by Carina. They face Russian agents, the Chinese Triad, even each other, but in general the first season is a season of discovery; finding out what the Intersect can do and helping Chuck to become an asset, while in turn he searches for a way to get the Intersect out of his head—something that would become much more eagerly pursued in Season 2.
From Casey’s perspective, the first season of Chuck is essentially a long mission in which Casey tries to protect Chuck up until the point where he’s no longer necessary. He keeps him under surveillance, having planted bugs all over his apartments, listens in on all his conversations, follows him when he’s being suspicious, and tries to make sure Chuck stays in the car on missions.
Bryce – supposedly killed – would reappear later on in the season, with Casey determined to hunt him down and return him to government custody. The involvement of Fulcrum becomes apparent at this point, leading to the rest of the season’s storyline, and leading into the next season’s.
At one point Casey is poisoned accidentally by Chuck, and then later given the antidote—this wouldn’t be the first time, either, as later in the series while on a lockdown (season 2) Chuck would attempt to cure Casey of a toxin he was infected with by kissing him. Chuck also at one point redirects a rocket aimed at a boat he, Sarah and Casey are standing on at another nearby GPS—destroying Casey’s car, his prized Crown Victoria, and the very first thing that Casey seems to show any kind of fondness for.
Just after the above event, Casey is reunited with an old lover – Ilsa – whom he believed to be dead after an explosion in Chechnya. Of course he also believed her to be a photographer, but it turns out that she is actually a French spy infiltrating the Russian mob. When she ends up at risk, Casey puts himself in it too, going out of his way to save her and showing genuine humanity. It is only after this episode that it becomes more than obvious that Casey has learned to genuinely care about Chuck, and though he may not be willing to say so out loud, consider him to be a friend.
After this Fulcrum come incredibly close to learning Chuck’s identity, after planting bugs all over the Buy More. The risk that Chuck will be exposed puts more pressure on Casey, since Chuck’s exposure means Casey has to take him underground.
Season 2
Season 2 is a lot more challenging for Chuck and for his team, and involves Fulcrum, the development of the Intersect and introduces a scientist called Orion. Operation Bartowski risks being shut down, and keeping Chuck’s identity as the Intersect a secret from both the enemy and from his family becomes all the more difficult as things progress.
It all starts out with a date. With the new Intersect project coming to a head, Chuck believes it to be his way to get out of being a government secret and go back to his old life, while Casey more than understands the truth – that people with government secrets in their head don’t get to just carry on where they left off. The Intersect project, however, encounters problems, with scientists being killed and ciphers and details being poached by Fulcrum, and the result is that Chuck’s lifespan is expanded little by little. Again: more missions, more pursuing Fulcrum, more of Chuck trying and failing to really woo Sarah while Casey is simply a reliable member of the team and otherwise keeps busy with his own things.
Aforementioned getting poisoned happens early on in this season, as well as Chuck falling all over himself to pursue a relationship with his ex-girlfriend Jill, who surprise surprise turns out to be a Fulcrum agent. Naturally after this betrayal, Casey has to pull his weight in saving the day, though in fact Big Mike – the manager of the Buy More – ends up saving Casey’s life after mistaking the Fulcrum agent ‘Leader’ as a robber.
Mid-season Casey’s old mentor Ty Bennett reappears, having broken from the government and begun collecting his own students to make money through criminal means. Ty makes an attempt to convince Casey to join him – kidnapping Chuck to make his point – however Casey puts the Intersect and the team at risk in his pursuit and gets dropped from the mission by Beckman. He uses Chuck’s thumbprint (and meanly convinces him that they have to talk about feelings to make him show up in the first place) in order to break into Castle, the new hideout under the Buy More/Orange Orange, and forces Chuck to flash on the dojo where Ty is hiding out, then handcuffs Chuck and goes after Ty himself.
Chuck escapes, and after driving to the dojo gets captured, and consequently Sarah and Casey arrive. Convincing Ty to fight him hand to hand, Casey takes on his once master and loses, only to be goaded by Chuck into fighting from his place of anger rather than the calm centre that Ty has been trying to train him to use to no success. Casey’s angry centre is much more effective, and after this occasion Casey actually thanks Chuck. Sort of.
At Christmas, Casey and Sarah sneak back into the Buy More after it’s pinned down in a Die Hardesque hostage situation. Casey gets his first and only permanently disfiguring injury on a mission during this occasion, after being shot in the foot ‘accidentally’ and losing most of his little toe in the process. The man holding the team hostage turns out to be a Fulcrum agent, as does the man sent in to negotiate, and Chuck reveals he is the Intersect and Fulcrum attempt to extract him. To protect Chuck’s identity, the agent is killed before the end of the episode.
Fulcrum, it turns out, have reached the point of having their own Intersect, although it has the unhappy effect of rendering the people shown the images braindead. An agent named Cole working for MI6 discovers Chuck’s identity, and is consequently captured, however he escapes without compromising the fact that Chuck is the Intersect, fortunately before Casey can take Chuck away. The identity of the scientist working on the Fulcrum Intersect is given as Perseus, and the team are ordered to capture him, however Perseus is shot and killed during the mission, leaving Chuck with the knowledge that it was Orion who designed the Intersect—someone who would later turn out to be Chuck’s estranged father.
Chuck, determined to try and get the Intersect out of his head, makes contact with Orion only for him to end up ‘killed’ after a Predator blows up his helicopter. It wouldn’t be until later, when Chuck was on a mission at Roark Industries that Stephen Bartowski would be revealed to be Orion, only to be taken by Fulcrum again. Chuck would take matters into his own hands to try and get his father back, but not before Chuck was ordered to be tranquilised and recalled to Washington for his own safety. Casey agrees, Sarah does not, and Sarah and Chuck go on the lam to attempt to find Orion and escape Chuck being buried.
Fulcrum and Casey both follow Chuck attempting to track him down, and come close to him, though it is Casey who wins in the end, and transports them both back to Castle. They escape, however, and go back to save Orion, and at the same time Chuck gets the Intersect taken out of his head. Ted Roark, the leader of Fulcrum, comes after Chuck. Back at Castle, Operation Bartowski is disbanded, and Casey is given his old assignment back – a special forces team, who crash in and take out Roark and his band at Ellie’s wedding as a favour to Chuck. However before he can go anywhere else his team is murdered, and he is knocked unconscious. Bryce – back working on the Intersect project – leaves to move the finished Intersect to a new secure location, but is killed by the enemy agent, dying just after Chuck arrives—and imports the new Intersect into his head.
Season 3
Things heat up in Season 3 as a combination of Chuck’s new Intersect as well as the dangerous Ring, and challenge for Sarah from the attractive and talented Agent Shaw. Casey also comes a little more into his own, especially since most of this season revolves around training Chuck to use his new Intersect and making him into a better spy – something even CIA training failed to do, since his emotions interfere with the use of the new Intersect.
Season 3 introduces more of Casey’s past, this time in the form of Goya, who is the Premier of Costa Gravas and a man that the US government want to protect now that his country is being opened up to democracy. Despite this, it is a mission that Casey has incredible difficulty with, considering he has been ordered to assassinate Goya no less than three times, and it makes it incredibly difficult when, considering a failure on Chuck’s behalf later on (where he and Sarah get thrown out), Casey finds himself trying to go undercover in a packed ballroom. Casey is mistakenly attacked by Devon and his identity revealed, and he is removed to a basement to be tortured.
The assassin who intended to kill Goya then goes ahead and poisons him using a cigar, and Devon is called in again to save the Premier’s life as his physician in LA. This allows Chuck and Sarah to sneak back in to look for Casey, who is shot in the leg during his escape, and later – after being anaesthetised by Chuck particularly brutally – he provides a blood transfusion to the Costa Bravan Premier and consequently is renamed The Angel of Life, much to his hatred.
Things continue on from there as Shaw settles into the team at Castle, giving Chuck missions of his own to work on against the Ring, which essentially put him in further danger each time, such as flying to Paris and handling an asset of his own. With Casey and Sarah’s help, he does manage to get through it, but without a doubt the pursuit of the Ring changes Chuck little by little.
After Chuck takes the role of assassin Rafe Gruber, he tries to find out who the Ring is putting out a hit on only to discover that it’s Shaw. Long before then, however, when taking the role at first, Casey’s cover is compromised and Chuck is forced to torture him to prove he was who he says he was, ripping out one of Casey’s teeth as he plied him for information. Rather than being angry, Casey was impressed, and remarked that Chuck had at least taken out the bad one and saved him a trip to the dentist. In the same episode Casey would shoot the real Rafe Gruber from a distance of five miles – an impossible shot – and save Sarah’s life.
Casey is contacted privately by The Ring, or more specifically by his old Colonel, Keller, who convinced him to fake his own death. Keller is blackmailing Casey over the life of his once fiancée Kathleen McHugh, but this is not revealed until Casey has already stolen from the government and consequently been arrested and locked up for his actions. Keller breaks him out, and afterwards Casey reveals this information to Chuck and Sarah, who agree to help him. Together – and by the skin of their teeth – they save Kathleen, and Alex McHugh – Casey’s daughter – arrives to find her mother okay. Casey doesn’t mention his existence to them.
Back at Castle, Casey is summarily dismissed, but he finds civilian life empty and unfulfilling. He gets in trouble almost immediately, with Jeff and Lester threatening to sue him for assault, and Casey being forced to apologise and make concessions as far as they’re concerned. Chuck sneaks a gun out to Casey, knowing how hard it probably is for him to live without one, and yet when Chuck is given his first kill order, Casey knows full well he won’t be able to do it and makes the shot for him, making him essentially a murderer since he was a civilian at the time.
The secret sticks (except for how Casey admits it to Sarah an episode later) and Chuck remains safe, and Casey remains civilian, and then Shaw – discovering that Sarah was the one who killed his wife, and having joined the Ring – works up an elaborate plan to hurt her, taking her to the street in Paris where she was killed. After capturing the Ring Director in Paris, Casey finally gets his job back, only to end up having to hunt down Chuck and Sarah after their vacation turns into an attempt to escape their spy life. After chasing them down, Casey offers them both the opportunity to leave twice, however they end up returning with him to Burbank.
After this, Casey is assigned to train Morgan, much to his disgust, something that doesn’t work out so well because Morgan has practically no useful spy skills, though he does have a significant amount of idiot courage, such as the ability to take on a Bengal Tiger unarmed.
The Intersect begins to effect Chuck in his dreams, and Casey expresses concern for his friend which ends up with Chuck being put into a mental institute. The corruption that the Intersect causes on Chuck’s brain is expanded on over the following episodes, and the Ring begin to try to convince Ellie that Casey is an enemy agent sent to spy on her. Ellie hits Casey in the face with a frying pan when he searches her apartment. Meanwhile Shaw has come back, and attempts to convince the CIA, in front of a room full of Generals, that Chuck is no longer a sustainable asset. He proves it by attempting to prove that Shaw – who he is surprised to see alive – is an Intersect by throwing a knife at him and expecting him to catch it; he intentionally does not, and Chuck is arrested. Casey finds himself arrested to, and the team are transported away, however after Chuck is sprung by his father and they go after the Ring facility, Shaw murders Stephen Bartowski in front of both Chuck and his sister (hidden in the shadows). She follows them to the rendez-vous point, and Morgan, Awesome and Ellie rescue Chuck, Sarah and Casey from Shaw.
In any case they capture the Ring Elders, beat Shaw, and everything seems to be fine for now. Team Bartowski is reinstated, and Chuck discovers his father’s old files under the old family home.
Season 4
A significant amount of Season Four revolves around Chuck’s relationship with his sister and his mother, and Casey is sidelined a little more as a result. That doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have some significant screentime, however, particularly since he is an integral member of the team.
This season follows the storyline of Chuck dipping into his father’s research and desperately hunting down his mother. Sarah and Casey are away on missions clearing up the last strongholds of the Ring and finding themselves pulled into Volkof’s interests. Meanwhile Chuck and Morgan following their own clues find themselves in the same place at the same time, Volkof industries in Russia. They save Casey and Sarah from Volkof and end up embroiled after discovering files regarding an agent called Frost, whom Chuck is certain is his mother.
Meanwhile the CIA have rebuilt the Buy More, recently exploded, and made it a classy gadget heaven filled with CIA agents—the place is perfect. Too perfect. Suspiciously perfect, threatening to blow everyone’s covers, especially now Chuck is working there again. Chuck is back on the job as a spy after deliberately trying to quit the spy life to pursue his own things, and he ends up immediately on a mission to Milan to pick up a weapon with Sarah.
After a cou by the Costa Gravan Premier’s wife, Casey finds himself back in the country guiding his fellows through the walls in order to save the man’s life. Again. Meanwhile shenanigans are happening at home, since back in Season 3, Casey was forced to tell his daughter Alex that he was her father, and consequently during his civilian life he has drawn closer and closer to her. She’s by this point dating Morgan secretly.
It’s not the end of Casey’s sacrifices. To find more information on Frost, Casey agrees to allow Chuck to arrange his funeral in order to tempt in the old Black Ops team that he used to work with, who want Casey’s hand print (his hand will do) in order to open a vault full of gold in Iran. He is poisoned such that he is rendered incapable of movement and his heart rate slowed, but it leaves him susceptible to attack. After they blow out the floor of the church in order to kidnap him, Casey is on his own, and after just about managing to escape despite his condition, Casey ends up rescued by Jeff and Lester, and consequently is shaken from his couch lock by Morgan telling him about his daughter’s relationship with him to get him angry. After they were captured, Morgan would earn Casey’s permission to date his daughter so long as he understood that if he hurt her he would be in a world of pain because he would safe Casey’s, Chuck’s and Sarah’s life by electrocuting himself and the old members of Casey’s team, effectively dying for a few moments before he was resuscitated.
At last Chuck’s mother shows herself, but she doesn’t seem to be who she should be, and she shoots Chuck in the chest, only to come back and tell him that she knew he was wearing a vest. Chuck isn’t impressed, and isn’t sure whether or not to trust her, at least not until he meets her handler Gregory Tuttle, who instantly makes him feel much better about everything. As a result, he leads her back to his basement in the old family home, and she and Tuttle – who reveals himself to be Volkof – destroy all of Chuck’s father’s research. Before they leave and explode the basement with Chuck and Sarah locked inside, she provides Sarah with a blade with which to cut the ropes binding her, and uses a suppression device on Chuck to force the Intersect to stop working, and consequently stop him coming after her.
Now Intersect-free, Chuck endures weeks of government poking and prodding as they try to dislodge the rock that Frost has put on the Intersect to prevent it from working. Chuck goes to Switzerland to try and jump start it through fear into working again. Casey has his own dangerous mission back at base—trying to protect Jeff and Lester from a vicious agent named Greta who is tired of being followed around and harassed by them, and expects Morgan to do something about it.
Chuck, captured by the Belgian on his Swiss mission, is held as the Intersect who can give up his secrets so that they can be sold on to the highest bidders; however the Intersect isn’t working, and torturing it out of him has no effect, so the decision is made to cut all of the man out and leave just the machine behind. Sarah heads out to get him back from the Brazilian jungle that he’s been taken away to, but Casey and Morgan are not far behind, determined to save their friend just as much. They storm the camp together.
Volkof, learning that Chuck is still alive, sends Frost to send three assassins to kill him—she kills the assassins, and Volkof catches up to her and insists that she kill Chuck. She reveals that he’s her son, and then Ellie calls (she’s pregnant by the way), and Frost is also forced to reveal that she has a daughter. The weapons magnate comes to dinner, much to everyone’s horror.
Casey is making more connections with his daughter, but he is also making more connections with his friends, and growing more settled with Morgan as a team member. Morgan is running a mission within a mission for Chuck, helping him to set up his proposal, and Casey gives him some advice based on his own experience with the matter.
Things are getting sticky, though; Sarah is forced to go undercover with Volkof industries in order to free Chuck’s mother. She is forced to prove her loyalty, and Volkof’s request? That she kill Casey. During the fight he tells her to throw him out the window – there’s a ledge about sixty foot down that he can land on, and the fall won’t kill him, however when he hits the ledge the cable snaps, and Casey falls the rest of the way. He ends up in hospital, recovering from a coma with his daughter beside him, and when Volkof’s agents come to finish him off, he’s more than ready for them. At the same time, Chuck pulls the sting that will capture Volkof completely.
After recovering, Casey is sent with the team to Morocco to rescue Roan Montgomery, and left behind since unlike the others his cover wasn’t blown. He ends up trapped in a wall while he waits for his team to fly back to Morocco to cut him out, and when the rescue attempt is almost thwarted, he fires through a bullet hole in the wall at the assailants blind, and past the heads of his teammates. He tells them ‘I’ve never done this before’, which no doubt instils plenty of confidence in them. Before leaving Casey promises to speak to Alex’s mother, but he can’t before he leaves; several episodes later, Casey would be tracked down by her after she recognised him at the Buy More, and confronted while in the middle of a mission.
Meanwhile, things are turning all the worse for Chuck and his team. The rescue a woman called Vivian from a man trying to find the key to Volkof’s assets; she turns out to be Volkof’s daughter, and after her rescue she becomes Chuck’s asset; he uses her to access her father’s bank account in exchange for a visit, but the government lets him down, forcing him to admit to having betrayed her. She hates Chuck for that, and first targets him with a bomb. Meanwhile Casey has been recruited to a private mission from Castle, spearheading the new Intersect project—only he discovers there are some kinks in it. The two choices; Greta and Greta, are a lot like him, and the new Intersect has been programmed not to have the kinks in it that Chuck’s does; the emotional insecurity, the inability to shoot to kill when necessary.
The only problem is that when it comes down to it Chuck is just better, so when the chance for him to edge in on one of Casey’s missions with the new team comes up, he takes advantage of it, and ends up diffusing a bomb and saving hundreds of thousands of lives in the process. With apple juice. Casey’s Intersects are de-Intersected, and Chuck is put in command of the project and offered the chance to choose new potentials himself.
Chuck’s potentials are in various ways a lot like him, and yet all terrible choices. They are consequently trapped in Castle after one of the potentials bombs the place, and cunningly tries to make it look like he’s the victim so that he can escape. Casey is understandably made to keep some of the peace throughout.
With Chuck’s wedding coming up fast, the bachelor party gets underway. At Las Vecas. However Vivian’s agents show up to try and capture the Orion computer with the Agent X information on it, and Casey is forced to take out the four agents to prevent everyone from being killed.
Finally, just before the wedding, Vivian decides she’s going to step in and ruin everything, putting together her weapon and capturing Chuck’s mother. Casey joins the team, and – after several attempts, and putting Morgan at risk as a ‘buyer’ for the weapons – they capture it and return for the rehearsal dinner. To do this Casey needs to snipe at four people he literally can’t see, except through a remote video. Unfortunately Vivian uses a second version of the weapon on Sarah, poisoning her, and the hunt begins for the antidote. The discovery is made that Alexei Volkof was in fact Agent X, and that he was put deep undercover with the Intersect, but somehow lost sight of himself in the process. Having discovered this information in England, the team are sworn to secrecy, otherwise someone will kill them to keep the embarrassment to the CIA and the US government a permanent secret.
Chuck needs to speak to Volkof in order to find the antidote to safe his wife, however now a new element in the CIA is playing his hand. Volkof is removed just before Chuck and Casey attempt to break him out of jail, and they are forced to pull an extraction, with Casey lending Chuck a motorcycle that can do 250kmph and catch up with the transfer. The CIA removes the Intersect from Volkof, returning him to his previous state. Even Sarah’s old team fall in to help, and Casey’s old friends in the Marine Corps help to get Volkof and Chuck to Russia after the first antidote fails, and after Chuck is briefly held hostage by the CIA agent who wipes the Intersect from him again.
Chuck, Intersect free, paratroops back in with the antidote to save Sarah, but is blocked by the CIA who overwhelm him and his friends. However then it rains Russian paratroopers from the sky, hundreds of them, who force the CIA to stand down while Chuck rushes in to save his fiancée. They get married, and Casey almost cries. No word of a lie.
Post Season-4
I’ll make some comments regarding things that happened after S4 in Casey’s personality, but only in general terms because he opens up a little more as time goes on (for instance his relationships with Verbansky and Alex demonstratively show sides to him that exist but aren’t actively realised up until the later canon points). Never mind the fact that he’s a Star Wars fan.
Personality:
Casey is a spy, and therefore there are already two sides to him. John Casey; spy, and John Casey; cover. Therefore he presents himself differently to people depending on which they know him as, and also whether they command any kind of respect from him. There is however a lot of basic crossover between the two. Spy and cover both have a gruff, capable exterior, though as a Green Shirt, Casey is an overaged man working retail, and as a result loses something just out of simple perception, while as a spy Casey is in his prime, and well respected. When Kathleen discovers his identity, she at first tells Casey off for pretending to their daughter that he’s a hero when he’s moonlighting as a waiter at weddings while also working at the Buy More, but quickly changes her tune when she sees him with a badge, and I believe this demonstrated the difference in perception perfectly. In essence, one is a little sad, and nothing to be impressed by, while the other immediately commands respect.
Casey has what Chuck has described as an angry centre rather than a calm centre, and it is from that fountain of anger that much of Casey’s physical attributes come, however as a sniper he is remarkably calm, efficient and accurate, he rarely misses. Certainly he can be angry, but he has remarkable control over it considering, and it boils under the surface. This leads me straight onto another point. John Casey feels. He may give the impression that he doesn’t, that he’s just out to do his job, but in fact he has very strong feelings. His anger burns hot, his love for the people that he loves often comes before his duty, and there is a small part of him that is a hopeless romantic no matter what. His control, then, is crucial, because if he were to ever let go of his feelings, then with his excess of strength and talent with weaponry there might just be no stopping him; he would be a formidable enemy.
At one point Casey says that the reason why Caseys don’t show their emotions and give of themselves is because the thing that hurts most in the world is to offer your heart to someone and see it stomped all over—the fact that he is offering this advice to his daughter after a messy breakup is perhaps the most touching thing of all. Casey’s soft spot for Alex, once he meets her, is such that he seems his most human around her, and naturally this is a weakness all on its own. Alex is the first civilian that Casey ever tells about his identity, or shows any warmth and compassion for, and he would kill anyone that hurt her, and bears grudges against those that do.
Casey develops friendships after his time in Burbank, such that by season four he calls it home, something that he hasn’t felt about a place for some time, much like Sarah. He has been directed to leave several times, only to find himself incidentally pulled back into it, and as a result he has put down the roots that he at first told himself not to, opened up his heart and made himself vulnerable, made Alex, the Buy More, Morgan, Chuck and Sarah important to him.
This makes it exceptionally difficult when Casey is instructed to direct the new Intersect project, as he feels he has to betray his team and more importantly his friends in order to do it, keeping secrets from his team and going on missions without them. Chuck is stung by Casey using him as a bomb disposal unit, but there’s no denying that when Chuck destroys the bomb after the replacement Intersects fluff things up, Casey is infinitely relieved, even impressed, and more than happy to return to his own team, though he’d never have said anything out loud.
In fact during this mission he treats Chuck with a remarkable gentleness that has been developing ever since the beginning of the season, and would eventually culminate in an actual hug. He opens a juice carton for him and puts it inside his face mask, then gently tells Chuck about his own experience wearing a bomb disposal outfit in Bosnia; it’s in fact the second noteable incident where Casey deliberately shares a part of his past with his friend without any kind of demand being made on him to do so, outside of the requirements of the mission or the situation at hand. The other is when Casey – quite out of the blue – told Chuck about his own proposal to Kathleen, and told him fondly that the timing and the view didn’t matter so long as you had the girl.
Casey has an itsy bit of geek in him. He also occasionally watches romances and movies with guns. No guesses as to why. He would have been about six when the first Star Wars movie came out, and as a result when Morgan has lost his memories of the movies and has recently broken up with his daughter by text message, Casey instructs him to start with Episode I: The Phantom Menace, and is amused when Morgan comes back asking why he likes the movies because he can’t stand any more Jar Jar Binks. He then tells him that he was messing with him, and to start with Episode IV, but then tells him that Darth Vader is Luke’s Father and Princess Leia is his sister, consequently ruining the trilogy for him; ruthless, thy name is John Casey.
So okay, seems like Casey is a nice guy, right? Wrong. If he sees you as a troublemaker, or if you break the law, or if you’re with Fulcrum or the Ring or something similar, he will treat you with abject and unerring suspicion until he proves you’re worth trusting. Casey is a spy, and his natural condition is on guard, unless of course he’s had previous experience having been seduced by another spy in which case… Well, he’s a lost cause. Casey is a terrible agent of seduction himself, having failed the course twice, but he’s easily seduced by the right (slightly dangerous) women. He finds himself tied to a bed by Catarina at one point, and at another smugly and gleefully asks Walker ‘Haven’t you ever had sex with someone who just tried to kill you’ in regard to Verbansky.
Of course it doesn’t excuse that he clearly has trouble understanding women otherwise. He fails terribly when it comes to plucking up the courage to invite Verbansky on a date, and in a previous season he actually as much as tells a woman he’s trying to seduce that she’s fat, and that’s why she’s down here guarding the cells. He meant it in a nice way, really.
Casey is arrogant and judgemental at the best of times, as well as being stuck in the past. Ask him what good things the French ever did for us, or what he thinks of President Clinton, or show him a red and black party invitation written in Helvetica font—I promise you he will just about implode. Casey is stuck in the late eighties as far as his patriotism goes, having a rich contempt for communism, insurgents, terrorism, that comes from having fought them fiercely for the last few years. He has a serious problem being nice to some people, especially Russians, and is chock full of more prejudice than you can shake a stick at, and not afraid to mumble his condemnations under his breath. Or better still just grunt. But then he grunts at everything, even public displays of affection. Despite being as aforementioned, a hopeless romantic.
As stated before, Casey has a strong relationship with his team born right out of their time together. He grew to like Chuck and Sarah sufficiently enough that he would never want to deliberately put them at risk if they couldn’t handle it, but he also respects them both immensely. He also has a certain amount of grudging respect for Morgan, otherwise he simply wouldn’t put up with him—or with Morgan dating his daughter.
But for Chuck and Sarah he would go out of his way to save them no matter what, even put himself right into the line of gunfire, even commit murder. When their lives are endangered in the final season by a kill order, the assassin whose identity Chuck and the team discovers arranges to kill them anyway, and the result is that Casey is forced to kill all of them in order to prevent them from being killed. Casey does it without a second thought. Only his friends’ safety and happiness matters to him.
There’s also no denying that Casey has a soft spot for General Beckman. He generally simply obeys orders, but he gets a wistful smile now when she comes up in conversation, and since she’s been giving him orders since 1989, it doesn’t seem too much really to imagine that he might actually like her just a little bit; after all Casey settles in with routine, and it seems to make him more comfortable.
Abilities, Weaknesses and Power Limitations:
Casey is human, but being a spy for the NSA means that he has a number of natural talents that put him above base level, and give him pseudo-superhuman powers. They are not, however, anything beyond what it is possible for someone with years of training and experience in their field could do, and while Casey is an exceptional spy with some magnificent qualities, he does still falter to human frailties, both physically and emotionally.
I have tried to include Casey’s emotional weaknesses in his personality section, and since those are in general most of the places where he is weaker than the average human (since things that will kill and maim and poison humans all naturally affect Casey as they would anyone else) I feel there’s not much need to expound on his weaknesses any further here.
It is important to note, however, that unlike other people, Casey is incredibly durable; hard headed and difficult to render unconscious (it takes three tranquiliser darts to put him down where it would usually only take one), as well as stubborn, which allows him to work through pain such as having been shot, poisoned, having his teeth pulled, or exposed to flash grenades. He bounces back quickly, since to do anything else would mean death; although all of this as I said is a matter of training.
As far as abilities goes, I’ll divide this into two sections; physical strength and weapons.
Physical strength;
Casey is stockily built for all of his six foot high, and most of that is pure strength. He can however be gentle despite it, as his passion for bonsai trees proves, possessing a steady hand and an incredibly delicate touch.
Casey possesses the physical strength to actually lift a man by his neck without choking him in the process, and hold him off the floor at arm’s length. He can break a man’s neck from a headlock in moments, and at one point – while threatening Chuck – he tells him that he can kill him a hundred ways with just one hand—or beat him to death with the radiator his other arm is chained to (he’d just pulled it off a wall). While it’s uncertain whether the threat is anything more or just a threat, it is true that at one point Casey uses a nerve pinch to put down a guard silently, and suggests that it is at least somewhat reliable.
Casey is violent and accurate with his strength, and is well known for using it even while maintaining his cover at the Buy More. The Burbank branch has practically eliminated shoplifting on account of having Casey in the store, as he has a great passion for maintaining lawful order in his own domain. At one point he tackles a shoplifter full on, throwing his arms around him and knocking him to the ground, and on another occasion, using only a half-eaten apple, Casey pitches it straight on into the back of a shoplifter’s head, rendering him unconscious. “Three strikes and you’re out.”
He is also capable of carrying full grown men with ease on his back, can run and presumably jump with them, though to be fair the time he ‘jumped’ there was a helicopter exploding behind him at the same moment, and it probably gave him an extra little push. In any case, Casey is without a doubt strong, as well as being remarkably tough.
His durability, an expansion of his strength, is again due to training and experience. Casey is capable of enduring torture; burns, cuts, ripped teeth, knife and gunshot wounds, and can bear those injuries without it affecting his performance. He has a considerable ability – trained into him – where it comes to shaking off the effects of drugs or tranquilisers, truth serums etc. as befitting a spy of his calibre.
Casey is despite his boarish appearance smart enough to be able to keep up with most aspects of a mission flawlessly. As aforementioned in his personality however, he has trouble when it comes to seduction. While he can juggle all the likelihoods and possibilities of an infiltration or extraction, make plans, work escape routes, and can smoothly transition from Plan A to Plan B to Plan Wing It in a fraction of a second, he falters as soon as he has to try to employ sexuality as a weapon, even though in general he is actually very good at maintaining his covers.
His endurance also shows itself in his dedication to his missions, as Casey is not the kind of man to back down from a challenge, or even an apparently impossible mission. He once hid himself in the walls of a Costa Gravan palace for two weeks during the revolution, and his efforts in Costa Gravas earned him the title El Angel de la Muerte (The Angel of Death). He also had a supporting wall fall on him while on a similar mission in Marakesh, and was forced to hold the wall up for about twelve hours as he waited for help to come. He threatened to cut his arm off if he had to in order to escape.
Weapons;
Without a doubt Casey loves his guns; at one point in Season Five he asks Sarah whether he should – on a date – take the Smith and Western since it implies he is rugged and dependable, or the SIG because it’s cool and sophisticated—in fact he decides to take both. His prowess is well known, so much so in fact that Verbanski has the gun that she disarmed from him set in pride of place in her office, with a plaque underneath stating that it was ‘Taken from John Casey’.
Casey is experienced in a variety of weapons, not only firearms but he is also trained in other methods of self defence, knowing how to use his body as a weapon, as well as staffs, knives, throwing stars etc. He prefers using a gun without a doubt, and it is his speciality within a team. In fact, he gets an itchy trigger finger if he’s removed from missions for too long.
He is also a munitions expert, particularly where it comes to using C4 and other explosives, which he handles rather than the other members of the team. He has experience in bomb disposal in Bosnia, though tends to leave that kind of thing to Chuck in general.
Among the weapons Casey has learned to use are sniper rifles, shotguns, handguns, rail guns, rifled, automatic machine guns—give him something with a trigger and he can fire it. He is also proficient at using these weapons in the dark, with either laser sights of high-tech night vision glasses.
The best way to explain just how Casey’s weaponry proficiency accounts for being an ‘ability’ is to use exemplary experiences wherein he has saved the day with gunfire. These are only a few, but they go so far as to explain how well trained and capable he is.
• Shot and killed six agents with a bead on him before a single one let off a shot, with pinpoint accuracy. They all fell almost at the same time, having been shot within the space of perhaps a second and a half.
• After being pinned down by four ex-green berets and their leader in a forest, successfully used stealth tactics to kill all four, by using civilians as bait and keeping quiet, as well as providing at one point a dummy target with one of their bodies. He did this unaided, and without a single shot being fired at him.
• Also pinned down in the woods – this time in daylight – and armed with only a sniper rifle, Casey shot and killed eight + enemies without being shot himself, despite being semi-exposed and guarding a casualty. He also identified his targets so that in the heat of the moment he didn’t shoot and kill Chuck, who came running at him suddenly out of the woods.
• After blinds were pulled down between Casey and sniper targets closing in on Morgan, Caset picked off four enemies with kill shots simply by watching a live video feed from a camera attached to Morgan’s tie, taking blind shots that could as easily have killed Morgan himself if he’d made a mistake. This displayed not only finesse and a certain ballsiness, but precise spatial awareness and split second decision making capability.
• Once made a kill shot over five miles; a shot that supposedly only a handful of people in the world could make. He was smug afterwards as a result “And I’m one of them.”
• Laid down fire, killing a number of enemies, while in a fast moving helicopter.
The importance of a steady hand, as well as other natural talents discovered and honed by access to gun ranges and experience in the field, is crucial as far as Casey is concerned. There is no doubt that he is an incredibly capable sniper, and his fondness for weapons lends toward his accuracy with them. Put a gun in his hand and he is deadly. It’s why he’s made it to the rank of Colonel.
As far as other talents goes, Casey can fly a stealth plane. Oh, and he bakes.
Inventory:
The likely contents of his pockets, consisting of:
One SIG P226 handgun
Three clips for said gun
One throwing knife
One pair handcuffs + keys
Three bidirectional earpieces for communication and surveillance
Five 7mm listening devices with a limited range and a minimal battery life (50 yards and 72 hours)
And finally something frivolous:
One 15 year old bonsai tree
One set of bonsai tree tools
Appearance: Broad, tall, strong, with an almost permanent stern expression. Eyes: blue grey, height: 6'4", hair: short and brown
Age: Late-thirties
AU Clarification: N/A
SAMPLES
Log Sample:
He’d been in the Marines, worked Black Ops, spent two weeks living in a wall in the Costa Gravas revolution, even flown a stealth bomber down on blind targets, and yet of all the postings Casey had had, all the mud and cesspits he’d had to wade through, he was sure that he had never been in a situation as repulsive, as unbearable as this one.
The no-man’s land was scattered with debris, the remains of a night where a host of men had stumbled bravely and blindly to their certain doom. Everything was almost deathly silent, except that something was breathing heavily like a wounded beast. There were bones scattered among the bodies laid out at awkward angles, lost shoes, a torn shirt. Something red was dripping still into a viscous pool on the floor. A mobile phone, left face up, and cracked across the face, mistreated by the evening’s battle, lit up and began to ring loudly. Casey recognised the tune—it was something from Star Wars, loud and menacing, and so irritating once it had been featured in store for the fifteenth day in a row that Casey had actually broken the disk, and not cared in the slightest when its value had been deducted from his salary. Discernible beneath a smudge of barbeque sauce and the savage crack in the phone’s case was the word ‘Mom’.
The corpses began to stir, and Casey aimed a savage kick at the one closest to him, Jeff, figuring that his hard head could take it. The room they were in was utterly trashed, empty barbeque rib cases strewn on the floor, sauce spots and melting frozen yoghurt, empty Subway wrappers—and not so empty ones. Jeffrey stopped grunting snores like a savagely beaten dragon with a spear buried through both its lungs, and blinked up at him. He elbowed his fellow carpet-crashed Nerd Herder, this one with a smear of mayonnaise – Casey hoped it was mayonnaise – plastering his hair to his face, and all around them bleary eyed dozers in various states of undress began to stir, looking momentarily lost, and then quickly fearful for their lives.
Casey growled fiercely, baring his teeth down at them, and moments later geeks were scattering everywhere, grabbing at paper cups, food and empty packets. He didn’t need to say a word; the Home Cinema room was not a party hard location, or the place for a Buy More sleepover, and yet here everyone was, barely conscious, making a mess of the store ten minutes before opening time.
If his cover life was going to be his real life now, the last thing that he wanted was it to be a constant nightmare of green and white shirts getting under his feet forever and ever. He wasn’t cut out for civilian life, and keeping his temper around these people had been hard enough already. But what could he do? Get another job? His CV practically included this job and nothing else, his record blotted out, his rank irrelevant. He didn’t have anything else, anyone else. This was it. At least if he’d been removed from service anywhere other than Burbank, he might have had a future, but what did he have to look forward to here? A quiet life? An empty apartment that he could barely afford, with nothing but a tree and a chair? He wasn’t even allowed to shoot anyone, which was going to be the hardest thing to deal with considering the idiots he was surrounded by.
Bodies scattered, BO left behind, Casey looked at the mess that was the Home Cinema room and tried to work out how it had come to this, that his life was so well represented by a crumpled Subway wrapper with nothing but a few crumbs and a smear of marinara sauce left behind. He felt empty, all the excitement gone; a man without a mission.
It pissed him off.
Comms Sample:
[ This opening post would be going very, very differently if Casey had just been able to find someone to hold hostage while he recorded his video. Chuck would have done just fine, but he was mysteriously absent, which was troublesome. Of course, even if Chuck hadn’t believed that Casey would actually shoot him, the whole point would have been that the people on the other side of the feed would believe it, and maybe they’d be dumb enough to tell him how to get out of here. Nobody wanted to see someone get shot in front of them, not even anyone as whiny and pitiful as Chuck Bartowski. Actually, no, come to think of it, it was a terrible idea. They’d probably be grateful.
So here is Casey, decidedly not about to blow anyone’s brains out, but looking as if he might be seriously contemplating it regardless. He starts off by baring his teeth, curling his lip, and just growling. ]
I’m going to make this short, because I don’t like to waste my time.
[ Casey is not a man of many words, and he hates speaking to strangers more than anything else. Especially when he’s not quite sure right now whether he’s meant to be maintaining cover or if he frankly shouldn’t bother. This could be an interrogation, hallucinatory drugs—stranger things have happened, and recently. ]
I can’t believe I’m actually going to say this, but—get me back to Burbank right now, and nobody will get hurt.
[ He hates space already, he can’t be blamed for wanting to make someone hurt for bringing him up here in the first place. He mutters the last word under his breath: ]
Much.
Name: John Casey (Alexander Coburn)
Canon: Chuck
Original or Alternate Universe: Original
Canon Point: End of Season 4
Number: 008 >> 089
Setting:
Regular old modern day in Burbank, California, where the spy world has collided with the world of the Buy More and every episode has suspicious amounts of marketing from Subway in it. Okay so maybe things are a little more technological than is strictly realistic, and there’s a supercomputer in this poor guy’s head, but that’s totally normal, right? Oh, and spies are dazzlingly attractive, unless they work for the NSA, in which case they’re just Plain Jayne.
History:
Chuck is a long lasting series with short episodal storylines interspersed over a season long storyline, following different enemy groups in each season from one to the next. Enemy groups such as Fulcrum, The Ring, and then Volkof Industries each take a firm standing as opponents from one season to the next. As a result, this history will make note of seasonal occurances rather than giving a blow by blow of the episodes themselves, and I will attempt to surmise Casey’s role in it rather than telling the story.
Pre-series
Born Alexander Coburn around 1971, very little is known about Casey’s early life and career, except that he was a choirboy, and in his late teens found himself inducted into the US Marine Corps. The day he left, Casey proposed to Kathleen McHugh, his fiancée, at a bus shelter, not knowing that she was pregnant at the time.
By 18/19, in 1989, Casey was a Lieutenant in Honduras, a star sniper, and had found himself noticed by higher ups for his particular talents. However Casey has never tested well, as would be proven later in the series when infiltrating Fulcrum, and he found himself not sufficiently qualified to train with Special Ops, a disappointment that pushed him to fake his own death and give up his life at home in order to join NSA Black Ops. He wasn’t aware that his fiancée was pregnant with his daughter, and would consequently wait for him almost indefinitely.
After joining the NSA and before going on to train with Ty Bennett some four or five years later, Casey would be involved in the Costa Gravas revolution, making assassination attempts on a man whose life he would later save – Costa Gravan Premier Alejandro Goya - and earning himself the name ‘The Angel of Death’. Casey in fact served in a number of different places following his joining the NSA, in some of the most dangerous places in the world; Bosnia, Syria, Iran, Afghanistan, Chechnya; and has spent enough time in other countries that he becomes deeply unhappy at the suggestion of having to ‘go back to France’, grumbles about having to visit Russia, and makes mocking comments about Paris being romantic.
To be more specific, Casey would be tortured in Syria by Baath Separatists, seal a vault full of terrorist gold up in Iran, spend two years undercover in Afghanistan, and while also undercover in Chechnya find himself on the outside of a terrorist attack, having lost a woman he had become deeply involved in name Ilsa. She had apparently been a victim, however it would be later revealed that she was a French Spy, although not before traumatising poor Casey for years.
And then there was the Intersect.
Season 1
Casey, working for the NSA, shoots dead a CIA agent breaking into a secure facility; the agent, Bryce Larkin, has just destroyed a computer that contains the joint intelligence of both the NSA and the CIA, but as well as having destroyed it, Bryce had uploaded it, sending the computer to a man he hasn’t seen in years; a man by the name of Chuck Bartowski. Chuck uploads the computer – called the Intersect – straight into his brain, and Casey, as well as Agent Sarah Walker working for the CIA’s interests, are both separately dispatched to find the stolen information and recover it.
Having discovered where the secrets have gone, Casey and Sarah are both assigned to guard the Intersect – Chuck – and protect him from people who might be trying to find those secrets too. It turns out there’s a lot of them, the very first being a doctor sent in by the CIA to establish whether or not the Intersect really is in Chuck’s head; Doctor Zarnow fakes his own death, cunningly making it seem like Casey and Sarah may be targeting each other, and making it easier to alienate and access them, so that he can attempt to find out who the Intersect is.
Casey, meanwhile, and for the duration of Operation Bartowski, takes a job as a Green Shirt selling appliances at the Buy More, something he isn’t actually all that bad at. However his real job is to wait for the new Intersect to be built, and then eliminate Chuck – but only after protecting him for the next six months. At this point the job is just another job to Casey; it takes him a while to actually warm to Chuck at all. Or Chuck to him, actually.
They proceed to go on missions together, Casey very often saving Chuck from his own messes, or crashing in at the last moment to save the day, and actually to be quite fair Sarah and Chuck saving Casey on occasion too, such as when he finds himself seduced and tied up in his underwear by Carina. They face Russian agents, the Chinese Triad, even each other, but in general the first season is a season of discovery; finding out what the Intersect can do and helping Chuck to become an asset, while in turn he searches for a way to get the Intersect out of his head—something that would become much more eagerly pursued in Season 2.
From Casey’s perspective, the first season of Chuck is essentially a long mission in which Casey tries to protect Chuck up until the point where he’s no longer necessary. He keeps him under surveillance, having planted bugs all over his apartments, listens in on all his conversations, follows him when he’s being suspicious, and tries to make sure Chuck stays in the car on missions.
Bryce – supposedly killed – would reappear later on in the season, with Casey determined to hunt him down and return him to government custody. The involvement of Fulcrum becomes apparent at this point, leading to the rest of the season’s storyline, and leading into the next season’s.
At one point Casey is poisoned accidentally by Chuck, and then later given the antidote—this wouldn’t be the first time, either, as later in the series while on a lockdown (season 2) Chuck would attempt to cure Casey of a toxin he was infected with by kissing him. Chuck also at one point redirects a rocket aimed at a boat he, Sarah and Casey are standing on at another nearby GPS—destroying Casey’s car, his prized Crown Victoria, and the very first thing that Casey seems to show any kind of fondness for.
Just after the above event, Casey is reunited with an old lover – Ilsa – whom he believed to be dead after an explosion in Chechnya. Of course he also believed her to be a photographer, but it turns out that she is actually a French spy infiltrating the Russian mob. When she ends up at risk, Casey puts himself in it too, going out of his way to save her and showing genuine humanity. It is only after this episode that it becomes more than obvious that Casey has learned to genuinely care about Chuck, and though he may not be willing to say so out loud, consider him to be a friend.
After this Fulcrum come incredibly close to learning Chuck’s identity, after planting bugs all over the Buy More. The risk that Chuck will be exposed puts more pressure on Casey, since Chuck’s exposure means Casey has to take him underground.
Season 2
Season 2 is a lot more challenging for Chuck and for his team, and involves Fulcrum, the development of the Intersect and introduces a scientist called Orion. Operation Bartowski risks being shut down, and keeping Chuck’s identity as the Intersect a secret from both the enemy and from his family becomes all the more difficult as things progress.
It all starts out with a date. With the new Intersect project coming to a head, Chuck believes it to be his way to get out of being a government secret and go back to his old life, while Casey more than understands the truth – that people with government secrets in their head don’t get to just carry on where they left off. The Intersect project, however, encounters problems, with scientists being killed and ciphers and details being poached by Fulcrum, and the result is that Chuck’s lifespan is expanded little by little. Again: more missions, more pursuing Fulcrum, more of Chuck trying and failing to really woo Sarah while Casey is simply a reliable member of the team and otherwise keeps busy with his own things.
Aforementioned getting poisoned happens early on in this season, as well as Chuck falling all over himself to pursue a relationship with his ex-girlfriend Jill, who surprise surprise turns out to be a Fulcrum agent. Naturally after this betrayal, Casey has to pull his weight in saving the day, though in fact Big Mike – the manager of the Buy More – ends up saving Casey’s life after mistaking the Fulcrum agent ‘Leader’ as a robber.
Mid-season Casey’s old mentor Ty Bennett reappears, having broken from the government and begun collecting his own students to make money through criminal means. Ty makes an attempt to convince Casey to join him – kidnapping Chuck to make his point – however Casey puts the Intersect and the team at risk in his pursuit and gets dropped from the mission by Beckman. He uses Chuck’s thumbprint (and meanly convinces him that they have to talk about feelings to make him show up in the first place) in order to break into Castle, the new hideout under the Buy More/Orange Orange, and forces Chuck to flash on the dojo where Ty is hiding out, then handcuffs Chuck and goes after Ty himself.
Chuck escapes, and after driving to the dojo gets captured, and consequently Sarah and Casey arrive. Convincing Ty to fight him hand to hand, Casey takes on his once master and loses, only to be goaded by Chuck into fighting from his place of anger rather than the calm centre that Ty has been trying to train him to use to no success. Casey’s angry centre is much more effective, and after this occasion Casey actually thanks Chuck. Sort of.
At Christmas, Casey and Sarah sneak back into the Buy More after it’s pinned down in a Die Hardesque hostage situation. Casey gets his first and only permanently disfiguring injury on a mission during this occasion, after being shot in the foot ‘accidentally’ and losing most of his little toe in the process. The man holding the team hostage turns out to be a Fulcrum agent, as does the man sent in to negotiate, and Chuck reveals he is the Intersect and Fulcrum attempt to extract him. To protect Chuck’s identity, the agent is killed before the end of the episode.
Fulcrum, it turns out, have reached the point of having their own Intersect, although it has the unhappy effect of rendering the people shown the images braindead. An agent named Cole working for MI6 discovers Chuck’s identity, and is consequently captured, however he escapes without compromising the fact that Chuck is the Intersect, fortunately before Casey can take Chuck away. The identity of the scientist working on the Fulcrum Intersect is given as Perseus, and the team are ordered to capture him, however Perseus is shot and killed during the mission, leaving Chuck with the knowledge that it was Orion who designed the Intersect—someone who would later turn out to be Chuck’s estranged father.
Chuck, determined to try and get the Intersect out of his head, makes contact with Orion only for him to end up ‘killed’ after a Predator blows up his helicopter. It wouldn’t be until later, when Chuck was on a mission at Roark Industries that Stephen Bartowski would be revealed to be Orion, only to be taken by Fulcrum again. Chuck would take matters into his own hands to try and get his father back, but not before Chuck was ordered to be tranquilised and recalled to Washington for his own safety. Casey agrees, Sarah does not, and Sarah and Chuck go on the lam to attempt to find Orion and escape Chuck being buried.
Fulcrum and Casey both follow Chuck attempting to track him down, and come close to him, though it is Casey who wins in the end, and transports them both back to Castle. They escape, however, and go back to save Orion, and at the same time Chuck gets the Intersect taken out of his head. Ted Roark, the leader of Fulcrum, comes after Chuck. Back at Castle, Operation Bartowski is disbanded, and Casey is given his old assignment back – a special forces team, who crash in and take out Roark and his band at Ellie’s wedding as a favour to Chuck. However before he can go anywhere else his team is murdered, and he is knocked unconscious. Bryce – back working on the Intersect project – leaves to move the finished Intersect to a new secure location, but is killed by the enemy agent, dying just after Chuck arrives—and imports the new Intersect into his head.
Season 3
Things heat up in Season 3 as a combination of Chuck’s new Intersect as well as the dangerous Ring, and challenge for Sarah from the attractive and talented Agent Shaw. Casey also comes a little more into his own, especially since most of this season revolves around training Chuck to use his new Intersect and making him into a better spy – something even CIA training failed to do, since his emotions interfere with the use of the new Intersect.
Season 3 introduces more of Casey’s past, this time in the form of Goya, who is the Premier of Costa Gravas and a man that the US government want to protect now that his country is being opened up to democracy. Despite this, it is a mission that Casey has incredible difficulty with, considering he has been ordered to assassinate Goya no less than three times, and it makes it incredibly difficult when, considering a failure on Chuck’s behalf later on (where he and Sarah get thrown out), Casey finds himself trying to go undercover in a packed ballroom. Casey is mistakenly attacked by Devon and his identity revealed, and he is removed to a basement to be tortured.
The assassin who intended to kill Goya then goes ahead and poisons him using a cigar, and Devon is called in again to save the Premier’s life as his physician in LA. This allows Chuck and Sarah to sneak back in to look for Casey, who is shot in the leg during his escape, and later – after being anaesthetised by Chuck particularly brutally – he provides a blood transfusion to the Costa Bravan Premier and consequently is renamed The Angel of Life, much to his hatred.
Things continue on from there as Shaw settles into the team at Castle, giving Chuck missions of his own to work on against the Ring, which essentially put him in further danger each time, such as flying to Paris and handling an asset of his own. With Casey and Sarah’s help, he does manage to get through it, but without a doubt the pursuit of the Ring changes Chuck little by little.
After Chuck takes the role of assassin Rafe Gruber, he tries to find out who the Ring is putting out a hit on only to discover that it’s Shaw. Long before then, however, when taking the role at first, Casey’s cover is compromised and Chuck is forced to torture him to prove he was who he says he was, ripping out one of Casey’s teeth as he plied him for information. Rather than being angry, Casey was impressed, and remarked that Chuck had at least taken out the bad one and saved him a trip to the dentist. In the same episode Casey would shoot the real Rafe Gruber from a distance of five miles – an impossible shot – and save Sarah’s life.
Casey is contacted privately by The Ring, or more specifically by his old Colonel, Keller, who convinced him to fake his own death. Keller is blackmailing Casey over the life of his once fiancée Kathleen McHugh, but this is not revealed until Casey has already stolen from the government and consequently been arrested and locked up for his actions. Keller breaks him out, and afterwards Casey reveals this information to Chuck and Sarah, who agree to help him. Together – and by the skin of their teeth – they save Kathleen, and Alex McHugh – Casey’s daughter – arrives to find her mother okay. Casey doesn’t mention his existence to them.
Back at Castle, Casey is summarily dismissed, but he finds civilian life empty and unfulfilling. He gets in trouble almost immediately, with Jeff and Lester threatening to sue him for assault, and Casey being forced to apologise and make concessions as far as they’re concerned. Chuck sneaks a gun out to Casey, knowing how hard it probably is for him to live without one, and yet when Chuck is given his first kill order, Casey knows full well he won’t be able to do it and makes the shot for him, making him essentially a murderer since he was a civilian at the time.
The secret sticks (except for how Casey admits it to Sarah an episode later) and Chuck remains safe, and Casey remains civilian, and then Shaw – discovering that Sarah was the one who killed his wife, and having joined the Ring – works up an elaborate plan to hurt her, taking her to the street in Paris where she was killed. After capturing the Ring Director in Paris, Casey finally gets his job back, only to end up having to hunt down Chuck and Sarah after their vacation turns into an attempt to escape their spy life. After chasing them down, Casey offers them both the opportunity to leave twice, however they end up returning with him to Burbank.
After this, Casey is assigned to train Morgan, much to his disgust, something that doesn’t work out so well because Morgan has practically no useful spy skills, though he does have a significant amount of idiot courage, such as the ability to take on a Bengal Tiger unarmed.
The Intersect begins to effect Chuck in his dreams, and Casey expresses concern for his friend which ends up with Chuck being put into a mental institute. The corruption that the Intersect causes on Chuck’s brain is expanded on over the following episodes, and the Ring begin to try to convince Ellie that Casey is an enemy agent sent to spy on her. Ellie hits Casey in the face with a frying pan when he searches her apartment. Meanwhile Shaw has come back, and attempts to convince the CIA, in front of a room full of Generals, that Chuck is no longer a sustainable asset. He proves it by attempting to prove that Shaw – who he is surprised to see alive – is an Intersect by throwing a knife at him and expecting him to catch it; he intentionally does not, and Chuck is arrested. Casey finds himself arrested to, and the team are transported away, however after Chuck is sprung by his father and they go after the Ring facility, Shaw murders Stephen Bartowski in front of both Chuck and his sister (hidden in the shadows). She follows them to the rendez-vous point, and Morgan, Awesome and Ellie rescue Chuck, Sarah and Casey from Shaw.
In any case they capture the Ring Elders, beat Shaw, and everything seems to be fine for now. Team Bartowski is reinstated, and Chuck discovers his father’s old files under the old family home.
Season 4
A significant amount of Season Four revolves around Chuck’s relationship with his sister and his mother, and Casey is sidelined a little more as a result. That doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have some significant screentime, however, particularly since he is an integral member of the team.
This season follows the storyline of Chuck dipping into his father’s research and desperately hunting down his mother. Sarah and Casey are away on missions clearing up the last strongholds of the Ring and finding themselves pulled into Volkof’s interests. Meanwhile Chuck and Morgan following their own clues find themselves in the same place at the same time, Volkof industries in Russia. They save Casey and Sarah from Volkof and end up embroiled after discovering files regarding an agent called Frost, whom Chuck is certain is his mother.
Meanwhile the CIA have rebuilt the Buy More, recently exploded, and made it a classy gadget heaven filled with CIA agents—the place is perfect. Too perfect. Suspiciously perfect, threatening to blow everyone’s covers, especially now Chuck is working there again. Chuck is back on the job as a spy after deliberately trying to quit the spy life to pursue his own things, and he ends up immediately on a mission to Milan to pick up a weapon with Sarah.
After a cou by the Costa Gravan Premier’s wife, Casey finds himself back in the country guiding his fellows through the walls in order to save the man’s life. Again. Meanwhile shenanigans are happening at home, since back in Season 3, Casey was forced to tell his daughter Alex that he was her father, and consequently during his civilian life he has drawn closer and closer to her. She’s by this point dating Morgan secretly.
It’s not the end of Casey’s sacrifices. To find more information on Frost, Casey agrees to allow Chuck to arrange his funeral in order to tempt in the old Black Ops team that he used to work with, who want Casey’s hand print (his hand will do) in order to open a vault full of gold in Iran. He is poisoned such that he is rendered incapable of movement and his heart rate slowed, but it leaves him susceptible to attack. After they blow out the floor of the church in order to kidnap him, Casey is on his own, and after just about managing to escape despite his condition, Casey ends up rescued by Jeff and Lester, and consequently is shaken from his couch lock by Morgan telling him about his daughter’s relationship with him to get him angry. After they were captured, Morgan would earn Casey’s permission to date his daughter so long as he understood that if he hurt her he would be in a world of pain because he would safe Casey’s, Chuck’s and Sarah’s life by electrocuting himself and the old members of Casey’s team, effectively dying for a few moments before he was resuscitated.
At last Chuck’s mother shows herself, but she doesn’t seem to be who she should be, and she shoots Chuck in the chest, only to come back and tell him that she knew he was wearing a vest. Chuck isn’t impressed, and isn’t sure whether or not to trust her, at least not until he meets her handler Gregory Tuttle, who instantly makes him feel much better about everything. As a result, he leads her back to his basement in the old family home, and she and Tuttle – who reveals himself to be Volkof – destroy all of Chuck’s father’s research. Before they leave and explode the basement with Chuck and Sarah locked inside, she provides Sarah with a blade with which to cut the ropes binding her, and uses a suppression device on Chuck to force the Intersect to stop working, and consequently stop him coming after her.
Now Intersect-free, Chuck endures weeks of government poking and prodding as they try to dislodge the rock that Frost has put on the Intersect to prevent it from working. Chuck goes to Switzerland to try and jump start it through fear into working again. Casey has his own dangerous mission back at base—trying to protect Jeff and Lester from a vicious agent named Greta who is tired of being followed around and harassed by them, and expects Morgan to do something about it.
Chuck, captured by the Belgian on his Swiss mission, is held as the Intersect who can give up his secrets so that they can be sold on to the highest bidders; however the Intersect isn’t working, and torturing it out of him has no effect, so the decision is made to cut all of the man out and leave just the machine behind. Sarah heads out to get him back from the Brazilian jungle that he’s been taken away to, but Casey and Morgan are not far behind, determined to save their friend just as much. They storm the camp together.
Volkof, learning that Chuck is still alive, sends Frost to send three assassins to kill him—she kills the assassins, and Volkof catches up to her and insists that she kill Chuck. She reveals that he’s her son, and then Ellie calls (she’s pregnant by the way), and Frost is also forced to reveal that she has a daughter. The weapons magnate comes to dinner, much to everyone’s horror.
Casey is making more connections with his daughter, but he is also making more connections with his friends, and growing more settled with Morgan as a team member. Morgan is running a mission within a mission for Chuck, helping him to set up his proposal, and Casey gives him some advice based on his own experience with the matter.
Things are getting sticky, though; Sarah is forced to go undercover with Volkof industries in order to free Chuck’s mother. She is forced to prove her loyalty, and Volkof’s request? That she kill Casey. During the fight he tells her to throw him out the window – there’s a ledge about sixty foot down that he can land on, and the fall won’t kill him, however when he hits the ledge the cable snaps, and Casey falls the rest of the way. He ends up in hospital, recovering from a coma with his daughter beside him, and when Volkof’s agents come to finish him off, he’s more than ready for them. At the same time, Chuck pulls the sting that will capture Volkof completely.
After recovering, Casey is sent with the team to Morocco to rescue Roan Montgomery, and left behind since unlike the others his cover wasn’t blown. He ends up trapped in a wall while he waits for his team to fly back to Morocco to cut him out, and when the rescue attempt is almost thwarted, he fires through a bullet hole in the wall at the assailants blind, and past the heads of his teammates. He tells them ‘I’ve never done this before’, which no doubt instils plenty of confidence in them. Before leaving Casey promises to speak to Alex’s mother, but he can’t before he leaves; several episodes later, Casey would be tracked down by her after she recognised him at the Buy More, and confronted while in the middle of a mission.
Meanwhile, things are turning all the worse for Chuck and his team. The rescue a woman called Vivian from a man trying to find the key to Volkof’s assets; she turns out to be Volkof’s daughter, and after her rescue she becomes Chuck’s asset; he uses her to access her father’s bank account in exchange for a visit, but the government lets him down, forcing him to admit to having betrayed her. She hates Chuck for that, and first targets him with a bomb. Meanwhile Casey has been recruited to a private mission from Castle, spearheading the new Intersect project—only he discovers there are some kinks in it. The two choices; Greta and Greta, are a lot like him, and the new Intersect has been programmed not to have the kinks in it that Chuck’s does; the emotional insecurity, the inability to shoot to kill when necessary.
The only problem is that when it comes down to it Chuck is just better, so when the chance for him to edge in on one of Casey’s missions with the new team comes up, he takes advantage of it, and ends up diffusing a bomb and saving hundreds of thousands of lives in the process. With apple juice. Casey’s Intersects are de-Intersected, and Chuck is put in command of the project and offered the chance to choose new potentials himself.
Chuck’s potentials are in various ways a lot like him, and yet all terrible choices. They are consequently trapped in Castle after one of the potentials bombs the place, and cunningly tries to make it look like he’s the victim so that he can escape. Casey is understandably made to keep some of the peace throughout.
With Chuck’s wedding coming up fast, the bachelor party gets underway. At Las Vecas. However Vivian’s agents show up to try and capture the Orion computer with the Agent X information on it, and Casey is forced to take out the four agents to prevent everyone from being killed.
Finally, just before the wedding, Vivian decides she’s going to step in and ruin everything, putting together her weapon and capturing Chuck’s mother. Casey joins the team, and – after several attempts, and putting Morgan at risk as a ‘buyer’ for the weapons – they capture it and return for the rehearsal dinner. To do this Casey needs to snipe at four people he literally can’t see, except through a remote video. Unfortunately Vivian uses a second version of the weapon on Sarah, poisoning her, and the hunt begins for the antidote. The discovery is made that Alexei Volkof was in fact Agent X, and that he was put deep undercover with the Intersect, but somehow lost sight of himself in the process. Having discovered this information in England, the team are sworn to secrecy, otherwise someone will kill them to keep the embarrassment to the CIA and the US government a permanent secret.
Chuck needs to speak to Volkof in order to find the antidote to safe his wife, however now a new element in the CIA is playing his hand. Volkof is removed just before Chuck and Casey attempt to break him out of jail, and they are forced to pull an extraction, with Casey lending Chuck a motorcycle that can do 250kmph and catch up with the transfer. The CIA removes the Intersect from Volkof, returning him to his previous state. Even Sarah’s old team fall in to help, and Casey’s old friends in the Marine Corps help to get Volkof and Chuck to Russia after the first antidote fails, and after Chuck is briefly held hostage by the CIA agent who wipes the Intersect from him again.
Chuck, Intersect free, paratroops back in with the antidote to save Sarah, but is blocked by the CIA who overwhelm him and his friends. However then it rains Russian paratroopers from the sky, hundreds of them, who force the CIA to stand down while Chuck rushes in to save his fiancée. They get married, and Casey almost cries. No word of a lie.
Post Season-4
I’ll make some comments regarding things that happened after S4 in Casey’s personality, but only in general terms because he opens up a little more as time goes on (for instance his relationships with Verbansky and Alex demonstratively show sides to him that exist but aren’t actively realised up until the later canon points). Never mind the fact that he’s a Star Wars fan.
Personality:
Casey is a spy, and therefore there are already two sides to him. John Casey; spy, and John Casey; cover. Therefore he presents himself differently to people depending on which they know him as, and also whether they command any kind of respect from him. There is however a lot of basic crossover between the two. Spy and cover both have a gruff, capable exterior, though as a Green Shirt, Casey is an overaged man working retail, and as a result loses something just out of simple perception, while as a spy Casey is in his prime, and well respected. When Kathleen discovers his identity, she at first tells Casey off for pretending to their daughter that he’s a hero when he’s moonlighting as a waiter at weddings while also working at the Buy More, but quickly changes her tune when she sees him with a badge, and I believe this demonstrated the difference in perception perfectly. In essence, one is a little sad, and nothing to be impressed by, while the other immediately commands respect.
Casey has what Chuck has described as an angry centre rather than a calm centre, and it is from that fountain of anger that much of Casey’s physical attributes come, however as a sniper he is remarkably calm, efficient and accurate, he rarely misses. Certainly he can be angry, but he has remarkable control over it considering, and it boils under the surface. This leads me straight onto another point. John Casey feels. He may give the impression that he doesn’t, that he’s just out to do his job, but in fact he has very strong feelings. His anger burns hot, his love for the people that he loves often comes before his duty, and there is a small part of him that is a hopeless romantic no matter what. His control, then, is crucial, because if he were to ever let go of his feelings, then with his excess of strength and talent with weaponry there might just be no stopping him; he would be a formidable enemy.
At one point Casey says that the reason why Caseys don’t show their emotions and give of themselves is because the thing that hurts most in the world is to offer your heart to someone and see it stomped all over—the fact that he is offering this advice to his daughter after a messy breakup is perhaps the most touching thing of all. Casey’s soft spot for Alex, once he meets her, is such that he seems his most human around her, and naturally this is a weakness all on its own. Alex is the first civilian that Casey ever tells about his identity, or shows any warmth and compassion for, and he would kill anyone that hurt her, and bears grudges against those that do.
Casey develops friendships after his time in Burbank, such that by season four he calls it home, something that he hasn’t felt about a place for some time, much like Sarah. He has been directed to leave several times, only to find himself incidentally pulled back into it, and as a result he has put down the roots that he at first told himself not to, opened up his heart and made himself vulnerable, made Alex, the Buy More, Morgan, Chuck and Sarah important to him.
This makes it exceptionally difficult when Casey is instructed to direct the new Intersect project, as he feels he has to betray his team and more importantly his friends in order to do it, keeping secrets from his team and going on missions without them. Chuck is stung by Casey using him as a bomb disposal unit, but there’s no denying that when Chuck destroys the bomb after the replacement Intersects fluff things up, Casey is infinitely relieved, even impressed, and more than happy to return to his own team, though he’d never have said anything out loud.
In fact during this mission he treats Chuck with a remarkable gentleness that has been developing ever since the beginning of the season, and would eventually culminate in an actual hug. He opens a juice carton for him and puts it inside his face mask, then gently tells Chuck about his own experience wearing a bomb disposal outfit in Bosnia; it’s in fact the second noteable incident where Casey deliberately shares a part of his past with his friend without any kind of demand being made on him to do so, outside of the requirements of the mission or the situation at hand. The other is when Casey – quite out of the blue – told Chuck about his own proposal to Kathleen, and told him fondly that the timing and the view didn’t matter so long as you had the girl.
Casey has an itsy bit of geek in him. He also occasionally watches romances and movies with guns. No guesses as to why. He would have been about six when the first Star Wars movie came out, and as a result when Morgan has lost his memories of the movies and has recently broken up with his daughter by text message, Casey instructs him to start with Episode I: The Phantom Menace, and is amused when Morgan comes back asking why he likes the movies because he can’t stand any more Jar Jar Binks. He then tells him that he was messing with him, and to start with Episode IV, but then tells him that Darth Vader is Luke’s Father and Princess Leia is his sister, consequently ruining the trilogy for him; ruthless, thy name is John Casey.
So okay, seems like Casey is a nice guy, right? Wrong. If he sees you as a troublemaker, or if you break the law, or if you’re with Fulcrum or the Ring or something similar, he will treat you with abject and unerring suspicion until he proves you’re worth trusting. Casey is a spy, and his natural condition is on guard, unless of course he’s had previous experience having been seduced by another spy in which case… Well, he’s a lost cause. Casey is a terrible agent of seduction himself, having failed the course twice, but he’s easily seduced by the right (slightly dangerous) women. He finds himself tied to a bed by Catarina at one point, and at another smugly and gleefully asks Walker ‘Haven’t you ever had sex with someone who just tried to kill you’ in regard to Verbansky.
Of course it doesn’t excuse that he clearly has trouble understanding women otherwise. He fails terribly when it comes to plucking up the courage to invite Verbansky on a date, and in a previous season he actually as much as tells a woman he’s trying to seduce that she’s fat, and that’s why she’s down here guarding the cells. He meant it in a nice way, really.
Casey is arrogant and judgemental at the best of times, as well as being stuck in the past. Ask him what good things the French ever did for us, or what he thinks of President Clinton, or show him a red and black party invitation written in Helvetica font—I promise you he will just about implode. Casey is stuck in the late eighties as far as his patriotism goes, having a rich contempt for communism, insurgents, terrorism, that comes from having fought them fiercely for the last few years. He has a serious problem being nice to some people, especially Russians, and is chock full of more prejudice than you can shake a stick at, and not afraid to mumble his condemnations under his breath. Or better still just grunt. But then he grunts at everything, even public displays of affection. Despite being as aforementioned, a hopeless romantic.
As stated before, Casey has a strong relationship with his team born right out of their time together. He grew to like Chuck and Sarah sufficiently enough that he would never want to deliberately put them at risk if they couldn’t handle it, but he also respects them both immensely. He also has a certain amount of grudging respect for Morgan, otherwise he simply wouldn’t put up with him—or with Morgan dating his daughter.
But for Chuck and Sarah he would go out of his way to save them no matter what, even put himself right into the line of gunfire, even commit murder. When their lives are endangered in the final season by a kill order, the assassin whose identity Chuck and the team discovers arranges to kill them anyway, and the result is that Casey is forced to kill all of them in order to prevent them from being killed. Casey does it without a second thought. Only his friends’ safety and happiness matters to him.
There’s also no denying that Casey has a soft spot for General Beckman. He generally simply obeys orders, but he gets a wistful smile now when she comes up in conversation, and since she’s been giving him orders since 1989, it doesn’t seem too much really to imagine that he might actually like her just a little bit; after all Casey settles in with routine, and it seems to make him more comfortable.
Abilities, Weaknesses and Power Limitations:
Casey is human, but being a spy for the NSA means that he has a number of natural talents that put him above base level, and give him pseudo-superhuman powers. They are not, however, anything beyond what it is possible for someone with years of training and experience in their field could do, and while Casey is an exceptional spy with some magnificent qualities, he does still falter to human frailties, both physically and emotionally.
I have tried to include Casey’s emotional weaknesses in his personality section, and since those are in general most of the places where he is weaker than the average human (since things that will kill and maim and poison humans all naturally affect Casey as they would anyone else) I feel there’s not much need to expound on his weaknesses any further here.
It is important to note, however, that unlike other people, Casey is incredibly durable; hard headed and difficult to render unconscious (it takes three tranquiliser darts to put him down where it would usually only take one), as well as stubborn, which allows him to work through pain such as having been shot, poisoned, having his teeth pulled, or exposed to flash grenades. He bounces back quickly, since to do anything else would mean death; although all of this as I said is a matter of training.
As far as abilities goes, I’ll divide this into two sections; physical strength and weapons.
Physical strength;
Casey is stockily built for all of his six foot high, and most of that is pure strength. He can however be gentle despite it, as his passion for bonsai trees proves, possessing a steady hand and an incredibly delicate touch.
Casey possesses the physical strength to actually lift a man by his neck without choking him in the process, and hold him off the floor at arm’s length. He can break a man’s neck from a headlock in moments, and at one point – while threatening Chuck – he tells him that he can kill him a hundred ways with just one hand—or beat him to death with the radiator his other arm is chained to (he’d just pulled it off a wall). While it’s uncertain whether the threat is anything more or just a threat, it is true that at one point Casey uses a nerve pinch to put down a guard silently, and suggests that it is at least somewhat reliable.
Casey is violent and accurate with his strength, and is well known for using it even while maintaining his cover at the Buy More. The Burbank branch has practically eliminated shoplifting on account of having Casey in the store, as he has a great passion for maintaining lawful order in his own domain. At one point he tackles a shoplifter full on, throwing his arms around him and knocking him to the ground, and on another occasion, using only a half-eaten apple, Casey pitches it straight on into the back of a shoplifter’s head, rendering him unconscious. “Three strikes and you’re out.”
He is also capable of carrying full grown men with ease on his back, can run and presumably jump with them, though to be fair the time he ‘jumped’ there was a helicopter exploding behind him at the same moment, and it probably gave him an extra little push. In any case, Casey is without a doubt strong, as well as being remarkably tough.
His durability, an expansion of his strength, is again due to training and experience. Casey is capable of enduring torture; burns, cuts, ripped teeth, knife and gunshot wounds, and can bear those injuries without it affecting his performance. He has a considerable ability – trained into him – where it comes to shaking off the effects of drugs or tranquilisers, truth serums etc. as befitting a spy of his calibre.
Casey is despite his boarish appearance smart enough to be able to keep up with most aspects of a mission flawlessly. As aforementioned in his personality however, he has trouble when it comes to seduction. While he can juggle all the likelihoods and possibilities of an infiltration or extraction, make plans, work escape routes, and can smoothly transition from Plan A to Plan B to Plan Wing It in a fraction of a second, he falters as soon as he has to try to employ sexuality as a weapon, even though in general he is actually very good at maintaining his covers.
His endurance also shows itself in his dedication to his missions, as Casey is not the kind of man to back down from a challenge, or even an apparently impossible mission. He once hid himself in the walls of a Costa Gravan palace for two weeks during the revolution, and his efforts in Costa Gravas earned him the title El Angel de la Muerte (The Angel of Death). He also had a supporting wall fall on him while on a similar mission in Marakesh, and was forced to hold the wall up for about twelve hours as he waited for help to come. He threatened to cut his arm off if he had to in order to escape.
Weapons;
Without a doubt Casey loves his guns; at one point in Season Five he asks Sarah whether he should – on a date – take the Smith and Western since it implies he is rugged and dependable, or the SIG because it’s cool and sophisticated—in fact he decides to take both. His prowess is well known, so much so in fact that Verbanski has the gun that she disarmed from him set in pride of place in her office, with a plaque underneath stating that it was ‘Taken from John Casey’.
Casey is experienced in a variety of weapons, not only firearms but he is also trained in other methods of self defence, knowing how to use his body as a weapon, as well as staffs, knives, throwing stars etc. He prefers using a gun without a doubt, and it is his speciality within a team. In fact, he gets an itchy trigger finger if he’s removed from missions for too long.
He is also a munitions expert, particularly where it comes to using C4 and other explosives, which he handles rather than the other members of the team. He has experience in bomb disposal in Bosnia, though tends to leave that kind of thing to Chuck in general.
Among the weapons Casey has learned to use are sniper rifles, shotguns, handguns, rail guns, rifled, automatic machine guns—give him something with a trigger and he can fire it. He is also proficient at using these weapons in the dark, with either laser sights of high-tech night vision glasses.
The best way to explain just how Casey’s weaponry proficiency accounts for being an ‘ability’ is to use exemplary experiences wherein he has saved the day with gunfire. These are only a few, but they go so far as to explain how well trained and capable he is.
• Shot and killed six agents with a bead on him before a single one let off a shot, with pinpoint accuracy. They all fell almost at the same time, having been shot within the space of perhaps a second and a half.
• After being pinned down by four ex-green berets and their leader in a forest, successfully used stealth tactics to kill all four, by using civilians as bait and keeping quiet, as well as providing at one point a dummy target with one of their bodies. He did this unaided, and without a single shot being fired at him.
• Also pinned down in the woods – this time in daylight – and armed with only a sniper rifle, Casey shot and killed eight + enemies without being shot himself, despite being semi-exposed and guarding a casualty. He also identified his targets so that in the heat of the moment he didn’t shoot and kill Chuck, who came running at him suddenly out of the woods.
• After blinds were pulled down between Casey and sniper targets closing in on Morgan, Caset picked off four enemies with kill shots simply by watching a live video feed from a camera attached to Morgan’s tie, taking blind shots that could as easily have killed Morgan himself if he’d made a mistake. This displayed not only finesse and a certain ballsiness, but precise spatial awareness and split second decision making capability.
• Once made a kill shot over five miles; a shot that supposedly only a handful of people in the world could make. He was smug afterwards as a result “And I’m one of them.”
• Laid down fire, killing a number of enemies, while in a fast moving helicopter.
The importance of a steady hand, as well as other natural talents discovered and honed by access to gun ranges and experience in the field, is crucial as far as Casey is concerned. There is no doubt that he is an incredibly capable sniper, and his fondness for weapons lends toward his accuracy with them. Put a gun in his hand and he is deadly. It’s why he’s made it to the rank of Colonel.
As far as other talents goes, Casey can fly a stealth plane. Oh, and he bakes.
Inventory:
The likely contents of his pockets, consisting of:
One SIG P226 handgun
Three clips for said gun
One throwing knife
One pair handcuffs + keys
Three bidirectional earpieces for communication and surveillance
Five 7mm listening devices with a limited range and a minimal battery life (50 yards and 72 hours)
And finally something frivolous:
One 15 year old bonsai tree
One set of bonsai tree tools
Appearance: Broad, tall, strong, with an almost permanent stern expression. Eyes: blue grey, height: 6'4", hair: short and brown
Age: Late-thirties
AU Clarification: N/A
SAMPLES
Log Sample:
He’d been in the Marines, worked Black Ops, spent two weeks living in a wall in the Costa Gravas revolution, even flown a stealth bomber down on blind targets, and yet of all the postings Casey had had, all the mud and cesspits he’d had to wade through, he was sure that he had never been in a situation as repulsive, as unbearable as this one.
The no-man’s land was scattered with debris, the remains of a night where a host of men had stumbled bravely and blindly to their certain doom. Everything was almost deathly silent, except that something was breathing heavily like a wounded beast. There were bones scattered among the bodies laid out at awkward angles, lost shoes, a torn shirt. Something red was dripping still into a viscous pool on the floor. A mobile phone, left face up, and cracked across the face, mistreated by the evening’s battle, lit up and began to ring loudly. Casey recognised the tune—it was something from Star Wars, loud and menacing, and so irritating once it had been featured in store for the fifteenth day in a row that Casey had actually broken the disk, and not cared in the slightest when its value had been deducted from his salary. Discernible beneath a smudge of barbeque sauce and the savage crack in the phone’s case was the word ‘Mom’.
The corpses began to stir, and Casey aimed a savage kick at the one closest to him, Jeff, figuring that his hard head could take it. The room they were in was utterly trashed, empty barbeque rib cases strewn on the floor, sauce spots and melting frozen yoghurt, empty Subway wrappers—and not so empty ones. Jeffrey stopped grunting snores like a savagely beaten dragon with a spear buried through both its lungs, and blinked up at him. He elbowed his fellow carpet-crashed Nerd Herder, this one with a smear of mayonnaise – Casey hoped it was mayonnaise – plastering his hair to his face, and all around them bleary eyed dozers in various states of undress began to stir, looking momentarily lost, and then quickly fearful for their lives.
Casey growled fiercely, baring his teeth down at them, and moments later geeks were scattering everywhere, grabbing at paper cups, food and empty packets. He didn’t need to say a word; the Home Cinema room was not a party hard location, or the place for a Buy More sleepover, and yet here everyone was, barely conscious, making a mess of the store ten minutes before opening time.
If his cover life was going to be his real life now, the last thing that he wanted was it to be a constant nightmare of green and white shirts getting under his feet forever and ever. He wasn’t cut out for civilian life, and keeping his temper around these people had been hard enough already. But what could he do? Get another job? His CV practically included this job and nothing else, his record blotted out, his rank irrelevant. He didn’t have anything else, anyone else. This was it. At least if he’d been removed from service anywhere other than Burbank, he might have had a future, but what did he have to look forward to here? A quiet life? An empty apartment that he could barely afford, with nothing but a tree and a chair? He wasn’t even allowed to shoot anyone, which was going to be the hardest thing to deal with considering the idiots he was surrounded by.
Bodies scattered, BO left behind, Casey looked at the mess that was the Home Cinema room and tried to work out how it had come to this, that his life was so well represented by a crumpled Subway wrapper with nothing but a few crumbs and a smear of marinara sauce left behind. He felt empty, all the excitement gone; a man without a mission.
It pissed him off.
Comms Sample:
[ This opening post would be going very, very differently if Casey had just been able to find someone to hold hostage while he recorded his video. Chuck would have done just fine, but he was mysteriously absent, which was troublesome. Of course, even if Chuck hadn’t believed that Casey would actually shoot him, the whole point would have been that the people on the other side of the feed would believe it, and maybe they’d be dumb enough to tell him how to get out of here. Nobody wanted to see someone get shot in front of them, not even anyone as whiny and pitiful as Chuck Bartowski. Actually, no, come to think of it, it was a terrible idea. They’d probably be grateful.
So here is Casey, decidedly not about to blow anyone’s brains out, but looking as if he might be seriously contemplating it regardless. He starts off by baring his teeth, curling his lip, and just growling. ]
I’m going to make this short, because I don’t like to waste my time.
[ Casey is not a man of many words, and he hates speaking to strangers more than anything else. Especially when he’s not quite sure right now whether he’s meant to be maintaining cover or if he frankly shouldn’t bother. This could be an interrogation, hallucinatory drugs—stranger things have happened, and recently. ]
I can’t believe I’m actually going to say this, but—get me back to Burbank right now, and nobody will get hurt.
[ He hates space already, he can’t be blamed for wanting to make someone hurt for bringing him up here in the first place. He mutters the last word under his breath: ]
Much.