In a strange way, a lot of "Chuck vs. The Ring" felt like the writers were patting themselves on the back for packing so much into last week's episode.

So we got things like the reappearance of Jeffster! felt self-indulgent (that said, good version of "Mr. Roboto," Lester). and Chevy Chase's return was oddly anti-climactic following the tease at the end of the last episode, particularly when it came to his death (because that's a hell of a coincidence, the one traitor on Casey's team being the man he asks to guard him).

Awesome and Ellie's wedding gone wrong also felt half-assed, especially considering how quickly and easily it was solved, as if the writers were ticking off the things they'd meant to get around to, but couldn't really be bothered about now that they'd gotten there.

That's not to say that the episode was completely pointless; I was perfectly happy to see the death of Bryce, and enjoyed watching Scott Bakula ape Zachary Levi when he revealed that he, too, had an intersect in his head (So why wasn't his removed when Chuck's was, last week?). And, for a second, I was hopeful about what seemed to be the new status quo... and then the old status quo jumped back in at the last moment.

On a practical level, I can see why the writers wanted Chuck to put the intersect back in his head - It keeps the show's original concept around, after all, and gives them a reason to keep Casey around - but I have to admit, I was much more interested in watching Chuck try and be a spy without a supercomputer in his head (and definitely without a supercomputer that can now upload new skills into his brain as the plot demands, deus ex machina-style - although I did like the "Guys, I know kung fu" last line - and just using the skills he'd learned over the last couple of years than basically circling back to where we were when the series started.

Add to that a new mysterious bad spy organization, the Ring, who're the organization in charge of the previous mysterious bad spy organization, Fulcrum, which just feels ridiculous; we never really found out what Fulcrum was after beyond getting the intersect, and already they've been replaced with something even more vague, just to make a show of raising the stakes when we didn't really know what the stakes were to begin with.

It's not that last night's episode was a bad episode, just that it wasn't as good as last week's, and felt as if everyone involved was getting cold feet at all the big changes they'd made so quickly. If we get a third season - and I really hope we do, despite poor ratings for last night's finale - then I'm hoping that some of the changes we've seen stick. Let's not have Chuck and Casey and Morgan return to the BuyMore, please. Keep Scott Bakula around as the eccentric intersect expert helping behind the scenes, and don't let Awesome forget that he knows about Chuck's double life. Actually, I could easily do a Wish List for next year right now, but I'll just keep my mouth shut and hope that it gets renewed, first. Until then, though, what did you think?

I have no idea where to start with "Chuck Vs. The Colonel" - Casey promoted? Morgan quitting the BuyMore? Sarah and Chuck finally just getting together at last? Awesome finding out the truth about Chuck? Chuck getting de-intersected? All of them happened this week, in what would've been the perfect last episode of the series, but doing it all with an episode left - as well as, I hope, a third season on its way - seemed particularly bold and more than a little risky. How can the show keep going after dismantling its entire premise?

But at the same time, it also seems pointless to complain; the episode took the show apart in such a way that was both true to everything that'd come before - the Awesome scenes in particular were weirdly fulfilling, as both Chuck and Ellie demanded that he live up to his name - and stylish enough in their own right, managing the speedy A-plot (including a Tron screening that was actually a plan to create an army of evil intersects) with multiple B-plots (Awesome's discovery, Morgan's realization, Jeff and Lester's attempts to sabotage the BuyMore) without it seeming crowded or over the top. Even the expected-return of Chevy Chase's surprisingly believable evil-Bill-Gates, Ted Roark, in the last couple of minutes of the show felt right. If they can carry this level of quality off into next week's finale, it'll be a fitting close to the season, and maybe even the series... but also a sign that, should NBC not renew it, another network (Hello, SyFy) should definitely think about picking it up.

What did you think? And, if there is a third season, how can they keep going without undercutting the closure of this episode?

Admittedly, despite my dislike for Brewster, the return of Jill to the show helped build tension and credibility for the end of "Chuck versus The First Kill," where Chuck and Sarah both apparently went rogue to go and save Chuck's dad (The entirely missing from this episode Scott Bakula). Finally paying off that whole "Is Casey going to be forced to kill Chuck" subplot from last year (not to mention the "Does Sarah love Chuck more than her job" thing that they've pretty much already dealt with two episodes ago), the NSA decided that it's not worth dealing with Chuck's whole emotional wellbeing or life, and tried to put him in lockdown - only for Sarah to spill the beans and go AWOL with him.

Before that, though, Jill returned and proved that you can't trust anyone apart from your ex-girlfriends who also turned out to be a spy. Me, I'm not so sure it was the greatest idea to remind the viewers that everyone around Chuck seems to have a double life so close to his dad being revealed to be the guy who built the supercomputer inside his head, but I have to admit that Brewster wasn't nearly as irritating this time around, and I'm growing to like her somewhat ambivalent evil nature... If nothing else, she's more fun than Tony Hale's Emmett, who managed to machiavellianly get Morgan to accidentally help him be crowned manager of the BuyMore, busting Big Mike down to a lowly green shirt, in one of the more tenuous "Look, BuyMore is just like spying - They even have the same moral at the end" connections in weeks. Why we had to suffer through that instead of see more with Ellie and Awesome, I have no idea, but at this point - and with the show finally bringing everything together and looking as if Big Change is around the corner - I'm willing to sit back and see what happens.

Fanboy questions abound for next week: Will Sarah and Chuck stay rogue for the rest of the show, with Casey chasing them down, Fugitive-esque? Is General Beckmann working for Fulcrum? Can Scott Bakula really get the intersect out of Chuck's head? And am I the only one totally sucked in by this point?

Surprisingly, the guest-shots from Scott Bakula and Chevy Chase didn't completely capsize "Chuck Versus The Dream Job" - In fact, Bakula (whom I spent the entire episode looking at and wondering if he was really old enough to have a son Chuck's age; he's 53, so the answer is "I guess," I guess) in particular fit right in with the regular cast and would make a nice permanent addition to the show if I wasn't so convinced that he'll die before too long. Chase, meanwhile, seemed like he came from another world altogether... which, considering that he was playing Evil Steve Jobs, actually made a lot of sense.

The dream job of the episode's title was a position with Chase's character's company, Roark Industries... which seemed like a mix of Apple and Google, with a side order of evil Fulcrum for flavor. Chuck was given the job of infiltrating the company to stop the release of their new OS, which - through the magic of television computer logic - would somehow magically infect every computer in the world with a virus that'd do something mysteriously bad (The bad was explained later - It'd give Fulcrum access to government and military databases - but that came after a bungled attempt to stop the release). Of course, infiltrating the company also meant alienating Morgan - who thought that Chuck was abandoning both him and the BuyMore - and his dad who, it turned out, had gone to school with founder Ted Roark and invented most of the things that had made Roark famous in the first place. What was a secret spy to do?

Apparently, the answer is "Fuck up the mission, get fired from Roark, then go rogue, shoot Casey with tranq darts, break into Roark and discover that his dad had built the intersect in the first place." Yes, this was the week where the show potentially jumped the shark - We discovered that the intersect's creator, Orion, didn't die when his helicopter exploded (No surprise), that Orion was, in fact, Chuck's dad (Again, not the biggest surprise), and that Roark Industries is all a diversionary tactic for Fulcrum's own intersect (Slightly more of a surprise). The episode ended with Chuck's dad agreeing to build a new intersect for Fulcrum in exchange for Chuck's life, and Chuck deciding to use that life to get his dad back or die - okay, get hurt really bad trying.

I'm not sure how to feel about the "All In The Family" revelation; on the one hand, it smacks of either incredible coincidence or creative desperation, but on the other, it's not that much more ridiculous than Chuck having the entire database of government secrets in his head just by looking at a computer screen in the first place, and it was done rather well. It does suggest that the "gamechanging" season finale talk is more than just an empty tease, as well, if only for the way that it's unlikely that Chuck's world will be able to stay the same by the time the dust settles on this particular storyline.

What did the rest of you think? Did you buy the discovery that Chuck's dad was Orion and also a superspy? Did you enjoy Chevy Chase's evil corporate guru? And did you have a slight nerdgasm when Scott Bakula said "Oh boy" in his best Sam Beckett worried voice?

Outside of making Helfer's Battlestar Galactica vampisms look like the model of restraint, last night's episode pushed the season firmly into its endgame: Awesome is about one step away from finding out Chuck's secret (even as Helfer's Alex Forrest, a secret agent for whom not even a stereotypical stripper at a bachelor party routine will stand in the way of her mission, may have ruined his relationship with Chuck's sister), Sarah tracks down Chuck's dad (Not seen in the episode but having his identity ruined less than a minute later by the promo for next week), and even General Beckmann coming around to the idea of a Chuck and Sarah relationship. But will anyone remember that when they think back on what happened? Oh no. They'll all be wishing that they were in Awesome's shoes, and very bad boys.

I'll give the makers of Chuck this - They definitely zig when I'm expecting them to zag. The return of Cole Barker, British superspy who acknowledges his influence by telling his torturers that his name is "Bond, James Bond" when we first saw him this week, wasn't used for cheap "will they, won't they" soap operatics between Chuck and Sarah as I'd been expecting, but instead an excuse for Sarah to finally just come out and tell someone that she has feelings for Chuck.

Similarly, the "Chuck isn't moving in with Morgan after all" B-plot didn't give us the "Chuck lets Morgan down again" moment it seemed to be heading towards, but instead let Anna take over and move in with Morgan... giving him the life that Chuck wants with Sarah. Holy plot and character development that surprise, make sense and advance the overall character arcs of the season!

All of that, mind you, was secondary to the episode's main story, which saw Team Intersect discover that Fulcrum has hoodwinked scientist Howard Busgang (played by everyone's favorite, Robert Picardo) into thinking that he's working for the government instead of a shady bunch of terrorists who claim that they're patriots working for the good of America... All would be usual Chuckery, if it wasn't for the revelation that Busgang helped create the intersect, leading to an obsessed Chuck trying to save Busgang because he's convinced that he's the key to getting the intersect out of his head.

He fails, of course - and sadly, because I kind of wanted Picardo to stick around - but not before Busgang reveals that the mysterious "Orion" may be able to help Chuck, because Orion created the idea of the intersect in the first place and gathered all the other scientists together to make it happen. The episode ended - post Chuck telling Sarah that he was in love with her and her not saying anything because she is crazy and you can't have a Chuck without some soap operatic dumbness - with Chuck looking at a whiteboard of paranoia that he's made, trying to map out all the connections and people behind his current situation.

The introduction of Orion makes me a little nervous, I have to admit. On the one hand, I like that it feels as if we're definitely going to meet Orion (whoever he or she is) before the end of the season, if only to give closure to the question of whether Chuck is stuck like this forever that's been coming up with increasing regularity and urgency as the season goes on... But on the other, I can't quite shake the feeling that Orion suddenly being mentioned just before we're about to meet Chuck's father isn't exactly a coincidence, and that idea worries me greatly. While this show willingly gets fans like me to suspend disbelief on a lot of things, if we're going to be told that Chuck's dad invented the thing that "accidentally" ended up in Chuck's brain... Well, that's where we end up in Alias territory for real, and I think about checking out for awhile.

Of course, that may just be my own brand of paranoia, and even if it's not, we've got awhile before those episodes - two weeks before the next episode at all, in fact, and that's the one where Tricia Helfer shows up to replace Sarah and prove that there's life after BSG and Burn Notice. Personally, I can't wait.

Following on, weirdly, from the episode before last ("Chuck Vs. The Suburbs"), we start the episode with Chuck avoiding Sarah's calls, and Ellie offering the kind of ill-considered advice fictional characters always offer in situations like this: Dump her.

As soon as she's said it - and given the traditional "If she's not The One, then you shouldn't waste either of your times" speech - it's only a matter of time before she changes her mind (which she does, midway through the episode and on the advice of Morgan, whose judgement is as questionable as his fruitbowl-genitalia slapstick). The damage is done, though, and Chuck and Sarah faux-split-up just in time for this week's bad guy, a smooth, be-stubbled British spy called Cole Barker, to show up, turn out to be a good guy after all, do some James Bond stuff like shooting down a helicopter with a gun in each hand, and doing his best to engage in some bondage with Sarah (All in the name of being undercover and getting ratings, of course).

Cole is clearly meant to be the latest Jill or Bryce - a momentary distraction standing between Chuck and Sarah's true love - and, as such, has less of a personality than a collection of familiar quirks meant to distinguish himself from Chuck but not be interesting enough to make you want Sarah to fall for him for too long. Weirdly enough, despite the British accent and obvious shout-outs to Bond, he seemed as if he'd stepped out of an episode of Alias, especially when he was getting whipped by a Fulcrum bad girl and refusing to spill secrets. Not that Chuck had any problem revealing that he was the Intersect when faced with the possibility of pain but, in true Superman style, no-one believed that someone that puny could be the hero of the hour. Even if they had, they would have ended up dead, anyway, when Casey saved the day with a convenient SWAT team rescue at the right moment.

After all of that, the end of the episode - Fulcrum kidnapped Cole when he least expected it, and Chuck's identity is so potentially compromised that he has to go into 24 hour protection under the cover of he and Sarah moving in together, just as he's agreed to move in with Morgan - seemed curiously tacked on (Why kill the badguys if Cole was going to end up recaptured anyway?), but satisfying, nonetheless; again, Chuck's life gets derailed by the intersect, and again, it appears to everyone who isn't in on his secret that he's unable to do anything with his life.

I admit, I felt as if earlier episodes of this season were lacking in any forward motion and just repeating moments from the first; it wasn't that it wasn't enjoyable to see Chuck as the fish out of water in an over-the-top spy world, but we'd already seen it last year. Thankfully, that's changed since and by this point in the season, we're not only seeing Chuck and Sarah addressing their fake/real relationship (along with some snark from Casey, who's increasingly come to act as an audience surrogate at times like that), but also the way that the spy stuff is slowly ruining Chuck's life, which has become a quiet running theme of this season, turning the comedic misunderstandings of the first into something darker and more worrying. Is it all heading somewhere? It seems to be... Here's hoping that the "gamechanging" finale lives up to its promise.

I have a love/hate relationship with Chuck; I always want it to be better than it actually ends up being, and am always kind of surprised when it disappoints me for whatever reason, even though it's never actually not disappointed me. So color me surprised that "Chuck Versus The Graviton" seemed to... well, do everything if not entirely right, then at least right-ish. I admit; I was won over very early by Chuck voicing my concern from last week, that it was ridiculous that his ex-girlfriend was also a spy - and amused by the explanation that, yes actually, the evil spy organization Fulcrum really does recruit Stanford students on campus (Yes, it's silly, but knowingly so, which goes a long way with me). From there, the Jill plot may have continued to hit the expected points - She's betrayed her evil spy masters! No, it's a double-bluff! Or is it? - but did so quickly and without insulting the viewers' intelligence too much (Skipping from the unseen "Negative" on the lie detector to Chuck at gunpoint within a minute, instead of dragging it out for another act, for example), and at least ended with her capture - and at the hands of Mr. Bartowski himself, no less.

Also, for the second week running - And I hope, I hope, that this is a sign of things to come - the Buy More B-plot tied in with the main story (In fact, was necessary for the climax, which was nice), and didn't treat its characters as one-dimensional buffoons? It was like a different, better, show that had caught an episode of Chuck earlier this season and thought "Hey, I could do better than that." There were even call-outs to previous episodes (Morgan's Thanksgiving excitement) and foreshadowing for future ones (The way that a visit from the Awesomes freaked Ellie out)! I don't know what made the writing come together so well this week, but can we make that happen every week from now on?

I enjoyed the episode so much that I didn't even mind the continued deconstruction of what made Chuck Chuck back when we first met him, although I'm still nervous that the more competent Chuck gets at the spy stuff, the less point there is in the show at all, and, for that matter, the more it turns into Alias... which isn't a good thing. That said, I have to admit that the glimpse of that show's Carl Lumbly in the trailer for next week made me smile...

One thing that "Chuck Versus The Fat Lady" (because there was a scene in an opera! Get it?) did right was move along the "Chuck's long-lost love Jill is back" plot almost as quickly as I wanted. Don't get me wrong; I'm no fan of the idea that Chuck always has to be sad and/or that Sarah is his one, true, unrequited love, but Jordana Brewster's performance as "the one that got away, only to return and as an undercover evil secret spy" - Something that became curiously obvious as soon as she was "kidnapped" midway through the episode, leading to a flat and underwhelming reveal in the last five minutes - has been so incredibly flat and lifeless that even before her secret was revealed, I was hoping that she'd turn out to be evil or have to make a heroic sacrifice as soon as possible, just to get rid of her.

That said, the idea that Jill - like Chuck and fellow Stanford student Bryce Larkin - just so happens to be a superspy somewhat stretches credibility on an already ridiculously unbelievable show. I admit that I like the idea that Jill is such Kryptonite to Chuck that he ends up going against the advice of his friends, family and co-workers (not to mention his common sense), just like he did back in college; it's a nice way to reboot the character, who was beginning to get a little bit too good at his double life, thereby defeating the premise of the show. But did she have to be a spy? She couldn't have just been your regular, common or garden version of a bad girlfriend?

(Also, as much as I hate Jordana Brewster's performance, I hope that they don't kill Jill off next week. It'll be bad enough that Chuck will have gotten over her, thereby removing the last of his original hang-ups that made him the underperforming nerd when we first met him; if she can't come back to twist the knife every now and again, I worry that we'll be stuck with the hyper-efficient, thinking-outside-of-the-box Charles Carmichael for the rest of the series.)

But despite the episode's "I love you, but spy work keeps us apart - And you're a spy as well!" soap operatics, it wasn't a complete waste of an hour last night... surprisingly due to the Buy More scenes, which - helped by Tony Hale's great new character - not only tied into the main plot for once, but also provided the laughs and sneakiness that the spy stuff normally handles. If we can have more of that in the future (and a promise from show creators that Hale isn't going to turn out to be a spy the next time sweeps comes around), then I'll be a happy viewer.

It's sad that, after last week's season best (Chuck and Casey kissing to cure disease! Yvonne Strahovski using her real accent as Sarah undercover!), this week's episode was so poor, but I'm hoping that next week will pull out of the second act slump... even if it's only due to the goodwill generated by losing Jill for awhile.

The main problem the show appears to be suffering from this season is being too aware of its format - For every sign that the characters are moving forward, some awkward circumstance will appear to pull them back into their pre-assigned roles; take Sarah and Chuck's relationship, for example - it's gotten to the point where it's obvious to the two of them that they should be together, and yet just when they're about to do something about it, Bryce reappears. It's obviously meant to be some kind of post-irony use of soap opera, but it just comes across as contrived. This isn't another Moonlighting where, if the two leads get together the show will be ruined, but coming up with more and more unlikely reasons to keep the two apart is going to get very tired, very quickly.

The same thing is true of Chuck's increasing competence at doing the spy stuff; one minute, he's boasting about having stolen the cypher from a Russian version of Julie Cooper and having jumped off a hotel balcony without a scratch - or, last week, saving the day with a well-timed appearance with an armed squad - and the next, everyone is treating him like a moron because, out of nowhere, he's acting like one - It's as if the writers get carried away with having the characters change and grow, and then someone reminded them that Chuck is supposed to be a loser midway through.

All of that said, there was a lot to like amongst the resets last night; Melinda Clarke's black widow was unbelievable in the best way, as tone-perfect with the Boris and Natasha accent and campy bitchiness as John Laroquette's drunken former James Bond looking for a return to former glories. The idea that the show has a subtle new direction (that Chuck and crew and working to get the new intersect built, as opposed to just doing random spy shit brought on by happenstance and random flashes) was welcome as well, as was the reveal that Sarah's new cover is just that - that the yoghurt shop is entirely a front for nefarious spy missions. It's moves like that - and like Chuck becoming more confident and more useful - that make me feel as if there's hope for the show. Now all they need to do is let themselves move forward (and work out some way to make the BuyMore scenes seem less like they've accidentally been edited in from another show altogether) and we'll be in good shape.