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?

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.