Last night was the last hour of Chuck before the actual season three finale next week, and like last season, it featured the return of Father Bartowski and some escalating Intersect concerns. Also – Shaw is still alive (and maybe has an Intersect in his brain now)! Ellie is being recruited by a Ring agent! Big Mike is the new manager of Jeffster!(!) General hilarity and ratcheting tension ensue!

I do wish that more of these plotlines weren’t so reliant on simple communication problems. Couldn’t Chuck have just told Sarah and Casey that he thinks Shaw is still alive right away? Why not tell Sarah about his dangerous mental status? It probably should have been the most annoying, but I was actually okay with Chuck feeling reserved about telling his Dad about the new Intersect – or I would have, if it hadn’t gone on for quite so long. The most annoying of these has to be the Ellie/Ring plot, if only because it’s been established for so long that Ellie and Awesome are the least sneaky, least deceptive people on the planet. No one who’s been around Ellie in the last two episodes could ever believe that she’s okay, and the idea that she’s cheating on someone based on that message alone was so absurd as to be laughable. Besides, she would tell someone she’s being recruited. C’mon now.

Essential communication issues aside, I’m a fan of the double-Shaw reveal. “He’s dead! He’s alive! He’s dead! He’s alive!” has to be done pretty carefully for it to be at all effective, and I thought last night’s attempt was remarkably successful. By the time we reached the end, the final reveal was hardly that surprising, except that it had the added bonus of taking place at the moment Shaw was downloading an Intersect. Separately, those two events would have felt fairly ho-hum; together, they were worthy of a second-to-last episode. It was also a canny way to avoid having to pay Brandon Routh for that episode – did you notice that even after he placed his hand on the pad and we got his “Identity Confirmed” image, we still didn’t get a shot of his face?

My other favorite moment from last night (second, of course, to everything to do with Jeffster!) were some throwaway lines from Chuck and Chuck’s dad. With Shaw, we now have the third handsome white dude to line up for an Intersect download, and while that’s not so many, it would be really nice for some superspy diversity to eventually have a presence. In the mean time, though, we have Sarah, who as Stephen Bartowski points out, is so impressive all on her own that she doesn’t even need a computer in her brain.

Next week: season finale, which according to this teaser, will include many very exciting things.