The "Chuck" Comic-Con panel ended a few minutes ago, and since Fienberg and I were on stage for it, Todd VanDerWerff will have a full report later today, and I will link to that here. In the meantime, two things of note, one about casting, one about the end of the panel:

The panel opened with a long highlight reel of season 3 that closed with the brief glimpse of Chuck and Ellie's mom. An on-screen caption asked who's going to play Chuck's mom, and, as the crowd roared its approval, added, "Okay, we'll tell you." Cue the pounding drums of the "Terminator 2" score, and a glimpse of one of the baddest women in sci-fi history, Linda Hamilton as Sarah Connor, turning to face the camera in the "T2" scene where the audience first sees her in the mental hospital.

Sheer pandemonium.

Josh Schwartz later said that we would first see Hamilton in the season premiere (which also guest stars Olivia Munn and Dolph Lundgren), and that gossip about the potential casting spread so quickly that when he finally spoke to Hamilton, she said, "So, I hear I'm playing Chuck's mom."

Now, because of that long intro video, and because the panel started late, I was somewhat taken aback when a Con staffer nudged me on stage and told me we had five minutes left. I jogged backstage to ask if he meant five minutes until we had to start audience Q&A, and he said, "No, five minutes. Period. Then we cut you off."

I ran back up, told Dan and we asked the audience to line up quickly for a few questions, and while we did that, we asked two quick filler questions for Josh Schwartz and for the Buy More guys, none of whom had had a chance to talk yet. Then we kicked it to the audience, only the Con staffer in charge of the line announced that there was no time for any questions.

So we're sorry. Had we realized about the late start, the long video, factored in for how prolonged the applause would be as we introduced the cast, etc., and that the Con staff was going to stick so strictly to ending at 10:45, we would've thrown it to the audience much, much sooner. (Though we would have risked not getting everyone on the panel to speak, which happened last year.) 

It was a fun panel, I think, but that was a bummer note to end on, and the point of Con is to let the fans interact with their favorites. Our sincerest apologies to those of you in the room who wanted to ask something and couldn't.

Here's Todd's recap of it all.