There have been a number of huge space-related decisions starting with the Obama campaign, which have caused me a lot of concern, moments of anger, and some genuine disgust. Regular readers of our little blog here will know that I’m not a reactionary kind of guy. I don’t hate the other party simply because they’re the other party, I don’t generally attack them. I do occasionally tease ‘em and I’m pretty open in my confusion about their thought processes, which frequently seem self-contradictory to me. I’m not that guy. I believe in America, I believe in the Two-Party system, I believe that the system is generally self-regulating, and if either side goes too far, the people will vote the extremists out of office.

That said, I don’t know what - aside from anger - to make of this:

So how long does it take for a vision of tomorrow to evaporate like last night's dreams? Not long at all. Sometimes something as trivial as a president who's been unable to keep a single one of his campaign promises, and decides to randomly kill a progam so it looks like he's not a completey toothless, inefectual leader.

The bottm line, my friends, is that last month Project Constellation went from being The Future to being something no different than all those Popular Mechanics covers from the 1940s.

Tonight, Ben gets the spotlight.  Last week, someone predicted that Mr. Linus (or in this case Dr. Linus) would end his path of redemption in martyrdom.  Did Ben go to his final resting place in ignominy, as did Nikky and Paulo before him?  Or was he redeemed in the end of tonight's episode?

Well, for that, you'll need to either have watched tonight.... or read the convenient spoiler-filled recap below the jump

Make that leap of faith...  

Zachary Levi—the title star and stirring straw of “Chuck”—made his directorial debut with this episode.  How did he do?  Read more to find out (but beware of spoilers).

Before we begin, I’d like to explain something. “Retrospeculative TV” was intended to be a once-weekly feature, but, seeing as it started in the winter doldrums at the start of the year, there really wasn’t enough new material on TV to cover, so we thought we’d pad things out a bit (read: “Entirely too much”) by doing it on two days a week until the season picked up again. Owing to my rather bad math skills, I didn’t quite realize that 17 episodes translated into four months and one week. Duh. Even now, I had to use a calculator to figure that out.