The in-laws arrived yesterday. My last day of work for the year is tomorrow. And that can only mean one thing: It’s time to stop posting regularly to the Big Bad Blog, and start to investigate what the Best of the Big Bad Blog was for the year 2010.

We begin today with your top five search terms, comparing to their position last year.

5: Sarah From Chuck (previously unranked)

Chuck is one of our favourite TV shows here at the Big Bad Blog, and Sarah is one of the lead characters in Chuck.

And, I suppose, sex-crazed Internet weirdos want to know more about her.

Being one of our favourite TV shows, we have written about the show twice in 2010. First, with the end of the third season, and then with the beginning of the fourth.

Additionally, we also wrote twice about the show in 2009. Readers have a lot(?) to read when they get here, I suppose.

4: Felicia Day Naked (4)

Back in October of 2009, I wrote a Big Bad Blog article titled apparently the Internet needs more naked Felicia Day.

I wrote the article because a couple of mentions of Ms. Day on this website had led to an avalanche of people reaching the Big Bad Blog in a search for pictorial representations of her breasts. The thought was, if the closest they could get was mention of Ms. Day as a dirty fairy alongside mention of Saved by the Bell pornography, there is indeed a demand for such photographs.

For some reason, putting the words “naked Felicia Day” together on the blog has not reduced the number of such searches that reach us here. The traffic from such people is fairly regular.

3: Volcano Eruption (previously unranked)

We have posted several photos of volcanoes erupting here on the Big Bad Blog. They tend to look quite pretty.

Combine that with the Eyjafjallajökull eruption earlier this year, and it is understandable that volcanic eruptions make the list.

2: Tattoos (1)

Tattoos sit in the second spot in the Big Bad Blog’s list, and we are surprised.

Not that it’s so high — we ‘write’ about tattoos a lot — but that it is so low. The daily report of top search terms reaching the blog is usually crammed with tattoo variants, and this shows in the annual stats. In the top twelve search terms leading to the Big Bad Blog, over half of them include the word tattoo: “bird tattoo”, “bad tattoo”, “weird tattoo”, “star wars tattoo”, “hello kitty tattoo”, and “origami tattoo” are all there.

And let us not forget the word “tattoo”.

So thank you tattoo lovers. I’ll keep occasionally posting them, if you keep coming.

1: Origami (2)

But tattoos are blown away by the most popular search term for the blog: Origami.

The search term “origami”, by itself, is about equal to all those tattoo results in the top twelve. But if one then considers that the terms “origami unicorn” and the all-powerful “origami tattoo” also find themselves in that list, it pushes Origami to the top of the list this year.

Summer is gone, autumn arrived, and this can only mean one thing: a new season of television shows. And last week kicked off the fourth season of one of my favourites: Chuck.

Beware, all ye who like to watch the Chuck but have not yet seen the first episode of the fourth season: there be spoilers below.

Chuck has always suffered from a problem: lack of confidence.

Not the character Chuck, but the show itself. It seems as though the writing team lives in constant fright that changes might not be embraced by the audience.

For most of the first three seasons, they were afraid to have Chuck make a move on Sarah, to change the chemistry between the two characters by allowing something to happen. Luckily they moved on at the end of season three, and finally let the two lead characters express their feelings.

During the third season, the writers were deadly afraid of abandoning the formula. They even replaced Bryce “super spy” Larkin with a new good guy/boyfriend/bad guy to be Chuck’s nemesis. And like the season before, when Chuck’s driving character flaw was his desire to no longer be a spy, they gave Chuck a somewhat random driving character flaw. In a complete turn-around, it was a desire to be a real spy.

Once again, starting a new series, the writers look scared. When we open, they have re-introduced a familiar mission from earlier seasons: Chuck is searching for one of his parents. His mother this time, naturally.

They also re-introduce old behaviours. Over the course of the third season, Chuck became quite the accomplished liar — which got him in trouble with his family and friends. He opens the season deciding to lie (seemingly without purpose) to Sarah about looking for his mother.

Your correspondent was shaking his head, and holding said head in his hands.

Happily, the Chuck/Sarah behaviour was nipped in the bud by the end of the episode. This — along with a writing team with a tendency to bring everything together at the end of the season — leaves me hopeful and happy about the new season of Chuck. Maybe we will get something that is a bit more creative and new, even if it does feature the same old characters.

The question is whether these same old characters will be given a chance to learn and grow, rather than holding hard-and-fast to defined personality traits until an epiphany arises.

Whether such a radical notion might occur is yet to be seen. Certainly a decision was made to change the tenor of the show this year. Count this viewer as happy.

In a move that makes absolutely no commercial sense, the third series of Chuck is set to begin to show on television here in the UK, a few short weeks after airing the finale in North America. Clearly designed with a young adult geek/nerd demographic in mind — the very same sort of person who will happily pirate TV shows via filesharing sites if it is not made available in the traditional manner — one cannot help but wonder why they would allow for such a delay between the two markets.

Many in their target audience have probably already watched the show, which will only hurt their UK ratings.

For those of you who have yet to watch it, this is a review of the entire third season. It contains spoilers, so read at your own peril.

The beginning: why the third season is awful

When I first started to watch episodes from the third season, I was incredibly disappointed. As you may recall from an article posted almost a year ago, I have long found some of the dynamics about the show to be frustrating and was quite happy when most of these frustrations were resolved at the end of the second series.

Series three, however, begins by stuffing all those worms back into their cans.

The series starts out with Chuck and Sarah back on the outs — the relationship never happened, basically. The two of them have resumed their Sam & Diane holding pattern. On top of it, he now has “Intersect 2.0″ super powers, which take away one of the more compelling elements of the show: Chuck as a fish out of water.

On top of this, the Buy More plots become weaker in the third series, as the show’s focus moves from Chuck as a nerd thrust into the spy life, to being the story of Chuck The Spy. While this progression makes sense, it eliminates the show’s safety net — it used to be that every episode contained a spy story and a Buy More story. With the dearth of Buy More intrigue, there is little to save those episodes in which the spy story becomes a simple re-hash of the Chuck and Sarah story. This happens far too often.

The problems are compounded with the addition to the team: Shaw. This character is basically Bryce II — the good guy who doubles as Chuck’s rival. Shaw is pretty much exactly the same guy, only he appears in every episode.

A kick-ass spy who also holds a piece of Sarah’s heart.

The viewer wants to hate him, but he is also one of the good guys … and who can hate a good guy when he’s saving the day?

Why the awful start is genius

This set-up is painful, but the payoff is worth it.

One of the biggest things that was missing — even though you might not have noticed it — during the first two seasons is that Chuck never gets to face off against his rival. His enemies were always rogue organizations rather than people — FULCRUM, or the Ring. But organizations cannot be a protagonist’s rival. Instead, Chuck’s rival had been Bryce, who is nothing but a good, stand-up guy all the way through the first two series. You were forced to grudgingly like the guy.

Shaw suffers from the same problem; he becomes the rival, even as he is fighting on Chuck’s side. However, he does not come with Bryce’s baggage. He is not Chuck’s former best friend, the guy who made Chuck into a superhero. He has not protected Chuck from day one.

Instead, Shaw is the perfect guy to be turned to the dark side and become Chuck’s true arch-rival. So, of course, he does. Shaw’s betrayal also kick-starts (what we hope is) a final resolution to the Chuck/Sarah plot, which is most welcome.

A wonderful end to the season

By season’s end, a number of fantastic developments have taken pace which, quite simply, make Chuck a better show.

First, Chuck finally gets to confront — and overcome — his rival. He finally has the chance to defeat a villain who was built over an entire season, and get the girl.

At last, Chuck finishes the season in a truly heroic manner.

Second, the secret is revealed. The show suffered for two years with Chuck’s double-life — it works for a few episodes, but not for a series. Every other show with secret identities — such as Buffy and Smallville — functions much better when there is a larger circle of friends and family who know the secret.

Chuck is no exception. Throughout the first two seasons, the two people closest to Chuck — Morgan and Ellie — were unaware of Chuck’s secret. But there are only so many ways to make the hiding-the-identity scene entertaining, and only so long that it can go on and continue to be believable.

In the third season, first Morgan and then Ellie find out. Not only are the individual episodes (and scenes) compelling in and of themselves, but the series becomes much more watchable as a result.

Where do we go from here?

The third season ended with a reveal for the beginning of the fourth season, so we know where we go to a certain extent. The question is whether the series can move forwards or if it will rehash old ground.

Chuck has promised Ellie that he will quit — clearly he will not. Does this mean that we backtrack to the lying-to-family stuff, or does the series move on from that?

Do Chuck and Sarah stay together, or do they somehow backtrack into being broken up — yet partners — again?

Backtracking on the first count seems more likely than the second, but I honestly hope it doesn’t happen. The de facto reset for season three — Intersect 2.0, backtracking on the Sarah/Chuck relationship and (essentially) recasting and redefining the role of Bryce worked well for series three. It probably will not work in a fourth series.

I hope that they keep the idea of having a proper villain to defeat over the course of a season, rather than just having the head of a rogue organization surface in the last two or three episodes. But one “reset” season is enough, and repeating plots grow old.

Here’s hoping that season four introduce some new twists, rather than taking us through the same paces all over again.

Several weeks ago, I wrote about my addiction to Chuck, and some problems I saw with the show. At the time, I was at the mid-point of the second season.

Since then, I have watched the remainder of the second season, and I must say: Wow.

The run-up to the season finale of Chuck is incredible, and provided responses to most of the concerns I earlier listed regarding how tenable the continuation of the show is. It certainly escaped from its mid-season rut.

I can also see why the show was not cancelled in the end — it was rescued as much by its strong finish as the support for the show on the Internet. Rather than being a show that was in a rut with a diminishing fan base, it showed itself to have a strong core of fans (via the “Save Chuck” Internet movement) and was unafraid to push onwards, rather than rehashing the same thing until all the fans left.

However, it is also easy to see how the show almost got canned. Season two had a plot arc that was entertaining for the first six or seven episodes, and excellent over the last six or seven episodes. In a twenty-two episode season, that left eight to ten episodes in the middle. Here, the wheels just spun.

Many TV shows get away without any character development for long periods of time. Shows such as CSI come to mind. There is a distinct difference in those shows, however — the characters in these shows are (generally) happy with their situations. They like their jobs and their relationships with their co-workers — or, at the least, they are happy to keep their concerns below the surface. Also, on these shows, their entire lives are rarely explored. They are approached only through their work life (CSI) or their home life (your typical sitcom). Chuck gets no such respite.

In Chuck this is not the case — the two main characters purport regularly to be unhappy with their circumstances (or protest that everything’s fine, when it’s clearly not). Both their personal and working lives are shown on screen, so both sides of their relationship are on constant display. They are dismayed with both. Viewers tuning in every week get tired of this, or of the hitting of the “reset” button on their relationship each week. “Well, do something already!” is, I imagine, our rallying cry. When nothing is done, it frustrates and feels as though the show is stagnating.

The writers appeared not to realize they had a three-act season going, and the second act ended up as dead space — they could not move the story forward, or they risked ruining the final act. But they needed to keep certain themes alive, so they could be resolved in that final act.

During the final third of the second season, it looks like Chuck and Sarah learn their lessons. The third season approaches, so we will have to see. Let’s hope the writers have learned theirs, and season three of Chuck doesn’t dip in the middle.

I suppose the final verdict for you nervous Chuck watchers who are in the midst of season two — do not get dismayed. Muddle through. Keep watching. There is a payoff at the end.