On this week’s Slice of SciFi, we brought you the news that Linda Hamilton will play Chuck’s mom on the upcoming fourth season of “Chuck.”

At the recent NBC Portion of the Television Critics Association meetings, producer Josh Schwartz talked about the casting and what the search for Chuck’s mom will mean in the upcoming season.

Schwartz says that Chuck’s mom will be front and center from the season premiere.

He also said that it was Hamilton who came to the production team about starring in the pivotal role.

“She had heard about the show and that they were looking for Chuck’s mom,” Schwartz said. “She had heard about the fact that we were looking for Chuck’s mom and that a lot of people wanted her to be that part. That was a great idea, somebody we were excited about and didn’t know if we could get. We sat down with her and she’s like, ‘So, I hear I’m Chuck’s mom.'”

“I know her a little bit from Terminator,” McG said. “I talked to her 10 years ago on the first Charlie’s Angels. She’s just a good spirit and a good soul, and I think she responds like anybody would to good material. I think Chuck’s the kind of thing you don’t need to bullsh-t around. You can just go, ‘Here it is.’ You respond to it or you don’t respond to it. You feel empowered in that respect when you can present talent with the material and go, ‘There it is. That’s exactly what we intend to do,’ and you’ll take the response that you get.”

“I think the iconic power of Linda and Sarah Connor doesn’t need extra commentary,” Schwartz said. “We might throw a joke in there somewhere. We tend to do that from time to time. Chevy Chase was quoting lines from Fletch when he was on the show, so I wouldn’t rule it out, but I don’t know if we’ll go that extreme.”

Actually, they’ve already got some juicy stuff planned for mom. It’s just extra cool because mom happens to be Linda Hamilton now.

“Mom/son dynamics are incredible fodder to play with in a dramatic capacity,” McG said. “I think it’s going to be the most refreshing season yet of the show and the most original season, largely because of just the firepower of Linda.”

Just when Chuck thought he was out, mom pulls him back in. He’d just promised Sarah and Ellie he’d leave the CIA. Now he could really use some government tech to find his mom.

“It’s a very different season this year in the sense that he’s retired from the CIA and he can’t tell Ellie he’s a spy, but he also has to find his mom,” Schwartz said. “So he has to do it without using the CIA resources, so he finds himself in the season premiere not being able to tell Sarah what he’s up to and not being able to tell Ellie what he’s up to. All he has in the world now is Morgan, which is a terrible, terrible fate for anyone trying to accomplish something in life.”

And then everything goes back to normal. “It’s kind of a little bit of a reset, in a way, but very quickly [it becomes] Operation Bartowski,” Schwartz said. “We don’t want audiences to think we’re abandoning the formula, the dynamic of the team, in any way.”