First off, I can't believe it took me two and half a seasons to realize that Dixon was played by John Parker from Buckaroo Banzai. There's really quite a lot of bizarre casting this season, most notably the return of Quentin Tarantino and the two-episode arc featuring David Cronenberg. The Cronenberg arc is particularly interesting since it's pretty much a first attempt at the Fringe pilot. I probably would have liked Fringe a lot more if they'd kept David Cronenberg in the mad scientist role. This season also contains the Ricky Gervais episode, which was enjoyable, if a little overly Prisoner-inspired.

The season started fairly well. I'm glad they followed through on the previous season's "Whaaa??" ending; they could easily have gone with a "There's No Place Like Springfield" twist, but the two-year jump provides an excellent propulsive engine for the first half of the season. The eventual resolution is a little anticlimactic, but that is perhaps to be expected. The second half of the season is a little odd. The introduction of Sidney's sister works fairly well, aside from the fairly jarring issue of ethnicity. I am all in favour of colour-blind casting, but it seems ill-advised to cast a Latina actress as the daughter of two fairly visibly non-Latin characters. I keep expecting to get a plot twist to explain things, but, to date, no sign of such a thing.

The season ends on kind of a weird note, basically revealing information about Jack's treating his daughter as an experiment which we already knew. Sending Nadia and Sloane off to find Rimbaldi's consciousness is an admirably insane plot twist, but the fact that is happens off-screen with no particular resolution is a little frustrating.

Oh, I almost forgot. There's a pretty dramatic jump in fatalities in this season. Previous seasons seemed to go to extreme lengths to keep the protagonists from killing people. I'm not entirely sure Sidney killed more than one or two people over the course of the first two seasons. Even the other CIA agents (or people who thought they were CIA agents) seemed to go out of the way to punch or kick people instead of shooting them. Which is fine, except for the fairly jarring decision to make Sidney start shooting people right and left this season. I assume that, after two seasons, they had enough leeway from the network (or moved to a later timeslot?) that they could have more protagonist-induced fatalities, but I sort of expected it to become a plot point. Especially in conjunction with the mysterious activities Sidney undertook during her missing two years, it seems like they could have tied in her increased willingness to kill people with whatever happened to her. Even if it wasn't so much reprogramming as a tough couple years that stripped her of her compunctions. Seems like a missed opportunity (and sort of undercut the "oh, no, Vaughn's become violently ruthless" storyline they went for at the end of the season).