SPOILER ALERT FOR WATCHERS OF CHUCK ON NBC

Chuck is an Emmy Award winning US action/comedy television series which airs Mondays on NBC. The show centers on Chuck Bartowski - a computer geek who becomes a secret agent after receiving an encoded e-mail from an old college friend now working in the CIA. The message is subliminally encoded with the only remaining copy of the world's greatest spy secrets and when Chuck opens the email he unwittingly downloads an entire server of sensitive data into his brain. Apparently Episode 5 of Season 2 - which airs 2 weeks from tonight - is titled Chuck vs. Tom Sawyer and contains a big Rush reference. From spoilers listed on the ChuckTV.net fansite:

Spoilers - added 06.30.08

We flashback to 1983, when a much younger Jeff has just won the Moto Industries video game championship with his skill at Missile Command. Sporting a mullet and a mustache, our man Jeff has a pair of bikini-clad babes in his arms and a reporter asking him what’s next. Um...

Back to present day, a crippling virus is sweeping through the Moto Industries computers. Chuck and Casey attempt to go in undercover as Nerd Herders (!) to find out what’s going on, but are rebuffed by the Moto Industries engineers. Sarah tries her hand at it instead. Somehow a gorgeous blonde who doesn’t know how to fix computers manages to gain access. They discover that terrorists have hijacked a dormant satellite and are planning to activate it and launch missiles starting a nuclear war. The code to deactive the satellite can be found on the final level of…Missile Command.

Now Chuck must find a way to beat the game before the worst happens, but there’s a final secret weapon that he’ll need to succeed: music from a certain Canadian band.

And even more details from io9.com:

So we were lucky enough to dig up some actual script pages from the fifth and sixth episodes of the new season of spy-database-brain comedy Chuck. They're "casting sides," which means they're for audition purposes. But they appear to be actual pages from the scripts.

In the fifth episode, we start off in 1983, where Jeff Barnes, sporting a mullet and mustache, has just won the Moto Industries Missile Command championship. He's asked what's next for him. Flanked by two bikini babes, he says: Why decide, when I've got so many tasty options? Then it's 25 years later, and he's working at the Buy More, wistfully muttering to himself about his "tasty options."

Some terrorists have taken over Moto Industries. Casey and Chuck show up to infiltrate the place, and Chuck tries to use his nerd skills to talk his way in with the geeks up front. But the PhDs at Moto Industries are not impressed with Chuck's paltry nerd-fu. "Why don't you help some old lady log onto AOL or something?" So Sarah has to go in and flash some cleavage to get the nerds' attention. The nerds fall all over each other to help fix her computer. Meanwhile, Casey decides to sneak around, leaving Chuck where it's safe — but as soon as Casey's gone, a terrorist turns up. But Chuck talks his way into Mauro Moto's penthouse.

A Moto Industries satellite is going to destroy everything unless Chuck can get the control codes, which can only be found on the last level of every Missile Command game, as we explained before. Maury Moto explains that the mathematics underlying Missile Command are too complex for anyone else to reach that level: "the music of the universe." "As much as I loved making games, I hated making weapons," he adds. The terrorists have forced Maury to play Missile Command, so they can access those codes. "How many will die for my weakness?" he asks. But Maury has to keep playing the game, or it'll explode. "The kill screen doesn't end," he explains. So Chuck and Casey have to escape, leaving Maury to explode.

Casey mistakenly believes that anybody who was into Missile Command would now be in their 30s and have jobs, wives and kids, but Chuck mouths: "No they don't." Meanwhile, he sees a TV broadcast about someone trying to beat the Missile Command high-score record, and "flashes" on the information. He realizes the terrorists are using the local TV station to control the satellite. Sarah heads over there.

Jeff explains the secret of Missile Command is "all about patterns. Heavy duty math. Before I play, I like to listen to Rush, and when I listen to Rush, I like to partake of a certain 100% natural, but not altogether legal, herbal enhancer... It's gotta be outta this world." Meanwhile, literally out of this world, the satellite is preparing to strike. Morgan is jealous of all the attention Chuck is paying to Jeff. It turns out Rush's music follows the exact same time signature as the game. And Rush's sheet music is in the "intersect," the spy database in Chuck's head. Because they're Canadian.

But Morgan gets over his jealousy enough to announce Chuck on-stage, with flashing lights, as "the King Of Sting, the Dancing Destroyer," etc. Chuck jumps up on stage and brandishes a single quarter. Chuck loses the first time, to the amusement of a crowd of jeering nerds who call him "king of the losers." But then he gets Morgan to play some Rush, and this time he beats the game, reaching the "kill screen" and then "beating the kill screen," finally getting to the satellite codes.

Meanwhile, Sarah takes out two terrorists holding the TV relay station, catching one unawares with a bag of chips in his mouth. She catches both their machine guns and brandishes them. Chuck gets her the codes just in time to stop the countdown, as Casey is preparing to try and shoot the satellite down.

Thanks to BenRaab for the heads up. This is eerily reminiscent of another Rush TV reference involving a vintage arcade game (Space Invaders) and the song Tom Sawyer which occurred in the Futurama episode titled Anthology of Interest II back in 2002. You can check out the reference in this video.

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