Mary Elizabeth Bartowski (née Gunter) is a character on the television series Chuck. Mary is the estranged mother of Chuck and Ellie Bartowski. She is portrayed by Linda Hamilton. Biography Few details about Mary's life have been revealed on the show. She was a CIA agent, while her husband worked with the CIA on the Intersect project. In 1991, her son Chuck breaks her favorite necklace, which is a charm of a boy and a girl holding hands. Although Ellie was greatly angered about this, Stephen tells her to help Chuck fix it. In "Chuck Versus the Ring: Part II" Chuck reveals that Mary left shortly after the incident (1994, according to "Chuck Versus the Anniversary"), and for some period of time Chuck blamed himself for her departure. Otherwise all that is known prior to Season 4 is that Mary left her family under unknown circumstances when Chuck was in the fifth grade. "Chuck Versus the Anniversary" revealed that Mary used to read Chuck a bedtime story called "The Frost Queen," the title character of which was the basis of Mary's codename: "Frost." Although the circumstances are not yet clear, Mary never actually left her family but instead had been captured, at some point ending up in the custody of Volkoff Industries. In "Chuck Versus the Aisle of Terror" Mary reveals that she left to go into deep cover with Volkoff, but got in too deep and placed her family at risk. The CIA operation was code-named Isis; however, intelligence recovered by John Casey from a former NSA contact indicated that Isis was canceled some 20 years earlier after Mary went rogue. Series In the first two seasons Mary was entirely unseen, though her departure was occasionally mentioned. Chuck tells Sarah that the day their mother left is the day he and Ellie learned to look after each other because their father was "never really there," a date they celebrate as "Mother's Day." Chuck would later give Sarah a charm bracelet that belonged to Mary as a Christmas gift during a hostage crisis at the Buy More. Stephen had previously given the bracelet to Mary when she was pregnant with Ellie and Sarah reluctantly accepted it, despite it being something Chuck should give to a "real girlfriend." Mary first appeared on-screen in "Chuck Versus the Ring: Part II". After his death, Stephen leaves Chuck a video message, introducing Chuck to