`Interact` not working as expected in bash/expect scripting

In order to provision an embedded device (i.e. writing images to flash) a series of very well known commands have to be entered during the boot stage. The algorithm is something like:

• Capture a bootloader shell by entering any key during boot
• Flash image A
• Flash image B
• ...
• Continue Boot (with new images)

Since we must first capture the bootloader shell at a certain point in the boot process I figured application of an expect script would solve this problem nicely. I also would like to mix some other bash commands for implementing the logic regarding which device node to connect to, etc. What I came up with (expect portion only) is the following:

#!/bin/bash
DEVICE=...
FLASH_CMD_A=...
#Other bash stuff

expect <<SCRIPT
    set timeout 5
    spawn plink -serial -sercfg 115200,8,n,1 $DEVICE 

    expect "Hit any key to stop autoboot"
        sleep 1
        send "\r"

    expect "=>"
        sleep 1
        send "$FLASH_CMD_A\n"

    interact   
SCRIPT

echo "Done!"

What I am observing is: The first expect line is properly being captured, the sleep is working, and the newline appears to be being sent. The next expect (capturing the prompt) and its corresponding sleep also appears to be working. The send command ($FLASH_CMD_A) gets printed to the terminal with lots of white spaces between words, but it seems to be working also.

The biggest problem is that the interact does not appear to be doing anything. Once the second expect/send is executed I am dropped back to a bash shell having never even seen "Done!" printed to stdout. I also tried the interact syntax:

interact {
    "=>"{
        send "\r"
        exp_continue
    }
}

But that did not work at all. The prompt was never captured and the script just exited immediately as if the interact statement were not there at all. Any ideas on what I may be doing wrong? I have:

expect -v
expect version 5.45

Although the commands seem to be being passed to the device I cannot be sure. Once I am dropped back to a bash shell all output from the device following those commands is lost. However, if I run my script a second time expect seems to dump its text buffer (expect_out?) and exit immediately. Interestingly, the output I was expecting from the previously sent commands is contained within this buffer dump.

As an aside: I tried this same script inside an VM environment and none of the "expect"ed statements were being captured; all input was printed to stdout and passed through.