Here's the Explanation Behind Two and Half Men's Bizarre Ending
In case you missed it, this week marked the series finale of Two and a Half Men, and while the stars were reminiscing about their time on the long-running CBS hit, the big question on everyone's mind was whether original star Charlie Sheen would come back. Well, spoiler alert: he did and he didn't. Charlie the character was revealed as actually being alive, despite being killed off on an earlier season, and when he finally comes back to reveal himself to Walden (Ashton Kutcher) and Alan (Jon Cryer), we see a stand-in for Sheen approach the door — then get a piano dropped on him. As if that weren't a weird enough way to close out the show or address the controversy with Sheen, the final frame then shows series creator Chuck Lorre, who gives Sheen's famous catchphrase, "Winning," then has a piano dropped on him too. Watch that last sequence if you don't quite believe it.
Lorre also addressed Sheen's absence in a vanity card that read:
"I know a lot of you might be disappointed that you didn't get to see Charlie Sheen in tonight's finale. For the record, he was offered a role. Our idea was to have him walk up to the front door in the last scene, ring the doorbell, then turn, look directly into the camera and go off on a maniacal rant about the dangers of drug abuse. He would then explain that these dangers only applied to average people. That he was far from average. He was a ninja warrior from Mars. He was invincible.
And then we would drop a piano on him.
We thought it was funny.
He didn't.
Instead, he wanted us to write a heart-warming scene that would set up his return to primetime TV in a new sitcom called The Harpers starring him and Jon Cryer.
We thought that was funny too."
And later in an interview with Variety, Lorre expanded on why he wrote himself into the last scene, saying, "It just felt like comedically the right thing to do. It's like 'Nobody gets out of here alive' may be the theme of this series. The proposition that anybody wins in something like this is ridiculous. That would have felt uncomfortable to me. So the second piano felt like the right thing to do."