NJRadioGuy

I was also expecting this. Sadly, I've heard several of these IRL and it's...powerful. Very real thing, using a murdered cop's cuffs to collar his killer. They got that right. What they also didn't do, and I'm surprised they didn't, when an NYPD cop gets shot they are awarded a gold shield with a formal promotion to detective (even if they remain on patrol). Eddie should have received hers before the funeral, preferably still in the hospital. These gold shield promotions are also awarded posthumously. Like others, I agree that this needed to be a 90 minute or two hour finale. My biggest criticism of this show is throughout it's run it remained an episodic show, with no overarching story arcs, meaning no real opportunities to wrap up the sub-plots of the characters in the preceding two or three episodes. I would have been very happy to see at least a full 30 minutes, if not the entire final episode, typing up every loose end in a satisfying way. I will miss this show dearly, despite its frequent and many flaws. The family aspect was always compelling, even if the procedural stuff was eye-roll cringe at times. And I always loved the sparring matches with the Cardinal. And finally, I think Frank should have announced his retirement, and that should have been the storyline for the episode, not just another case-of-the-week.

It's even more specific than that. It's the number people in the 18-49 year old demographic of Nielsen box households who are watching the show live or within three days, and who watch the commercials. Absolutely nothing else matters re a show's survival that the C3 ratings. If you don't have a Nielsen box in your house and are between 18 and 49, you don't matter. Nielsen used to release the Live+7 and overnight ratings until about two years ago, now it's just weekly generic numbers, not broken out by demographics. As of last week, Ghosts was the #19 show for the week. If you take football out of the equation, it would be the 12th highest, and the 7th best scripted series. This is out of 249 measured shows. https://ustvdb.com/ratings/shows/

They put the FUN in dysfunctional.

Whereing suddenly the song ♫♪ I'm my own grandpa....♫♪ gets taken to a whole new level.

I'd be fine with this, except for Jamie getting away scot-free. Perhaps Beth fulfills her promise or he ends up going to prison for the rest of his miserable life, etc. I think the rest is a good bet.

Well, consider that there's a difference between

Big fire scenes for TV are crazy expensive to shoot. Network revenues are in rapid decline, actors salaries are high. So we get more character stories, bottle episodes, smaller sets, fewer name-brand cast members and so on. There are already fewer episodes per season than there used to be (18 instead of 22 this year, I believe), and they've cut cast salaries by writing characters out for 2 or 3 episodes. I just don't think those major events are affordable more than once or twice a season now.

And that's why I was screaming at my TV. Even someone like me who's never been within 1500 miles of a Texas oilfield knows that steel-on-steel will spark if hit. Why they didn't have a big-ass 6-point wrench with about 10 feet of pipe for exactly this kind of thing is beyond me. It's easier on the fastener, or valve in this case, and there's no potential for sparks. Handy when dropping a vehicle's fuel tank, too!

AI-generated clickbait. It's over.

I've never liked Cruz after he let the gang leader burn up in Season 1, and essentially got away with it. There's a debt that has to be paid, somehow, dramatically-speaking. I'm curious to see where that story goes after the break, but I honestly don't see any kind of a satisfactory resolution that could redeem him from that act but still keep him on the show.

Link?? That was before my TWOP days.

Loving Pascal now. He didn't say a word, and Severide caught on with a subtle smile. How 'bout them Black Hawks, Chief? I see Novak is trying to recreate her own mini-version of The Wedsworth-Townsend Act. Wonder if she could get a 7-year hit TV show out of it? Glad to see the cigars are back! Unless all the sticks in Bishop's small wineador* were Cohiba Behikes or the like, that is not $50k worth of cigars. That's a rather small collection, and probably, maybe, $10k if acquired all together. My own cigar collection is about triple that size, although it took me 12 years to build it up, a box or two at a time. I've known guys in my now-defunct cigar club who would buy 10 or 20 boxes every order. Even that wouldn't have been more than $5k, and they would have filled two of those enclosures. Possessing Cuban cigars is not illegal, just importing or selling them, so that wouldn't have even been probable cause. I expected Severide to have found the fire retardant instead. It's relatively easy to get Cubans here, and for a while, under the Obama administration, it was legal to bring them in yourself from abroad, which is how I got all of mine back when I was traveling internationally on a semi-regular basis. Nowadays they're too spendy, and non-Cubans are actually much better sticks anyways (especially Nicaraguan puros). *A "wineador" is slang for a wine cooler/fridge converted to a humidor.

It's 18 hours by road from Pampa, TX, where the spur maker was, to Bozeman or Helena, so two days of hard driving and one overnight. That timeline didn't seem overly stretched. But speaking of the spur and bit maker, Billy Klapper was a real-life legend, and that scene was filmed in his workshop. He died two months ago in Pampa at the age of 87. To me, that was the most poignant scene in the entire episode.

I was just gobsmacked that there were a couple of pieces of apparatus not associated with Station 51 on the fireground (and—gasp—they actually knew how to put water on fire). And speaking of 51, where was Engine 51 this episode? No mention of it or its crew anywhere. I'm guessing cost saving for the show? Not a bad job by actor Christian Stolte throwing that ground ladder in the station all by his lonesome but I'm curious what was going on outside the camera frame to help him out, and/or how many takes it took to film. I'm about his age and even throwing a 12 footer against the side of my garage is a workout!

And that 'tragedy' took me completely out of the show. I completely lost interest from that story afterwards.