Now About Those Finales . . . 'Rescue Me,' 'HawthoRNe,' 'Weeds' & 'Nurse Jackie'

*Warning, spoilers ahead from some recently-aired season finales.*

A lot of the shows which premiered in the spring are ending their runs right about now so we've had a run on season finales as of late, for shows like Rescue Me, HawthoRNe, Weeds and Nurse Jackie. And what finales they were.

First, with the most recent and most explosive finale . . . Rescue Me.

This season has seemed like a quasi-renaissance for Rescue Me, at least as far as I was concerned. The season saw Tommy vacillate between various women -- mostly between the nutty crazy control freak Janet and the nuttier pill-popper Sheila -- give up his year of sobriety while sitting at a bar overlooking Ground Zero and encourage his formerly AA-attending family members and friends to just enjoy the drinking life. It was his Uncle Teddy who planted the idea in Tommy's head that if he knocked back a few while watching old family videos, he'd work through his demons following the death of Tommy's father. Tommy had been worrying about whether he was losing his capacity to feel anything, so he gave Uncle Teddy's advice a shot.

Ironically, it was Teddy's grief over the death of his wife following a drunk driving accident that led to the shocking scene in the season finale. Was it really in character for Teddy -- the man who murdered the drunk driver who accidentally killed Tommy's son in season two -- to shoot Tommy and watch him bleed while using his gun to hold Tommy's friends and family at bay so they couldn't help Tommy? It seemed wrong to me, for Teddy. Sure, the Gavin family fights, oftentimes brutally, but they're not going to off one another, are they?

Otherwise, I loved the finale, particularly the wacko scene with Janet and Sheila confronting Kelly.

As for the nursing/hospital drama HawthoRNe -- to which TNT has given the go-ahead for a second season -- the series got better in the last half of the season, as it has dealt with more serious personal and work issues. The season finale found Jada Pinkett Smith's Christina Hawthorne walking arm in arm with Michael Vartan's Tom Wakefield, the obvious central, unconsummated love story. The finale also went full circle from the pilot episode, looping back to the subject of Christina's husband who died of cancer a year ago.

In the pilot, Christina was supposed to hand over her husband's ashes to her mother-in-law, who she despises (the feeling's mutual), but took some and conducted her own little ceremony by putting ashes in the bottom of a small hot air balloon and watching it float away. In the finale, Christina -- whom writers have started to make more fallible and therefore more real, which is a good thing -- and her mother-in-law came to an understanding and wound up peacefully disposing of the ashes in the ocean together, in the company of Christina's daughter. It was a quiet, but sweet ending to HawthoRNe's freshman season.

"Sweet" is not a word I'd apply to the season finale of Weeds which concluded with Nancy Botwin's teenage son Shane trying to take care of business for his dear old mom by offing her nemesis -- who was blackmailing his mom's new hubby into doing her bidding and viciously threatening Nancy's sons' lives -- with one swing of a croquet mallet. It was disorienting enough to have Nancy's on-again/off-again relationship with her Mexican drug lord/politician baby daddy morph into a marriage and watch Andy, jettisoned. But to have Shane commit murder: Whoa. This is definitely not the same wimpy kid from season one.

Nurse Jackie's finale was none to sweet either. Jackie's boyfriend Eddie, who was just laid off from All Saints Hospital, found out that his gal pal was cheating on him with . . . her husband Kevin, the tavern owner with whom Jackie has two daughters. While viewers were waiting to find out if Eddie would blow the lid off of Jackie's little, extra curricular arrangement and tell Kevin ("I met Kevin and that's a really nice boy you've got," he whispered into Jackie's ear), at least we got to enjoy a little bit of humor seeing hospital administrator Gloria Akalitis trapped in the elevator and Zoey donning "depressed" scrubs.

But, as with Greg House, Jackie's drug dependency is most likely going to spiral out of control, the only question is when will it start to affect her work, and overtly affect her marriage?

Any spring show season finales you liked? Hated? Which intrigued you?

Image credit: TNT.