Tim Allen Says ‘Last Man Standing’ Finale Knocks it ‘Out of The Park’

The Last Man Standing series finale airs in less than a week, and star Tim Allen is more than satisfied with the last episode, which he wrote himself. The last [ten] years working on the show have “flashed by,” Allen said, calling that the earmark of a “great” experience. He promised that the last episode “knocked it out of the park,” since it does not focus on being a sad farewell.

The two-episode, hour-long finale kicks off on Thursday, May 20 at 9 p.m. ET on Fox with “Baxter Boot Camp.” The episode features Mike Baxter (Allen) teaching his eldest daughter and future Outdoor Man CEO Kristin (Amanda Fuller) the importance of balancing work and life. Ed (Hector Elizondo) also helps aspiring minister Kyle (Christoph Sanders) with a theological problem and Vanessa (Nancy Travis) joins daughter Mandy (Molly McCook) to teach Jen (Krista Marie Yu) about camping. The next episode, “Keep On Truckin,’” is the series finale, the first and only episode written by Allen. It centers on the theft of the 1956 Ford F-150 he has spent the last decade restoring. He gets the Baxter family and his friends together to talk about what the truck meant to them in an obvious metaphor for the show itself.

“I believe we knocked it out of the park,” Allen said Thursday, reports TV Insider. “Rather than have one where it’s sad, it wasn’t about sad. It wasn’t turning the light out at the end of the scene. We didn’t want to do any of that. We wanted to go out kind of naturally.” The final episode still centers on the loss of something beloved. In the world of Last Man Standing, Mike loses the truck he loved. On the other side of the camera, Allen is moving on from a show he loved making.

“And he’s OK with” moving on, Allen said of his character. “And that was something I had to say to myself and to the audience that we had for that last show. I did have to say it to them and to myself. I’m OK with it. Really it was the process of getting it to the finish line. It was mission accomplished. We did it. We got here.”

Last Man Standing ran for six seasons on ABC before it was canceled, so this is really the show’s second ending. After a year off-the-air, Fox renewed the show and aired its last three seasons. The series will finish with 194 episodes.

Throughout its run, the show was famous for touching on politics, although it swerved away from that this season due to the presidential election. Still, Allen said on Thursday he was happy that the show’s writers were not afraid to mention controversial subjects. “It’s funny that this group, left and right among us, we didn’t like when we were told early on by both networks [ABC and Fox] that we might want to avoid talking about [politics],” Allen said, reports Entertainment Weekly. “I loved that we all are the type of people who said, ‘Well, screw that, we’re going to talk about it anyway.’ What I’ve always appreciated about this group is that we have a broad range of attitudes. We really pushed a little bit, and I really admire that.”