‘Desperate Housewives’ Finale Provides Closure for Wisteria Lane Residents

ABC’s ‘Desperate Housewives‘ concluded its eight-year run with a two-hour finale on Sunday night, neatly wrapping up the storylines of the title characters and hinting that even without them, life on Wisteria Lane goes on.

So how did it all end?

Details abounded, but here’s a brief summary:

Perfectionist Bree Van de Kamp (Marcia Cross), who was on trial for a murder she didn’t commit, was spared an unbearable existence behind filthy prison walls when cancer-stricken senior-citizen Karen McCluskey (Kathryn Joosten) confessed to the crime.

Of course, she wasn’t guilty either — the accidental homicide was actually committed by Carlos (Ricardo Antonio Chavira), who’s married to Bree’s fellow housewife, sexpot Gabrielle (Eva Longoria). But in a final act of selflessness, Karen took the fall before succumbing to her disease, saying in her false confession that Wisteria Lane “is not just a bunch of houses in the same place. It’s a community — people who care about each other.”

After the charges against her were dropped, Bree settled down with her attractive lawyer, Trip (Scott Bakula), who seemed not at all bothered by her tainted past, affectionately asserting that it “just proves that you’re human.”

As for harried working mother Lynette (Felicity Huffman), she and her husband Tom (Doug Savant) patched up their troubled marriage right in the middle of Wisteria Lane, with the streetlights subbing for romantic candlelight.

Meanwhile, hijinks befell Renee (Vanessa Williams) as she prepped for her nuptials to Ben (Charles Mesure), including having her wedding gown soaked when a pregnant woman’s water breaks in the limo en route to the ceremony. But all was not lost — Gabrielle, who’s always up for a good adventure, played accomplice as Renee stole a new dress from a bridal salon.

That pregnant woman, by the way, was Julie (Andrea Lauren Bowen), daughter of Susan (Teri Hatcher) — and in well-edited cross-cuts, Susan became a grandmother, Renee began her new marriage and Karen took her last breath, providing a tidy birth/wedding/death convergence.

So where are we to imagine the ‘Housewives’ go from here? The series finale led us to believe they’d all go their separate ways with addresses on and off Wisteria Lane. Susan, the only lady who wasn’t paired off at the end of the saga, was the first to depart the idyllic neighborhood, selling her house to a young wife named Jennifer and her husband.

And when Jennifer, who seemed to have some secrets of her own, worried that living in the ‘burbs would be “boring,” Susan smiled knowingly and said, “Oh, I wouldn’t worry about that.”