The final episode of The Colbert Report will air this Thursday, Dec. 18 at 11:31 p.m. EST on Comedy Central. Everyone is getting ready to say goodbye to one of the best satirical TV shows of today, and now we know the people who are going to help us do that.
The Colbert Report recently announced the final line-up of guests for the show's last week, and overall it's pretty straightfoward. It doesn't look like Stephen Colbert is going to have some big, sentimental retrospective of favorite guests from the past 11 seasons of his show. The last guests on The Colbert Report include Seth Rogen, Kendrick Lamar, former Marine and author Phil Klay and Grimmy, a.k.a. the Grim Reaper.
OK, that last guest choice is odd. Colbert's final guest will not be a politician, journalist or celebrity, the type of guest that usually joins him onstage, but none other than the Grim Reaper himself. Does that mean The Colbert Report will have an extremely dark ending?
Quite possibly. Though Grimmy is described as "Stephen's colleague and lifelong friend" on The Colbert Report's official website, Colbert gave a huge hint back in October that things would end badly for him in his final episode. When Colbert had 32 episodes left of The Colbert Report, he did a segment where he discussed how the show would end, hinting at some "massive foreshadowing" in the remaining episodes of the series. The camera cut to Grimmy, who flipped over an hourglass, pointed at Colbert and dragged his finger across his throat. Of course, being the enthusiastically dense character that he is, Colbert didn't pick up on the hint.
Colbert has said he plans to retire his narcissistic, ultra-conservative character with The Colbert Report before he moves on to host The Late Show some time after David Letterman's final episode on May 20. So it seems likely that the Grim Reaper will appear in the final moments of The Colbert Report to kill the host off. Every great series finale has to kill someone off anyway, right? I can only imagine Colbert's character going out in some crazy blaze of glory.
However, Grimmy has also been a friend to Colbert throughout the years, so maybe the show won't end as badly as it seems. Colbert has danced with Grimmy twice to celebrate the death of Obamacare, twerked up on him like Miley Cyrus and had a more sophisticated slow dance on another occasion with an attempt to cop a feel of Grimmy's rear end, of course.
No matter how The Colbert Report ends, we'll definitely be watching.
