Finishing the Hat (Desperate Housewives)

Katherine makes a surprise return to the lane, having made a huge amount of money as the owner of a frozen food conglomerate in France, and offers Lynette a job as the head of her United States expansion. Tom recommends she take the job.

Susan reveals to her friends that she is moving. While seeing Julie through the last weeks of her pregnancy, Susan tries to set her up on a date with her obstetrician.

Julie, Gaby, and Susan are all helping Renee on her wedding day. In the limo on the way to the wedding Julie's water breaks. Susan jumps into the driver's seat of the limo and takes Julie to the hospital. Renee arrives at the wedding disheveled and distraught, but the wedding goes off without a hitch. Trip crashes the wedding and finally convinces Bree that he truly cares for her. They kiss and reconcile.

Bree is tasked with getting a particular hard-to-get 45 rpm record and a turntable to play it on for the dying Mrs. McCluskey. On the day of the wedding, Bree stops in and sees that Mrs. McCluskey has the record and turntable and Roy says Trip got it for them.

During a poker game, before Susan's departure, the girls vow that this will not be their last poker game, but as Mary Alice reveals via voice-over, it turns out to be. Lynette and Tom move to New York, where Lynette works as a CEO; they move into a penthouse apartment overlooking Central Park and spend the rest of their lives happily together with their six grandchildren. Gaby and Carlos start a personal shopping website that leads to a show on the Home Shopping Network, and they move to a mansion in California. Bree marries Trip and they move to Louisville, where Bree becomes a member of the Kentucky state legislature.

In one of the final scenes, Susan drives her family around Wisteria Lane one last time before they leave. Unseen, they are watched by the ghosts of nearly every character who had died on the lane during the course of the series, beginning with the most recent, Susan's husband Mike Delfino. This continues in roughly reverse chronological order, and ends with Mary Alice Young, whose suicide was the catalyst of the series.

• According to show creator Marc Cherry, he had the idea for the final scene featuring one of the women moving off the lane and the ghosts of Wisteria Lane watching over the street, and "kept it in [his] back pocket". Additionally, the original pilot featuring Sheryl Lee as Mary Alice seemingly served as a precursor to the final scene of the series with the ghost of Mary Alice standing in her lawn looking over her friends as they found her suicide note and pondered her secret. This concept was removed from the final version of the pilot that aired.[15][16][17]
• Edie Britt's ghost is absent in the final scenes because of the lawsuit pending between Nicollette Sheridan and show creator Marc Cherry.[16] In a 2011 interview, Cherry had previously hinted that he wanted to ask Sheridan back for the series finale "to pay homage to everyone who has been on the show".[18]
• When asked why additional dead characters from the past did not appear in the show's final scene – such as Ida Greenberg, Felicia Tilman and Victor Lang — executive producer Sabrina Wind stated that they tried to get everyone but some could not make it.[19]
• Actress Kathryn Joosten died of lung cancer on the morning of June 2, 2012, after an 11-year battle with the disease. Coincidentally, her death occurred twenty days after the onscreen death from cancer of the character of Karen McCluskey, which she played, on the final episode of Desperate Housewives.[20] She was diagnosed with lung cancer three times, much like her on-screen character was twice.