‘The Middle’ Season 9 Finale Recap: Axl’s Sendoff To Denver, Sean And Sue’s Love Confessions [VIDEO]

The Heck family of ABC’s The Middle said their final goodbye to their nine-season run on Tuesday night.

The final episode, “A Heck of a Ride,” centered on Axl’s (Charlie McDermott) sendoff to Denver where he accepted a new job. Originally, Axl thought he had another month before he had to leave, but Mike (Neil Flynn) found out that he was wrong and in fact only had four days. With this, the family took a road trip to Colorado to drop off Axl.

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After years of bickering between the siblings, viewers caught a glimpse of loving moments between Axl and Brick (Atticus Shaffer) and Sue (Eden Sher) before departing.

“I’m trying to figure out what my room is without you in it,” Brick said to Axl. “I’ll miss you.”

While the family unit was being broken into different regions, Sue and neighbor Sean Donahue (Beau Wirick) were finally brought together in an interesting way. Sean found Sue’s snow globe while going through TSA at the airport for his summer-long trip to Ghana. This leads him to abandon his flight in search of the Hecks on their way to Denver. Once Sean and Sue reconvened, he confessed his romantic feelings for her, and the two agreed to date after he returns home from his summer vacation.

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Frankie (Patricia Heaton) tried to play it cool so that Axl would make sure to come home and visit, but evidently, her maternal emotions got the best of her. Mike reassures her that change is inevitable and that they’ll always be there for one another, even if they don’t all live in the same place.

But it didn’t end there. The episode flashed forward to future Axl, Brick and Sue in adulthood. Axl moved back to Indiana to raise a family of three sons, Brick wrote a book that earned him millions of dollars and Sue married Sean after a chaotic romance.

Before the finale aired, The Middle creators DeAnn Heline and Eileen Heisler told Variety the reasoning behind the lack of shock-value of the episode.

“One thing that’s very important to us is to think about our fans and to think about us and think about an ending that’s appropriate to the show we’ve always been,” Heisler said. “Personally, I don’t think the point of a finale is to shock [the audience]. I think that you really want to honor the show and give people an [episode] that is closer to a typical one, while being exciting, than something that veers off in another direction.”