Two and a Half Men ended after 12 successful seasons Thursday night. Though Charlie Sheen hasn’t been the star of the show in five seasons, Chuck Lorre made sure to make a number of references to him throughout the episode.

Two and a Half Men Finale

In 2011, Sheen was fired from Two and a Half Men after giving a number of rambling, incoherent interviews. The fallout led to Sheen writing an open letter to his erstwhile boss – Lorre – questioning Ashton Kutcher as his successor, and the show’s ability to go on without him among other things.

The plot of the finale had Walden and Alan (Jon Cryer) searching for Sheen’s character Charlie Harper, who apparently didn’t die as they had thought. “I found this crazy rant about a former employer,” Walden (Kutcher) says at one point in the search.

After Alan finds him, he tells Walden, “I told him all about you. How you’re richer than him, prettier than him, moved into his house and carried on like he never existed.”

Sheen’s epic rants, which often included references to ninjas and tiger’s blood, were also fair game. At one point Charlie Harper sends a text to Walden that reads: “You despicable troll. You thought you could replace my ninja awesomeness, you lame clown. I will deploy army of assassins to destroy you, I will bring my bayonets of truth to the hexagon of death where I will carve my initials into your reptilian skull and cover you in tiger’s blood.”

To sum up Charlie Harper/Sheen’s departure from the picture, Alan states, “It wasn’t that mysterious. He was taking a lot of drugs and pissed off almost everybody.”

As the finale came to an end, a Charlie look-a-like comes to the door only to get crushed by a piano. Lorre, sitting in a director’s chair then shouts out one of Sheen’s favorite catchphrases, “Winning!” before he meets the same fate via piano.

To explain why Sheen didn’t make the much-hyped cameo, Lorre penned a letter.

“I know a lot of you might be disappointed that you didn’t get to see Charlie Sheen in tonight’s finale. For the record, he was offered a role. Our idea was to have him walk up to the front door in the last scene, ring the doorbell, then turn, look directly into the camera and go off on a maniacal rant about the dangers of drug abuse. He would then explain that these dangers only applied to average people. That he was far from average. He was a ninja warrior from Mars. He was invincible. And then we would drop a piano on him,” Lorre wrote. “We thought it was funny. He didn’t.”

“Instead, he wanted us to write a heart-warming scene that would set up his return to primetime TV in a new sitcom called The Harpers starring him and Jon Cryer,” Lorre added. “We thought that was funny too.”