Gravity Falls showrunner Alex Hirsch has announced that his beloved exploration of Bigfoots, interdimensional travel, and the joys of being a kid will be ending very soon, with its soon-concluded second season to be its last. “There are two more episodes left,” he wrote on his newly minted Tumblr, declaring that, after Monday’s planned “Weirdageddon II: Escape From Reality,” the show will air one more hour-long episode as its grand finale.
Hirsch went to lengths in his post to say that the tale of Mabel and Dipper Pines and their bizarre summer at the Gravity Falls Mystery Shack was being finished on his own terms, and that Disney XD hadn’t canceled the series. “This is 100% my choice, and its something I decided on a very long time ago,” he wrote. “I always designed Gravity Falls to be a finite series about one epic summer—a series with a beginning, middle, and end.”
Hirsch also said that the decision to keep the show’s pending conclusion a secret wasn’t his, and that he was asked to keep quiet by people hoping that he’d change his mind. (The critically lauded show landed Disney XD’s highest-ever ratings with its mid-season premiere earlier this year.)
But ultimately, Hirsch wrote—amid jokes about people burning down his house and the mysterious whereabouts of Andy Kaufman and Tupac Shakur—it was time for the story to come to an end.
“Gravity Falls was never meant to be a series that goes on and on forever,” he wrote. “It’s meant to be an exploration of the experience of summer, and in a larger sense a story about childhood itself. The fact that childhood ends is exactly what makes it so precious—and why you should cherish it while it lasts.”