The following contains out-of-this-world spoilers from the Falling Skies finale.

It was back in May, during Upfronts week and more than a month before Falling Skies‘ Season 5 opener, that Noah Wyle spoiled for me the outcome of the TNT series’ finale.

“I don’t want to give everything away, but… we win,” he let slip with a wink. Even so, “We thin the herd along the way,” he warned. “Not everybody makes it to the finish line.”

As the alien-invasion drama’s final hour unspooled, Tom, wife Anne, sons Hal, Ben and Matt, and the rest of the 2nd Mass — plus a few new biker pals led by Jeff Fahey — made tracks for the Lincoln Memorial, where the Espheni were guarding something big. Traveling through an access tunnel, they stumbled across a nest of glowing (they’re always glowing, aren’t they?) eggs containing super-extra-nasty Espheni. It was down there, during a blast, that Tom get separated from the rest of the troops, and forged ahead alone, coming face-to-face near Lincoln’s severed head the Espheni queen.

The queen pinned down Tom with a spritz of goo, leaving the Dorniya bioweapon just out of his grasp. But just as the queen went to suck Tom dry, he grabbed the vial and let its contents run through his body and into his attacker, promptly exploding her into smithereens, along with all of her minions. (That the hornets’ bursts resembled fireworks above the Washington Monument surely was by design.)

Tom’s thrill of victory would be short-lived, however, as upon reuniting with his unit he discovered that newly pregnant Anne had died, from wounds suffered during the subterranean blast. Flashing back to his own miraculous apres-moon trip salvation at the hands of the Dorniya, Tom carried Anne to the water, beseeching his onetime saviors to bring back his wife. There at the shoreline, Tom also had a final face-off with a worse-for-wear Pope, who breathed his last breath after agreeing on a certain peace with his years-long frenemy.

In a brief coda, we flashed forward to a ceremony commemorating humankind’s victory, seeing Tom, an alive Anne, Weaver, Hal (with fiancée Maggie) et al scrubbed clean and in their Sunday finest. Now the professor emeritus at the new United Nations University, Tom gives a speech, closing with the feel-good takeaway from the five-year skirmish — that “We are not alone.”

In the wake of the Steven Spielberg-produced series wrapping its run, executive producer David Eick emailed TVLine the answers to a few burning questions, revealing some flash-forward “RSVPs” that got lost in the mail as well as the final twist that was deemed too ominous.