What a Way to Go...

I was going to post something different in the morning, but decided to put this up now so that people could see it before reading about it and having anything given away.

It's the finale to The Colbert Report from Thursday night.

(Unfortunately, the way YouTube works, they decide what the image will be for a video, so some of the surprise is given away.  But don't worry.  Keep watching...)

Usually when I've watched the show, I record it and watch the next day.  For the last episode, though, I decided to watch it live.  Boy, am I I'm glad I did.  Superlatives are always dicey, but this might well be the greatest finale I've ever seen for a series.  There was actually a sign-off that came after, and it was very good and appropriate.  But this is what people will remember.  

This is the way to go out...

Okay, here is an update.  

To be clear, though, I still don't want to give anything away about the finale, so you'll have to scroll down just a bit to see what the update is.

And no, this doesn't count as "scrolling down just a bit."

You'll have to go further.  

No, really.

When I say "just a bit," I mean it.

Okay, we're almost there.  Just one more scroll to go.

Good, got it.  Here then is the update --

I was able to find a fairly comprehensive list from Mashable about who appeared in the sequence.  It doesn't include everyone, just who they were able to identify, and where.  And it doesn't seem to include most from the big group at the very end.  (Or any, but I think it does.)  Overall they do a solid job with identifying.

And this is the list:

Jon Stewart

Randy Newman (on piano)

Willie Nelson, Bryan Cranston, Doris Kearns Goodwin, National Institutes of Health Director Francis Collins

Tom Brokaw, Mandy Patinkin, Yo-Yo Ma, Neil deGrasse Tyson

Sam Waterston, Jeff Daniels, Cyndi Lauper, Big Bird, Former Commissioner & Chairman of the Federal Election Commission Trevor Potter, Keith Olbermann

Blogger Andrew Sullivan, ballet dancer David Hallberg, Katie Couric, Ric Ocasek, Ken Burns

Charlie Rose, United States Ambassador to the United Nations Samantha Power, REM's Michael Stipe, James Franco, Cookie Monster

Toby Keith, Segway inventor Dean Kamen, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

Barry Manilow, Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio (background), author George Saunders (background)

David Gregory, Wilco's Jeff Tweedy, Christiane Amanpour, Patrick Stewart, Andy Cohen

Stone Phillips, Peter Frampton, Ariana Huffington

Alan Alda, Cory Booker, George Lucas, former soccer player Alexi Lalas, Jon Batiste

Elijah Wood, Henry Kissinger, Bob Costas, Mike Huckabee, Tim Meadows

Colbert Report staff

Pussy Riot's Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alekhina (we think)

Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan

Men and women in uniform

Colbert Report characters Tek Jansen and Esteban Colberto

President Bill Clinton, tweeting.

An astronaut on the International Space Station

J.J. Abrams

Smaug

Many other guests, including Jake Tapper, Lesley Stahl, Senator Claire McCaskill, Terry Gross, Jeffrey Toobin, Norman Ornstein, Emily Bazelon, David Leonhardt, Matt Taibbi, Eliot Spitzer, Nate Silver, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Thomas Friedman, David Remnick, Paul Krugman, Grover Norquist