‘Two and a Half Men’ signs off with a ‘Winning’ meta finale

The bad (tiger?) blood between Charlie Sheen and Chuck Lorre made for a good ending to the longest-running live-action sitcom currently on TV.

“Two and a Half Men” wrapped up 12 seasons Thursday with an extremely meta hour-long finale that milked the misbehavior of its former star, Charlie Sheen, who wasn’t there in person but was ever-present in spirit. The actor’s notorious antics leading up to his famous 2011 firing threatened to derail the once top-rated comedy, so it’s with no small amount of irony that his outrageous personality traits became the basis for the CBS series’ swan song.

The episode, titled “Of Course He’s Dead: Part I and II,” opened with a flashback to Charlie Harper’s (Sheen) closed-casket funeral, followed by a scene that showed Charlie’s stalker-turned-wife, Rose (Melanie Lynskey), ostensibly holding him hostage — “Silence of the Lambs”-style — in a pit in her Sherman Oaks basement.

Charlie escapes (although we don’t see him) and begins sending nasty texts to his brother Alan (Jon Cryer) and his Malibu beach house “replacement,” Walden Schmidt (Ashton Kutcher). Sheen threw similar shade on both men in real life.

“I can’t wait for this to be over,” Walden says at one point, breaking the fourth wall and looking directly into the camera.

While scouring the internet looking for proof that Charlie died in Paris, the only thing Walden could find about the presumed dead man was some “crazy rant against a former employer.”

Anyone who’s paid any attention to Sheen’s story recognized that line as a reference to the actor’s well-documented vitriol against creator Chuck Lorre, whom he once called a “contaminated little maggot,” among other things.

The finale made myriad jokes about the show itself, including the series’ reliance on raunchy humor and the widespread belief that it should have been off the air years ago. (Say what you will, but the sitcom averaged just north of 10 million viewers this season and continued to rank as one of the most-watched comedies on TV.)

At one point, Berta (Conchatta Ferrell) made a crack that if Charlie were alive and Alan moved out, Charlie could move back in and be roomies with Walden.

“I believe we can keep this going for another five years!” she said.

“Yeah, I don’t think so,” Walden replied in a thanks-but-no-thanks tone.

As you expect in a series finale, plenty of familiar faces from the past popped up, including both of Alan’s ex-wives as well as Walden’s ex, Bridget (Judy Greer). Turns out she’s shacking up with John Stamos.

“You’re just a handsome guy who got lucky on a sitcom,” Walden quipped.

While Sheen himself didn’t make his much-anticipated cameo, another “Two and a Half Men” star who left under a cloud did come back for the finale. “Half man” Angus T. Jones returned in a scene that had him joking about playing “craps” and betting on the “come” in Vegas — sophomoric double-entendres in keeping with the show he once described as “filth” when urging people not to watch it. (You know Lorre had to love writing those lines for the former child star.)

Some of the episode’s best moments involved newcomers.

Arnold Schwarzenegger, who knows a thing or two about being a disgraced celebrity, played a police officer that Alan and Walden enlisted to find Charlie.

In an effort to get the story straight, Schwarzenegger basically ran down what happened on the show during its dozen years, including the fact that Alan’s son got inexplicably dumber as the show went on, Walden didn’t commit suicide because the water in the ocean was too cold and Alan and Walden married each other to adopt a child (who was noticeably MIA in the finale).

“When you say it like that it sounds ridiculous,” Walden said.

“This whole thing has been going on way too long,” Schwarzenegger said, adding that perhaps Charlie should have tried anger management (the name of Sheen’s ill-fated FX series).

Another fun moment came courtesy of a cameo by former Hollywood bad boy Christian Slater, whom the police mistook for Charlie in a ransacked hotel room.

Lorre addressed the inevitable fan disappointment in Sheen being a no-show with the series’ final vanity card, posted at the end of the episode (read it in full below).

We had to make due with the back of an actor resembling Charlie as he walked up to the door of the Malibu beach house, where Alan and Walden were holed up inside cowering with fear. A piano fell from the sky and crushed the former jingle writer, flat as a pancake.

That’s when Lorre, sitting in his director’s chair, turned to the camera in the biggest meta moment of all.

“Winning,” he said with a sly grin in a clever shout out to the obnoxious hashtag Sheen made famous during one of his ranting sessions.

Lorre’s apparent victory — unlike the series — was short-lived. A piano came crashing down on him, too.

It was a fittingly cartoonish end to a cartoonish comedy that never pretended to be anything else during its long, messy run.

CHUCK LORRE’S ‘TWO AND A HALF MEN’ FINALE VANITY CARD:

“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.

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.

We thought that was funny too.