It’s that time of year when some shows are wrapping up their seasons, while others are wrapping up forever.

This week I’m emptying out the Notebook with Emily Deschanel talking the Bones Season 8 finale, while The Big C concludes its final four episodes airing starting Monday. And Nurse Jackie is giving us more reasons to love Thor this season. Let’s dive in!

BONES With Monday’s season finale, Executive Producer Stephen Nathan already told TV Fanatic that Pelant will be targeting Booth. But how far will Brennan go to protect him and the people she loves?

“As you see in this coming episode, Brennan is willing to go farther than she's ever gone to protect somebody that she loves," Deschanel said on a press call this week. "And now, you'll see that she'll do the same for other people that she loves to protect them, to protect her life with them... we may see multiple victims in this episode from Pelant.”

And when a show runs as long as Bones, one of the most challenging things isn’t servicing the large cast but instead, as Nathan told me, it’s “finding cases, murders and science that’s fresh and that continue to interest us. We’ve done…I don’t even know, 170 cases. I mean that’s a lot. You know, if we can have that as a jumping off point and then explore the characters from there it’s kind of a gift for us. So, I also feel that it’s fresh.”

Nathan said another challenge is “in the eight years that we’ve been doing the show, forensic science has progressed so much and so rapidly that we’re now contending with new equipment, new science, new discoveries that we couldn’t even have imagined eight years ago.”

THE BIG C The Laura Linney-anchored series is wrapping up its series run with four one-hour episodes that begin airing this Monday. And while the Award-winning actress has always produced stellar work, she goes to even higher heights in these episodes.

“When you work with Laura Linney,” Executive Producer Jenny Bicks told me this week, “it’s not like this was surprising us all season that she has this amazing ability to embody all these different levels of Cathy at the same time, but I think this group of episodes offered a whole new set of challenges…she plays Cathy with such courageousness and then she’s terrified, and then she’s hysterically funny.”

Watch for a guest turn by Brian Dennehy as Cathy’s estranged father and a return appearance by Alan Alda as Cathy’s doctor. (I’ve seen the episodes and, yes, it’s a dark subject... but the show has always balanced the dark with the light and continues to do so up until the last scene of the last finale.)

NURSE JACKIE I’m a big fan of shows with great supporting characters who can still surprise you. Case in point: the character of Thor on Nurse Jackie, as played by Stephen Wallem. In the recent season opener, we found out that Thor may be a gay nurse but that he also [GASP!] is a big sports fan!

“Up to that point,” the actor/singer told me, “there had been some sort of expected references to musical theater and hair and makeup and all of the stuff that is fun, but I love the fact that here is something that I don’t think an audience would ever guess that Thor is actually a football fan. ‘Oh look at that. You can love musical theater and also be a football fan.’ Gay men can run the gamut!”

Wallem, whose sister Linda is one of the show’s producers, added: “I think [the writers] have done a great job of introducing these little aspects to my character that are surprising and fun.” And while we’ve seen Thor do a little dancing on the show in the past, watch for Wallem to show off his impressive singing voice later this season. (Nurse Jackie airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on Showtime)

That’s a wrap for this week! Anything else you’re dying to know about your favorite show? Leave a comment here or you email me directly at jim@jimhalterman.com. And remember: follow @TVFanatic for all your TV scoop!

Jim Halterman is the West Coast Editor of TV Fanatic and the owner of JimHalterman.com. Follow him on Twitter.