That's a wrap on NBC's Grimm , which said its farewells and thanks to audiences in its series finale, "The End."

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To celebrate the series' swan song, IGN got on the phone with showrunners David Greenwalt and Jim Kouf to unpack the final episode, look back at what could have been and answer our lingering questions. As such,continue below.

Grimm Cast Reacts to Series Finale 9 IMAGES

Bree Turner, Claire Coffee, Sasha Roiz and Silas Weir Mitchell in Grimm

David Giuntoli and Claire Coffee in Grimm

I think it was a nice fairy tale ending bookend to the series, so I think kind of always knew we wanted to end [here]. We have these kids; what is going to happen to them? Are they going to continue on? So I think that was the idea from the beginning.That's the big question: what did happen to Diana and Kelly? And we also always had the image of the book itself closing, and that being the final image, except for saying "thank you" to the fans. Then to go not only full circle in terms of a myth/legend/fairy tale but actually go out to the future and have a guy say, "What you've been seeing is all true. I know it happened because my father told me," that always struck me as really strong, kind of an oral history and written history of these kinds of tales.When we created this powerful staff, if it really had that much power, it had to have some power beyond the death of the Zerstörer. It had to be some reward for not letting the world turn bad.And Nick was ready to make that Devil's bargain, too, to have his loved ones back, until he had a somewhat supernatural experience of the strength of his blood and his ancestors who came before him, and then naturally who would come after him. I mean, just imagine if we had just killed everybody and he just walks off to the drug store! Everyone would have had a big fit.The Other Place is the place where Wesen have the power and humans are cowering and running for their lives.This notion is that Hell can be quite beautiful. It doesn't have to be a fiery pit of despair, but a place that these inner demons that have plagued humanity from time immemorial actually reign supreme. That would be Hell. We have plenty of it in our own world today. It's less an alternate reality and more Hell on Earth.Yeah, it was a hard reset. When the Zerstörer died, it was as though he never came through, so it reset to that point.I think it was ultimately about family and the power of family, and the support of family makes a huge difference in people's lives. When Kelly showed up and Aunt Marie and Trubel and Nick and the family all came together to fight as a team, [it showed] they can fight evil.You can always dig a little deeper than you think you can dig, and then the whole thing of coming full circle too. I like that notion.It was very important to get them. We wanted them, but their schedules, they're extremely busy. The scheduling was the most difficult part, and we actually scheduled them for two days. No more, no less; they had a hard in and a hard out. Then, of course, the weather got involved and we were panicked because we only had two days to get all their scenes and we lost one day because of the snow. We had to frantically get everything done in that one day. The weather, it was snowy and rainy then sunny then snowing then rainy then sunny. It was crazy, but we did it. And they were gung-ho. They were on board from the moment I think David first spoke with them a month before.We thought that she should stand alone without Nick. She's a powerful woman and she doesn't need a guy, and she found a purpose without having a particular relationship. She was in for the fight. She realized that's what she was motivated to do.She found real purpose with all the terrible knowledge that came to her and even all the terrible things that she did. She had one of the more interesting character arcs in that she kind of coalesced into two new people.Yeah, that was a really important scene. I feel that then you understood, oh, it's not about being happy, it's about having a purpose.We always thought it was a fairy tale ending, and fairy tales don't seem to end. They don't go away, they're always with us and they keep going on, so what a perfect way to end this type of series with a new beginning.It could take on a life of its own, you never know. There's many different versions of how that conceivably could continue. At the same time, we did end it and go full circle. It's a hopeful future! Everyone's out there fighting.I don't think we had any real idea. When you don't know how long you're going to go, you don't really want to start thinking about an ending until you're forced to think about an ending, because what if we came up for a great ending in Season 3 and then [you have more to go]. So we just let the characters tell their stories for as long as we could let them tell their stories, and when we finally got the go-ahead to end the show from NBC, then we really put our attention to, "OK, how do we wrap all this up."Just backing up a little bit, we introduced this idea of these seven keys unlocking something in the pilot, and then we sort of let that float out there for many a year. I think it was about two years ago at Comic-Con when we promised we would answer the damn keys what they unlocked in episode 100 and we revealed what was in there and we just delved a little deeper. Like, well, what is this thing, and what can it do? And we had a lot of fun of people going, "What do you mean it's a stick?"[laughs] Exactly!The crazy thing about it is it's all based in mythology. The big staff is based in religious mythology, in which the staff of Moses parted the Red Sea. It could turn into a snake. It had magical powers. There were a lot of other staffs in mythology that had magical powers. David and Goliath, he carried a staff that supposedly had some magical power. It was fun finding a way to explain what that little piece of stick was a part of.I think once we had done Cinderella a year later and did kiss a princess and she turned into a frog, and the tree episode this year -- that tree guy was someone that we did wrestle with for many years and thought it had gone by the wayside. I can't think of another something that we wanted to do that we didn't get to do.No, we really explored fairy tales and myths from all over the world. We attempted to make this as worldwide as possible.Thanks for sharing your fairy tales with us, because that was the inspiration for everything we did.We so appreciate the broad reach of this kind of storytelling. There's something universal about all of this worldwide, and we're so grateful that people connected with the show, and we thank them for that because without that we wouldn't be doing it.

Terri Schwartz is Entertainment Editor at IGN. Talk to her on Twitter at @Terri_Schwartz