[Saturday Night Saloon series, 1/9/10, Brooklyn, USA]

Finales aren’t a plot point, they’re a genre. You can save a lot on comics and invest it in a lot of popcorn-counter runs if you just get the planetary-blowup last issues of comic companies’ crossover events and skip the scenes leading up to the big dance-competition throwdown in the average multiplex pageant. Hence, while the leadup episodes of Vampire Cowboys’ Saturday Night Saloon series of monthly episodic plays were each their own reward, every company knew what they were there for when it all came to an end.

Dustin Chinn’s “Let’s Ninja Science Ranger Team Get!”, which had proven four previous times that there’s no longer any limit once you’ve gone too far, concluded its tale of time-traveling martial-arts action figures by launching right into that dance-competition you craved, with bonus cross-millennial rap battle as the Rangers travel to the early-’70s Bronx in a final conflict for the past and future of hip hop that’s too complicated to go into and too immaterial to matter as the crew convert the real-life audience into their block-party grandstand and gleefully get buried under their own fallen fourth wall.

Brent Cox’s “Jack O’Hanrahan and the Troubulation of Doom” pushed the plunger on a matching self-referential implosion, as the play’s unseen narrator stops explaining and starts interrupting for some deus-ex-machina plot wrap-ups to complement onstage eminence Kelly Rae O’Donnell’s tour de force demonic-possession solo, an occult-madonna set piece that makes Mike Mignola’s comics seem not so unfilmable after all.

Payoffs can be emotional as well as pyrotechnic, so Mac Rogers’ “Mother Sacramento” and James Comtois’ “Entrenched” each pulled the surprise ending of authentic pathos, the latter with a depressingly redemptive scenario of eternal sacrifice by a time-manipulating scientist who will never know he’s a savior; the former with a downbeat private armageddon for the ecclesiastical melodrama’s faithless-cleric heroine and her fallen former-lover antagonist.

The jewel of this evening’s logical conclusions was Crystal Skillman’s cybotage potboiler “Hack,” an entire narrative cobbled from coming-attractions-style outbursts giving way to action-flick afterthought serial epilogues, all seen through the interface of Skillman’s masterful eye for archetypal cliché and suicide-mission self-invention. The dramatis personae of shadowy e-terrorists, teeth-gritting commando spooks, and those who play them on their Facebook page go through a gauntlet of real-time jump-cuts, faked fights, echoing gauzy flashbacks and other actually-absent production tricks that both make you aware of how helpless contemporary movie and TV performers are without their FX bells and whistles and how irreducible are the talents of this definitively game-faced ensemble.

Having thrown everyone clear of the blast at the end of each month’s bill, Jeff Lewonczyk’s “Lady Cryptozoologist: Season 2” settled for no less than crescendoing its cliffhanger about a madly propagating mutant fungus with a Lovecraftian quantum orgasm and climactic mountain cave-in. And then a singalong. Because nothing ever ends, and even if the world’s blown up and the theatre’s dead, the true artists are always up for renewal.

[www.vampirecowboys.com/events.htm]