Last night, yet another of the final episodes of Kyle XY aired, and the show still manages to amaze me with its ability to draw realistic characters while maintaining its sci-fi arcs.

I started watching Kyle XY for a lot reasons. The first reason I had was the music: there’s an ongoing thread in the original scores for Kyle XY that, to this day, reminds me of Explosions in the Sky. And we all know that Explosions in the Sky’s music makes even the most mundane moments seem epic so the early moments of the show were greatly enhanced by the minimalist bombast of the score. I mean, there’s a scene where Kyle eats a freaking muffin in the first episode that makes it seem like he’s climbing Mount Everest.

So the music made me stay for a little while, but the thing that really made me stick around was the novelty and realism with which they handled a character with complete and utter amnesia, though it’s not really amnesia per se. The scene I linked to earlier is Kyle’s first meal. He didn’t know what food was or how to eat before that scene and his discovery of it is handled very well. In a scene shortly after this he pees his pants because he didn’t know what that strange sensation he was having meant. There are lots of little interesting trains of thought brought up through the narration in those early episodes that offer a fantastic look at what it might be like to be born fully grown. This sort of storytelling is already very much in the realm of science fiction, but the show goes beyond that by introducing Kyle’s superhuman abilities and the mystery of where he came from, why he isn’t there anymore, and why he has no bellybutton. And while those sci-fi elements are interesting, the thing that really truly makes me excited to see each new episode is the characters.

When I wrote about Kyle XY getting canceled I mostly brought up its sci-fi aspects, but the real world relationships are why the show is so good. That science fiction is a part of the tapestry of the show is surely a reason I enjoy it, but I get as much pleasure from Kyle using his super genius brain to hack into a mainframe as when he’s super nervous about his first date with Amanda.

Last night’s episode had some of the sci-fi stories to tell, but the real beauty of them was that they were there to facilitate telling stories about the characters. Kyle used his ability to visually explore memories to help Jessi, his female bellybutton-free counterpart, get some closure on the disappearance of her mother. Those scenes also brought some much needed empathy and humanity to Jessi and managed to convert me from a Jessi pseudo-hater into a full-on Jessi/Kyle shipper. And all of that happened in just one of the plots of the episode. In another thread, Josh and Andy, one of the best teenager relationships — one of the best relationships in general to be honest — on television, are forced to deal with their impending separation. And he makes all the stupid mistakes you know you shouldn’t make when you’re desperate not to lose the most important person in your life. Josh began the series as the slacker joker who never takes a moment seriously and if you started watching this show with this episode you would have been amazed at his evolution and growth.

I wish this show was continuing on. Mondays at 9, two shows come on that I watch: Heroes and Kyle XY. I think you all know my stance on Heroes by now, but I haven’t done my due diligence in expressing my love of this sweet little show. Don’t let the fact that it airs on ABC Family dissuade you: this show is worth your time. Enjoy it while it’s still here.

Apparently, Kyle XY has been canceled. Despite what you may think about ABC Family, on occasion they produce decent television. It’s astoundingly hard to find television that kids can watch to learn life lessons while staying enjoyable for older people on other merits. Kyle XY was one of these shows.

The stories centred around a family that took in a John Doe youth who has a mysterious past and no bellybutton. As Kyle learns how to live — making friends, respecting elders, all that stuff — the kids watching can get reinforcement for the virtues of good behaviour. But the characters are never saccharine, they’re not perfect little angels, and everything doesn’t always work out for them. The parents talk to their kids about their problems and when sex starts to rear its head into their increasingly complicated life it’s played realistically from both the children and the adults.

Well-written characters and intelligent plots are hard enough to come by in youth-oriented television in the world of Raven and Hanah Montana and Zack and Cody but then the show starts layering in sci-fi elements and that’s when it gets interesting for me. Kyle has no bellybutton. To a sci-fi geek like me that’s fairly self explanatory: he’s someone born from an artificial womb, which means he’s either a genetic experiment or a clone. But the show takes its time in exploring Kyle’s history and what he could be.

As the history deepens and the sci-fi elements go from implied to explicit, the show has seen declining ratings — something I hope doesn’t happen with this new season of Lost and its much more explicit sci-fi elements — and as the characters grow up the stories become more mature which could cause some hesitation from more conservative parents, but the show’s core messages remain the same. Or rather it did.