After two and a half years on the air, Glenn Beck ended his controversial Fox News show on Thursday night.

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he video: On Thursday evening, Glenn Beck spent his last hour on Fox News reviewing his momentous 30 months at the network, hinting at his future plans, trashing Jon Stewart, and gushing about meeting U2's Bono backstage at Broadway's Spider-Man: Turn Out the Dark. (See the video below.) After the ratings highs and advertising lows of his controversial tenure at Fox, the normally weepy Beck went without tears on Thursday. But still, the notorious conspiracy spinner was free with his emotions, thanking everyone who made his show possible, showing their names on his ubiquitous chalkboard, and saying he had to leave New York before he lost his soul.

The reaction: "In classic professorial fashion," Beck used his trademark blackboard to "simply and convincingly" recap the impressive amount of information he's shared with his viewers, says Tina Korbe at Hot Air. Say what you will about Beck, but he "fearlessly left few topics untouched," and his fans valued his "unadorned truth." Hold on a minute, says David Zurawik at The Baltimore Sun. The truth is he talked to his fans like "Mr. Rogers spoke to the preschool children" in his audience. But I'm not complaining: Compared with the "paranoia, rancor, and hate" of his usual shows, this "silly" farewell episode was actually "relatively quiet, banal, and kind of pathetic." Watch the final segment: