What did Mama mean by the final lines? Roy's going to come back and claim her? We never saw him again.

[regarding Roy's cooler he left at the house] - "Just leave it be. I have a feelin' this time Roy Harper'll be back to claim what is his."

This was her veiled way of saying that when Roy returned, she would be his (only, as we know, he never returned).

Now that you mention it, it would have been interesting to see him return in the series finale...

Vicki Lawrence said on one of the DVD interviews that originally, Mama and Roy were going to go to bed together, but when Vicki read it, she objected. Her feeling was that Mama was "Bible Belt" and would never sleep with her dead husband's brother, so the writers rewrote the second half of the episode so that Mama acknowledges her feelings for Roy but they both decide they can't act on them.

^---yes, she discusses this in her book Vicki! The True-Life Adventures of Miss Fireball. She says the original script called for Mama and Roy to sleep together, but with the rewrite "the family only thinks they slept together". However, the episode does not show the family thinking this at all, so it's odd that she would say that (perhaps she is just "remembering wrong" on that point, which we have seen her do occasionally on moments of her career).

I'm glad they didn't further this storyline. I'm not too fond of the Uncle Roy episode.

I think it was an excellent episode, definitely one we never would have seen in the syndicated years. Gave us a different glimpse into Thelma and really humanized her.
As far as Roy coming back for the series finale, there really wasn't one on NBC given that they didn't go off the air of their own volition. And by the time the actual finale aired in 1990, Murray Hamilton had been dead going on four years. Even if someone else had played him, it would have been too heavy a topic to deal with both in the syndicated universe *and* given the primary storyline of Tiffany Thelma being born.

^---True, but it was just fun fan speculation, lol :)

True, and that's the fun thing about this board!

Do you think this is the same Uncle Roy that that lost a finger that Mama mentions when her mother's ghost visits?

LOL I forgot about that. Taken literally, it almost has to be a different Uncle Roy given that the one we know had all 10 of his fingers ... and by then, Grandma Crowley was dead so if he lost one after we saw him, how would she know? :)