Depths of despair ... Grey's Anatomy.
Free to air
Grey's Anatomy, Seven, 9.10pm
This classy medico-drama series delivers a season finale that is as heartbreaking as it is stomach-churning. In addition to the usual surgical gore over which trysts are made and broken, there are gruesome close-ups aplenty of the central ensemble operating on each other, and themselves, after their light plane crashes in a forest on the way to their graduation ceremony.
Unfortunately for the squeamish, the award-winning cast makes it impossible to look away as they plumb the depths of despair, veering from shocked hysteria to wracking grief as the gravity of their situation becomes clear.
Meanwhile, back at the hospital, Dr Teddy (Kim Raver) spars with Dr Owen (Kevin McKidd) over her career options while performing a heart operation, which coincides with a terrifying attempt of the same procedure at the crash site. Impeccable acting from operating theatre to disaster zone ensures the action remains on the right side of melodrama and the most shocking of plot twists are played to maximum impact.
My Sex Robot, SBS One, 11pm
Women are great and everything, except for the fact that they have their own opinions and desires. Luckily, American inventor Doug Hines has found a way around that with Roxxxy, the world's first sex robot. Inert as she is, Roxxxy comes off as the most sympathetic character in this bizarre documentary, which follows three robot fetishists in their quest for cyborg love, including Delosian (''Robots don't break your heart''), Kaizo and Edward, who has a perfectly normal (i.e. real) girlfriend who he wants to make more robot-like.
Could Roxxxy (RRP: $US7000) be the answer to their prayers? After all, she has ''multiple points of movement'' - the eyebrows, the eyelids. She even shudders to simulate orgasm, an interesting yet largely redundant feature given that any guy willing to spend $7000 to have sex with a bit of plastic is not going to care if it has an orgasm. Oh, and she also has very large, very erotic tongue. ''This is the future,'' Hines says, holding the tongue in his hand. If you say so, Doug. - Tim Elliott
Neighbours, Eleven, 6.30pm
With a storyline about the launch of a smartphone application and another centred on the fractious marriage of a property-buying Indian couple, this ancient suburban soap is doing its best to shake off the old-fashioned, WASP-ish image with which it has been stuck since the 1980s. But most of the heated exchanges continue to occur in lounge rooms between pretty young white things in tracksuits and their older, interfering guardian figures.
In this 6464th episode, Tash (Valentina Novakovic, younger sister of Bojana) wrestles with her conscience when smooth-talking Andrew (Jordan Smith) tries to cut geeky Ed (Sebastian Gregory) out of the publicity deal for their app (the exact function of which is not quite explained); Sheila (Colette Mann) makes amends for her meddling; and Toadie (Ryan Moloney) and Sonya (Eve Morey) have a thoroughly modern debate over which of them should change their name to that of their spouse.
Olympic Games, Gem, 6.30pm; Nine, 6.50pm
There are some pretty exciting events scheduled to take place in London tonight, with 13 gold medals up for grabs. On the track, Brendan Cole and John Steffensen lead the Australian relay team in the first round of the 4x400 metres, while after midnight Jamaica's Usain Bolt lines up for the 200-metre sprint final. In the water, Australia's Brittany Broben and Melissa Wu vie for a spot in the 10-metre platform diving final; Jake Donaghey and Alex Haas attempt to break Australia's 56-year drought in the canoe sprinting; and Melissa Gorman swims the 10-kilometre marathon on the Hyde Park lake.
But of course what everyone will be staying up for is the rhythmic gymnastics, that loveliest of events that manages to combine ribbons and dancing with sport.
Bridget McManus
Pay TV
Doomsday Preppers, National Geographic, 7.30pm
They sure keep finding 'em. Tonight we meet 30-year-old Becky, who is convinced that the Obama administration is going to declare martial law any day now and send squads of jackbooted thugs to kick in her door and drag her away to … where? FEMA concentration camps? Who knows? But Becky is afraid, so very afraid that she spends four hours a day working on her stockpiles of food and water. She even rented a flat overlooking the Utah state legislative building so that the view of government in nefarious action would inspire her to prep harder. It's quite depressing - as is the statistic provided here that 41 per cent of Americans think that preparing for doomsday is more important than saving for retirement. Elsewhere, we meet a developer who is turning an old nuclear missile silo into a complex of expensive luxury bunkers, and a prepper who uses bird feeders as an intruder alarm system.
Gold Rush: After the Rush, Discovery, 7.30pm
Grizzled old miner Jack Hoffman reveals he is addicted to morphine for back pain in this post-season wrap-up show. We get to see him undergoing surgery to try to correct the problem, and he and the rest of the team also look back at the season's various dramas - most of which involved mechanic Jim going AWOL.
Brad Newsome
Movies
Alone with a Stranger (2000) Seven, noon
If you were able to suspend logic and intuition long enough to embrace the conceit that Jamie Lee Curtis was oblivious to the curious behaviour of her federal agent husband, Arnold Schwarzenegger, in True Lies, or you had no difficulty accepting Arnie and Danny DeVito as genetically engineered twins in Twins (1988), this lunchtime drama might prove palatable. It concerns a woman who discovers her husband has an identical twin brother - like Jeremy Irons as the Mantle boys in Dead Ringers (also 1988). The trouble here is not so much that both men might want to interfere with her ''personal liberties'', as the Mantle brothers did with Genevieve Bujold, but that one of them is a brutal psychopath with homicidal ideas. Sound plausible? You can't even elude such deviants by going to the cinema these days. They're everywhere!
The Baader Meinhof Complex (2008) SBS Two, 9.30pm
During the '70s, radicalised baby boomers in Germany initiated an anarchic terror campaign against the government. Led by Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof, the group waged war on the establishment using violent tactics. They were met head-on with the might of what they believed was a neo-fascist regime. This dramatised account of the group's genesis and eradication is told from the viewpoint of the man charged with halting its activities. Most of the ''gang'' were ruthlessly eliminated in often controversial circumstances, but how much of the truth is really known?
Hierro (2009) SBS One, 11.55pm
Maria is smashed when her son Diego vanishes overboard, presumed drowned, from a ferry bound for the Canary Islands. She ventures to El Hierro a month later to identify a body but it's not him. Maria's paranoia is heightened by the gloom.
Il Divo (2008) SBS Two, 12.10am (Fri)
You beauty, said the guys who install the plastic letters in those neon billboards outside cinemas. Il Divo - six letters and off to the pub. But the full title of the film turned out to be Il Divo: The Spectacular Life Of Giulio Andreotti. Toodle-oo morning tea. This taut drama is the story of Italy's veteran politician as the crafty old hardliner begins his seventh term as PM in the wake of the assassination of Aldo Moro and politically inspired killings by Brigate Rosse sympathisers of the Baader Meinhof crowd.
Doug Anderson