Game of Thrones, season 8

Winterfell hosts the war for the living. The Dothraki charge goes out as points of light and comes back as darkness; the crypts, sold all season as safety, fill with risen Starks; and the Night King, ignoring dragons and armies alike, walks to the godswood for Bran. It ends not with the sword-hand but with the knife-hand: Arya, out of the dark, the blade dropped and caught. The dead fall where they stand.

The living then lose the peace in five episodes. Rhaegal is shot out of the sky; Missandei dies in chains on a wall with one word - dracarys - as testament. And when King's Landing rings its bells in surrender, Daenerys, alone past every advisor she has buried or executed, chooses to make the sack an argument: the city burns street by street with the fighting already over.

What remains is the reckoning. Jon, who loved her and told the truth about his name anyway, kills her at the foot of the throne she barely touched; Drogon melts the chair itself and carries her away. A council of the surviving great houses, at Tyrion's suggestion, crowns Bran - the story, not the sword - and lets the North go its own way under Sansa.

Jon returns to the far north he once deserted, this time by choice. Arya sails west of every map. Brienne finishes a page in a white book.