Smallville, season 10

The final season opens with resurrection economics: Lois pulling the dagger from Clark, Lex's leftovers - a decaying clone shepherding a perfect child, Alexander, who grows toward his template - and something else entering the world through the crack Zod's war left: Darkseid, played all season as corruption rather than creature, a darkness that takes people at the point of their despair.

The year is a long graduation. Jor-El's disapproval, the show's oldest weather, finally resolves into inheritance - the suit, crystallised in the Fortress, waiting for a son ready to carry it. Oliver goes public and pays the vigilante-registration price; Lois learns everything at last and the show discovers, delightedly, that she was always the point: the proposal, the almost-wedding, the partnership.

The bench clears its debts: Tess, revealed a Luthor, chooses her own decency and is murdered for it with a kiss and a knife by the resurrected Lex - restored, memory-wiped just enough, inevitable. Alexander's innocence is spent the same hour.

It ends where ten years pointed: Apokolips dragging fire across the sky, Clark - mid-wedding - taking Jor-El's gift at last, the suit out of the ice, the flight finally flown, a planet pushed off the world's back. Seven years later a familiar theme plays over a Metropolis rooftop, and the shirt comes open on the S.