Smallville, season 7

The dam breaks and out of the water comes Kara - Clark's actual cousin, sent to guard a baby and arriving eighteen years late, with all the powers he has and the flight he refuses. Her ship, her missing memories and her father's agenda (Zor-El, carved from the family's worst wood) run the season's Kryptonian half.

Bizarro - the phantom wearing Clark's face - opens the year by stealing his life for days before anyone notices, the show's neatest trick about how little the people closest to Clark actually look. Lana, alive after all and done being anyone's project, spends the season becoming someone the show is not sure it likes - a surveillance operation on Lex, a kidnapping, a marriage's scorched earth.

The name that reorganises everything is Veritas: a society of old money - Luthors, Teagues, Queens - who knew a Traveler was coming and fought over who would control him. The season is the dig toward that fact, and Lionel dies for it - out a window, by his son's hands, the show's point of no return for Lex.

It ends at the Fortress: a control device called the orb, Brainiac's mischief spent, Chloe arrested, Kara trapped in the Zone - and Lex, finally holding proof, standing in the snow telling Clark he knows, as the crystals come down on both of them.