Smallville, season 8

Lex is gone - presumed dead in the arctic collapse, present all season as a surveillance state with a signature - and the show promotes its bench: Tess Mercer arrives to run LuthorCorp with Lionel's cunning and her own grievances, and Clark, finally, takes a desk at the Daily Planet across from Lois, where the show's endgame quietly begins.

The season's tragedy is Davis Bloome, a Metropolis paramedic who loses time and wakes near bodies. He is Doomsday - grown in a lab from Zod's genetic material, designed to kill Kryptonians, wearing a decent man as camouflage - and the year's best material is Davis fighting his own biology, and Chloe, married to Jimmy and increasingly not, becoming the monster's keeper out of mercy that curdles.

Lana returns for a last arc and exits through the show's cruellest door: a power-suit that absorbs kryptonite, meant to stand beside Clark, weaponised by Lex's dead-man switch into a barrier between them - she can never come near him again.

It ends in a geyser of consequence: the league splitting Davis from the beast, Doomsday buried under a fusion charge mid-fight, Jimmy killed by the human half everyone spared - and a black ridge of Kryptonian orb-birth in the wreckage, announcing Zod.