Smallville, season 9

The orb delivered Kandor's garrison - Zod's soldiers, cloned from blood taken before the planet died, powerless under a yellow sun that should have made them gods. Their Major Zod is the season: charismatic, wounded, genuinely grieving a lost wife and child, and turning that grief into empire one manipulation at a time. Clark's bet - integrate them, humanise them, withhold the sun - is decent and doomed in equal measure.

Clark himself goes dark-shirted and rooftop-formal: the Blur, full-time now, with Lois as the voice on the phone he cannot tell and the reporter falling for both halves of him. Their year - assignments, a Pulitzer-bait rivalry, an undercover wedding - is the show finally enjoying its own destination.

Checkmate surfaces as the human counterweight: Amanda Waller's agency, drafting vigilantes by force, treating the coming Kryptonian question as a war to win first. Tess plays every side of it; Chloe builds Watchtower into an institution and stockpiles kryptonite against her best friend's species, a choice the show lets be both prudent and chilling.

It ends with the Book of Rao: an instrument that lifts every Kryptonian off the planet - all of them. Zod, gifted powers by Clark's blood, takes the garrison to war instead; the sky fills; and Clark, run through with a blue-K dagger to keep him grounded and mortal, goes off a ledge into the dark as the rest ascend.