Supernatural, season 12

Mary Winchester returns to sons older than she is, and the season has the decency to make it hard: she grieves a four-year-old who is standing in front of her at forty, hunts because it is the only fluency she has left, and keeps a secret that curdles - she is working with the British Men of Letters, the transatlantic order whose approach to American hunting is an efficiency audit with executions.

The Brits are the year's slow villain: charming Mick, who learns too much conscience to survive his employers, and Ketch, who never had the problem. Their recruitment of the American hunters ends the way managed relationships with Winchesters end, but not before their methods - surveillance, brainwashing, a kill-list of hunters - price the partnership honestly.

The other thread is Lucifer, loose in a rock star and then the President, leaving Rockville a pregnant aide, Kelly Kline, whose child's power warps the season around it. Castiel, adrift between armies, finds his purpose in the unborn Jack - a vision of a future worth guarding - and holds to it with a convert's calm.

It ends at a house by a lake: a rift torn to an alternate world where the brothers were never born and the apocalypse won; Lucifer and Mary through it as the seal closes; Crowley dead by his own choice to lock it; Castiel dead on the ground with burned wings - and upstairs, past his mother's body, a grown Nephilim sitting naked in the corner with gold eyes.