Supernatural, season 14

Michael wears Dean for the season's opening stretch - recruiting monsters, upgrading werewolves, asking every host species what it wants - and Dean gets himself back by a trick with a price: the archangel caged behind a door in his own mind, held shut by concentration that cannot lapse. The year lives under that hum.

It is also the family season: Jack, graceless and mortal, burning off his soul to matter in fights; Nick, Lucifer's abandoned vessel, walking a serial-killer's road back toward his old tenant; Mary and the boys actually cohabiting; and episode 300 bringing John Winchester forward through time for one dinner - every apology the show owed itself, served and then honestly taken back by the timeline.

The door, of course, opens. A blow in a fight lapses the hold, Michael slips the cage, and the body count of the escape includes the season's best supporting players before Jack - burning the last of his soul to do it - crushes the archangel and eats his grace. Restored and lit from within, Jack is also, now, unsupervised arithmetic: when Mary tries to reach the boy behind the power, what happens to her is not malice. It is a snap - literal - from a child who no longer entirely has a place where guilt goes.

The endgame is Chuck, returned, offering a gun that trades the shooter's life for the target's, and Dean at last declining to shoot the kid. Chuck, annoyed at his ending being refused, says the quiet thing loudly - 'story's over' - kills Jack with a word, and raises every soul hell has: the season closes with the brothers and Castiel back to back in a graveyard as the dead come up like weeds.