Supernatural, season 2

Dean is dying from the crash, and John does what Winchesters do with death: he trades. His life and the Colt for his son's - and a whisper into Dean's ear before he goes, the weight of which Dean carries all season: if you can't save Sam, you may have to kill him.

The year hunts on - a killer clown, a racist truck, Hollywood ghosts - while the yellow-eyed demon's plan surfaces piece by piece. There is a generation of psychic children like Sam, and they are not being collected for their own benefit. The brothers meet others: some innocent, some already turned, one a soldier the demon has been grooming.

It ends in an abandoned frontier town, the chosen children forced into a last-one- standing game. Sam refuses to play and is knifed in the back for it - dead in Dean's arms. Dean, out of moves and out of the will to find any, makes the family deal: his soul, one year, for Sam alive. The demon's endgame follows immediately - a devil's gate opened in a Wyoming cemetery, hell emptying into the world - and amid it, with the Colt's last bullet and John's ghost clawing out of the gate to hold the demon down, Dean fires. The thing that burned Mary is dead. The year on Dean's contract has already started.