Supernatural, season 6

Dean has been out a year - Lisa, Ben, construction, a life - when Sam turns up alive and wrong. He does not sleep. He watches Dean get turned by a vampire rather than intervene. The diagnosis, when Death himself confirms it, is exact: Sam came back without his soul, and the thing wearing his skills is a hunter with no brake pedal. Reinstalling the soul - scarred by however long in the cage with two archangels - requires a wall in his mind that must not be touched.

The Campbells, Mary's people, are back in the life and working for someone. The season's mystery - who pulled Sam, who is moving the pieces - resolves into the show's saddest reveal: Castiel, fighting a civil war in heaven against Raphael, has partnered with Crowley to farm purgatory, where every monster that ever died waits full of usable souls. Eve, the mothers' mother, surfaces and is put down; the alphas are collected; and the friends investigating it all keep finding Castiel's fingerprints where they should not be.

It ends with the wall kicked down - Castiel's doing, to slow the brothers - and Sam seizing on the floor of Bobby's panic room while the ritual completes elsewhere. Purgatory's souls flood into Castiel, Raphael is snapped out of existence, and the last scene is a friend announcing himself, flatly, as the new God, and requiring their love.