Supernatural, season 8

Dean claws out of purgatory after a year of pure war - shoulder to shoulder with a vampire named Benny, the cleanest friendship the show ever wrote him - and finds Sam did not look for him. He tried a life instead: a girl, a dog, a normal year. The resentment runs the season's first half, and the show lets it be ugly.

The engine is Kevin Tran, advanced-placement prophet, translating the demon tablet - a word of God that includes a recipe: three trials, and the gates of hell close for good. Kill a hellhound. Rescue an innocent soul from hell. Cure a demon. Sam takes them - Dean tries to, but it chooses Sam - and each one burns him from the inside a little further.

Around the spine: the Men of Letters, a legacy order the Winchesters never knew they belonged to, and a bunker full of archives that becomes the first home the brothers have had; Castiel, back but wrong, running heaven's errands under Naomi's needle; and Metatron, the scribe of God, found in a hotel room full of books with an agenda he keeps folded.

It ends double. Sam, mid-cure with Crowley half-human under his hands, is told the last trial will kill him, and Dean talks him into putting it down - the season's best scene. And overhead, Metatron's own 'trials' complete: not a closing of hell but an expulsion from heaven, and the sky fills with falling angels.