The Vampire Diaries, season 5

Elena and Caroline try Whitmore College, and the show gives the normal life about four episodes before the campus turns out to be built on the Augustine Society - a decades-old programme that experiments on vampires, with Damon's imprisonment in its past and a vengeful subject, Enzo, in its cells. The reveal reframes Damon's worst self as something that was done to him, without excusing what he did with it.

Katherine, human at last, ages and fails fast - then cheats death by passenger-seating into Elena's body, and drives Elena's life for a run of episodes that ends with the show's most durable villain finally, definitively gone.

The season's monster is Markos and the Travelers - witches without a home, bent on unwriting the spirit magic the world runs on. Their unspelling of Mystic Falls makes the town itself lethal to its vampires. Stefan is killed and the Other Side - the vampire afterlife that has been fraying since Silas - begins collapsing outright, taking the dead with it into nothing.

The finale spends everything: a plan to blow the town's gas main and shuttle the dead back through Bonnie, who is dying anyway. Most return. Damon and Bonnie do not. The last image is the two of them holding hands as the light takes the place apart.