The Vampire Diaries, season 6
22 episodes · 18 kept in The Essentials
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Season 6 recap Spoilers — open after watching
This recap reveals the events of season 6.
A world without Damon, a town that bans vampires, and a coven that collects its own.
Damon and Bonnie are not dead - they are in a prison world, a looping 1994 built to hold a Gemini coven monster named Kai, whose pleasant affect and total emptiness make him the season's best villain. Getting them home is the year's first machine; what Kai does once free - merging with his brother, absorbing the coven's leadership, collapsing the distinction between petty and apocalyptic - is its second.
Elena, grieving, has Alaric compel away every memory of loving Damon, which the show plays fair: when Damon returns, she is a stranger to her own history, and the season lets the two of them renegotiate rather than reset. Caroline loses her mother to cancer - the one enemy the show refuses to let magic solve - and flips her humanity off into the season's darkest stretch, with Stefan following her in.
The endgame is a wedding interrupted: Kai crashes Jo and Alaric's ceremony, kills the bride and the coven, and links Elena's life to Bonnie's - Elena will sleep, magically, until Bonnie dies. It is Katherine's shadow one last time: the two women who defined Damon's life, and he can only have one awake.
Elena says her goodbyes down a line of everyone the show has kept alive, and the coffin closes on the series' first lead.
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