The Vampire Diaries, season 7

Lily Salvatore - the mother both brothers buried - is alive, returned from a prison world with her chosen family: the Heretics, witch-vampires who can absorb magic, settle in Mystic Falls under a treaty that empties the town. The season's first half is that cold war, and the brothers' unfinished business with a mother who chose strangers over sons; her death lands harder than her return.

Julian, her partner, outlives her and becomes the mid-season problem - and the occasion for the year's defining wound: a fight staged around Caroline's impossible pregnancy (the Gemini twins, magically carried), and a Phoenix Stone sword whose blade does not kill vampires but files them away inside its own hell. Both brothers do time in the stone, and what it does to Damon - who comes out unable to trust that anything is real - nearly costs him everyone.

The back half belongs to Rayna Cruz, a huntress resurrected lifetime after lifetime, whose blade marks Stefan and never stops pulling toward him. The scar drives him out of his own life, into a swapped body, and finally to a bargain: Rayna's last life traded into Bonnie - along with, it turns out, the hunt itself, now aimed at everyone Bonnie loves.

It ends in the Armory vault, where something older than all of them has been waiting, and Damon and Enzo walk in and do not walk out.