The Ending Of The Vampire Diaries Explained

"The Vampire Diaries" ended in 2017, but just like its namesake monsters, the show's legacy is eternal. Everybody's favorite grief-drenched vampire soap finished its run of love triangles, family issues, terrible choices, super-friendships, doppelgangers and death in one glorious blaze of heartbreak and hellfire. While not every character survived or got a happy ending, some at least got what they deserved, with fan-favorite characters advancing to spin-off shows on The CW, such as "The Originals" and "Legacies."

The final episode, "I Was Feeling Epic," packs a plot-heavy punch, and also attends to every main character's conclusion — even if some of the logic doesn't completely track. Hey, this is "The Vampire Diaries." It just wouldn't be the same if the show didn't break a few of its own rules — or play a song by The Fray. But what the ending of "The Vampire Diaries" lacks in complete logical sense, it more than makes up for in votive candles and emotional resolution.

"The Vampire Diaries" started out as an exploration of a teen girl's grief and a super old vampire's family drama. After eight seasons of loss, love, and densely complicated lore, the final episode concludes those journeys and resolves the epic love triangle at the bleeding heart of the show. Whether you've recently discovered the paranormal romance that revolves largely around two vampire brothers — Stefan and Damon Salvatore (Paul Wesley and Ian Somerhalder) — in love with the same woman, Elena Gilbert (Nina Dobrev), or you've been a fan for years, read on for the ending of "The Vampire Diaries" explained.

Previously, on "The Vampire Diaries": Elena (Nina Dobrev) awakens from her magic coma and into a limbo dimension long enough for a still-alive, but still-linked-to-Elena Bonnie (Kat Graham) to start working on a plan to wake Elena up for real. Evil doppelganger Katherine (also Nina Dobrev) wants to burn down the town of Mystic Falls with hellfire: actual fires of hell that will send the entire town into Cade's (Wolé Parks) arms — and eternity in his hell dimension.

This is already a rough deal for Elena, Bonnie, and everyone in Mystic Falls — but to top it all off, Stefan (Paul Wesley) and Caroline (Candice King) just got married. Who wants to spend their honeymoon in hell? Vicki (Kayla Ewell) is also not a fan of hell, and specifically chooses to ring the bell in the Mystic Falls Church every five minutes in order to bring about the hell-splosion.

This is a big bummer for Vicki's brother, Matt (Zach Roehrig), who can't convince his sister to, you know, not torch all of Mystic Falls just to escape her own eternity in hell. Damon (Ian Somerhalder) knows what it's like to argue with family. He and brother Stefan argue over who will sacrifice to save Elena — and kill Katherine. Everyone's fates hang in the balance. The last episode of "The Vampire Diaries" sets up everyone to make heartbreaking choices to save Mystic Falls, their loved ones, and in some cases, themselves.

It's terrible choice o'clock! Matt decides that if he can't talk Vicki out of burning down the town, he can least bring their dad over to say goodbye. Matt evacuates Mystic Falls while Bonnie plans to send the hellfire straight back to hell. If Damon and Stefan can get Katherine there, it will destroy her, too. The plan is hard enough to execute — Bonnie needs to really trust her magic — but there's another catch: sleepy girl Elena is trapped in a spellbound room.

Stefan and Damon try to out-hero each other to save Elena (and, fine, the town). Damon, desperate for his now-human brother to live a good life, compels him to leave and be happy with Caroline. But Stefan ends up giving Damon the cure, making Damon human, then taking his place as both sacrificial lamb and Katherine-killer. He wants Damon to go live, laugh, love with Elena — not forever, but for a human life's worth of time. Does all of this suck for Caroline? Maybe. But don't worry, she and Alaric end up opening their own supernatural boarding school with a boatload of money from Klaus.

Bonnie has her own epic moment, using her magic to save the day with a little help from the Bennett witches. After the day is saved, Bonnie heads out to finally live life for herself. Elena and Damon marry, live, die — and reunite with their families in the afterlife when it's all over.

"I Was Feeling Epic," the final episode of "The Vampire Diaries," is a series of heartbreaking decisions and outcomes, along with a dash of heartwarming connection, salvation, and absolution mixed in. Also, Katherine gets stabbed with a bone dagger that briefly sends her to hell about 20 times.

The end of "The Vampire Diaries" was written by its longtime showrunner Julie Plec ("Kyle XY") and show co-creator Kevin Williamson, the screenwriting legend known for "Dawson's Creek," "Scream," and "The Faculty." Given these two writers' combined dramatic taste and experience, the end of their hit series was naturally going to go for the jugular — and the heart. Themes of love, loss, and redemption run throughout the show and culminate in this final episode.

The labored plot and chaotic "logic" of the episode are all in service of a much greater theme, and one that everyone making the episode delivered on: Life is horrifying, but worth living, because love makes it so. We are all worthy of living a good life, even if we have been terrible people or vampires, because that is the gift of humanity. We can spend so much time in darkness, but if and when we choose to let in a little light and peace — it's ours to earn and enjoy.

So much of "The Vampire Diaries" revolves around Elena making a choice. Two choices, really. One: how to live life in the face of unspeakable loss, and two: who does she want to be her possibly eternal boyfriend?

There's an old storytelling adage that says "the end is in the beginning" — but in "The Vampire Diaries" the beginning is in the end. The entire show starts after Elena loses her parents in a terrible accident. She writes in her diary about how pointless she feels everything is. She turns away from her old, bubbly personality. She is literally only animated by the need to care for her still-living brother, Jeremy (Steven R. McQueen). But when she meets Stefan, a 161-year-old vampire, she finally starts to feel alive again.

This moment is also reflected in the series finale. While Elena ultimately falls for Damon, she remains deeply connected to Stefan — so much so that, in the finale, they communicate for a moment in a dimension between life and death, in a high school hallway where their love began. While the scene mostly consists of a friendly hug, it's a moment of forgiveness between Elena and Stefan. They will always love each other, even if not romantically — and it's a moment where we know that they love themselves too. That propels Elena into the rest of her life — one she thought she didn't want to live — but it ends up being a good one.

There's a reason The Fray has scored so many epic moments in "The Vampire Diaries" — this show is fraught with emotion and drama, often with a supernatural bent. But when it comes to the Salvatore brothers, the ending of "The Vampire Diaries" finally un-frays the ties that bind the two brothers. For all of its soapy power, "The Vampire Diaries" is also about the love — and hate — of family. By the end of the series, Stefan and Damon have been through so much at each other's hands, and so has the audience. The ending finally puts the brothers on equal footing, which makes their closure all the more satisfying, if heartbreaking.

Stefan often seems like the good brother to Damon's bad boy, but let's be honest. These two have killed more innocent people faster than you can say "founding families." While they have both spent time being Elena's most beloved and most hated, they have also both spent a lot of time trying to be better — and that thirst for redemption, rather than blood, is highlighted for both characters in the final episode. When these two reunite in the afterlife, it's a reminder that their relationship trumps even the romantic bonds they forged with Elena and others throughout the show — the Salvatore brothers are finally able to be good with each other again, as well as on good terms with themselves.

Just like "The O.C." was a family drama wrapped in a nighttime teen soap, "The Vampire Diaries" was a found-family drama wrapped in a vampire show. In fact, "family" is the watchword in this show, even more so than "cringey and wrong age-gap relationship" or "way too forgiving of serial-killing vampire behavior."

Family is at the non-staked heart of the ending of "The Vampire Diaries." From Matt and his dad bidding farewell to Vicki one last time, to Alaric (Matt Davis) insisting Caroline save herself so "her" girls have a mother, to a freshly-married Caroline telling Stefan that she understands why he's "choosing" Elena in order to save his brother — family really does come first in Mystic Falls.

It also comes last. Elena enters her "peace" — or heaven, or afterlife, or whatever it is — in her family's arms. The gang's all there: Mom, Dad, Aunt Jenna, Uncle John. But even if Jeremy is still in the land of the living, the point is clear: when we go, "The Vampire Diaries" says, we go back to who our family is. For Elena, it's the family she lost too soon. For Stefan, it's his often-estranged brother Damon, and vice versa. For Caroline, it's the students she teaches at her school. For every character, the tie that binds them is the family they choose to make with each other, all else be damned.

While Stefan might have pulled one last hero move with his sacrifice in the series finale, Bonnie Bennett has done more than her fair share of saving everyone around her for the entire run of the show. In the ending of "The Vampire Diaries" she pulls out one last truly spectacular save. She figures out the magic spell to send the hellfire back to hell, but more than that, Bonnie trusts her magic and herself.

This simple act of self-confidence is powerful enough that Bonnie is able to summon the spirits of Bennetts past. Her family of fellow witches rise up to help her battle the biggest evil she's ever faced. Even Grams (the incomparable Jasmine Guy) shows up to fight by Bonnie's side. The series has been especially punishing to Bonnie, with very little in the way of screentime or romantic rewards — so her epic moment in the finale gives audiences a taste of what Bonnie can do with the show's full storytelling power behind her.

Her story arc also shows that a little confidence goes a long way. Even though Bonnie is somewhat annoyingly coached through her Mystic Falls-saving plan by the spirit of Enzo (Michael Malarkey), when she finally gets to take her passport and leave, it's implied that even Enzo will be left behind. It's Bonnie's era now, and she's going to fully embody it.

"Peace" is a major theme in the ending of "The Vampire Diaries," and the peace that all characters achieve is dramatized as being an actual place. That place wouldn't be in "The Vampire Diaries" if its visual logic wasn't a little confusing. If Elena and Damon both die after living a long and happy human life, why do they appear the same age as they do in the rest of the show? It makes sense that Stefan doesn't age, but are we to believe Elena lives a long life into her twilight years, only to enter "peace" as someone who looks vaguely in her upper twenties, with severely straightened hair?

This puzzling visual logic is never explored by the show. Nor is the fact that, earlier in the finale, sleeping spell Elena is wearing what looks to be a Jessica McClintock prom dress to bed, with heels. Why heels in a dream bed? Why not, says "The Vampire Diaries." Also, of all places and times a dead Stefan could enter his version of peace, why does it begin with Lexi in the high school parking lot?

Is pretending to be a high schooler for a handful of years really so meaningful in Stefan's life that his high school's parking lot is where he would choose to enter eternity? Maybe so. Ultimately, the only logic that ends up mattering in the ending of "The Vampire Diaries" is the emotional logic of grief and peace after life and loss.

Elena's final (vampire) diary entry reads: "This life will be good, and beautiful, but not without heartbreak. In death comes peace but pain is the cost of living. Like love, it's how we know we're alive. And life goes on." And just as life goes on, so does the afterlife.

Many helpful "ghosts" and guardians appear in the final episode of "The Vampire Diaries." They serve as a potent and poetic reminder that we — and our beloved characters — are never without our families, even the members that we and they have lost along the way.

Almost every character gets a tender moment where a "ghost" that's important to them watches over them in some mundane life event. Caroline's mom, for example, makes her presence felt when Caroline drops some papers in her new school. Caroline experiences a positive sensation, whereas in life she and her mom were mostly at odds. It's a moment that demonstrates how emotionally powerful this otherwise very wild vampire soap could be — and a reminder that love lasts beyond life, death, and dimension.

Paul Wesley, who played Stefan, claimed to Entertainment Weekly that he was unaware of his character's demise until he read the script for the series finale, but thought it was the right way to go. "I had been telling them that I think Stefan should die," Wesley said. "He's been the Ripper; he was the one who caused his brother to turn into a vampire. All the murders Damon did were all my fault really, if it comes down to the genesis of it. I just felt like he's been the hero of the story to a degree and it only made sense for him to die at the end."

Obviously, the writers of "The Vampire Diaries" agreed — and so did Nina Dobrev. She told Entertainment Weekly that the series finale was a fulfilling experience, particularly with Elena achieving humanity and finding the peace she craved. "She gets to be with the man that she loves, which is what she always wanted," Dobrev explained. "She gets to say goodbye to her former love and now best friend ... I cried at the end when I read that Elena was writing in the diary again, when Elena basically says the same sentence that I did in the pilot eight years ago."

Showrunner Julie Plec got the idea to explore the theme of "peace" from a much earlier episode in Season 3, and it clinched the finale for her: "For me personally, I am writing a show about that fear of loss and not knowing that someone's okay and not knowing if you'll ever see them again. So watching Anna and her mom reunite in that episode ['Ghost World'] is what launched this whole notion of peace for me," Plec told Entertainment Weekly.

She also admitted that the show's writing team had "just as many discussions over killing Damon as we did over killing Stefan, and let me tell you, for a very long time the pendulum swung the other way." A huge factor in who Elena ended up with in the end was actually dependent on the fact that actor Nina Dobrev left the show for other opportunities in Season 6, only to return for the season (and series) finale in Season 8.

"I felt like we had to make a commitment to seeing Damon and Elena through to the end," Plec told EW in a separate interview. "If Nina had never left, I would've loved to have been able to see if Stefan and Elena could've found their way back to each other ... But her departure sealed the romantic contract between Damon and Elena."

Julie Plec and Kevin Williamson were very torn about which Salvatore brother they should kill in the finale. Ultimately, the writing team chose to make two heroes with one choice, with Williamson telling Entertainment Weekly that Stefan's sacrifice "secured Damon's fate: Now Damon's going to be the hero forever because he has to do that for his brother. And this show has always been about the two of them and their love and their sense of family. And now Damon's going to be worthy of Elena."

"It's no secret I was always a fan of Stefan and Elena ending up together," Williamson said. "In another universe, that would've been the ending, but we didn't have time to tell that story in the last season because we didn't have Elena. We couldn't get them back together." Williamson added, "It's all about who is the better man ... And that's what Damon ultimately learns and he wakes up every morning just to do better and he's doing it for his brother and he becomes the better man. It's an ongoing struggle."

While the writers really considered all their options for the finale of "The Vampire Diaries", the actors that played the vampire brothers with hearts of gold had very different ideas. "Paul and I talk about this all the time ... Damon's 174 years old and in love with an 18-year-old. It's the most unbelievable example of robbing the cradle, first of all. Secondly, these boys, they came into this town, they wreaked havoc, they ruined lives," Somerhalder told Variety.

"We would love to see the two boys go down to the Caribbean somewhere and sit on a beach drinking some 60-year-old Caribbean rum," he continued. "And as the sun comes up, just toast each other, give each other a hug, and take off their rings and throw them into the sea and let them just poof — turn into ash." While the grisly ending Somerhalder and Wesley had planned didn't come to fruition, the two were able to create a more satisfying finish for themselves. The actors started their own bourbon company together, appropriately named Brother's Bond.