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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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."

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."