On The Vampire Diaries season 6 finale we said goodbye to Elena Gilbert and a few other characters, but said hello to a bunch of new drama.
The wedding aftermath
After Kai attacked there are several people hurt and/or killed, and Damon tries to feed Elena his blood but it doesn’t work. Caroline and Stefan tell Damon to take her to the hospital and he does, but then Kai snaps Caroline and Stefan’s necks. He confronts Alaric, who’s holding a dead Jo, and then Kai’s family starts saying a spell to return him to a prison world. But then Kai stabs himself in the neck because if he dies, they all die with him.
Kai
Unfortunately for everyone Kai does die but because he has Lily’s blood in his system he wakes up as a vampire. He comes across Alaric who just finished putting Jo away and about to commit suicide, but then Alaric attacks. It doesn’t work — so Alaric tries shooting himself but there aren’t any bullets. Luckily Tyler comes and since he broke his curse he bites Kai and runs off.
Kai heads to the hospital where Elena is being kept and Damon demands to know what he did to her. Since Kai is dying from the werewolf bite and is desperate for a cure he tells him about his plan connecting Elena and Bonnie.
Bonnie Bennet
Damon calls Bonnie who is okay, and Damon explains what happened. Elena is at the hospital but the doctors say there’s nothing physically wrong with Elena, so Bonnie decides to head over.
She heads to the Salvatore Mansion and finds a video that Kai left for her, revealing that he linked Bonnie’s life to Elena’s, except he twisted it: As long as Bonnie is alive, Elena will be asleep and preserved the way she currently is. And if Bonnie tries to figure out some sort of magical way around the link then Kai rigged it so they both die instantly.
Matt tells Bonnie to run out of town because as long as she’s there Damon is going to want to kill her. Kai goes back to the wedding area to see if anyone alive has blood he hasn’t drained yet and Bonnie shows up, demanding that he reverse the spell. She says she can just wait for him to die from the bite anyway, but then Kai realizes that werewolf venom has/is magic, and so he siphons the magic out of it and suddenly he’s healed, and he throws Bonnie against a wall.
Damon shows up, and Kai gives him an ultimatum: Let Bonnie die from a collapsed lung or kill her himself and never be forgiven by Elena. But he one-ups Kai, and walks away from Bonnie to let her die. Kai is confused, but then Damon shows up behind him and decapitates him, saving Bonnie afterwards.
Tyler and Liv
Tyler got stabbed with a shard of glass in his chest, but luckily he’s still alive. He’s next to Liv, who’s dying because Kai is now dead. Liv wants Tyler to trigger his werewolf curse since it’s a full moon and it’ll heal him, and they say they love each other before Tyler ends up killing her.
Tyler calls Matt to tell him that he’s triggered the curse and every vampire needs to stay away from him.
Caroline and Stefan
Visiting Elena, Caroline and Stefan end up talking about how in love with Elena Stefan was. But then Stefan says that yeah he was in love with her, but he realized she was the only person that truly loved Damon and showed him that Damon was still worth loving.
They establish that Stefan has moved on, then Caroline walks away. Again. But later in the episode they get back together, and Stefan says he made a list of the ways loving Caroline has changed his life, and he says he will wait for Caroline for however long it takes for her to be ready for him.
The Vampire Witches
Caroline and Stefan wake up in the back of Enzo’s car who’s bringing them to help deal with Lily. She’s still at the address Kai gave her looking for her friends, thinking they must be hidden in one of the hundreds of shipping crates.
Stefan is trying to convince Lily to stop searching for them, but she won’t give up Then Stefan asks what she gave Kai in exchange for help getting out of the prison, and she tells Stefan she gave him her blood.
The next day Enzo returns to find Lily still looking, explaining why she wants to find her friends so badly. They then discover a building that wasn’t there last night, and Lily finds her friends.
The goodbye
After the events of the night and when everyone is safe they gather at Salvatore Mansion with Elena in a casket. Since Elena is preserved until Bonnie dies, they’ve decided to keep her safe so that Bonnie gets a chance to live a long life, and when Bonnie naturally dies she’ll be able to wake up.
They each get inside of Elena’s head so they can say goodbye and it’s emotional as all hell. Elena and Alaric training with boxing, Matt and Elena throw flowers off Wickery Bridge, and Stefan and Elena take a really long hike. Even Jeremy shows up to say goodbye to his sister at the old spot in their high school.
Damon and Elena dance the night away as Damon says he’ll wait 60 years or more for her to return to him.
The kicker comes when Bonnie says goodbye and Elena asks her to do the feather thing again. That’s when we all shut down and cried for an hour.
They put Elena’s body in a casket and put it in the Salvatore family crypt, where Bonnie puts a spell on it so no one can try to get to the cure that Elena has.
A peak into season seven
Several years later, Matt is policing around an abandoned and wrecked Mystic Falls, and Damon is atop the Mystic Falls watch tower. What happened?! We’ll have to wait until next fall to find out.