About season´s 4 finale, what it has to do with Jeremy ...

SPOILER ALERT!
If you haven´t seen Graduation 4x23 don´t read what´s next.

The resurrection of Jeremy Gilbert: "Vampire Diaries" fans are used to characters dying -- and occasionally, they pop back up later, whether it's as a vampire or as a ghost. Still, we were (pleasantly!) surprised to learn that Jeremy was coming back from the grave permanently, particularly because his goodbye episode was so heart-wrenching. Didn't the writers worry that resurrecting him would dull the impact of his beautiful, memorable send-off?

"It's something that we talked about a lot," Julie says. "Our intention, originally, was to say goodbye [to Jeremy] permanently. But then a lot of questions came up about the power of this girl losing her only living relative. It was so important to her journey at that moment. The global, eternally reaching tragedy attached to that is really sad, and really depressing."

Though Jeremy had to die in order to push Elena into the next phase of her life as a vampire, the writers quickly realized that it'd be impossible to bring her back from that dark, desperately tragic point in her life unless they revived Jeremy. Without him, Elena was looking down a long, black tunnel of depression -- and that wouldn't make for a particularly lively Season 5.

"We argued a lot, in the writer's room -- could we successfully bring this character back in a way that wouldn't feel cheap? Ultimately, I think that the way that it plays out, it does feel like the natural gift at the end of the season for this character that has been through so much," she explains.

Now Elena has a chance at some happiness in Season 5. "[Getting Jeremy back] resets her, in a way, where she can now get on with her life and live like the Elena that we know," Julie says. She is cautious, because she knows that some viewers might not be pleased with the loophole Jeremy steps through to return to the land of the living. "Critically, you can look at something and go, 'Well, that's a take-back, it's not fair,' but emotionally, I think, it's a positive. We might get hammered for it. We'll see. I'm hoping people will be so glad to see our Elena pull her life back together, they'll accept it."