The Vampire Diaries to End After Season 8

It was announced during the show's comic con panel that we'll soon be saying goodbye to Mystic Falls

By Lauren Piester, Jean Bentley Jul 23, 2016 6:35 PMTags

The end is officially here.

The Vampire Diaries' eighth season, which The CW ordered back in March (along with every other show on its schedule at the time), will officially be its last. The news was announced during the show's San Diego Comic Con panel, and was followed by heartfelt goodbyes and an emotional farewell video, which you can watch above.

"It's so rare for a show to get to last this long, and what a privilege that Mark Pedowitz and Peter Roth have allowed us to choose the time to end the journey on our own creative terms," said co-creator and executive producer Julie Plec in a statement. "It's been eight of the best years of my life. I will miss it terribly, but I'm so proud to be here to see it to its proper end."

The CW

"I feel so blessed to have been a part of The Vampire Diaries," co-creator and executive producer Kevin Williamson said. "It has been a magical, thrilling, life-changing experience. Working with Julie and our amazing cast and crew has been one of the highlights of my career and life. At its core, the show has always been about family and that's what we have become behind the scenes as well—one big family. And while it's sad to see it come to an end, I'm thrilled to be back and part of the final chapter. We're very grateful to our loyal audience—they're our family, too—and we hope to say thank you by giving them the last and most epic season ever. Thank you, thank you, thank you."

Williamson, who co-created the show with Plec and left in 2011, was on hand at the panel to announce that he's returning to the writers' room for season eight, and to tease a "final big bad." The season eight teaser revealed that we would be meeting "evil herself," which does not sound good.

It was also revealed that season eight will consist of 16 episodes, and will conclude in 2017.

The CW

Plec told E! News back in January that she'd already begun discussing the end with the Salvatore brothers themselves.

"I finally realized that my destiny on this show, creatively, is tied in to Ian Somerhalder and Paul Wesley. And I mean that in a really good way," she explained. "As long as those boys who I now consider my friends want to keep telling the story, then I won't walk away from telling the story."

A few months later, star Somerhalder told us that he hoped season eight would focus on the show's core characters to give fans a satisfying ending. "I really want to make sure that we get to go back to the basics," he explained. "What made people fall in love with this story was its characters, not 40 of them, like eight of them, six of them—this core group of actors, of characters that really move you."

He added, "We don't know where that's going to go but leaving the audience with the fact that by that time they will have spent eight years of their life with these people, I want the audience to feel closer, more afraid, more in love, more in tune with these characters than they ever have been."

The final season of The Vampire Diaries debuts Friday, October 21 at 8 p.m. on the CW.

Watch: Paul Wesley and Ian Somerhalder Play "TVD" Game