Yes, That Was Nina Dobrev In The Vampire Diaries Season 7 Finale

Confirmed: She really did return for that scene

By Jean Bentley May 14, 2016 12:53 AMTags
The Vampire Diaries CastNino Munoz/The CW

We know what you're thinking after that Vampire Diaries season seven finale: Was that really…? Did she..? 

The answer, friends, is yes. E! News has confirmed that Nina Dobrev did record new dialogue for a particularly emotional scene in the episode, which you could hear over a montage of a vision Damon (Ian Somerhalder) had of him together with Elena .

After Damon managed to kill the Everlasting, a.k.a. the tie that bound Bonnie (Kat Graham) to an unquenchable thirst to murder every vampire in existence (so, all of her best friends in the world), he needed to get the heck out of the vault the Everlasting was locked inside. And he needed to do it as quickly as possible because, as we learned earlier in the episode, the vault also hosted an unkillable evil that's been alive for thousands of years. No big deal!

Just as he was about to get outta there, he heard Elena's voice calling to him—the new dialogue Dobrev recorded for the episode—and saw visions of some of your favorite romantic Delena moments.

At the end of the episode, the characters referred to her again. Season seven has featured each character writing to Elena to fill her in on what she's missing while under a Sleeping Beauty spell (and only able to awaken when Bonnie dies), and at the end of the finale we saw Stefan (Paul Wesley) warn Elena about the evil that has overtaken Damon: "Just know that what happens between now and then, it's not his fault."

read
The Vampire Diaries Finale Will Give You Steroline Closure, Reveal Bonnie's Fate

When Dobrev left the series, she wrote a beautiful tribute to her time on the show. "I always knew I wanted Elena's story to be a six season adventure, and within those six years I got the journey of a lifetime. I was a human, a vampire, a doppelganger, a crazy immortal, a doppelganger pretending to be human, a human pretending to be a doppelganger," she wrote in an Instagram post. "I got kidnapped, killed, resurrected, tortured, cursed, body-snatched, was dead and undead, and there's still so much more to come before the season finale in May. Elena fell in love not once, but twice, with two epic soulmates, and I myself made some of the best friends I'll ever know and built an extended family I will love forever."

Watch: Nina Dobrev Recalls Final Day on Set of "Vampire Diaries"
photos
2016 TV Finale Spoiler-rama!