This post contains spoilers for Daredevil Season 2, Game of Thrones Season 5, and The Walking Dead Season 6. In other words, if you’re not caught up on your major genre TV shows, now’s the time to stumble towards the door.

There’s been a fatiguing trend on TV of late. As we move out of the shock-you-with-a-main-character-death phase, shows are now fully embracing the fake-out death (a trope, yes, nearly as old as TV itself). For all the ups and downs of Daredevil Season 2, it at least avoided this lazy narrative device that has already worn out its welcome.

The most famous recent example of the fake-out death is Steven Yeun’s Walking Dead character, Glenn Rhee, who fell into a grasping pit of zombies and seemed to have his guts ripped out of his torso early on in Season 6. Turns out: not his guts, not his torso. But the fake TV cadavers have been stacking up big time since the fall. From prestige dramas like The Leftovers and Homeland to genre shows like Doctor Who and Arrow, the only-mostly-dead plots came rolling in. These dramatic “twists” worked with varying degrees of success—I’d argue The Leftovers made the most out of their reversal—but all seemed calculated to whip the fandom up into a frenzy and inspire headline after headline along the lines of “Is _____ Really Dead on ________?” (Guilty.) When the answer kept being no, the question became completely boring.

The most high-profile, recent fake-out TV death, of course, comes from Game of Thrones. The HBO series may have been early to the trend but, unfortunately, the long 11-month hiatus between Jon Snow bleeding out in the courtyard of Castle Black and his inevitable return in Season 6 means the juice has been squeezed out of this story. It’s reasonable to assume that series show-runners Dan Weiss and David Benioff left the threads of Jon Snow’s fate dangling because the plan—we now know—was to let George R.R. Martin resolve the cliffhanger in his forthcoming book, The Winds of Winter. The new novel was supposed to come out before Season 6, giving Martin the chance to be the one to tell this chapter in Jon Snow’s story. Martin was never going to publish A Dream of Spring—the final installment of A Song of Ice and Fire—before the HBO series wrapped up, so giving him Jon Snow’s resurrection was the least Weiss and Benioff could do.

But with or without Martin’s book, Jon Snow’s non-death became an impossible secret to keep. Despite the various half-truths (and some flat-out lies) both the cast and crew were forced to tell, Kit Harington’s continued presence around set made Jon Snow’s return feel as inevitable as an ice-zombie invasion. For nearly a year Harington has had to endure scrutiny on his every move and bang trim, and he’s not the only actor who had to jump through hoops. Norman Reedus of The Walking Dead said of co-star Yeun, “Steven went into hiding and I had to sneak him around. He was in the back of my car lying on the floor with a coat over him. Those were some interesting couple of weeks, for sure.”

Wisely, Daredevil Season 2 steered clear of any of that nonsense. Élodie Yung’s character, Elektra, very famously meets her maker in the Daredevil comics. It’s a sad scene that also played out in the 2003 film version starring Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner. And despite the comic-book reader’s knowledge that Elektra comes back and despite that Garner-led Elektra spin-off that takes place post-resurrection, the Netflix series could have gone the fake-out route. The season easily could have left it with Elektra sacrificing herself for Matt in the finale and dropping these promising last words:

But the show, thankfully, went for zero ambiguity. Daredevil closes out its season on Elektra’s empty grave and her red-silk-clad body in the Hand’s mystical tagine of resurrection just before the screen goes to black.

So that’s it. Elektra’s coming back in some form or another. Élodie Yung doesn’t have to pussyfoot around in interviews. (In fact, she was quite forthright in a recent interview with vanityfair.com.) Elektra’s absence from the final scenes allows Matt to finally come clean about his superhero identity to Karen, a move that will hopefully allow their narrative threads to be more entwined going forward. It also sets up Elektra as a possible antagonist in a future season. Who knows just how she’ll return once the Hand is done with her. But whether she shows up in the future as friend or foe, there will be no narrative fake-out and behind-the-scenes obfuscation necessary. And that kind of clarity is refreshing.