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.