My girlfriend and I were binge-watching some science fiction show I hadn't heard of. It turned out to be four seasons long.
The first episode opens on an open-air marketplace. A set of elaborately filigreed double-doors swing out from an imposing wall. Two soldiers (one male, one female) in early middle age step out, carrying a baby girl. They are followed by an imperial scholar. They close the door behind them and begin discussing where they should go to keep her safe.
On their way to the agreed-upon hideout, they encounter an orphaned toddler boy, who is instantly fascinated with them, and sticks to them like glue. The girl exhibits some ability at magic, and the boy come to completely idolize her, wanting to be just like her in every way.
Apparently this setting's magic is one of those things where anyone can learn, but the singularity of focus required is so difficult that, most people never manage to start training. The girl exhibits a prodigious aptitude for it, and the boy is essentially normal, but has still begun at an extremely early age, and so is likely to become a once-in-a-millenium-level expert. The scholar guide them in the tropey "vague-but deep aphorism" way, but didn't start learning till college, so isn't nearly as strong as these small children. The boy is very stubborn, which is a mixed blessing, as it gives his magic raw potency, but makes it difficult to adapt to the new paradigms required to do different things. The girl, on the other hand, is extremely intelligent and creative, and so always takes to new tasks with ease, but she's also quick to abandon ideas, and has to learn patience in order to keep the effects from fizzling out as soon as they become obvious.
Each episode ends with the soldiers shuffling them all off to a new hiding place, on a different world, either because they've been in one place too long, or because the children did something overly attention grabbing.
Over the course of the first season, the boy and girl become best friends, train in magic, and they grow to roughly kindergarten age, in real-world terms. For this season, the only source of visible conflict is the conflict between the children's desired abilities, and the actual state of their abilities. It becomes apparent to the viewers that we're in a post-apocalyptic setting, where there was a vast, interstellar civilization that collapsed for unknown reasons, and every different place has a different improvised system in place to achieve local subsistence.
In the second season, the boy has become jealous of the girl. He's older, so he should be stronger, and smarter, and better than her. He's gone from her best friend to our primary antagonist, and frequently instigates situations that could kill the girl and her guardians, not because he wants them dead, but simply because he wants to prove himself stronger, no matter what. (As the first conflict of this season starts, I comment to my girlfriend that this is terrible writing, and the boy's characterization had completely changed in order to artificially shake-up the character dynamic.) The boy has stopped hiding with them, but, just as in the first episode, can track them uncannily whenever they move to a new hideout. There is a protracted scene of them competing to conjure the tallest tower, which keeps alternating between the boy's and the girl's being in the lead, before the boy starts conjuring additional obstacles to distract her or incapacitate her from continuing. This season takes us from kindergarten to early teens. The scholar's role diminishes over the course of the season, until the writers seem to have completely forgotten he exists. The season ends with the boy accepting that being second-best at something is still valuable, and rejoining the team. (Again I comment that this unrealistically sudden and drastic character shift is bad writing.)
Season three has no distinctive memorable moments, but contains gradual paradigm shifts: the boy and the girl go from children to adults, from friends to lovers, and from obeying the soldiers to commanding them. As our main characters become more aware of the world, we the audience, gradually become aware of the setting's back story:
⇳ Click to Expand Summary
galactic society started as a democratic and egalitarian federation of planets, with faster than light ships from any world to any other, and constant exploration of new frontiers, but the advent of instantaneous transportation via hyper-gate replaced interstellar journeys with a stagnant network of static connections between worlds. As people became accustomed to instantaneous transport between worlds, nobody had the patience for long journeys of exploration any more, and the boundaries of civilization solidified. As society stopped expanding, wealth and resources turned into a zero-sum game, with no new supplies coming in from anywhere. Additionally, breakthroughs in genetic manipulation allowed the wealthy to design children with radically increased mental and physical abilities, leading to a renaissance of eugenics and racism, as the well-off deliberately chose to make their children into psychopathic narcissists with no psychological barriers preventing them from exploiting others in the extreme. These new racial strata ossified into a feudalist hierarchy, with a cunning emperor assuming total authority, and restricting access, first to designer offspring, but eventually all education and technological progress, to the imperial family only. Society reached an equilibrium where nobody's quality of life improved or declined over time, and stagnated for a millenium. And then aliens breached the gate network. They had no interest in domination or politics, only access to natural resources, so they cleared humanity from vast swathes of every world, but largely ignored population centers. However, when humans sent forays out to try to regain control of areas, or steal resources, these were traced to their sources, and those sources were eradicated, much as we do when we find a trail of ants in our home. And so, the emperor, and the entire imperial court, were slaughtered... Except for two guards, one knowledge keeper, and the empress heir.
Tl;dr: society was a stagnant monarchy that got eradicated by the zerg, and our girl was the newborn heir to the imperial throne, hastily smuggled away by her two guards. Also, the palace runs on an energy source that could annihilate the galaxy if it were to destabilize, so now that she's ready, she needs to reassume control of the palace. Season finale is them returning to the gate from the first scene, and stepping back through.
The entirety of season four takes place in the abandoned imperial palace temple. The imperial hypergate opened directly into the throne room, which left them totally vulnerable to the exterminating aliens. The aliens had no interest in governing, so simply left once they had eliminated the primary source of human resistance. However, the palace has advanced technomystical automated security systems. This part gets really weird. The girl has to overcome all sorts of weird trials, which involve de-aging her guards by twenty years, duplicating herself and momentarily allow one version to die in order to merge with the palace guardian, and mysteriously having a daughter offscreen. She finally reaches the system core, and the final security barrier before she can gain full control over the palace systems is that she must tell it who the father is.
Final scene: she answers that
she is the father, and is granted control over the system, and then instantly disappears, leaving the two guards with her daughter. The search the palace for her, and find only a royal knowledge keeper, who tells them that they must keep the girl safe, and rushes them back through the gate. As it fades to credits, we hear the gate clank shut, and the ambient noise and first lines of dialogue from the first episode, revealing that this whole series has been a time loop.
(Here I wake up, roll over, fall back to sleep, realize the guards must be aware of the fact that they're in a time-loop, and start dreaming progressively less coherent alternate ways for the final season to go when they get back to the palace this time)