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[Warning: General spoilers ahead.]

There are some shows where you wait for the season premiere with the anticipation reserved for seeing old friends again. Killjoys is that show for me this summer, and it’s a bittersweet return because it’s the last one. But it’s so, so good to have them on our TVs again, this Friday at 10 pm ET on Space in Canada and Syfy in the US.

As you’ll recall, the Season 4 finale left our crew in quite the lurch, but they didn’t know it, with a whopper of a reset that cast them all into new settings and made them suddenly unaware of their previous lives or relationships to each other. The Lady had made it out of the Green. She’d won.

When we pick up Season 5, Westerley is still in the throes of a happy-go-luckyish existence, and you’d be forgiven for thinking for a moment when the cold open begins that you’d somehow queued up an episode of Bomb Girls with the 40s music and factory vibe. Instead, it’s the new normal, and our characters are here, but they’re slightly off.

The opener, written by series creator Michelle Lovretta and directed by Peter Stebbings (his fourth outing–his first was S1’s “Come the Rain“, which I still love), does a wonderful thing that the cast touched on during my set visit last summer. Our Killjoys and their extended tribe are safe and well, and while they’re not themselves, they’re also not radically different personalities.

We recognize them. That’s a really nifty trick to throw different dialogue and circumstances at characters we innately know and have the writing and acting tease out that our versions are still in there somewhere. It’s a joyful thing to witness.

The action of the episode finds everyone humming along in their new lives, yet still under the quiet, constant threat of contamination from the plant–a handy plot device that I won’t spoil. Dutch and Johnny are now Yala and Johnny, and they run the Royale. D’av is still a Killjoy, Pree is part of the RAC, and Zeph is grasping at the threads of her brilliance without quite being able to assemble all the puzzle pieces. As we saw in the finale, D’av has an open warrant for Jaq, and that sets in motion a chain of events that help rattle some memories loose.

And that’s about all you need to know going in. Look for terrific moments across the board as these new characters still find each other, still connect. There are also a couple of folks in the mix who haven’t been scrubbed, which I love, too.

Killjoys has been a show that can go as dark as anything else on TV and then turn around and be ridiculously, wonderfully silly. The premiere lands somewhere in the middle, easing us back in. It’s a welcome balm for those of us who need it right now. I’m so, so glad they’re back.

Killjoys begins its final season Friday, July 19th, at 10 pm/9c on Space Channel and Syfy. Come join the live Tweet shenanigans with the fans and creative team. All of our Killjoys coverage is here, and you can catch up on all four seasons on demand on the Space Go app and Syfy app and website. Here‘s a look at the season ahead [Spoilers ahoy!].

Photos courtesy of Space Channel.