Vogler, Memo From the Story Department:
The hero returns home or continues the journey, bearing some element of the treasure that has the power to transform the world as the hero has been transformed.
The hero returns home a changed man or woman. They will have grown as a person, learned many things, made new friends and enemies, faced many terrible dangers, and even death, but now look forward to a new phase in life. Their return may bring fresh hope to those left behind, a direct solution to the town’s problems, or perhaps a new perspective for everyone to consider.
Batty - Movies That Move Us:
Physically, the protagonist is located firmly back in the Ordinary World, and perhaps even in the same scenario where the audience previously found him. The difference now is that he has brought back physical treasure, and his emotional transformation is manifested through physical action or reaction. Revisiting a situation from the original Ordinary World suggests that a journey has been travelled, and the bringing back of something physically new makes it different this time; the situation is better. The very end of the screenplay may be punctuated by a physical representation of change, perhaps in the form of a visual image or a line of dialogue, giving final physical closure to the narrative.
Vogler, Memo From the Story Department:
The hero usually overcomes the physical problems and makes progress on the emotional ones, achieving Mastery or experiencing a Sacred Marriage, in which warring opposite sides of a personality are brought into harmony and balance.
Palmer - http://www.crackingyarns.com.au/2011/04/04/a-new-character-driven-heros-journey-2/
Step 12: Complete (Return with the Elixir)
When you watch the 100m Final at the Olympics, you don’t go home after the race is run. You stay for the medal ceremony. That’s what this sequence is all about. We’ve just witnessed some heroics at the climax; now we want to stick around to soak up those overwhelming emotions.
When we first met the hero back in their Ordinary World, they were “Incomplete”. Rick Blaine in Casablanca was hiding from the world, Loretta in Moonstruck was about to marry a fool, and the only list on Oscar Schindler’s mind was the one featuring Gewurztraminers and late-picked Rieslings.
But the story has forced the protagonists to confront their flaws and, at the climax, prove that they’ve addressed them. Their ultimate material circumstances don’t really matter. And it doesn’t matter if they’re still not perfect human beings. The audience will be delivered the catharsis they seek as long as the Hero, by their “Decisive” action, proves to us that they’re “Complete”.
In Brokeback Mountain, even though Ennis has only a flannel shirt to remind him of Jack, we know the character has gained the wisdom that we can’t choose in what form love comes to us.
In The King’s Speech, when Bertie thanks Logue, “My friend”, and his therapist for the first time calls him, “Your majesty” you get the sense that our Hero, after all his travails, is finally fulfilling his destiny.