Bones, season 5

Booth comes back from surgery with his aim recalibrated and his memory intact except where it matters. The season runs its cases with the old rhythm - a psychic's tip, a body in a chocolate vat, Nigel-Murray's facts - while the show circles its own foundation: the hundredth episode replays Booth and Brennan's actual first case, before the pilot, when a kiss in the rain and a tequila argument ended with her walking away and both of them pretending otherwise for six years.

The revelation destabilises the present. Sweets, whose book about them insists they are in love, pushes Booth to gamble; Booth does - says it plainly, in front of the Hoover - and Brennan declines with the season's saddest arithmetic: she cannot change, and he deserves someone who can. They keep working. It costs exactly what it looks like.

The Gravedigger stands trial and the team's own buried histories become the defence's ammunition; the verdict holds, barely. Angela and Hodgins, locked in a jail cell over a contempt charge, get married for real by the judge who put them there.

It ends with everyone scattering on purpose: Brennan to a dig in Indonesia, Booth to train soldiers in Afghanistan, the lab team on their separate leaves - a one- year pact to meet at the coffee cart, all of them fleeing the same conversation.