Bones, season 7

The shortened season opens with Booth and Brennan cohabiting on a technicality and arguing about everything a registry can hold - and the show enjoys the incongruity: the world's most literal woman, pregnant, house-hunting with a man who believes in luck. Christine arrives in the season's middle, delivered in a stable at a prison rodeo because nothing about this family is allowed to be ordinary.

The antagonist changes the show's weather. Christopher Pelant is a hacker with a tracking anklet and total contempt for it - a man who alters records, reroutes evidence and murders through machinery, and whose real weapon is the team's own faith in data. His first full engagement frames Brennan by increments: her car, her search history, her handwriting on a killer's note, until the arithmetic of a trial becomes unwinnable.

It ends with the season's boldest swing: Brennan, out on bail, takes Christine and runs - Max's tradecraft, a goodbye at a christening, Booth watching the car pull away, knowing why and wrecked anyway. The fugitive family drives into the credits, and the lab is left holding a case built by the man who designed it to hold.