Bones, season 9

The Booths settle into marriage with the show's blessing and its mischief - the honeymoon doubles as a case, the christening wars resume, and Brennan discovers board games are a hill she will die on. The casework year is strong and strange: a body at a science-fiction convention, a ghost-ship, the return of the Ghost Killer thread - a society daughter whose murders were curated away by money, and whose file refuses to close cleanly.

What the Ghost Killer case disturbs is bigger than her: a pattern of evidence massaged across decades, a foreign bank, a name - the McNamaras - and behind it the suggestion of an apparatus inside the government itself, blackmail as infrastructure. The season pulls that thread carefully, aware it is load-bearing.

It ends without warning. Delta Force contractors ambush Booth at home the night he is due to testify about the conspiracy; he survives the assault, is arrested in his own wreckage for the men he killed doing it - and three episodes earlier, in the year's true gut-punch, Sweets closes his last file: killed on a parking ramp carrying evidence, dying on the ground between Booth and Brennan, telling them the world is better than it feels that day.