Breaking Bad, season 2

Tuco does not stay a business partner; he becomes a kidnapper, and the desert interlude that follows ends his part in the story and puts Hank one room away from Walt without knowing it. The vacuum he leaves is the season's problem: Walt and Jesse try running their own crew, and every step down that road costs someone - a friend of Jesse's is used, a dealer is killed, and Jesse's own standing is spent to keep territory.

Walt's lie collapses at home in slow motion. Skyler tracks the inconsistencies, the second phone, the absences, and by the end she does not need proof so much as an admission. Jesse falls in love with his neighbour Jane, who is in recovery, and their relationship becomes the most dangerous thing in his life for reasons neither of them sees coming.

A lawyer named Saul Goodman arrives and turns out to be the most useful person either of them has met. Through him comes a new arrangement: a cautious, meticulous distributor who deals only in volume and only through intermediaries.

The season ends with a choice Walt makes in a bedroom by doing nothing at all, and with two planes touching over Albuquerque - a disaster that traces, link by link, back to that bedroom.