Breaking Bad, season 3

Skyler is done. She will not turn Walt in, but she wants him out, and her way of forcing the issue - telling him exactly what she has done and with whom - is the coldest scene of the year. Walt, meanwhile, is offered the thing he claimed to want: out. Three million dollars for three months of work, a laboratory built under an industrial laundry, and an employer, Gus Fring, who behaves like the last reasonable man in the trade.

Two brothers come up from Mexico with an axe and a photograph of Walt. Their business is family vengeance for Tuco, and the way it is redirected - toward Hank, in a parking lot, in the season's most sustained action sequence - leaves Hank half-broken and the cartel short two men. None of it is an accident; the redirection has an author.

Jesse gets clean, gets angry, and starts pulling at a thread: the meth traded on his territory, the boy who works for the dealers, the arrangement his employer tolerates. The season's last movement is Walt choosing Jesse over the operation, twice, in ways that cannot be walked back - a car accelerating on a residential street, and a phone call ending with an address. It closes on Jesse's hand shaking, a trigger, and a man named Gale.