Breaking Bad, season 4

Gale is gone, which was the point: with no replacement cook, Walt and Jesse cannot be disposed of. What follows is a year in a box - the box cutter making the terms clear in the first hour, cameras in the lab, drivers watching drivers. Gus never raises his voice and never stops moving pieces. Walt drinks, rants and plots; Jesse is quietly rebuilt by Mike into something with a job and a purpose, which is its own kind of leverage against Walt.

Hank, recovering, follows a hunch through Los Pollos Hermanos paperwork toward the truth with nothing but patience. Skyler is in the business now - the car wash, the story for the money, the gambling fiction - and discovers she is better at the lying than Walt is.

The cartel demands its settlement, and Gus's answer - a bottle of tequila by a Mexican pool, decades in the making - is the season's clearest statement of who these people are. Walt, out-manoeuvred and marked for death, finds the one ally Gus cannot account for: an old man in a wheelchair with a bell and a grievance.

It ends in a nursing-home room with half a face, and with a potted plant by a swimming pool saying what Walt has actually become.