Breaking Bad, season 5

With Gus gone, Walt builds his own operation: a house-fumigation front, a partnership with Mike and Jesse, a methylamine problem solved by robbing a train. The costs arrive immediately and keep arriving - a boy on a dirt bike who saw too much, Mike's exit delivered by Walt in a fit of wounded pride, ten men silenced in three prisons inside two minutes. Jesse walks away. Skyler counts money in a storage unit and asks how big a pile is enough. Walt, finally, quits - and then Hank picks up the wrong book in the wrong bathroom.

The back half is the reckoning, played at full speed. Hank works Walt in secret; Jesse, burned once too often, works with him. The desert meeting that should have ended it instead brings the season's worst men - Jack's crew - down on all of them, and what they leave behind is a family with a name it cannot use, a brother-in-law in a hole, and Jesse in a cage cooking for the people who put him there.

Walt runs, is hollowed out in a New Hampshire cabin, and comes back for one engineered morning: a ricin capsule for one enemy, a rigged machine gun for the rest, an admission - 'I did it for me' - that the whole series had been waiting for, and a laboratory floor to die on.