NCIS, season 10

The bombing's butcher's bill is paid in the premiere - Ducky's heart attack on a beach, the building patched, Dearing run to ground and ended by Gibbs alone in a farmhouse kitchen, a knife answering a grief the season declines to mock. The aftermath year then belongs to the Davids.

Eli David comes to America talking peace with Iran through back channels, and is machine-gunned at Vance's dinner table - Vance's wife dying in the same attack - and the hunt for the hand behind it, Mossad renegade Ilan Bodnar, becomes Ziva's season: grief worked like a case, a chase run half off the books through Berlin and a car crash, and a rooftop in the finale arc where her long accounting with Bodnar ends on her terms, extradition treaties notwithstanding.

The cost lands on the agency. A parsing of who authorised what puts Vance and the team under an investigator - Richard Parsons, building a career on Gibbs' file - and the season closes with the show's cleanest sacrifice play: DiNozzo, Ziva and McGee resigning to take the institutional blame onto themselves, three badges on the director's desk, and Gibbs, in the tag, aiming a rifle on a covert tasking at a target the year refuses to name.