NCIS, season 17

The opening arc pays the resurrection honestly: Ziva alive because Sahar's network believed her dead, four years underground spent dismantling the threat to Tali and everyone she loves. The hunt runs through safe houses and old debts - Gibbs' guilt for mourning instead of looking, Bishop deputised as her runner - and resolves in the mid-season pair: Sahar unmasked and ended, the ledger cleared, and Ziva, free for the first time in a decade, choosing Paris - DiNozzo, Tali, the family she earned - with the show granting the reunion off-screen as a mercy to its own history.

The year then returns to case scale with relief: McGee's algorithm troubles, Palmer's grief file, a Gibbs-and-a-kid hour of the classic pattern, and the slow assembly of the season's home-front theme - the agency's people, not its enemies, carrying the accumulated weight.

Its ending is history's, not the writers': the production year stops early, and the season closes quietly mid-stride - the last aired hours standing as an accidental finale about the team simply doing the work.