NCIS, season 20

The Raven business ends where the last season left it hanging: a two-part hunt run jointly with the Hawai'i office runs the bomber to ground and puts a face on the name - a manipulator with a years-old grievance and a talent for making other people carry his violence. Parker's frame-up is unwound with the arrest, and the team gets its leader back with the ledger clean.

The season that follows is the Parker era settling in: a year of steady casework - con artists, cold cases, a serial poisoner - with the family maintenance the show now does as well as anything. Torres works his temper like a case file that will not close; Knight and Palmer's slow-building thing finally says its name out loud in the year's back stretch, mid-operation, with the show's characteristic timing.

The season's warmest hour belongs to the past: Ducky, historian emeritus, returns to the building for a case only his memory can unlock - a visit the show could not know it was banking.

It ends with the team intact and the arrangements holding - partnerships named, grudges parked - the calm the franchise usually writes just before it collects.