NCIS, season 7

The premiere is the franchise's best hour: Ziva reported dead in the Damocles sinking, and the team - refusing the report as grief policy - engineering a capture in Somalia to reach the man responsible. Drugged in a chair, DiNozzo tells the truth serum the truth: they came to avenge her. The reveal that she is alive in the next cell, and Gibbs' rifle answering from a ridgeline, close the arc the tarmac opened - and Ziva comes home to begin, deliberately, the paperwork of becoming an American and an NCIS agent in her own right, her resignation from Mossad delivered to her father's face.

The season's second spine is older: Mexico. The cartel figure Paloma Reynosa and her brother surface with a patient grudge, and the file underneath is the series' buried confession - Pedro Hernandez, the dealer who murdered Gibbs' wife and daughter, killed decades ago by a sniper's round nobody ever traced. The year lets Franks, the desert, and an old rifle say what Gibbs will not.

It ends with the past armed: Reynosa holding the Hernandez file as leverage, Jackson Gibbs' general store full of shotgun smoke, and the season closing mid-siege on the question of what the truth about Gibbs is worth.