NCIS, season 9

The season runs warmer than its neighbours: DiNozzo untangles the covert assignment's fallout, McGee's grandmother and Ziva's citizenship get their hours, Jimmy Palmer plans a wedding, and the cases lean into the show's middle-age confidence - a body on the flagship, the mentalist episode, the year's running joke about Gibbs' door.

Its long arc wears a suit. Harper Dearing, a defense contractor turned grieving father - his son dead on a ship whose known flaw the Navy priced and shipped anyway - begins engineering deaths that read as accidents, then as messages. The season is slow to say his name and right to be: by the time the agency understands it is the target, Dearing has mapped its buildings, its cars and its habits better than security ever mapped him.

It ends with the case arriving at the front door. A car bomb in the navy yard, the finale cutting through the building in slow motion - glass, smoke, every principal down and unaccounted for - and the year stopping mid-blast, the show's biggest cliffhanger staged in its own parking lot.