Inspired, as some of you will doubtless realize, by last night’s season finale of The Walking Dead, in which
[spoiler]someone DIES! Only we don’t know who, except that it wasn’t Rick or Carl. And yes, I’m sure of that. Negan’s orders to his men as he begins the last-minute execution – "Make the rest watch, and if anybody tries to interfere, cut the boy’s remaining eye out and feed it to his father – only makes sense if the person he was about to use for batting practice was someone other than a Grimes. Anyway, the point is that as Negan starts swinging Lucille, it’s not remotely clear which of Team Grimes is getting his or her brains removed.
Oh, and Carol was gravely injured on account of being suicidally depressed, and Morgan did something stupid, and both of them were taken in by an apparently non-villainous group. And Tara appeared at the last minute making out with Beth.
One of those statements may be a lie.[/spoiler]
A lot of people were annoyed by the spoilered non-resolution. And though I was glad to not actually SEE the murder to the degree of detail that was shown in the comic books, I’m among them. But that’s because I dislike season-ending cliffhangers in general. I’m not a huge fan of long-term storytelling in TV shows in the first place; I rather prefer the Law & Order paradigm, in which there are character arcs but for the most part you can watch the episodes in any order without getting lost. But if a series simply must tell extended stories, I prefer each season to be more-or-less self-contained. It’s fine to plant a seed for the next season in the finale, but don’t cut out in the middle of a sequence.
But that’s just me. What do the rest of y’all think?
Don’t wait for the poll, there isn’t one. And while I do have pie, there’s not enough to share.
If the entire season has been building up to one event and that gets pushed back to another season, yes very much so. To the point of completely dropping the show like with The Killing. Having a cliffhanger to set up a new season is fine, screwing the viewers out of a resolution for the current season is a big no.
I can wait. But just so the writers know… I really like this show and don’t need to be tricked into tuning in again in the fall. But it’s not like I’m going to be agonizing all summer over who got killed. We’ll find out when the show starts up again.
I’m old enough to remember “Who Shot J.R.?”, and all the hype and excitement surrounding it. And I fell for the hype. I wasn’t a regular viewer of Dallas, but I tuned in to the season premiere the next fall, because it seemed like the thing to do. Interestingly, the premiere didn’t actually answer the question “Who Shot J.R.?” It confirmed that J.R. was going to live, but you had to wait until three or four episodes into the new season before they finally gave you a resolution to the question everyone was asking. Maybe they didn’t quite know how to do cliffhangers back then.
Cliffhangers “worked” then, to the extent that they worked at all, because it was something surprising and unusual. “Who Shot J.R.?” got so much attention precisely because no other show was doing anything like that at the time. But these days, it’s become an expected part of a program’s seasonal cycle. You know it’s the season finale (and you can’t avoid knowing, because it’s splashed all over the commercials for weeks leading up to it, and very likely every other show on the network is also having their finale that week as well), so you know that there will be a cliffhanger. Heck, even sitcoms often have season-ending cliffhangers these days. Like RealityChuck mentioned about Grimm, it’s possible for the show itself to joke about it, because everybody knows it’s going to happen.
I don’t hate them, but it does kind of irritate me just because it’s so predictable. It smacks of the producers checking things off a to-do list–it’s the end of the season, so we have a cliffhanger. That’s just what you do.
They don’t bother me when they’re on shows that are “healthy”, in the sense of popular and getting high ratings. They serve a purpose of generating interest in the beginning of the next season.
But I really don’t like them when they’re done by “unhealthy” shows, where the literal last thing we see concerning the show is the cliffhanger. That sucks to be left eternally hanging.
What I think is best is when the shows are the standard 22 episode season, but are broken into sub-series separated by a few months, and we have a mid-season cliffhanger separated by a few weeks. You get all the suspense and what-not, without the threat that we won’t ever find out what happened.
Personally, I prefer shows with long story arcs. Cliffhangers I don’t have any particular strong feelings about, beyond the fact that they seem an inevitable consequence of a seasons-with-a-break-between format. I guess if I have any feeling at all about them, it’s that it’s a little bit awkward that major story-changing events need to be spaced uniformly rather than occurring whenever is most natural.
I’m used to them, I guess. I am bothered when a show pads the long term plot to be sure they get their cliffhanger episode. The writers have come up with a good few episode arc and somebody gets the bright idea to make it last half a season and then not fully resolve it so they get the cliff hanger. It makes what could have been good, suspenseful television weak and overdone.
I don’t know if Animal House started the trend, but it’s the first example I remember of a pre-credits rundown of what happens to all of the characters in the future. I always wondered if that was supposed to be satisfying/serious or if it was lampooning the idea that anyone would care about the characters. The latter idea basically sums up how I feel about cliffhangers. The major plotlines, who lives or dies, relationships forming and ending, who gets rich/poor, etc etc, it’s all just an arbitrary framework that the writers come up with to hang the actual entertainment on, which can be witty dialogue, zombie gore, PG TV sexy time, ethical dilemmas that make you think, whatever.
I think cliffhangers are cheap but I really don’t care because I know the resolution can never be epic, it’s always just going to be whatever decision was hashed out in the writers room and won’t really affect my enjoyment of the show in any way. It’s like The Lady and the Tiger, that sort of story only works because there’s no resolution. If you turned the page and it said, “Yup, it was the tiger,” it’s completely unsatisfying because that the outcome was just an arbitrary choice of the author.
That said, my issues with TWD specifically are that the moments of actual entertainment I described above are few and far between, and the rest of the show is spent dryly explaining the framework that the writers have come up with, often without any actual payoff. In that regard, I think writers sometimes mistake cliffhangers for entertainment.
tl;dr – if the show is entertaining I don’t care at all about cliffhangers, but excessive cliffhanging can be a symptom of a lack of entertaining content.
Not so much because I hate cliffhangers, although I do, but because of the extra infusion of artificial drama that creates them. I don’t remember which show this was, a science fiction show I think, where the season would end uprooting the status quo significantly and then the first 3 or 4 episodes of the new season would have to be used up to backtrack the whole thing. Very annoying.
I always liked the way Alias handled its episodes: whenever something was done, the next thing would start even if that happened in the middle of an episode. This is how season need to work, too. The reason is that the amount of time a story arc needs very rarely matches the number of episodes it needs to be crammed or stretched into, so either everything is rushed or there are long stretches of nothing much happening.
These days I tend to save up whole seasons. And then sometimes when I fall out of watching a show with 5 or so episodes to go I just save them, then wait for the next season and watch 10 or 20 or 30 episodes in a row. Most TV is better when you don’t wait an average 1.5 weeks between episodes, anyway.
Yes, I agree with this. Also, a great reliance on cliffhangers seems to indicate that the writers aren’t sure how to keep the interest of the audience. Or, for that matter, how to write actual suspenseful screenplays. It’s more of a cheap trick than anything really worthwhile.
Now, saying that, sometimes cliffhangers can actually be really good, but only if they come sparingly and aren’t use to tease the viewers. If the viewers are waiting for some payoff for an entire season (or half-season), then to delay that payoff for a cliffhanger is just a bad idea.
I don’t mind cliffhangers but I minded this one. We’ve known for a while that this was going to build up to a death of a major character. That was the hook, the shock, the thing that draws us in. Now that we have a death and they don’t tell us who it is, it feels like the show is trying to have its cake and eat it too. Not only do we have a death that’s shocking, but we won’t know for 6 months? They seem to be dragging it out for no reason. The tension that was built up in that last 30 mins, with the chase in the dark and Negan’s speech is supposed to pay off, and now we’re supposed to keep that up for 6 months? That’s bullshit
If we knew who died, then this season’s big payoff would have been there. There would be fan discussions, anger, debate about how the group moves on, what the death is going to do to them, how Rick gets revenge, all that.
For them to hold it off until the first episode of next season makes the pacing kind of weird. We’ll see who dies, then immediately instead of getting angry or grieving or coming to terms with it, we’ll see Rick and company’s reaction to it and move on. It cheapens this finale because most of us will essentially see it the reveal as an extended version of season 6, and doesn’t allow us to move on in anticipating of season 7.
Moreover, there was so much padding in this ep that it was clear the production staff was just screwing with us on both cliffhangers. And if they wimp out and kill
Aaron, most minor character in that group of potentials
I’ll be quite annoyed, not least because
damn it, Daryl needs to have sex at some point, and we all know he ain’t into girls. Beth proved that.
Though I supposed
that if Aaron bites it, his boyfriend Eric will be available.
Cliffhangers can be annoying when they feel like they are messing with the audience, or when it feels like the show is stretching things out in order to have a cliffhanger. The Killing is a good example of it done badly. From what I remember of the show, the first episode was great, and then as the season went on it got somewhat bogged down. Since it was one investigation over the entire season, there were some detours and some people who acted shady just so there could be an episode where they were a suspect until the investigation moved on. So by the end of the season, some people were mainly watching to find out who did it, and then when they didn’t even reveal that, it felt like a cheat.
I felt like Lost did some good season finale cliffhangers because they deepened the mystery, although some might disagree on Lost. The first season of How to Get Away with Murder also did a decent one, because the whole season had been leading towards who killed a character, and that was definitely answered, but then the cliffhanger at the end of the episode was that another character was discovered to be dead.
I think it also has to do with the quality of the show. Fringe and Breaking Bad both had cliffhangers that I was fine with, and it was because those shows were good and I felt like I could trust the show creators. It felt like the cliffhangers weren’t just tricks to get the audience coming back, but felt true to the story, and that whatever happened when the show came back it wouldn’t just be the audience getting jerked around.
Someone in the comments on the Walking Dead recap on io9 summed it up as such:
That applies to most shows and cliffhangers. If the cliffhanger is just to withhold information from the audience in an unnatural way, it’s probably not a good cliffhanger and will bother a lot of the audience. But if it’s setting up things going forward, it can be good and exciting.
The cliffhanger at the end of the season bothers me less than the continuation at the start of the next season. Almost invariably, the cliffhanger points to major, irrevocable changes to the show - a dead character, the world has been infested by a plague, cats and dogs having sex - and then the next season starts and within the first 10 minutes they’ve figured out a way to sweep it all under the rug and reset everything so that the show can continue on with no changes from the way it had always been. I hate the reset button. And I know they’re going to do it, so it ends up annoying me when I see the cliffhanger at the end of a season now.
Or even if they do try and continue the “big honking event” into the new season, after the long break, the tension is gone. The revelation isn’t a big deal any more. So it still just isn’t worth it.
It’s been about twenty five years and I’m still waiting to see how The Alf cliffhanger resolved. Yes, I know there was a TV movie years later. That doesn’t count.
And that’s part of the reason why I prefer long story-arc shows, because they usually don’t just use the magic reset button. When Delenn went into her cocoon, she came out as something different, and stayed different. When Zuko fell completely out of the graces of the Fire King, he didn’t regain his status, he started helping Aang.
