Good Wife seems to have ended each season with a Huge Crisis that more or less blows away in the first few eps of the next. That’s probably stretching the model, though, and isn’t too uncommon anyway.
I don’t really buy that. Col. Greene would have loved to charge Magnum. If he was forced to cover it up, it would have affected how he treated Magnum in later episodes.
I don’t know what happened, but I doubt it was an official coverup. And what of the driver? I hope they didn’t shoot him, because he could testify to Rick being there.
If they’d have just made a passing mention to Magnum claiming self-defense, we wouldn’t have this unresolved ending. Plus, the ending still makes Magnum a murderer, no matter how you slice it. I don’t care if Ivan deserved it 10 times over, it’s still murder.
Current sitcom Superstore has just started season 2. Season 1 ended with all the characters being fired, and the assistant manager/ loss prevention specialist promising them to not worry because [Wal*Mart] the corporation will have them all replaced with no interruption in the store’s business.
Season 2 opened with everyone back at work, no mention of the mass layoff.
That’s exactly right. The gunshot is a perfect dramatic end to the episode. However now they have a dead Russian diplomat/spy that someone is going to miss and Thomas just murdered. The next episode is a Simon and Simon crossover.
Season two of 24 ends with a sudden, surprise assassination attempt on President David Palmer. Season three is set over a year later, with everyone basically saying, “Gee, good thing we got out of that situation okay, eh?” :smack:
The Simpsons has a number of episodes which end in unresolved cliffhangers, though it’s mostly played as a joke. One example is the episode which was a parody of The Prisoner, which ends with the family still trapped on The Island.
Farscape nearly ended in a big cliffhanger if they had not gotten to make a movie to wrap it up. It would have been excruciating. Main dude and main girl died. Spoiler: they come back.
Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles ended with a total cliffhanger, something about a new present timeline where no one knows who John Conner is.
Hannibal ended with both Will and Hannibal jumping/falling off a cliff.
Angel brilliantly ended with the heroes in various states of health, all heading off to kill demons and a dragon. “Let’s go to work.” was the final line. Awesome.
I think 30 years is the spoiler statute of limitations.
Ok, but that’s more of a tying up loose ends problem, not a cliffhanger. If you’re not desperately waiting to find out what happens next, it’s not a cliffhanger.
Rosebud shot JR.
Didn’t Mork & Mindy end season 4 with a cliffhanger, the world knowing he’s an alien, and the show was never picked up? I’d read somewhere that season 5 was going to be Mork trapped in limbo bouncing around through time and landing in different eras.
Yeah, but it also spoils the remake, “Terms of Enrampagement”.
But how do we know Magnum actually killed him?
Do you think Thomas missed? Did my mother cry for nothing?
Did you see Regis this morning?
Yeah, Thomas kills a few people that they never talked about again and he never had to answer for. I imagine IRL someone in their respective organizations would want to avenge LeBull, or that Chinese gangster guy that blinked before he struck.
And you’d certainly expect there to be some fallout from the samurai who stabbed half a dozen ninjas at the airport.
Note to everybody: I’m not going to hijack my own thread, you can talk about what you want, but in my mind I was specifically not talking about last episode unresolved scenarios. “Cliffhanger” was probably not be the right word, I was more thinking of things like a character losing all their money in an episode, with creditors lining up to take him apart, yet spending as normal in the next with no apparent source of income. The Hawaii 5-0 example Folacin gave is ideal.
That’s what I was going to say. My example does not fit the OP exactly but it is closer than episodes that became unresolved cliffhangers because the series was cancelled.
The episode “Conspiracy” On Star Trek: The Next Generation had a parasitic enemy almost take over Star Fleet. The main bad guy slug sends out a signal into deep space presumably for back up. It felt like it was the start of a long story arc…it wasn’t.
Thats just what they want you to think.
It was intended to be the introduction of the Borg, but they rethought the concept.