Medium killed the husband…what cliffhanger did the other two end on?
I think I am in the wrong thread…I was just coming it to delete that
Even before that, they resolved it in the comic book version.
and a novel if memory serves.
Dark Skies. Space: Above & Beyond. Obviously the most recent X-Files, although it looks like that might now be ocming back again.
One Day at a Time doesn’t end on a cliffhanger, but its “final episode” as it runs in repeats is almost as bad. After a pretty satisfying planned series finale, the following week, there was a backdoor pilot in the timeslot for a show with the character Schneider caring for his orphaned niece and nephew. It was supposed to be a new show, but as a backdoor pilot, it runs with the One Day at a Time opening theme. It’s terrible, and easy to see why it didn’t get picked up. I don’t see why it has to run in the regular repeats. There are other series that have pulled an episode from the rerun schedule for one reason or another.
Anime can be particularly bad for this, as a lot of anime series are adaptations of Japanese manga (comic books) or novel series. The goal of a lot of the anime adaptations winds up being trying to drum up interest (and sales) for the source material. This means that providing a fulfilling ending to all of the storylines isn’t exactly a priority (I have a sneaking suspicion that in some cases, they see ending the series with a lot of stuff unresolved is a feature, as it will drive people to buy the source material to see how things end). Fortunately they usually aren’t total assholes about it. The anime series typically ends with some kind of subplot resolved, but it’s really annoying to get invested in the main plot only to see it go no where, and as I don’t speak Japanese picking up the source material isn’t an option (although some more popular works are getting official English translations that can be bought online).
I’m quite new to anime, so it was a recent series called Re: Zero that introduced me to this trend. It really annoyed me because I was enjoying the series so much: the main plot revolves around a competition for the throne of a fantasy kingdom, with all the political intrigue that implies. Meanwhile, in the shadows a witch is building up forces and unleashing them on the kingdom. In the middle of its all is the protagonist Subaru, an ordinary teen plucked out of Japan by the witch and brought to this fantasy world. Subaru is unskilled and nearly useless in this new world – he can’t even read the local writing system – but whenever he dies he travels back in time, Groundhog Day-style, and gets to try again.
The series ends with a minion of the witch defeated and Subaru reunited with his love interest, but all of the fascinating questions that the series raised go unanswered: what the witch is after, how Subaru fits into her plans and how he can escape her trap, how the competition for the throne will be resolved, etc, etc. It’s very frustrating, especially now that I’ve learned that the book series that it’s based on plans to have enough material for like 10 more seasons. It’s basically impossible to adapt that much, so I don’t expect to ever see an ending to the series.
A couple of weeks ago, I watched the outstanding series Home Fires (BBC, women in a village during WWII). Two seasons straight through, except for the season 2 finale, which I watched in the regular time slot. Several intense plots were left hanging, including a bomb falling on a building where one of the main characters is giving birth, attended by her husband, the doctor, and another neighbor. That’s where it ends, with the bomb buried in the structure! And there will be no third season. Too expensive, not enough of a moneymaker, blahblahblah The writers have shows written halfway through a third season, so maybe someone will pick it up. :mad:
I think there was a TV movie that showed he escaped that fate?
Home Fires is cancelled? Bummer
The ending to The Glades was the first one that jumped to mind. In general, my irritation increases in direct proportion to how easy it would have been to tie things up cleanly and neatly. I mean, I understand if you’re in the middle of a big, complex arc and can’t feasibly slam on the brakes. But The Glades didn’t have anything like that going on. It was your basic police procedural with a sprinkling of character growth thrown in. Change less than a minute of the final episode, give the leads their happy ending and leave it at that. The ridiculously botched ending of Castle is another, mainly because they DID get enough warning to adjust the ending yet they somehow managed to make it MORE annoying.
Yes, there was.
It was way before my time, but I remember my mother talking about a soap opera (Edge of night?) that had a cliffhanger of a character collapsing on the witness stand of a big trial, and the series was cancelled.
Woody’s Roundup. 'Nuff said.
The series finale of The Sopranos was a controversial cliffhanger ending. At least among the series ending episodes I’ve watched, this one gets my vote for worst.
Castle.
There was a lot of controversy as it neared its end of season that Stana Katic was not going to return, apparently because Nathan Fillion didn’t feel like she was a team player outside of the on-camera work. She didn’t socialise enough with the rest of the team, or something. Not sure, but that was the rumour.
So the end of the season had a sudden twist where a gunman was hiding in their kitchen and shot them both. Presumably the idea was Castle would be the sole survivor come season 9. However, they got the news the series was cancelled a couple of weeks before the finale was broadcast, and had pre-planned a sequence as a series finale epilogue just in case.
But it was a clumsy tacked-on unsatisfying bit of nonsense, set years in the future with their kids running around the house, all soft focus and out-of-context with any other part of the episode. Awful.
And what made it especially frustrating is they could’ve done something else as the last-minute season finale. If they had ended it earlier without the gunman twist, and just had them both answering their phones together when a new case came in, cut to black, it would’ve fit with everything else, and been a great way to end it.
It wasn’t a cliffhanger.
There was detailed dissection online of what happened at the end. It made sense. Read spoiler if you want to know.
[spoiler]All through the season each murder was shot in a certain way before it was performed, leaving a subconscious expectation what was going to happen.
At the end Tony seemed to have banished his enemies and was sitting with his family in a restaurant. A man comes in, Tony looks at him, he could be someone bad, but the man goes into the toilet.
The scene is performed like the other murders.
Scene continues. Then sudden black.
The man had gone into the toilet, and, in Godfather type scene, taken a gun out of the toilet cystern, and come in and shot Tony in the back of the head.
[/spoiler]
I have said it before - V (original 1984 - 1985). I was obsessed with this show (yes, I was little). All of the neighbourhood kids played V and Terminator.
They ended it with Elizabeth (the surviving human/alien hybrid) getting on a ship to broker peace with the Leader and Diana has smuggled a bomb on board.
They brought the show back, but it was different and never addressed it.
The ending scene was very polarizing at the time with your spoiler’d dissection being a prominent view. I leaned toward this view but not as set in stone firmness, and also I wanted to see deed being done. The background music of Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” suggested to some viewers that the pending hit would be unsuccessful. If a near consensus has been reached among fans in the past 10 years since the series ended, then I am not aware of it.
Earth 2. Devon Adair, the leader of our band of plucky survivors, has been diagnosed with an incurable, degenerative disease, so they put her into a stasis pod and walk away.