Cliffhangers, and why they are often dumb

 I’m not necessarily talking about games this week; in fact the inspiration for this pointless, poorly thought-out, badly written, childishly provoked rant was actually Star Trek: The Next Generation. I’ve recently been re-watching several episodes of TNG. In the wake of Star Trek: Discovery, Star Trek: Picard, and all the other recent garbage with the label of “Star Trek” unjustifiably stapled onto it, Red Letter Media released two hours of Mike and Rich talking about their favourite episodes of TNG and this made me want to re-watch some of my old favourites, as well as the one that I don’t remember that well, but were apparently really good.

I’ve been watching them in no particular order, but I recently got around to The Best of Both Worlds, the infamous two-parter where Captain Picard is assimilated by the sinister Borg Collective. This revelation is perhaps one of the most well-known cliffhangers in all of Star Trek: the captain has been assimilated, Riker is now in command, the Enterprise has a way of destroying the Borg cube, the camera pans round to Commander (now Captain) Riker, “Mr. Worf, fire”. Climax the music, “TO BE CONTINUED...”, roll the credits. I have to admit that this cliffhanger is fantastic. Back during the original broadcast fans would have had to wait 6 months to find out what happens next, but in 2020, the next episode is merely seconds away with DVD box sets, which are also outdated by now, aren’t they? Anyway, I start off part II and we have the “Previously on” section, Borg, Picard, assimilation, “Mr. Worf, fire”, and then we hear “And Now The Conclusion”: “The weapon has no effect, sir”.

Really?? We waited 6 months for that?? But then once you think about it, how could they have possibly satisfied that cliffhanger without actually killing Picard and ending the episode after 10 seconds? They simply couldn’t have, which is why cliffhangers are terrible, especially when the conclusion picks-up exactly the exact same moment that we faded to black.

I remember the first time I was let down by the conclusion to a cliffhanger was in a 2006 episode of Doctor Who, I would have been 9 at the time. Picture the scene: the Doctor and his companions are trapped in a parallel Universe, the Cybermen are attacking, the Doctor can’t stop them, he and his companions try to escape but they get surrounded, the Doctor offers a surrender in order to save their lives, but the Cybermen aren’t having it, “You will be deleted”, they declare; “Delete!! Delete!! Deleeete!!” cut to black, roll credits. Next week, the Doctor pulls a thing out that shoots a beam of energy at the Cybermen killing them all instantly. What the fuck? That isn’t clever. That’s just pulling a solution out of nowhere.

Doctor Who has had a problem with cliffhangers since its inception, although it can be far more forgiving in the classic iteration of the show where more episodes ended on cliffhangers than didn’t. It was just more of a “this is where we’re stopping the episode now” –hanger. But in a show like the modern iteration of Doctor Who, or The Next Generation where cliffhangers were only occasion things, usually reserved for the end of a season, it can be very easy to think about the here and now, trying to make the most exciting climax you can think of, but seemingly paying no heed of how you’re going to pay it off for the next episode.

I think the best way of doing a cliffhanger is have the episode end not with an action, but a change of circumstance. For example, if The Best of Both Worlds had ended not with the moment Riker orders Mr. Worf to fire, but with the assimilated Picard on a comm. channel announcing that “resistance is futile. From now on you will service us” or whatever. That would have been much easier to write an interesting conclusion to. In fact the rest of the two parter could have been exactly the same with the part II starting with Riker ordering Worf to fire and finding that their weapons have no effect. It would have been far less of an anticlimax than “Fire!”, six month wait, “it doesn’t work”.

All that being said though, there examples of cliffhangers ending with an action being paid off in a satisfying way, and one example that springs to mind is Half-Life 2. Yeah, couldn’t stay away from talking about games for too long. At the end of Half-Life 2, the final boss has been defeated, the interdimensional portal has been closed, and the citadel’s reaction has shut down. “We’ve got to get out of here” declared Alyx, “maybe, we still have --”, but she doesn’t get to finish that sentence. The reactor explodes, but at that very moment time seems to freeze, the G-man appears, takes Gordon back into stasis and leaves Alyx to die. So how does Half-Life 2: Episode 1 tie off this cliffhanger? Well, it introduces something we’re already familiar with, but using a power that we previously had no idea they possessed. The Vortigaunts, a mysterious and spiritual alien race of allies that have offered cryptic advice throughout Half-Life 2, appear in the same point of frozen time that Alyx was left in, chanting in some strange other-worldly tongue. Most of them don’t even seem to be standing on anything, but they are all, one-by-one, appearing out of nowhere in this frozen instant of time, two then appear either side of the motionless Alyx. Gently they grab on to her arms... and she wakes. As time starts to slowly resume, Alyx and the Vortigaunts vanish.

What the hell just happened? I didn’t know the Vortigaunts could do that! How did the Vortigaunts do that? Why were they all purple with bright blue eyes? What the hell is going on?

That’s one way of paying off an action-based cliffhanger. If that cliffhanger had been paid off in the same style as the Best of Both Worlds, the exploding reactor would have just turned out to be pathetic sparking of broken machinery with Alyx being completely unharmed, looking around, shrugs and then heads over to the nearest elevator.