Cliffhanger Crisis

I was saving "The Hour" for a slower patch in my viewing schedule. It's one of those period British shows with short seasons and smart characters that I tend to like. Dominic West, Ben Whishaw and Romola Garai play the leads, and they're actors who have been great in everything else I've seen them in. The only trouble is that "The Hour" has just been cancelled after two seasons. And to make things even more infuriating, the second season reportedly ends on a cliffhanger that is never going to be resolved. Oh joy.

This is not a rare problem. Having been the fan of many short-lived genre shows in my time, I've had to put up with cliffhanger endings before. "Angel" ended with most of the cast about to go off into battle, and who knows if anyone survived? More recently, there's the possibility that "Alphas" killed off all but one major character in its last episode. And the new "V" left us on the verge of a full-blown alien invasion. There are also plenty of shows that never get around to addressing their central conflicts or wrapping up dangling questions before they had to say goodbye. I'm still nursing a minor grudge that "Eerie, Indiana," a short-lived supernatural mystery show I watched as a kid in the '90s, never explained the origins of the mysterious Dash X. What is an invested fan to do?

Well, we used to be totally out of luck, stuck simmering over the lack of resolution. Fanwork is a good source of unofficial endings, and there are plenty of fanfiction writers who actually a appreciate a good cliffhanger, because they create good jumping-off points for the future adventures of all your favorite characters. Recently, however, creators have been stepping up to provide a little resolution on their own. Joss Whedon continued "Angel" in a successful series of comics. Bryan Fuller is attempting to do the same with "Pushing Daisies," and has provided plenty of teases for possible continuations in other formats. The "Doctor Who" crew released storyboards for a scene that got cut out of an episode last season that would have wrapped up the story for a minor character many viewers were left wondering about. In a few cases, creators of cancelled shows like "Threshold," "Defying Gravity," and "John Doe" have popped up in interviews or extras to shed some light on future storylines or to spill major secrets.

Then again, there's something to be said about leaving them wanting more. I think people tend to overlook the value of a good mystery. For instance, "The Sopranos" ended with that famous cut to black, a deliberate choice made by the creator David Chase. Though initially reviled, it's become one of the most talked about, written about, and endlessly analyzed scenes in the entire show. Did Tony Soprano die in a hit? Was the cut to black a metaphor for something? What about the lack of end credits music? What was David Chase trying to say? It's interesting to look at some of the shows with major cliffhanger endings, thinking of them as true series finales. Suddenly the entire nature of "V" changes. Suddenly it's a tragedy, chronicling how the human race lost the planet to alien invaders. "Alphas" ends on the heroic sacrifice of nearly all our heroes.

Last minute rescues and improbable deus ex machina solutions are so ingrained in the minds of viewers, bad outcomes and tragedies in our favorite television shows can be difficult to accept. I wonder what the response would have been to the BBC series "Sherlock" ending after its second series, which came to a close with "The Reichenbach Fall," an episode with many allusions to the famous story where Sir Arthur Conan Doyle tried to kill off the literary Sherlock Holmes permanently. A third series is on its way to resolve the cliffhanger we were left with, but I think it would have been perfectly fine to let the series end right there, though maybe with a few revisions to remove the big, honking, obvious clues that something else was up. Oh sure, it'll be nice to get more "Sherlock," but there was a nice sense of finality about "The Reichenbach Fall," the kind that few shows ever get. I can't imagine any ending the show comes up with later will match up to it.

Movies suffer the same problem, of course, especially now that franchise pictures are getting more serialized. The sad fact is that more than a few of these big, gargantuan film series are just going to peter out eventually, ending on lesser adventures that fail to make good use of the existing source material. There's a reason why the most successful series tend to be limited ones, designed with an ending already in mind, give or take an extra "Harry Potter" or "Hunger Games" film. Production complications and different financial models mean that few television shows can be done this way, and you really learn to appreciate the ones that can manage strong exits. I'm really looking forward to the "Breaking Bad" finale. Fingers crossed.

Good endings are a rare commodity, and sometimes going out with a bang, with a big, infuriating cliffhanger, beats going out with a whimper. So the long and the short of it is, I think it's high time I watched "The Hour."
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