Main Tropes Index

Troperville

Editing

Tools

Toys

Narrative

• Universal
• Applied Phlebotinum
• Characterization
• Characters
• Characters As Device
• Dialogue
• Motifs
• Narrative Devices
• Paratext
• Plots
• Settings
• Spectacle

Genre

• Action Adventure
• Comedy
• Commercials
• Crime And Punishment
• Drama
• Horror
• Love
• News
• Professional Wrestling
• Speculative Fiction
• Sports Story
• War

Media

• Animation (Western)
• Anime
• Comic Book
• Fan Fics
• Film
• Game
• Literature
• Music And Sound Effects
• New Media
• Print Media
• Radio
• Sequential Art
• Tabletop Games
• Television
• Theater
• Videogame
• Webcomics

Topical Tropes

• Betrayal
• Censorship
• Combat
• Death
• Family
• Fate And Prophecy
• Food
• Holiday
• Memory
• Money
• Morality
• Politics
• Religion
• School

Other Categories

• British Telly
• The Contributors
• Creator Speak
• Creators
• Derivative Works
• Did Not Do The Research
• Language
• Laws And Formulas
• Show Business
• Split Personality
• Stock Room
• Trope
• Truth And Lies
• Truth In Television
• Weirdness Isolation

Is this the tragic end of me?
Or will the sequel set me free?

The Aquabats, "Stuck In A Movie!"

A Cliff Hanger ends an Act Break, episode, or even a whole season with some or all of the main characters in peril of some kind and the audience is made to wait for the outcome. Typically the longer the viewer is made to wait, the larger the seeming peril.

A Cliff Hanger can also be centered around surprising revelations; either one just made, or one being saved for the 'hanger's resolution.

Named for the old Saturday matinée film serials which would frequently leave a character literally hanging from the side of a cliff, revealing how the character escaped in the next episode.

The season type of 'hanger has a flaw: if the show gets canceled, the 'hanger stays unresolved. A few such 'hangers are listed below. This is not to be confused with a Bolivian Army Ending, which is an intentionally unresolved cliffhanger as an ending. If this happens, the cliffhanger may be resolved in a movie or miniseries later on. Or, it may not... and that's why we have Fan Fiction.

Stories need not end with just one cliffhanger; there can be one for every independent plot thread if the writers think the audience will stand for it.

Myth Arc, Mind Screw, and Jigsaw Puzzle Plot series all use cliffhangers as often as possible, some of them with every episode.

This site contains a comprehensive list of unresolved cliffhangers.

---

Cliffhangers that were resolved normally:

• Doctor Who was famous for this and did once have a companion (Romana in this case) hanging off a cliff (Episode 1 of "The Stones of Blood" to be exact). In Episode 1 of "Dragonfire", the Doctor himself climbed over a railing for no apparent reason and then dangled from an umbrella making stupid faces.
• Lost regularly milks cliffhangers of both types for all they're worth, and Heroes is jumping in with both feet too.
• Also a staple of J.J. Abrams' other serial Alias, as as acknowledged nod to The Perils of Pauline. Almost to the point of annoyance.
• Peril 'hanger: At the end of Angel Season Three, Angel is put in box and sunk to the bottom of the ocean and Cordelia becomes a higher being and disappears. Huge cliffhanger.
• Every single Farscape season ending.
• Revelation 'hanger: When Clark asks Lois to marry him on Lois And Clark and she says, "Who's asking? Clark or Superman?" This cliffhanger lasted for four months.
  • Four months? It was a year in the UK. Frustration ensued, especially as UK viewers are less habituated to cliffhangers...
• The Adventures Of Brisco County Jr made regular use of cliffhangers. The early episodes had two cliffhangers (one for each act break). Later episodes had one.
• Fastlane has two major characters being taken over by Jay Mohr, and another jabbed with a potentially-fatal overdose of drugs.
• The first season of Stargate Atlantis ended with the city of Atlantis on the verge of another wraith attack, Ford captured by the wraith, Colonel Everett surrounded by them, and Major Sheppard flying a booby-trapped puddle jumper on a suicide mission towards a Wraith Hive-ship.
  • The second season ended with several Wraith hive ships headed towards Earth.
  • The third season ended with the city stuck in the middle of empty space with limited air and a failed hyperdrive. Even if Jewel Staite was entering the show as Kaylee rather than Doctor Keller, it's a bit tricky to imagine them fixing it.
  • Season four ended with the slightly less impressive cliffhanger of an building collapsing on the team.
• Likewise, parent show Stargate SG-1 ended almost all of its seasons with cliffhangers of varying magnitude, all with the ominous "To Be Continued..." caption.
• Even anime has done season-ending 'hangers, with The Big O and Zoids Fuzors, not to mention a cliffhanger of truly staggering size at the end of Season 1 of Code Geass (mentioned in detail below).
• Dallas relied on a season ending Cliff Hanger every year. The most famous was "Who Shot JR?" in 1980, which lasted from March 21st to November 7th.
• Star Trek has had a Cliff Hanger in nearly every non-final season since Star Trek The Next Generation's Season Three. It's no coincidence that that cliffhanger, "The Best of Both Worlds", is considered to be the best episode of the entire series (and good arguments are made that it's the best episode of the entire franchise. Edith Keeler might disagree, though...)
• 24 typically uses a cliffhanger at the end of each episode. The show also featured a season-ending cliffhanger in the final seconds of season 2, which, irritatingly enough, was subverted when the third season picked up three years later and the cliffhanger had already been resolved.
• Subverted in the South Park episode "Professor Chaos", which appears to end on a cliffhanger: "Will Professor Chaos' latest plot succeed and be the final undoing of Earth? And which boy has been chosen as the replacement for Kenny? And which of these South Park residents was killed and will never be seen again?" Right before the episode ends, all these questions are answered (with "No", "Tweek", and "Ms. Choksondik").
  • South Park also squeezed the concept for all the humor and frustration they could in the "Who is Eric Cartman's Father" two-parter, "Cartman's Mom Is a Dirty Slut" and "Cartman's Mom is Still a Dirty Slut". They teased the fans mercilessly by splitting the two episodes up with an unrelated full-length Terrance and Phillip story.
• Spoofed on Homestar Runner in the Strong Bad Email "cliffhangers", where Strong Bad is asked by a fan to "Resolve all the cliffhangers, please". After showing three mock cliffhangers, the email ends on an actual cliffhanger when Strong Bad's Lappy 486 computer gets stolen.
• The beginning of the new Doctor Who episode "The Impossible Planet" has a Shout Out to the Cliff Hangers of the old series. In The Teaser, the Ood, who look like Lovecraftian horrors, walk toward the Doctor and Rose chanting "We must feed", and the close-ups and spinning camera angles match the old Who's Cliff Hangers perfectly. Naturally, after the titles, the Ood are shown to be perfectly nice and friendly, with their apparent viciousness being a Phlebotinum Breakdown: "We must feed..." — whacks the translation orb — "...you, if you are hungry. Do you want refreshments?"
• ER does this pretty much every season.
• CSI ended its seventh season with Sara Sidle stuck in the middle of the desert (during a rainstorm) and trapped under a car. This was because the Serial Killer had put her there.
  • Its eighth ended with Warrick Brown apparently shot dead by the Undersheriff.
• Parody: Terror Island theorem 099 ends with a caption saying "Cliffhanger!" but it was resolved in two days, which is the usual time between strips.
• Meta-example: The cliffhanger was part of Scherezade's desperate gambit to keep herself from being executed in Arabian Nights, as she told the evil king a series of stories for one thousand and one nights, ending each night on a cliffhanger so very enticing that he could not execute her, because then he would not get to hear the ending. Thus, the cliffhanger is Older Than Print.
• The anime Code Geass ends its first season on a particularly high Cliff Hanger: the rebellion is collapsing, the entire school is being held hostage by a student with a bomb, the Anti Hero's identity is revealed to his now bloodthirsty former best friend, and the situation devolves into a rage-filled Mexican Standoff... just to fade to black in time for a single gunshot.
  • Let's be perfectly honest here. Code Geass has a very, very, VERY nasty habit of leaving cliffhangers at the end of every single episode, at least in the first season. The season is basically a 25-episode cliffhanger, ending with a scene that quite often leaves viewers screaming at the top of their lungs at their screens. This troper can only wait to see how the Adult Swim boards react when that one gets thrown out...
    • It's not nearly a big a deal in the Adult Swim broadcast, as there was only an extra week between the first season finale and the second season premiere (not to mention the second season premiere came with a slightly less impossible airslot and was viewable on Adult Swim's website before that).
  • And then comes the second season, where every. Damn. Episode. Ends with a cliffhanger of cosmic proportions and every second one is a Wham Episode, to boot.
• Season 3 of Babylon 5 ends not only on a cliffhanger, but a cliffjumper as the main character flings himself into a bottomless chasm.
• Season 3 of The Sentinel ended with one of the main characters having been drowned in a fountain by an evil female Sentinel and a "To be continued"...at which point the show was cancelled. Fan outrage helped get it uncancelled for a half-season, long enough to resolve the storyline and come up with a less depressing finale.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2003) was fond of the season-ending cliffhanger: three of its six seasons (1,2,4) end this way. Season 4's cliffhanger is notable for being in danger of never being properly resolved, since for never-quite-adequately-explained reasons, the people behind the show decided to skip season 5 and go from season 4 to season 6 without explanation, ignoring the cliffhanger. After several delays, the "Lost Season", as it came to be called, began airing on February 2008—a year and a half later than it would have, had it aired normally.
• Season One of Supernatural had demonic possession of John and Dean being tortured and Sam is trying to get them both to the hospital, saying that everything will be fine... and then *WHAM!* a giant truck totals the Impala, leaving all three men bloody and unconscious.
  • This was nothing compared to season 3. Where Dean dies and the last shot is of him in Hell.
• Parodied in the first episode of Magical Project S, which ends with the then-faceless Pixy Misa saying "you'll have to wait until next week to see who I am".
• The Simpsons Did It: Who shot Mr. Burns? Obvious homage/parody of Dallas.
• Whether on purpose or not, Misfile's weekend breaks usualy fall just as it seems some new tidbit of plot information will be revealed or that something exiting will happen. Fans of the comic have taken to calling them "Chrishangers," after the artist.
• The author of the webcomic Sequential Art recently managed to pick the most irritating part to his break with the comic.
• EVERY season finale of One Tree Hill.
• Third Watch had Cliff Hangers after its third, fourth and fifth seasons - the latter two both involving Bosco, Faith, Cruz, and a shooting.
• Even sitcoms aren't immune - most of Frasier's season finales ended on a cliffhanger - the biggest one being the end of Season 7, where Niles and Daphne finally got together.
  • Even the Grand Finale ended on a minor cliffhanger. The only seasons not to end with one were 1, 2, 3 and 6.
• Beast Wars tended to pull out the stops at the end of a season. According to the writers, they were never sure if there was going to be another season, so they wanted each cliffhanger to possibly be the end of everything.
• In Golden Sun, you have only managed to climb up one of the four Elemental Lighthouses when you reach the final Dungeon, Venus Lighthouse. If you haven't been reading a guide (or spoiled by this example) you'd assume you were halfway through the game. To be fair, the game does provide some hints, the Infinity Plus One Sword is contained inside, and the music does lend the tower a tone of The Very Definitely Final Dungeon. But once you reach the top, the game throws both the main antagonists of the story at you, you beat them, then they combine and throw the Final Boss at you. Once you beat that, the game just ends. The missing friends are still missing, the party travels off to parts unknown, and the credits roll. Quite an impressive feat, making a very big cliffhanger that wasn't resolved for a few years when the second game came out.
• Smallville. Every single season of Smallville.
• Sonic Chronicles ends with a major cliffhanger. After getting brutally smacked down by Super Sonic, Imperator Ix commands the wormhole connecting Sonic's world with the Twilight Cage to close before he disappears. The whole team rushes right on out to the Cyclone to jet and get the hell out of dodge before they find themselves trapped for all eternity. And lest you not forget how the flow of time differs in the Twilight Cage with how Ix could still be alive after four thousand years, take a moment to remember who stayed behind before you crossed dimensions and what he could possibly do with all that time...
• The first and fourth seasons of The West Wing end on extremely tense cliffhangers.
• "You aint my muvva!" "Yes I am!!" Dun Dun dundundundun...
• In an unusual move, the second season of the light-hearted Big Wolf On Campus ended with one of the main characters a stone statue after making a Heroic Sacrifice for his best friend. All the more dramatic because the show nearly didn't come back for a third season, but fortunately it was renewed and he was saved.

An intentional (I think) cliffhanger, or at least the show wasn't unexpectedly cancelled; Green Wing - both series end with a number of major characters in an ambulance, literally teetering half-on and half-off the edge of a cliff. The first one is resolved in the second series, the second is (sort-of) dealt with in a one-off special episode.

---

Cliffhangers before a cancellation:

• Soap's final ep ended on four cliffhangers. It is yet unknown whether the South American guerilla militia firing squad Jessica ended the episode in front of were Bolivian.
• Red Dwarf ends with the titular ship being devoured by a genetically enhanced virus while most of the crew evacuates, and the main characters escape to a mirror universe. Except for Rimmer, who finds himself facing the Grim Reaper in the rapidly disintegrating ship. He knees Death in the groin, announces that "Only the good die young" and runs of. The series ends with the screen saying "The End? The smeg it is!". A movie has been in development hell for nine years now, and fans have been waiting that long to find out what will happen next.
• Usually, fans become quite irate when cancellation leads to a series ending on a Cliff Hanger, but for some reason, when Farscape ended this way, the fans took this as a bold statement by the makers, refusing to give in to the Sci Fi Channel's decision to cancel the show. Only a few people were annoyed that, given plenty of warning and knowing how unsatisfying such an ending would be, they didn't opt for a more graceful ending. On the up side, that season's main storylines were already resolved, with the last few minutes used to set up a new bit of drama for the cliffhanger. And we were eventually rewarded with a Grand Finale miniseries.
• The series finale for Stroker and Hoop ended with the titular duo (Plus their friend "Double Wide") being dropped from a magnetic crane and over a giant cliff. Guess we're supposed to assume that they died.
• The final episode of Alf ended with the title character preparing to return to his home planet, only to have him and his host family surrounded by government agents. This cliffhanger would be resolved in The Movie, Project ALF.
• Invasion partially avoided this by wrapping up most of the series's plots in the last couple of episode, but still managed to end on a minor cliffhanger.
• Surface ended with the sea levels rising and the world now apparently dominated by monsters, with most of the issues raised in the series (such as who created the monsters and why) still unresolved.
• Cleopatra 2525 ended with three interconnected cliffhangers and two Reveals.
• Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go ended on a huge cliffhanger at the beginning of what would have been the main climax of the series. One more season of the show was intended, but Disney decided not to go for it, so everybody was left at the beginning of the final battle. As you might imagine, the fans were not amused.
• Joan Of Arcadia was canceled in the episode where the series' Satan equivalent was introduced, gaining control of everything and everyone in Joan's life and poised to ruin it all.
• Duckman ended with three characters — Duckman included — getting hitched, and his late wife Beatrice suddenly appearing alive and well at the end. Writer Michael Markowitz seems unwilling to divulge the ending, leaving it up to the fans to guess what may have happened.
• Another revelation 'hanger: What turned out to be John Doe's final episode revealed William Forsythe's character to be one of the bad guys.
• And let's not forget the movie The Italian Job (the original version) which ends with a literal cliffhanger that will never be resolved.
• "How's Annie? How's Annie? How's Annie?"
• Get Ed ends with Ol' Skool trapped in The Machine with Bedlam, and "sent away" by Ed. The series was not picked up for a second season.

Other

• The children's show Between the Lions has a segment called Cliff Hanger, which stars the cartoon protagonist of that name. At the beginning of each segment, the announcer always says "We find Cliff Hanger where we found him last... hanging from a cliff!" And of course, by the end of each segment he's always right back where he started.
• The original 1960s film The Italian Job ended on a literal cliffhanger when the bus carrying the protagonists and their loot overshot a turn in the Alps...

---